July 13, 2014
The drive from here to Blacksburg is, largely, paradise, through the ragged mountains and the ditches all filled with chicory, just a shade purpler than the sky. The length of the drive just touches the sunny side of fed-up. A great red-tail dived at me just at the college gate. The field outside my window at the University Inn was beautiful, rolling down to a stately bog. Virginia Tech is unimpressive architecturally but quite large, with a dear little college town at its edges. I hadn’t seen T in–what?– 33 years, a third of a century–and I wondered if things would be difficult or dramatic. They weren’t, but normal and comfortable, as though we’d seen each other yesterday. It took me a minute to adjust to his obliqueness, perhaps him one to adjust to my directness. He introduced me as “the man who taught me to write.” I keep thinking of him as “the poet,” though he himself left that, deliberately, long ago behind. I never leave anything behind. That’s one of my blunders.
There was a dance piece and a dramatic piece at the black box theater based on his new book. The book is far better than either of them. The dance was fun, the dancers attractive and full of application. They danced around a white paper forest that hung from the ceiling–making for interesting and imperfect sightlines– and which endured–an even worse idea–for the dramatic piece. The one-women show-- except for getting T’s beautiful images out into the air– was, to me, offensive. The woman acted herself doing a one-woman show, a piece for a resume rather than the homage one might have expected. She was always in the room but never in the script. She was showing off. At odds with the showing off was the fact that she had not bothered to memorize the script. The female voice was a perverse choice for this work, which related so much, and inescapably, the emotions of man. But, it is better that both dance and monolog exist than not, and I was glad to see them. They are exactly what university theaters should be doing now and everywhere.
Off to his big house on a mountain, where L had made us supper. We talked, caught up a little, ironed out misconceptions we had about one another’s last three decades. What I interpreted as a third century of abandonment and dismissal, T explained as shyness. Well, OK. I can almost see that. After dinner a walk in the woods T mentioned in his book, a close look at places to which he alluded. He and I both noticed the similarity to Maytree. A woman warned us we were going to be attacked by geese, but we were not. A deer stood in the bog, her broken leg held at an odd angel, wondering of we were gong to pursue her. I could barely look at her. I’ve never adjusted to tragedy about which I can do nothing, especially when I could hit it with a thrown stick. The forest floor hopped with bay toads.
It was grand to see what I took to be a fully functional partnership. Even at the dinner table, after however many years it was, they were wooing each other, explaining each other, inclined to each other’s tone and expectation.
In the hotel bar there were happy kids–from a wedding party, I think–talking about how wonderful Asheville is. I chimed in that I am from there, and we talked about their favorite places. They, too, love Wicked Weed, but had a bad experience at the Coxe Avenue Asheville Pizza, because everyone there, they said, was smelly and unclean. After vodkas, to bed. The drive home, me now sitting in my upstairs study, wishing I’d turned the fan on before I sat down, cat on my foot, recording.
