Thanksgiving

 

November 27, 2025

Woke Thanksgiving morning to the first ever blooms upon my camellia, which sat flowerless four years amid the ailanthus. 

Trip to see DJ in the convalescent facility. He’s in good spirits, wanted me to bring him peppermint mocha from Starbuck’s. The facility was surprisingly brimming with good cheer. 

Remembering grandma’s house Thanksgivings all those years ago, when you thought nothing would ever change, when you thought you would be safe forever. The grandparents are gone, all the parents are gone except Aunt Barbara, one of the grandchildren is gone. No one, not one, was left unshattered. 

I remember dad saying that one of the consolations of old age was happy memories. I have happy memories, but I have to summon them. Those that come unsummoned recount brutalities, faux pas, awkwardness, inattention, ignorance, mortification, mean-spiritedness on my part, almost all of which were unintended, often unconscious, until later reflection. Why torment me with those now? What am I supposed to learn? In almost every case I can say that, given who I was and the experiences I had, it would not have occurred to me to do otherwise. 

 

November 26, 2025

Bright day. Schuman from the bud downstairs. 

 

November 25, 2025

Chilling back to the state of autumn. Thin rain.

Bought lights for the chaste tree, the first outdoor Christmas lights I ever had for myself, partially because until I put the pond in I never had an outdoor electric outlet. The lights in the tree make me extraordinarily happy. The one string I put up looks paltry, so I’ll hang more today. 

AVLGMC meeting cancelled last night (after I’d bought provisions) and no more ASC for a while, so I have an unwonted chunk of evenings to myself. 

Call from MAHEC to redo a blood draw. The phone call sounded urgent, and the fact that they didn’t say what was wrong filled me with the anxiety of not knowing. The doctor (he sounded handsome and concerned on the phone) left a message to call a certain number, which I did eleven times in two days without anyone picking up. Twice I was on hold for 13 minutes, at which point the phone apparatus rejects the call. The on-hold music is Classical piano and nice enough a few times through. Finally got through, and was told there was a not-all-that-concerning excess of potassium which they wanted to check on. By the doctor’s tone on the phone I assumed it was leukemia or leprosy. The Internet says among the causes are all the foods I actually eat– cabbage, vegetables and the like. Will know more in an hour. 

Brown-headed nuthatches the new majority at the feeding station. A great pileated comes twice a day. One downy sits in the same place at the same bit of seed and munches away without moving. 

Fern Hill

 November 23, 2025

Strange brownish dark over the world. Georgian music on You Tube, sad and beautiful.

Stood in for J as Scrooge at the AVLGMC rehearsal Saturday. The script, which I feared, is at the worst innocuous and at the best charming. Did not, could not stay for the full rehearsal. Enough of that is enough. Ate a pastry and made my excuses. ASC concert Saturday night was lovely, I thought, not too big, none of the music too familiar. C sang Stravinsky’s “In Memory of Dylan Thomas” to perfection, which is not easy to do, given it’s made of tone rows and there are no reference points, no way one note helps you onto the next. Twelve-tone music is an unexpectedly good vehicle for poetry, as you concentrate on the words, having no melody by which to be seduced. In this it makes an odd alliance with Baroque opera, which is the last time text was actually at the fore. I think my pre-show Dylan Thomas lecture went well. It sounded right in my ears– but how would one tell, as there was no time after to chit-chat? The audience was quite elderly. I felt a youth again. However ancient, only one was visibly asleep.

***

David Brendan Hopes

Facing Dylan Thomas: For The Asheville Symphony Chorus Concert, Nov 22, 2025

Read Text of Over Sir John's Hill

Here the young poet Dylan Thomas– he was always young– declares the duty he takes on as a creator, a comprehensive elegy for the dead, which requires an extended and inspired celebration of the living. In the program tonight we will hear Stravinsky’s setting of Thomas most famous death poem, the villanelle Do Not Go Gentle into That Good night. Remember that you do not mourn what you have not praised, so if you say that Thomas’s poems are elegies for what is passed you would be right, and if you say they are celebrations for what is, you would be right. This is one of the great vocation poems, wherein the poet declares the great theme of his ministry. In your leisure time, please compare it with other great Vocation poems, such as Shelley’s Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” By some grace I have been given to see this miraculous thing. If the powers permit, I will deliver this miracle to the entire world. 

Were you tuned into the world of high culture in the early 1950's, you’d have witnessed an unexpected phenomenon: a scruffy poet reading to mass audiences, not quite in stadiums, but in venues larger than most fine artists could imagine, getting reviews, making headlines, fawned over by nearly hysterical fans..That these fans were largely middle aged academics renders the events all the more remarkable. 

Dylan Thomas made piles of money on his American tours– the tour organizers made more– returned home with almost none of it, and so had to return three times, sicker and more desperate each time, trying for financial success somewhere near the magnitude of the artistic one. Not all the echoes of these amazing events have died down. On my first day of graduate school I walked into the English Department office at Johns Hopkins, and asked why there was a trash can bolted to the wall. “That,” the secretary explained to me, “is the trash can into which Dylan Thomas vomited when he read on campus.” Even a secular age has its holy relics. 

A surprising percentage of the places relevant to Thomas’ childhood and youth are gone. His home town, Swansea, was an industrial port blasted to pieces during the Blitz. He was in London then, writing some of time’s greatest elegies for the dead in war, including “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a child in London,” which ends with the lines like the tolling of a golden bell: 

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,

Robed in the long friends,

The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,

Secret by the unmourning water

Of the riding Thames.

After the first death, there is no other.

Thomas’s wife Caitlin tagged along for the third American tour to keep him from too many adulterous assignations. He and she carried on a contest wherein each strove to be the sloppiest and rudest drunk. To honor her memory, one must acknowledge that Caitlin often won. Thomas died before the third tour was finished, notoriously neglected in a New York hospital emergency room where everybody thought he was just some drunk rolled in off the street. At least that was the story that honored everyone’s idea of how a poet should end in a world that does not love poets, or even understand fully what one is. It almost doesn’t matter anymore what the real story was. 

But for a few years, Dylan Thomas was a rock star. Three American tours organized by Canadian/American critic John Malcolm Brinnin brought not only his art but his bad behavior to the forefront of cultural consciousness. He was a Brit–one should say more specifically a Welshman– and in the UK he had cobbled together a life of irregular publications and commissions from the BBC, enough to keep his family fed, after a fashion. No one since Byron has gotten rich from being a poet, and Thomas’s extravagant appetites and absent organizational skills made his lot rougher than many. He was capable of holding a job, and was for a while an important contributor to the BBC’s cultural programming, retreating from time to time to his study at riverside near Swansea, his hometown, to write his poems. 

His days of yeomanly striving amid the deprivations of war-shattered Brittan tend to be forgotten, for in America, he was gold. He could be counted on to drink too much at the party, to fall on the floor and try to look up the hostess’s dress, to accept the company of culture vampires who wanted to brag that they had slept with the most famous poet in the world. Brinnin cashed in twice, not only organizing the tours, but writing a book afterward, Dylan Thomas in America, wherein the worst moments of the situation he himself created were cataloged. He was the most splendid and unalloyed example imaginable of the dissolute poet, helpless in every daily pursuit, but god-like when his mouth opened and the thunder rolled out. A Minnesota folk singer by the name of Bob Zimmerman wold rename himself after him. 

Dylan Thomas grew up in Wales in a situation that can be described as half suburban, half rural. The Welsh are proud of their language, and some biographers claim Welsh was spoken in the Thomas household, though Dylan himself never claimed to use it or understand it. But there’s something in the culture that honors the male voice– think of the famous Welsh male choirs, and of Thomas’ younger contemporary, Richard Burton. Voice would become the center of the Dylan Thomas mystique, and for every reader who appreciated his words on the page, there would be 20 seduced by his voice. So thorough was that seduction that some critics claimed Thomas had not much to say at all, only an unmatched way of saying it. They were wrong. 

When he was reading his own poems, very few people had any idea what he was talking about. Nor were they inclined to worry about that, for his famous voice, resonant, god-like, incantatory, encouraged admiration more than comprehension. It was like a Latin Mass or listening to the chanting of Tibetan monks on the Internet. 

But, now that the time of notoriety is passed– many of my colleagues in the Symphony Chorus murmured “Who’s Dylan Thomas?” when the music was handed out– the time is ripe for evaluation, for a second hearing aside from the enthusiasm of fame. This calmer audition reveals a poet of lasting greatness, and one who is easier to comprehend than one supposes. Here are a few pointers for getting at the meaning of a Dylan Thomas poem, among the greatest of which is tonight’s “Fern Hill.” 

“Fern Hill,” by the way, is a farm in Wales owned by his Aunt Ann Jones, where Thomas spent a number of years in the 1920's. When Thomas lived there it possessed a large apple orchard, which accounts for some of the imagery in the poem. One may think of it as a remenbered Eden.

Speaking about Dylan Thomas to an audience with a particular interest in music is advantageous, because one way to grasp his intention is to think of him in musical terms. The first tip to full comprehension is to read “Fern Hill,” or any other Thomas poem, aloud. This is a secret to conquering all poems in the Western tradition. As a poet myself I know that a poem is written for the ear, and best communicates to the ear. Think of that old hymn “Humbly I Adore Thee,” which says “taste and touch and vision to discern thee fail. Faith that comes through hearing pierces through the veil.”

The normal expectation for a poem in English is that it will hover in the neighborhood of iambic pentameter. Do NOT go GENtle into THAT goodNIGHT. The FORCE that THROUGH the GREEN fuse DRIVES the Flower, but Fern Hill whacks us with a intake-of-breath anapest (now as I) followed by an alternation –or perhaps an experimental uncertainty–of meters, before crashing into a cluster of thunderous trochees.

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

     The night above the dingle starry,

          Time let me hail and climb

I promise this will be the one and only mention of prosody, and I do so only to suggest that Thomas alters his meter, his time signatures, exactly the way a composer does, for variety and strangeness and lyricism far afield from the drumbeat of certainty. Fern Hill never rests very long in iambic pentameter. It is never in C major and 4/4 time. Not Mendelssohn but Bartok. Actually, when I think of the closest parallel in music to Thomas’s achievement in “Fern Hill” I arrive at Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Insofar as either of them is “about” anything, they are about the same thing. 

Now that we’ve broached the subject of “meaning,” what is it? First of all, believe that it takes no special apparatus to get at the message of even a poet as idiosyncratic as Thomas. It’s all there on the page. There is no such thing “hidden” meaning in poetry. The “hidden meaning” of a poem is like that part of the iceberg that is underwater and therefore invisible, but the ice above will tell you almost all you need to know about the ice below. 

Poetry–next to music, I suppose–is the most compact and efficient way of delivering emotional information. If poems seem difficult, it is because they have skipped from A to W, trusting you to fill in the spaces in between, or to recognize that the spaces in between are interesting to a scholar but irrelevant to the reader. When a poem says “My love is like a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June,” you probably can EXPLAIN what that means, but the explanation takes many times longer than the original image, and is not as much fun. 

When people refer to the “meaning” of a poem, they often mean a paraphrase, a parallel construction usually presented with the phrase, “Well, what he meant to say was–” attached to the front. Do remember that the poems we cherish present not meaning but experience. 

When Yeats writes “Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”

What he really means is “Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”

It is not about paraphrase. It is about experience. If the experience could have been related any other way, it would have been.

The paraphrase of “Fern Hill” is “Wasn’t it lovely being young? “ We recognize that sentence is continents away from the experience of the poem. 

Imagine that you’re hiking. You stop on a hilltop and look around. Tell me the meaning of what you see. It sounds stupid in that context, but it’s almost as stupid when applied to poetry, at least poetry on the level of Dylan Thomas. You see birds and clouds, but unless the seeing of birds and clouds is illuminated by some radiant image, the real experience fails to convey. I worked through college as a Parks Naturalist, so I see an additional level of specificity– mountain ash and pileated woodpecker and basidiomycetes. Any better? Some, maybe, but still the quality of the experience escapes unrevealed. Poetry’s power is to present without explanation, to enlighten without doctrine. When somebody says, “Gee, didn’t we have good times as kids,” you’re invited to fill in the blanks with your own experience. When Thomas writes, 

Time let me play and be

     Golden in the mercy of his means,

And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

          And the sabbath rang slowly

     In the pebbles of the holy streams.

You’re presented with a vision that guides, enlarges, and transforms your own. You saw it for yourself without realizing its richness, its sadness, its eternity. If you never saw such a thing for yourself, it is a free gift, a donation of a corner of the world that otherwise would have been dark to you. 

 Imagine for a moment that you are in Plato’s cave, peering into the dark at what you suppose is reality. Artists helps you to understand and reconcile with what you see. The greatest artists take you by the shoulders, turn you around and march you toward the true light. 

Thomas’ poetry has its own music, which makes it less easy than certain others for a composer to set to music.  Two mighty strains must reconcile. Corigliano and Thomas must find a way to co-exists, to speak at the same time and still be understood. Though TS Eliot was the poet of his time the least like Thomas in any way, they both came to a point where they believed poetry must somehow emulate, or at least suggest, the movement of music. We see this in Eliot’s Four Quartets, which even has a musical title. We see this in the poems which I believe are Dylan Thomas’s greatest– Fern Hill, Over Sir John’s Hill, In the White Giant’s Thigh, In Country Sleep, whose sprawling, inclusive, impassioned, un-paraphrasable energy comes as close as words can to the symphonic. Let me again evoke Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, I wish I could get Disney’s nymphs and satyrs out of my head, as I wish I could get out the image of the waste can on the office wall. Let me substitute an image of Beethoven and Thomas in Paradise, Thomas intoning into Beethoven’s deaf ears, and Beethoven understanding every word

In a few minutes we’ll will hear Corigliano’s music dancing with Dylan Thomas’s. I think you might want to hear Thomas in its purity beforehand, so you can tell what has happened and why

Read Text of “Fern Hill.”

 November 21, 2025

Checked my portfolio. Down $71000. I blame Trump. 

Ghostly spider triggering the security camera in the eaves. 

Exhausting rehearsal last night, learning choreography, enduring the director’s repetitious tics and errors, which she goes through night after night as though reading from a check sheet. Still, our numbers grow. Ultimately, failure, success, and just squeaking by are equally inexplicable. 

 November 19, 2025

Check-up at MAHEC, Dr looking older to me as I must to her.  Feel better day-to-day than I have for many years.

Madame red-tail perched in the black walnut at the edge of my garden, preening and watching for a long time. 

Feeling rushed and low on time, though when I consider that actual situation I can’t place where the urgency comes from. 

Feeders

 

November 18, 2025. 

Mighty throng at the feeders this morning. At one point there was a pileated woodpecker in one tree and a flicker in another. 

Toddled about cleaning up the yard, making it spruce and orderly for winter. 

Stood in the kitchen at sunset watching two bears cross Lakeshore and cavort for a while on the apartment lawn. Returning from rehearsal, I had to make a panic stop on Kimberly to avoid hitting a bear that chose that instant to cross the street. Maybe all this activity is to get enough calories to sleep for a while, though nobody seems to be going to bed.

 

November 16, 2025

During the sermon this morning I had an extended revery of decorating my Christmas tree, quite specific about the placement of each remembered bauble. 

Bob

 

November 15, 2025

What have I been doing instead of recording here? 

Visited DJ yesterday, measurably better than he was the last time I saw him. On the road to recovery.

Last night startled a quite black opossum on the east porch. 

Preparing my Dylan Thomas lecture for the ASC concert. This is an echo of the best that happened when I was a professor, real research and real revelation to people who are really interested.

Yard work today. Raking, thorough cleaning of the pond pump well, the stream now like a forest brook. 

Two big garbage bags of shirts and two boxes of books off to Goodwill. 

L tells me of a man named Bob who was the love of our mother’s life, who returned from WWII only to be killed in a tornado. I knew assumed she’d had boyfriends in her youth, but had no idea of anything of this specificity. L showed me a piece of beautiful brocade Bob sent to mom from some exotic place where he had been stationed. It had been kept in a box, with other keepsakes for more than 60 years, until dad gave the keepsake box to my sister. I wondered if he ever opened it. I wonder why people never tell me their secrets. Maybe they don’t think I’m interested. Maybe they’re afraid I’ll turn them into a story. 

 November 11, 2025

I’d been lamenting how my balance is compromised and my legs don’t work right, when, scrolling through the Internet, I discovered videos generally titled, “Restoring Balance for Seniors.” A query asked and answered. I’ve sampled the suggested exercises and feel better already, though, because of the extreme cold, I haven’t put my gait to the test in the open. I should have thought of exercise, but did not. 

Yesterday’s snow stuck, and is not likely to melt today. AVLGMC planning session cancelled in a moment of swirling inclemency.

Theater

 

November 10, 2025

Rameau on You Tube. 

Snow this morning on the momentarily resurgent calla lilies. 

Saturday afternoon spent in the woods on the other side of the river, celebrating the demise of The Magnetic Theatre and the arising into its place of Phantom Lantern, one of those thing one dreads but which turns out to be sweet and memorable. Read a monolog from In the Assassins’ Garden. Met a donkey named Nadine, whose voice carried marvelously over the landscape. Two members of the band told me their life stories, as easily and fluidly as if I’d been summoned there for that purpose. Promised to read D’s play about some adventure his mother had. 

 November 7, 2025

Tapping of tiny claws on the roof above my head. 

Have been asked to do an enrichment presentation on Dylan Tomas before the concert where we sing Corigliano’s “Fern Hill..” 

Visited DJ at his nursing facility. Found it fairly depressing. What to do to shorten the time? He’s still in pain. You’d think a hospital could at least manage pain. It felt insolent to be able to come and go. 

I’d ordered gummies, trying to find some that were not clearly placebos, as those bought at local shops seem to have been. They arrived Tuesday, and– my having experienced them as little more than placebos– I swallowed one down. It was a powerful and prolonged experience, but not a good one. I was stoned for a full day, and not all the effects were gone even last night. I literally could not walk. I handed myself into bed by grasping onto bits of furniture. Once in bed, I could not move except after long planning and sharp effort. Sleep was a flash flood of vivid, sometimes beautiful but often disappointingly silly images. Consciousness dived so deep I kept struggling out of it, supposing that what I was experiencing was how you die. I was truly and uncharacteristically frightened. I kept praying to survive the night because I had to take J and L to the airport in the morning. I did survive the night and did take them to the airport– without mentioning my condition, which was in full force yet and might rightfully have frightened them. That afternoon’s still a blur, rehearsal a blur, home a blur. I finally slept it off. Never did that to myself as a kid. To me it was not a pleasant or enriching experience. I kept murmuring “unfair,” because I’m old and all that should be past that and I hadn’t intended it. There should be limits on the penalty for mistakes. 

Exhaustion that I’m blaming on the gummy. 

 November 2, 2025

Brunch with D and H at the Crown Plaza. Recollections of adventures past, planning for adventures future. It’s funny the things people remember about you that you may not even have noticed, sayings of yours that they latch onto with any memory of it on your part. They remembered walking in on me in a café in Buda, just sitting at my table writing, carefree, as though I had lived there all my life. They remembered me turning to them when the first bit of music for The Birth of Color was performed, saying, “I didn’t know it was going to be good.

Lauridsen Lux Aeterna at First Baptist for All Saints. I think we did well. I was in iffy voice, but made no actual mistakes. I’m the only bass with the very high notes and the only bass with the very low notes, even when the voice is iffy. Bright moon in the parking lot. 

Discouraged to discover I’d lost my driver’s license. I never lose anything, so I gnashed my teeth at the unfairness of it all. As I was singing I had a clear image of the coat I had warn earlier in the day, and when I checked later, there the license was, having fallen out of my wallet. Take deep breath. Clear your mind, and the world will answer. 

 November 1, 2025

When I first looked out my front door Halloween morning, all was as it had been the night before. An hour later, when I went to greet the de-humidifier man, one pumpkin was hurled onto the lawn and another eaten completely out, cap bitten off, pulp gone from rind to rind. Security cameras revealed a bear come onto the porch, reconnoiter standing on his back legs, then dig into the pumpkins. All that vegetable slaughter within two feet of my front door, in broad daylight. 

Though I sat on the porch with the light on, not one trick-or-treater. 

Last night I again came under attack. I heard bears wrestling with the trash can, ramming into the fence between the gardens, growling, scratching at the space under my bedroom window. I ran into the kitchen and turned on the outside lights to frighten them away. I beat on windows and hollered. Twice later I woke, sure they were at it again. Morning revealed that this all was my imagination. The trash was untipped, the surviving pumpkins unmolested, no sign of great animals marauding in the night. Very curious. Had I heard something I misidentified? Had I heard nothing at all?

Dress rehearsal at First Baptist. I was in bad voice until my throat cleared half way through. Snuck my purchased-by-mistake carton full of potato chips into the First Baptist kitchen. 

 

October 30, 2025

AS rehearsal last night, at which I did poorly. Bitter rain. A’s birthday gathering afterward at the Barrel House, which must be astonished to see the likes of us. 

As of yesterday a giant white calla was blooming on the west side of the house, a white iris re-blooming against the driveway. The roses hold.

DJ not needing surgery, beginning the long road back to his former condition. I write “long road” out of ignorance, acknowledging that there is mercy in the world and it could be a very short road. Dreamed last night of trying to visit him in the hospital but being crowded out by swarms of teenage girls, who were enthusiastic fans of his.  I gathered he had a life as a rock star of which I had known nothing. 

 October 28, 2025

DJ left fasting and thirsty in his hospital bed for a day because the doctor did not bother to appear and decide for or against surgery. Surgery finally, today. deemed unnecessary, physical therapy begins. 

Part of the morning spent getting the car readied for the next few months. Waiting room enlivened by a two year old with endless energy. No button was left unpushed, not chair left unscooted loudly across the floor. His grandma was heroic. 

Hurricane with winds the speed of a tornado’s hits Jamaica. Indra in fury. Where will anybody hide? Pictures of dogs on the abandoned streets of Kingston, waiting. 

Sat at the computer screen this morning sobbing, over– God remembers what. But I felt better afterward, clearly needing a release even as unfocused as that. 

 

October 26, 2025

Odd weight on me in recent days, some dissatisfaction that I have tried and failed to connect with some real circumstance. Nothing dire, just a little background noise of unease.  

Car blazed through my driveway at 1 AM. Security cameras didn’t record it. Maybe it was a ghost. 

Dean S has started to use “She” as God’s pronoun. I startle every time, but can find no objective objection. It’s all emotion. But my reaction does shed light on the reaction of others to new things. They are more honest than I, following their emotions to faithful end, not letting them get muddled by second thoughts.

DJ in the hospital with a broken sacrum.

I have set aside most of my power in deference to others. 

 October 24, 2025

Days of radiant blue skies, edged at evening with white and gray almost stationary clouds. Rehearsals, where I fought off phlegm that is apparently going to be the bane of every winter. S had us say long pure vowels for a long time last night, after having noted how little time we have. She is one who imagines that a wry obsession is a crusade, and there’s no hope of reasoning her out of it. But, you hear the minutes ticking away. . . 

Good writing at the riverbank yesterday morning, then a stroll through the reviving River Arts District, renewing old acquaintance. Most of the work there is quite bad. I think the good artists had to retreat from corporate properties, and can be found, if one looks, somewhere else. 

All bulbs presently in my possession are in the ground. 

Bears

 October 19, 2025

Roused from the couch last night by terrible noise out back, like somebody dismantling the tool shed, Two adult bears haunted the yard. One was wrestling with the garbage can and its bear-proof lid. The lid won, but I wonder if it would have had I not interrupted. One of the bears fled as soon as I appeared, but the other took his time, walking back into the garden, then changing his mind and walking toward me again. He passed peacefully between the car and me and out toward Lakeshore, but I watched his brown eye in the flashlight glare, wondering if he wanted to attack, flee, or was merely going peacefully on his intended way after an insignificant interruption.. 

 October 18, 2025

Infuriating rehearsal last night. Constant stopping of the music to correct diction errors which had not been made. 

Excellent gardening, planting daffodil and hyacinth, digging, weeding, mulching. Bulbs that must yet be interred shrink to a single box, unless I’ve ordered something I don’t remember. 

The School of Night

 

October 16, 2025

Finished, for the moment, The School of Night. Finished it twice ,in fact. The first ending worried me for hours before I went back, deleted it, wrote another ending not like the first at all. It’d easy to imagine that an outside power reads and critiques one’s work, then sends one back to the keyboard, because that’s how it feels. Whom was I pleasing when I changed the end? Wasn’t I content with the first? Who wasn’t? And why did he prevail? 

 

October 15, 2025

The man next to me at rehearsal last night said he was just getting over COVID. Great. 

 

October 13, 2025

Almost tomorrow. When I turn the heater on upstairs, the smell of cat urine wafts from the rug. This fills me with sorrow, missing Maud, who loved the study and, understandably, couldn’t be bothered to go downstairs and use the litterbox. 

Final performance of Washington Place yesterday afternoon. However many times I’ve seen it, I never wept in the last scene. I did yesterday, uncontrollably, shaking in my chair– though it was the least well done that it has ever been.  My nerves have been building toward a good cry: that was perhaps a prelude. This run has been extraordinary: full houses every night but opening, friends of mine not theater people attending, remarks from the crowd of unexpected admiration. An usher reports that as he was helping an old lady down the steps, she said, “I lived forty years in New York and saw a million shows. This was better than all of them.” The actresses said it was “poetic” and “inspiring.” Two people said it was “profound.” J said I am “a gift to the community.” One longs for such comments, then pretends they don’t mean anything. One doesn’t know how to react. I got tongue-tied in the talk-back and sounded like an idiot. Perhaps this will add to my mystique. 

Randomly came across a recording of Cantata 140 on You Tube. Such perfection! Why did I weep? The beauty of it, perhaps, or perhaps realizing I am one of the wise virgins keeping their lamps trimmed through the long night, awaiting the bridegroom. 

Went to Morris’ Funeral Home and talked with a funereal young man about my burial arrangements. J his name was, reporting that his secretary said I was “cheerful” on the phone. He handed me a giant folder full of information I must master before making decisions. It would have been easier to have died and left it to somebody else. The money I pay for the services goes into an insurance account. I asked, “So if I don’t die, I get all the money back?” He didn’t know whether to laugh. The firm had done Billy Graham’s service, and there huge photos of that on the wall, including Donald Trump, who was at the funeral. J said, “We are proud of these photos, though we know some of the images in them may be divisive.” 

Lunch with SS. I’m almost hopeless at practical planning. In any controversy I tend to forget the worst parts over time, which infuriates those who remember them. I forget who my enemies are, which may have the unexpected by-product of bewildering them. 

GMC planning meeting here. I was dark and combative. I’m fighting against the birth of a new world. It’s not better than the old world–worse, in several ways– but it is new and must have its day. Savage condemnation of anyone who does not honor the specification of pronouns and the desire of a person to be referred to as “they,” regardless of the knots in meaning that causes. Vehement dogmatism is always a testimony of doubt. Enlightened people do not recognize, often, where their enlightenment ends and something begins which in anybody else they would call bigotry.

Agitated and wary. When I search my mind for reasons, I come up with nothing. Maybe it’s just the general specter of the world in these latter days. 

Winter seeds and feeding stations set out. 

 October 11, 2025

All-day rehearsal retreat with AVLGMC. Good work, I think. The touchy-feely parts were considerably less mortifying than one expected. My partner for the sensitivity moment, or whatever it was, was supposed to tell me something about myself I might not know others know. He said, “You think people don’t know you’re a fucking genius because you never talk about it.” I’m sitting beside T now, my absurd infatuation. My infatuation may be absurd, but he is not.

Weary to the bone. 

 October 10, 2025

Blazing blue day. Enlarged the back garden to include a Cherokee rose and a couple of lines of crocus. The rose fought me, and my arm is red with thorn wounds. 

GMC last night, turbulent but useful. Good fellowship, as it had not been in quite a while. New blood, new energy. I’m an old limb on that tree, but not quite withered. 

Dragonfly

 

October 9, 2025

Moon, rising late and late-enduring, colored the west just as dawn colored the east. 

Planted narcissus and crocus yesterday– some of what lies waiting to be planted. Managed to fix the pond pump, an issue that has surprising effect on my state of mind. The solution came– I swear– in a dream, in which I was cleaning things at an archaeological site with the garden hose. Trundled out and fired the hose into the pump pit, and at one point dislodged a wad of vegetation from what I take to be the intake pipe. Rejoiced. Assured the fish that they soon would be able to breathe. Sat down to watch the water flow, ended up watching a dragonfly for most of half an hour. She swooped and hovered, laying eggs, I thought, but she dipped her tail in the water only once or twice, spent the rest of the time hovering, as though she were going on a journey and wanted to remember every detail of her home. 

Security camera picks up Bart the cat sunning on the porch. 

Watched an interview made with Jane Goodall in anticipation of her death. She relived her life and her scientific observations. She was like a creature from another world, calm, direct, humane, not one observation dogmatic, every detail draw from close and verified observation. We could have lost the entire present administration and kept her. 

T and I had coffee in the cold morning light and spent two solid hours excoriating Trump and his works.  Just like old times. 

Trip to Ferguson Auditorium on the AB Tech campus to decide how to set it up for the AVLGMC concert. I stood there thinking about other things while the boys whirled about in an excited frenzy of organization and problem-solving. How I admired their enthusiasm, their energy. I must have been like that at one point, though I don’t recall ever being much of a planner. “Just come out and sing” was a suggestion not at all tuned to the moment. 

 October 7, 2025

 Hours yesterday getting my tire fixed. Huge tow truck guy taught me how to use the inflator apparatus and towed my to the amazingly clean AAA garage downtown. Tow truck guy lives in Alexander with his wife and three little boys. He loves his job, but hated school because he only likes things that are “hands on.”  The tire had a puncture in the sidewall, so it had to be replaced rather than fixed. $250. There was no nail or debris, which strengthens my suspicion of sabotage. But, who knows? 

GMC planning meeting here last night, two hours of talk of staging and choreography and raffles and decorations. I want to stand on the risers in my tuxedo and sing Bach. That voice, except for me, is no longer heard. 

 

October 5, 2025

Downtown last night to see two of T's short plays at the BeBe. One was a masterpiece. The other was possibly a masterpiece, but one for which the actors’ needed a sharper conception to put fully across. Lines almost as gorgeous as mine. I kept checking myself to see if the splendor of his person wasn’t affecting my judgment. Anyone that good looking shouldn’t be able to write so well. Hope I’m getting past that. Took in the town, as I do mostly on those nights when I go to the theater. Lively, happy. I must seem a tottering relic alone on the streets like that. When I appear on my new security cameras my hesitant walk makes me look 1000 years old. 

In the car ready for the trek to Waynesville when I discovered a very flat tire. Turns out the 2024 Toyota Cross has no spare, and the AAA guy was unable– for liability reasons– to help me with the re-inflator apparatus. So, getting a tow first thing in the morning. I simp for God so much that the thoughts that ran through my mind were how much luckier it was than to have a flat last night on the downtown streets, or half an hour later on the road through the mountains. And maybe missing today’s performance of my play caused me to miss something far worse, as on TV shows when the hero misses the plane that crashes. I suspected sabotage for a moment, but the security cameras detected nothing. Probably a bolt or nail left over from recent construction. P writes me a review of the performance: 

We’ve gotten back from the play and dinner and wanted to let you know how everyone we talked to—our friends from Deerfield, Daphne and Bill, and J and D F all had things to say about your play that would make you blush were you to hear them. We loved how you treated the story and made it come alive, not as a tragedy you can read about, but a very personal account of the protagonists. Each woman, and the young man, were rounded complete people—all in the space of 90 minutes—and their personal stories didn’t have a tincture at all of the commonplace or the emotionally hyped-up.  It was all very satisfying theatre, and the actors themselves, in the Q & A following (oh, how we missed you at that) said they’d become very connected with the subjects they were performing, and had on their own gone to look up as much as they could about their roles. How often does that happen when someone’s playing Coriolanus! They also said how well your script turned into easy-to-perform dialogue, that was beautiful to hear and to speak as well. The performance (and therefore the play itself) was enthusiastically applauded with a standing O that would have pleased you.

Washington Place

 October 4, 2025

Feast of St. Francis

To Waynesville last night for opening night of Washington Place. I’m always astonished and grateful to see the effort so many people put into realizing my work. It was a good show in an especially good space for it. The girls tried Yiddish and Italian accents, which got in my way, but which were praised in the talk-back, so I assume I have the playwright’s prejudicial passion to hear every single syllable. The actresses had done research and knew far more about their characters and the event than I. Gussie wore a necklace because her character, burned past recognition, was identified by a necklace worn in a certain way. 

 October 3, 2025

Getting used to the security cameras. Trying not to obsess and look every 20 minutes. The backyard one sees ghosts– which is to say it detects a person and then shows none. I think it’s triggered by big moths close up, which is what I saw in the videos. The front camera is ill-placed, and a person, or a car, can come up the drive without being detected. You can get to the front door without being detected if you come from the east. But, at 2:30 this morning it caught a family of bears drinking from the cement basin on the front porch. My guess is that the cameras will reveal nightly bear visitations. I asked Zac my installer specifically if a bear would count as a “person” to the camera, and he assured me it would not. Glad he was wrong. 

Huge, irritating rehearsal last night. We’re not used to the numbers, and the social energy & chattering are hard to tame. We’re singing a song called “Pink Christmas”– against which I fought manfully but unsuccessfully– containing perhaps 40 uses of the word “pink.” After each and every goddamn one our director would stop and say “PinKKKK” to emphasize how much she wants a clown-like final consonant. The direction you repeat most often is the direction which is wrong, and you know it’s wrong because you have to repeat it. So old, and yet not all my rough edges worn off.

Monteverdi playing from the computer. He played while I was trying to work while the solar guys messed about in the attic. Wonder what they thought.

First female Archbishop of Canterbury.

Jane Goddall

 October 2, 2025

Security installed, solar array in process. I was told it would take one day, but perhaps they’re doing a really good job. I did not “arm” the apparatus last night, considering that I’ve never had a night invasion (except of my car) and assume spotlights will be enough. The solar installers walk back and forth on the roof above my head– a white boy and a black boy; I’ve not heard them speak one word to each other.

It’s 11:40 AM, and at this minute the upheaval of construction has become irksome. “Finish up,” I think, “the guy told me one day at most.”  

Secretly I expect none of this laborious apparatus to work. The new wiring will start a fire and burn my house down. Some glitch will never allow the solar units to work. Turkeys will shit on the solar panels before the day ends. All my breakers will be flipped when they hit the “on” switch. They will have bashed holes in my roof hidden till the rains come. Something. 

Excellent writing session at riverside. So cold, though, my winter jacket was almost not enough. 

Jane Goddall has died. Whenever anyone asked about my “living heroes,” she was always first on the list. Gaia. Yavanna. 

 October 1, 2025

The Security System man and the solar panel men came in the same hour. Footsteps and banging on the roof.  I expect each bang to break through into my study.  Hubbub from which I am about to flee. As they have my car hemmed in, the flight will probably be to the garden with a box of bulbs. Sweetboi’s strange end made me think I need security cameras. A man knocking at the door with an offer of free installation made me think I needed solar.

 September 30, 2025

Cold. All the windows shut for the first time. Twice my finger hovered at the thermostat.

Gave an interview about Washington Place with Janet Kopenhaver of Asheville Stages. She’d been to the gym and was hyper-hydrated and had to use the bathroom a lot. Interesting half hour. It is still true that I have never listened to a podcast of which I was not the subject. 

Guy delivered a pallet of materials for my solar panels, so I guess that’s on. What a week of banging and hammering this is going to be.

Waiting for a locksmith on one of those “I’ll text a half hour before I get there” arrangements which are the most infuriating things in ordinary life. I expected the call at 8 AM. It is now 3:20 PM. I’m not the kind of person that can be casual about appointments. 

Vivint Security guy makes arrangements for tomorrow. I let loose about asking for a morning time, getting a vague sometime-in-the-afternoon time, repeating the AM request with every communication, being ignored every time. There was a glitch in their system, so he says. and now I have a slot at PRECISELY 9:30. Their web page won’t let me sign some document I’m meant to sign before the technician arrives. Days chopped to bits by interruptions and irrelevancies. 

Some hugely dark nights replaced by irritations far more immediate and superficial. This is an advance.

Ate a single tomato for lunch. Quick and baffling diarrhea. 

School of Night gets better and better. I impede progress by thinking, “So what? Irrespective of quality, it will come to nothing.” Old songs repeated so often they leave grooves in the air. 

TP responds to my announcement about the Washington Place productions with: This is great. My entire day is just trying to stay alive. Doctors are considering putting a fucking bag on my side I can’t even use the toilet without help. I was in an unbelievable amount of pain when we first met. I didn’t realize how many physical problems I had then I guess even I didn’t believe I could have so much wrong in my early 20’s . I lived with it all and had to at last end up not being able to walk about 6 years ago after a trip to the park to play frisbee with Nick and Dylan. I wish I had been smart enough to do some things differently. I am really happy to hear about your play. It’s wonderful. Thank you David for being a wonderful person and friend.

I remember his angelic beauty and clear talent when we were doing our play at the green door. No, I knew none of this, or but echoes of it that I did not pursue. Alas repeated like the call of a bird.  

The Locksmith arrived after a bitter text from me. He was a giant, sweet Tunisian, very apologetic, though pointing out correctly that our plans had never been definite. He fixed the knobs in five minutes, and showed me how to open the doors correctly, and undercharged me because I had been disgruntled. He thought my house was beautiful, and lamented that his wife filled theirs with “so many things.” 

Dream before waking, mostly lost: I was in a very beautiful blue landscape, evening or some blue planet, trying to save somebody. Around the small sharp moon a flock of white birds wheeled in a circle I thought they were tiny birds, but that was a trick of distance. When I saw them in trees later, they were gigantic. It was a dream that continued into wakefulness, then reasserted when I deliberately went back to sleep so the beauty of it would continue. 

Lord of the Rings

 September 28, 2025

“The People that Walked in Darkness” from Messiah rises up from the kitchen. Sat down to watch the whole expanded version of The Lord of the Rings, over three late nights, after the talk shows end. Reminds me of exam week at Hiram, when I’d re-read The Lord of the Rings instead of studying. That worked out well enough.

Helene

 September 27, 2028

The Helene Anniversary. Everyone’s Facebook and You Tube feeds overflow with images of wreckage and desolation. 

Morning rehearsal at First Baptist, then a performance at Pride in City-County Plaza. One tape has us sounding horrible, another has us sounding fine, so who knows? Mostly what you hear on the tape is the chatter of the crowd, so maybe it didn’t matter how we sounded. Finally a big hurricane memorial service at First Baptist. I think it went well. I made the fewest mistakes in the Lauridson Lux Aeterna that I had ever made. Tall H was planted right in front of me, so I could only guess what the conductor was doing. Fell asleep on the sofa, woke after 3 and staggered to bed. 

Question: “What are you going to do to commemorate the hurricane?” Answer: “Flush my toilet.” 

 September 26, 2025

Dim days, half rain, half gray light. A cloud of titmice at the feeders late in the afternoon. 

Emotions roiling as though I were a teenager.

Hurricane anniversary weekend. We’re singing a commemoration program at First Baptist. Here’s an enigma: we have too many rehearsals and yet, at the same time, we are under-rehearsed. 

Pride tomorrow. They predict considerable rain. 

Naps

 September 24, 2025

Productive time a riverside working on The School of Night. 

Sound of turkeys racing around on the roof. Something gets into them every now and then and they fly up there. 

Odd exhaustion. Two naps in one afternoon. 

 September 23, 2025

Trump inconceivably demented before the UN. I use “inconceivably” properly, for such atrocities could not have been anticipated, could not have been imagined, are difficult to believe once witnessed. 

 September 22, 2025

Autumn. Swift progress on my Marlowe play, the words fitting like bricks in a wall.

Path

 

September 21, 2025

Lunch with DJ after church in the lingering autumnal afternoon light. 

Thought of vocation. What was I actually called to do? Did I do it? The thought crossed my mind that the calling is not, at the end, as important as the doing, and that my real destiny was made by my clinging, step by step, to the path I set before myself. That thought was a benediction, for clinging to the path I set for myself is what I have done. 

 

September 20, 2025

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

Woke laughing from a dream of some hilarity. I fell asleep on the sofa watching Seth Myers and Paul Rudd cavort in an episode of “Day Drunk,” and I carried that with me to bed, where the three of us were in a gift shop (or something) throwing things at one another and laughing till we were weak. Even when I rose to go to the bathroom everything I saw, everything I said to myself, seemed funny.

 September 19, 2025

The most spectacular storm outside now since the hurricane. The wind roars. Thunder rolls from the south. If I’d carried out earlier plans I’d be on the road to Waynesville just now. Bad memories arise. 

Pond pump out again. This fills me with stress, thinking of the creatures in the pond who depend on me, whether they know it or not, for their health. Maybe lightning will strike the pump back to life. 

Coffee with K at the river. She told me of her plans for her new theater company, Phantom Lantern, and for her new baby, who should be born in Florida at the end of next month. Her new company will be largely improv, which leaves me out. I do understand the attraction of what needs no preparation and no rehearsal. The riverside café seems to have its full complement of chairs and picnic tables and gossiping clutches of caffeine hounds back, 11 ½ months after Helene. 

 

September 16, 2025

Hard rain on the roof, shooting out in streams where the gutter man failed. I must have been cold last night, for there were dreams of snow covered landscapes. In one, my sister and I stood by a frozen river competing in who knew the names of more Norwegian birds. 

The creature in my garden was an iris-borer, the larva of a benighted moth. Sorry I didn’t throw it to the towhees. 

In the last hour when they would have been visible, two bears cubs and their enormous mother came to visit. It puzzles me why they walk across the front porch rather than around, which would eliminate at least two climbs. Maybe they’re looking in on me. In any case, it makes night porch-sitting an adventure. They drank from the pond, frolicked, disappeared into the night, leaving me with a sense of benediction. 

Alert for the failing of my faculties, I light upon the myriads of typos that crop up in my writing, more, I think, than in times before. In the last entry I mistyped the word “turkey” three times in three different ways. There are sometimes two errors in four words. Right now I mistyped “different.” I suppose editing solves the problem, but adds lugubriousness to an activity that used to be fleet as the wind.  

SS writes in a press release about T's upcoming production: I've long believed that the subject of a play doesn't tell you much about it: something that sounds amazing might be so badly written as to be an utter bore, and something that sounds unbearable might prove funny and transcendent. And I had a direct example of that quite a bit earlier, when another of our great local playwrights, David Brendan Hopes, sent me a script about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory tragedy. All I could think before reading it was, "Too sad! I don't want to have anything to do with this!"I hadn't read two pages of David's remarkable Washington Place (which I produced and directed at The Magnetic 10 years ago, and which opens in a new production at HART, coincidentally, in October) when, to my surprise and delight, I was having such a good time that I immediately knew we had to do it. For David hadn't focused on the horror, even though it was there; he had concentrated his considerable gifts on the lives and loves of the otherwise unknown victims, gracing them with intelligence and humor and a humanity that could not be denied. The results were astonishing, about which I'm sure those of you lucky enough to have seen it would agree.

 September 14, 2025

Return with vengeance to the garden, spading, weeding, settling the fall bulbs, cleaning and moving the water gardens. In the grass I found big feathers and tufts of down from a turkey, and one long hawk feather. I wonder if hawk and turkey had a disagreement in my garden. I’d have thought a turkey too large for a red-tailed, but the warriors screaming in my trees might have tried anyway. 

Failed to mention my trip to the Arboretum, where I walked in the gardens and bought two more indoor plants, now potted and settled. A bus had brought a load of old people. I kept thinking of myself as separate from them. . .  but nobody else would. 

Shamed by my sometimes not leaving the house for a full day, or two, I decided to go to the theater last night. It was a battle between going out and staying home, and only at the last possible moment did I put on a decent shirt and get into the car, heading to Waynesville to see A Little Night Music at HART. When I got there (through miles of detours) the main theater was dark. In the new theater, though, was a banquet with everybody dressed in– I think– Roaring Twenties costumes, all feathers and glitter, and a voluptuous banquet spread on tables at the entrance. It was like stepping into a Fellini movie. I turned around and came home. Still haven’t looked up what was actually going on, but was impressed that HART could get together a party so massive and, by the evidence of my wars, joyful. The sun was behind me on the drive home, lighting the mountains with gold touched by pink. Perhaps that splendor was the intent of the mistaken journey, for it felt purposeful in some way, not merely the outcome of not having prepared or bought a ticket beforehand. 

Red-shoulder

 September 12, 2025

Clouds seem to be gathering. Rain would be well.  Covered myself in glory today in the matter of gardening. Restored the iris garden, planting fritillaria, alium, but mostly digging and dividing old iris, pulling grass roots away from their roots. Digging the dry ground was like trying to chip through stone. Uncovered a quite large larva (I guess) more than two inches long, with very prominent pincers and bright orange globular segments, like beads on a bracelet. Researching online has turned up nothing similar, except a sea-worm, which it definitely wasn’t. As I worked, a pair of red-shouldered hawks flew into the garden, screaming alone, then screaming at the horde of jays that came to scream at them. Denise with a new mate? I think probably two completely new citizens. They looked young and feisty. Tried to tempt them with leftover pork roast, but they were having none of that.    

Blake and Archbishop Cranmer on the porch with P. 

Anniversary

 September 11, 2025

Ended the fast at 112 hours. Felt so good I started another immediately after eating the pork roast I imagined and brought to pass. 

Return to AGMC. Our numbers are larger than they’d ever been, and the sound is tremendous. 

 September 10, 2025

During SC rehearsal last night my official fast ended. I had a brief revery about pork roast, but went to bed fasting. It is now 108 hours and counting. 

Quite brisk morning.

FL proved once again my theorem about the thing directors mention most often is the thing they’re wrong about. A portion of last night’s rehearsal was taken up with slandering the letter “R,” having us cross it out of words. Vehemence on this point is inexplicable. 

 September 9, 2025

Heroic weeding and dead-heading, and by “heroic” I mean just about as much as I can stand for today. Looked up from weeding at a disturbance in the air, and saw a cardinal fleeing from the claws of a hawk. I don’t know how that drama ended. 

 September 8, 2025

Rameau on Pandora. He’s as good as anybody. Not as stridently martial and antique as Lully. 

At 72 hours on the fast. There’s a feeling in me which doesn’t necessarily read as hunger. Morning mucous is a tithe of itself. No drama in the stomach or digestive system– in which there are usually some issues, which I’d thought of as just part of life. De-hydration is the enemy. You forget you can have liquid. You want something to eat for maybe half a minute, then the desire dissolves, and the food you wanted seems oddly repellent. 

Potted several newly acquired plants, set up ( re-purposed) a marble table to hold them. Pulled a few weeds in the scalding light. 

America is in such peril that if one had written about it the text would be cursed as an improbability, a libel. The worst man imaginable doing worse things than one imagined. Some still stand back from cursing his name. It is unaccountable. One must turn away and talk of something else. Felon, rapist, thief, traitor, he is allowed to stand in the light of day, an abomination, the scourge of a Satanic being. Yet people draw breath. People drive to the beach and come home. I am going to go downstairs and turn on the TV. I will not be watching the news. 

 September 7, 2025

I’d gotten in the habit of calling journeys uneventful, but the one home from the beach was not. D fell in a rest stop toilet stall. He himself makes very little public complaint about such events, so one hesitates to make complaint on his behalf, but it is a wrong and terrible thing, and God and I strove on my front porch in the dark last night about it. My task was to dead lift him off the floor. My fear was that, in these diminished times, I couldn’t do it. Turns out I could. It was good to be home. I could scarcely walk for driving all that time. We’d watched a TV program about a 4 day fast which is meant to do one worlds of good. At 8 PM on our last night on the beach I opened a can of water, drank it, and began my fast. It is 38 hours later and I’m holding good, and not particularly hungry. 

Attended service at First Congregational, I suppose to honor old times at Emmanuel U C of C. I was greeted to within an inch of my life. Very elderly church, full of good will and good intentions. After that– or including that– a strange sadness about the day, maybe less sadness than an aura of valediction. Several activities and concerns of my life hovered before me as if made of smoke, and I brushed them away. . . never again. . . never again. . . .

46 hours fasting and still going strong, though probably if there were anybody to notice, I’d be grumpy. I did this sort of thing long ago, but feared to do it as an old man. Seems to be having no unexpected consequences. 

 September 5, 2025

Amazing that the record doesn’t get very far as, literally speaking, there’s nothing that should interrupt, but things do. One wanders to the pier and writes one’s poems. One remembers how mediocre the blood Marys are, but orders one anyway. One is patient, so a grackle comes and perches on the table. One sits on the balcony before the others bestir and writes one’s poems. One tries to recover from the giant meals. We go to Jack of Cups for a lovely lunch. One tips lavishly. We sit on the hotel terrace having cocktails. Lovely Olivia, a senior at the College of Charleston, waits on us. She’s afraid to open the Prosecco, so we do it ourselves. One hears of goings-on in far places.

Evening: the blues and pinks settle over the pale sand, the blaze of sun quieting. L and J left this morning after a bit of breakfast.  A day of lounging, overeating, staring at the sea, quite successful napping. I am wild to be home, wild for it to be this time tomorrow. The sea is useless to me unless I am alone.The immensities are useless to me unless I am alone. The ways in which these junkets at the shore are a “vacation” are mysterious to me. To me it is a narrowing and a deprivation– except for the vast and profound presence of the sea itself. To keep myself in check is the task. With my sister’s help, I think I succeeded this time. Maybe not again. It’s too late in the day for me to try to deceive myself about myself.  

Dolphin

 September 4, 2025

Amazing dreams last night, extended, cinematic. Watching a dolphin cross my entire field of vision, left to right. 

 September 3, 2025

Early up and on the road with L and J to the ferry to Fort Sumter. A red-shouldered hawk presided over the waiting area for the boat. Brief ride, brief visit to a place of significance.

Yorktown

 September 2, 2025

Yesterday I turned 75. The number is shocking, but the feeling is not different from any other day. I shamed the group into taking me to the South Carolina Aquarium. Lovely. All the animals were strangely charismatic.  A wild osprey perched on the mesh over an outdoor display, wondering how to get into the voluptuous bounty clearly visible below him.  A snapping turtle swam to me and leaned against the glass as long as I stood there. Maybe it was affection. Maybe it was the color of my shirt. J and L arrived. We had dinner together, then came back to the condo and socialized more successfully than I had imagined. The half moon spread a wide highway of silver across the sea. It will be wider and brighter tonight. 

We went to the carrier Yorktown. It was deeply moving, as I had not expected it to be, the valor and sacrifice and the bright-eyed youth gone under the waves for an America that is, for the moment, lost. I stood and sobbed, as I don’t remember doing before in public. Dolphins passed under the bridge that led to the boat. 

 August 31, 2025

Blazing morning on a blazing sea. 

Wrote a little on the balcony, then walked to the pier and finished writing the poem there. Expectable and lovely beach scenes, cocktails and lunch. 

I watch my companions scroll their cell phone. It’s the most of what I do, unless I get up, walk the beach or the streets, the same things I’d do if I were here by myself.

 

August 30, 2025

Folly Beach, after a long drive so uneventful I had to struggle not to sleep. Lunch at at the Bohemian Bull, groceries bought. The sea from our balcony stands rough in a variety of grays, same as the ruffled sky.

Morning glories

 

August 29, 2025

Waiting for Iris, bought pottery I didn’t need and then plants to put into the pots.

Successful read-through of Purification at my table last night. It seems short to me, but there’s really nowhere to work in another scene. SS and I should do the show ourselves, as it went off first time without a hitch. 

Packing. Making sure all things are ready for the beach. My needs diminish through the years.

Long wait at the drug store for a prescription I hadn’t submitted, didn’t yet need, but accepted anyway, just in case. The line was twenty people long, and the staff went at their usual careful pace. Every so often a geyser of rage would arise from the line. 

Morning glories everywhere, pink, red, blue, tiny pale white. You forget what havoc they cause in the garden and let them flaunt their beauty. 

August 27, 2025

The book finally turned out to be Once Below a Time. Finished a revision of An Age of Silver immediately after. 

Perfect, if autumnal, days-- shimmering light, lazuli skies. 

Realized with considerable sadness that I will never climb Ben Bulben. Knocknarea may still be a possibility if I go very, very slow. Dreams of travel (literal dreams, that is.) Dreams of the discovery of treasure. 

More public agitation than I remember in my life. Knotted nerves in the chest. Restless sleep.  Back when we were fulminating against Vietnam or racism or what have you, the conviction was that our cries were falling on rational, civil ears, or at least on the ears of those capable of embarrassment. Our leaders dreaded elections. Our leaders dreaded the final authority of the Courts. There is now no such conviction. The courts are bought and paid for, and there is no assurance of a fair election in time to come. Evil has absolute impunity, having added the sociopath’s indifference to public perception to its other defects. The government’s masked and insolent troops on American streets are indistinguishable from the Gestapo or the Savak. A situation is created in which violence is almost the only conceivable remaining response. I assume I’m too old and faulty to help very much, but who knows? 

Symphony Chorus revved up last night with rather less confusion than expected. Steve, the guy I sat beside, is a knowledgeable art collector. 

I hate when people try to show me photos from their phone.

No one had sent me a bill for the beach trip, and I’d asked DJ directly about it. His answer being vague, it crossed my mind that it was being given to me as a 75th birthday present. But, turns out I just missed the communique months ago. Sent the money, feeling foolish. I’m the one who still looks for a basket on the porch Easter morning, who throws a glance under the tree Christmas Eve, who gets mugged on the streets of Dublin for believing the line, “No, I really like old guys.” Serves me right. 

 

Secret Birthday

 

August 23, 2025

My secret birthday. Fifty-nine years ago tonight. 

Startled that it’s Saturday. Somehow I lost a day. 

Realize I haven’t left the house in two days, working on the music novel, for which I still have no title.  All the titles I’ve gone through miss the mark. Right now it’s You Can See the Whole House from Here.

 August 21, 2025

Return to church choir. The music has stopped being challenging, not because of my attitude, but because of exhaustion on somebody’s part, the choir’s or the director’s. Fun at the Barrel House with S’s new Chinese boyfriend. I would never be so assured in China as he is here. 

Rich dreams for many nights in a row. At one point last night I saved a cheetah cub from an attack by a murder of crows. Later in the dream I was told the cub had turned into a person. 

 August 19, 2025

Hazy, yellowish sky. No change in the quality of light since I woke. 

I had forgotten how much fun J is to be around.

Of course, not one of the Birthday Banquet photos includes me. As though I wasn’t there.

M’s church has a Swahili mass. 

Saw many deer along the road this time.

August 18, 2025

After rather beautiful dreams, rose when it was still dark and hurried home, where I am now, with a tumbler of wine at my side and the study fan pointed at my head. Glad to be home. The carpets felt delicious under my feet.  

Banquet

 

August 17, 2025

Drove to the Cleveland Museum of Art yesterday morning, Had to go clear to 532 to find an on-ramp to 76 that wasn’t closed. This was emblematic of the entire journey, through literally hundreds of miles of construction, much of it quite dangerous for that reason. When I finally got on to 77, the story was the same, almost all the way to Cleveland through a construction zone. It’s clear that our environmental problem stems at least partially from the orange and white construction barrels that exist in unknowable millions, wrought from hard, imperishable plastic, and which have to be stored somewhere in warehouses that must cover square miles. The sheer multitude of them is shocking. The museum was larger than I remembered, undoable (by me) in a single day, but studded with old favorites. You’re surprised when Cleveland has a Very Famous Painting.  

In the evening, off to the golf course banquet facility for the Ellet High class of 1968 75th Birthday celebration. It was maybe the best time I ever had at one of these. I felt free and comfortable. I was the answer to two of the trivia questions. Many old friends, many acquaintances who have become friends through the years. Without even a greeting, MH began his recitation of illness and procedures, whose severity and number, it must be said, are impressive, Frank reasserted his interest in my play. E, who was a beautiful youth (for whom I pined) is a fine looking old man. My classmates were interested in anecdotes from Helene and the flood.  The lake at the course was beautiful in the green-gray evening light. 

Breakfast with Mike and Jack and parishioners of the Visitation of Mary Parish at the Akron Family Restaurant on West Market. They’re so well known all I had to do was ask for their table. Much talk of current times, reminiscences of Boy Scouts, loud recriminations against Trump in a place that must have been at least a little Trumpish. Much, much talk of M & D’s many illnesses and procedures. They are lucky to have survived, a fact which they attribute to divine intervention. I do not doubt it. J and M possess memories of my father that I have lost, or never had. Dinner for me at the Lamp Post, open 24 hours. A guy who’d just gone on a 8 mile “walkabout” (because he has no car) recommended the triple-decker BLT at 3 AM as the food of the gods. I remember the Lamp Post from my time, for its disreputability, but that was left unsaid.  

Melancholy now, preparing for the journey home. Sadness over what? For all that was lost? All that was abandoned for something else? For what else?, the final question is. Peach ice cream from the store beneath my hotel window. 

Finder of Tigers

 

August 15, 2025

Before entering the hotel I stood in the parking lot letting the swifts swirl around me in their evening foray. The smell, the feel of the air, the quality of the light were “home.”

Drinking my coffee this AM, I struck up a conversation with Joe, who tends plants in businesses, working for a company called Ambius. He plucked dead leaves from plants so flawless I thought they were plastic. Long haired country boy-- 33, from Rootstown--he loves his job because he’s mostly on his own, unencumbered by office politics. “I’ve had a lot worse jobs.” He cuts his hair once a year, usually in April. His life philosophy is comprehensive and well worked out, a homegrown Buddhist with assists from cannabis. He is, in fact, a graduate of the Cleveland School of Cannabis, which I doubted till I looked it up. He’s a former Trumpist “pretty well fed up with the ways things are going. This is not what we were promised.” We speculated on the possibility of an asteroid or a magnitude 8 earthquake hitting Anchorage in the next few days. He was very voluble, and our conversation lasted an hour. Someone I would never have met in the ordinary course of things. Same for him, I would imagine.

Left Joe to drive to the Akron Zoo. It’s petite, only a few animals, but good fun. If I expected a rush of nostalgia from a place where I’d been many times as a child, I was disappointed. Little but the carousel is as I remember. In my time everything had a Mother Goose theme, I think, and there were bears, and a bison, and a room you could see minerals gleaming under black light. What memories I had took an odd turn. It was called Perkins Park back then, and dad resisted taking us too often because there were too many black people. I do remember the black people– though how many were too many I couldn’t tell. Where we lived and who we were we saw few black people on a normal day, so Perkins Park was like travel abroad. Things change: I counted 3 black faces in a throng that must have numbered several hundred. I remember bitterness at never being allowed to ride the exotic animals on the carousel. This was because dad feared the uncleanliness of black people, and I would be sitting right where they had sat. How many decades does it take to clear that wholly from your mind? Maybe the fact that I thought of it today it means that it requires more decades than I have given it. 

Climbed up to see the Sumatran tiger. People were leaving disappointed, saying, “There’s nothing there.” I supposed there WAS something there, and asked myself where I’d want to be on a hot and sunny day if I were essentially nocturnal, and there I found him, camouflaged by stripes, asleep under a tree, quite near a side window. For a while, until someone took up the task, I stood and pointed, so visitors would not have climbed to the tiger eminence in vain. “Thank you,” the weary parents whispered. Earlier I’d watched parents and children together, and considered how inessential my life has been, no getting a brood settled around a picnic table, no comforting a tired child, no carrying sleeping babies. Nothing that was actually part of the great planetary plan. But in that moment I took comfort. I was He Who Finds the Tiger. I have always been he who finds the tiger. It is useful in the moment, in its way. It is well. I have done it with full faithfulness.

Grandparents took a table beside mine, repeating everything they said to them in Italian, so the grandkids could learn another language. It was about food, so I could follow what they said. Another mother, seizing a teachable moment, said to her competitive children, “I don’t care if I’m not winning. Sometimes I prefer not winning. Sometimes it’s fun not to win.” 

The barmaid in the hotel bar is an Ellet High graduate– 52 years after me.

Rubber City

 August 14, 2025

Uneventful but deeply tedious drive from Asheville. Eastern Ohio is part of the same sea of stone as North Carolina, but its waves sweet and rounded rather than the oceanic upwellings of the south. Crossing the Ohio I always think “home–”

Fifth floor of the Hilton Garden on Market Street, where the vast Goodyear parking lot used to be. Indeed, this is the hovering-place for the ghost of Goodyear, which, once an empire, is now a tacky (and, today anyway) empty tourist spot. Whole blocks and neighborhoods are gone. Mrs. Hughes’ house by the river is gone. The shattered shell of Goodyear Jr High looms from the neighboring hill, ruined and yet standing, like something from Kyiv. In Goodyear Hall my name in bronze, and beautiful murals of WWI soldiers being welcomed into heaven, are covered in bland wood, perhaps gone forever. The place was probably a little past its prime even when I first knew it. Fell from the chair onto the floor first thing. Second thing was discovering my lap top had died, roaring off to Chapel Hill (the remnants thereof) to buy a new one immediately, in a frenzy of impatience, glad that navigating the streets of Akron is still second nature. The Tourette’s of the salesman was so bad I kept pulling away, thinking he was going to hit me. I hope he’s used to that.

Caligula

 August 12, 2025

Part of each day is the tamping down of political fury. Trump is of course the worst, but there are also the police and ICE and the slow murder of UNCA and the strangulation by the Right of all things generous and upright. Marksmen hide in the tall grass, taking aim at anything that flies. I’m almost explicit in my belief that Trump should be eliminated by any means necessary. I ask myself, then, if I would do it.  The surprising answer is “probably not.’ I could simply lack courage, or the fortitude to face the consequences, but also I doubt the simple capacity to do so. What cannot be imagined can probably not be done. With the gun in my hand and my finger on the trigger I’d be thinking, “This is really not for me.”  I don’t understand why he is alive. There are plenty who CAN imagine such a thing. His own guard killed Caligula.

Came home from errands yesterday evening, preparing to go to my meeting at Grace Covenant. Two police cars blocked a lane of Lakeshore, edged up onto my grass. “What the hell?” I wondered. Parked, went inside, found two police officers standing in my living room.

“Who the fuck are you?” one barked, hand on pistol.

“Who the fuck are YOU?” was my retort. He pointed to his badge.

“Do you have a warrant?

“The door was open.”

“The door was unlocked. It was not open.”

“ID. Now.”

I made clear that this was my house and they were not going to see ID. Two more cops had been poking around in the garden. I saw them pass the living room windows. I feared they would come in, but they didn’t. Things looked tense, as the cops wouldn’t tell me who or what they were looking for before I showed them ID, and they were not going to see ID as long as he moon stood in the sky. Finally one looked down at the desk, at a stack of mail with my name on it. He read the name and said “Is that you?” It would have been stupid to answer anything but yes. The other one said, “That’s not good enough. You’re going to show us ID or we’ll take you downtown and ID you.”  That this was not going to happen was so obvious I didn’t bother to respond. Finally the less stupid of them said, “We’re looking for Stewart. Do you know Stewart?” In fact I bought the house from a man named Stewart–eleven years ago-- but I was in no mood to assist them in any way, so I said, “no.” He asked if he could have one of the envelopes with my name on it. I thought of all the ways I might regret that, but there was nothing on the envelope that is not public knowledge, so I removed the contents and gave him the envelope. They were probably determined not to leave empty-handed. Though leave they did. One even fondled the great scarlet hibiscus bloom by the stairs as he left. 

Did not make it to the meeting. 

Temptation

 August 11, 2025

Rain began as I walked to the mailbox. I was grateful, as it meant I couldn’t weed today. 

On a whim began pricing cottages in Ireland. I could pay cash for some of them. I hadn’t counted on this level of temptation. 

Sturgeon Moon

 August 10, 2025

Dwelt on the porch last night watching the full moon traverse the sky. Moments of ecstasy.

Decent weeding this morning, not the plot I intended to weed, but in need nevertheless. Hummingbirds throng my plants. I must subconsciously have planted them toward that end.

F sent a list of corrections for the play, which I made. I simply do not see typos– have to look hard sometimes even when they’re pointed out to me.

 August 9, 2025

SS expresses interest (guarded) in Purification. FM writes, “It may be the best play I’ve ever read” and wants to market it to Cleveland theaters. Are there Cleveland theaters? 

Lesson for the day: If you buy raspberries in a market, eat them fast. Otherwise, they’ll vanish under fungus in two days. 

Finding those sing-along pages on You Tube, to practice sightreading until the choruses start up again. 

M is pregnant with a daughter.

Bear comes into the garden at sunset, noses around, takes a drink from the pond, makes his rounds totally unperturbed by my rushing from place to place trying to take his picture. 

 

August 8, 2025

Sat on the porch with my rose\ last night, saw a raccoon humping through the brush by the light of the cloudy moon, heard a screech owl warbling and crying in the pines. Needful things. 

Lunch with SS, during which the future and the agony of theater were discussed. 

BRH calls to inform me of J’s death, and to say how much he (J) loved me. The lights of Broadway will dim for J on September 8.

Made reservations for the Akron trip. 

 August 7, 2025

Yesterday, solid work weeding. I felt better than I had for days after the exercise. 

Yesterday: much commemoration of the atom bomb. The use of it seemed inevitable at the time. For us looking back–

Finished Purification. At a certain point I had abandoned it as unfinishable

Have to brush turkey poop off the back porch, table and chair and all. . 

Lively lunch with DJ. My unabated rage at the state of the world lifted our energy level. 

 

August 4, 2025

Chill last night again, but lighter, spring-ish this morning. 

Roaring toward the finish line with Purification. Adding one character solved the problems it was having. 

JB

 August 3, 2025

JB is dead. What kindness he always showed me! The perfect example of the artist/citizen. 

Much closing of windows against sudden chill– from rain forest to New England autumn with no transition. I was actually kind of comfy in the rain forest. 

 

August 2, 2025

Turbulence last night. I woke in the last dark so sick I had to totter to the bathroom, and once in the bathroom heard something moving in the garden, which I assumed was not an animal because animals are silent. Turned off the light and looked, saw nothing. At that moment light was coming, and I satisfied myself that nothing bigger than a bird stirred in the garden. Did not get back to sleep. In dreams I was constantly being left without a ride by my companions at remote diners– in deserts, on craggy shores– from which I had to find a ride home. 

 August 1, 2025

Turbulence from Facebook. People begin to address my anti-Trump screeds, and the people who do that are (so far) the stupidest kids I knew in high school, no longer kids but still (probably increasingly) stupid. The religious tone, the inseparable alloy they make of Trumpism and Christianity, would be terrifying if it were one degree less ridiculous. Stupidity is attracted to easy answers, especially if they manage the enticing equation of ignorance and sanctity.

Large turkey family visiting me garden in late afternoon. After gleaning, they assemble on the picnic table, making it invisible beneath their fluffy selves. 

 

July 31, 2025

Turns out that D who wanted to repair my Wikipedia page is a scammer–  at least searching his name online reveals only a female Asian banker. Turns out there’s no such thing as a Wikipedia head editor, which he claimed to be. 

Haircut, washing of my poor foundling car, grocery shopping, much sitting with the air conditioning on listening to the radio in various parking lots, and still Iris had not finished with the house. I was berserk with impatience. I realize nothing stops me from coming home while she’s still working, but that’s one of Those Things Which I Do Not Do. 

Cannas and Joe-pye in bloom. 

A Furnace of Beryl

 July 30 2025

Reading MJ's memoir. He warned me I’d be in it, so I looked first thing, and there I am, primarily to do a good deed which I had forgotten: introducing him to his second wife, S, who was my roommate at the time. She asked to move in while divorcing her first husband (whom I thought was exquisite: a handsome abstract painter), which I didn’t realize until now was probably a set-up concocted by her and MJ to get her away from her husband and into a space where they could carry on their passion. . . which they did. No matter. It was an interesting time.  The book puzzles me a little. It’s a lively read, but I can’t imagine its having an audience beyond those mentioned in its pages, and still alive. 

P & I talking Blake on the porch while the thunder blasted in the east. The Male is a Furnace of beryl; the Female is a golden Loom.

 

July 28, 2025

News from Scotland: Trump creates a trade crisis, then gets credit for partially resolving it. That America should always have the better deal is not what our forefathers fought for. 

D, the editor of Wikipedia, wants to edit my page and improve it by taking away tags, etc. I say yes, and miraculously manage not to take a look. The last time I looked at the page was 2019 or so, after disgruntled student Z B-S libelously vandalized it. Such laborious malice is hard for me to comprehend.

Watched Olivier’s Henry V. Wonderful!

Thunderstorms each evening. They don’t cool things down much, but they allow my garden to get through the heat wave. You can hear the thirsty roots sucking. The wet lasts until morning, evaporates in the first hour of brutal sun. 

 

July 27, 2025

Maybe I prosper in the record-breaking heat, or maybe I just endure it, but recent days have been full of accomplishment. 

Publicity for GMC’s Christmas concert is horrifying. It’s meant to be a bearded drag queen in a sleeping cap (not unlike Scrooge, you see) but it’s weird and un readable. It’s not necessarily a good idea to let your boyfriend do the art. 

 

July 26, 2025

Furious personal message from TE, from Ellet, scolding me for the horrible things I say about Trump, “the greatest President America has ever had.” He’s memorable from high school and Boy Scouts mostly for his extravagant stupidity, which was rather sweet in its way. I wonder why stupid people don’t check themselves before going on tirades. Do they not know they’re stupid? Do they think stupid goes away when they really, really mean it? This is the same guy who was asked to resign from his county school board after he advocated that police use live ammunition to quell Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Judging by the illiteracy of his message, the greatest offense was his being on ths school board of anywhere.  I resisted the opportunity to correct grammar and spelling and send the message back.