Birthday

Dear everybody. We're on a wonderful four-day vacation in Dalat. Dalat is pretty close to Ho Chi Minh City geographically, but in temperament it is decidedly different. It's very cool for one thing. When it rains, it rains all week without any break. There are plushy grass-like mosses and pine forests, spongy this time of year. I probably wouldn't pause to pick-up on the accidentally dropped Update trail right now, not while we're off on holiday. But this is a vacation made up entirely of extended, luxurious pauses, our first in forever, and also made up of Sunshine's birthday, her thirty-first, which happens to be today. Since I consistently demonstrate a tendency to elaborate on needless minutia here, I imagined it wouldn't really be fitting to miss making note of this special day. Dear Sunshine, happy birthday. We just enjoyed high tea, my first ever, in conjunction with a chocolate buffet (two words that nestle together so winningly that they should only be employed on a cozy, rainy birthday). Also, since this is turning out to be a number of open letters, I'll add a carbon copy: dear Gilberto Hernandez, many years ago you sat at your art table and drew the final couple dozen or so pages of Human Diastrophism, one of my favorite Palomar stories from Love and Rockets. One of these pages, one of the best, originally appearing as the eighty-fifth page of that story in issue number twenty-six of the magazine, I think, and renumbered to page eighty-eight for various omnibus reprints, has wound its way to Vietnam. Here it has made one birthday girl very happy; and she promises to cherish your piece. Since I have rather retroactively hijacked your collaboration in this year's big surprise, I wanted to thank you. Yours truly. [Cavin]