The sun was out Sunday, which meant it was time for walks and treats. Around the Slope, weekend bustle and feelings of spring. My canvas grocery tote held three kinds of cheese, two cupped handfuls of red radishes, a box of grape tomatoes, a bunch of asparagus, and a small sack of pastry flour, this last item signifying tarts to come.

I stood in the sun glugging an iced chocolate drink and talking on the phone with Tom till I felt I should get back to work, at which point I went home and took a nap.

In the evening, the kids came by, first Jazon, then Jeff, then Maud and Hector, then Martin. Like he’d timed it, Martin arrived just as we were taking the spinach–goat cheese tart out of the oven, he’s smart, that one.

The Martin story is, at some point over dinner, Martin said he was from Limerick, which made people say, “Do you get a lot of jokes about that?” which made me say:

“There once was a man from Saint Bees
“Who was stung in the arm by a wasp.
“When asked, ‘Does it hurt?’
“He replied, ‘No, it doesn’t,
“‘But I thought at first it was a hornet.’”

This is the limerick that I was so lucky as to find while flipping through some linguistics book in the Galleries Victoria Kinokuniya in Sydney last summer. I read it once, then I read it again, then I was compelled to ring CC and read it to her over the phone. I was trying to be very quiet in a very quiet corner of the bookshop, but it was difficult because I was laughing so hard. It was that same kind of painful stomach-tightening silent laughing that overcomes you when you are, for example, in Chinese class in convent school, and Mrs. Keok has her back turned because she’s writing on the blackboard, and your friend has just passed you a very silly note. You would like to laugh out loud, but you cannot, because then Mrs. Keok will turn around and fix her beady eyes on you and say, “Eh, zhen me le?” and then what will you say? Meanwhile, of course, the not being able to laugh out loud makes the whole desperate scene even funnier, and quite possibly by this time you are bent over clutching your stomach and your head is on your desk and you are shaking, uncontrollably and so very silently, and you just want to crawl under the desk and die laughing on the dusty concrete floor, but truly, you cannot, because Mrs. Keok is kind of frightening.

(I suppose perhaps Mrs. Keok had reason to be frightening; ourselves we were sometimes a frightening class. When we were distributed weekly calendars one Children’s Day, Mrs. Keok came upon Tricia filling in her week with various permutations and combinations of eat eat eat sleep sleep sleep sex sex sex.)

When I recited this limerick, with some kind of pride, at the dinner table Sunday, it was followed by a silence, and it wasn’t because Mrs. Keok was in attendance.

“People,” I said, “that was very funny. If any of you cared even a little bit about linguistics, you would have found that funny.” At which point some smartass peeped: “We don’t care even a little bit about linguistics.”

It is just as well, then, that it was not a linguistics party but rather a tart party; and tarts there were, first the spinach–goat cheese in a flaky crust, then the lemon in a sugar crust. The flaky crust was a bitch to make, because it involved putting the ingredients in the freezer for ten minutes, then taking them out and having your way with them, then putting them back in the cold for thirty minutes, then taking them out again, then putting them back in for at least forty-five minutes or preferably overnight, on and on and on while people observed quizzically—and I think, actually, that Maud was able to make the entire lemon tart in the time it took me to make that one crust—but it was a fine crust. “Hector,” I said, because it was true, “quand tu gagnes, tout le monde gagne.”