Post leaving my daughter in her college dorm, the cats and I hole up and read Here by Richard McGuire. A sample of this amazing book is:

Here: the cats and I wake, in the morning that’s yet dark, to the rain pattering through the open windows on the stones and leaves around our house. One more week of August remains, and the swimming prognosis is lousy.

Around me: backroads in places still barely passable, bridges out, the riverbanks strewn with human junk — pieces of the ripped-apart motel, wires wound around wood and twisted clothing and two cars and so much plastic. I started this summer, July 1, driving to an Independence Day celebration, cloudy with smoke from the Canadian wildfires, noting that day as my own marker: the smoke has become part of our life. We accepted it, kept on with our lives, as we had — and have — to do.

A summer of the strangest things. The world’s great problems, my own petty woes. In all this, we filled our days with working and drinking coffee, hiking and playing cards and eating tacos and talking, so much talking. Gravy.

On this rainy Friday morning, a Raymond Carver poem:

“Gravy”

No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”
he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.”