July 30, 2010

Hot mornings, hot with the heat left over from the torrid evenings. I keep the garden watered, and it doesn’t look like it suffers too much. The swamp hibiscus are the spectacular blooms now. A few days before I left for England, the joy was that big blacksnake curving into my yard. Yesterday evening, it was a garter snake as long as my arm, imperfectly hidden under the anemones. What joy it gave me to see him there! I wanted to touch him, but he was having none of that, and whipped away into the rocks. Met DT for drinks. He’s here at a science education convention, giving us a chance to see each other more than we have for many years. It’s a little hard to get him off the subject of Hiram, but that’s because he loves it so much and the present President has done so much to destroy it. Obsession is therefor understandable. President Chema is one of those people who haven’t noticed that corporate power structure has failed even the corporations, one of those people who actually holds as an unexamined article of faith that the “bottom line” is the significant thing, that if the checkbook balances the deed has been accomplished--who congratulates himself that he has replaced a diamond with a shard of glass and thereby kept costs down. Took 150 years to build the school and ten to destroy it. It is a sad thing. Of course, the last flourish is the Hiram administration’s insistence on taking, like Chinese Communism, correction for disloyalty. Sad, and sad. It was a beautiful place. But I tell DT that the sadder thing would be to let anguish over it destroy his life as well, seeing that his efforts at correction have not been welcomed, nor have they availed. I’m all for being the lone rebel, but not when that takes humanity away. “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart,” says Yeats. Drinks at Sazerac, then we sat in the moonlight before the Jackson Building and chit-chatted in my sweet city.