And so, yes, I'm back from Boston, back from my latest and much overdue Inspection Tour of the East Coast and Harbor Islands. The weather was perfect, and the Keelhauler and I packed in as much sight-seeing as was humanly possible: the Freedom Trail, the T, Fort Warren, the last days of Filene's Basement, the South Shore, Central Mass, and a few select dive bars which my brother and his wife were kind enough to show us.

Kelley Square, in Worcester, is home to the finest of dive bars: The Hotel Vernon. I can't recommend it highly enough. If you can make your way through the pot-holed asterisk that is Kelley Square itself--a confluence of several streets with no traffic signals, site of some truly gruesome accidents over the years--I suggest you stop at the Hotel Vernon for a Narragansett draft.

The building faces the Square, which is as I have mentioned, more of a star, and features a grand mural advertising Narragansett beer, with a silhouette of a great sailing ship. There's a long bar right inside the door, and a jukebox, if I remember correctly--standard bar fare, but you'll have to note the elaborate murals that decorate the walls. Through years of nicotine stains, sailors navigate ships through towering waves, and, at the back of the room is painted the gentle reminder, May our love of the glass never let us forget decency. I will raise a Gansett draft in agreement. I will even buy you one. They're a buck apiece, and come in a frosty mug.

Just back of the bar is a room of indeterminate function, walls covered with posters advertising bands scheduled to appear, floor a patchwork of linoleum tiles laid out in checks. The patterns do not match, and it is evident that fixtures have been removed, leaving their footprint in contrasting linoleum squares. The result is a pleasing quilt and it leads directly to the highlight of the Hotel Vernon, which is:

The Ship Room. The Ship Room terminates the series of rooms comprising the bar, a rectangular room with a stage at one end and a row of booths along each wall. The booths have flat wood plank seats and red-painted tables, and are separated by curved wooden dividers that roughly approximate the ribs of a ship, starting low at the aisle and rising toward the exterior walls. Each booth also features a circular prop porthole, and a nautical motto in neat handwriting.

Onstage is a piano and, at center, a giant ship's wheel. When we entered the Ship Room, the Keelhauler jumped onstage to take the wheel and steer. I spun in the middle of the room, exclaiming, "This is the best bar EVER!"

Right about then, two bar employees entered the Ship Room, of which we were the only inhabitants, looking bewildered. "We wondered, 'Where did all those people go?'" explained the female of the pair, regarding our group's rapid procession from entrance, through the bar to the back room without stopping. We explained that we were up to no mischief, and asked lots of questions about the Ship Room, including the possibility of having my band play there. She was very encouraging about the prospect, and suggested that I put our band's name and number down on the calendar next to the juke box, to hold a date.

After a time, we sat down at the bar for some dollar Gansett drafts and conversation, when E mentioned another dive bar. "It has LOTS of taxidermy," added SamAnn, his wife. "Why are we not there already?" asked the Keelhauler, and so waving goodbye to the hospitable hosts at the Hotel Vernon, we piled back into the car and zoomed off to our next destination.

I could tell right away when we'd arrived, because a big neon sign in the window reads THIS IS IT. I admired its certainty and sense of self, this little building set on a back street among triple-deckers sided in asphalt shingles. It was dark inside, and boasted all the promised taxidermy of my dreams. We took a seat at a circular table beneath a stuffed furry animal wielding a tiny baseball bat and wearing a teeny cap. "Is that a raccoon?" I asked. The Keelhauler thought it was a fisher. Whatever it was, we were there to love it, that lonely little baseball-playing animal.

The name of this place is Vincent's, or maybe just Vincent, which is what the other neon sign outside read, in neat blue script. A lady gave me a dollar, and asked me to play the jukebox, claiming unfamiliarity with it. "Play something so it sounds like we're in Key West," she said, genially, and reclaimed her seat at the bar.

Never having been to Key West, I paged through the selections in search of something tropical. Or sub-tropical. I didn't see any Jimmy Buffett, so I selected some Dimitri from Paris, Nick Drake, and Tom Waits. It seemed to suffice.

E and I discussed, as we often do, the various crimes and misdemeanors committed by kids we'd gone to high school with. The kid who killed his mother and, after hiding the body, threw a party that same night. The handyman who likes to steal underwear from the ladies of the houses he works on. SamAnn weighed in about the girl from town who'd offed her mother with a hammer. The Keelhauler grooved along to the music, half-listening to our discussion, still observing the frozen menagerie on the walls. He strolled over to the other side of the room and returned moments later, bent over with laughter. "I found my favorite!" he exclaimed. We all looked over in the direction he'd indicated, but the years of smoke and dust obscured the object in question.

"It's a taxidermied? Chicken foot?" he laughed between phrases, then indicated with one hand, "giving the finger!" And so it was, there on a little plaque, someone's long-ago answer to the question, "What should I do with this chicken foot?"

It was soon time to leave, and so we finished our Gansetts and Diet Cokes and whatnot and headed back out to the car for the drive back to E and SamAnn's house in the suburbs.

When we'd said our goodbyes to E and SamAnn, the Keelhauler and I drove away into the blue evening, and he was quiet as we passed leafy yards and lovely old shuttered houses in the town where I grew up. I thought about how familiar it all felt, even though years have passed since I've lived there. It was a warm, happy feeling, like I was driving to grandma's house.

"You know," said the Keelhauler thoughtfully, as we passed a tall house with lamplight shining through the maple leaves, "that foot was kind of big. It could have been a turkey."

Star of the day. . .Vincent