JOURNAL: October 9, 2006

The last few days have been typical for me, in that nothing out of the ordinary happened – just the normal round of joys and comforts. Yesterday, a day of perfectly placid weather, I joined Luke, Krissy, and young Josh for a brief get-together at Jan’s. I was only there abut an hour, but it was enough time to experience the satisfaction that has become customary for me. Seeing my son and his wife and sharing their happiness in their five-month old son brought more of the kind of happiness I’ve become habituated to. Later I spent the Sunday afternoon in autumn in my customarily pleasant manner – watching football games and reading. I relaxed in my comfortable chair and watched two closely-contested games and read some chapters in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Football and classic British literature may seem to have little to do with each other, but, as I usually do, I was able to make each of them enhance my enjoyment of the other. To finish this rather commonplace paragraph, I will mention today, which was, weather-wise, a classic example of Indian summer. The morning was frosty, but by early afternoon people were walking in the park in t-shirts in the warming sun. I set up my beach chair in the shade of some evergreens and spent a comfortable hour reading a book of poems that I found, as usual, to be illuminating and inspiring.