Jim Neeley’s Interstate Barbecue. Nuff said. Even in an airport terminal outpost, a chopped pork sandwich so genuine I bit down on a knucklebone the size of a quarter. In the Memphis Airport, everyone’s flirting in the Tennessee manner, and one bookstore clerk is reading aloud to another clerk from a volume off the New Fiction shelf. Not my book, but you can’t have everything. It was a good trip. We tempered the desert furnace (115 degrees well after the sun has sunk) with ice cream and braved the weather advisory to visit the Poisoned Pen, the largest independent bookstore in the Phoenix area. My web chat there will be up for some time to come. Now home to Gil, Maud and Oliver, who probably spent fully six hours awake in the five days I was gone. G’boy.
Jean Zimmerman 