I'm feeling glum today for no reason that I can discern. I've got a pile of green beans to pickle, and a pile of textbook pages to edit, and a pile of towels to wash, and a mountain of boy land to negotiate; but none of that is particularly disheartening. Last night, I helped my friend Dave sound-check the Harmony fairgrounds stage, which meant singing "Pretty Woman" into the mosquito-laden dusk as our sons chased around in the shadows after a Frisbee. That certainly had nothing to do with glum: maybe wistful would be the better connotation. My favorite underrated utility player, known around our house as the Great Bill Hall, hit two homeruns for the Red Sox; and I didn't have to nag Paul to practice the piano. I got an email from the grant foundation saying that my application had passed hurdle number 1, and I read proofs for my Blake essay, forthcoming in the Blake Journal, which actually commissioned it. All of these events are cheery enough. Yet melancholy has its own trajectory, and noting that I shouldn't be sad has no impact on anything at all.

Yesterday, in Kate O'Brien's novel The Ante-Room, I read about a woman who is predicted, as she ages, to be "ruefully beautiful." And somehow ruefully struck me as word that might sum up something or other about my state of mind: exactly what I can't say . . . except that rue is both regret and a bitter medicine.