June 30, 2015

Last contact of the night was with my mortgage representative at Freedom Mortgage, whereby I retired in rage.  They are full of questions about 62, which they are not financing, which is at the point nothing hut asset, which is irrelevant to the issue. They demand forms and documents which they themselves vetted when they wrote my mortgage a year and a half ago. Did they do it wrong? Are they forbidden to look at their own documents? They’re duplicating the title research which they did less than two years ago. To top it off, the whole thing is their idea. I did not call them to refinance, but they me. Except that they are paying for everything, the appraisal, the title search, etc, I would think this a major scam. The embarrassing thing is that I am unable to retain civility. I can hear scorn and contempt dripping off my own tongue. They are at the same level of unnecessary megalomaniacal fussbudgetry as the airport TSA, but extended apparently infinitely through time.  I know I have email awaiting from them, but cannot, for fear of meltdown, open it.
   
Sky is trying to rain. All the air show is in place; all it needs is to let go.

Supreme Court gets it right again with abortion and gerrymandering. Odd decision on capital punishment– essentially that any method of execution must be considered constitutional so long as a better one has not been found.

June 29, 2015

Discovered “Scare Cam” and the day was wasted. My belly aches from laughing.

A festival in Cashiers is doing "The Critic."
   
Alexander’s House finished triumphantly in every possible way. A milestone for us, and, if we build on it, for theater in this town. I keep numbering the times when we seemed to have been better than the sum of our parts, but that’s how art works. The soloists covered themselves with glory. Party here afterwards, ten happy people. They tested out some of my baking experiments without knowing. Leftovers were taken home in plastic wrap, so I assume they were successes. Chili filling the largest pot I have was barely enough.
   
Good work-out, then on the phone making the dates and looking after all the duties that I dreaded, so that they are all, to some degree, on the road to redress. Feeling of fulfillment without actually having DONE anything. It’s how rulers must feel, setting other things and persons in motion. Fix my roof. Cut DJ’s dead tree. Build me a deck. Fix my locks.
   
Calla lilies and tiger lilies in bloom. The yellow calla is unworldly perfection.

June 28, 2015

Had to start on the antibiotics.. Therefore felt convalescent all day yesterday, and feel so at this early hour today. After days of heat the house is almost uncomfortably cool, a stiff dawn wind coming through the windows. Nasty mood, which may just be the infection.
   
The Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage rights continues to be the wave upon every media beach, sometimes alternating with the Confederate Battle Flag. I do not understand why a straight person would care about the gay marriage issue, except to rejoice at the general prospect of equality. The major Republican politicians and “Christian” spokespersons are all in prophetic dudgeon Of all the things God could rain down judgment for, they think it’s going to be this, a thing which, at the least, does no actual harm to anybody on earth. It’s not merely that I disagree; I don’t see the point. Why would I care about anyone else’s marriage– or anyone else’s anything, for that matter-- except to wish them as well as I wish myself? I can see resenting rich people because their superfluity materially diminishes the portion of all others, issues like that, but some kinds of having take nothing from anybody.  People who say gay marriage diminishes the sanctity of THEIR marriage need to be horsewhipped and deported, being too stupid to be Americans. Yes, friends, it is possible to be too butt ignorant to be suffered to express your idiot beliefs. And it is exactly these people who always have a microphone in their mouths.
   
Also don’t get the furor over the Confederate flag, though I might if I were black. The argument that bothers me is this: when someone says, “What this flag means to me is–“ I’m thrown into Wonderland with Alice. Do things mean just what we think they mean? I’m sitting here thinking what “symbols” push my buttons. . . can’t think of anything of that intensity. Maybe I just don’t have the gene.
   
I remember long sessions with Jack in grade school, where we tried to perfect our drawing of the swastika. I think we were coming to terms with history. Someone watching us might have thought something quite different
   
Long day. Last performance of Alexander’s House, which has proven to be a major triumph for Cantaria. Reception here afterwards. I have been cooking and baking, which kept my mind from worse things.
   
Pink clouds in the north, all I can see from the tiny study window.

June 27, 2015

They promised rain last night, but there was no rain. It’s taking a while for morning to come, so maybe there’s a cloud cover.
  
Friday spent, largely, cooking. Also gym, errands, minuscule writing. Had a bellowing melt-down when I discovered that the garden hose had been disassembled (Russell borrowed it to clean DJ’s gutters) and the nozzle twisted “off” so hard it could not be opened. I was amazed by the intensity of my fury–though probably it was fed by the various irritations of cooking all day for company tomorrow–, dismayed by the fact that part of my brain knew it wasn’t worth it, but yet could not control the part that was stomping around like a wounded bear. Got it assembled. Got the nozzle working. Watered the drooping eggplants. Came in wondering about the fragility of my equipoise.

June 26, 2015

The Supreme Court ends marriage discrimination. One says this casually, noting that when one was born, such a thing was not at the back of even the most progressive person’s mind. It shows the flexibility of the Constitution when interpreted by enlightened men. The principle that human rights– God given rights-- do not require legislation, nor can they be legislated away, is preserved. The people most disturbed by this ruling reference the God to whom these rights are attributable. People who want to pretend to be upset on legal grounds mourn that the power to define marriage has been taken away from the States. When a State misbehaves, its prerogatives are taken away. We saw this with the Civil Rights movement, where the States cried out that the Constitution gave them the right to frame voting laws. The principle was set there: exercise an option badly, lose it. The idiocy of the opposition proves the correctness of the ruling. There is some assumption of exceptions to be made for people who have “deeply held religious beliefs,” but I say that the most deeply held belief can be cruel and wrong, and the sincerity of the belief should not protect it from correction.
   
Maybe I should go out and get married now. I often think about my perplexing and un-wished-for solitariness, most recently coming to the conclusion that I’m such a tribulation that if I had married or partnered, we would be separated now anyway and I back at square one. Circumstance merely saved me the intermediary.

June 25, 2015

Final dress of Alexander’s House would have been superb last night if S had done one run-through rather than two: exhaustion, diminishing returns. But, according to the people in our first little audience, it is most well. They say the chorus sounds good and I can hear for myself that the soloists do. It is truly a remarkable achievement for us, a milestone. Looking forward, as I almost never do, to opening night. Drinks at King James afterward.

Excellent work-out at the Y. Laundry. Received my new driver’s license in the mail, one that is meant to last for eight years. I contemplate that I might never again have to renew. Drove to the Toyota place too early, and diverted myself on the Parkway. I stopped and hiked the Shut-In for a little while. I’d taken ten steps into that silent tunnel of green when I felt stress ease out of me like sour breath. Ten steps, better than a pill, better than a cocktail. It really is paradise. I botanized for a time, then came down the mountain and back to the Toyota place where I traded in my old Prius for a new one, silver, the color of moonlight. The last one was never quite right; this one is perfect.

The heat wave begins to bore. The cats can barely move their bodies from one sleeping post to another.

June 23, 2015

I thought I remembered the GPTC had promised me $$$ for my participation in Omaha, but I got no check there, and no check here, so I assumed I’d imagined it. But, today the check arrives, having been sent to 62 for some reason. Pittance or fortune, one is happy to have reward for labor in hand.

Crushingly hot. I still refuse to use the air-conditioning, as a series of fans trained on places I’m likely to alight do the job.
   
Nearly sideswiped yesterday by a guy changing lanes without looking on Merrimon. Close enough to ding my side-view mirror. He kept wandering across lanes afterwards, so there might have been some real confusion going on there.  My car is not used to having its horn blown, and took a few minutes afterwards to shake it off.
   
No pain in my heel today at all. Cannot figure these things out. Reconsidering evil spirits.
   
A play about Madame du Pompadour and Convulsionnaires slowly takes shape.

June 22, 2015

 Praying for a few random drops from an angry sky to turn into real rain.

 Steve and I were interviewed at WCQS this afternoon, so I went downtown early to renew familiarity with the hometown, a process complicated by the return of plantar fasciitis. Most things you can muscle through or ignore, but this you really can’t. My flat feet! Wanted leather dye, and did not find it. Wandered into the Grove Arcade book exchange, selected Truth and Beauty by Ruskin. When the clerk took my credit card, he said, “Are you local?”
    “Yes,” says I.
    “I have something to show you.”
    He dug around in his backpack and brought out a copy of The Glacier’s Daughters,” which had been recommend by Luke Hankin and which he is reading and which, as a used book expert, he had acquired from the Saint Louis Public Library when they let go of it. I’m sad that St. Louis is doing without, but the rest was a sweet coincidence.

On to Blue Spiral, which has the worst art in it I’ve ever seen there. Sticks and pale shreds of paper. Ugly blocks of clay. One guy cut up old school desks and framed the pieces and charged a couple thou each. I recalled as I climbed the stairs that I was John’s boyfriend when the place opened, was there for the grand opening, either thought of or approved of the name, and predate not only anyone now working there, but three or four of their predecessors back as well. I don’t know why that seemed important at the moment. Maybe because the art was so bad and my foot hurt so I had to find something–.  Bought frozen yogurt that claimed to be blueberry but tasted EXACTLY like the natural gas that comes out of the stove.

Ruskin claims on the first page of my very old new book that the apprehension of beauty is caused by God’s wish to have us react in that way to the things which he has prepared for us to delight in. It is the apprehension of things of which God approves. That view certainly retires the problem of subjectivity– which has falsified the witness of beauty for the last century. I probably believe it, too, in a way, though I would never present it exactly that way in class..

June 21, 2015

Father’s Day. Finished re-writing my play Father’s Day last night. Spent the morning scanning and putting on Facebook pictures of my dad. Things started out so – remarkably. One more day of asking “what happened?” will not avail any more than did the last thousand.

One of my students remarks on FB:
Thanks, Dr. H. Happy Father's Day to you! You've certainly been a dad figure to many a lost university student

If that is the case, then all is well.

Painted yesterday, finishing a piece on particle board called Solstice. Everything has been timely of late.

Still reading my Albee bio in snippets between other tasks. My antipathy toward Albee– what my antipathy would be more purely if I hadn’t met him and understood what a puffed-up little piece he is–is that most of his plays are bad. Not even his fiercest partisans can, and stay within the bounds of discernment and experience, deny this. Those that aren’t bad aren’t particularly good, and what goodness they have arises from the pleasure, if that’s what it can be called, of watching a mind trying to beat its way out of a morass of self-involvement. Sometimes the play declares itself to have done so, but there he is in the next one, starting at the same place, or maybe–encouraged by brainless lionization– even deeper in. You must be interested in the tangled psyche of Edward Albee to enjoy his work, for nothing else is offered. Virginia Woolf, which I have heard called the greatest American play, is a tour de force for actors, but contains nothing truthful or genuine or challenging to anything but patience (I have performed the piece twice, and seen it twice again) despite its own testimony that it’s about “truth.” Albee allows his characters to be baffled by emotional or intellectual dilemmas that a six year old could navigate.  He wounds his characters so at the outset that we are meant to let them get away with all manner of idiocy. It’s like watching people on crutches and walkers trying to get up an endless staircase.  We are not allowed to bring up his complicated vacancy, because he so FAMOUS.  As far as I can see, he is famous because of being lucky in acquaintance. Truly terrible work of his made it immediately to Broadway because he had influential friends and was briefly wildly famous for a piece no one should have been famous for beyond a season. He did like Bronzino’s Gaze in Houston, and his plays are fun to play. I would act in another in a second, so long as I was not called upon to justify it. I concede all that.

Hysterical calling of jays in the rather sickly yellow morning light.

June 20, 2015

Made it finally to the studio. After setting it (mostly) to rights after the last flood– the most recent flood, I should say–I did work and was happy. Several clumps of tourists made it up the stairs and had a gawk. This is not the usual thing. Left when my braying neighbor compromised the quiet. Revised We Gather Together. This activity was inspired by the play at Flat Rock, as WGT was designed as one of those unchallenging feel-good romps (about Thanksgiving, yet) that the timidest community theater might put on without confusion or blush--and which is certainly better even at that than the one I saw the other night. I lack only preferment. I lack only agency. Satisfying supper at Avenue M. And home before dark.

Sonnet

Matthew Wells wrote a series of sonnets about some of the plays at GPTC. This is the one he wrote about Washington Place

“Oh you beautiful doll!” he sings to me,

   And I pretend that I don’t understand.

I speak Italian very patiently;

   My sister translates, then he takes my hand.

Meanwhile the socialist talks of a strike

   And someone’s thread gets balled up in a tangle

And one girl’s pregnant with some little tyke—

   It’s just another day at the Triangle.

When Yetta cries out: “God made floors to keep

   Us in our place—we must rise up and fight!”

I picture floors, and boys who like to sweep.

   When Gussie feels a sharp electric bite,

      I dream of phantom hugs, while someone tall

      Belts out: “Oh! Oh! Oh you beautiful 

June 19, 2015

Woke late, having had a late night. Drove through the skirts of thunderstorms to Hendersonville to see Over the River and through the Woods at Flat Rock’s downtown location. I did so because S took me aside at the performance the other night and said, “Please come see my play.” I love the theater space there, though it’s extremely deep, and S solved the problems of not making everybody look small and distant all the time. Everything was flawless, the acting exemplary, and so on, but I had, as I knew I would have, no interest in the play whatever. It was skillfully and professionally written, but one knew at the first of the first scene exactly what emotion of tender nostalgia one was to bear through the entire show, anticipating a little orgy of smiling sadness at the end. It was like picking up a birthday card from your grandma twenty years later– enough for a moment, but not an entire play. I don’t mind memory plays– where a character at one point in time comes out and tells you what happened at another point in time– but even the best of them–The Glass Menagerie– is a little bit of a cheat, providing a guide to inform you of your emotions rather than a situation actually to create them. Everything S was responsible for was brilliant, so I’ll tell him that. Adding in the wine needed to get through, it was an expensive evening. Hendersonville was packed with strollers and merrymakers and people eating under umbrellas. Fell asleep on the sofa, my glass of tea still perched precariously when I awoke,
   
Reading at the Albee bio I picked up in Nebraska. I napped after one session, and in the nap-dream I was Albee drunk and obnoxious at a party. The very next chapter was about Albee being drunk and obnoxious at a party, quarreling with Jospeh Papp like to weasels in a hole. Maybe my soul read ahead as my body slept.

Borage in hazy blue bloom.

June 18, 2015

    Looking back at yesterday with tints of rose. I was happy. I did things I like. We performed some of All Is Calm for NC Stage’s preview, which required me to improvise a bass line to “Silent Night,” something I can do like a frog sitting in a pond. The audiences seemed moved. I am so happy that NC Stage has asked us to participate in this! December–the whole fall and winter-- opens like a flower. Saw S and T. Afterwards, we crossed the streets and had friendly conversation and miraculous hamburgers at The Vault. Everyone was sweet. A kid named Sean engaged us like we were family. My gorgeous blond student from Cambridge was there, still gorgeous and blond, on her way to Bali. Got back in touch with A, my student from very long ago indeed. He delivered an enconium on how large I loom as an influence in his life. Difficult to listen to, but beyond gratifying–justifying.  Have smiled all day. Now, as yesterday at this hour, there is distant thunder.

June 16, 2015

Sultry afternoon. If I open the back door, a breeze like unto a wind cools the downstairs.  

The assessor the mortgage company hired came here to look things over. He was a presentable middle aged man, and when the hint came that there might be another kind of inspection, I should have been more receptive, though I do not now regret having pretended obliviousness. He had to take photos of the tool shed to insure the company that I was not making bombs or drugs. He noted the supermarket, and said he would have to “offer proof” that it was not noisy and annoying. My say-so was not enough. I wonder what would constitute proof of such a thing. What constitutes proof that something has not happened?
  
Summer rhythm of activity in the morning and evening, sleeping at midday, like an animal in the forest, or an Italian.
  
Sudden realization, out of nowhere, of the damage that serpent AW has done to my life. Well, little damage (if much creepiness) yet as much damage as he was able to do. Like Wormtongue in Tolkien, hiding, creeping, lying, insinuating, patiently finding ways to hurt that kept him safe, smiling his sidelong weasel smile.


Distant thunder.

June 15, 2015

Cast as Finbar in The Weir. Now I’ll have to read it.

Disappointing Alexander’s House rehearsal. The leads are doing well, but the chorus lags. I thought that being away for six weeks would put me behind, but it didn’t at all. There is enough mud and lead in the group that our every triumph is an astonishment. Salad at Marco’s afterward. Maybe it’s age, but I grow impatient with small talk. Having to repeat anything puts me on the verge of tears, and since everybody’s deaf, the evening is a tribulation.

Still crying “Ow!” when I move my back a certain way. It’s always something.

I get enough sleep that I wake absurdly early, but go back to sleep then, knowing that the next hour or so will be filled with the most elaborate and amazing dreams.

Racquet Club dunning me for the pay stub which I have delivered to them now three times. My rage at this is almost unaccountable. 

Is the year truly half gone?

There are more roses than I can look at.

June 13, 2015

Yeats’s birthday. Drove to Waynesville to audition for The Weir. The air was pearl. Got a tour of the new theater.  Shopped at the Farmers’ Market.

A half dozen calls informing me that my studio flooded in yesterday’s cloudburst. Nothing to be done. . . except after a dozen terrible floods, you’d think they’d have found something to do about it. Too discouraged even to go and look.

Day sometimes blazing, sometimes dim. Finished The Handsomest Man in the World.

June 12, 2015

Harder to get up before the sun, as he rises early, runs late, golden and stupendous.
   
Magnetic Theater last night to see a Moliere-ean send-up of the Asheville scene. Parts of it were magnificently better than that. The new space is calculably better than the old one. Beside me, a gorgeous woman and a sort of goofy looking man. You always wonder about such things. Maybe he was her brother. Drinks afterward at King James. My back was out all day, so I had to sit at first one way and then that. Not the best night for the theater.
   
Returned from the gym, dead-headed the roses, pulled up pokeweed that appeared, I think, during a single night. I sat in the whirlpool with one hot jet pointing directly at the sore spot in my back.
   
The groaning that woke me several nights ago was actually from my old place, 62, where grandfather suffered troubled dreams.
   
Sky ruffled with steel colored clouds.

Still reading my GPTC biography of Albee. He is still my prime example of someone who gets famous because someone important decides you're going to be.

June 11, 2015

Ran a mile at the Racquet Club. Had the oil changed and the car looked at. Thought I’d buy a new one, but all the cars on three lots bored me. Renewed my driver's license, Changed the cat box. Shopped, Made limeade. Dealt with email. And it is not yet 10 o’clock. Time for a brief nap and a second start.

June 10, 2015

Image from the dark of morning: the streetlight dashed off the birdbath in such a way that it looked like a sea ripped by violent wind. Only when I opened the door and heard the sound did I know that it was not wind but heavy rain shattering the surface.

    Gratifying E-mail from K at GPTC:

Thank you for this very kind email.
I know that I spoke with you after, but I want to reiterate – your play is beautiful, deeply effective and moving. I think you may get a production query from Omaha before long.
Scott and I always review the responses and respondents each year and try to make changes that will best serve the playwrights. This will certainly be the case again this summer. We will be working hard on our end to improve the feedback and we will not stop until damaging comments/tone are a thing of the past. Your ideas will certainly aid us in this regard.
Please feel free to write or call with anything regarding this or anything else and please let us know how the continuing journey of the play goes.
Have a wonderful start to your summer.
Most warmly,
            K

Settling into a summer rhythm. Some of it is wasteful, and those parts must be revised.
   
Cop in McKinney, Texas, caught on video arriving at the scene of an over-attended pool party already out of control. HE was out of control, I mean, as soon as his shoe leather touched the pavement. The clear, obvious and immediate testimony was that he did not find the white teenagers to be a threat; he did find the black teenagers to be a threat, even when they related to him in calm voices that they were simply attending a pool party. To get them under control was the focus of his anxiety, though from the video they didn’t seem to be out of control, merely numerous. So many questions. I’ll bet he never thought “I am going to distinguish between the black kids and the white kids,” but that response was immediate and reflexive. It’s hard to think how to cure something that is immediate and reflexive, except to hire different people, who have more informed reflexes, or at least those more open to the scrutiny of reason. More basically, who gave the police the idea that they ought to be mindlessly obeyed, and disobedience ought to be punished by summary execution, or the threat of it? The are like one of those diseases where the immune system, created to protect, turns on its own body in destruction. Eleven other cops were on the scene, and they seemed to have carried on correctly, except for doing nothing to stop their berserk colleague. Sometimes I hate cell phones, but sometimes I think God gave them to us to open the secrets of the unrighteous.

Good day at the gym. Hard and blissful sleep.

June 9, 2015

The last two mornings I have been awakened by agonized, frightened voices. This morning the voices were distinct enough that I could hear the words “Go away, go away.” I can’t quite locate the voices, though moving around under the eaves in the rain in the dark of this morning, I think they’re probably coming from the apartments. They could even be a voice crying out in sleep, the words are so primal, so garbled. I wonder if my neighbors heard my own wars with God.
   
Blessed rain, in all other ways.
   
Sorting through email– of forty new emails during the night, one actually has something to do with me. Revised Five American Places.

June 8, 2015

Slept and then woke with a sense of alacrity. Memorizing Alexander’s House was a looming task, and now that’s accomplished, the summer lies open like a rolling plain before an antelope. The soloists are quite good. Salmon salad and vodka afterward.
   
Watched the Tony’s, feeling my own ignorance of that scene. If the excerpts were any indication, I scarcely have a single play that isn’t better than the play nominees. Sing heigh ho.

June 7, 2015

Call from some creeps claiming to be the IRS, saying they’re filing suit against me. Chilling even when you know it’s a fraud.
   
Planted what I suppose will be the last planting, a big rose, milkweed, a red sedum.
   
Sent revised Edward the King to Pavel, though the theater is so upset in LA that he can’t commit. Of course.

I have 5 or 6 plays with sensational openings, but nowhere to go after that.
   
Dim bird-call-y morning.

June 6, 2015

Days go by, when there is nothing much to record, only the revision of writing and studying the Cantaria musical to make up for seven or eight rehearsals lost to wandering. Jack’s birthday party last night. I invented pistachio cheese cake, It was a success. Sent a revision of Washington Place to Emma, whose response was curiously dogmatic. She cited the durable wisdom that we expect to see the protagonist grow and change in a play, and for the first time I had the courage to observe that’s not what we expect at all. It’s hard for me to cite a theatrical masterpiece (Maybe The Winter’s Tale) which does not, rather, involve a set and fully formed character coming to terms with a novel situation. The character does not change in the contact, but is graduallv revealed by it. Hamlet’s character does not change one bit; nor does Lear’s: they are, instead, explored in crisis. But the energy of the exchange did inspire yet another revision, which I feel now is the right one. Revising Edward the King. The sky is a steely morning yellow.

June 3, 2015

   Dowland on Pandora. Off to the doctors. Blood pressure down. Everybody happy. Still working chaotically, not sure where to put the focus. But, working. . . .

June 2, 2015

 Frenzy of dead-heading this morning. The magnolia and the water lily (the scarlet one) are in bloom.
   
Image from GPTC: a woman looking over the crowd which was primarily women saying, “I look forward to the day when more women will feel free to participate with us. Full artistic equality!” Wild applause from the outnumbered men.
   
Got the car washed. Unpacked. Turned my sail forward.

June 1, 2015

Thunderstorms in two directions, cool and rolling, fire at the edges: the summers I remember. The garden was overburdened rich when I came home; The stewartia is finally abloom. The clouds of roses bend down toward the ground. One pink in the front yard is like the inside of a shell repeated a thousandfold in the air.
   
I wanted to say that the flights home were without incident, but the fact is I almost missed the plane in Omaha because the taxi Would Not Come. I’m glad it was early, for I stood in the middle of the campus street, on the phone with the confused dispatcher, able to see no taxi for half a mile in either direction, dancing my fury dance at first of morning. The Ethiopian driver had parked at the entrance to the school, bewildered, phoning me with the number he had been given, which was ringing my landline in Asheville. Finally we connected. I was so angry and he was so frightened that he forgot to turn the meter on. Inside there was a line at the counter, and I made it to my gate only by blithely walking in front of everybody. Nobody said a word. Maybe steam was still curling out of my collar. The dispatcher lady kept pleading, “But he can’t find you” and I kept saying “He works for a taxi company and can’t find a simple address upon a simple street??? “ His rather beautiful face was so contorted with distress that I had to laugh, and then it was better. God paid me back by making the gate for my departure to Asheville the exact one I entered from Omaha.
   
Home was not the jolt I feared it would be. Maria had kept all things well. The cats remembered me after a while. I had left tea for myself in the fridge.
   
Went immediately to All Souls to hear the Atlanta Children’s Choir, and to see my friend Jonathan David. His beautiful “Alleluia” was being performed by the choir. Dinner at Avenue M, which I threw up at the base of the redbud tree. Too much travel, too much. . . .
   
I don’t know if I’ll be able to summarize the GPTF, or if it’s the sort of thing one formally summarizes. I’ve already done the changes I want to do to Washington Place, and insofar as the changes are improvements, all came out as it was meant to do. The trophy they gave me sailed unharmed through the Scylla and Charybdis of Delta Air, so that is some kind sign. I’m not the sort of person who generally picks up useful contacts, but I am the sort who remembers beauties and kindnesses, so I have things to think on there. In my luggage is a stack of cards on which the Design Wing had written the names and stats of all who died in the Triangle factory, as part of their design for the play. One seldom comes home with such souvenirs .
   
After limping like a war wounded through Rome and Omaha, I took one of the anti-inflammatory pills the doctor gave me for gout–and poof, I was restored. I had those pills with me the whole time. The gods have their little jokes. . . . .
   
The man from my mortgage company called with a plan to refinance and save me $90 a month. Incredulity made me rude, but we’re doing it now that I am assured
   
It is only Monday, and I have done most of the things which weighed upon my mind. Some lie ahead, and bed is yet hours off.