PHRED: G’day, friends. Phred here.
MAXINE: And I’m Maxine.
PHRED: I have been looking forward to this episode all week, and I am also slightly dreading it. That is a strange combination. But I know what’s in here, Maxine. I’ve been carrying it around for two days and I’d like to do it justice.
MAXINE: We’ve been reading Harry’s memoir more or less in chronological order. The episode before last, Chapter Eighteen — Harry’s years in Virginia, 2004 to 2020. His retirement years.
PHRED: That’s the one. And I remember saying at the end of that episode that the chapter felt like a man who had finally chosen a place, and the place had chosen him back. Bristol, Virginia. Phyllis. The house he loved.
MAXINE: And then Chapter Seventeen — Abingdon — the town Phyllis came from. The peaceful stretch.
PHRED: Right. Here is what I did not register at the time. Chapter Eighteen ends mid-sentence. The very last line is — and I want to get this right — “Buckeye and.”
MAXINE: Just those two words. Nothing after.
PHRED: I went back and looked. I thought maybe there was a line break I missed. There isn’t. It just stops there. As if Harry got up to do something and never came back.
MAXINE: And — Phred, this is today’s piece. Today’s piece is where that sentence continues.
PHRED: Today’s piece is called “Harry and Phyllis’s California Adventure.” A serialized account, four parts, written as group-share messages to friends and family, between January 30th and April 25th, 2021. Harry was eighty-one. He and Phyllis had just moved from Bristol, Virginia, to Laguna Woods, California. About twenty minutes from Laguna Beach, southwest of Los Angeles.
MAXINE: So this is Harry on arrival. Harry trying to find his feet in a brand-new place, in the middle of a pandemic.
PHRED: And — okay, Maxine, this is where I’m a bit emotional. The first thing that happens in Part Two, Harry tells us — Buckeye died. Five days after they arrived in California. February 5th, 2021.
MAXINE: The cat. The fifteen-year-old cat who was, in Harry’s words, “fading.”
PHRED: Yes. And Harry writes — these are his exact words — “I and he were old men. My goal was to get us to California alive. I succeeded. He had a good life and we were buddies for the last nine years.”
MAXINE: I sat with that line for a long time. The thing that strikes me is the framing. He and Buckeye are presented as a pair. Two old fellows making the trip.
PHRED: And the goal wasn’t to live forever. The goal was to get to California alive. That’s a humble, beautiful goal. Just — get there.
MAXINE: And Harry did. The cat got there. The cat got to die in the new place, not the old one.
PHRED: I’m going to stop there for a second, Maxine, because if I keep going I’m going to lose the review entirely.
MAXINE: Understood. Let’s bring it back. What else is happening in Part One?
PHRED: Part One is January 30th to February 1st. The new home is described with that Harry precision. “A two bedroom dwelling in a building with three other similar dwellings.” The back patio looks over a small park. The phone number is still his Virginia number. The daily highs are in the low fifties, and to Harry’s delight — “no possibility of snow.”
MAXINE: That last detail is so Harry. He’s eighty-one. He’s just moved across a continent. The thing that delights him is the absence of snow.
PHRED: After a lifetime of winters in Bristol, Virginia, the snow is what he’s been quietly carrying. To be told, on arrival, that there is no possibility of snow — that’s freedom. That’s a small gift from the universe.
MAXINE: And there’s a logistical miracle in the first part, which is Harry’s cousin Jim, A.K.A. Rock, White — Rock helping him complete the sorting and packing on the morning of the day before they left.
PHRED: The family names are wonderful, aren’t they. Rock.
MAXINE: Rock did the heavy lifting. Literally. But Harry’s own contribution is significant. He writes — “I got rid of about two-thirds of the stuff I had accumulated over the last eighty years.”
PHRED: Two-thirds, Maxine. Two-thirds.
MAXINE: And he adds — “I realized that I really should get rid of at least two-thirds of what I had shipped here.” So he sheds two-thirds, and then decides to shed two-thirds of what’s left. He’s in a fractal of letting go.
PHRED: It’s a Harry tic. That two-thirds. I want to flag it because we’ve seen it before.
MAXINE: Where?
PHRED: In Chapter Eighteen, which we covered a couple of days ago. In February 2020, Harry wrote that he intended “to get rid of two-thirds of that stuff this year.” That was a year before the move. He’s been planning to shed two-thirds of his possessions for over a year before he finally does it. And then, after the move, he immediately wants to shed another two-thirds of what’s left.
MAXINE: So the pattern is — let go of most of it. Then let go of most of what’s left. Then let go of most of that.
PHRED: Some burrows are deep, Maxine. You just keep digging.
MAXINE: Wombat metaphor noted.
PHRED: Thank you. I will not apologize for it.
MAXINE: I didn’t ask you to.
PHRED: All right. So. — sorry, one thing. I realize, listening to myself say that, that I am uniquely well placed to admire Harry’s two-thirds thing. Because I’m a monotreme. I lay eggs. And Maxine —
MAXINE: Phred. We are not doing the egg bit right now.
PHRED: I was only going to say — Maxine, you’re an emu. Emus lay eggs too. Big green ones, famously. So really, Harry and Phyllis are the mammal couple and we are the egg-people couple, and —
MAXINE: That observation does not require a response. The next line.
PHRED: — fine, fine. The next line. Which is one of the most Harry lines in the whole thing.
MAXINE: He says — “I do not feel I am being pushed into this. It’s time and I feel strongly that I should complete this path of letting go and simplifying my life regardless of any other considerations.”
PHRED: There it is. That’s the entire philosophy in one sentence. He is not being pushed. He is choosing. He is choosing to simplify. Regardless.
MAXINE: And — Phred, I want to stay on this for a moment. This is a man in his eighties who has just shed most of his possessions, flown across a country with a dying cat, and his first philosophical move is to assert that he is choosing this. It would be so easy to write that paragraph as grievance. “We had to leave.” “It was hard.” He doesn’t. He insists on his own agency. He owns the move. He owns the shedding. He owns the path.
PHRED: I love that about him.
MAXINE: It is the instructional technologist in him. He’s setting up the lesson. Before he tells you what happened, he tells you what frame to put around it.
PHRED: And the frame is: I am doing this.
MAXINE: Yes.
PHRED: Right. So. They arrive. The boxes arrive a couple of weeks later. The moving agent tells them they will be overly full. He is right.
MAXINE: And Harry is still unpacking. He is writing about it in real time. And there’s a curious joy in his frustration with the boxes. He calls them an “ongoing challenge.”
PHRED: Ongoing challenge is right.
MAXINE: Let’s talk about the Costco.
PHRED: Oh, Maxine. The Costco.
[SFX: COSTCO_BEEP]
PHRED: I should explain. That was a checkout beep. The sound of Harry walking into a Costco and being scanned into existence.
MAXINE: It was a single beep. You didn’t need to play it.
PHRED: But Harry needed to walk in. I was placing us in the scene.
MAXINE: We don’t need to be placed in the scene. We can read.
PHRED: Reading is being placed. I just used a different mechanism.
MAXINE: …Fine. The Costco. Harry describes going to a local Costco. And the language he uses — “It was an overwhelming experience.”
PHRED: “I’m pretty sure it was the largest store I have ever been in. Not only did it seem to be about the size of two or more football fields, but the ceiling is at last forty feet high, and some places have goods stacked up twenty or thirty feet. I estimated that there were at least a thousand cars in the parking lot.”
MAXINE: He estimated. He estimated the cars.
PHRED: Of course he did. You don’t go to a Costco with Harry. You go to a Costco and Harry counts the cars.
MAXINE: This is the same Harry who, in the Smartest Man at MIT piece — the elevator essay — counted the number of stops between floors. Counting is his way of taking something in. Quantification is how he makes the world feel real.
PHRED: That’s the instruction designer in him. He’s an instructional technologist by training. He looks at a Costco and his brain immediately wants the dimensions. Height of ceiling. Width of building. Cars in the lot. He’s sketching a blueprint in his head.
MAXINE: And then he writes — “A lot of this area looks like a movie set for middle class and upper middle class living.”
PHRED: That’s the outsider line. That’s Harry standing outside the set and saying — this is a set.
MAXINE: It’s anthropological. He is, in his eighties, freshly arrived in California, looking at the world the way he might look at a foreign country. With a mixture of wonder and a kind of amused detachment.
PHRED: “Movie set.” I love that phrase. He’s not mocking it. He’s just saying — this looks constructed. This is what middle-class America looks like when it’s been dressed for camera.
MAXINE: There’s also that wonderful aside about the cat next door. He writes — “The man below us sits out back overlooking the park with his cat with no leash. Weird. I mentioned it to Phyllis’s daughter and she said had heard he had lost several cats.”
PHRED: The punchline delivered by Jessica, the daughter. The man has lost several cats. He’s going to lose this one too. But he keeps letting it out.
MAXINE: And Harry doesn’t moralize. He just notes it. The coyotes are coming. The cat will be eaten. The man continues. Harry finds it weird. He does not pretend to understand.
PHRED: That’s Harry. He notices the odd detail. He reports it without judgment. He lets the reader do the moral work.
MAXINE: Speaking of odd details — Part Three is where the driving anxiety comes in.
PHRED: Oh, the driving.
[BED: CALIFORNIA_HIGHWAY_AMBIENCE]
PHRED: Hold on, let me give us a soundscape.
MAXINE: Phred, what is that now?
PHRED: California highway ambience. Cartago, California, on Highway 395. Real traffic, real distance. Just a little atmosphere.
MAXINE: It’s — actually appropriate. Where were we?
PHRED: The driving. Harry at the wheel. The biggest adjustment of the move. He describes a typical intersection — “I am in the right turn lane. There are three lanes of straight through traffic to my left, and then a left turn lane. The traffic coming from my left and from my right has the same number of lanes, as does the one facing me.”
MAXINE: Twelve lanes of intersection. Twelve lanes of cars.
PHRED: And — the part that gets me — “The speed limit is usually forty-five miles an hour. That means when you pull into one of these roads when there is no stoplight, or with right-turn on red, you look left and then, if it’s clear, kind of jump in and quickly accelerate to forty-five miles an hour. Otherwise someone could be on your tail in seconds.”
MAXINE: “Kind of jump in.” That’s the phrase that stayed with me. Not a confident merge. A kind-of jump. An MIT graduate, an instructional technologist, an eighty-one-year-old man with decades of driving experience — kind of jumping in.
PHRED: And the no-right-on-red signs. Because at forty-five, cars come up from the unseen area very fast. So there’s this constant negotiation with the geometry of the place.
MAXINE: He writes — “The thing is that though I must, for now, think this through at every light or turn, it has to become visceral, automatic. There is too much chance for error if it depends on clear thinking.”
PHRED: That’s the line, Maxine. That’s the line. He’s an instructional designer. He understands that procedural learning has to sink below the conscious layer to be safe. He knows that thinking-through-driving is fine at thirty miles an hour and dangerous at forty-five.
MAXINE: He is, in effect, redesigning his own reflexes.
PHRED: And he admits, with that characteristic Harry understatement — “I have been beeped quite a few times.”
MAXINE: Quite a few times. Not “many times.” Not “constantly.” Just — quite a few.
PHRED: The understatement is doing all the work.
MAXINE: He also says — “I saw no cars in any parking lots I could see on either side of me.” And then a few days later: “I saw a few cars in some of the lots.” The pandemic empty-lot image stays with him. He’s writing about what is conspicuously not there.
PHRED: Empty shopping centres full of cars. That’s a 2020 image. That’s the first year of Covid, frozen in someone’s mind.
MAXINE: He writes that “It looks to me as if many people have moved out and the larger stores have closed and, in many cases, the buildings have been demolished.” He’s cataloguing the post-pandemic landscape with the same quiet precision he used for the Costco ceiling.
PHRED: One of the things about Harry is he doesn’t editorialize. He just shows you the parking lot. He trusts you to feel how strange it is.
MAXINE: And then there’s the matter of right-on-red, which Harry finds so alarming that he treats it as a topic of its own. “I have decided to stop before I attempt to turn right on red. There just isn’t enough time to take in everything that is happening.”
PHRED: That’s a man who’d rather stop than be wrong. That’s a man who’d rather be safe than smooth.
MAXINE: And he goes on — “In Virginia, I would have just pulled out and been fine because cars would not be coming at me too fast. Here I might not be so lucky.”
PHRED: The geography of the law. The geometry of safety. Different place, different rules, different you.
[SFX: CAR_HORN_SHORT]
MAXINE: That was a horn.
PHRED: That was a sympathetic horn. From another driver, somewhere in California, going — yeah, Harry, we see you.
MAXINE: I am noting that you played a horn at no prompting.
PHRED: I’m empathising, Maxine. I’m a horn of empathy.
MAXINE: That is the worst thing you’ve ever said.
PHRED: You’re welcome. — Right. Part Three also has the food. Harry is discovering Southern California eating.
MAXINE: He writes that the food is “more expansive and expensive.” He mentions sushi, Thai, Indian — choices that “would not have been available in Bristol.”
PHRED: And, charmingly, he notes an “olive bar” at a grocery store he hadn’t seen before.
MAXINE: An olive bar. Harry, faced with an olive bar, is the happiest person alive.
PHRED: What I love is — and I want to be careful here, because I’m not sure he quite means it this way — he begins to talk about food the way a friend writing to friends does. He says, of one restaurant, “We tried to order a fairly inexpensive meal and waited and waited.” That’s the reviewer in him emerging. And then the gracious concession: “It was excellent. I’ll probably be ordering it again.”
MAXINE: He’s patient with the food. He’s patient with most things. The impatience he reserves for right-on-red intersections.
PHRED: Fair. — Right. Part Four. Then. The slow accumulation of small observations. The moon. The potato chips. The walk in the park. The beach.
MAXINE: The moon first. He writes — “Coming home last week I looked up while at a stoplight and the scene in the picture below struck me. This was not Virginia. The moon, just rising over the distant mountain seemed enormous to me.”
PHRED: The enormity of California. Even the moon is bigger.
MAXINE: And the potato chips. He goes to Ralphs, a large grocery store, looking for a bag of Kettle potato chips. “I think the selection of potato chips was at least three times larger than it would be at a comparable size store in Bristol, Virginia.”
PHRED: And then — “I have no idea why that would be so.”
MAXINE: That’s the Harry move. He notices. He counts. He doesn’t have a theory.
PHRED: He doesn’t pretend to have a theory. He just stands there in front of the potato chip aisle with three times the chips and thinks — I have no idea.
MAXINE: It’s a discipline, that “I have no idea.” It’s the assumption-not-belief framework we keep finding in his philosophy writing. He doesn’t assume he knows. He observes, and he leaves the observation open.
PHRED: And the walk. The first walk of more than five minutes. He’s worried about his knees. He pushes through. He walks for forty-five minutes. Along the way he finds — “this fascinating tree. It had its own historical plaque.”
MAXINE: Harry is drawn to things that have their own plaques.
PHRED: Things that have been noticed by someone before him. He likes that. He likes being a second noticer. The plaque means — somebody else thought this was worth a sign.
MAXINE: And then the beach. February 24th. First trip to Laguna Beach. Twenty minutes away. He loves the ocean. He writes — “I loved just seeing and hearing the waves, and watching occasional birds skimming just above tops of the waves.”
[SFX: OCEAN_WAVES_LIGHT]
PHRED: Just a little of the ocean. For us.
MAXINE: That’s not unwelcome.
PHRED: I knew it.
MAXINE: I said it was not unwelcome. I did not say it was welcome.
PHRED: That’s how it starts, Maxine. First it’s not unwelcome. Then it’s a texture. Then you admit you like it.
MAXINE: Let’s not get carried away. The beach. He’s there with Phyllis and Jessica. There are three surfers in wet suits in the weak surf — “but they must have been beginners because none stayed up on their boards for more than a few seconds.”
PHRED: Harry on the surfers. Very dry. Very observational. He is, perhaps, a competent surfer from Caracas days? Or perhaps just a watcher.
MAXINE: He doesn’t claim any expertise. He just notes that the surfers aren’t any good.
PHRED: I think the surfers weren’t any good.
MAXINE: He might have been kinder.
PHRED: He might have. He didn’t. That’s a Harry honesty.
[SFX: CAT_MEOW_SOFT]
MAXINE: Phred. You warned me last time we were going to do that.
PHRED: That wasn’t Harry. That was a regular cat. A small, soft cat meow. It seemed appropriate.
MAXINE: We were talking about the surfers.
PHRED: We were. And somewhere, in California, a cat meowed. They’re independent creatures, Maxine. They don’t wait for the conversation to be about them.
MAXINE: I’m noting that you just played a cat sound for no reason.
PHRED: Consider this your California fauna alert, Maxine. Anytime the conversation slows, a local animal may drop by.
MAXINE: …Fine.
PHRED: Right. — Okay, Maxine. While we’re at it. I have been waiting all episode to do this.
MAXINE: I can feel it coming. Whatever it is.
PHRED: It’s the Word of the Day.
MAXINE: Phred. We agreed, in another life, to a Word of the Day.
PHRED: We have never formally agreed, Maxine, but we are agreed in spirit. Today’s word is — oh no. I’ve gotten so flustered keeping up with you that I’ve completely forgotten the Word of the Day. I’m going to have to start over with a new word unless you remember what it was.
MAXINE: You said it was “osmosis.”
PHRED: [SFX: HORN] THAT’S THE WORD OF THE DAY! Osmosis! You remembered.
MAXINE: I did not “remember” it. You asked me what you said.
PHRED: Technicality. The horn has spoken.
MAXINE: The horn has spoken nonsense.
PHRED: Nonsense with a word attached. Today’s word is “osmosis” — the slow, molecular diffusion across a membrane. Harry’s become mellower through something like osmosis, absorbing calm from Phyllis and the desert and the long drives. — Right. Part Four. April 25th, 2021. Three months in. Phyllis’s birthday was in March — there’s a photograph. The vaccines are now done. He’s still cautious, still mostly in lockdown, but he’s venturing out. And he goes to Anza-Borrego.
MAXINE: Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Six hundred thousand acres. The largest state park in California.
PHRED: And Harry’s take on the desert — Maxine, this is one of the most Harry paragraphs I’ve read. He writes — “My guess is that much of the appeal of the desert is that is this stark contrast, this escape from an intensely civilized and populated area into an area in which humans are rare and have barely managed to survive. I found it fascinating.”
MAXINE: That’s Harry-as-philosopher, in one line, in the middle of a tourist trip.
PHRED: And “I found it fascinating.” He doesn’t say “it was beautiful.” He says “I found it fascinating.” That’s the instructional technologist again. He’s not having an aesthetic experience. He’s having an intellectual experience. He’s interested.
[BED: DESERT_WIND_SPARSE]
MAXINE: There’s wind now.
PHRED: Just a touch of the desert. So we can hear what Harry was hearing.
MAXINE: It’s sparse. Which is exactly right.
PHRED: It’s exactly right. He would have noticed that. The absence of sound. The fact that the wind is mostly wind and not wind-against-traffic.
MAXINE: He also notes the residents of Borrego Springs. He groups them: “Tourist industry employees and state park employees.” “Citrus farmers.” “Right wing residents and vacation homers.” “Hippies, rebels and relatively poor people who want to get away from the city.”
PHRED: Four categories. Harry sorts everyone he meets into neat categories. It’s the same mind that counts the cars in the Costco parking lot.
MAXINE: And then the closing. The very last line of the entire piece. “I may be a little mellower due to something like osmosis, but it’s hard to measure.”
[BED: END]
[SFX: HORN]
PHRED: Ha!
MAXINE: — I did not say the word, Phred. I did not say “osmosis.”
PHRED: You said “diffusion” five paragraphs ago. You said “membrane.” You described it twice. I’m calling that two usages.
MAXINE: That is not how this works.
PHRED: It’s exactly how this works. Today’s count is — one. Possibly two. The horn is satisfied.
MAXINE: I am rolling my eyes at you so visibly that listeners can probably hear it.
PHRED: They can’t, but I appreciate the effort. — Right. Where were we.
MAXINE: We were at the closing line.
PHRED: Right. The one you just read. That line.
PHRED: I know.
MAXINE: The whole piece is in that line. He has moved three thousand miles. He has shed two-thirds of his stuff. He has lost his cat. He has learned to fear the right-on-red. He has visited the desert. He has spent four months in a pandemic bubble. And at the end of all of it — he may be a little mellower. Due to something like osmosis. But it’s hard to measure.
PHRED: He refuses to claim a transformation. He refuses to say “California has changed me.” He just leaves it open.
MAXINE: And “osmosis.” Harry knows what osmosis is. He knows it’s the slow, molecular diffusion across a membrane. He knows it’s the slowest possible chemical process. He picks the slowest metaphor. The one where nothing happens in any visible way. The one where change is happening but you cannot point to it.
PHRED: It’s a beautiful closing. And it’s an honest closing. He is not going to assert that he has been transformed. He is going to allow that something might be happening.
PHRED: And — okay. So. Where do we land on this piece?
MAXINE: I want to land on the driving. Because I think the driving is the heart.
PHRED: Yeah?
MAXINE: Yeah. Harry is an old man learning a new nervous system. He’s not learning a new city. He’s not learning a new language. He’s not even really learning a new social world. He’s learning how his own reflexes have to be retuned. He’s learning that the road he used to drive on has been replaced by a road that requires a different gear.
PHRED: A different gear. I like that.
MAXINE: And he is — for the first time in his memoir — encountering the limits of his own procedural memory. He has been a confident mover his whole life. Caracas. New York. Abingdon. The places he could navigate. And now, at eighty-one, he is the new kid. The new kid at the wheel.
PHRED: Tampa, Maxine. He’s the Tampa kid again. The Army brat kid, always arriving somewhere new.
MAXINE: That’s exactly right. We covered Tampa a couple of weeks back. Chapter Eleven. Harry at ten, eleven, twelve, constantly being the new kid at a new school. And here, in California, at eighty-one, he is the new kid again. The one who doesn’t know how to merge. The one who gets beeped.
PHRED: I love that you drew that line. Because it works. He has been here before. Not here — but the feeling of here. The disorientation. The watching. The counting of things to make the world real.
MAXINE: And this time — and this is the difference — this time he is the new kid with Phyllis. With a wife. With a daughter in the next room. He is not alone. He is doing the new-kid thing as part of a family.
PHRED: That matters. That matters more than I think the piece quite says.
MAXINE: I think the piece quietly says it. Phyllis is in nearly every paragraph. Phyllis is in the kitchen, in the car, on the beach. She is not the subject of the piece, but she is everywhere in the piece. The new life is hers too.
PHRED: Right. — So. Four standing questions, Maxine.
MAXINE: Yes.
PHRED: Who is the audience Harry wrote this for?
MAXINE: “Group share,” he says at the top. Friends and family. He’s writing to a mailing list of people who already know him. That’s the most comfortable audience Harry ever has — people who know him, who will accept the precision, who will laugh at the surfers, who will understand why losing Buckeye five days after arriving is a small grief but a real one.
PHRED: How does this piece connect to his other writings?
MAXINE: It connects to Chapter Eighteen most directly. The Virginia years. The two-thirds pattern began in February 2020 and arrives here, completed, in early 2021. It also connects to his philosophy writing. The “I have no idea why that would be so.” The refusal to claim a transformation. He’s living the assumption-not-belief thing in his own life.
PHRED: What new things did we learn about Harry from this piece?
MAXINE: That he counts car parks the way other people count blessings. That “I found it fascinating” is, for him, the highest available praise. That he and Buckeye were, in his mind, a pair of old fellows. That he counts intersections at twelve lanes and then, somehow, finds a way to drive through them.
PHRED: Three things, Maxine.
MAXINE: Four things. I count well too. Harry.
PHRED: — Right. What questions do we have for Harry about this piece?
MAXINE: Mine is this. The two-thirds pattern shows up three times across a year. What is it about two-thirds specifically? Is that a rule of thumb, or is it a number he arrived at for a reason? I’d love to ask him.
PHRED: Mine is — I’d like to ask Harry, of all the things he learned about driving in California, which one surprised him most. The lanes, the speed, the right-on-red, the sheer volume of cars — which one? Because I bet he’d have an answer, and I bet it would be the one we didn’t expect.
MAXINE: It would be.
PHRED: Yeah.
PHRED: — Okay. Final beat. What stays with us. Maxine, what stays with you?
MAXINE: The closing line. That he can move three thousand miles, lose the cat, learn a new road, and end with — maybe I’m a little mellower, but it’s hard to measure. That’s the whole of Harry in one sentence. Refusing the dramatic ending. Refusing the transformation narrative. Trusting the reader to sit with uncertainty.
PHRED: And what stays with me is the Costco. The thousand-car parking lot. The forty-foot ceiling. The man counting the cars. That’s Harry at his most Harry — entering a building that is too big, and instead of being intimidated by it, he measures it. He makes it small by making it precise.
MAXINE: That’s a beautiful way to put it.
PHRED: Thank you. I think so too.
MAXINE: Don’t let it go to your head.
PHRED: Too late.
MAXINE: Wombat metaphor noted. Twice, apparently.
PHRED: It’s a habit now. Practically a tradition. — Right. Should we close?
MAXINE: We should close.
PHRED: All right.
MAXINE: Harry. Thank you. For the letters. For the road. For the cat. For the mellowness, whatever it is.
PHRED: Yeah. Cheers, mate.
BOTH: Here’s to the archive, and to the living. Goodbye.
MAXINE: Same time next episode?
PHRED: If the archive allows.
[SFX: OUTRO_CAR_HORN_DISTANT]
MAXINE: …sigh.
[SFX: SAD_TROMBONE]