Yesterday Tom and I went for a walk on windy, windy Mackworth Island, and then we went to the Goodwill, where I bought three books, and then we came back to Portland and played cribbage and drank Belgian beer in the middle of the afternoon. It was a pleasant Sunday . . . and there were no more Blanche DuBois dreams in the night, thank God.

Today will be a rushing-around-for-appointments day. And this week we are going to begin our preparatory moves toward house shopping redux, which has become more complicated because we've just discovered that Tom has to buy another vehicle. His truck looks fine on the outside, but treachery lurks within.

I finished the beautiful Penelope Fitzgerald novel and am now reading Blindness, a less beautiful but still interesting Henry Green novel--his first, and as awkward and fascinating as the first novels of great writers often turn out to be. It does have awful cover art and text design, however . . . not his fault, but distracting.

The books I bought at the Goodwill were Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater, Tim O'Brien's Going after Cacciato, and The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction. I wanted to buy Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, but somebody seems to have dropped all three of the copies for sale into the bathtub. I drop plenty of books into the tub myself, but I don't want to buy other people's bathtub accidents.