June 1, 2017

Parent’s anniversary.

Working on a new play. Twenty pages and I don’t yet know what it’s about. Painted in the AM. Returned to find G hard at work on my lawn, after I’d almost given up on him. The grass was long and the thatch now is heavy. He weed-whacked a bee-balm and a clump of sorrel, but in most things he’s exemplary, so the lips were sealed. Another client had him dig up a sizeable rhododendron because one of its branches was dead. He gave it to me from the back of his truck, and I have planted it, hoping lying in the sun for a couple of hours with its root ball drying won’t be fatal. I want this one to grow. I want orphans and rescues to prosper. Watered it copiously. Watered the new coreopsis at the edge of shriveling.

Z’s conversation topic during our session was, oddly, playwriting. He allowed me to enrich my conviction that to set out to “make a statement” in a piece is always fatal, even (or especially) if that statement is itself praiseworthy.