Le Gaudron is closed. Well, it’s opened again, but it’s not the same. It’s better, which is worse. I don’t care. It’s nothing to me. I live 3,638 miles away from it. I didn’t even like it there. Flies circled lazily, the bread wasn’t very good, and one of the women who worked there, an enormous lady with a piggy face and blue eye shadow, hated me. But the case was filled with strange and beautiful pastries, miracles of sugar, and the banquette faced the case. I had a plan to eat one of each of the pastries before we left Brussels—I knew, always, my time was limited—as an experiment or task, but instead I just ate the éclairs. I think, in retrospect, that was wise of me.

One night I was the only person in the café, close to closing, and I heard one of the women working there say to the fat woman, So why don’t you close up? The fat woman inclined her bouffant head towards me and said, venomously, Elle est là. One of the first times, by the way, I understood someone else’s conversation in French. After that night the sign on the door advertising the hours was amended to note that table service ended a half an hour before the café closed. They meant me.

One day soon after we moved to Brussels, I couldn’t leave the apartment. I couldn’t work and I lay in the bed with the covers pulled up. David couldn’t get out of work yet, wouldn’t for a while. Eventually, I went to the Gaudron.

One evening everyone who came into the Gaudron had crutches, a cane, or a wheelchair, except me.

There were a lot of dogs at the Gaudron. I don’t know why, but once, watching the little white dog belonging to the table next to me scrounge around at the base of the table for pastry scraps, I was inspired. I thought, All you have to do is be that dog. Nothing came from this except for something I can't explain to anyone else, but that I find occasionally useful.

You would not believe how much a juice cost. Sometimes, but not from the fat lady, I would get a free cookie with my coffee. The ham sandwiches were passable. The chocolate, from a mix. Everyone smoked. I should find my notes from then, I should find what I wrote. I may have written that I was homesick, but that was a lie.

Yesterday I went to turn off the hose that was watering the magnolia tree, you remember the magnolia tree,that replaced the magnolia tree that replaced the old magnolia tree that was here but dead when we moved in? Long, boring story but anyway I went to turn off the hose and saw, lying on his side, a small mouse, breathing rapidly in the shade of the house. He didn’t move when I came near and when I accidentally dropped the hose end on the slab of stone he lay on he twitched but didn’t go anywhere. So I knew he was dying, and I wondered what I was supposed to do about it. I thought I could kill him with a shovel, or I could move him with a shovel, or I could do nothing.

I chose, of course, to do nothing, and now he is there, dead, today. There are cats that come over from the neighbor’s houses, but I don’t know that they’ll eat him when he’s already dead. Will the possum whom we used to feed, generously, on chicken bones and other items from our garbage, prior to our discovery of the bungee cords that now fasten the tops of the garbage cans firmly to the bottoms, come back and do us this service? David said, Won’t the squirrels take care of it? and I said, You mean the squirrels that eat nuts? but I have to admit that it really does seem like something that the squirrels should do. What do they do around here, anyway, except quarrel with each other and jump from the trees to the roof?

David and I finished watching Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story last night. Based, of course, on Laurence Stern's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which I haven’t read, the movie kind of tells the story of the life and birth, which it can barely get to, of Tristram Shandy. In the movie the story of the book is itself barely seen, as the story of the crew making the movie becomes increasingly important.

Appropriately enough, as the subject of the film is, in large part, digression, David and I had had to divide it in two, watching in the hour or so between Henry's bedtime and our own on Wednesday and then Thursday nights. I’m not going to now tell you about that intervening day, which was spent for me, anyway, in some frustration, from the point of view of work and potty training, because I’m not interested in digressing from my discussion of the movie to show you that I know the movie is about digression. Except unfortunately I am, as the movie understands, caught entirely in a web of digressions from which I vainly try to manufacture a linear life, and so I’ve digressed, and each word I write takes me a farther from what I started to say, and will continue to say, once I stop writing this.

I loved the movie and in fact spent part of the day after we saw the first part of the movie specifically in anticipation of seeing the second part of the movie. Thinking, I can't wait to see the end of the movie! But then, in the end, what is funny about the movie, apart from the funny parts, is that even though the movie builds to a conclusion, and in fact was conceived and built to make precisely the point that nothing in life or narrative is as satisfying as the lack of satisfaction one gets from the beginning of things—structure and closure and an ending being impossible, and shitty—even though the movie knew this, and planned on this, the ending still wasn’t satisfying. Intellectually, I was impressed. But I was not satisfied.

There's a connection, in my mind anyway, between Shandy and Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows: Both are concerned with the creation of story from no story. Melville's movie, about a band of French Resistance fighters, starts out sporadically, episodically, a series of scenes without direct links between them. As it continues, though, the links become clearer, and the story becomes, clearly, a story about how the life that seems episodic, scattered, based on chance, is in fact anything but that. The scenes become the story, and the story is that scenes add up, luck runs out, and everyone is killed.

John had his first swimming lesson yesterday. Needless to say he wouldn’t go in. His excuse was that it was in the medium pool, and he never went in the medium pool. He had gone to his lesson with his babysitter, who called to me tell me this. When I got to the pool later with Henry, I found John at the baby pool, where he showed me two toys other children had brought, but that he was playing with. I stepped into the baby pool and said, John, let’s go into the medium pool together, and he got out of the baby pool and ran around the baby pool saying, No I’m not going in the medium pool I don’t want to, no, no, no, no, no. Then when I stepped out of the baby pool he reentered the baby pool and took up playing with the toys that other children had brought to the pool. When he heard another child say, Torpedo, he quietly moved, with the torpedo, to the other side of the pool.

I went to the big pool with Henry, where he secretly—this is against the rules—dropped quarters on the bottom and dove for them. Then he handed me the quarters, which someone else had lost, for safekeeping and rolled around in the water and pretended, when it was time to leave, that he couldn’t hear me because he was underwater. Each time I called his name he dove under, but I was able, eventually, to time shouting his name with his surfacing, and to make it clear that he had to get out. To get out he swam and walked slowly across the whole distance of the pool to the stairs.

Later John went into the medium pool with Henry, and they wouldn’t leave, and we temporarily but convincingly lost one set of car keys, and John wanted to take a rock from the parking lot home with him and I said he couldn’t, and he cried bitterly and lost his ice cream by not listening, although he will almost certainly have it tonight. We had a wonderful time at the pool yesterday. It was not nearly as crowded as it normally is. It was all there only for us.