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.

The Asheville Cantos

 July 25, 2025

Mother’s birthday. 

Modest weeding, planting of a purple elderberry, copious watering against the crushing heat. 

Finished The Asheville Cantos last night. Sat on the porch with my Buddha-gong, thinking how perfect everything was. 

 

July 23, 2025

Early to the riverside. Cloudy. Everywhere was shade. Two herons chased each other up and down the river, croaking in a way I found unusual.  Wrote until my hand cramped grotesquely and I could physically write no more. Wedding anniversary cocktail with J and DJ and L and M. M corrected my Italian grammar. 

 

July 22, 2025

Modest weeding, the planting of a box of iris roots that arrived in the mail. 

GMC committee meeting last night. I was a monster of hurrying-things-along, cutting every corner I could in B’s magisterial delivery.  It takes him ten minutes to deliver four minutes’ worth of information. Drove TP home afterward, who has been covering by bus the entire city north to south to make these meetings. His excitement ran every direction, and one smiled without bothering to follow. His smell in the car was young and joyful.  

Quincy

 July 21, 2025

From email this morning: 

Dear David,

We are excited to tell you that your play Hancock Street has been selected to be part of our 2026 one act play series. The performance takes place at the Ruth Gordon Amphitheater. All performances produced by Friends of Ruth Gordon Amphitheater and Thalia Theater Troupe at the Ruth Gordon Amphitheater are free to the public.

As part of the inclusion, we are offering you $25.00 for the rights to perform the play and video it as we do all performances at the Amphitheater.

Please let us know your acceptance. When the 2026 schedule is set, we will notify you of the date and time. We hope you will be able to attend the performance. We expect the director will want to consult with you if they have any questions.

Thank you and congratulations!

Ann Danby

Founder, Thalia Theater Troupe

Managing Director, Friends of Ruth Gordon Amphitheater

Exhausting, joyful all day work on The Asheville Cantos. My voice is the great voice. Small poems are like gems that never quite find their place. There must be the necklace, the diadem. 

Hen

 July 20, 2025

Praiseworthy weeding in the bamboo garden. At one point I was weeding in one corner of the garden while a hen turkey and her brood (six chicks) foraged in another. My Facebook one-year-ago pop-up informed me that I took a photo of exactly the same thing one year before. 

 

July 19, 2025

Though I intended other things for the first of morning, I continued the labors of the night by cobbling a great poem out of minor ones. Be praised. Back in one saddle, at least. Heat and thunder. 

 July 17, 2025

DJ and I at lunch in Reynolds Village. I’m at the age when every restaurant portion is too much. Talked about the special treat when mom and I went to the Georgian Terrace in O’Neill’s for club sandwiches. Kids got a menus shaped like an elephant. Those club sandwiches were dainty. Those at the Village Porch were leviathans. Could barely haul myself into the van. 

On the night porch: Bart the black cat leapt up, sensed me, deliberated for a moment whether I were tolerable, then departed. I was disappointed. The balls of fluff (now taking up the tops of two columns) are sleeping wrens. I disturbed one a little, and he fluttered stupidly around until he found his perch again, groggy, or maybe night-blind. I guess the porch saves the energy it takes to cling to a twig; plus, against the roof, they are vulnerable to approach from only one side. As I turned to go inside, the shape of a bear loomed out of the gloom, making for the back garden. Unaccountably huge. I’m used to being amazed at the hugeness of bears, but this was at another level.

 

July 15, 2025

Images on the Internet of a flood in the 28th Street subway, which I took from the theater two weeks ago. 

Allons enfants de la Patrie

 

July 14, 2025

Heroic weeding in the roadside garden. Took the car to be inspected. It was fun listening to the guys at Valvoline calling to one another as they worked, blue collar opera. The guy who took my money said “You don’t drive this much, do you?” Then he offered to buy my car. Even had his offer been stunning I’d have to think of the bother involved in getting a new one. 

 

July 13, 2025

Days of variegated sun and storm. 

 July 11, 2025

Heroic, though not valedictory, weeding this morning. The vine is, all in all, the most insidious vegetable form. 

Dark sleeping shape on the column again last night. 

Ethan and Gunter returned yesterday, and after their detailed (and exhausting) presentation it looks like I’ll have a solar array on my roof. This is a mild surprise. Roof still has to pass an examination to see if there’s enough light. I’m in the enviable position of not caring one way or the other. The fact that there’s no up-front outlay left me wondering what the downside was– except for ugliness on my lovely roof. E and G clearly enjoy each other’s company. Examples of healthy, humorous, affectionate redneck masculinity. Not too MAGA, either, because the Right wants to end subsidies for solar power. E & G were curious about me. When I told them I’m a retired English professor, they said, “That explains the way you talk. Very clear and all.” They mentioned another UNCA professorial retiree up the street, from Mathematics (I didn’t recognize the name), and they said, “You guys are very different. He’s weird. Full of himself.” Not being weird or full of myself (or at least less so than my colleague) put the crown on my day. 

 July 9, 2025

Back to painting, but slowly increasing the total number because I like to repaint old ones. 

Two guys came to the house wanting to sell me a solar power array. I had to get dressed to answer the door. They were handsome, so I let the conversation go. They were excited because as they waited for me to answer, the red-tailed hawk captured a bird at the end of my drive. “There was a flurry of feathers,” one said. He’d been in a few movies, and mentioned a scene where I had seen the movie and actually remembered him in it. I told them I was not going to buy their service, but said yes when they wanted to come back on Thursday. I can look at them, and then say no again. 

Sat by night on the porch hitting my new singing bowl, trying to get the best sound. The light touch is almost always better, and that almost always takes me by surprise. As I sat, a bear came up between the hollies and made his way across the lawn, going at about the pace of a human jogger. His form was beautiful, deeper black between the black and the moonlight. He showed no interest in me, but I panicked anyway and went inside, ashamed later of my retreat. 

PR and I sitting on the east porch drinking cold, bitter tea, discussing Blake, Berkeley, Shelley. 

 

July 8, 2025

Hot days punctuated by thunderstorms. My patchwork weeding continues. Found the Ur-version of Jason of the Apes, turned it into a short story.

Maeve

 

July 7, 2025

MT facebooks me a photo of himself atop Knocknarea, with the message: Thinking of you, David. Thank you for lighting a fire within me. Thank you for teaching me about Yeats. Queen Maeve says Hello.

Fireworks

 July 5, 2025

More fireworks tonight than last night, including a huge fusillade from Grove Park, partially visible through my trees. Last night girls (by the sound of it) from the other corner of Lakeshore set off fireworks across from my drive. When they were done I shouted “Thank you!” and they shouted back “You’re welcome!” I was happy listening to the explosions and reverberations from my front porch, the waxing moon making his way across the west. 

Another huge day of weeding, maybe more strenuous than yesterday, though the results less visible, because the job far more massive. Two weeks of neglect returns the plot to wilderness. 

Tired eyes. I want to paint, but not to prepare the canvas. 

Dinosaurs

 July 4, 2025

The most tragic and hypocritical Independence Day of my life time. I would take up arms, if I could, if I had any, if I knew where to aim first. 

Ingegneri on Pandora. 

DJ and R and I to Asheville Pizza last night to see the latest Jurassic Park film. In terms of storytelling (and of acting) the best of the lot, perhaps because, as DJ pointed out, Spielberg’s hand was off it. A large family sat next to us. The youngest boy (I’d guess about 4) was clearly too young to watch monsters devouring people twenty feet tall fifty feet away. He climbed from his seat into his father’s lap and said “I don’t like this movie.” I lost track of that drama until R stiffened beside me and said, “He just slapped that child across the face.” I don’t know what I would have done by myself, but R’s indignation aroused mine. We left little doubt that we had seen and it would not go unremarked. The father’s response was, “I’ll do what I want with my own family.” The answer to that was, of course, “No you won’t. At least not in public.” The wife said “We’ve taken care of our own problem,” but they hadn’t counted on R’s moral sense. I’m not sure of the sequence of events, but R went to the lobby to call the police. The father confronted him there, strutting about like the redneck coward bully he revealed himself to be (you are a coward and a bully to strike a four-year-old in the face, whatever the provocation). R did call the police, who came with Child Services in tow. I got this from employees standing around discussing it when the crowd exited, and later in DJ’s phone call to R.  At one point I assumed there would be fisticuffs between me and the young and very fit father. Thank God the wife was sitting between us. But I was happy with the mood in my mind, which was absolute fearlessness and readiness for whatever came. Part of my character was wasted, I think, in a basically tranquil life. 

Heroic weeding in the first half of the day, a visible dent in the work that needs to be done. 

Prom King

 July 3, 2025

The painting that moved me so in the Frick was The Purification of the Temple. KS is the beautiful delicate boy in the Glass House.  Wikipedia reveals he is 32 and has had a far bigger career than I imagined (having gotten his age so wrong as well). I’m glad I didn’t use the phrase “very promising” to one whose life is already in full bloom. Though he still lists High School Prom King among his credits. 

 July 2, 2025

Part of my feeling terrible yesterday was the onslaught of phlebitis, which after the strain and stress was quite expectable, which I caught in time to head off with the magic pills. The lesson I keep learning is that the bad feelings are never age (which of course is what I think it is) but the disease gathering in my vessels. 

Sat on my porch last night to revel in the difference between my garden and Times Square. On the capital of one of the columns was a fuzzy shape I took to be a bird nestling for the night. It was gone this morning, so whatever it was it was mobile. 

Lilly's

 

July 1, 2025

Home, planted upstairs in the blast of my fan. My last night in New York proved sweet. A little stroll (one block off 8th Avenue and it’s a neighborhood, sedate and picturesque) supper at Lilly’s on 9th with a waiter, Michael.  from Dublin. Incredibly, a firefly flickered and fluttered in the Paramount Hotel bar. My bartender was an immigrant from Bangladesh, who said the problems in his life were caused by the people poorer than he, who sucked away resources which might otherwise go to him and his struggling family.  The Republican strategy of making the poor blame the poorer rather than turning the right direction and blaming the rich has worked utterly, unaccountably. I couldn’t even form a sentence to counter him, so passionate and ingrained was his conviction. Quite dark dreams before waking and taking the plane, with minimal event, home. My body aches with a not quite definable ache– maybe just exhaustion. Lawn has not been cut. Hope Tony was not seized by ICE.

 

June 30, 2025

Walked north to 5th Avenue yesterday morning to attend mass at St. Thomas. Magnificent, as usual. I was not in a worshipful mood, but all was glorious as it had been before. Attendance not much better than All Souls. Attended the final performance of Old Friends, a review of Sondheim’s greatest hits, with some of Broadway’s brightest stars, like Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga. Some trick of having booked only a few hours before got me in the front row, where I do long to be. I could have reached out and touched Bernadette Peters’ shoes. Did not do so. Peters spent a surprising amount of time looking at the front few rows– at me, I fantasized– while others kept their eyes on the back of the balcony. Was she expecting someone? Had she always been that way? Was it a gimmick to involve her audience more personally? Matthew and I met a portion of the cast at the Glass House across the street afterward, and one of the boys– the most beautiful onstage– apologized for spitting on me, so I know he too scanned the front. I assured him it was an honor to be spat upon. The show was quite wonderful– overpowering, even, sitting that close to the tip of the action, close enough to note every gesture was precise, sharp, readable, no slack moments on any face. Peters was a little delicate and past her prime, and there were a lot of crepey bare arms onstage– the cast being”legends” after all–but the energy was a blast furnace. I expected to be a little patronizing and above-it-all at such a spectacle, but assuredly was not. It was their final performance, so everybody got weepy onstage and all the backstage crew had to be introduced and applauded. Matt came down from Washington Heights to meet me afterward. We retired to the Glass House where, as I say, the younger portions of the cast gathered to celebrate loudly. I met them, praised them with extreme praise which was, nevertheless, fully warranted. Two of the main boys looked towering onstage, but were actually not quite as tall as I. The one I mentioned before was unimaginably beautiful, with the affect of kid right off the farm. He said he’s waiting with fingers crossed for his next role, having done a number of auditions. You never know for sure, but I think he has stardom written on his brow. Matt and I talked mostly about teaching, writing, and how much we hate Trump. I fell on the bar steps, and had to be levered up by Matt and the hostess. After Matt left, I retired to the Rum Bar and chatted with the giant Albanian bartender, who told me how to say “stupid” in Albanian, and that the word is also the word for a kind of flute. A couple from Columbia seated across from me were almost unnaturally beautiful, as though they had been chosen and set there by a theatrical director.  

On the street were mostly boys in glittery costume returning from the Pride Parade. V offered me a place on the Riverside Church float, but riding the streets of gay New York in the heat was not on my agenda. Besides, I had nothing appropriate to wear. Maybe somebody would have lent me a boa. Stopped answering V’s phone calls after the first one went nearly an hour, with lists of his acting credits and genealogies extending back to the old country. People look remote and dignified until you get them on the phone. 

PM: After a series of subway mishaps, wove my way through Union Square and Washington Square, sweating profusely. It was a mistake, based on the theory that Tuesdays are easier travel days than Mondays, to add this day. I wanted to be home the whole time, staggering here and there out of a sense of duty to fill each hour. 

Bryant Park

 

June 29, 2025

Yesterday spent largely in and around Bryant Park, dwelling, writing, watching, taking it all in. Trying to imagine what I would do and be had I chosen to live in New York City. Weaver finches took dirt baths at my feet. 

I do think my walking and wandering around is no less than it has been in the past, which is well, but at greater cost, which is a controllable variable.

Hiked down Broadway to 28th  to see night two of the play festival, only part two this time, my play and two others. Drank something sweet at the Milk Bar. How ludicrous I must look tottering about alone and adventuring at my age! Again, my team and the audience’s response fully satisfied. The other pieces (and those I heard through the curtain, having arrived early} were almost unbearable.  Like Mozart, I’d heard them but once and could practically recite them word for word. Nylon Fusion is a lively and popular enterprise, and I was honored to be part of it. I wish them well in all times to come. 

28th Street

 

June 28, 2025

Big Friday. Hauled off to the Frick, newly remodeled and newly opened, which meant crowds and lines, as the demand for tickets was great. Arrived early, sat in Central Park watching the passing show until my entry time. They were filming a fashion shoot which involved a statuesque woman and a dog walking across the street in a provocative way. The dog maintained his dignity. The first painting I saw was El Greco. I burst into tears. Wept through pretty much the first half of my tour, as one profound statement succeeded another. El Greco moved me; a big Corot landscape, practically monochromatic, moved me. Turns out I remembered my long-time favorite, Bellini’s St Francis, backward, as he faces left instead of the right in my memory. The crowd eventually got to me, and the clever way it was arranged so that if you veered off to the toilet or to get a coffee you could not return for a second look. Kept the crowds moving. 

My taxi driver from Central Park, an immigrant from Ghana, mistrusts both progressives and populists, insisting that virtue must find some middle ground. 

The part of town where my play is (W. 28th and environs) is fascinating and even, by the lights of the City, homey. Arriving early, had time to cozy in and get comfortable at a table on Broadway, sucking down some intricate juice. I worried about taxis and such, but when I arrived, I found a subway entrance (which would whisk me to Times Square) on the same block as the theater. Everyone and everywhere reeks of weed. Nylon Fusion is, by the way such things are judged, long-standing and surviving. The TaDa Theater, which they rent, I guess, is squalid outside but business-like inside, almost indistinguishable from the theater where Jack and Bruce did my plays farther Uptown. In an evening of brief plays, you expect some OK and some better, maybe a clinker or two, but you also expect that in New York the quality would be uniformly higher. It was, but only by the merest fraction. They didn’t know me from a haystack, and yet chose my play, so I know the selection process is upright, but, still– these were all they had to choose from? The end of that observation was that my piece was by levels of magnitude the best. It got tremendous laughs (I didn’t know it was that funny), and, as I sat in the front row, I could see the exertions my actresses put themselves through to sell the show. My gratitude, ladies. They read the room correctly. I wanted a little archness, a little more subtlety; they correctly came as close to burlesque as they dared. They were, for that moment, right. 

Heading home, stopped at am open-air wine bar on Times Square, right beside the lighted flag, to sip Prosecco and take in night at the center of the world. I compared it to sitting by night alone on my front porch. There were resonances I could not in the moment explain. 

NY, NY

 

June 26, 2025

Eleventh floor of the Edison, overlooking a Mordor of industrial rooftops. 

Arrived at the Asheville airport on the day it opened its new and hugely enlarged facilities– got to use the new upstairs bar for the first time, damn near its first customer. No liquor license yet, so a good-luck bloody Mary was off the table. When I sat down the bartender cried out my name. He is a kid active in the local theater scene until COVID blasted his professional plans and turned him into the father of two daughters. Fate guided him well. He was less dramatically beautiful, but clearly happy. He is also whom I thank for my single worst on-stage experience– the laugh-riot King Lear at NC Stage many years back. I didn’t mention it. Perhaps he never saw it that way. The tide rolls in and the tide rolls out. 

Hobbled to The Joyce to see Pilobolus. I first saw them in Baltimore the year of their inception (or very close; it must have been 1973) and have done so at intervals since. They are less conceptual and more dance-y than they were, some of their gestures frozen into formula, but still marvelous to watch. It was better, or at least different, when they were all male. Some of the frisson is gone. They traded their odd glamor in to become an institution. Last night’s dancers didn’t really become their stage presences, as performers often do, but remained muscle-y boys who had learned a technique flawlessly while staying recognizably themselves. “Look what I am doing without actually being.” I think that is fine. 

When I caught myself in the last second from a fall down the Joyce Center balcony steps, I foresaw my end. It will probably be a fall, as my legs do not work, without my being able to say exactly why they do not. Took the subway to the Joyce and back. This was itself an adventure and a victory, for I imagined the subway and myself would not meet again. The steps were a tribulation, but minutes later my breath returned and I went on. The City was once the exhibit of my stamina, how I would run down the streets and conquer the subways and be ready for more. In the two days I’ve been here I have done what I would have done in past time, but very much slower, hardly able to move at the end of it. I’m glad tonight’s adventure is but two blocks away.

Drank my way back from the subway stop. The bartender at the Iron Bar was happy about the recent Democratic primary. “Anybody but Cuomo,” she said. The bartender at the bar that’s in the Paramount but not part of the Paramount said she preferred the devil you know (presumably Cuomo) to the devil you don’t. At the Iron Bar, a girl– very loudly– declared to the boy she was with that he couldn’t possibly understand her, as he was neither black nor female. She discoursed on her uniqueness and the unknowability of her experience at some length, and volume. Even most black girls couldn’t understand her due to qualities of her hair and complexion. One nods and agrees when people say that people who are not them cannot understand them, but I wonder if it’s actually true. What about empathy? What about the penetration of the eye of the artist? “You don’t understand” is one of those statements which cannot be corrected or even discussed, because all data are deliberately concealed. Yes, dear, I do understand, You just don’t like that I do, that anyone can.  

Fighting the terrible blast of the room air conditioning. Brought no jacket, anticipating the heat wave forecasted by the media. 

The hotel’s complimentary breakfast costs $6.50

 Bought a watch at the Times Square Swatch, as I have done for half my life. This is the third, at least. Somehow they don’t remember me from decade to decade. 

Hiked to MOMA. Ate incredibly overpriced salad on a balcony overlooking the sculpture garden. 

Evening. Attended Oh, Mary! at the Lyceum. Somewhat unexpectedly, a glorious evening. Cheap laughs became consequential ones. 

 June 24, 2025

Lovely supper with Mike G and the Moseleys last night, a perfect light summer repast, much talk of the University and old times. Mike’s retaining wall came down in the hurricane and has not yet been replaced. 

Worry about going to New York tomorrow, when every outlet shrieks news of a dangerous heat wave. Sitting here in the blast of my fan, I may not take proper account of the peril.

From the Nylon Fusion webpage:

This Round On Us:

Life In Transition

June 27th-28th, 2025

featuring the captivating theme of

"The Gilded Age/Cage."

at 15 West 28th Street, NYC 

Featuring New Plays by New Plays by John Patrick Shanley (A Dreamer Examines His Pillow), Lyle Kessler (Orphans) Migdalia Cruz (Fur), Nick DeSimone, Scott Carter Cooper, James McLindon, Sarah Congress, Ellen Abrams, David Brendan Hopes, Andrew Phillips.