February 28 2006, 09:54 PM War Profiteer

It is a useful day to celebrate. We went to a little Italian place not far from here on a hill, a strange little room set back from the world, cloistered from the evening. The decor didn't suffer for it, and gentle music sifted through the tight array of tables. The kitchen was quite close, and it became a little silly as ranting began to spill from it, bright and clear and full of colorful words and violent handling of cookery. It is to their credit that the food could have been the food of an off night, but the food was fine, the vodka sauce bright, the bread good, and the soup a warm comfort. It would have been better if the cursing had been in Italian.

Before that: we had been in casual discussion with another friend who was in dark woods (a condition not entirely unknown to myself, these days). He had woes, to be sure: they were mostly in that terrible category of uncertainty, where he holds in shaking hand a guttering candle to try to lamp the hulking shadows in the future. It only makes them worse.

She said: two things. The first is to remember gratitude, for all of the good things before you are too shy to stand up to speak on their own, but they will be gentle if you remember them. The second: play. Let that noun roll freely on the tongue to wake it up, and send you out to make small discoveries of delight in spite of yourself. I think these are good advices, for they make the assumptions fall away, re-color the landscape, and the neck hurts less from the study of shoes. It is a good time for it, too.

So we sat in a little Italian place, listing to yelling and crashing English in the kitchen, to Italian melody on the sound system, to the snap of cards on the table and the whip and spray of words and chuckles as we filled ourselves with tastes and smells. I leaned to my arm at the end, and my shadow fell across the candle, revealing light sent down through the deep cobalt of the candle dish, setting on the white of the tablecloth a delicate blue limn.