Women who lunch

Today I met an old friend for lunch, and we talked and talked. Each of us wanted to catch up on a year's news of the other and her family, but the conversation kept going off on a tangent, tangents which would eventually lead to a question that brought us back to our immediate lives, but it all came in fragments, pieces, a puzzle to be put together later, connections made. It is a kind of literature, the kind with no beginning and no end, just middle, everything always middle. it was lovely and we made a date to go to the Nikki de Saint Phalle show at the Grand Palais next week, having not begun to say everything we had to say. She left to go to a Borgia exhibit at the Musée Maillol, I came home to work on an introduction to a translation, and now having done what I can for today on that, I am going to crunch a Melatonin pill (for jet lag, see The Fleet Street Jet Lag Calculator, online, it seems to be working) and take a book--which book, Elena Ferrante, I think--to my corner of the Luxembourg Garden, under the sequoias, put my feet up and read until the sun goes down and they whistle us out.