January 29, 2021

Renaissance Viols. Bright, cold, a little too cold for me to take advantage of the brightness, Did buy mealworms for the bluebirds.  Did put The Storm You Must Endure together.

Zoom meeting last night with AGMC. We sat staring at one another because none of us had anything in particular to say. I could have said, “I just finished a book about musicians–ya’ll should be interested in that-- shaped in less than a month, and I had a book of poetry accepted, and am working on the 6th novel I’ve hammered into being during the Pandemic, and I’ve resurrected my oldest hobby of all, hiking in the woods. . . “ but none of that, except maybe the hiking, would go over. Silence, perhaps “that’s nice.” We can hear about triumphs or failures in the kitchen, and illnesses, but talk of art stops the conversation. Maybe I travel–have pretty much always traveled– with the wrong crowd. Graduate school shines golden in my mind because you could actually talk about such things. I remember at B’s birthday how I never mentioned The Falls of the Wyona, because, though it was what happened in my life, though it was the only thing anyone outside that little clutch on the lakeshore would have heard of, it would seem alien among the illnesses and cute tricks of grandchildren and the effort to avoid mention of those things that would set one or another of us off. Now that I think of it, I was never able even as a child to talk about the things that really interested me. Secretive little bastard, but I sensed that was preferable to being an outcast. This has bothered me less than I would have expected, reading it about someone else, written in a book.