Tea and Cookies

Met up with a friend from our old neighbourhood yesterday...we were going to go to a cafe and sit outside and eat ice cream, but the weather was cold and grey, so she made us tea and cookies at her place instead, and we exchanged news and thoughts, about pretty much everything. She is working on an essay about the Cretan Paradox, but won't show even a page of it, until she likes it better. We talked about deconstructed literature, and she--she's a mathematician by formation--plumped for arguments in the traditional fashion, with a beginning, a middle and an end. The time passed quickly. I tried to keep track of her stories--she and her husband, who died a couple of years ago, have known a dizzying number of figures of American and French intellectual and creative life over the past 70 years and have stories about them all--Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell at Yaddo, or so-and-so in Paris in such and such a cafe or gathering.

Today the sun is shining, the washing machine is humming in the background, and I have my seminar for 3 hours this afternoon, then the gym, and it's biking weather again.