“Dear Derb—What on earth am I hearing in the background? It sounds like a

clothes dryer with a pair of wet sneakers in it.”

Yeah, sorry. For technical reasons the snippets were read in by phone from my

study. I was doing this just at the hour when battalions of Aztecs swarm

over my neighbors’ gardens with 800-horsepower lawnmowers and leaf blowers

rigged up from reconditioned Boeing 747 engines. Noise-reduction software

can only do so much.