November 16, 2015

Hours in the studio for the studio stroll were, of course, mostly wasted in everything but that fact that I got work done, work that nobody much, apparently, is ever going to look at. All the fine artists say this, while the craftspeople prosper. It is that world. Worrying about sales and presentation does violate the reasons I took up painting, so I’ll try to keep the flood at ebb.
   
Shoulders so raw it was, after a while, agony to lift the brush. Talk about sacrifice.
   
Family up to see Washington Place and do a power of eating. People tell you they liked the show (how could they tell you otherwise?) but you wonder HOW they liked it. My nephews are not theater-goers, so did they perceive the conventions? The adaptations of the conventions? Could they follow it? Was the topic alive to them? Did it please the mind or the heart? Both? Neither? Was it too foreign? The opening of a door into a new world? You don’t know how to ask; they don’t know how to say. Lunch salad asserted itself and I had to leave in the middle of Act I, praying that one time to be invisible. King James pub afterwards, where we caught up on months of separation. D is muscled and burly to the threshold of TV wrestler. L is happy, and somewhat surprised to be. Must stay off the topic of politics with my new brother-in-law, whose existence refutes my assertion that one cannot be a Republican and intelligent at the same time, or at least provides an exception.
   
Two nights of freeze have killed off the last hopes of the garden.
   
Woodfin Y this AM. Karl had seen the play and said it was “good.” I don’t think he realized that I’m the author, so I’ll take that “good” as meaning good. More buildings going up on what was a beautiful wild hillside, barking with foxes.
  
Worried about Sam in France, though he is 100 miles from Paris.