2:39 a.m. I am always unsure about which truth to tell each day as I sit down to write these pieces. If you were to parse the day just past, you'd always find that eight good things, eight bad things, and eight insignificant things have just happened to you. Always.

Twenty-four truths. I can't tell them all -- there isn't enough time.

One good thought I've always had is the sheer fairness of the hours and the minutes. Every single breathing entity gets 24 and 1,440. You do, I do, and yes, that's all Bill Gates gets as well, monopolist though he may be.

What makes the game really interesting, of course, is strategy. Everything depends on what you think. What you think is entirely in your control. Entirely. There are eight sides to every pumpkin.

This particular pumpkin, for instance, was a gift from the heavens on the day after Halloween. Someone had tossed it over our wall, maybe as a prank. Or maybe Johnny Pumpkinhead was strolling through town, dispensing his heavy seeds. It was suddenly just lying out there in the sun on the concrete by the front door with the newspaper, already starting to ooze from the wound near its stem.

I knew it was a goner, but I put it on the table with the rest of the fruit and kept an eye on it. A little weepy by the stem -- nothing else until this morning when it suddenly had a beard on the side facing the wall. Velvety like flocked wallpaper. Soft like a poodle applique on an old felt skirt.

When I lifted it out of the basket it was all especially soft and clingy against my fingers, threatening to burst. But it held together. It didn't have to. For that I'm grateful.

I had a teacher once, a poet named Theodore Weiss, and he read a phrase aloud from one of his poems that I've never forgotten -- "Rot, the Oriental."

I can't find the rest of the poem to slip it back into, but whenever I see the elaborate flume and fizzings of any kind of lidded growth on cottage cheese or sponge cake in the fridge, I think of Rot, the Oriental with his coloratura plumage.

And when I see the mold and the mildew, I think of Ted Weiss and my old classes and for that, too, I am grateful.

And so there's six nice things in one pumpkin, alone. Plus, I took it's picture and put it in here. I'm up to seven already and we've never even left the kitchen table.

Ain't life grand?