To eat the picnic we brought a picnic basket. From it we spread out food on the picnic blanket. The blanket was red and white, picnic-colored. In the middle of the proceedings Jennifer said, I have such a hankering for things un-picnic. I took this as a bad sign because it was a bad sign. Jennifer is the only woman I have ever loved. If I lose her, I rightly said to myself, my picnics will never be the same again. As the day went on and the sun beat down on our disintegrating picnic I found myself losing track of the way I thought things would go. I took Jennifer’s hand but it was already writing me a letter. When I got home that day I ignored the letter. It was all I could do to keep my little boat afloat, the boat that formerly held dreams of picnics triumphant. That night Jennifer called and it went the way you can imagine it went. Around midnight I began plans for another picnic, one without Jennifer. I also wondered if I could do it without the picnic basket but this thinking was dangerous and I knew it was dangerous. I was slowly figuring things out, things that had bedeviled me back in the good and bad days with Jennifer, when picnics were de rigeur and days were pretty much planned around them. O those glorious but difficult days! My next picnic was going to be experimental in nature, while still hewing fairly close to the parameters established for all things picnic.