November 5, 2013

Trying to re-integrate, trying to catch up, trying just to sit for a while.

I do love being in New York. I feel empty and a little frightened today, as though I’ve lost track of what I was supposed to do with my life.

Two appointments with the tech guy at school missed, not by me but by him, and when we finally manage to connect I hear me apologizing for being a nuisance. O and I were to meet at her place in the wilds of Fairview to read through a script. Appointed hour comes and passes, and I think, “I should learn the lesson. If they’re not here, they’re not coming, and I could spend– as I spent already once today–an hour waiting for someone who is cavalierly off doing something else.” I’m half way home when she calls to say she had gone to walk the dog and was “only a few minutes late.” I fight the urge to blame myself, if I had only waited a little longer, though in fact I left only when the rage was becoming ungovernable. She suffered because I already had faced that particular provocation today

Aunt Marian is dead. I would like to stop her spirit on its way home to ask what she thought of the life she lived. An outsider would find it squalid and futile, a failure in every measurable way. But I bet– I sincerely hope–she would say, “ I did everything I wanted to do and not a damn thing I didn’t.” In her youth she must have been a big, loud, happy girl. Her household was as grotesque as anything Faulkner or O’Connor dreamed up, but it lacked both the memory and the delusion of greatness, which are necessary for the generation of fiction. Her mother was one of the most elegant and cultured women I ever met. She had not cleaned house, or thrown anything away, in forty years.  I may find myself missing her.