Within the space of a week, the new ninth grader has managed to lose three water bottles and his school-picture money, although his grades are pretty good and he can tell you anything you might want to know about bubonic plague. Because it is aggravating to be his caretaker, I keep trying to remember that I was just as much as of a dipshit. (My downfall was mittens.) I've begun to conclude that the interior of a teenage brain must look like Jarlsberg: dense and waxy and sprinkled with holes.

Meanwhile, I am trying to reacquaint myself with solitude. Today, for the first time in months, a space of writing time spreads before me; and as always, I am both excited and intimidated by the prospect. In The Birth of the Modern I am reading about Barbary pirates. In the garden I am concentrating on Swiss chard. The western Pennsylvania project beckons. I think I can rise to meet it, but something, anything, may insert itself between us. What I will actually compose, as I sit at the kitchen table surrounded by the detritus of myself, is anyone's guess. I will produce my little scratchings, and then I will rise and return to the stove and the woodshed. I will drive to Dexter and buy my idiot ninth grader a new water bottle. I will threaten to make him pay for it but will probably forget to collect the money. Tonight we will sit on the couch together eating coconut popsicles and watching Star Trek, and the big lug will sag against me and drop his head onto my shoulder and drip popsicle juice down the front of my shirt. "And it is true," says Rilke, "that life goes by and leaves you no time for omissions and the many losses; particularly true for anybody who wants to have an art. For art is something much too big and too heavy and too long for one life."