They walked with their Chocolate Lab

along the top of the grassy hill along-

side the channel leading to Lake Mich-

igan on a summer’s Sunday afternoon.

They observed people sitting on

lawn chairs and on blankets watching

the boats coming and going. He saw

Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon

on the Island of La Grande Jatte and,

for some reason, started to hum quietly

Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition,

a triumphant piece testifying to the in-

dominability of the human spirit, not unlike

Copeland’s Fanfare for the Common Man,

as they sat at a picnic table with a fellow

from California and one from Tennessee

who worked temporarily for the same

company in the area and who had spent

the God-awful winter of 2013-14 right there.

He handed his Chocolate Lab a small piece

of the Pronto Pub, a hotdog on a stick cover-

ed with a razor-thin coating of flour. The

fellows excused themselves to go find their

boss and the Chocolate Lab begged for more.