The commitments.

As much as I love squeezing between cramped lines of clothing and muscling my way into the racks at vintage stores, I almost never walk away with anything. A few items at Retropolis almost made the cut: an art deco-style necklace with staggered rows of black and clear rhinestones, a 1940s black dress with periwinkle and pink appliques and some pink pleating, and wispy chiffon nightgowns reminiscent of old Shadowline or Vanity Fair styles. But I just couldn't commit.

Our favorite way to shop is to split up for a few minutes, make mental inventories, and then take turns leading guided tours of the highlights. There's simply no other way to do it. The overwhelming quantity of stuff at Retropolis almost defeated me, though. I nearly forgot half of what I intended to show Andy.

Recently I've had problems committing not just to clothes, but to books, too. I entered bookstores with a long list of wishes and leave empty-handed and entirely dispirited. I want to take some risks, just not pricey ones.

So today I applied for a library card from my childhood library. Entering a location I knew intimately as a child usually causes me to see double: both how large and cavernous a place seemed long ago and how average and comparatively unimpressive it seems now. It's hard to see the space for what it is, instead of just how it looks in relation to a memory. I used to hang out underneath the library staircase after school, and today I noted how small of a space I was crawling into (and how annoying this must have been to the librarians, who probably didn't appreciate that we dragged books under there with us).

The library cards were the major change. Back in the 80s, my card was printed on a typewriter and stuffed into a clear plastic sleeve. Now, of course, it's shiny and colorful and has a ridiculously overblown title ("the knowledge card"). But it still does the same thing, and after such a long hiatus from library use, I felt especially thrilled to browse and finally check out a book. I was already planning some interlibrary loans on my way out.

I came home with Juliet, Naked, which I'd only hesitated to commit to because it's still in hardback, and made myself some hot chocolate.

Later, we streamed Encounters at the End of the World on Netflix and were absolutely hypnotized by its beautiful scuba sequences. Although sometimes heartbreaking, it reminded me of how much I love exploration narratives like Tony Horwitz's Blue Latitudes or David Grann's The Lost City of Z (I loved the original article in The New Yorker so much that I photocopied it and gave it to Andy when I first met him). The documentary closed with a forklift operator charmingly paraphrasing Alan Watts: "Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence." Really wonderful.