Oliver

 

February 23, 2026

Intensely bitter weather. My front wall had developed a gap above the floor, to freezing wind blows in and freezes the feet. What I can see from the study window is the violent lashing of the tops of trees. New York, Boston, and the Northeast lie under feet of snow.  My feeders are Times Square for the birds. 

Writing like mad, but a deadening sense of futility prevents me from sending anything out. Happy creating, glum selling. 

Sitting at my desk trying to write, shivering with cold. 

Thinking of my grandfather Oliver, sharp as a knife amid his uncertain son, his soft daughters. He rowed me in a boat out to the middle of a green lake. He asked why I wasn’t dragging my hand through the water, as children do. I told him I was afraid of being pulled in by the mermen and becoming one of them. He didn’t scoff. He just said that lake was too small for mermen. I remember a man taking me into the forest and teaching me the names of flowers. Either it was him, or it was a dream. In any case, I knew the names of flowers before I could read. Trillium. Mayapple. Anemone I didn’t know if he liked me, or anybody. He was not like us– or rather, we were not like him. When he was alive I didn’t know he had been born in England, in Somerset, among the coal mines. He worked the coal mines in Pennsylvania. His name was Oliver and his father’s name was Jabez and Jabez’s father was Oliver and that Oliver’s father was Jabez, a line broken forever in a new world, The last time I saw him I stood in the hospital parking lot in Pittsburgh and looked up into a high window where he was shaking hands with himself, as though he were shaking hands with me.