Dude, Where's...

This is the spot where our new-to-us car should have been on Monday morning, because this is where we parked it the night before:

And this is the Seattle Times (again, RIP Seattle P-I) lying on our sidewalk:

Sometimes it's not just the horoscopes that have predictive power.

We got the car back Monday evening around midnight when an officer found it in a park about 15 minutes away. It was cleaned out but dirty, and mostly unharmed. Cleaned out, that is, except for a tweed jacket that Joe bought in New York when he worked there for a month a few years ago; he wore it on the flight home and it therefore escaped being lost with the rest of his luggage. Some jackets fit their owners so well that they refuse to be taken away.

When the weather gets hot, as it has been, unseasonably, the neighborhood draws us into its vortex, even as we try to live outside its reach. Out of necessity, we fling open the windows and find ourselves privy to sidewalk conversations and car parties. By day, the ice cream truck cruises past constantly, plinking out a distorted version of The Entertainer. By night, we will ourselves to sleep over jangling shopping carts being pushed over concrete. The front yard becomes the only bearable living room, one where we're subject to the interrogations of the 8-year-old next door and the cooing of the elderly woman across the street.

In winter, you can retreat to your newly-remodeled house and pretend you live somewhere else. But in summer, the Hilltop comes to you and violates your boundaries and reminds you that, after all, you live in a city.