As in the Wallace Stevens poem “It was evening all afternoon.” This week I have enjoyed going to go the café across the street to read and drink coffee and eat muffins, and ended up mostly watching the young families and the timelessness of their lives and the kids eating croissants without worry. All of the young girls wear striped stockings and rain boots and messy ponytails and say things like “I know how to say hello in Spanish. Ola. Ola.” Their sweet and total guilelessness makes my heart ache.

 I read great books that become great ghosts that keep me company. I go to bed with them and stay awake much too late. Nicholson Baker and Lydia Davis make rather fine friends when you are feeling kind of lonesome. Chekhov is good too, of course, and some Tolstoy, but not too much. Baker reminded me of what an excellent poet Elizabeth Bishop is and I re-read a bunch of her stuff and looked out windows and felt quiet and alive. I worry so much about the future, but am trying to just appreciate what we have: one moment to the next. My flaneur nature- growing bigger, taking me over, propelling me into whatever is next- and me, trying to accept it.

While I am in this limbo period I am at a bit of a loss as to what I should be doing with myself. I have been listening to Vince Guaraldi's lilting, soft piano sounds which always make blustery fall blues more bearable, warm and suddenly fuzzy. I went running up to the top of Mount Tabor and began losing myself in it's winding ways, found myself drinking rose with pals and eating their home-cooked, love-stewed meals, spent time reading plays and pioneering narratives and contemplating over the lives and thoughts of rugged, spirited creatures like John Muir and Lewis and Clark and Opal Whiteley and imagined the long days of Louisa May Alcott and was charmed by her old journal writings. I walked around listening to musicals on my headphones and all of their "I Wish!" openings and springy optimism. I got briefly obsessed with Stephen Sondheim, particularly the complicated triumph of Sunday in the Park with George and the weird vignettes that make up Company and the vivacious breakthrough that he and Jerome Robbins made with West Side Story. I drank fortifying coffee, read edifying poetry, woke one morning and did the sun salutation next to my bed. I have not, however, cleaned or packed a thing, and spend every day wondering if small pleasures are big exercises in procrastination.