The last time I saw Paris...

...it was raining even harder than in Seattle tonight. In spite of the rain, it's not particularly cold - the balcony door is open, and Sparky comes and goes.

I'm sure the rain hasn't spoiled the Storm victory parade and celebration at the Seattle Center. The team had a splendid season, topped off by winning the WNBA championship in three straight games, and their loyal, enthusiastic fans are ready to celebrate.

Sometimes September is warmer than summer here, but not this year.

A rainy month is a good time to read. Before the Seattle Public Library shut down for its late August - early September furlough (second year for a regrettable event forced on the system by budget cutbacks) I lugged home an assorted bagful. Although the books weren't all from the same section of the library, they all focused on England, something I didn't actually plan.

I like English mysteries, especially those set in familiar places. Right now I'm working through Peter Turnbull's series of police procedurals set in York.

"Arts and Letters Daily" is an excellent source of on-line articles and reviews. In an article about successful children of famous parents, I read about Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel's son, who lived well into the 20th century, and had his own literary career. In search of his autobiography, published after his death by his widow, I found instead Hawthorne and His Circle, a delightful memoir Hawthorne wrote in 1903. While it focuses on his father and mother and their well-known friends, the book highlights Julian's childhood memories of these people mixed with his reflections on growing up in a charmed atmosphere.

The Hawthorne family spent seven years in England and Italy. According to Julian, Nathaniel particularly loved England, regarding it as "the ancestral home." If his life had not been cut short, four years after the family returned to America, Julian believed his father would have returned to England to live.

My first job was in a small-town library, where one of the duties was to get new books ready for the shelves. In those days, this involved putting the dust jacket into a plastic cover, pasting in a pocket for the circulation card, and embossing the library name on "the secret page" - a way to identify the book in case it met with some disaster.

SPL books now have computer chips instead of card pockets, and you can check out books without ever interacting with another human. But Julian's book is old - I was fascinated to discover that the Seattle Public Library put it into circulation on April 10, 1913 (according to a fading date stamp.) Another stamp records the date it was sent to the bindery, to reappear in familiar green hardboard. The book still has a checkout card and pocket inside the back cover - last used in 1967.

The book didn't register on the check-out pad. "It's so old that it has to be hand-checked," explained the counter clerk, who pasted a dime-size orange dot onto the book's cover to remind me to hand it to a real person when I returned it.

Here's another picture of Paris in unsettled weather, taken from the Pont de Grenelle.