I walked into a lake to get some sleep down in there

So, our anniversary. It was good.

We did not make it to a museum for the afternoon as originally planned, but we spent a nice hour browsing the Million Year Picnic and then we walked up through the already icing streets to dinner at Waypoint. The restaurant is new since the summer, located on Mass. Ave. right where the last landmarks of Harvard Square begin to transition into the outskirts of Central; we had passed by it before, mostly noting its separate sub-menu of absinthe cocktails with names like "Storm Clouds" and "Riding High" and the green-black aquarium blur of its interior at night, a kind of glassy drowned shimmer beyond the double doors. The menu advertised "coastally inspired fare." We didn't know how much of an understatement that was. We arrived dressed to match the decor in our own formal greens and blacks, derspatchel wearing the Navy shirt that belonged once to nineweaving's father. We were shown past an alcove where a salvaged sign for Russell's Bar flashed the neon outline of a hooked perch into the main dining area, all wood-plank and wave-white marble and brushed steel, ice glittering under the oysters on the raw bar, bell-glass lamps clustering like jellyfish from the beams overhead. The pots of ferns and grasses at the edge of the open kitchen gave it a look of dunes or tidepools. Across the far wall tiled in black and slate-grey and blue, a second enormous fish-sign bent like a dolphin in a mosaic, steadily green-shining "Au Nid du Doré." Everything swam. We ate the sea.

( With minnows in my belly and dank in my veins. )

If you have any aversion to seafood, this is not the restaurant for you. The house-baked breads were all oceanic: salt black with squid ink, tart-flecked with seaweed, pungent with colatura di alici—the closest thing to garum in Italy these days—with a moray-colored smear of smoked seaweed butter around the rim of the plate and a little pot of chunky, garlicky anchovy dip topped with walnuts, which were the only thing left by the time the plate was taken away. The oysters came from Maine and Massachusetts, so sea-sweet that I drank the brine out of their shells. My cocktail was called the Ocean Flor, but got away with it by being (a) delicious (b) made with nori gin and absinthe and generally tasting as well as looking like something I should have been drinking out of my sand-cracked onion bottle salvaged from a seventeenth-century shipwreck. Snails came glistering dark on top of a split marrow bone, earthy and meat-buttered, with more seaweed sourdough for scraping out the bone with. There was trout roe pearling the steak tartare, popping a slippery savor into the clean cool beef; the soft-boiled egg halved beside the toast was superfluous. Rob ordered a cocktail that tasted of wet earth and gardens, like coming suddenly ashore; I cannot regret trying the house sangaree with madeira and nutmeg molasses even if it was much sweeter than my usual taste in drinks because it set off a round of quoting Flanders and Swann. The real umamibomb was the squid ink gemelli, even richer and darker than the crusty bread, garnished with pale strips of swordfish lardo—which I am pretty sure is fancy for swordfish belly lox and now my hands-down favorite preparation of a fish I have always considered essentially boring—and a thick mixed crumble of smoked ham, pine nuts, and pecorino. Dessert was cinnamon-sugar donuts with coffee ganache (I did not touch those) and a pear and fig crostata served warm under sesame ice cream (all mine). We were unable to resist the lure of the double-sided absinthe menu and finished with a louched glass each, in Rob's case Jade 1901, in mine Butterfly. I am delighted if bemused by the idea of pre-Prohibition Boston absinthe. Afterward we walked down Putnam to Magazine Street and then to the river, crossing the Charles at the Weeks Bridge and then back again via the Anderson Memorial Bridge. We saw a lot of cat-ice and Canada geese. The Red Line to Davis and the 88 home were surprisingly on time.

And this morning I had a doctor's appointment at a painfully early hour, compounded by not having slept more than three hours after overheating and waking at five-thirty and being unable to fall back asleep before it was time to get out of bed, and I have spent most of the day feeling jet-lagged while still needing to make lots of phone calls and catch up on work, but that was still as sea-full an anniversary as I have gotten without time by the ocean itself. Worth it.