It's the year when some poet said we must love or accept the consequences

It is my birthday. I am thirty-two years old. I woke to derspatchel calculating when I would be thirty-three and a third. (Sometime in February 2015.) I have a card from my parents with a midway motif, a copy of Evangeline Walton's She Walks in Darkness (Etruscan!), and from Rob a framed print of the iconic sign of Lyndell's Bakery, a meeting point between our households when I lived on Dartmouth Street; now we visit it together. It will be the first piece of art we hang in our new home. We are going to spend the afternoon at New England Aquarium and then see if we can catch the restoration of The Caine Mutiny (1954) at the Brattle. It is clear and sunny outside, bright autumn. So far, this day, so good.

Pull off your old coat and roll up your sleeves

We didn't make it to The Caine Mutiny. We went for dinner at The Melting Pot and it kind of turned into a banquet. (Next time, we split an entrée.) We could have made the movie fifteen minutes late, but instead we went to the MFA and saw Regency furniture, an eighteenth-century drawing room and a seventeenth-century dining room, a short history of the color pink, and—because tonight was the free members' preview—watercolors by John Singer Sargent. Which were amazing. And the aquarium was full of the colors and the movement of the sea and not more screens than fish, which is always to be feared when a scientific institution renovates. The wall of sharks is back. The jellyfish exhibit is incredible. The electric eel was there in its tank, sending out jolts and clicks of exploration. I couldn't find the model of the humpback whale calf (Halos, second child of the famous Salt, born sometime in the early '80's) that I remember hanging on the second or third floor, but maybe it's only been moved. And I read half of the new Evangeline Walton on the train and I think our understanding of the Etruscans has moved on somewhat since whenever in the early 1950's she wrote it, but her evocation of the underworld is splendid. We walked a lot, from the museum to dinner, from the MFA most of the way to Harvard. It was a good crisp night for it. (A beautiful late-lit afternoon.) I am extremely happy.