January 4, 2019

Reviewed the photos I took at the New Year’s party. Unless they were of a cat or a Christmas tree, there was not one where somebody–in some cases everybody– wasn’t looking at their phone. At the stroke of midnight I surveyed the room and everybody was on the phone, texting or reading text. There is no “here” anymore.

Rain unrelenting.

Wrote well in the morning on Sam-sam, then drove to the studio to work on Daniel’s painting. As I parked, I watched a woman pushing a stroller and with two other kids in tow run for and miss the bus at the stop by the studio. When I looked again she was on the street, trying to compose herself, looking wildly around. Her baby was crying and her two girls huddled against her, their lips trembling with cold. As I watched, her face convulsed into one of the most awful expressions of fear I’ve ever seen–like the women in news reports of lands at war or after an earthquake. It was cold, raining hard, and she clearly had no way to get anywhere. She was pushing the stroller down Roberts Street– in the direction that leads to nothing–when I shouted at her “Where are you going?” As they piled into my Prius I learned that her car–a 2002 Jeep-- had overheated and stalled, and she had left it at the dealership to be fixed, but then she missed the bus and her phone had died so she couldn’t call her sister for a ride– a clusterfuck on a winter morning. I drove her to her sister’s (her sister’s boyfriend’s she explained, as though precision in this event were paramount) on Brevard Road near the Outlets. The two pretty girls– six and four, I’d guess-- sat in the back seat drawing, while the boy sat in front with mom. He was probably 2 or 3. Nothing prepared me for the bombshell of undirected energy that is the three year old male. He WOULD play with the dashboard. He WOULD stand and look out the window whatever his mom did to prevent it. At one point he knocked the car out of gear. I hadn’t seen him do it, so I didn’t at first know what the problem was. But he was also curious and attentive, and listened rapt if you told him anything remotely engaging. I couldn’t help comparing him to his sisters. I’m an essentialist, and believe that gender difference is at once congenital and real, but I suppose the case could be made that he was the way he was because got away with things that his sisters didn’t because he was beautiful, and a boy. Funny, I don’t remember getting away with anything. Probably I did. As I drove back to the studio, I thought of the dozen things that delayed me and, as I decided then, insured that I would arrive at the right place at the right time to help this woman. The Lord had provided, and the immensity (and complication) of the providence was overpowering. You’re fed up with God, and then He goes and orchestrates something like this. . . .Finally, it is finer to be the instrument of Providence than to be the object of it.

Met my new neighbors again, and I was in a better mood, and all is well, and we shall be a jolly family. Learned two texture-makers that I hadn’t known before.

Dark now, the rain still falling. Books take a very long time.