Chicken Salad

 

December 17, 2025

Bought chicken salad that I didn’t like, so instead of trashing it, I dumped on the front porch. In two nights it was gone– I’m guessing my big opossum. What a Christmas feast that must have been! Crows took care of the croissants that came with it. 

I’m wondering how my days pass. They do, and I wake in the morning full of odd energy, but I write nothing here and my recollections are of thoughts rather than incidents. 

Facebook threw up a photo of Maud in front of my Christmas tree three years ago. I wept bitterly. 

DJ to come home Friday. His patience exceeds mine as the heavens are high above the earth. 

 

December 15, 2025

Temperature in single digits, though mitigated by radiant morning sky. Our former executive B said the AVLGMC concert was “the worst he’s ever heard.” Put that down to short memory: there have been plenty worse. The discussion around his email revealed how out of touch I am with most gossip. There was a war between him and other members of the group, apparently, that “tore us apart” and about which I knew nothing. Fighting hard to include actual music in our next concert. We have become a show choir, the specific condition which I always dreaded.  But. . . fun is fun. 

 

December 14, 2025

Bright, but winds near gale force. Two burly young man came out to assemble my raised flower beds, my having determined there was no way I could do it myself. One had “Enka High” on his sweatshirt. I asked him about that and he said, “It’s my boys. They wrassle there.” The placing of Christmas lights in a 100 foot tree they planned to do after my raised beds had to be cancelled because of the wind.

K reports on Facebook that he has inoperable pancreatic cancer. 

Almost Perfect Music

 

December 13, 2025

Night. Renaissance dances from the speaker below. Last night and this afternoon were our two AVLGMC Christmas concerts: The Holidays Are a Drag. The program was too long and, musically, not first rate– in places not even second rate-- but we seem to have pleased our relatively huge crowds, so all is well. My body slowly recovers. Voice exhausted.  I don’t believe I’ll be able to do another concert unless accommodations can be found. Others sit. I could sit, but somehow have not made that compromise, though I leave stage staggering like I’ve been shot. Spent the morning answering a panicked call for more baked goods, so I didn’t get the rest I might have gotten. But, it passed the time, and here we are in our own study, hearing distant and almost perfect music. 

Awfulness

 December 12, 2025

Woke late after staggering to bed at 3 AM. Last night’s dress/tech unspeakably bad, and if bad wasn’t bad enough, also a marathon that didn’t end until 10. I was nearly crippled. Someone asked if he could drive me to my car. I should have said yes. My ancient goal for the group was to sing the best music we could find as well as we possibly could. This weekend’s offering is a mile and a half from that. If I ever mention this, the refutation will be, “but we sold so many tickets.”

A’s Nutcracker cancelled this morning because of a snow storm that never happened. 

Goethe

 

December 11, 2025

Cold. Cold coming under the attic doors. Cold wind rattling everything that can be rattled. Woke in a bad mood. Maybe it was the cold. Fury at the dead solar panels on the roof, the city’s refusal to inspect them, everybody’s refusal to set a time or date or give a plausible excuse. Not that I care. Isn’t that remarkable? I don’t even really care. It’s just that I want something to be under control, to go my way, or at least a reasonable way, rather than wandering about like dust across a desert. Any loose end tied up, any question answered.

Goethe says that those born under Virgo are destined to be writers. 

 

December 8, 2025

A week ago I met S on the street while I was taking out the trash bins. Thought of that as I performed the same action today, without the magic. 

Finished, I think, with baking for the AVLGMC. Two batches before 9 AM. 

Meeting of the planing committee (unnecessary, reassuring ourselves of things already assured) T gave us tree ornaments in the shape of G clefs. 

 December 7, 2025

JC, my student, the photographer who looked like a faun, is dead. 

I was given a beautiful passage from Baruch to read for Lesson & Carols

The yearly holiday struggle with a giant inflatable Santa has begun across the street. Each afternoon it is inflated and secured, looming to the edge of the roof; each morning it lies loose and deflated. 

Baking batch after batch of cookies for the AVLGMC concert. Looking for new recipes, I found old ones in the Hiram College Faculty Wives cookbook from 1971. Some of the names after the recipes remain fresh to me. 

 December 5, 2025

Chaotic and exhausting–but still rather fun– rehearsal last night. I did not disgrace myself with my dancing. Hilarious sensation of people watching me for dancing cues. Handel from the computer. Set up and decorated my Christmas trees. I can tell from the way I moved during and felt afterward that I’m in better shape than I was the last time I dragged out the Christmas decorations– 2023?  Nibbling fudge B made for the choristers. 

A spider web drapes over the front security camera, which the camera interprets, constantly, as a ghostly intruder. 

 December 4, 2025

Cold. Gray. Going over music for the Christmas show, realizing that there are two pieces I have never, ever, even once in my life, looked at. Perhaps on a day I missed? The rest of the story is that both those pieces are bad– one unnecessary, one idiotic. I have insufficient pull on the committee to stop the inclusion of pieces that “fit” but which are nevertheless awful. Why do we spend time singing trash? That is my constant– though sometimes muffled– cry. 

 

December 3, 2025

Cold. S and A and I have a lunch full of reminiscences. One’s periods of productive solitude stretch until one forgets what society is. 

Sam

 December 2, 2025

As I dragged the trash to the curb yesterday, a man biked past me on Lakeshore. He stopped, turned toward me, and said, “Professor!” That almost unbelievable coincidence is how Sam came back into my life after eight years. We were planning to see each other the next day (today) anyway, but he was riding past a house he forgot was mine at exactly the right moment. Over tea we caught up a little. He is not having the life I’d imagined, the life he intended the last time we spoke, but rather the life of disappointments and compromises that turns out to be the lot of nearly all. I had no idea he fled DC and is living in LA with his father. As we spoke, I realized that his extreme and enduring handsomeness– reasserted each time I look at him–is the reason I have a hard time imagining anything for him but success. It is shallow of me to expect that beauty shields one from heartache, but that is what I do expect until I work consciously toward a more informed perspective. In any case, for me the hours were a delight, a delight renewed this morning when we met for coffee at the Rowan café on Haywood Road. My dilemma is trying to know if I am a friend or a mentor. I last knew him as a student, and must work my way into a new relationship. It is comfortable to be with him. I tell him things I don’t recall telling anybody else. All this gets renewed tomorrow when we have lunch with A. 

The freezing time begins, when I stagger through the house clutching a blanket and wondering where all the drafts come from.

December 1, 2025

Huge revision of Jason. The revision appeared to me in a dream. It sounds suspicious to say, but there we are– 

 

November 29, 2025

Tom Stoppard is dead. Philippe Sly on You Tube.

I catch myself watching the headlights in the street, hoping one of the cars will pull into my drive, hoping for something to happen. 

Now the Spanish Madness on You Tube. 

I go almost completely unobserved. I am a shock to myself when I see me in the security cameras.

I thought everything necessary would come to me. 

How many nights, Creator Spirit— ?

November 28, 2025

Most tiny spider hangs on an invisible thread from the lampshade. What does he eat? Can there be anything smaller than he is? I stay my distance. If I come too close my breath sway his lifeline like a hurricane. 

Ordered cedar planters much too large for me to move, much less assemble. Dragged them to the tool shed by opening the crates and moving them piece by piece.