August 24, 2019

Supreme retirement party for the Dean last night at the brewery. Everybody was there. Todd looked as happy and loving as a kid. I’ve never had that look on my face in my life. Of course he has reverses in his life, but I would say he’s as close as anyone I know to being as perfectly fulfilled as a mortal can be.

Interesting morning in the café. Worked on a resistant play, then continued through The Wind in the Willows, our reading for Tuesday. When I got to the part about Mole smelling home I burst into tears, wanting so hard to go home, not even sure what I mean by that. The little box on Goodview Avenue? It is possibly as literal as that. I know if I ever went there and it was for sale, or cruised the Internet and found it for sale, I would try to buy it. It’s not that I was particularly happy there, but that while I lived there it had never crossed my mind that I wouldn’t be happy and fulfilled, sometime, somewhere. A big, shapely man was buying coffee, and I said to myself “if only we could be friends, I would stop being sad.” He sat down at the next table and began reading art history. He looked like a workman, so the reading was interesting, but he was engaged in his book and I went back to engaging in mine. Half an hour later he spoke my name. Seth and I had corresponded for a while, though we never met. The things we have in common came pouring out. I gave him a copy of The Falls of the Wyona and he praised The Glacier’s Daughters. His eclectism left me in the dust. He didn’t go to college, but sat in on courses, including one he said was an ecstatic experience– the teacher was Wiebke, one of my tormentors, whom I deem a trifling biddy. Some people should stay in the classroom. I’ll actually see him at the reading of Father Abraham tomorrow. It was a blessing. I said to the Lord, Well done.

Have been looking at old one-acts and 10-pagers, some of them unopened for a decade. They’re almost all better than I remember them.

Less accomplished today than I had hoped. Stopped to wonder how many people worry about their accomplishments on a Saturday.