Yesterday the three of us walked downtown to get library cards. Then we went to the Portland Museum and wandered around looking at Matisse's book art and a variety of pieces inspired by Moby Dick (Rockwell Kent, Frank Stella, and others). In the evening I made roasted fingerlings and a big seaweed salad, and we watched old clips of Soul Train and a Parliament show in Houston. Outside our bedroom window someone was intermittently letting off Roman candles. There were a few drunken hoots, here and there, but mostly the neighborhood was sedate.

Now, on the first morning of a new year, the streets are vacant. Even the dog walkers are invisible. A single car mutters past. Beside me, the cat hunts a long piece of red and white string. I consider the tedium of resolutions and resolve not to make any. What happens will happen. I will read and write and cook and haplessly love people and play music and slip on the ice and fret about world troubles and feel ignorant and miss my land and do many things I don't want to do and second-guess my intentions and be curious and awkward. The same old story goes on and on.

I wonder if you have a similar sense of consistent self. I feel like I am the exactly same person I was when I was six and twelve and sixteen and twenty-five and thirty-three and on and on till now. Even the shifting, circular obsessions stay the same--animals, lovers, children, books. Only the carapace changes.