March 31, 2019

Scheidt on the CD. Wind outside making the wind chime frantic. I didn’t write journal entries in Portland; let’s see what comes out of me now.

Tight scheduling forced me to get to my gate at O’Hare at a dead run, or what passes these days for a dead run. The amazing part of that is that somehow my bag made it too– someone must have been quick and attentive. Contrast this to Warsaw, where there were two lazy hours and still the damn thing got mislaid. I think the airline guy foresaw that I was going to call him an asshole and pulled my bag out. Portland is not as big as you expect (though people say that most of it is hidden ’behind the hill,’) brimming with coffee shops and, in my experience, excellent food. I noticed that its woods are luxurious and (to me) exotic conifers, and on the hills between the airport and the city stand innumerable homeless camps. The homeless are very evident in Portland, whether because they are actually more numerous or because they are less persecuted. The trolley ran practically from my hotel door to the convention center, so all was well there. Daily dramas on the train; you miss that driving your own car. I asked one woman on the train if she were a native Portlander. She was. I asked her what the great river we were crossing was. She said, “I really don’t know. Geography is not my best thing.”  It was, of course, the steel-colored and inexorable Columbia. I couldn’t believe she didn’t know her own river.

The Conference was pretty much as it has always been. I managed to leave all my information behind, but they found me nevertheless. Something was mismanaged, so that the registration lines were so huge they finally gave up and let everyone in without credentials. Went to one session, and that only because Lori was in it. Half the sessions were about women. Three quarters of the participants were women. During one of my signing sessions, not one man stopped at the Red Hen Press. I spent most of my time either on the streets of Portland or in the Bookfair, roaming around or at the Red Hen tables signing copies of The Falls of the Wyona. The last corrections could not be included in the mock-up of the book they did for the conference, but it was glorious to see my little green book sitting there large as life anyway. There were bars of chocolate whose wrappers reproduced the covers of the books.

I am reminded that I can be quite convivial, but not for very long.

I reread the book in the hotel lobby. The takeaway? It is very good. It is almost flawless. I read it as though it were someone else’s, weeping at the sad passages, tensed at the thrilling passages. I was filled with gratitude, for it is very good. I can hardly imagine having written it. The Red Hen people seemed to share my amazed delight. One thing stands fully accomplished.

Met at least five men named David. One with whom I shared space at the bar had me write down the info for The Falls of the Wyona so he could order a copy for his wife. Another had written an autobiography of Frankenstein’s monster.

Drinks with MT Friday night. His presence gave me joy. He asked me what the highlight of the Israel trip was, and I said Adam’s skull under Golgotha. He didn’t like that as much I would have thought. He recites the dogma wherein Baptism and Repentance are necessary for salvation. I utter the new (to me) perception that salvation is fully and eternally accomplished, and Baptism and Repentance are sublime theater, which to enter into is delight, but irrelevant to salvation once demonstrated and fully sufficient from that time forth. We knew better than to argue about this. We met again in the Portland airport, for he and Wes and I were on the same flights home. I think all in all it was beneficial. If nothing else it was a weekend full of Something Different. But I think full confidence in my work, in comparison to the thousands of other works represented there, was worth the journey.

Call from the Grievance Committee chairman. Brian Hook is aggrieved about his firing from the humanities chairmanship, and wants me to recuse myself from the committee receiving the complaint. Oh dear God, yes. My hatred of him is just, but not what one would call impartial.

Half drunk on bloody Mary’s I sat in an airport bar and wept in apprehension of the glory of God.

Hoped to work in the garden today. The North Wind has other ideas.