Page 61 Friday 14th September (by Walt Willis, taken from "Two For the Road, or Twice Upon a Time" as published in Warhoon 28.) We awoke in the middle of the living room to find that living had started without us. It now included Cal Demmon, who had been sound asleep (we could hear the sound from outside his door) when we arrived late the previous night off the bus from Seattle. In the subhuman life form I assume before breakfast I was in no condition to divine where in this calm giant could be hiding the mercurial Cal I knew from his writing, and shortly both of them left for work. I dressed in the bathroom while Jerry Knight made the mystic passes which transformed our double bed into an ordinary settee, and then he and Miriam and we had a leisurely talkative breakfast of toast and coffee. American bread tastes rather lifeless raw, but regenerates itself when toasted, like a phoenix. Then Madeleine devoted herself to the difficult problem of the appropriate costume for sight-seeing in San Francisco in an open Volkswagen, and I strolled outside feeling a catlike need to familiarize myself with my immediate environment. We were, I found, living in a tiny two-storey red brick house rather remi- niscent of a mews cottage. It was in the corner of a little courtyard, off a wide main road which stretched limitlessly into the haze. The day was warm and sunny, a strange meteorological phenomenon which even we from Ireland were beginning to accept as commonplace. So adaptable were we indeed that I gave my sense of wonder a mental pinch to try and waken it up. We're in San Francisco I pointed out to it. But it just lay there, unimpressed. Strolling along happily in the morning sunshine it was certainly difficult to work up any tension, and there was nothing very startling to be seen. A commonplace motel, an ordinary gas station, the usual advertising signs. There was a small store subtitling itself "The Sincere Grocers" and I made a mental note to suggest, when passing it in fannish company, that it must specialize in frankfurters. It's hard to sustain a reputation for native wit while coping with a foreign country. American streets are so monotonously straight and long that there never seems any point in waiting unless you are making for some definite destination, so after a few hundred yards I turned back, carrying out a post mortem on my sense of wonder. I just didn't feel I was in a foreign country, I realized: I felt quite a home. I could walk back into 947 University Avenue, Berkeley, California, with no more tension than into 170 Upper Newtownards Road, Belfast. Was it possible I had met Miriam and Jerry only last night? If walking alone along a street in California wasn't enough to waken my sense of wonder, it obviously needed something out of this world. Back in the courtyard outside the house I found it. When everything is alien a familiar sight can awaken wonder, like a castaway on Mars finding a primrose among the lichen. Or maybe I should say a sprig of heather, for anything as staunch and resilient as this Scottish flower blooming under an alien sky. There in the sunbaked Californian courtyard was Ethel Lindsay, a little more sunburned than when I had last seen her in Chicago, but as cheerful and happy as ever. It was a wonderful surprise to find her here in Berkeley. We had been traveling