A Quiet Day...

the kind I like best. A day of running errands, to the supermarket down the block, after lunch when it's not too crowded, because the aisles (I wrote 'isles') are narrow and cluttered and there are usually employees loading the shelves or pushing some kind of cleaning machine around...and around. I ran into my neighbour, the guardian of our building, who was remitting money to her mother in the Philippines. We talked about her son, who is getting a masters in business at the Sorbonne. I bought some yogurts, potatoes, lettuce, toothpaste and dragged it all home in my shopping cart, and then I gathered three books (Robert Lowell) and went to the Luxembourg Garden to read in a deep comfortable chair in a sunny spot with my back to the wall of the Orangerie, until closing time. It was frosty and nice, and gardeners were rushing about with leaves, piling them up, moving them, and mothers and nannies were walking in pairs and groups with strollers. There seemed to be a lot of twins, and one very odd couple: a very tall, masculine-looking woman with a stroller walking fast and her mother (?) very small and bent, trying to keep up and having a conversation with the infant in the stroller.

On my way home I went by San Francisco Books, a secondhand place, to see if they had a copy of Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men, about the Watergate Affair. I have a feeling the next four years are going to be full of opportunities for investigative journalism. They had a copy but it was a hardback first edition, so I turned it down and bought a detective story instead, and V.S Naipaul's Half a Life. I loved his The Enigma of Arrival.