November 15, 2007

Very dark, blessedly rainy, very early. One or the other of the kittens slept in the palm of my hand all night. They stagger to their bowls in the morning, which I fill up, then it’s full-out mayhem for hours on end. I laugh all the time.

Meeting for Crown of Shadows last night, the house full and loud, a chaos of movement not unlike the kittens’, but by very much bigger bodies. I’m uneasy having people–let alone crowds-- in my home space, but I didn’t used to be, so perhaps I’ll dig my way back into civility. Anne-Marie is going to make an excellent Isabella. She already is an excellent Isabella. Told Adam and her they could do the show tonight and, if it were all acting, it would be a success. M’s budget for the festival is $15,000. I almost laughed out loud when I heard it, but, on the other hand, what do I know? I have never succeeded at a really big event because I have only tried once, with City Dionysia, and who knows how that might have gone the second time. But everyone is enthused, and so I shoulder my way into the kingdom of enthusiasm with a smile on my face, a smile which becomes more genuine as the days pass. The honor they’re doing me by addressing my plays with such ebullience may never be repeated in my lifetime.

Plus, I like them. I shouldn’t make a kitten analogy, but that’s what creeps into my mind. They do what they do and I smile, grateful to have been a witness. TAB stayed a couple of hours after everybody else left to show me poems and a bit of a play and to talk. He thanked me profusely for my time, but I should have been thanking him. I never met anyone like him, and I watched him as if I were Miranda and he one of the shipwrecked sailors, fascinated, grateful. His diffident eloquence, his apparent fragility, his sort of defeated hopefulness are all new to me, and I could but cast around for way to treat him right. I know that if any stayed behind and claimed my attention, it would be the same.

I never stay behind. That is my loss.

I pray for things–like company–and when I get them, they are so much stranger and richer than what I thought I was asking for. MA asked me why I was a believer, and the first answer--though not the one I gave him-- is that things are so much stranger and richer than they could possibly be by accident.