August 24, 2010

Dark morning, fiddling of the musical insects. The drive back was a record-breaking nine hours. It might have been slightly briefer, except that at a rest stop on 81 in Virginia I heard, amazingly, someone call my name. It was Al DiMartino, a ghost from the past. Al is one of those guys who seems to talk nothing but bullshit, but when you go to check it out, everything he says is true. So, I received the recitation of the unlikely turns in his story, all of which I’m sure are genuine, however byzantine. His main occupation is as an ombudsman’s helper. He works for a lawyer, and when the lawyer’s efforts at arbitration or reconciliation fail, Al apparently comes in with his two dogs and touchy-feelys everything to start moving again. The fact that I had never heard of such a thing doesn’t mean it doesn’t exits. He asked about Nick, and I realized I haven’t seen him since 1996.

Patrick and a woman were in the sweet gum when I got home. She was cranky and resistant, and they hadn’t got much work done. She was also, improbably, as beautiful as he.

HS keeps erupting from Asheville High. What kind of person is it is who, when corrected for a damaging error which harms or misleads others, doesn’t apologize for the error but rather demands apology for having it pointed out? Nearly everyone around here, now that I think of it.

Dennis and I motored to Cleveland to see the Art Museum, which was woefully under-utilized and quite beautiful. I remembered almost nothing from before, and so everything was a revelation. Former visits were hardly systematic, so maybe I was seeing truly new things. We crossed over to the Botanical Garden, fluttering with neon butterflies in one room and twittering with jewelbox birds in another.

Afternoon: great limbs of the sweet gum come down, and light falls where it has never fallen since I lived here. The scent of the sawn wood is incredibly sweet.