mentally reduced the afternoon's festivities to simply The Three H's: hygiene, hair and haberdashery. A trilogy of tasks which, I felt quite certain, would be best accomplished in precisely that order. I got lucky. Seattle is a white-collar town with lots of folks having latitude as to their hours. During the week, the freeways begin to clog at two-thirty. Fridays it's an hour or so earlier. Holiday weekends, it starts on Thursday afternoons. I found a diagonal parking spot on James Street and backed in. Downtown Seattle parking meters are calibrated to parcel out their time in nanoseconds. Eight nanoseconds per twenty-five-cent piece. I thumbed quarters into the meter until I risked carpel tunnel syndrome and was rewarded with a maximum thirty minutes of grudging forbearance. My relationship with the Parking Enforcement Patrol was such that last spring I had purchased a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: "Meter Maids Eat Their Young," which I proudly wore whenever both circumstances and the weather permitted.
