Last night and long ago.

Last night, I took a nice long walk with Whiskey over the manicured grounds of the sea-coast hotel where we have settled in for the better part of a week.

The air was crisp, crisp like an apple, and the sky was ink, with a million blinking stars announcing their presence. I identified the ones I could (I've never been much for astronomy, though I have a nickel's worth of knowledge about most things) as Whiskey romped and sniffed in the high-grass.

Though the day had been summer, autumn had arrived that evening. I thought about my adventures in sleepaway camp, where on nights like this we would wake at three in the morning, take our flashlights and adventure through the woods for a "raid" on the girls camp across the brook.

One of my first crushes was on a girl I'll call, for the purposes of anonymity, only L. She was blond, and aloof, and half a head taller than her bunk-mates and had what they called in the old-days, bee-stung lips that made her look, to my 13-year-old eyes, like a 1920s, film ingenue, on the order of a Jean Harlow or even a Paulette Goddard.

I arrived at her bunk, sneaking through her cabin, and woke her with a gentle jostle. "L," I said, "it's me."

She batted her impossibly long lashes my way and looked more than a little vexed. "I know it's you. What do you want?"

I was stupefied. I hadn't at the age of 13 precisely figured out what I wanted. Did I want to make-out, did I want just to chat, or maybe I wanted a long walk to nowhere just to say I had done it.

"I better go," I said. "I just wanted to say, hullo."

A counselor, or maybe two, stirred against the noise of three or four teenage boys shuffling over the wooden-planked floor. We didn't want to be caught, and besides we had accomplished our mission.

We snuck out and made it back to our cabin without being detected. Along the way, I saw the silhouette and heard the honking of a long-vee of geese heading south. That's right, I said to myself, fall is coming then winter.

Last night was a night cool like that one. And while there was no L and no skein of geese, the grass was wet with dew as was Whiskey's belly. I still haven't figured out how to answer L's question.