Thanks to the insomnia troll, here I sit in the dark, stupidly drinking black coffee at 4:30 on a Saturday morning. Only the cat is pleased about this.

Through the windows I see rainwater glittering on the cars and the pavement. Yesterday I walked coatless and damp all around town: up and down busy wet Congress Street, in and out of crowded markets and the bank. It felt like the first true day of spring. Today there will be sun, and I have high hopes for my radish seeds. This is just the sort of weather that convinces them to burst.

Still, despite these cheering thoughts, I'd rather be asleep now.

Yesterday I worked a bit on my laundry essay; I did some classwork; I spent an hour at the library talking to a young woman about her hopes and dreams and fears. I read The Maltese Falcon and marveled at the evanescence of slang. I thought about the poems of Anna Akhmatova. I lugged home bags of groceries. I arranged tulips in vases. I cooked chicken and peppers and crushed up avocados into guacamole. I listened to David Price pitch a good game for the Red Sox and comfortably ignored/intersected/overlapped/engaged with Tom, as the whim took us. All the while, my thoughts kept turning back to the young woman in the library . . . not just her but the other people who trickle in and out of that writing project. My tame and modest days are the days that some of them desperately desire, that others desperately flee, that still others cannot conceive of as a possibility. Once a week I finish up my conversations with them and return home to this plain life--to what a friend labeled yesterday, with a certain amused irony, as my wholesome life. What an outdated, even embarrassing, word wholesome is: connotations of cheese and lettuce sandwiches on brown bread, and going to bed early, and washing dishes, and sewing on buttons, and packing lunchboxes, and going for walks along suburban streets, and reading old Dashiell Hammett novels because the slang is enjoyable.

When I was a teenager, I was constantly humiliated by my boringness. Or what I perceived as my boringness. At the same time I was obsessed by my obsessions. Now, in my early fifties, I am demonstrably the same person, but with fewer stabs of shame. Though shame never disappears.