Saturday, 5:30 a.m. A porcelain moon, round-cheeked as a Hummel, nods over the neighbors' Edwardian roof. It shines down onto my modest Cold War roof, onto Weimar and Prohibition and Lost Generation roofs . . . a little jumble of history dozing under a blanket of sky.

Here, in the little northern city by the sea, in this leafy village enclave, with its steeple and corgis and late-blooming roses, I sit under my Eisenhower rafters, thinking of Samuel Taylor Coleridge thinking of his friend Charles Lamb, "my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom / No sound is dissonant which tells of Life."

I've been a little lonely for my old friends. I had hopes of seeing a few next week, but schedules collide and that won't happen. Still, before long I'll see others in Brooklyn, another in West Tremont . . . joy and sadness, aging and loss, these beloveds who have loved for so long. "Now, my friends emerge / Beneath the wide wide Heaven," as Sam T. sighs. It's a great poem and not too long: you should read it and sigh with him, and with me . . . "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," written in 1797, and still as fresh as a breeze.

Now, outside, first light is shimmering over economical vinyl siding and cracking asphalt driveways, over exhausted sunflowers and forgotten bicycles, over chubby cats slinking into garages, over a tired drunk shuffling slowly up a small hill.

I pour my second cup of coffee and gaze into the barely day, into the not-yet future. Time pauses. It is a moment of nothing much. And yet.