All the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room.

I am reading The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster (nonfiction book about father figures: his own, himself, and other dads or dad-like individuals). The above title is a quote by Pascal and is referenced by Auster.

I read the book on the train today. I rode the J into the city with Owl Licks this afternoon. I on my way to babysit on the UES, he on his way to work at the metal shop at Columbia. There was a chubby gay man in green pants who boarded the subway with us at Gates. He was with an older heterosexual couple who looked to be from the Midwest. I guessed they were his parents, visiting. He was taking pictures of them and himself before the three of them walked to the front of the subway car (we were on the first train car) and stared out the window at the expanding tacks as we pushed toward Manhattan. Owl Licks and I had a hearty laugh somewhere over the East River, wedged between the two lanes of traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge. I don't remember what it was that made us laugh, but I think the two of us both needed a serious guffaw and that it didn't matter in the least how it came about. And we were both adamant about carrying the laughter on, all the way across the bridge. Perhaps we had exhausted what we were talking about or maybe we'd become self-conscious and the once earnest laughter had become a nervous continuum of giggles. Either way, I thought that the guy seated across from us probably believed us to be stoned.

I picked up the boy I watch from school and took him in a cab to midtown where he has a tennis lesson. I sat on the sidelines, on a comfortably cushioned wicker bench, and watched as he and three other ten-year-olds were instructed by a lean, tanned young man on the form and footwork of tennis. An older woman, clearly the mother of one of the other boys, walked in towards the end of the lesson and sat down next to me, on a matching wicker chair. At the end, all the boys ran over to the water cooler in front of where we sat and began voraciously chugging. The mother next to me tried to casually start conversation with the attractive, younger tennis instructor. She complimented his ability to keep all the kids respectful and in-check during the lesson. The instructor was standing on the other side of me, leaning against the wall and spinning his racket atop the turf of the court, and I inevitably found myself in the middle of their conversation. I smiled occasionally as they chatted, but had no interest in joining their prattle. He was attractive though. The mother then said something about someone being contrite. I'm not sure who she was referencing but the once talkative instructor suddenly shoved his paper water cup into his mouth, took a long drink, looked at the mother, smiled quickly, said Yes, and looked away, back towards the court where the four boys walked around with slow steps, almost hopping, covering and hiding scattered tennis balls inside fluorescent orange tubes that were taller than themselves. It seemed to me that the instructor didn't know what contrite meant. This might be unfair of me, assuming someone who is good at sports has a poor vocabulary. But his expression looked just like mine does when someone uses a word I don't know. Though, sometimes the proper response is indeed a blank-faced stare followed by a introspective Yes whether or not you know what the other person is talking about.

After the lesson, my boy and I went back to the UES apartment where he lives. He was reading on the couch, waiting for his piano teacher to arrive, while I leafed through the dozens of Christmas card pictures the family had gotten over the holiday season. One was from Justice Clarence Thomas. And his was more like a newsletter than a card. And it wasn't devoted to the children, as most Christmas cards are, but instead to Mr. Thomas himself. It was written in first-person, from the perspective of his wife and filled with lots of colored pictures of Mr. Thomas at Nebraska football games. At one point his wife listed off things that her husband had accomplished during the past year and at the end in parenthesis added, "not to mention being the best husband ever!!"

Another quote from Auster's book:
"Impossible, I realize, to enter another's solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, where all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely."