February 7, 2016

Arvo Part on the CD.

There were so many instances of absent-mindedness, distraction, foolishly tender emotion in the last few days that I was, in a way, relieved to find out I was actually sick. Almost, toward the end, immobile with pain. Reached a crisis, shivering on the couch, covered with my coat, took the pills. Some better quickly; the rest comes gradually.   

The pine shed great limbs in the last storm, that battered down a portion of my fence. Sawed and cleared the limbs. The pine sap on my hand smelled clean and sharp. Will worry about the fence later.
  
Waited for Zach for an hour before realizing that one of the things the fever blotted out was recollection that he had rescheduled. Waited around the house for six hours for the Am Ex guy to bring my euros, realizing finally that I had misread the door notice and there are no Saturday deliveries. Too sick to have gone very far anyway.
  
The paint came off the front bathroom wall overnight. I assumed a leak in the roof, though I couldn’t see one. Internetted some service who gives your name and your problem to a number of professionals, and big Jim was at my door in under an hour. He climbed the roof and sealed around a couple of pipes, which he thought might be the problem. He chuckled sadly at the roof’s advanced age, and assured me that Stewart had lied about the date of replacement. Big Jim moved here from New Orleans when he visited once and saw that the lead story on the news was ducklings fallen into a sewer, and he wanted to live here rather than a place where they couldn’t mention all the murders of a day in a single newscast. One son is a ear, nose and throat specialist, the other an anesthesiologist. The wall behind the paint is fascinating, a mosaic of old paint jobs, and I may just leave it for a while.
  
Made my first batch of from-scratch baked beans– a triumph. Bon Appetite suggests in its article on “the bean” that its gas-producing qualities are exaggerated. This is not true.
  
J takes my piano with her to Florida, “She just hauled it away,” Steven says. It’s all right. It has a next episode in its adventure.

My Syrian friend Mojahed takes pictures of himself reclining at ease beside a Swedish lake. He made it out, whether because of connections or his striking beauty I don’t know.
  
Too cold in the study almost to work when you first sit down. Finish a paragraph or two and you don’t notice it. It is not true, however, that one gets used to everything.