Today is my 46th birthday.

I began my life by loving my parents, my sister, my grandfather, many cats and cows, and a piece of land.

I married a mysterious and intelligent man and became the mother of two mysterious and intelligent boys.

I read books and I played the violin.

I wrote five books and managed to publish three of them.

I made a few dear friends, and only one of them has died.

I never came close to starving.

Nonetheless, I joined the ranks of the melancholy.

I suppose you, too, have also joined those ranks.

I suspect we all have.

Yesterday was one of those days that just would not end.

Rush to school to pick up Paul for a piano lesson. Rush back to school for his soccer game. Watch his team get creamed. Watch a large kid collapse on Paul's leg in front of the goal. Watch my child crumple to the ground and then get carried off the field. Rush to the emergency room. Sit around for hours and hours in a mysteriously slow yet unbusy hospital. Make cheering conversation with my brave but nervous child. Overhear why other people are also sitting around in the waiting room. (Best story: "I don't know how it happened. I just tipped back in my chair and the lit cigarette went right into my eyelid.") Overhear excoriating televised news about Fred Phelps, who is clearly protected by the First Amendment but is surely going to hell. Meet numbers of pleasant ambling hospital staff members who prod my child and make him wince. Eventually get a verdict: very bad sprain, fluid on knee, possible hairline fracture on his knee's growth plate. A nurse named Autumn wraps his knee in a brace, teaches him how to use crutches, and talks about her twin boys. We feel sad that she is a night nurse with two babies sleeping at home who are awake when she has to be sleeping. Not that she complains. Paul's spirits lift inordinately once his knee is immobilized. Now he can anticipate the glory of arriving at school on crutches and the fun to be had when he makes his brother jealous by describing his wheelchair and hospital-bed rides. Now, finally, we get to drive the 40 minutes back to our house, Paul eating a banana and chattering about learning to play Dave Brubeck songs on the piano and how he's going to attend all his soccer events anyway and how, when quarterback Tom Brady tore his ACL, he was out for the season, and on and on. And I am very tired, but happy for him to be happy and not terrified anymore, and grateful for the state health insurance that covered his visit, and hoping not to hit a deer in the road, and imagining the comfort of clean sheets on my bed. Which, as it turns out, is a dream in vain because I can't sleep and spend the night on the couch instead.

Sigh.

Among the stack of books I'm reading is one called Soccer in Sun and Shadow by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. I first heard about this book a couple of weeks ago, when I was at Haystack eating curry and talking about kids' soccer teams with potter Mark Shapiro, who set down his wineglass and proceeded to quote this line:

They say where [the goalkeeper] walks, the grass never grows.

Naturally I was spellbound. And now I'm delighted to report that the whole book is just as good. A stylistic cross between literary sportswriting and magical realism, it's organized into tiny chapters with titles such as "The Idol," "The Ball," "The Goal," and "From Mutilation to Splendor." These chapters are beautiful and elegiac yet also filled with irony, much of which is very funny. Here, for instance, is a paragraph from the chapter titled "The Language of Soccer Doctors," which is written in the language of soccer doctors:

It would be easy for us to evade our responsibility and attribute the home team's setback to the restrained performance of its players, but the excessive sluggishness they undeniably demonstrated in today's game each time they received the ball in no way justifies, understand me well ladies and gentlemen, in no way justifies such a generalized and therefore unjust critique. No, no, and no. Conformity is not our style, as those of you who have followed us during the long years of our career well know, not only in our beloved country but on the stages of international and even worldwide sport, wherever we have been called upon to fulfill our humble duty. So, as is our custom, we are going to pronounce all the syllables of every word: the organic potential of the game-plan pursued by this struggling team has not been crowned with success simply and plainly because the team continues to be incapable of adequately channelling its expectations for greater offensive projection in the direction of the enemy goal. We said as much only this past Sunday and we affirm it today, with our heads held high and without any hairs on our tongue, because we have always called a spade a spade and we will continue speaking the truth, though it hurts, fall who may, and no matter the cost.

Galeano's book chimes pleasantly with Dickens's and Melville's, not least because it deals with those same old themes: love and honor . . . yet more proof that there's nothing new to write about. But who cares?

And now it's time for the Garden and Cheaply Purchased Vegetables Update:

1. Having finally pulled all my carrots, I can announce that my garden has produced a substantial and often strangely shaped crop. If I weren't a Luddite and actually owned a digital camera, I would take a photo of Sexy Carrot Legs for you. As it is, you just have to fantasize.

2. At a local farmstand, I unearthed a great deal on hot red and yellow peppers: 99 cents a pound, as long as I bought at least 5 pounds. But what does one do with 5 pounds of hot peppers? I decided to pickle them, and they came out looking like jewels. If I were judging the canned goods at the Harmony Fair Exhibit Hall, I would give them a Best in Show ribbon.

3. It's been a good year for green storage cabbage. My garden is chockfull of heads as big as soccer balls. (You see? Today's disparate subjects do have a metaphoric connection.) My plan is to transform them into sauerkraut. I'm a little worried this will make my house smell bad while it's fermenting, but it can't be worse than the grilled Limburger sandwich Tom once made.

I have reached chapter 20 in both Moby-Dick and Great Expectations. It's Christmas Day, and Ishmael is about to set sail on a frightening voyage with the as-yet-unseen and mysterious Captain Ahab. Meanwhile, Pip is about to take the stagecoach to wonderful, terrifying, as-yet-unseen London and embark on his career as a gentleman, thanks to a mysterious or possibly not mysterious benefactor.

Perhaps this plot synchronicity is a structural by-product of the nineteenth-century psychological novel. Although, as far as I know, MD was not first published in magazine installments (as so much of Dickens's work was), that plot-twist pacing must surely have been nearly automatic for novelists of the era. In any case, as a reader, I know when I encounter these books that I am wading into a familiar river, though I have never read Moby-Dick before, though I have read Great Expectations dozens of times before.

I recently received a rude rejection letter, presumably written by some callow graduate underling, accusing my poems of "melodrama" and of "saying nothing new," which in light of our reading project is pretty hilarious. For neither one of these great novels says anything new. Both deal with ancient issues of love and honor. Both are jam-packed with melodrama. Both follow predictable narrative patterns. Nonetheless. And that's a big word, that nonetheless.

So my question to you is: why doesn't it matter that these novels follow a well-traveled path? Or does it matter? And for you personally, what does it feel like to wade into the great narrative river?

Off to church for the first time in 10 years because Paul has a 5-minute meditative music gig.

Patchy frost last night, but perhaps the cucumbers were spared.

Slept horribly while listening to foxes wailing in the underbrush. This meant that the dogs also slept horribly.

I have reached chapter 20 in Great Expectations. I am bringing Moby-Dick to church. This is probably wrong, but it's best to be prepared for every contingency.

Today looks to be the sort of October day--breezy, blue-eyed--that makes me feel like it's my birthday, even though my birthday doesn't happen until next week. It is, however, my friend Angela's birthday, and we and our families are going to celebrate by driving to the coast, looking at art and the sea, and going out to dinner. In short, we will do things that are impossible to do in Harmony and Wellington, where we really live, where there is no ocean (though we do have a wood chipper/mechanical leviathan parked at Morrison's Garage, and its operator and I were marveling together about this strange and complicated machine as he pumped my gas this morning), no art (except for the eclectic display at the dump), and no restaurant (except for the Breakfast Nook, which is never open, and store-made pizza, which we turn to in only in emergencies).

I forget if I've mentioned here that I've dedicated my rereading memoir to Angela because she, too, is a rereader . . . and purer one than I am: a reader who doesn't feel the urge to write herself into the story, as I do. So in honor of her birthday, I think I'll copy out what I wrote to her in the acknowledgments:

Finally, I want to thank Angela DeRosa, my dear neighbor in the woods, who borrows my old novels and then returns them tied up in pink ribbon--a love note for me, for herself, for the characters, for the writer. We're all mixed up in this story together.

Sorry this post is so late: our power's been out since last night. But it was an excellent storm, humid and gusty, and getting into bed beside the open window felt like climbing into Ahab's Pequod. Probably there were whales in our yard.

Speaking of Ahab, I have reached chapter 20 in Moby-Dick and chapter 18 in Great Expectations. Since no one is complaining and Teresa is actively clamoring to continue, I say let's keep going. When I get to chapter 25 in both books, I'll stop and see what you all have to say about what we've read.

Meanwhile, here's my current favorite MD quotation, from the very end of chapter 14:

With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.

I find the walruses hard to believe in, but I like them in the passage anyway.

And by the way, thank you, dear unknown blog reader, for the card you sent me. I was very surprised, and happy.