Dan and I had boxed—sparring lightly—for 50 minutes, so I left the gym with a light sweat and moderate thirst at 5 p.m. Friday. Not wanting to jostle in line at the liquor store with the vary-shaded hoodrats who inhabit the 2 by 2 block mini-ghetto behind the gym, I walked on by.

Ahead was a yard that has ever intrigued me, as I have never seen a human in it, just the Doberman, the pit bull, and the mutt. This yard wraps around a corner brownstone and is dominated by a net-sided trampoline in its center under which the dogs are generally sunning themselves, the boss mutt dispatching the Doberman and pit bull to patrol the fence line when I walk by. Yesterday, a little blonde boy was out playing in the yard, imaginatively, with his plastic sword. A large working pickup truck was parked here at the frontier of this little slice of savagery as the Section-8 criminals exported by Baltimore city, backed by the Federal Government, invest this faltering working class neighborhood, with the black population exploding from 8% in 2015 to 20+% in 2016, and crime quadrupling in the same period.

Dad must have been home from work. Mom, a good looking, tanned blonde with big hips and teased out hair, lay on the trampoline in jeans and tasteful blouse, reading, the three dogs under her, fanning out to warn off this passerby. I walk by with the impression of a settler’s cabin, and hope he is a deer hunter.

A half block ahead, across the street from three for sale signs and a number of freshly barred doors, stands a clutch of mammas, a BT-800, a BT-900, 2 BT-1000s [quickly becoming the classic muscle car of the series] and two BT-1100s are looking at pictures of their ever expanding, free-range broods on smart phones.

Asimov is lucky he died when he did.

They see me and make arrangements to be polite and let me use a sliver of the sidewalk, but they are so big that the jostling is fruitless, and though half spill off into the grass the enormity of the light-skinned BT-1100 requires I walk around—gladly—only to hear the BT-800 declare, as she peers into a purse-sized smart phone, “Well ain’t that a fine little chocolate drop!”

That’s Harm County at a good moment, on a good day.