Astana

On Thursday I returned to Columbia for an evening to hear Mark Krotov's roundtable on Astana, and felt the old terror. All the lawns were marked with little yellow flags indicating poison, forcing me to sit on stone. The Take-Back-the-Night rally blocked the main thoroughfare.

But Mario approached, with a basketball close to his heart, as if it were the world. And Mark said that viewed from above, Astana's prim and ornate flowerbeds look like traditional Kazakh rugs, which the nomads would spread beneath their camp as they schlepped across the Central Asian plain. And Shayne told me to forgo the worries about reputation, and finish the stories. But change the names, he said.

Having convened with three wise men, Rumply returned home triumphant. The next day he went to a dress rehearsal of the stunning La fille du régiment, and to his sister's sweet sixteen, and returned home in a festive car of the Q train, wearing a furry green hooded sweater and holding a fist of tulips from his mother's garden. Costumed girls handed out tiny promotional bottles of Burt's Bees lotion.

The tulips sprung in the morning on the windowsill.