Julia met me at the door, laughingly telling me the explanation. Soon after I'd left for Aikido, Vanessa had called my mom to say they had too much fo...d, and they needed help to eat it. So my family had come over for dinner. Gina and Leanna had checked with their parents then stayed for dinner too. Last and not least - in terms of girth and importance - Gina's Mom had come over about an hour ago. She'd intended just to collect Gina and Leanna, but she was still holding forth in Vanessa's. I hadn’t forgotten that about her. I tried to think of the last time we had spoken to one another. It was some basketball game at the high school. Every once in a while, between the Fall and Spring semesters at college, I would attend the basketball games at my former high school. It was always a good place to meet old friends, since most of us were bad at staying in contact. There was always a lot to keep up on. So-and-so is engaged, so-and-so is at an Ivy League school, so-and-so hasn’t been. “I promised Gina I’d take her out to dinner for helping me with all my errands yesterday even though most of them didn’t work out for me.”I offered her my arm and she took it daintily as we walked back outside and got in the limo. I thanked Darnell and then we were off again. It was just about the time that most people were arriving at the dance so we’d show up in the thick of it.Tricia wanted to know about the errands I had to run and I told her about wanting to get her corsage for tonight and. Replica swords were popular in the South; that factory shared a metal supplier with a family operation in Idaho that crafted Nazi helmets. A lot of tenuous, probably meaningless, points of interaction. But ... you never know.Back home, I would try to integrate two separate sources. Law enforcement had undercover agents, snitches, lowlifes whom they bribed, threatened. The SPLC and similar groups had small armies of civilian volunteers — decent, everyday citizens concerned about the direction.