December 31, 2021

Palestrina on Pandora. 

Cool day, sun and rain squalls alternating. 

The headachy ickiness I felt at the beginning of the week was possibly Covid. D and L both Face Book that they have it, and are quarantining. I assumed a big gathering like the one at Christmas would be a cauldron of it. But, if that was it, it wasn’t much. I thought it was phlebitis and gobbled unnecessary anitbiotics.  My socializing is so slim I won’t worry about deliberate quarantining. 

During massage, Z told me about his new reading habits, and how he’d finished a number of books. For one wild moment I thought he was going to comment on OBN, but, of course, not. The most influential read in his life turns out to be a self-help called No More Mr Nice Guy, which suggests ways, I gather, to stop being everybody’s doormat and dare some self-assertion. Haven’t read it, but the change in him over a two week period was miraculous, from mouse to peacock. Peacock suits him. He has the equipment for it. His beauty should have obtained for him a more exciting life than he has so far had .

Do I overestimate the worth of personal beauty? I think of Dickinson’s poem, “Success is counted sweetest. . . “ 

I am probably not an intuitively good audience for No More Mr Nice Guy

The file “Play Submissions” sits on my screen. I have made 90 submissions of plays in 2021. Two have resulted in productions or future productions. And, as only one of them has actually happened, only one is sure: “Alfie and Greta” in Australia, my first work there. Only four have received outright rejections.

O, what a year.

Lost Circe the angel cat. Bitterly wept for her. I hope she knows. 

Sweetboi and Denise came to lord it over my garden. Maybe the best thing of the year. 

My garden was the best it ever was. It will be better this spring.

Lost trips to Greece and Israel.

The One with the Beautiful Necklaces and Washington Place appeared in print. The Ones with Difficult Names is all proofed and edited and ready for the next step. 

Wrote volumes, the mass of which I have not come to terms with myself. Sat at the green table and wrote a brief story this morning, before coffee. Maud is the hero of it. 

Went back on stage, in a live play, a ballet, and an oratorio, all of them brand new. I’m prouder of that than I was when I began to type the sentence. 

Getting ready to leave the house, I heard a tiny scratchy sound on the walk. The sun was low and in my eyes, so I had to adjust for a moment to see the truly massive flock of turkeys that had gathered under my magnolia. Almost the best imaginable sign for the coming of the new year.

The overture to “The Flying Dutchman” is my earworm at the moment. What sign is that? Travel. A love-curse. 

 

December 30, 2021

Brahms’ 4th on Alexa. 

Intermittent but wild pain in my left knee. 

 December 29, 2021

Encountered AS at the bagel store. We chatted. When I inquired about matters at UNCA, she made the face all faculty make when asked that question, a complicated play of disgust, disappointment, remote hopefulness. It cannot get better without a radical revisioning along exactly those lines which any presently conceivable administration would reject out of hand.

Red-bellied woodpecker is the sunny ghost of my yard.

Dreamcatcher

 

December 28, 2021

Rose shocking late, for me. Drove to the Rice Pinnacle trailhead, which by reason of vacation and fine weather was packed. Had to hover for a parking space. I took a trail not taken before, to the right of the main (and partially paved) one. A near constant barrage of mountain bikes made it a walk rather than an actual wilderness experience. Off to the right of the trail someone had created a sylvan fetish with carved face and clothing and dangling dreamcatchers. People shot by on their bikes at such speed that I may have been the only one who noticed, though the presence hung no more than 100 yards from the rail opening. 

Escrow weirdness causes my mortgage to go up $300 a month. I don’t even call for an explanation. 

 

December 27, 2021

J commanded me “Wash your car,” a comment relative to how long we’ve gone without a good, driving, wash-your-car rain. 

Christmas Eve service at the church was expectable and expectably lovely. Came home, watched a little TV, drank DJ’s egg nog. Off to Atlanta early the next day, survived the gigantic family gathering, many times larger and more disparate than Dr. Fauci would probably advise. I simply did not get the enjoying-the-family gene, so dominant in my sister. I brace myself for an hour or so before I can relax into it. I do well in formal social situations; informality is a process with me. My sister glows the more as the mayhem increases. But it was lovely, all the nephews and their spouses or near-spouses, M’s parents and grandparents, who apparently all travel as a team, even A, whose friendship with J is odd and fortunate. Food was eaten, gingerbread houses made, anecdotes shared, gifts exchanged. D got me a bb gun to defend against the bears. I can’t imagine using it for that, but I’ll load it and keep it at the ready in case someday it comes to pass. Beka’s flight from Denmark was discussed. She blames Denmark, but among all countries Denmark is probably unblameable. I think she found her paradise in Colorado and wants to go back to it. No blame there. Cannot sleep in my sister’s house. Who knows why? 

The long drive each way, unremarkable.

On the schedule: wrestling with Allianz over a refund for the Jerusalem trip; testing the weather outside to see if it’s hikeable. 

Christmas Eve

 

December 24, 2021

J and DJ and L and I keep Christmas with many drinks at Rye Knot. We discussed how, no matter how many times we hear A Christmas Carol, it still lands its blow.

Renewed the seed trays and the suet, that the birds too might have a merry Christmas. A great hawk (red-tailed, I think) sat in the tree across the street studying the hawk buffet thus created. 

The Internet issue was solved (or at least addressed for the moment) by re-installing the whole apparatus, taking the wire from a different pole and burying it underground. I don’t know how the technician achieved this in the time it took– I went hiking, to get out of the fury-cauldron I’d created around me over this issue–but when I got back from the mountain, it was accomplished. I’m ashamed to be undone by small, temporary things. I whisper my thanks that I have small, temporary things to be undone by.

Handel and Bach in the half-lit rooms. 

 

December 23, 2021

The AT&T workman’s meter said the cable break is twenty feet from the inbox, putting it in the attic. Workman says, “I don’t go into attics.” We’ll see how this comes out. 

Tightness in the chest. . . betting this day ends in the long-awaited heart attack. 

Cleaning lady and technician arrive at the same time. Chat with cleaning lady. She observes that it’s hard to take on new hires these days. I ask her about the petite young woman whom I’ve seen here several time. “Oh, that’s my daughter. Five weeks ago she was in a horrible traffic accident right over on Merrimon. Lady pulls out of Ingles while on her cell phone. My daughter was five months pregnant. She lost the baby. She was on her way to work. Now every time she walks into a house, she remembers, so–.”

Technician says, “I’ll have to replace that whole friggin’ line.” He’s very grumpy. I can’t get past my own rage to feel for his dilemma much below the surface. He crawled into the attic after he said he wouldn’t. He called the original installer to bitch at him for leading the line into the attic. Neither of us at the time of installation could think of an alternative. He blamed squirrels for all six of my failures. “They rub the cable with soy oil and that really attracts the squirrels,” says he. My responses– stop doing that, rub it with something nasty afterward–seem so obvious it would be rude actually to say. You think in this technical age you won’t have to go through this, that there’s always a quick solution. I’m not good with the repetitious nuisance. I said “Can you do without me?” He said, “Yeah, we have so much stuff already I won’t take any of yours.” I drove off to the first overlook toward Pisgah and hiked slightly north on the MTS trail. I found a log to sit on, and there discussed with the Lord my realization that I have not been as kind as I could have been, throughout my life. I have fought for principles, for my own autonomy, for time, against stupidity, but so seldom tempered those battles with mercy–or even proportion– that I had to sit in the wilderness and think about it for a while. When I got back the Internet was on. 

 

December 22, 2021

In the dark of the darkest night–almost, in fact, at the stroke of midnight-- two bears were on my porch. They’re so silent I wouldn’t have known had I not been looking out the window at the hard moonlight at exactly that second. They’re two of Ruth Bader Ginsbear’s cubs from this year, big, hungry teenagers, funny to watch. The corn I left out for the birds didn’t interest them much. They checked to see if I’d restored the birdfeeder they disembowled at their last visit. I had not. They didn’t get the suet box, which is as high as I can reach, and higher than they can.  I am glad they have each other. Private marauding must lack the crucial element of shared experience. I took them for omens of the night, and their behavior, being playful, a good sign for times to come. 

Past day of anger at an agent’s flip rejection of Jason. “I was not as excited by the opening pages as I anted to be.” Wanted to slap her stupid face. But, early this morning, sat down and wrote a far better opening page, a whoring opening page designed to catch attention rather than to begin the story, but that’s the way it is. 

When I was walking the woods around Lake Powhatan, I realized my inner voices had become tangled, superabundant, nasty. I stopped on the path and bade them Silence! Relief came to my heart almost instantly. The forest had voices that only in my silence could penetrate. The blessed silence held for a few seconds before I realized “I am working hard on being silent before the voices of the sky,” which was itself a voice of distraction, if a purely descriptive one. This is the task for the coming year: achieving emptiness without congratulating myself on emptiness, listening without singing inside “see me listening!” My approach to all things is narration; this will be difficult. 

Again, inconceivably, the Internet is out. My rage is comic. How may different ways can AT&T be consigned to hell? Had to drive out and park on some street to call Spectrum and sign up for their service, as my phone was out too, for reasons not entirely clear.  Two hours of run-around from nice people with Indian accents on whom I could not release the full force of my fury. The AT&T “supervisor,” to whom I’d demanded to speak, left me a phone number which connected to the J.P Morgan/Chase personnel office, which offered me (electronically) a job application. Trying to think of Kentucky, trying to think of Yemen, places where my little inconveniences look like the head of a pin. Even rage over the head of a pin sometimes cannot be avoided. Playing de la Rue and Obrecht on the DVD player in the living room. 

Solstice

 

December 21, 2021

Longest night. Draw on, sweet night!  Baked two other batches from the same old cookbook, one alleging to be Charles Hartshorne’s favorite oatmeal cookies. Had no raisins, so used vanilla chips instead. Crows gathering strangely in this tree, then in that tree. Strange, pure emotions: I will be convulsed with grief at certain times during the day, at remembrance of things passed. This is not depression, but quick, deep, pure in ways difficult to explain, parting like clouds and letting the light back almost immediately. 

Merganser Lake

 

December 20, 2021

Rose early and drove to the Hard Times trailhead. Walked to Lake Powhatan, which I want to call Lake Merganser because I see two pair of hooded mergansers almost every time I go. Caught them this time not only from the fishing pier, but from a loop of forest, and they no more than forty feet away, sporting in the silver water. Mallards too, unusually shy. Heard a kingfisher but didn’t see it. For a while, it being early and cold, I had the paths and the lake to myself. One woman standing at the cultured edge of the lake talking on her cell phone was unbelievably loud. I walked a long way trying to get away from the sound, and never did until I sank back in the forest. 

Expiration

 

December 19, 2021

Turned my Pandora on to the adagio of one of Beethoven’s late quartets, the most sublime music I know. Sat at the keyboard and wept. Baked cocoa drop cookies, varying the recipe by emptying out jars of Marischino cherries and what have you that had been sitting in the fridge. Threw out a can of Crisco that expired in 2012. It was expired when I moved it from one house to the other.

Proofing

 

December 18, 2021

Proofread the new book– some astonishing bloopers, I think by them. Consistent confusion of hyphens and dashes. The poems are strange to me, as if another intelligence wrote them. But also, I think, quite beautiful. My thinking so is enough to last this night. 

 

December 17, 2021

Red-bellied woodpeckers lead the parade to the new suet, and a birdseed wreath studded with berries. I entered the Wild Bird store for supplies, praying that the lady wouldn’t ask me, for the 9th time, if I wanted to join the birdseed buying club. She didn’t, making the whole day blessed. I think it must have been 70 degrees at some point.

 

December 16, 2021

Joyful tasks of Christmas, visiting here, bestowing there. Bought supplies to bake cookies I am now out of the mood to make. Using the Hiram Women’s Faculty Club cookbook of, it must be, around 1971. Margarine appears in recipes then as it never would now, as does a great variety of salads involving Jello. Recipes are terse, without wit or anecdote. Spices are limited to the four or five I remember from my mother’s spice rack. Some things you are just expected to know. 

Maud curled in a corner which somehow amplifies her purr, which fills the room, sounds like the purr of a tiger. 

There is a Taco Bell Quarterly actually soliciting literature concerning the fast food business. 

 

December 15, 2021

Kelsay sends proofs I can’t bear to look at now– though the cover is gorgeous. One crow does not bother to move when I approach. Will work on this until one day maybe we will touch. 

 

December 14, 2021

Return to poetry, not a river, but a laughing merry stream. One of the poems is about the house on Tonawanda Avenue that was always the prize for Christmas display in East Akron. I wonder if the people who live there now know that. It would almost be worth the trip to see if the tradition were preserved. Or if they know there are poems written about them. 

Mendelssohn

 

December 12, 2021

Mendelssohn in the morning, “Behold a Star from Jacob Shining,” a perfect work of art, soul and cunning construction in exquisite balance. 

Afternoon returned to the Cathedral to hear a concert by Finn Magill and friends. Finn was pretty wonderful, especially his intricate adaptations for violin of un-violin-like carols such as Patapan and Carol of the Bells. His friends were less wonderful, a C-grade singer-songwriter and a male quartet with balance problems. The bass in the quartet used to sit beside me in choir at All Souls. All I could think of was how he’d lost the shocking beauty of his youth. Still, I was glad I dragged myself out of the house.

Chaotic Good

 

December 11, 2021

Heron down on the lake, on a stick near shore, hunched over like an old woman complaining about the cold. 

Reading Byron, finding his impression of Valletta to be exactly the same as mine 200 years later– damn the streets that are all stairs.

Not only did Necklaces not win the Thomas Wolfe, I was not one of the five finalists invited to read at the ceremony. I misjudged that memorably. 

Coffee out of the first mug Kit ever sent me, perhaps twenty-five years ago. I knew there was carving on the side, but I took it to be free-form, or perhaps a mistake. Looked at it in propitious light this morning, and it is my name in an arch over what might be a phoenix or a tree or a crucifix or, most likely, the star shape with which I used to sign letters, back when I wrote them. . 

Read about the “Nine Alignments.” I am Chaotic Good.

Dog with White Eyes

 

December 10, 2021

Someone--maybe Freud–asserts that dreams are wish fulfillment. If so, I wondered why so few of my dreams are fully or fulfillingly sexual. Last night’s was, extended, vivid, lyrical. My partner was somebody I sort of know, but transfigured the way dreams do, and the identity for the moment forgotten. 

For no good reason bought Japanese porcelain at Biltmore Antiques. 

My tiny play The Dog with White Eyes accepted for publication

Revisions and additions to the Parish Profile submitted. 

Shying from delving into a big project, though three or four sit in the computer waiting to be delved. 

Office cleaning. Documents from before the move finally found their way into the recycling bin. 

AW continues his decades-old program of defamation and slander. I admire his diligence, but wonder at the place I continue to hold in his psyche, whereas I never think of him unless I receive word of another subterranean attack. He might have done something useful with all the energy he expended on me, though probably not. 

Two different broadcasts of ancient Christmas music from two different rooms.

 

December 9, 2021

Trip to Hendersonville to avoid the cleaning lady. Breakfast at Main Street Cafe, where they served their eggs Benedict with melted Velveeta in place of Hollandaise. Waitstaff merry and unafraid to laugh back in the kitchen. Everywhere you go in Asheville people are masked, but it was rare in Hendersonville, and in one store something I said made the owner launch into a diatribe against vaccination. Her main argument seemed to be that the formula for the vaccines is imperfect and some future effects remain unknown. My main argument–which remained unexpressed–is that they keep you from getting sick in the short run, and that’s all I can expect to have control over. Bought a bear and a banner with quotations about Valhalla. 

My rewrite of the Parish Profile seems to have received general approbation. 

 December 8, 2021

Video night with DJ and R. Ordered pizza from Papa John’s. when I arrived to pick up, they had no record of the purchase, but made me a pizza on the spot and did not charge me. Sweet kids. I’d brought no cash so I couldn’t put anything in the tip jar for their efforts.

Bears visited last night. Didn’t see them, but one bird feeder has the bottom ripped out and the suet holder has literally vanished. 

I figure that, had things been different, I’d be in the air now, having left Tel Aviv for Charlotte. Seems at the end of it like such a tiny moment in time. I am, all in all, grateful that things turned out the way they did, thought I figure I will have lost $8000. I’ll pretend Bruce had gotten me into another Broadway show.

The slacks I ordered to wear in Israel arrived today. 

 

December 6, 2021

Bad dreams through the night. In two cycles I had sunk under two different circumstances and I could find no way out and it looked like my life was ruined. Then I clawed into consciousness. Took a minute to realize “it wasn’t real!” Maybe that’s what death is like. 

Combing You Tube for Irish music. Guess I want to go there again.

 

December 5, 2021

Lovely Lessons & Carols this morning. A tune on the radio flooded me with the Christmas spirit, so long gone. 

 

December 4, 2021

Parish Profile arrives. That it is an undistinguished document could be excused if it hadn’t taken two years to create. You wonder if it’s worth the exhaustion of watching select committees aim low and still miss the mark. Don’t know what to do. People are probably tired of my sharp mouth already.

Shining Rock

 

December 3, 2021

Walked in Shining Rock and Graveyard Fields in the purest blue air that has ever been. Gille na gille, brightness most bright. I considered that I likely have not walked there in this century. I was purely alone heading our early, though I ran into outgoing hikers as I headed back to the car. Two very old men in camo had gotten there, amazingly, in a truck. I don’t think they were hunting. What would you hunt there on the roof of the world? When I approached they were packing camp chairs and putting them back into the truck. I think they may have just been sitting there facing the Majesty. Stopped and turned around at a patch of ice that went on farther than I could see. Slipping and falling was not on the morning’s agenda. Ate ice broken from stone, cold, stony, refreshing beyond words.  Lauridsen’s “Sure on This Shining Night” was my earworm for the journey. That was well. Every ten feet or so, streams have cut deeply into the roadside. The slope to the north doesn’t look high enough to generate all that runoff. Juncos were with me, and down in the gorge I heard ravens calling their unmistakable call. One of the lines from the Agee text is “all is healed, all is health.” That is how I felt. 

Wash Creek Overlook

 

December 2, 2021

Fine warm day. Rose and drove to Stony Bald Gap, where I began to climb up and to the south, the wood gleaming pale and azure around me. The rocky unevenness of the path defeated my knees, though, and it was not a long walk. At the overlook I encountered a pale man-bunned, sweet boy, from Detroit. We remarked on the splendor of the day. He wants to move to Asheville and open a printing service. Unfortunately I could offer no wisdom on those prospects. He said Mount Mitchell is closed because of ice. I told him go on to Pisgah, which was unlikely to be closed. Ouching on my knee, I advised him to stave off old age as long as he could. He promised that he would. At the Wash Creek overlook I saw a black cat. He must have been abandoned by someone, for no cat would climb there on its own. I got out and called to him, but he ran into the woods. I stopped on the way back, but there was no sign of him in the sun-struck woods. 

 

December 1, 2021

Picked up the intriguing amounts and varieties of trash that gathered on my lawn. Left the big bear mess at the entrance of the lilac tunnel for another time, not having the stomach for it right then. Got all my art supplies together from house and office and set them on the front porch for Allyson to pick up for her school. Empty drawers and shelves. The oils might be too sophisticated for gradeschoolers, but teacher may use them herself.  Painting “51" in orange on my mailbox may be the last time I have an oil brush in my hand.  AT&T cancels my technician because there’s a systemic outage and, I imagine, all hands must be on that deck. No satisfaction to me. There was no hurricane, no earthquake, and a systemic outage does not excuse the loss of nor return my Internet to me. Wild with rage and sadness. Do not intend to be patient. Do not intend to be forgiving. Do not intend to be rational. Why do companies offer services they cannot provide? The house is silence and isolation.  In the same vein, the Discernment Committee has not completed the Parish Profile three weeks after the absolute and final deadline they set themselves, ten months after any rational end point. I’ll be the one who has to say, “The Discernment Committee clearly does not intend or is not able to provide a Parish Profile. Should we not do it ourselves?” and then get blamed for hurting everybody’s feelings. 

Laundered the unthinkable bedclothes. 

Working hard on the trimmed and revised Tub. Lost 7000 words.

 

November 30, 2021

Beyond credibility, my cable is out again. Five times in a month. Jimmy calls and says they’ve found the problem, on a pole somewhere remote from here. Can it be fixed tonight? No. It must be fixed tonight. We’ll be there first thing in the morning. I need it to be fixed tonight. It will not be fixed tonight. The grief I feel has something to do with solitude, and little do to with the actual service. It’s like being in constant panic and having the drug that covered that panic suddenly removed.