Frank

 April 29, 2026

As I stand painting in the attic, the calling of frogs comes loud and joyful from the pond. 

Raced down to the sound of a doorbell. I do not have a doorbell. No one was at the door.

From Frank in Cleveland: What an honor to receive this email from you on the eve of opening night of what may be the best play I ever read. I had marked my calendar in the hope I might be able to attend, but alas, I cannot. I can only hope it will be recorded (I would be happy to contribute to make that happen) and if it is, I want to purchase a copy.I continue to believe this play can have a positive impact on people at a time when we are all wandering around saying, "What in the hell is going on?" and "Why in the hell is this going on?" and "How in the hell do we stop this!?"

I have felt all the things you are feeling right now. I remember when I directed The Merry Wives of Windsor, my first Shakespeare play, for free in downtown Canton and carrying set pieces to where we stored them after the final dress rehearsal, an actor said to me, "How can you be so calm when there are so many things that could go wrong tomorrow?" I thought about all the things he was talking about (I said to myself, "You don't know the half of it!") and said, "We have something really good. We have done everything we can to be as prepared as possible. There is nothing left to do, but do it. Whatever will be, will be." That one went great and I went on to direct four more. 

Break a leg. Frank

 April 28, 2026

Two days of intermittent but blessed rain. 

SS says not to bother with rehearsal tonight, so I will finish my painting. 

Rehearsal

 April 26, 2026

Lilies (yellow callas) were languishing in their tubs in the church kitchen, unclaimed after Easter. I gathered them up, brought them home and put them into ground still damp from the rain. 

Downtown to the BeBe to watch a rehearsal of Purification.  4/5 of the cast is stellar– the one who most needs to be, not quite yet, though I’m assured great strides of been made and greater still will come between now and Thursday. Mostly, the nerves relax, seeing that, besides expectable problems like remembering the lines, the interpretation is solid and the actors are good and have been working incredibly hard, and I’m grateful to them however it all turns out. Always grateful to production crew, who put forth such effort of one’s behalf. I remember as an actor not thinking very much about the playwright, though in fact most of them were dead or distant. I need to get over my insistence on correct grammar. “On whom one can depend” and the like stick out too often. The opening scene gets to its point a little too fast. Perhaps the play was written a little too fast, with too much political urgency. There’s also a bit of self-satire, which I didn’t include consciously, but the Muse did. It’s otherwise on the brink of being over-earnest, of never cracking a wry smile. It’s almost impossible to hear some of the most earnest speeches without thinking, “I am allowed to feel they are going too far.” If the art is true, the artifact is wiser than the artificer.  

Walked briskly and without pain from my distant parking space. 

 April 25, 2026

Light but probably sufficient rain. At least no watering today.

Drove to campus for maybe the third time since retirement, to the student art & ceramics sale. How new & happy the students looked, and how happy I was to be briefly among them again. I bought a large pitcher to water the plants on the porch, though it may be too heavy to be used for that very often. The young lady who’d made it was at the check-out table. She smiled and waved and cried. “That’s mine! I made that!’ I was glad that she got to see someone appreciating her work. 

Sweet night. Painting. Music from the age of Charles V on the CD player.

Hit and Run

 

April 24, 2026

Spring returns. Black iris a shock in the front yard. Tree peony wane and herbaceous peony come to the fore. First pale yellow roses, first flat pink climbing roses in the near shade, wild white thorn in utter shade. Even as I type in the attic, perfume wafts through the little window. 

By means of the security cameras watched the cleaning ladies pick at the flowers on the front porch. Couldn’t hear what they were saying, which was a disappointment. They waited until I got home (I usually wait for them to be gone, but my timing was off) so they could talk with me after, by their calculation, a year. They told me how lovely my house and garden are, pointed out loose bricks in the stairway, said how well I look, and complained about the unreasonable client who was their next stop. It would never occur to me to try to negotiate downward a workman’s fee. They wondered if I collect antiques. I didn’t know how to answer. I have antiques and so must have, in a sense, collected them, but I never thought of it that way. Need a bowl? Get an old one. 

Got buzzed by an old black pick-up last evening as I drove to chorus. Its muffler was shot, so loudly and aggressively it wove through lanes on Patton Avenue, trying to inch ahead of traffic. I was stopped at the first traffic light west of the Smoky Park Bridge, looking at the cars stopped a little ahead at the second one. The pick-up wheeled around me, cut the red light, and in five seconds hit the car in front of me with considerable force. The back of the car disintegrated, while the pick-up reversed, found a new angle, and took off through the red light, having committed a hit and run. I waited for somebody to get out and check on the driver, but I was first in line, so I realized it was me. I got out and ran (as much as I can run) toward the wreck. The driver was visibly unhurt, but stunned and disoriented. He was either very stunned indeed or was Hispanic and didn’t understand what I said. He looked at the back of his car, struggling to comprehend. Patton Avenue, especially at that hour, is the busiest street in Asheville, so I knew I couldn’t leave my car where it was. Another driver and I kicked the largest and pointiest debris to the side of the road, and I got back in the car and drove on, over the remaining debris, which I assumed would shred my tires, but seems not to have. Cars going around us shouted ugly things about getting out of the way. When I got to St George’s I called the police, and when I got home received a call asking for details. I knew how incredibly unhelpful my testimony must have been. What kind of truck? No, I couldn’t read the license. . . all I had was the blackness and scruffiness of it, and that fact that its muffler was shot. It must have been bashed in considerably at the front, by I didn’t actually see that. The cop on the phone was very pleasant. As I drove on, I had to remind myself that I hadn’t been the one in the wreck.

Dug weeds and grass from the iris bed, then put in zinnia seeds and watered. While I watered, a cock robin came and stood in the spray. He dug for worms a little, but mostly stayed for the spray, and moved to follow the spray when I moved it. Spent a length of time providing cok robin with a shower. As I worked in the garden, a rabbit grazed unconcerned ten feet away. 

My father’s hoe finally broke, as I was tugging on bamboo. It broke right at the head, so is still usable as a staff and a hand cultivator. 

Rehearsal was unexpectedly merry. 

Huge fire in the River District.

 

April 21, 2026

Removed covers from the plants I covered last night against the frost, which apparently didn’t happen. Perhaps they felt looked-after regardless of the need. 

Coffee with TB at Riverside. T has no need for employment, which means he can spend all his time worrying about his writing and being a writer, which is the sadder because he is not good at it. He blames his failure at innumerable schools and with innumerable applications on everything but that. I finally had to stop writing him recommendations, having run out of ways to do so while at once telling the truth and attempting not to disadvantage him. How long can you hope someone has potential, and claim it for him without evidence? I thought that would end our relationship; apparently it did not, or only for a while. Affirmative action and DEI are his present enemies, excluding him as a straight white male in order to accommodate any number of less talented people of color. I do not doubt that this is an actual issue– I have faced it myself– but it's not helping to dwell on it to the extent he does. He’s getting his painful depression under control with a battery of self-prescribed botanicals, medical professionals having failed him. It’s the same litany from eight years back, and one feels equally helpless to be of assistance. Dogs came as we talked to me and not to him. I thought that meant something. 

The lamp my mother covered with tiles during her mosaic phase lit my desk at UNCA, and languished at riverside after my retirement until I rescued it yesterday and set it in my living room, lit again after nearly six years.

Peculiar anguish after AVLGMC meetings. I am doing no good. I am having no effect. When I was at Boy Scout Summer Camp, there’d come a time when we’d plan Skit Night. We’d decide on a funny little story, develop a script, think of songs we could perform, or adapt, to move the story along. We’d make costumes and find bowls to give us bosoms and somebody somehow would have a tube of lipstick. The more knowing among us would compose tiny Broadway shows for us to star in, everybody cooperating in the spirit of fun & comradery. On Family Night, when our parents came to visit, we’d put on the show. Though it wasn’t very good in any objective sense, we liked doing it and our audience liked witnessing it, taking exuberance and good fun as sufficient for a night’s entertainment. We were good because the people who wished us well wanted us to be good, and took our every effort as an actual achievement. What happy memories! I’m less comfortable with that process now. With the differences of better performances and a good deal more money, this is PRECISELY what happens with AVLGMC shows. (can’t really call them concerts) today, and there looks to be no deviation from that, or modification to it. What we did at camp was oh so relatable (to use Thomas’s word) but is to be relatable the only virtue we’re aiming for? Can we sometimes be challenging or transformative? Can we sometimes teach as well as satisfy? Could we exceed expectation as well as indulge it? Can we imagine that improving our range and skill as performers may, in some way, please and serve our audience?  Time grows short, and I have planned more than my share of Summer Camp Skit Nights.

Fretted over this until I realized how little it matters to the onward flow of things. It mattered in the moment.

Skinks

 April 19, 2026

Almost 90 yesterday, almost freezing today, with a stiff, petulant wind. Tiny, unforthcoming rain barely enough to wet the pavement.  

The reading at the Black Mountain Center for the Arts was better than I expected. What an odd thing poetry is! I’ve dedicated my life to it, and should be more articulate on its behalf. What is it? It’s something that happens to words to brighten and sharpen them beyond their ordinary force. Why is the poet not king of the world? Because every warden of the Kingdom of Poetry misdefines it and conceals its power. Even your teacher tells you, “write about how you feel today,” as though lacing on your boots were the whole of the journey. Some of the student poets were quite good, some were not– the same spread detectable in the “professionals”– yet I believe the value in the effort of composition to have been roughly the same in every case. A poem is a victory over confusion, though of course some victories are more consequential than others, some include the listener while others are for the poet alone. Poems that intentionally take up causes are invariably bad. A, whom I have missed since he moved to Virginia, is performative (I wonder if that’s the word I want?) in the sense that all is effect, designed to illicit immediate recognition and response from an audience. He is good at it, and has made a living at it. My poetry– I recognized as I was at the podium reading it–is exploratory, probing into unknown spaces, hungry for revelation, as is nearly all the poetry I prize as a reader. The response to my work was, in any case, electrifying, gratifying, and I ended up being glad I took the gig.  Several invitations to read elsewhere. I knew my words were different when I sent them ringing into the air. I continue to be the last poet. 

Meeting at church to reveal that first stage of rebuilding– long delayed, it seems to me. I’d planned to attend, but didn’t, assuming my presence would change nothing and merely being informed seeming, at this point, frivolous. I’ve never needed to be informed when I wasn’t instrumental. 

First skinks appeared on the porch last week. They huddle in their caves today.