My friend Lee Ann wished she had not moved back to her hometown after earning a pointless Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Montana, Missoula. But where else could she go?

Now she lived with her golden retriever in a tiny apartment in a not-great urban neighborhood, working 60 hours a week at a chain bookstore, where she “assisted” the manager, i.e., managed the store, booked the readings, supervised the staff, and  ran the book club while the manager read proofs.  On her day off, she and her dog walked for miles around the neighborhood.  

She spent a lot of time at a neighborhood cafe.

“Sit, Marlowe.” She perched on a chair at my table, with the dog adoringly lolling at her feet. The sign said NO DOGS, but the servers made an exception for Marlowe, whom they called the “therapy dog.” 

Lee Ann looked pale.  “Marlowe is acting weird. I’m never home.”

“He seems happy.”

“He eats the furniture.  The arm of a chair is gone.  It’s gone!”

“No!  He couldn’t eat a chair arm.”

“Well, he bit it off.  Something.”

“I could dog-sit occasionally if it would help. We have cats, but Marlowe could stay in the dining room,”  We lived in a huge apartment in a building across the street – the right side of the street, if I may say – though eventually we would have to leave. On the day I had to step over a passed-out john in the hall we began to make plans to move.

“Would you mind looking after Marlowe tonight? I have to lead the book club, but it only lasts an hour. I would rush back! We’re talking about Francisco Goldman’s The Long Night of White Chickens. It won’t be a long discussion,”

“I loved that book!  What a great choice.”

“Hardly anyone comes. There will be a neurosurgeon and three housewives.  That’s all!”

 “At that huge store?”

And then her face turned light green and she threw up her croissant. Ugh! Then she threw up again.  And I agreed to lead the group that night, because she was terrified she’d lose her job.

That night a friend accompanied me to the book group. I was begging her to be my co-leader when the neurosurgeon arrived.

“He’s hellaciously handsome!” she whispered.  “Yes, I WILL be the co-leader.”

It was the usual book group, with coffee, cookies, a few brilliant remarks, much encouragement from me, and several digressions about a sale at Younkers.  The neurosurgeon praised Goldman’s style, humor, vivid characters, and handed out Xerox copies of a diagram of the structure of the book.  I may have looked at the diagram upside down, but was impressed he’d done it at all.

One of the housewives had a meltdown. “I had to get out of the house!  I had to get away from my family! I haven’t had time to read in a year.”

“You could go read in the bookstore cafe if you’d like,” I suggested

How many people have my super-powers saved today, I wondered with a bit of cynicism?  Lee Ann; the book group; the housewife who never got a chance to read… But why did I always try to fix things?

Eventually Lou Ann inherited some money and moved away. And we moved from one bad neighborhood to another until the bus stop was so full of drug-users that I couldn’t take mass transit and we had to reconsider our options.

Still, while the first neighborhood lasted, it was a great, mellow place to live. Why does everything good get ruined? It’s the age, as the narrator of Thomas McGuane’s Panama says.