Last night was warm, which meant we slept with the fan on and I woke up frequently, walked down the hall to the bathroom, came back, took a few swallows of water, went to sleep woke up a couple hours later, walked down the hall to the bathroom, etc. A hot night in San Francisco would likely be considered pleasant in Louisiana, where I grew up. I can remember a couple of times as a teenager when I grabbed the glass of ice water next to my bed and dumped the whole thing over my head. You’d think I’d be tougher about heat. But I’ve lived here now for most of my adult life, and I no longer have much tolerance for balmy nights spent looking for a cool place on the mattress.

We had a staff meeting yesterday — by Zoom of course. Strange to hear that a few people are still going into our building. Our CEO goes there once a week to check the mail and sign checks, and the plant and building managers are using this time for maintenance, cleaning carpets, repainting, and doing repairs. I felt a bit jealous as I listened to them. Wish I could be there in that beautiful old early-twentieth century building, even if it’s mostly empty now.

As employees, we’re all pretty lucky. Those in charge seem to be doing their best and our salaries are still being paid. We’re also fortunate in that the library banks with a small financial institution actually interested in helping all its clients, even modest non-profits. I’m hearing accounts of banks like Wells-Fargo ignoring less well-heeled customers in favor of the large, sleek, and well-funded, even though assistance is supposed to be on a first come, first served basis. A rumor circulates about an executive at another small library phoning their big, famous bank to ask about assistance and being told “We’re not even accepting paperwork yet. Call back tomorrow morning and we’ll send you the documents.” She called first thing in the morning and learned all the assistance had already been given out to a bigger, wealthier customer.

Another Zoom meeting yesterday afternoon with our film curator, talking about next week’s film discussion. His husband could be seen in the background through an open door moving about in what was plainly their sunlit kitchen. After we’d hashed out how we’ll handle the zoom meeting next Friday, Matt’s spouse came over to show off the two perfectly baked loaves of bread he’d just taken out of the oven. They live in Oakland in a house that has an unusually large, narrow back yard. “I think this used to be a goat farm,” Max said. That back yard is a garden now, and they grow their own vegetables and herbs.

I’m enjoying The Mask of Apollo, my bed-time reading these days. There are occasional over-large chunks of dialogue-driven exposition — a frequent flaw in historic fiction — but the personality of the actor narrator is deftly and believably conveyed, the classic ego of a star. My favorite passage: “The Amazons is one of Theodektes’ better plays, and won the poets’ prize. He had ridden over from Athens, and was so pleased with us that he never said a word about the places where I had sharpened up his lines.”

Yesterday afternoon, on the rooftop, I had a bout of what I call time-sickness. This building is not a high rise, but it’s on the crest of the hill. Streets I used to walk every day are visible from here as gullies and canyons in the distance. They tugged at me.

I wanted the impossible. I wanted more than just to be on those streets again, walking in the sunlight, passing familiar places — the old Uomo store where Dad bought Mom a leather jacket back in the ’90s, just because she saw it in the window and liked it — the noodle shop that disappointed me with its gristly chunks of chicken — the high end European candy shop with its window full of foil-wrapped, molded chocolates in the shapes of Santas at Christmastime, rabbits at Easter, pumpkins at Halloween — The glassy Apple store that always reminded me of an ant-farm with its three stories and stairways and all those moving human figures visible from across the street — the bar/art gallery next to the entrance of the library, the DADA with its delicious Sazeracs, its constantly shifting paintings, its massive permanent sculpture of a pair of opalescent wings made from computer motherboards.

I wanted to walk past these places with a freedom and assumption of safety that I don’t think I will ever feel again.

The last time I walked through downtown was when I went home at about sunset on the Friday we learned the library would close. I’d assumed that Laura and I would be back in the office on Monday as part of a skeleton crew doing some last-minute housekeeping before the building truly closed. By Sunday evening, though, it was plain we weren’t going downtown any time soon. I didn’t get to say goodbye to the city I knew. When I finally get to walk past those places again, I wonder which old friends will be unlit and empty.

Maybe that’s why last night I rediscovered another old friend, a book I’d read in my twenties. Over the summer I spent overseas as a college student, I binged on Mary Renault’s work, starting with The Persian Boy, and then tearing through her whole ancient world series. It seemed her paperbacks were the main English language fiction on sale in Europe back then, especially in Italy and Greece.

The Mask of Apollo was my favorite, an historical novel set in ancient Greece disguised as a chatty, bitchy, name-dropping memoir by a famous actor, the fictional Nikoratos. Reading its first pages again on Amazon made me want it again. Unlike many books I revisit from my youth, this one had aged well, drew me in. I think it will do me good to spend more time with Niko, his wit, his insights, the perfectly captured, badly disguised vanity of a successful actor who, even as he describes historic events and great men, can’t resist sliding in a few humble mentions of the applause he enjoyed, the compliments he received. If anyone can reconcile me to the reality of growing older and seeing the world I knew fall away forever, it’s him.