SATURDAY MORNING SURVEY

Raise your hand if you love this dog. Put it up in the air. Now. No one's watching.

TODAY

It's not every day that you sit in a gay cruising park, smoking a stale cigarette and having a long conversation with your ex-husband about how to meet women.

It was a good conversation. I'll write about it sometime. But for now I'll just savor the fact of it.

It's not every day that you open your back door to a virtual shower of gold — paper-thin walnut leaves falling in profusion, set adrift by a killing frost, floating into your dining room, dancing around your head, carpeting the entire yard.

You know then it's not going to be a regular day.

It's not every day that your student tells you something awful that happened to her. And you know she is embarrassed and is only telling you because it means she missed class. And you get to reveal: "The class is not important. Don't give the class another thought."

KILLJOY

I called the cops on my neighbors for having a party last night.

I was about to say this makes me officially old, but on second thought, I would have done the exact same thing when I was 20: gotten on the horn and rang up the AUTHORITIES. Despite my live-and-let-live attitude, deep down I'm a tattle-tale. The only difference is that at 20 I would have been twice as self-righteous about it as I am now.

I got home from work at 2 a.m. — in no great mood — and knew something was up when there was nowhere to park. I had to squeeze in way up the block between two daddy-financed SUVs with right-wing bumper stickers.

I strode up the block and discovered the house just north of mine had intoxicated children spilling out of every crevice. Out the front door, out the back, on the window sills, exuding blabber with some nouveau rap beat pounding in the background.

I went inside and let my dogs out. They ran to the fence and started barking crazily, like "Hey, DID YOU SEE all these people back here?!" I went to the door to quiet them, but then realized the absurdity of that; compared with the overall noise level, their ranting was insignificant. Some of the partygoers even seemed to be enjoying them. One of them knew Mabel by name (I'm guessing this is from my shouting "Mabel!" about 10 times a day to get her to quit howling at squirrels and such). That put a little humility in my stride. I thought, "OK, OK, I have some loud dogs, granted, but generally they aren't keeping people awake at 2 a.m.! 6 a.m. sure, but who the hell isn't awake then?"

Anyway, it wasn't so much the noise outside as the large bonfire roaring three feet from my property line (and my rather large collection of unraked dry leaves) — an inferno tended by a boorish band of boy-drunks.

Fire. Alcohol flowing like water. Boys cursing. Girls giggling. A loosely defined bathroom. I could easily wake up to an apocalypse.

So I called the cops and popped an Eggo in the toaster. I wanted to see if, as the dispatcher said, they were really sending someone "right out."

As I recalled, last time I tattle-taled, I drifted off to sleep to the pulsing beat of a car stereo. The car was parked diagonally in the same neighbor's yard. I don't know if anyone was inside it or if the police ever did come.

Just as I was uncapping the maple syrup, someone knocked loudly on my front door. I feared it was one of the party hosts who saw my light on and came over to borrow a cup of rum or perhaps a teaspoon of weed. The dogs went insane. I turned on the porch light and peeked timidly out the window like someone twice my age. It was a man in uniform, possibly half my age. A good-looking young man with a buzz cut and dimples.

"The party's been taken care of, ma'am," he assured me. "They've been issued a warning. If it starts back up, call us and they'll likely be issued a citation."

"Thank you, Sonny," I wanted to say. "Would you like to come in for a cookie?"

I also wanted to say, "Dude! What are you doing here? What if they see you? They will know that I tattled! They'll pee all over my car! They'll feed my dogs putrid luncheon meats!"

But I confined my remarks to "thank you."

As he marched off my porch, I wondered if I should traipse over to the party and, I don't know, ask to borrow a cup of rum or a teaspoon of weed, so they wouldn't suspect me as the killjoy.

Then I ate my waffle and slunk off to bed, as the party noises subsided into a muted rumble. The revelers went inside or straggled across the neighborhood to their cars, laughing stupidly. I woke up to snippets of conversation beneath my windows ("Call me!" "Where the fuck did we park?" "He's an asshole"), random door slams, stray shouts, the smell of a smoldering bonfire. It seemed an unspeakable injustice that I was the only person on earth who would remember this party tomorrow.