After stopping at the beach where I’d found the seashells (on the trip I’d been telling you about, where I’d traveled south), I’d driven a little way to a nearby town, where I’d visited a friend who is also a writer, and whose two dogs I’d interacted with and had attempted to befriend while we sat on the porch with them and with his girlfriend, and drank beer, and talked, and looked out at the yard and at the road, along which I don’t remember a car passing, though there were houses here and there in that neighborhood, and though probably a car or two did pass, for we were not out in the country, or a very remote area, but in a part of the city that I suppose would be called residential, and that was merely very quiet in a pleasant way, with thickets and trees and foliage, and birds; and was not a development where the lawns are uniformly cut, or manicured, and where the houses are nice but are perhaps too similar to be distinguishable from one another, and where there is a silence that can make one feel conspicuous.