Most indoor spaces are off limits for now, but we’re free to wander around outside for the most part. So what happened today? It snowed. Still, I’m sure I’ve seen more people walk by my house than usual, some with dogs, some without.

Thirty years ago, I boarded a flight in San Francisco bound for Tokyo, with the intention of living in Japan for a while (but not Tokyo). That’s what I did. Occasionally I think for moment, did I really do that? But it doesn’t take much to remind me that I did.

Not long after arriving in Tokyo, but before I left for the Kansai, I went to the main post office in Tokyo and sent a telegram. I had never done that before, and I haven’t done it since, and never will.

A Mailgram, actually. So no uniformed representative of Western Union arrived at my mother’s door. Even by 1990, they existed only in increasingly old movies. The text went to the United States, maybe Middletown, Va., where it was printed and then mailed to her.