December 28, 2012

Dusting of snow when I returned from Georgia. All is well there. Linda allows her sons to create around them the perfect boy paradise, full of other boys, the girls appreciated and yet held at distance, as they were in times far past. David is emotional and transparent, with a soldier’s paradoxical sweetness. Daniel may be emotional, but he’s not transparent, so he keeps one guessing. David went winter camping, and was in heaven gathering his gear around him. He could survive a holocaust with all those provisions up on the snowy mountain. We went to see Les Miserables, which was deeply affecting, besides making me ashamed of the petty things I find to complain about. When I walked through my back door, Maud was staring at a Cooper’s hawk perched on the porch rail. The oddest thing was, little birds were feeding four feet away at the feeders. Does he not eat little birds? Had he sat there so long they’d forgotten him? His disappearance when he sensed me was so fast I couldn’t even mark which way he had gone. Saw Lincoln on my own last night. Spielberg’s vulgarity is invincible. Even bravura performances from many cast members– I think Tommy Lee Jones and Day-Lewis most of all–did not quite save it. Moon rose in ghostly mist as I headed for the cinema.

Woke this morning to a dream in which I was in the hospital for some slight thing, I thought, but there was a red bottle on the desk outside my room, and Heather Hamilton came to visit me, and she had once worked in that hospital, and she told me the red bottle meant I was under “professional” care, for something serious. The other part of the dream involved a band of divinities or super-heroes who went about generating lovely surprises for desperately ill children. I was surprised that they considered me one of those children. I was at the same time one of THEM, one of the spirits, and I listened with bemusement to the sorts of things they thought I would like as a surprise. My costume, or identity, was a sort of imp, like you might see on a Christmas ornament.

My glorious fish fossil arrived in the mail.