Der Rosenkavalier

 

September 28, 2021

Serious weeding today in the cool & perfect light, mostly woodbine and poke. Pulled out the largest lady’s thumb I’ve ever seen. I thought it was a whole stand, but it was one plant trying to gobble up the garden. It felt good to be gardening again. Weeding is potentially a kind of meditation.

Napping, I had WDAV playing, and at one point I woke hearing piano music. I said to myself, “That can’t be one player. It must be something for two pianos.”  Then the announcer said it was a Mozart concerto for two pianos. Slept again and woke amid the most intricate and lavish music, which my subconscious mind read as a kind of architecture, thick and strong and glorious. Fully awake, I realized it was dances from Der Rosenkavalier. 

Made chili. 

Every few hours I go into the guest room and cuddle with Maud for a while. She’s either ill or going through one of her phases. She eats and visits the litterbox and rumbles like an engine when I embrace her, so she can’t be too sick. Maud’s frantic horror of leaving her own house renders the decision to go to the Vet dire. I have my own horror of it. Except for neutering, we’ve never visited the Vet where it turned out to be casual, but always the beginning of an ordeal of pain, disruption, futile treatment, and the deaths that leave me howling with my face to the wall. 

 

September 27, 2021

Wrote in the morning, then drove to the mountains and hiked a chunk of the Hard Times. Beautiful dapple of lights, tiny blue and golden autumn wild flowers. 

Long disturbing dreams that endured through several shiftings of position in bed: I got an “apartment” in a basement with a dirt floor, with a cot to sleep on, heated by a wood stove. It was in a kind of homeless camp, though I had my own squalid space, and the owner of it all invited me to tour his shining modernistic mansion on the other side of a creek. I had failed horribly at something—maybe at everything–and the task of the dream was figuring out how to live under altered circumstances. 

Autumn

 

September 25, 2021

Finished the revision of the Covid play. It’s name will change to The Dress. Drove to Black Mountain, but there wasn’t a single parking space in the whole town. Drove to the Flood Gallery to pick up my Larson monoprint, but the gallery was closed, in the middle of its Saturday opening hours. Pulled up black walnut seedlings, carried the smell with me the afternoon. The ironweed seeds arrived. Turned the furnace on. The season of cold is upon me. For five months I will wake freezing and frightened in the middle of the night, wait for the comforting sound of the furnace clicking on. I’ll have to drink hot tea or Bushmill’s to make it to bed time without shuddering.  Need of aspirin pulls me away from the keyboard downstairs. Brilliant day. Fatboi the groundhog is too enormous to fit under the shed. 

Covid

 

September 24, 2021

Walked to DJ’s for movie night with him and Russell. At one point a beautiful, lush fragrance filled the air. I realized it came from piles of dirt dug up in J & L’s front yard to uncover their broken storm sewer. The earth was a perfume. 

Got my Covid booster this morning at Ingle’s. it took me five minutes. The evening news shows long lines and hours of waiting. 

 

September 22, 2021

Begin the day with a call to Citicards concerning four thousand dollars of bogus charges. The California thief bought herself Uber rides, and airline tickets-- Delta and American (and insurance)-- apparently in her own name, so maybe we have her. She also bought an extraordinary quantity of flowers from FTD. This is happening with some frequency. 

I remember father saying that one of the pleasure of old age was thinking of comforting memories. Maybe I’m not old enough, but my memories are at this point a number of things, but not comforting. When I think of things that happened when I was a kid, it’s often with the apprehension that, without my knowing it at the time, I was being selfish or awkward, and didn’t know because people were kind enough not to call me to account. 

Speaking truth

 

September 21, 2021

OJB committed suicide. When he came over to 62 to confide in me about A, I thought he was the most beautiful young man in the world, but so over-impassioned that I prayed for some of the tempestuous emotion to wear off that he might live an abundant life. Apparently it did not. 

First Vestry meeting after THE Vestry meeting. My colleagues mounted a better defense of me than I would have myself, so again I was able to remain silent. D resigned, blaming me. Then he was persuaded to reconsider. That drama is not yet over. Speaking Truth to Stupidity is not really that rewarding. 

 

September 20, 2021

The day gathers its breath, preparing for storm. 

Beautiful men at the spa, long-eyed and gracile, like Tolkien’s elves, the sight of them my reward for rising early and working out. 

One of the artists I purchased from Saturday promised to send me ironweed seeds from her meadow. I’m already watching the mailbox. 

Stock market plunging, and new (urgent) requests for support from nearly everywhere. 

Fruit Bat and Pomegranates

 

September 18, 2021

Went to the Arts & Crafts street festival in Weaverville. Bought some art: a small oil of a fruit bat hanging upside down over pomegranates, a box painted with a turtle, turtles mating inside, a big wooden bowl with its edge inlaid with chips of semi-precious stones. Met with Cyn selling her cityscapes. We compared notes on how we didn’t miss UNCA at all, and how we both look great. 

DJ says of our Thursday adventure that it was the worst vestry meeting ever. 

The Remember January 6 Rally seems to have been a non-event. Sometimes entropy is holy. 

 

September 17, 2021

Drove to campus to get my Retiree Parking hang tag. Proximity encouraged me to walk in the Botanical Garden, which have not done, much past the gate, for many years. Rejoiced in the labeled wild plants, increasing my own internal herbarium. Saw students, saddened that few–or any– among them would know who I am now. Students in these years, so politically uncertain, so rife with Covid, are very unlucky. I hope some good thing compensates them in time to come. 

Went to Connie’s opening at Pink Dog. It’s a cohesive and culminating show, summarizing in simple, nostalgic gestures the compassionate perspective she has been exhibiting through a long, productive artistic life. She wore a mask covered in rhinestones. 

 

September 16, 2021

Here was a day. I needed to have a phone issues addressed (it claimed that its charging slot had impurities) but the Mall doesn’t open until 11, so I walked along the Riverwalk, where I was, apparently, caught by TV cameras and revealed ambling along on the 6 o’clock news. I didn’t see it myself. Once at the Verizon store I was told three times by feckless young men holding the phone as if it were a turd, “We really can’t help you here.” I knew they could, and finally, after they began actually looking things up, I came away with a new phone. The young man who set the new phone up for me used, while he was working for Fed Ex, to deliver to my house. He remembered the address and I remembered him. I complimented him in getting out of the weather. My step app lost all the steps I’d gained hiking in the morning. 

Early in the evening came the special vestry meeting occasioned by the now clearly immortal indignation of those who have decided to be indignant. The first three comments of “general discussion” were calls for me to resign from vestry. Fifty years of professional life didn’t quite prepare me for that. Their rage at my letter concerning the Parish Profile was based pretty much on poor reading skills, but since one of the accusations against me was arrogance, I thought it best not to point that out then and there. The railed against “tone” while themselves unable to recognize it. I imagine they didn’t do well in high school language arts. Clearly, they had not read the text for understanding, but for fuel for their inexhaustible fires of self-righteousness. As all unfolded I noted my own lack of indignation– my calm, if astonished, curiosity, like one watching wild animals rend one another in the wilderness--which served me well, for not only did I not rebut, but I didn’t say anything the whole time, which must have left some kind of impression. Like the lamb who before his slaughterers is dumb. What must be noted is the vehemence and eloquence of my supporters, who were not only in the majority but, unlike my accusers, wise and probing. Attacked by people I don’t respect and defended by those I do, I had, all in all, a good evening. If a curious one. I do have the ability to enrage people and I seldom know exactly why. I almost never mean to. I do understand that “You’re really too stupid for us to have this discussion” will not calm the waters. I want to find in Christ precedents for my own behavior, but I think I misjudged the size of the issue. They are no brood of vipers. They are lawyers and grandmothers and day-to-day people who have found a place for themselves in their own imagination, and resent (as I would and do) being nudged from that security. They might provoke Jonathan Swift, but they cannot survive him. My duty from now on is not to stop speaking the truth but to use my inside voice, even if that leads to the necessity of repetition, which I hate so much. The stupid are not the evil, nor are the frightened necessarily the stupid. John quoted someone saying, “Every prophet is a pain in the ass, but not all pains in the ass are prophets.” I must hold this before me before I speak. 

 

September 14, 2021

Rough, peculiar night, out of which I rose unexpectedly refreshed. Went to the Y and did an excellent weight set and spent some time on the cross trainer. My energy was not yet spent, so I drove to the Parkway and hiked along the Hard Times. It had to be in the shade, as my skin still erupts at the direct touch of sunlight. My face is peeling; I must look like a leper. Some foot and bicycle traffic on the trail, but enough solitude for real spiritual renewal. I lingered at one beautiful grove and heard the prayer that I had prayed: O beautiful Spirit, let my warfare be at an end. Botanized to my heart’s delight. Wondered what made the woodsy sweet joe-pye sweet, and was the meadow version somehow bitter? Horse balm and leafcup. A hawk crying somewhere in the canopy, maybe Sweetboi’s country cousin. Met two solemn, friendly dogs. 

Sweetboi Returns

 

September 12, 2021

Betrayed DJ by sleeping during the ride back from Folly. It could not be helped. Home to a waiting throng of turkeys, and Maud planted foursquare hollering at me for being gone. She’s now glued to the desk, against my chest, head nestled in the crook of my arm, purring, which makes it hard to type but which is otherwise gratifying. Tried to do some writing. I thought I heard a noise downstairs, but I hadn’t, really, unless it was the impalpable call of an old friend. Sweetboi was standing on the pavement below the side porch, surveying what has never ceased to be his domain. 

Spent last evening watching 9-11 documentaries. Still a dagger in the heart. Would we rise to another occasion such as that, or would we stand amid the ruins blaming one another? 

 

September 10, 2021

Keeping out of the sun limits what you can do on a beach vacation. Even with sunblock slathered on, hives appear on my skin when I venture out for more than a few minutes. Therefore: sleeping, writing, and the ceaseless preparation and consumption of food that is our practice here. When we’re not eating, we read recipes and quote online menus to one another. Beautiful sea moving in and out, happy people driving into and out of his fringes. Began an oceanside murder mystery, longing to witness, someday, someone actually reading one of my books. 

Mindy

 

September 9, 2021

Tropical Depression Mindy brings heavy rain and lightning. Dark skies will be well for a while, as in the last two days my sunburn stopped just short of needing medical attention. 

Rain stopped as I was abroad in the town. Luckily I had my old yellow raincoat, which was hot but protective. 

Seeing that it had a pathetic little library, I left a copy of Necklaces at Planet Follywood. Someone may read it someday, even in a drunken fog.

Startling aggressiveness of grackles–

Passed some barrier of unspecified depression, out again on the other side–

Evening now: regular panoply upon the sand. Parents are never more sweetly attentive than when they bring their young to the shore, lovers seldom more demonstrative, with the sea and the sky as their witnesses.. 

“Sex-bugs” are everywhere, fragile little puffs connected at the base of the thorax, apparently copulating constantly, inseparably.

 September 8, 2021

Up early in the party-ravaged condo, sea-sound through the open door. The door is so warped and off-track only two of us can open it. It must have rained during the night. Dolphins gamboling for a while in the distance. I got a severely sunburned face in what I thought was relatively little time exposed. 

Insane dreams: in one I wrote an entire play, talked about it with a director, cast it, had trouble with a cast member and found a replacement. In another I was a painter in a giant studio with many rooms and passageways. While exploring, I encountered a beautiful man (whom I seemed to know, but I can’t think now who) with whom I spent time. In the last scene he was advising me on how to improve my painting. His advice was “make it smaller.” In another I became friends with a Kardashian, especially with her little daughter who took a liking to me. I served as a kind of nanny. I accompanied the little girl to a TV talk show where the host insulted her mother, and I tried to think of something to say to the little girl to comfort her. 

The sea-sound is all the wonderful things people say it is.

Pelicans

 September 7, 2021

Clouds over the coast, close and intimate, sky and sea and shore. Our kitchen sink clogged almost first thing, and after 5 calls, a plumber showed up. My distress confirmed to me that I have a mild cleanliness fixation. I couldn’t seem to take all that filthy water in stride. People remark that my house looks like nobody actually lives there. Anyway, the problem was shrimp shells someone (not us) had put down the disposal. The plumber and his assistant were an act, the (white) plumber aggressive and demanding and the (black) assistant subservient and apparently used to being treated as though he were stupid. Perhaps he is. But before the end of the session the plumber was jolly and explaining to me (as if I had remarked on their relationship, which I had not) that they had worked together forever and Larry was used to being treated that way and realized it was a sign of affection. Larry concurred.  The plumber has been divorced for 16 years and is dating a woman much taller than himself, whom he calls “the Amazon.” He and the Amazon will be renting this very unit for New Years. Larry poured the drained sink water into my bathtub, which immediately itself clogged, and I had to summon them back from the very door of the elevator to fix that additional problem. 

Flights of pelicans come over our balcony by night, heading mostly south. Last evening a hawk stood still in the air over us, training his keen eyes on the beach.

Folly Beach

 

September 6, 2021

First day at the beach accomplished. Blasted past my step goal for the first time since the spring. Wandered downtown–such as it is–and was happy in the jostling masses, thought it must be observed that no one was wearing a mask, and the news reports today that South Carolina has the highest Covid infection rate in the country. DJ and B and I closed the evening watching Saturn ride over the dark waves, concealing and disclosing as the clouds blew. 

AGMC blows up as members quarrel over. . . something. . . whether to have a virtual concert? . . something that need not have stirred all that ire. 

Pleasure in the sound and rhythm of the sea. Could I live at the shore? Of course I could. Not this shore, though: I need a rocky coast, like NH, with tide pools filled with waving sea life.

 September 5, 2021

Uneventful passage got us to Folly Beach in time to watch red sunset from the back balcony. Our own balcony faces northeast, with the sun rising in white glory after an odd and rather violent sleep. I was over-tired. Walked early toward Charleston. Beautiful brown boys setting up chairs. Families wading in and out of the waves. I gave myself a good soaking. My physical progress may be told by my walking twice as far as I ever did last year at one time, and coming back not out of exhaustion but because I was running out of beach. The sun might have been unbearable were one not knee deep in the water. 

 

September 4, 2021

Getting as much done as I can before DJ comes in the van and sweeps us to Folly Beach. Foggy morning. I’ve left few enough errands that I should be done in time, standing on the porch with my gear, ready to begin. 

O phones from the road to tell me my comments about the Parish Profile angered “many,” though “I have your back. I absolutely have your back.” He noticed, as I did, that my plaint about people thinking with hurt feelings was answered by a flood of hurt feelings, and not one actual application to the argument. People do get furious at me. It always takes me by surprise. I think of reasons: I continue to be playful after others have begun to take things seriously; my style in pamphleteering is very 18th Century, very Tom Paine, and what to me is the triumphant revelation of reason is to others arrogance; I’m direct, and do not take the circling route of tattling and innuendo that seems to be the choice of the South; I’m told that others find me intimidating, and though that is hilarious to myself, I hear it often enough to believe it to be a factor; my patience with deliberate or indelible stupidity is small; I do not think that the way a person feels is always a useful tool in determining true and false; my rhetoric is generally better than my opponent’s, which enrages people who think they are right even if their arguments fails, or that their sentiments should be honored simply because they’re theirs. But, as observed, the counterblast is so feeble in this it won’t cause the self-reflection it might otherwise have. I read my essay over and wonder how it can be disagreed with: I suppose that’s the arrogance people see in me.

Watched Godzilla versus King Kong until early in the morning. I was as happy as a ten-year-old. 

Ida

 

September 3, 2021

In the present dispensation, I can count on, lying in my bed before rising in the morning, the soft, vaguely interrogative voices of turkeys under my window. It allows me to arise smiling.

Hurricane Ida visits incredible destruction everywhere between New Orleans and Manhattan. Images of the Central Park roads deep under water, neighborhoods near Philadelphia smashed by tornadoes. Are the gods more wrathful, or just more camera lenses turned on their wrath? 

Bittersweet

 

September 2, 2021

DJ arranged a gathering for me at Rye Knot. Convivial. I allowed vodka in celebration, and came home happily drunk. Tea-totaling today. Much of the chatter concerned church politics, the hot point right now being a letter I wrote to the vestry expressing my exhaustion and impatience with those still whining about injustices that never actually happened to clergy who actually abandoned us in an hour of crisis, setting as many fires as they could behind them. I was fearful for an hour or so, but when the responses began to appear, they were either in agreement with me or so stupid as not to be taken seriously. Nothing assists an argument like an inept rebuttal. 

Went to the forest, which, this being a weekday, was less crowded. I got the last parking place at the Bent Creek trailhead. There’s a side trail I often take and then retrace my steps because it crosses a creek. This time I calculated that I’d wet my shoes but little jumping from this stone to that, and so I did, and walked a path new to me, though I knew very well where I was going, having seen the other end of it near Lake Powhatan. Open spaces alternated with forest, so there was a great variety of late summer blooms, which pleased me. Sat in the sun at lakeside. On the path back a man was pulling something at the path side. We chatted a little. He’s a retired park ranger who has taken on the unofficial task of removing invasive Oriental bittersweet wherever he sees it. In the parking lot two old men rested in lawn chairs in the shade beside my car, retirees from Enka High who, the one said, met every so often to hike and then sit somewhere and solve the problems of the world. As I pulled out they were arguing with a young man about Covid and the wearing of masks, they in favor of it and the young man expressing skepticism. I think he was doing it just to have a conversation. 

Trimmed giant cosmos from around the smoke tree, which they overwhelmed.

It is a remarkable fact that mosquitos are ten times worse in my garden than they are in the deepest forest, or even in the swamps around the lake.

Happy Birthday to Me

 

September 1, 2021

Happy Birthday to me. Rain from the disintegrating hurricane makes the day pearly and melancholy, as I rather like it. Bach on Pandora. 

Cheerful Michael Smith is dead. He was two years younger than I. 

Miraculous thing: my yard was filled with bird, eight or nine species I could count, not many of each, but all boiling through the grass like some choice seed was just now coming to ripeness– a couple of kinds of woodpeckers, including two great pileateds, jays, flickers and robins colored so that you knew they were this spring’s babies. Some blessedness had descended on the garden. On the other side, near the fence, turkeys ran with their necks extended, making piteous calls. Don’t know what they were running from. They bunched up in the front yard to graze the cosmos seeds. 

Hymns

 August 31, 2021

A notebook has been sitting on my desk for days. It contains a poem I roughed out at the riverside, that I was anxious (but apparently not THAT anxious) to finish. Opened it up, ready to begin. It was awful. Closed the notebook.

While it was still dark I rose and offered a revision for the Parish Profile and call for a new Dean, which as they stood sounded like an eager high school girl’s citizenship essay. 

I put out shredded documents as a mulch on the hibiscus. The turkeys love that, come all the way across the lawn to shit just there. 

Hearing this, joyfully, in my head:

I will bow and be simple

I will bow and be free.

I will bow and be humble

be thou like the willow tree.

I will bow, this is my token

I will wear the easy yoke

I will bend and not be broken

with my back against the rock. 

Thinking of the time when I was singing in the choir at the Disciples Church in Hiram, and sang “Be Thou My Vision” for the first time. 

Devotion is higher than wisdom.

Devotion is higher than wisdom.

Maud returns to her old ways, no longer hissing from the hurt in her back legs. However long this blessing lasts, I send up my little fountain of praise. 

Had a $1500 charge on a credit card from a hotel in Haiti. 

 August 30, 2021

Languid summer. I’m actually doing a lot of writing, though long periods of sleepy idleness minimizes the impression. 

Louisiana devastated.

Turtlehead

 

August 29, 2021

1610 Vespers. The golden waves of sound. 

Thought I rose early enough to beat the crowds, but the parking lots for all the trail heads were packed full before 9 AM. Sunday, though, which may have been a factor. Drove on, parked at the first overlook pullover and headed north on the MST. The stretch of forest was magical with bird calls, most of them recognizable, but one far off which I thought to be a grouse. Tiny pink and yellow flowers in deep shade, asters and turtlehead. 

Finished this revision of Jason of the Apes late yesterday afternoon.. 

Maud hisses when I touch her. Don’t know why. If the end of that nears . . . I am never equipped for it. 

Found the 1940 census. My grandfather made $1900 working at Goodyear that year.