The world is tied to a simple text

The last time my birthday fell on Yom Kippur, I was twenty-seven years old; the time before that, nineteen. This time I am thirty-eight years old. I can't think of a character my age this year, but spatch has reminded me that he was my age when we married. That counts.

My erev birthday was observed with my niece and candles and pre-fast pizza and my mother handing me a small square package wrapped in shiny blue paper with strict instructions not to open until the morning. I was afraid the City of Somerville would give me an alarm clock with a repeat of yesterday's sleep-shattering jackhammers right outside our driveway, but the rain must have kept them off: I woke on my own time and my husband sang to me and now I have a CD of the 2018 original cast recording of the NYTF's Fiddler on the Roof/פֿידלער אויפֿן דאַך, which seems very suitable. The plan is to visit museums during the day and meet my parents for break-fast after sunset. Every year is its own.

There was music in this valley, but not of birdsong and falling streams as in Tabitha's valley. Here the music was of the waves breaking along the shore, the sea wind rustling in the silver leaves of the olive trees, and a strange wild haunting melody that was like nothing Tabitha had heard before. Had she ever heard a harp played she would have been reminded of that, yet it was not harp music. It was lament and triumph in one. It was a wild desire to be gone and the sorrow of parting. It was an Autumnal song. It was weeping and laughter. It was darkness and light and being born.

"What is it?" she whispered. "Andrew, what is it?"

"It is the Minstrel Swan [. . .] Don't you know your signs of the Zodiac?" asked Andrew, smiling.

"Yes, I do. There are twelve of them, one for each month. There are starry people and starry beasts and starry fish, and one who's both a man and a beast, and one who's a beast and a fish, but no starry birds. I've always thought that's wrong. Why should the birds have no star to watch over them? I've always believed someone made a mistake in calling the Autumn sign the Scales. September 23rd till October 23rd. That's the time of the year when the great winds come in from the sea like beating wings. Parson Redfern has a picture of the Scales, and they look just like a great winged bird flying through the sky. I believe the Autumn star is a bird. And he's the greatest of all the star creatures."

"You're right," said Andrew. "He's the greatest of them all, and he is called the Minstrel."

—Elizabeth Goudge, The Valley of Song (1951)

װעלן עפֿענען די טירן פון דער וועלט אויפסנײַ

We went to the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the Harvard Art Museums. At the former, we saw exquisitely rendered rotting and blighted glass fruit by Rudolf Blaschka—apricots shriveled with brown rot, softly splotching pears, strawberries furred with blue mold. You wouldn't want to eat them, but it is a masterstroke to make a material as brittle and glinting as glass look sticky, squishy, sunken, fuzzy, bruised. I was especially fond of the magnified field of Aspergillus, globes of spore-clusters on jelly-translucent stalks in a squiggling network of hyphae. spatch took some pictures, mostly of the glass sea creatures also by the Blaschkas and the hallway of deep-sea black-light paintings. We said hello to the Kronosaurus, because it's just good manners. The Chilean rose tarantula really was a beautiful rose-gold color on the fine hairs of its legs and the shield of its back. At the latter, we mostly wandered around among the modern and contemporary art on the first floor; we meant to check out the special exhibitions on the third floor, but there kept being another room of Impressionists, or Surrealists, or the Berlin Secession. I love Lyonel Feininger's Avenue of Trees (1915) like I'd like it on my wall, the fractured prism of a fairy-tale wood, an Angela Carter story you're already disappearing into. His Bird Cloud (1926) is the same crystalline fragmenting of a world, but I've seen skies with exactly that quality of light. The evidence of El Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy suggests that I like Constructivism, or maybe I just like anybody who likes Victory Over the Sun. I understand why Max Beckmann kept The Fire (1945) with him till the end of his life: however chilly the circumstances of its painting, it is warming to look at. I wish very much that the information for Robert Smullyan Sloan's Negro Soldier (1945)—which is even better in person, one of those penetrating portraits that studies you back—included the model's name.

We were supposed to meet my parents for break-fast at Mamaleh's, but due to a problem with broken track-switching on the Red Line that made our train take half an hour from Harvard to Davis, rather than throwing ourselves back on the grenade to Kendall, we opted to meet them instead at Porter Square Books and I am just as glad we did, because I got the surprise present of running into rushthatspeaks. Then we went to the restaurant and some of us had reubens and some of us had whitefish and most of us had knishes and I personally had a bowl of borscht with a thin dicing of cucumber and a thick garnish of labne and half a bagel covered with very savory chopped liver and mustard stolen from my husband's knish. We got our pictures taken in black and white in their semi-antique photo booth, although we misjudged the number of photos in the strip, so we are only hanging around one another's necks and smiling, not kissing for the flashbulb. The staff heard it was my birthday and brought me a slice of apple and date crostata with a candle lit in it. Rob gave me a beautiful little black-and-white-and-gold enamel pin of a mimic octopus, which now lives on my lapel above the Elder Sign of NecronomiCon. The rest of my birthday will be celebrated on Friday when my brother's family can make it.

I am home now and it is a new year and our cats are warm. The world is complicated. It's the one we've got. Right now, I am not unhappy to be in it.