April 6, 2012

Had to leave Maundy Thursday services early (got through the Offertory, which is what I thought I should.) I was ill, but I didn’t know what exactly with. Everything at once. Nothing very specific. Maybe just exhaustion, for I rise this morning exhausted but otherwise symptomless. Maybe God was driving an impure hear from the midst of his people. Nobody called to check on me. I suppose I'm not the type one calls to check on.

Reading by student poets in the library yesterday. One of the readers was the fair-haired boy of the department who, apparently uncharacteristically, seldom came to my class. This made me feel bad, for everyone has tones praise on their lips for him, and I could not, and I assumed something in me was to blame. Couldn’t hear a word he read, so the possibly comforting judgment was aborted. J did well, and bothered to remember the event was at least in part about communication. Whitman in poetry class. I was happy. Maybe they were.

Rescued a neglected lily from the Common Room.

Good Friday sees me trying to attend to one duty, one appointment after another. I have a feeling this is not how it was supposed to be.

Removal of the piano 1) allows me no place to set stuff, 2) brought back to my attention the large military trunk I bought in Ithaca long ago (The man said it had contained a typewriter? Camera equipment? He said something, anyway) and which has been filled with the negatives of thousands upon thousands of photographs. I throw them away today, not having used them in all these years, not foreseeing a use for them in years to come. I remember dad saying “You’ll take a picture of anything, won’t you?” and that must have been true. There are also five large folders of slides, which I won’t throw away until at least I’ve looked at them, and some quite dramatic and beautiful pictures I took with one of those cameras which produced prints of various sizes, panoramas, deep vistas. I wandered some city in the rain–was it Atlanta?– take lonely and lyrical shots. As a photographer I was quite good sometimes, merely gluttonous for color and complexity at others.