My birthday was this week. I am now forty-two.

The rain started on Wednesday as a pleasant silvery day with a driving mist. On Thursday, it came down in earnest. In the com room we could hear it beating on the plastic roof over the porch. Kay commented that when we move to the new locaion on Lombard, he will miss that sound.

Friday, it was still blustery. All that day people trickled in to wish me happy birthday. Employees always get a card and a bottle of wine (white.) Portia delivered this. Kay brought in my favorite breakfast, a sparkling apple juice and a croissant. Lou brought in some flowers for me, long stemmed and eccentric (much like her) with tumbled wheatlike yellow and purple blossoms. I treated myself to a special lunch at Betel Nut, a chic, dark little place, where I had a hideous but delicious anchovy salad — dried minnows with their heads and eyes intact, tossed with toasted peanuts and green things I could not identify. Then I went to my usual lunchtime haunt, Solar Light Books, where I bought a ridiculous volume on fairies and a paperback about the wreck of the Medusa.

Another lost bookstore. Solar Light Books was one of those Union Street shops in a building once residential, now retail, the bookstore reachable by a wooden angled outside staircase. I recall a nice young female owner, and a cat. I’d like to find that book on the Medusa and reread it, but I fear it’s not so much lost as submerged in the ocean of books crammed onto shelves and boxes in this apartment.