September 13, 2009

LeBron James, the basketball player, was on the radio. Though otherwise our experiences are as different as can be imagined, we are both Akron boys, and much of what he said, and how he said it, rang a bell for me. He seemed an unusually upstanding and virtuous man, and I waited in the car after I’d reached my destination, to hear the end of the interview. I was proud of the homeboy.

The weekend was swallowed up by church choir retreat at Lake Logan. I went early, thinking that wandering around in the stony riverbed a while would make me feel better about an event that I normally find trying and wasteful. I was right. Peace sat over the Pigeon River like a blue dome, the fish nearly still in the stream, the primroses a blaze of gold on the banks. For a moment I saw things as the valley would, the open places and the campgrounds a momentary deviation from the still, vast darkness of the forests. Wherever I was, was in the midst of the great wilderness I have wandered since coming to this place. Between rehearsals I read MacLiammoir’s All for Hecuba, sketched in my little sketchbook (mostly the abundant fungus), and studied Hamlet, though I did not fully escape the conviction of trial and waste. Driving home was an odd and unexpected experience– I was unfathomably sad about something, and though I could put it into words, the words do not now have the power they did when I was a white streak between the farms and utility poles. Loss. . .loss. . . loss. . .I am still exhausted from the passion of those moments.

Home, I napped and, without planning it, made more headway against the thicket at the northeast corner than I had in any day before.