Knock, knock.

It seems to me that all I do on this blog is apologize for my long absences.

Each time I come back, I feel like a traveling salesman returning to his wife after a long business trip. Please accept this vegetable brush and this bouquet of roses, by way of consolation. And while you are finding forgiveness in your big brunette heart, and an appropriate vase in the kitchen, I will be removing my coat and hat, and a long blonde hair from my cheaply tailored shoulder.

...

The hair would probably belong to the younger Auden, with whom I have been boozing it up alot lately--along with Ovid, Pope, and to a lesser extent Virgil. None of these lads is exactly the party animal he once was, but then none of us really is, or ever was.

After 40 years, I take a kind of comfort in the fact that the person I am and the person I think I would like to be are maybe not so far apart as they once appeared. While I doubt that I will ever meet the mysterious fellow behind my dreams (except, where all things meet, mathematically speaking, at infinity) every now I catch sight of him in the window of the 9:07pm Express: weary, but not worn out.

Life is hard. It is always much harder in the winter--especially when, resting your head against a cool window pane on a crowded train, you try to wring something warm and human out of an icy and dejected looking New England landscape.

But I always like to set aside one or two things for the Future--to look forward to when I get home: a Kurosawa movie waiting from Amazon, Mahler, grilled sausages, Auden, you. A slightly used winter kimono I almost passed on purchasing in Asakusa, for 9,000 yen, two years ago.