With a few days between book signings, I'm staying at the house of a dear old friend, in stunningly beautiful country, some odd patches of snow remaining, high atop the crest of the Sierras, overlooking the Tahoe basin. Ok, in truth, it's about a mile and half walk to where you can actually look over the Tahoe basin, but I'm feeling expansive, and a mile and a damned half is precious little distance to quibble over.
Aside from simple friendship, and the fact that I'm sort of halfway between my next two signings, the best part of the arrangement is cooking for each other, foods we'd never make to eat alone, or that a spouse won't eat. I'm eating embarrassingly well.
I'm guessing that food satisfaction radiates somehow, because we seem to be attracting bears. Two mornings in a row we've been visited at dawn by a bear who'd really like to come inside and share in the good times with us, but who never really got past a nose through a cracked- open window. Like all well-behaved bears, he finally responded to, "go, bear", and left the window, pausing a bit to look in the back of my car to see if I had food. No harm done, he wandered off, leaving only a slightly muddy pawprint on the car.
It seems that everyone has this bear-folks relationship well worked out. I just found out that a bear used to stand at my friend's kitchen window, just to watch him fry bacon and smell that bacony goodness coming out of the exhaust fan. Nothing overtly forward, he evidently just enjoyed watching bacon fry.