Terrible Anniversary

 

May 4, 2021

The terrible anniversary. 

Rain. 

AH came over in the afternoon, and we sat on the porch with wine, and rain falling a few inches away, one of the first purely social activities of recent months. He mainly talked of his mother, sick and old and mean in assisted living in Pennsylvania. The morning was spent struggling with my computer, which declared itself “offline” and could nohow be brought back on line. It took a call to the HP help service and a patient Pakistani two hours to find out that some automatic upload from Windows had messed everything up. My fury was extraordinary. 

Much bad news from the internet, in the form of “no”s from publishers. 

Message from L that she wants to come here next, after Akron,  in her vast cycle of visitation of old high school friends. Our relationship is almost wholly a fabrication on her side, and our old age, in which she became a fire-breathing and lie-consuming Trumpist, did not improve anything. She sent out a message observing that I was the only one of her liberal high school friends who hadn’t called her names because of her politics, and the vehemence of them. I did not respond “that was an oversight.” I have no idea what we will talk about. I did get her a hotel room, resolving that, whatever else, she should not spend the night. I could have lied and said I wouldn’t be home, but some distant voice whispered, “see it through.”