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When we descended from the clouds on Saturday into a vista of sunlight and shimmering water, we echoed the Three Bears: “So much green!” I said. “So much water!” said my seven-year-old. “So many cars!” said his five-year-old brother. Our first glimpse of Seattle and Puget Sound.

My wife retrieved us and we were on the road 20 minutes before seeing a pickup truck. We have just left Houston where my Oldsmobile was the only non-truck in many a parking lot. Drivers in greater Seattle use turn signals, unlike their Houston cousins. The forsythia is in bloom along the highway. I haven’t seen forsythia, spring’s harbinger, in four years. The sunshine turned to sleet, and snow, and rain, and briefly hail. Downtown Bellevue, where we’ll live in “corporate housing” for a month or so, was crowded with shoppers, the neon glowed, snow fell, and it felt like Christmas. Many Asians, few blacks, no Latinos and, judging from appearances, lots of unreconstructed hippies.

We crossed the street from our apartment to the library, where all of us signed up for cards. I checked out one book, a title by Theodore Dalrymple, Mass Listeria: The Meaning of Health Scares, I hadn’t read or even seen before. Here’s the first sentence:

“Man is born immortal, but everywhere he dies.”

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