June 1, 2009

My parents’ anniversary.

Walked into the garden at dusk. Half a moon gleamed–gleams now-- at the zenith, pink clouds eastward, the rest the most perfect, flawless azure blue. The great mulleins–five of them–lift their ruffly pinnacles twice as high and thrice as thick as anything else, sturdy, masculine, assertive, the emerald yang of twilight. A heavy scent lies on everything, mostly honeysuckle, but mingled with rose and ghost white madonna lily, and the grass I weed-whacked into submission at the end of the morning. Everything is magic. If the garden stretched a hundred miles in every direction, just as it is, it would make a separate world, and men would lie down under the blossoms and dream dreams that themselves would becomes worlds. The lavish calling of a mockingbird from the telephone wire threw me back to the convent school on Green Spring Valley Road in Baltimore County– St Mary’s?–where thirty summers ago I walked at dusk amid the calling of mockingbirds. There was a constellation of fireflies then that is not matched here, perhaps is matched nowhere now in this diminished world. I remember distinctly watching the fireflies and hearing the mockingbirds and praying “Let me remember this moment forever.” And so I have, this portion of forever, anyway. I have been fortunate mostly to remember the things I longed in the moment to remember: the shell-pink moon rising over South Carolina as I drove to some lecture or reading; the red bat over the pool in the deepest part of the forest; my pugilist lover in the Sauna on Ormond Quay; T’s smell as he lay in my arms; the moon rising over the road to Tobar at the edge of the Burren; the gypsy singers on Temple Square; the light of morning in the tiny patch of wilderness, as it then was, at the edge of my father’s lawn. I must have longed for these things purely, for they, and a dozen more, perhaps, like them have stayed with me, and so far as I know, there is none in all the world that shares them with me. They go when I go. Perhaps I should say, they abide where I abide.

Reception at NC Stage to welcome the new season. Except for the actors, I knew very few of the people there, who were mostly (I suppose) rich and old. I’ve seen or been in all of them, so I’ll go for the nuance rather than the discovery.