Today it rained. Real raindrops, not just a driving mist. It was cold and gray and a miserable drive to work because my window was stuck halfway down. I spent the day listening to the radio and typing old summaries into Wordstar for one of Charlie’s bibliographies. The traffic reports sounded like battlefield dispatches, accidents everywhere, including a chain reaction near the Golden Gate Bridge that killed at least one person. Faren took the day off because her parents were visiting, so I was alone in the back.

While I was making tea in the kitchen, Charlie sat at his table looking mournful. We are at last getting a new Locus car, and he may be sad about getting rid of the old one. I asked if he was going to trade it in and he said it would hardly be worth it. He’d only get about $300 for it. This cracked me up, which seemed to amuse him.

He was out for most of the day, either at the dentist’s or running errands with Shelly, so I had the place to myself.

Rainy days in California can be like snow days in the south — carnage on the road because nobody is used to driving in such weather. (I once had to explain to a life-long Angeleno the meaning of the word “hydroplaning.”)

Funny, the whiffs of memory that rise from the pages of a diary. I don’t remember this day, but I remember what it was like. I can see the color of the shadows in that house, the shade of dark gray falling across the spines of the books on the shelf at the end of the hall. I can hear the hollow air of empty rooms on a rainy day, the click of a keyboard, the turn of a page — no doubt I took a break or two by walking aimlessly out to the living room with its broad picture windows, looking out at the dripping leaves.

Remembering places where we worked can be like remembering a past home. That house where I spent more than forty hours a week may still stand in the Oakland Hills, but it’s no longer Charlie’s, no longer Locus. When I mention him sitting at his table, that would be the table in that living room that was pushed up against the picture windows. I can see myself , feel myself, pausing in the room with my cup of hot tea I’d carried from the kitchen, noticing him sitting there staring out at the rain, looking melancholy. This is the stuff of ghost stories.