Vance Monument

 

May 18, 2021

Yesterday it did not rain, and I got in Ajax’s share of gardening, opening and preparing new beds, planting giant sunflowers and a Japanese golden pine, digging out failed roses, watering everything. Today I started back in quite early and put a large viburnum into the ground. I was watched while doing so by a pileated woodpecker in the black gums. I think all the annuals are in. I may add this and that as I redeem the erstwhile flowerbeds from their blankets of crabgrass and honeysuckle. 

Denise perched on the electric pylon by the pool, and was worried away by a bluejay. This seemed wrong. 

Exhausting Vestry meeting last night. I bless the Powers that these meetings are still virtual and I can sigh and languish and belch without being detected. Maybe the only good to come out of Covid. I am, as I have noted many times, not a detail person. 

A laptop I keep in the living room bookshelf leapt into life last night (though the lid was closed and had been for weeks) and I woke to the sound of, I thought, an arrest being made on You Tube. Two days, two electronic hauntings. 

They have begun to dismantle the Vance Monument downtown. It’s a shame and a sadness. Why couldn’t it have been re-purposed, given another name? I suppose if I wanted my say I should have volunteered for the committee which decided its fate. Part of me wonders how this is different from the destruction of the rock Buddhas by the Taliban, or Palmyra by Isis, actions universally vilified (so far as I know). One difference is that no one would call the Vance Monument an artistic masterwork, I suppose. But I will miss it. I will think, but not say, that this hour’s emotions should not always have the last say. I suppose that means that my Vance play is dead now forever.