All Saints Day--- Toussaint on a Sunday. And the first day of Spring Forward, Fall Back. It's important always to have an entry on the first day of a month. Just as it's important to have entries on one's birthday, on New Years, and on O-bon. These things do matter.

Up early this morning and out to the coffeeshop. Sat and listened to Phoenix and Ryan Teague and Thelonius Monk on the Small Psyduck iPod and read in Robt. Kaplan's "Mediterranean Winter". I like Kaplan, but there are moments in "Mediterranean Winter" when I have to laugh. He's been a journalist all his life--- he does write like he's doing newspaper pieces. I'm not so very sure how to explain this, but he does interject little explanations in the middle of things the way you'd do it for a newspaper piece. It's a different kind of flow from someone used to doing more literary things. He...writes like a reporter. But that only makes sense: he is a reporter. It's a different flow from what you find in Pico Iyer or Patrick Leigh Fermor.

I do miss Nela at steeping. I miss reading her entries, miss knowing that she was reading me. She was someone who wrote me once that she'd travel with stufflings--- that does mean a lot. I don't have so many gentle, bright voices to lose.

Little Eva-Grace wrote me once about O-bon to say that she'd always thought phosphorescent sea-foam was the long hair of mermaids' ghosts. I do love that image. I love the image and I do miss Eva-Grace.

"Mad Men" and "Dexter" tonight. The season finale of "Mad Men" should be soon. I will consider cutting clear of cable once the seasons for the two shows are done. Henry VIII still has two new wives to go through on "The Tudors", but I'll wait for the DVDs. "True Blood" Season 2 should be on DVD soon enough, too. Those are the only things I really have an interest in. Even the Travel Channel series will be on DVD or on line.

One day...maybe I'll just have the laptop for watching things. Or get a small flat screen hooked to a DVD player. Just the laptop might be more efficient. All the more so if I really was a 15-inch MacBook Pro in black.

Miss Chang called from the aerodrome. She's on her way to Los Angeles tonight. She'll see USC and then go up to Stanford. I've never been to California--- I really wish I could see San Francisco. Which does remind me to ask Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo what she thought of "Medicine for Melancholy".

Lorrie Moore's "Self Help"... I still don't quite know what an "upper-crust Delaware accent" sounds like.

When I think of O-bon, I do sigh. I'd send out little paper boats with candles. I'd always do that. And then I wonder if anyone would do that for me--- if anyone will do that for me.

There was a girl once, long ago, who did ask quietly if one day I'd take her to meet my parents--- to stand next to me at their grave. She wanted, she said to just tell them she knew how much they'd meant to me and to tell them she'd take care of me and be good to me. I remember her saying that to me and just feeling so amazed that anyone would do that for me, or feel that way about me. We never made the trip to the grave, though. A lovely girl standing there in a suburban cemetery on a November late afternoon and saying that--- I do wish I had that value to someone, that someone would find me worth the gesture.

Rituals in valediction, rituals of memory... Those things do mean a lot to me. I told Miss Ginny once that I need the proofs of love more than love itself. She wrote back to agree with me, to say that she was the same. Small proofs, small gestures: those really do matter.

Girls have done things for me--- gone with me to other cities and other countries, played out roles and scenarios, experimented with ideas and erotic games. But as much as some of those things have mattered, the thing that I always long for is just to be part of a lover's rituals of memory, to be worth being remembered. It's one thing to be vaut un detour as a lover. But it's something far more important to be worth a paper boat and a candle at O-bon.