January 25, 2025

Briefly excited about being in A’s play, because it was A and I’d be Richard Burbage. Signed up for an audition time and memorized a monolog. Backed out, though, because of time & chorus conflicts, and looking on the webpage and seeing performances stretch through the entire month of May. Too little time to do too much. One of the advantages of being old is that one can back out of things for the vaguest “health reasons” and one is never questioned. 

Enduring cold. 

Working hard on ICY. It contains some of the most beautiful writing I have ever done. It’s either silly or lovely that I can still be ravished by my own words. 

Video of a driver hurdling off the fishing pier in Virginia Beach, “barely missing a pedestrian.” The pedestrian was D, out jogging. Brushes with fame. . . . 

Strange events, sometimes in dreams, mostly in waking, when, like a mirror shivering in the distance, some mystery come clear, some conundrum resolves. The experience is sensual rather than intellectual. I see an opacity, then its moving and shattering, and then some great (or little) clarity. I was watching videos of babies and young children racing for their fathers when they came home from work, dancing and crying out in transports of love. I felt sad for my father, wondering if he ever experienced that. Then I realized– remembered, beheld-- that yes indeed he had, and that when those moments ended, it was because he ended them. The vision did not reveal why. I was, in some moment now irretrievable, thrown back upon myself, and three quarters of a century could not undo it. I remember two or three times when he was uncharacteristically loving toward me: the thought came into my brain that perhaps my father had been hidden or taken away all this time, replaced by an imposter, and this new man, the one who seemed to love me, was the original finally returned after the expiation of I did not know what trespass. But, no. It was back to normal in the next hour. I’ve sought in my heart for the behavior that turned him away. It was not me. What baby has that power? Some great angel or gift of fortitude allowed me to go forward another way, relying on myself, asking little but cobbling my own world together, in which it was possible to live. But not to live unscathed. I am as one returned to the nursery where he grew up, finding all the broken toys, helpless to put even one of them back together. I feel sad for my sister, because I think I almost remember when things were well, and I’m not sure she can. Mother’s rather glorious loyalty to her husband made sure she went the way he led. Or perhaps they warred in the silence of the house, and she could not overcome him.