Dough boys, clam cakes, and chowder. And if I was lucky my grandfather would take me out for lobsters and make a pasta sauce with the leftovers.

Clam cakes! I have a wicked craving for clam cakes. I have to make them take me next time I go home.

Very happy to hear Grace's good news.

I did watch a bit of Ted Kennedy's funeral - the bit where the "youngests" in the family came up and read bits from his speeches (Prayers of the something?) - I liked that. Plus, it was interesting to see the young ones.

My mom told me that her synagogue held some sort of reception for Ted Kennedy shortly after he was first elected senator, and the youth group waited tables there, and she was president of the youth group so she got to serve the head table. She was totally mortified to serve Senator Kennedy the dish that the synagogue Men's Club was immensely proud of and served at every function -- individual meatloafs, with a peeled hard-boiled egg baked into the center of each one, which they thought was really clever because it made the meatloafs look bigger but only used cheap eggs, instead of more expensive meat.

Now I have made myself hungry for things that I doubt I can find in Worcester.

Late summer was usually when we'd go on vacation, so meals would be salami and cheese and crackers at rest stops or reconstituted dehydrated food at a campsite (Loch Ness soup is a stand out memory - it got scorched so my mom and I were the only ones who thought it tasted good - mmm, burnedness, yum), barbecued salmon or oysters on occasion, whatever restaurant Road Food turned up along our route. If we were home, I remember churning a lot of ice cream, but I have no memory of hot weather food. Whatever my dad wanted to put on the hibachi, probably.

I don't have any sense of "traditional family meals late in summer" either.

I know what we ate down the shore.

Yeah. We had seasonal fresh tomatoes and corn in late summer, but all our meals that involved any sort of tradition ran from Thanksgiving through Easter. Even Fourth of July just had random picnic food rather than anything set.

Ah, age-inappropriate crushes. Is there anything better?

Wow, in stark contrast to the Contra Costa Sherrif's deputies, this was extremely astute and aware. Riveting.

**********

ANTIOCH, Calif. — Phillip Garrido's unspeakable private life began unraveling in a very public place: a college campus.

He arrived at the police office at the University of California, Berkeley, with two girls, ages 11 and 15. Two very alert women — one the manager of special events, the other an officer — immediately sensed something was wrong.

Garrido announced he wanted to hold a religious event on campus related to a group called God's Desire. He seemed weird and unstable. But it was the pale, blonde, blue-eyed girls who really set off alarm bells.

They wore drab, monotone clothes and seemed programmed — "almost like `Little House on the Prairie' meets robots," says Ally Jacobs, a campus police officer.

The younger girl "was staring directly at me," says Jacobs, the mother of two small boys. "It was almost like she was looking into my soul. ... Her eyes were so penetrating."

When Jacobs asked her about a bump near her eye, "she immediately replied with this very rehearsed response: `It's a birth defect ... I'll have it for the rest of my life.'

"I was a little taken aback. ... She just wouldn't stop smiling."

The older daughter, meanwhile, stared at the ceiling and looked at her father "in awe, as if she were in worship of him. I kind of got the feeling that these kids were like robots."

Garrido gave them copies of his book he had written called "Origin of Schizophrenia Revealed." They had a hard time following his conversation.

But he revealed the girls were home-schooled by his wife, with an assist from him. The girls said they had an older sister at home, 28 or 29, and that seemed strange, too, that she was even mentioned.

Finally, Jacobs says, Garrido grabbed his oldest daughter and said: "'I'm so proud of my girls. They don't know any curse words. We raised them right. They don't know anything bad about the world.'"

By then, she says, "my police mode turned into my mother mode" and her suspicions were more than confirmed when a records check found that Garrido was a registered sex offender who had been convicted of rape and kidnapping more than 30 years ago.

A call was made to Garrido's parole officer. A terrible secret was about to be revealed.

Moises Kaufman is directing Into The Woods. [link] I wish I had time to go see this.