Yesterday was completely lovely: a low-key, mooching-around-the-house day . . . a bit of gardening, a bit of kale freezing, lots of reading, afternoon baseball, capped by an arm-in-arm stroll around the block for dinner out with my sweetheart. I ate mussels, he ate duck, we shared a plate of oysters, had a couple of glasses of wine, talked of this and that and held hands under the bar. Golly, it's so nice to have a pal like him.

Today will be a bit busier: this morning I'll ferry my neighbor to the bus station, and then I'll need to get a jump on the week's grocery shopping before I drop my car off for its three-day hospital stay at the body shop. And then there will be the final Sox game of the season--and the final game of his career for the best play-by-play guy in the league: the Hall of Famer, the Voice of the Boston Red Sox, Joe Castiglione, who is retiring after today. I will be weepily sentimental, but I am intending to embrace it. Nothing can be more elegiac than autumn and the end of baseball season, and the final dulcet tones of Joe reading Bart Giamatti's words: "Baseball will break your heart. It is designed to break your heart."

I guess I'll become a Mets fan now . . . at least for the postseason.

I've been reading Jeannie Beaumont's new poetry collection, Lessons with Scissors, which is so extremely good; interspersing it with dips into Larry McMurtry's novel Evening Star. I've been sewing on buttons and watering houseplants and washing dishes, but mostly I have just been noticing that I'm alive and in love and in the world, and isn't that achievement enough?