September 28, 2019

Stand with hose in hand, trying to help the newest green citizens through this drought. We had a rag of somebody else’s thunderstorm yesterday which barely got the pavement wet.

Having missed too many rehearsals–and being too idle to learn the music on my own-- kept me out of Pride celebrations today, which was a disappointment, but which also gave me a day to my own devices. A mighty sending out of play scripts. Also, I went to the riverside office and prowled around for David Garrison in my Baltimore journals. Found him. Also found that my first Baltimore address was 1615 E Baltimore Street. Google puts this in the middle of the street, in an area I don’t recognize, so maybe urban renewal destroyed it, or I copied the address down wrong. I find that my stipend at Johns Hopkins was $222.22 a month, which was evidently sufficient. I met Rosa Ponsell on October 22, 1972. I sang on National TV before Aaron Copland on November 3, 1972. It was something difficult and not one of his popular pieces. He was kind and very tall.  I also applied to Phillips Exeter to be the Bennett Fellow 10 years before they chose me. But about David:

May 4, 1973: Talked to David, who is Barry’s friend, about Spanish and British poetry of the Seventeenth Century, and about religion. Missed a Journal Club meeting.
May 9, 1973: Socialized with Rangl, Barry, lanky David, Cro-Magnon Jack. David is like a minister you meet at church camp, smiling and calm. He is from Seattle
May 18, 1973: I shut my eyes. There were Titans with their eyes open in their sleep, and their eyes were fire and jewels. David Garrison, the Hispanophile, invited me to supper with him and his wife Sunday evening. He lives in Pumpkin Court Apartments.
May 20, 1973: Went to the Garrisons’ in Laurel for a delicious supper, curried chicken with broccoli afloat on it. A second guest, an Indian woman, was being deported and couldn’t make it. We talked. For a while with them I felt like a regular person.

Also was amazed by my dedication to the journal, pages and pages tightly handwritten, in a hand that was then still quite legible. I recorded everything. I was a vampire, a wolverine, tearing apart Civilization to devour it, to make it my own. I can barely eke out a terse paragraph or two now.