Hiram College Directory

 

March 9, 2021

Spectacularly productive day, not in terms of writing but in general housekeeping. Restored the catastrophic walk-in closet to order, as well as the guest room closet and the shelves in the dressing room, leaving me with a sizeable load of cast-offs for Goodwill. This was enabled by my breaking down and buying a step ladder with which to reach the inhumanly high closet shelves. Who lived here before? Maybe the floors have subsided. Learned how to use the portable battery powered pump, inflated the tires on the truck. As I was reattaching the garden hose to the spigot, I heard a noise behind that was squirrel-like but too loud for a squirrel. It was Buddy the Bear (gown quite enormous) hauling himself over my fence into the yard. I startled him, so he ran to the neighbors’, but our biggest, blackest sign of spring is again abroad. I smile inwardly even now. 

David has asked me to perform his marriage ceremony in May, 2022. 

The Hiram College Directory arrived yesterday. I’ve been going through it, looking at once-familiar names, waiting for dim images to form, or fail to form, in my remembrance. A number of people I remember vividly without knowing why. What I remember, of course, are selves fifty years in the past. How many would I know on the street? Little stars mark the decedents. Some I knew, many I did not. Many of the men we assumed, or knew, to be gay are gone, I suppose from AIDS. Almost all the black men I knew personally or even peripherally in that small place, are dead, which is testimony in itself.

This is what I wrote one year ago today: Late, late, just coming back from the bars I stopped at after the theater. One guy was singing his heart out with Billy Joel. Beggars are more numerous and strident than in times past, and more clearly bogus. Rain all day. It looked thicker in the lamplight than it felt. Walked to the National Gallery. In the Jack Yeats room I burst into tears. For the Road and The Singing Horseman in particular remind me of the high and great times here when I believed I could be an Irishman loved by an Irishman. As close as it came, it was never quite real. I wept for that. I wept for the decades when I thought I would be a painter and stand in a company with Jack Yeats. That too did never come to pass. The pain was sharper, deeper at that moment than it is now. Blessings on that. Visited Loretto at the Trinity Gallery, gave her a copy of FW and made a date for lunch on Wednesday. The play at the Abbey was The Fall of the Second Republic, and though it ended on the wrong foot, it was funny and clever and well done. The actor Andrew Bennet, whom I’ve seen in every visit to Dublin, played the rotten Teaschocg.. Can never cross over to America, because of its concentration on the Irish parliamentary system – a mystery to Americans--and its luxurious use of the word “cunt.” Walking home from the theater reminded me why I love Dublin so much, young and alive and grubby, unwholesome, elemental, eternal.