November 23, 2014

All the Ellet people reminiscing on Facebook yesterday about where they were when Kennedy was shot. JH and I were sitting side by side in Mr Tucker’s junior high history class: a kinship that transcends the years.

Yesterday’s event was the MFA project of a young woman from Antioch U, whom I agreed to mentor. Her degree is to be in Creative Writing and Social Awareness, and she organized a reading of pertinent works and a silent auction to benefit animal rescue organizations. I admit I wasn’t paying that much attention–she didn’t seem to need much mentoring, and her social focus was un-amiable to me– so the event took me a little by surprise, for I had fallen among the animal activists. These people can’t say “animal” but only “non-human animal,” couldn’t abide the ride in the elevator because there were pictures in it, and only of humans; can’t bear mention of Santa Claus without shedding a tear over his abuse of the reindeer. Wish I were exaggerating, but I’m not. I probed the air for humor, but there was none. They took turns leaving the room in heartsickness over the brutalities in the excerpts they chose to be read. One read surprisingly good poems excusing the fault of excess tenderheartedness. She didn’t mean that at all. I had some inkling of the procedure, because she sent me a story to read (an awful one with a sort of interesting premise), whereby I did stop myself from wearing the leather jacket I’d worn the rest of the week. I finally figured out what “milk is rape” meant. They all knew the buzzwords, and nodded as they came rolling out. The silent auction was larded with drawings of American Indians lounging about in forest glens with friendly animals, the fact that the AIs ate and otherwise used these animals apparently irrelevant to the purpose. My thoughts were confused, because I have what I think of as holy and informed reverence for nature, yet the attitude around me, though allied, caused me to cringe. Cringing without total disagreement. I feel the same around religious people, a believer in almost a fanatical sense who nevertheless is mortified around too much witnessing, too much talk of what should be private and experiential. The path that leads from revelation to extremism to idiocy is, unfortunately, poorly marked. Saw once beloved DD, and met his fiancé, who has a task ahead of her. The story I was given to read involved a fisherman who was given a heart attack by the sight of a puma. The story wanted the hungry puma to eat the man, but lifted up its petticoats and tip-toed off in another direction. Interestingly, the bit of a novel read by my mentee was SENSATIONAL, and, even more interestingly, had the brutal mutilation of a cat as a significant plot point.

Dream of my father sitting in his living room, telling me of a rest home to which he wanted to retire. I took the address and went there. The rooms were small, but the setting was at the edge of a vast wilderness, saw-tooth mountains in the distance. I told him what I’d found, but he said, with tears in his yes, “I want to go there.” This is the first moment when I thought he had visited me.

Deep turquoise in the study window.