And painted by the Bosphorus in blue

1. I took my mother to Mamaleh's this afternoon. I had wanted to ever since it was such a hit last week with my father (and me: their Reuben is competitive with the Deluxe Town Diner, my previous local benchmark. Maybe with a slight edge. Their corned beef is amazing even before they pile Russian dressing and cole slaw—I prefer it to sauerkraut—on it. All their deli meats are in-house). She loved it. We ordered sable, a fish she had not had since she visited relatives or her godmother in New York City; unless I'd encountered it under a different name as sushi, I'd never had it. She was very encouraging that I should. It came smoked, delicately edged with what looked like paprika, with a ringed arrangement of cucumber and tomato slices, red onion, capers, and cream cheese. It was expensive, the same price as the smoked sturgeon. It was worth it. A rich, silky, melting fish, exactly as good as my mother had remembered for decades. I ate a cold tongue sandwich—I really like this thing where I can now get tongue on marble rye at Mamaleh's and in corn tortillas at La Victoria in Arlington—and still saved the last bite of sable for the end of the meal. My mother loved her 50/50, which was approximately the size of a city bus. She drank some of my chocolate egg cream and then ordered one of her own. (Is a pretzel rod in an egg cream a regional thing? I have never encountered it before, either in Boston or New York. Do I just order my egg creams in the wrong boroughs for it? Philadelphia?) Then we found out that their bagels are good. Like, insanely, four-in-the-morning-in-Manhattan good. We took home a dozen. I spent the rest of the evening in Lexington, helping clean the house in preparation for incoming relatives with an hour off for a stunned nap, from which I woke up starving and ate a bagel covered with whitefish salad. The block of halva we also took home did not survive the night. I am so happy about this restaurant. I'd been hoping about it since the owners were interviewed in the Globe in the spring, but first it wasn't open and then it wasn't open for dinner. Given its name, I am especially glad that it serves food that makes my mother happy. She wants to order the chicken livers next time; she thinks I may have eaten them as a small child in Portland, when my grandmother would have made them. I'm up for it.

2. The stove in the new apartment isn't dead, but it's mostly dead: two burners on a good day and no oven period. The property manager came to look at it early this afternoon while I was at my PT appointment, before derspatchel left for work. She suggested we try lighting the other burners by hand to see if we could burn off some of the rust and crud and if that didn't work, she'd bring the appliance guy to check it out. She must have rethought her position, because later in the afternoon she called me back to say that she had brought the appliance guy and he had all but taken his hat off while somewhere a stove-sized bugle played taps. So next week we're getting a new stove. I know not to feel jubilant until it's actually installed and isn't an electric range or anything else godforsaken, but this is already such a change from the landlord with whom we had the five-month fight just to acknowledge that the oven was defunct and the broiler had had small animals living inside it, I'm quite impressed.

3. I like having the two versions for comparison, but I really love the first, which is the more faithful: Angela Leighton translates Leonardo Sciascia's "Hic et Nunc."

Tomorrow I need to mail a whole bunch of bills, make several phone calls, and work an inordinate amount of catch-up for all the hours I missed yesterday and today. I feel very cautious about being in a good mood given this last year's baseline of violent self-damaging depression into which I am sure I will crash back at any minute, but the change is really nice.

Bold the brave, brave ocean, it rolled us suckers in

Autolycus purrs on my lap as I type, compactly curled into a black fur croissant. Hestia has claimed the basket chair for her own, partly snuggled under the green weighted blanket that usually lies on the bed. It has been not quite raining since this afternoon when I walked out to City Hall and the post office in Union Square, returning by way of Hub Comics. I made baked beans with hamburger for dinner and read some more Alistair MacLean at the kitchen table. Otherwise I have mostly been working and it is not very interesting. I hope to watch a movie tonight.

I was just sent an appeal from Kirk Douglas, who hopes to celebrate his hundredth birthday in December while still being proud to be an American. That is a lot of history to live through, and I don't think alarmist to remember.

On the importance of names, the acknowledgement of humanity in the individual as well as the incomprehensively collective, and the burial of the dead as more than symbols: Maaze Mengiste, "The Act of Naming."

I am tired and the most fun I've had today involved walking up and down hills in incipient rain, but I don't feel awful. We have ordered our Rosh Hashanah challah from Mamaleh's.