A good day is a two-swim day. A good day has a run, preferably in the most crisp fall-turning-into-winter air, your cheeks flushed and your muscles burning. If the run brings you to the edge of the water where you can watch the ferry gliding over to Shelter Island, the water churning furiously in its wake, so much the better.

These days, a good day is filled with ordinary things. Three cups of tea steeped a shade too long, the liquid turning a dark sepia color before you add just the right amount (read: an irresponsible amount) of honey and milk. The feeling of a baby’s warm body, heavy with sleep, against your chest—his breathing steady and rhythmic, his soft and chubby fingers gently resting on your neck.

Shocking as it may be, I don’t think I’ve ordered delivery pizza in my life—ever. I grew up far enough from any town (or grocery store or coffee shop or anything) that I doubt you could have gotten delivery even if you’d wanted to, although that’s an untested theory. In college, you only ate pizza late at night at at the campus center if you needed to soak up a substantial amount of beer and/or shots of tepid Southern Comfort and/or vodka mixed with cranberry juice, poured into sticky red Solo cups in the common room shared by four sophomore boys, the floor strewn in typical college-boy-fashion with all manner of lacrosse sticks and open bags of Doritos and a Martha’s Vineyard Black Dog sweatshirt and a stack of psychology textbooks and a scientific calculator and a pair of soccer cleats.