Storm

 

July 29, 2023

Woke with one of the rarest things in my life– a headache. Massaging various places seems to have gotten rid of it. 

Heat. Rabbits crowd into the maple shade, nibbling whatever they can reach from there. 

Turkeys are daily visitors, a growing flock, now with three adults and more chicks than I’m able to count. 

Almost impossible not to sleep.

Crisis in Biltmore. It’s almost preferable to be challenged where one has no resources at all, as crises tend to slide into the bailiwicks of those who actually know what to do. Sometimes I’m that person; sometimes I’m not. As this unfolded, a sudden storm arose. Came home to find a significant flock of turkeys sheltering behind my shed.

Not invited to W’s wedding. I cringe a little as the photos appear on Facebook. I try to remind myself that, all in all, I mostly would rather stay home. Maybe not this time, but–

 

July 28, 2023

Second of four rehearsals for the one-act festival. K was out for bronchitis, so the others are ahead of us. O and I struggled through. I have most of my lines– all of them if I trusted myself. Comfortable on the stage again. K says I was “always entertaining.” Determined to take that as praise. The two plays I’ve read beside ours are dreadful. K says no one-act festival (by which she means 10 minute play festival) next year. Selection of plays by committee is generally a bad idea. Her good news is that someone has bought the building who is friendly to the arts, and to the theater specifically, with plans for improvement. It’s well somebody catches a break. 

Heat wave continues. I water the garden once an evening, to keep it alive. My two fans and open back door (despite the bears) seem to keep me cool enough. That the Earth will become Venus seems, on certain days, plausible. All that striving and struggle for nothing. 

Gallons of bitter iced tea. 

Finished a big, big painting. 

 

July 26, 2023

Finished The Lexington Tract almost exactly on the stroke of noon.

Writing by the river. 

 July 25, 2023

Mother’s birthday, one year short of a century. I post her photo on Face Book and some people think she’s still alive. I do not correct them. 

Watered the thirsting garden.

Spend time at the Toyota dealership, getting inspected and tuned up to drive for another year. I cannot make the coffee machine work. The process takes half the time I expected it to. The night flies by with extravagant dreams. 

 

July 24, 2023

Went to the river to write. Did so. Many dogs were abroad, and when I sat down, a cream colored Husky/German shepherd mix named Pancho turned from what he was doing and ran straight for me. The look on his face was such gleeful mischief that I had to laugh even as he launched through the air toward me. A second later he was on the picnic table, scattering my phone and books, and taking my nose full in his mouth. I suppose that was his idiom. His master was upset until he saw that I didn’t care. 

 

July 23, 2023

J and I motored down to the Peace Center in Greenville yesterday to see the musical Six, in which the six wives of Henry VIII vie to win a contest as to which of them suffered most. It had nothing to recommend it but the energetic dedication of the young women playing the parts. The music was loud, inane, repetitious, the script nothing more than the outline of an unwritten play set to music, as if time or imagination had at the outset run out. Worthless and expensive. The money spent on that useless production could have fueled every theater in Asheville for two years. Impromptu supper with the usual suspects once we got back into town. We sat outside, relishing the cool evening breezes. 

Raccoons chittering under my window last night. 

Return to church after many weeks. Canon A gave an uninspired sermon, quoting Taylor Swift. Did not sit in choir. People around me remarked what a beautiful voice I had. Secretly, I must have hoped for that. 

 

July 21, 2023

Turbulent vestry meeting. I have lived a life dedicated to avoiding situations about which I can do nothing, so when they arise anyway, I am unarmed. 

S phoned from DC, his young voice breaking whatever gloom I was in. Senators and Supreme Court justices eat at his restaurant. 

Catbirds

July 20, 2023

P bought Catbirds for less than half of what I anticipated selling it for, but all is well. One cultivates patrons who are also ancient friends, whose now-dead husband one owes more than one could possibly repay. We walked about while I named the flowers in the garden with which she was unfamiliar. At Phil Mechanic I paid $500 a month and seldom in a year sold as much as I have working from my attic free. One’s situation never suits the imagination, but reason, upon taking thought, is satisfied.

 

 July 19, 2023

Morning spent with C, lingering over coffee in Arden, catching up on the year of our parting. I learned much about what’s happening in the Asheville theater scene from one now living in Los Angeles. I never know any gossip. It shouldn’t be so hard for an artist to make a living. He nears 40 and still has no security. I feel almost compromised that I took on the security of Academia, though that wasn’t a fall-back, but rather a vocation. 

Left Maud’s uneaten cat food out for the raccoons last night, taking the bag to the far end of the garden under the bamboo, so they could have the food without necessarily associating it with me. 

Native hibiscus in Sauron-eye bloom. 

Peaches

 

July 18, 2023

The delivery guy brought a box of roses yesterday, so I rose up early to prepare a place for them and plant them. Done before 10:30, and it is not yet near the heat of the day. 

Director being ill, rehearsal cancelled for tonight. I have the delight of a child at cancellations. 

The bears are already at my unripe peaches. I hope they set their teeth on edge. 

Dominion Energy guy bitched that my raspberries had overgrown the gas meter and he couldn’t check it for leaks. So I cleared stalky thorns in the blaze of the day. I thought of saying “No, I won’t do it” to see what happened. 

 

July 17, 2023

Morningstar Report: Year to date market return is 15.56; my personal return is 19.93.  Goes on to say that since purchase my return has been 28.62; Market return: 10.36. Good enough for someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Lunch with SS: lamentations about the state of theater & civilization. Bigger Reuben sandwich than anyone on this planet needs. 

 

July 16, 2023

CD phones to praise The Falls of the Wyona. He said it gives one a unique sense of the peril and the glory of the wild. 

Revising, revising. 

Toast

 

July 15, 2023

Still and hot, like the inside of an oven, except also dully bright with hazy sun. The evening primrose I planted over Maud’s grave shot up belatedly and is in bloom. Evening primrose seemed right for her, somehow. Single giant Mexican sunflowers dominate both the front and the back gardens. I didn’t plant them this year, so they are re-seeds from days gone by.

Finished by far my biggest work in egg tempera. A painting can be done in one day because you don’t have to wait so long for drying. 

Longing for toast for my sandwich, remembered making toast at Boy Scout camp by frying bread in a skillet. Did so again after sixty years. Ambrosia. 

It’s been trying to rain all day. 

 

July 14, 2023

First rehearsal last night. My co-star is Hawaiian. I felt weirdly awkward on stage, not knowing what to do with my feet. It’s been a long time. 

Attended R’s opening in the little gallery downtown. His art is awful, though no one (least of all me) seems to mention that to him, probably because he is so beautiful himself. All these pictures are about Jesus; hence the church: mysterious footprints on the sand, prophetic writing in the sky, physics-defying rainbows, all with the innocent exuberance of a fifth grader.

 

July 13, 2023

Studied lines and wrote by the river, at the park pullover. A redneck kid caught a big water snake on the end of a stick, tormented his girlfriend with it for a while, then eased it back into the river.  Pairs of anhingas flew north upstream, but never seemed to come back.

I parked in one of the riverside pullovers and watched a homeless man climb up from the river bank and begin going through the trash can. I got out to give him money. He said to me “I’m just recycling.” He was reluctant to take the money and keep looking about to see if we were being observed. “We could get into trouble,” he said, finally taking the money. The law has apparently been coming down hard on panhandlers, though that’s not what he was doing. 

As I watered the garden, arching the stream over the beebalms, a hummingbird flew close and hovered, stabbing the flying droplets for a drink. I tried to hold the stream steady for her. 

Raspberries

 

July 12, 2023

Writing, by the river and then in my hot-box loft. Painting some when I realized I had not given my catbirds feet. Watering the peeked plants, then foolish gardening just after the heat of the day, itchy and covered in sweat. Ate raspberries off my volunteer raspberry vines. They were hot and sweet in the sunlight, like they just came out of the oven.

Brie and Ritz crackers

 

July 11, 2023

The Mark Taper Forum closes, the news announcer foretelling the death of “original” theater. Broadway is a Disney ride. New plays have roughly the same market as pamphlets on quantum physics. And I dedicated the middle of my productive years to writing play after play, the quality of which turns out to be, for the most part, irrelevant. S soldiers on brilliantly, gallantly, agonizingly; M soldiers on wearing motley and playing kazoos (yet soldiers on; that’s the main thing) but there are fifty new plays for every production slot. I might as well have become a priest of Isis if I so aspired to irrelevancy. Many venues that accept new work want new plays that have the same effect on audiences as the old ones. Or they solve the problem of selection by cleaving to the latest social issue: thus the dozen recent calls for Trans plays or plays by people “identifying” as thus and so. If only I were Polynesian or mixed race. . . Offerings at M have been, by and large, preposterous, but you can’t complain, because they are, at least, new. Should bad plays get an airing? The argument is “how else do they get good?” but in the meantime, a fraction of the disappointed and already tiny audience is sheared away. I’ve never been associated with a large and prospering company for more than a single production at a time, so I only guess how matters proceed day by day. This was a fault. I should have paid more, or different, dues. I remember distinctly the moment I chose not to be a Theater Major. All was grubby and chaotic in the theater at college. For every person doing his best there were four there to smoke weed and get drunk after rehearsal. Nobody cared about the script, in any case. My university was by levels of magnitude worse, a hive of dilettantes and ever-fearful mediocrities seeking, for the most part, to avoid blame. Not the students, who were charming: the faculty. When I sought collaboration, they looked for every motivation I might have except the making of new, sturdy theater, and turned and hid in their holes. Black Swan was a success artistically and not a failure financially, but we started anew each time, and it was not the best use of my energy even when I had more of it.  Why did I not go to New York and dive in? The easy answer is “I didn’t want to.” I thought that in some grand division of labor writing the play would be enough. I didn’t recognize that in every endeavor I attempted– poetry, fiction, theater, painting-- salesmanship is equal to craftsmanship. I don’t resent this; I just didn’t discover it in time. Why didn’t I go to New York? I wanted a garden. Flip, but true. In the time left I need to travel more, see more. Perspective gets hemmed in by these mountains. When I imagine the billion dollars falling from heaven with which I build my ideal theater, I, now, run up against the question of limited energy. Maybe when I was 30 it would have been OK, but the idea of hiring the right people and separating warring factions and hammering out schedules and making sure everybody’s creativity is honored and arguing that aesthetics are Platonic realities, daunts even an imaginary situation. Did I have fun writing these works? Yes. Is that enough? I’ll know at the end. 

Learning lines for my August appearance at M. As I depend on actors to play my parts, I must return the favor. I wonder if Yeats ever appeared on stage in a role? I don’t actually miss the stage, but neither am I dreading the next round of it. The play is not inept. Clever, actually, though you wonder if all the “I mean”’s and “like”s are an effort at contemporary speech patterns or solecism. Of course this is a festival of 10 minute pieces, the form which has all but swept other modes of theatrical expression away. 

Sent in my check for the banquet at our 55th high school reunion. Our ranks diminish. We will have to wear name tags to recognize one another’s ravaged visages. 

Discovered that I can work all day at the computer if I put sunglasses over my glasses to cut the glare. There must be a screen dimmer, but I can’t find it. 

In the larder are brie and Ritz crackers.

Foraging

 

July 10, 2023

Fed a turkey hen and her three chicks from the front porch. They left some of the kernels behind to go forage for the same thing somewhere else. 

 

July 9, 2023

Milestones: today I ate the first BLT I ever made for myself. 

Blessings: I sat for a moment on the front porch with a cold drink in my hand. No sooner had I settled than a deer walked the full length of my drive, from west to south. He was larger than expected, and if asked his color in that instant I would have said “red,” like the iron oxide in my paint tubes. I felt I said seen a great sight, been privy to a great secret. 

Someone, I suppose a raccoon, came up on the east porch to tear open a bag of fertilizer, taste-testing it. I hope he found it loathsome. I crossed bear off the list of possible marauders because a bear would have carried it away. 

 

July 8, 2023

Heard a bear passing through my garden gate last night. I leave it open to make just such passage easy, but you have to jangle it a little if you’re not going the right way, and he wasn’t. He gave a little whuff of impatience. This led to a night of bear dreams. One featured a narrow upright range, such as you’d find in an apartment. When it appeared, it was known that a bear had killed that night, except the person it had killed would be there, reborn, and unwilling to talk about the experience. 

It’s a new world painting and writing in the same room. I analyze and critique my painting with the side of my head while I’m writing. A bad passage in painting can be redeemed by as little as smearing it out with your thumb and realizing the smear is exactly what you want. This does not happen in writing. 

Anniversary

 July 7, 2023

Forty-seven years ago today was my heart surgery in Cleveland Clinic. That makes it a birthday of sorts. What have I accomplished since then? Something broad but not long or deep, a garden but not a road. In some ways everything began on that day. In some ways I haven’t taken a step beyond it. 

Edited D’s manuscript before he sends it off to a prospective publisher. His life was more agitated than mine, with an even greater disparity between promising beginnings and uncertain outcomes. 

Catbirds are the spirit of the garden this year. Last year it was thrashers and the year before, red-shouldered hawks. 

Just finishing what people will think is my best painting yet. I’m astonished by how much luck is involved in painting; there’s none in writing. 

 

July 6, 2023

Intestinal upset the central issue of the moment, no pain, but repetitive flux. Four times last night. The pharmacy opens in an hour. 

Unspeakably tedious drive home from Atlanta. As I unlocked the front door, a wild hope seized me that Maud would be standing there ready to greet me, hollering because I’d left her. Unexpectedly melancholy homecoming therefore. Went grocery shopping and picked up what turned out to be tasteless deli item from FM. Maybe they were worse than tasteless, and that’s the root of the problem.

Fireworks

 

July 4, 2023

Independence Day.

Baroque oboe to calm me in a strange place. Slept, for me, a very long time.

Spending money like I were really on vacation.

D and D just bought 12 acres on Azure Rd in Dahlonaga. Drove out to see it. Very wild and steep. They own frontage on a beautiful river whose name I forget, where the kids and dogs swam. Cookout at Linda’s, where M announced that she is pregnant with my sister’s 6th grandchild. Too much food by levels of magnitude. I don’t know whom we were expecting. We concealed our drinks from Miriama’s mother, who is Muslim. My level of exhaustion is shocking, but I vowed to go out on the street to watch the fireworks, and so I did, over the roof of a parking garage, in light rain. I remember being little and trying to choose my favorite of the fireworks, trying to remember the glory of one to compare it to the glory of the next. I wondered what it said about me that I usually preferred the blue and silvery ones. 

Alpharetta

 

July 3, 2023

Hamilton Hotel in downtown Alpharetta, a surprisingly lively area. Drank in several local bars in the afternoon, getting on a sweet day-drunk, collapsing into bed and sleeping until now, the middle of a rainy night.  Everyone charming, the drive tedious.

Paradise

 

July 1, 2023

I don’t think painting upstairs will be possible during the summer, except at night, or with a much bigger fan than I have now. 

Roses, callas, daylilies in as many colors as they have: I have created around me a bit of paradise. I want to invite people to see, but “Come see my garden” sounds creepy.

 

June 30, 2023

Cooling rain. I woke while it was still dark, and the sound of birds was voluptuous, magical. Went back to sleep, though, and had amazing, half-waking dreams, all apparently about art. In the last of them I was having a conversation with my nephew Daniel about what he meant by “Nazi” art. He meant square-edged realism. This probably because painting was the last thing I did before going to bed, and the piece was not finished. It appeared pretty accurately in the dreams, and I tried what next steps before actually committing myself to canvas.