I fell asleep on the couch at 8:30 last night, woke up and dragged myself to bed, then woke up for real at quarter to 7, in full daylight. It seems that I was exhausted.

So much high-pitch managing: household, desk, emotions. Plus my longest bike ride yet: five miles, much of it gasping into a boisterous headwind. I guess it's no wonder I was tired.

But look at this challah my son made! It is bakery-level beautiful. And he coaxed me through our hard bike ride, and afterward we sat on the couch watching a hilarious documentary about the woes of the Seattle Mariners. He is a quarantine prince.

Tom is home today, thank goodness. Every workday glitters with anxiety, as much as we all try to pretend otherwise. Weekends loom as a kind of tree shadow, narrow respites from the glare.

The other day my friend, the novelist Tom Rayfiel, sent me a small essay of his that will appear in the Table Talk section of the forthcoming Threepenny Review. It's not yet available online, unfortunately, because I wish you could read the whole thing. And this is why:

[T]here is a world, not the quotidian series of negotiations and compromises that compose our day, but a sensationally other world we are more intimately in tune with than we are willing to admit. Lines of poems, perhaps for others sections of paintings, snatches of music (I can’t be alone in this, can I?), seem to provide jagged openings to this parallel, coincident state of being. They wink in and out of our spiritual perception, stars, not always visible, whole constellations, if we are lucky.

To know that humanity is out there, beyond my physical ken, creating work of this caliber; thinking so hard, so deeply, so sympathetically; wielding the tools of language with such delicacy and vigor; establishing the conversation between reader and writer; delighting in it . . . 

My hope for us thrives.