July 25, 2019

Mother’s birthday. I’ll try to think as much about her today as I can. She has been gone 45 years. It is cruel and wrong. D mentions that her father, my mother’s little brother, never recovered from her death.

Yesterday I took advantage of the cool and gave the world one of the banner days in the history of weeding. I was almost inexhaustible, though my back tells the story this morning. Most of the needing-to-be-weeded ground was at one point cultivated and mulched, so things were easier than they might have been. One finds things that one didn’t expect– seedlings of native hibiscus, a pink garden phlox that must have imported itself from somewhere, forgotten acanthus that just needed excavation from its roof of vines. Two or three more such days and the weed issue will be solved.

Thought of this: It puzzled me why I didn’t get a job my first year having completed my Ph.D. Then the credentials department at Syracuse made a mistake and sent me a copy of my packet, with all the records and recommendations in it. I opened it and read the recommendations that I was not supposed to read, and discovered that my adviser had been sabotaging me, but not completely out of malice. He was a fine dissertation director, and I learned much from him. At one point he said, “I think we can schedule the defense now.” I said, “So, I can go ahead and put together a final copy?” His answer was “Yes.” No one typed his own dissertation (this was 1979) because of the footnotes and corrections, etc, that are not too much of a problem on a computer but suicide-inducing on a typewriter. I was a grad student, working at a liquor store, and the going rate for typing a dissertation was $250. This panicked me. I mentioned it to my dad, and he offered to pay. You’d have to know the history of my dad and me to know how unexpected and wonderful this was. So, I hired this lady (forget her name, but have a vivid picture of her in my mind. She looked like Rosemary Harris, Spiderman’s aunt in the first movie). Had my defense, which was actually kind of fun. (Side note: I am NEVER late. But I was late to my Dissertation Defense because I had it marked down for the wrong day, and I had to run from my apartment to the U, and arrived pouring sweat). At the end my dear Professor said, “Well, now, I think we can make the final revisions and get this printed up.” My heart sank through the floor. It was all done and paid for, and he wanted revisions. Actually, he wanted one revision, that he had hinted at in the past, but kept saying “you’ll figure it out” when I asked him what it was. In the following days I brooded on this. It wasn’t just the money. Since my dad had paid for it, had participated in my education at that point, the typed dissertation was a sacred object to me. Also, I thought the desired revision was petty and arbitrary. Today, of course, it would be the effort of a moment. I decided that I would rather leave without my degree than do this. For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to explain my thoughts or my emotions, but simply said to my committee that I would not revise and would leave without the degree. All of them but my director, were on my side, and so, somewhat to my astonishment, I won the day and got the degree. The rest is history. Do these things cast shadow on your succeeding life? I’m sure they do. Do I owe a debt on this or am I owed one? To paraphrase Viola in Twelfth Night, “Time, you must untie this knot, not I. It is too hard a knot for me to untie.”

Dreams last night included B, twice. In each case he drove a car too close to people who were standing along the street. The first time everyone jumped back in time. The second time there was a wall or a rail, and the last person in line had his legs severed. B looked back from the speeding car, smiling.