Lenten roses

 

February 26, 2022

Jimmy Jackson died, a peripheral but enduring figure in my youth. His obit reads as though all his good humor and agreeableness rewarded him in life. 

Listening to Cecilia Bartoli. 

The box of The Ones with Difficult Names arrived. My intelligible but outsized fury over that subsided.

The card my Internet search prompted me to write to E hit pay dirt. The one I chose was the right one. He sends a card back today saying, “It’s been twenty-five years.” Felt it in my throat. I do not want him to send a photo. I do not want to link up on Facebook. I do not want to see his face, to know if he’s been a failure or a success. I remember that fatal night at the bar saying to the universe he is the one I will have. I did have him. The having of him must have supplied the universe with a great laugh, the greatest and bitterest of what I’m bold to call my love life. I thought at the end of it the catastrophe of all that would make love smooth sailing from then on. That must have been the loudest part of the laugh. Yet, I did want to hear from him, or I wouldn’t have sent the card. Maybe I assumed he just vanished when he didn’t have me to haunt.

Opened RG’s new novel randomly to the passage: “Do you know William Butler Yeats?” “Is he in our class?” Not promising.

The Lenten roses are in lovely bloom. 

 

February 25, 2022

Did a turn writing thank-you notes to people who had pledged. I picture the poor souls’ consternation when they try to decipher what I wrote. 

Tried to escape the cleaning lady by going to my office, but a giant delivery truck blocked the entire parking lot. Drove to the Woodfin Riverside Park, where huge rain made it best to stop and wait a while. I wrote a poem. It is uncomfortable writing in the car. When the rain slackened I found I was being visited by a beautiful black cock. He gleaned the wet earth a little, flapped his wings and crowed. The river had risen perceptibly when I continued on. 

Return call from my new mortgage people, responding to a call I made THREE DAYS AGO. 

 February 24, 2022

Angry day. All of my anger is specific and phenomenal. That doesn’t seem to make it easier. Maybe it does. 

Wind blew from the south, tattering and swirling clouds in various grays. Speeding from the north against the wind, and yet barely flapping their wings, came long-winged hawks, forty of them anyway, heading south. It was a moment of beauty and mystery. At the end of it I was still angry.

 

February 23, 2022

FICO score 745. One month it was 621. I had done nothing different one way or another, proving that these scores wander like deer in the forest. 

Voice too mucus-y to be any good at rehearsal.

2/22/22

 February 22, 2022

2/22/22. 

Unable to get down to a task through most of the day. Late in the afternoon I took to Bent Creek, at its last hurrah before it joins the French Broad. A woman wandered through the woods picking up pine cones, examining them, setting them down. I’m always amazed that there’s so few fish in Bent Creek, even in places where it would be a delight to be a fish. 

Grand-nephew

 February 21, 2022

Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump– what would it be like to know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the world would be improved by your vanishing from it? I dreamed last night of putting a hex on Russian war equipment, that nothing electronic would work. They’d charge into battle and a great silence reigned over the tundra. 

Vestry. Perrin spoke barely a word, in contrast to John, who held the floor, I would guess, 50% of the time. After every treasurer’s report I am reaffirmed in my lack of any interest whatever in accounting. How did my father do it? 

Call from Jonathan. He and Miriama are pregnant with a boy. He sent an ultrasound image. Confidentially, ultra sound images sicken me a little. As I thought of this driving home from church, the image came into my mind of a small boy with yellow hair and solemn eyes sitting on a porch swing. I realized this was my son, left unborn by the swirl of events. The grief and remorse of that moment cannot be put into words. Of course it is not my “fault,” but many thing not one’s fault nevertheless happened or failed to happen because of one’s choices. The sad little boy . . . .

 

February 20, 2022

Email this morning: Anyusha Schmitt <nickellcxtempiezy@outlook.com> 2:47 AM (5 hours ago)

to me

Hello there.)

It's really interesting for me to become acquainted with you.

So I have a wish to start our conversation.

I expect u and I will manage to build committed bond.Hopefully that you are trying to find long-term romantic bond so I decided to acquaint myself with a fellow via date matching site.

You know I have never tried such way of communicating.

I had in mand the idea that that men and women meet via internet dating relationship website only in a movie. Nevertheless I have heard that a lot of men and women were lucky to find their soulmate and I hope I will be in luck too.

I am an ordinary girl and I am hunting for an honest fellow. I want my man to be open and clearly I do not want him to cheat on me. Truthful feelings are too necessary for me. This is what I value and I want my beloved to do the same.

I am keen on comedies, thrillers, romantic movies and dramas. I really like 'Titanic', 'The Great Gatsby','Shawshank Redemption', 'Escape from Pretoria' and 'Catch me if you can'. I enjoy hiking, tenting, fishing, swimming and lying in the sun).

I think I 'm attractive, nevertheless I understand that it's a matter of taste. I am a white girl with light-coloured hair and gray-blue eyes. I 'm of a middle hight. I am quite slim. I am going to send pics of me in the next e-mail.

I will look ahead to a reaction enthusiastically from you.

Have a good day. Anusha

Respond to the poor girl and put her out of her misery? I am not, in fact, on a dating site, though the Internet seems to think I am. 

Was reading on the Internet of a mother and her boyfriend who tortured her eight year old son to death, trying to fathom the dark wing of cruelty that shadows the world. For one second, I dared to perceive the possibility that my having been essentially solitary all my life was God’s way of saving me from the infliction of horrors I probably cannot understand now. What if I’d had children and was cruel to them? What if I’d been a dark shadow from which souls strove to escape? What if there were people in the world (more than there are now, and with better reasons) who hated me with hatred renewed with every remembrance? Exactly what is meant by “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” a prayer in my case, possibly, answered before it was uttered.

Church today oddly discomfiting, like a video with sound and picture out of synch. 

Say the Lines

 February 19, 2022

Bracing blue cold. Stepping out barefoot to do some recycling wakes one up instantly. 

Theater at Magnetic last night. The era of social distancing has passed there, and we sat, masked, shoulder to shoulder. K especially wanted me to see this play because it was co-written by two local playwrights as a sort of experiment. I recognize that I look at a new play very much differently from others. I try to peer past the performances to hear the play itself, which given an amateur world is not always easy. Most regard the actors. A playwright learns that applause is for the actors, how well they have done, how bravely they have soldiered through not doing well, an aspect the genuinely sweet impulse of encouragement most audiences seem to have. The author is an afterthought. This performance–it was opening night–was halting and uncertain. One saw reasonably good actors having fine moments and fluffing others. Did I truly hear the play behind that? If so, it was a disappointment, and would have been if superbly performed. Its humor stood to one side of the situation–the characters actually told jokes to one another on stage. There was nothing inept about the dialog or the direction (or the quite elegant set). It was good classroom technique in the service of nothing much. In my seminar I would have given it an A without ever expecting it to appear on stage. All so inconsequential. Nothing ever at stake. What made contemporary playwrights think a play could be made out of discussing feelings? Maybe it can, but not by these particular ones. It broke free for a moment, circled back to reiterations of viewpoints that were pious and shopworn the first time they were uttered. I hear the talk in the room when the playwrights sat down: “OK, so this guy is a lawyer and his wife is a college professor and one day they begin to feel that their communication skills have failed to keep their marriage vibrant: GO!” It’s a bad sign when the lights go down and you hear yourself praying “Dear God, let this be the end,” and it isn’t. Sat beside B the Arts Blogger. He sighed at the end the same sigh as I. Walked to the parking lot with the giant moon hanging over the railroad tracks, melted and uneven at the rim. 

A poem can be made of a fleeting–even a trivial– emotion. Can a play? Plays require labor and material and money and time and space and people pulling on their boots and hauling out into the winter air. Shouldn’t they get something more than they would have gotten sitting home before the TV? Shouldn’t there be big ideas and big events? Well, not necessarily, but big themes tend to pull the writing up to match them, and from what I have witnessed, that is for living playwrights the most needful thing. Elevation. Expansion. Daring. Doing good work is not enough to drag people from their couches. Good must ascend to ravishing, to terrifying, to transformative. 

Why are we satisfied with so little? 

Attached to all this is: what good does is my championing new theater if what people see when they go to it is wan, unchallenging, and timid? After a while people will stop trying. But, then, how do playwrights grow if their work is not staged, some of it inevitably better than others? Perhaps we should take the idea of workshop productions more seriously than we do. Yes, I would rather have seen what I saw last night than an excellent production of The Sound of Music, but in this I constitute a minority of vanishing smallness. 

Reading The Method by Isaac Butler. To me the controversy is irrelevant because what matters is not what the actor is experiencing, but what the audience is. Among method actors I have know personally in shows in which I was involved, it was never the case that “the method” improved the performance. It almost never the case that any particular technique (except effective elocution) or theory can insure excellent performance. In my experience, a person is an effective actor or he isn’t, and the difference between the two is the quality of the imagination. Purely from a playwright’s point of view, I want to counsel, “Talk loud and say the lines.” Upon those two hang all the Law and the Prophets. 

Managed to change the battery in my car key with only one minor tantrum. 

 

February 17, 2022

Tax information hauled downtown to CK. The receptionist, who sees me twice a year, remarked on how very well I looked. There seemed to be genuine surprise. Perhaps the last time I looked a mess. 

The dizziness I experienced for several months upon rising and, mostly, changing positions in bed, seems to have gone. I throw myself into dizziness inducting positions to test if it’s really gone, and it is. I congratulate myself on not having bothered the doctor about this. 

I realized at rehearsal last night that when I’m sight-reading or executing a difficult passage, I imagine my father sitting beside me, when I’m finished remarking, “I didn’t know you could sing like that.” 

Marco

 February 16, 2022

Noble Renaissance on the CD player. Maud jammed, rumbling, between my chest and the keyboard. 

Had my hair cut by Marco. Marco is from the Dominican Republic, and dreams of going back when he retires. Facilities and prices are going up so fast, he says, that the DR is destined to be the next Dubai. He and his wife divide their time between Asheville and Sarasota. Marco believes that the country is in trouble because 1) everybody is angry at everybody else and 2) it gives so much away (specifically COVID relief) that people will not be encouraged to work for themselves. He returned his own COVID checks to the Treasury. He made a pilgrimage to the replica Noah’s Ark and Creation Museum in Kentucky, one of the high points of his life. Astonished that one man so long ago could build all that in the time God gave him. “And without power tools,” I added. He agreed. He fled Kentucky pretty fast, though, because everyone there was depressed and had no happiness in their lives.

Melody across the street had an ambulance visit her. I don’t think they took her away.  

 

February 14, 2022

Found J with his very long rap sheet, larceny, parole violation, bad checks, criminal impersonations, failure to appear. One of his criminal impersonations was likely of me. In our last phone call he summarized all this as “being on the West Coast for a while.” In some cases eleven years passed between offense and conviction. Don’t know what this says about the Connecticut judicial system. 

So Long Ago

 

February 13, 2022

My sister having helped me discover those online people finders, I went into an orgy of personal archaeology.

Betty Andonian, my mother’s best friend at the end, died in 2017. I must have seen her just before her death. 

One Patricia Evan responds from, I suppose, Akron: Hi this is Ron Evans wife. You emailed my son Ron Evans Jr. You have the right Ron Evans. His brother David died 2020 Mike passed 2022 Tim not sure when he died might be 10 years n Linda died in 2005 have all passed. His Mom in 2008 n Dad in 2004 have passed also. He is the only one left. Sorry to say that he has short term memory. Not sure he will remember you. But I will see what he says n see if he remembers you. Thanks for thinking about him n his family.

I have very specific memories about each person she mentioned. My memory is of them children and teenagers. Linda was boy-crazy and had a necklace with a big blue stone. I went to the Tallmadge carnival with her once, and watched her hunting down boys. I was probably, without knowing it, taking notes. She spread bubble gum across her lips, so when you kissed her you were kissing bubble gum. This might have been my first non-familial kiss. Mike and Tim were burly kids tagging along behind us. Ron’s big brother David was a testosterone-y teenager, but also, when the moment came, tender and kind. He gave a teenage party in their basement and invited me, and all the big girls asked me to dance. Ron was my best friend. He was quiet and kind. I was not. I was warned to take care for his–well, stupidity– as he was warned to take care for my fragile heart. When I stayed with them during my mother’s illnesses, I had to wait for him to get home from summer school to play. Maybe it was he who turned me into a wilderness wanderer. That is certainly what we did, hour after hour, in a wilderness– thinking back on it–no bigger than this neighborhood. My parents grew to despise him and the family– I don’t know why– so after a while he vanished. It’s shocking when everyone you used to know is either dead sunk in memory problems. I want to say to his wife, “I have written about Ron many times: here he is in The Falls of the Wyona–” but, I have learned, the odds of her appreciating it or understanding it are vanishingly small. I have taken my time getting my story out. No matter, on several accounts, but the place where it matters is that everyone to whom it might have meant something personal is gone. There will be no reminiscences where somebody recounts, “Oh! I was with him when this happened!”

Two Bach pieces, farewells said to O at church. I know everybody prizes vulnerability, and probably applauds breaking up in the middle of a speech, but I think of Yeats’: “But they. . .  If worthy their prominent part in the play, do not break up their lines to weep.”

Sounds of the Superbowl from below. I have never once in-what? 56 years? –watched it. Vowed that tonight would be different. 

 February 11, 2022

Return to AGMC rehearsal last night, toward the end of lip-synching to recorded music on our “float” for the Mardi Gras Parade. I will make my excuses. S says our summer concert will be “madrigals” sung at the Montford Park amphitheater. It sounds delicious, though I wonder if she and I mean the same thing by “madrigals.” Probably too good to be true. The first forty minutes of rehearsal was chatter; the rest was music that I 1) hate or 2) have no interest in singing. “Ikko Ikko” is fun. That’s the end of it. Sat in Brueghers writing a children’s book. I’ll look soon to see if there was anything to it. Went to Barnes & Noble to spend a gift card, sank into depression because, of course, no book of mine lay on the shelf. Existential doubt is so exhausting you leave it when you can, even if it hasn’t run its course. 

Drove to Lake Powhatan, where geese clamored on the waters, but almost nothing else seemed to be abroad. Brilliant sky, temperature tolerable. Drinks with SS in the evening. We are each, in some areas, the other’s only refuge.

Amazon

 February 9, 2022

    From Kelsay: 

Hi David,

We have heard some startling news from Amazon, and I am not putting books up for sale there until learn all the facts. Your book will be on the Kelsay Books website in a few days. I will follow up with you when I have more Amazon details and let you decide if you want your book placed there for sale there. 

She hasn’t said exactly what the problem was, or is, and I have managed not to blurt out, “Do you mean we’ve gotten this far and our best public outlet isn’t going to carry it!?!’ Wouldn’t that just be typical?

 

February 8, 2022

Final proofs of The Ones with Difficult Names, plus an invoice for the copies I ordered. 

Paid the wrong amount for rent, had to run to the Riverside to make that right.

Purchase and hanging of many new shapes of suet for the birds, all with the pepper that bears and squirrels are supposed to hate. 

 

February 7, 2022

“You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”: The Talmud, quoted on Facebook. 

 

February 6, 2022

Bright, cold day. Vivid woodpeckers at the suit towers. 

Great strides in the revision of Diving into the Moon, based largely on being able to let go of items part of the original story but not, it turns out, part of the REAL story.

Found that Wyona is discussed on Good Reads, favorably enough to satisfy even me. The person who liked it least wanted more gay sex. I’d assumed no one had read it or discussed it anywhere in the world. This is a cold day’s unexpected sweetness. It seems to have won a Rubery Book Award, whatever that is. I probably need to hire a clipping agency. 

 

February 5, 2022

Bright, cold, the titmice greedily at the new suet. 

Three social occasions yesterday, breaking all records during the Pandemic. Met K for lunch, when we talked about the fate of theater and the arts and the Magnetic in particular. She thanked me for being more useful to the theater than most of its Board. Her energy is to me all but unendurable. I had that at one time. I’m not sure it profited me much.

Visit to D, who gave me a sweet oil study of Beaver Dam in thanks for my gift of pastels. She filled me in on her life– most of the information unknown to me before– in the space of half an hour. One certain difference between men and women is that women can talk at rates a man can barely comprehend. She remembered kindnesses from me which I myself did not remember. I suppose that’s the way it should go. 

Met A at Zillicoah Brewery, which can practically be walked to from here in time of need. I wonder if he could feel the waves of fatherly love beating against his brow? A is forthright, ebullient, and confiding, and I think we caught up on his comparatively turbulent life. He’s gathering materials to write a one-man-show about his uncle, Phillip Cyr, who was a Peace Corps teacher in Nepal, later murdered there by treacherous guides. He led me back when I went astray trying to find my car in the dark. 

Images

 

February 3, 2022

My two-or-three-times-yearly trek out for a restaurant breakfast. Exceedingly good this time, the hash browns ambrosia. 

Music from the court of Charles V on CD. 

Great storms continue to pass just to the west of us. The Angel on Bayona’s Mount with his sword extended, thou shalt not–

Found a thumb drive I had been looking for on and off for ten years. L had put on it all the photos from our childhood. Found it to today. For me, a treasure surpassing rubies. I looked at images of me in infancy with special tenderness. I have not wandered that far. I did not stray very long. It was well, always, if I but knew it. So many images make me weep I must take them slowly. 

Brigid of Kildare

 

February 2, 2022

A movie version of The Green Knight with DJ and RT last night. Largely beautiful, sometimes odd, finally wilful. Artists are misled when convinced that their own intention is sovereign. 

Delivery Chinese gave me a monumental flux, which made 3:30 AM an interesting time. Ended up laundering a giant comforter. The spin cycle did not work right, and I had to drag the sopping thing to the porch to let it drip dry enough to slop into the dryer. But the temperature sat below freezing, so there I am wringing the thing out by hand before it froze, my clothes wet, my hands numb. It’s in its second go-round in the dryer. Homage to Saint Brigid, the patron of days that start bad and end up better. 

 

February 1, 2022

In one of my dreams I was a female Olympic champion in something that was like bobsledding, only you jump out at the last second and the sled goes slamming into a wall. My score was so great that people challenged me to do it again, and I was faced with the dilemma of backing out or confessing that I had mated with and allowed an angel to possess me in order to get the win. I was prepared to point out that this was NOT, specifically, against the rules. . . . Another dream, though dim now, was also of mating with angels. Some thread was clearly playing out. . . .

 

January 31, 2022

Golden morning, the trees around the apartments fluttering with bluebirds. 

My friend H– possibly a former student; one loses track–writes on Facebook: In my own experience, when I was working as a ghostwriter and doing copy, the people who did become successful (like mainstream, household name successful) had terrible writing. I mean, appalling, if you grew up reading classic literature and being taught to write by old school "school marms" - but you couldn't clean it up too much, because it had to have this particular style that was indicative of what mainstream publishing wanted. To me, that was questionably bad writing, but it was accessible to the Joe Blow and Karen Book Club Next Door Reader. At least people were reading. The "writers" who'd get the biggest book deals were celebrities and politicians not writing their own material. I was a nameless, faceless person, hidden behind a NDA, writing people's books for them. The writers who were extremely talented and had outstanding, raw original material were having to publish online and hopefully build their own readership enough to eventually gain notice of a university press. If they were lucky. Those years were ethically tough for me. It was painful to see books I wrote, or partially wrote, in print. Where I only made a few hundred bucks at the time and was dealing with housing and food instability, Joe Deep Pockets was being called an "author" and lauded for his work. I haven't written anything in probably 6 or 7 years. I fucking hate the publishing industry with a passion now.

She can have no inkling of what this testimony means to me. It is horrible, of course, but it means that I am not alone. I am not singled out. It is what I needed to hear in order to go on.

 

January 30, 2022

Battled my way through the cold to make announcements at th 9 AM service. The room was almost empty. It was awkward blasting my way through the hymns in an echo-y space which, but for me, was nearly silent. 

Considering why it is I watch video after video on You Tube–Karens, bad cops-- which I know will infuriate me.