January 9, 2008

Maud, like a tiny white cloud, glides over the keyboard as I write.

I have been rising at 4 in the morning since returning from Ireland, and working steadily through the day, without being able to dig completely out from under the tasks at hand. This is remarkable to me. This signals to me that there are too many tasks at hand.

The time, apparently, became right for me to turn Gilgamesh into a full-length play, which I have done with the speed and invention and delight I associate with doing it right. Each page was a fresh discovery, a jeux d’esprit. I wish I could get it into the hands of every producer in the world at once.

Cody was relating his visit home to Texas to visit his folks, and how his father is having premonitions of death.
“How old is your dad?” says I
He is exactly as old as I.

Mickey brought my plaque from winning “Outstanding Performance” honors at HART. There’s a picture on it of me looking old and fat. Nevertheless, after a clash of vanities, the vanity of the actor wins and it goes on the mantel with my Desert Star star.

In something of a precipitous chain of events, my father has determined to move to an assisted living facility within a block of my sister’s home in Atlanta. He had been opposed to such a thing, but he must have had a scare that made him doubt his continuing ability to live alone. He seems happy about it. Either age has changed him, or I never noticed his excitability, his tendency to leap into things in full panic mode. Maybe I did notice it subconsciously, and from it derived my calmness, my casual approach to crisis situations, which people with higher idles probably find irritating. I am one of those people who does not rush to put out a fire, but waits to see if it will exhaust itself. It usually does. Sometimes it doesn’t. Father thinks that because he pays a deposit and a month’s rent, he is wasting money if he is not there living all that month, taking advantage of every dollar he paid in rent. I think that since the money must be paid anyway, and since there are no expenses on the other side (the mortgage long since paid), one could take one’s time and get to the facility whenever one wished, and the money would be spent no more or less. I bet we will never be able to convince one another of the rightness of our stands. Anyway, one doesn’t expect this sort of thing. One ponders how to work it into the mix.

I contacted one moving company online, and have received responses from six. You gotta love the Internet.