Frank

 April 29, 2026

As I stand painting in the attic, the calling of frogs comes loud and joyful from the pond. 

Raced down to the sound of a doorbell. I do not have a doorbell. No one was at the door.

From Frank in Cleveland: What an honor to receive this email from you on the eve of opening night of what may be the best play I ever read. I had marked my calendar in the hope I might be able to attend, but alas, I cannot. I can only hope it will be recorded (I would be happy to contribute to make that happen) and if it is, I want to purchase a copy.I continue to believe this play can have a positive impact on people at a time when we are all wandering around saying, "What in the hell is going on?" and "Why in the hell is this going on?" and "How in the hell do we stop this!?"

I have felt all the things you are feeling right now. I remember when I directed The Merry Wives of Windsor, my first Shakespeare play, for free in downtown Canton and carrying set pieces to where we stored them after the final dress rehearsal, an actor said to me, "How can you be so calm when there are so many things that could go wrong tomorrow?" I thought about all the things he was talking about (I said to myself, "You don't know the half of it!") and said, "We have something really good. We have done everything we can to be as prepared as possible. There is nothing left to do, but do it. Whatever will be, will be." That one went great and I went on to direct four more. 

Break a leg. Frank

 April 28, 2026

Two days of intermittent but blessed rain. 

SS says not to bother with rehearsal tonight, so I will finish my painting. 

Rehearsal

 April 26, 2026

Lilies (yellow callas) were languishing in their tubs in the church kitchen, unclaimed after Easter. I gathered them up, brought them home and put them into ground still damp from the rain. 

Downtown to the BeBe to watch a rehearsal of Purification.  4/5 of the cast is stellar– the one who most needs to be, not quite yet, though I’m assured great strides of been made and greater still will come between now and Thursday. Mostly, the nerves relax, seeing that, besides expectable problems like remembering the lines, the interpretation is solid and the actors are good and have been working incredibly hard, and I’m grateful to them however it all turns out. Always grateful to production crew, who put forth such effort of one’s behalf. I remember as an actor not thinking very much about the playwright, though in fact most of them were dead or distant. I need to get over my insistence on correct grammar. “On whom one can depend” and the like stick out too often. The opening scene gets to its point a little too fast. Perhaps the play was written a little too fast, with too much political urgency. There’s also a bit of self-satire, which I didn’t include consciously, but the Muse did. It’s otherwise on the brink of being over-earnest, of never cracking a wry smile. It’s almost impossible to hear some of the most earnest speeches without thinking, “I am allowed to feel they are going too far.” If the art is true, the artifact is wiser than the artificer.  

Walked briskly and without pain from my distant parking space. 

 April 25, 2026

Light but probably sufficient rain. At least no watering today.

Drove to campus for maybe the third time since retirement, to the student art & ceramics sale. How new & happy the students looked, and how happy I was to be briefly among them again. I bought a large pitcher to water the plants on the porch, though it may be too heavy to be used for that very often. The young lady who’d made it was at the check-out table. She smiled and waved and cried. “That’s mine! I made that!’ I was glad that she got to see someone appreciating her work. 

Sweet night. Painting. Music from the age of Charles V on the CD player.

Hit and Run

 

April 24, 2026

Spring returns. Black iris a shock in the front yard. Tree peony wane and herbaceous peony come to the fore. First pale yellow roses, first flat pink climbing roses in the near shade, wild white thorn in utter shade. Even as I type in the attic, perfume wafts through the little window. 

By means of the security cameras watched the cleaning ladies pick at the flowers on the front porch. Couldn’t hear what they were saying, which was a disappointment. They waited until I got home (I usually wait for them to be gone, but my timing was off) so they could talk with me after, by their calculation, a year. They told me how lovely my house and garden are, pointed out loose bricks in the stairway, said how well I look, and complained about the unreasonable client who was their next stop. It would never occur to me to try to negotiate downward a workman’s fee. They wondered if I collect antiques. I didn’t know how to answer. I have antiques and so must have, in a sense, collected them, but I never thought of it that way. Need a bowl? Get an old one. 

Got buzzed by an old black pick-up last evening as I drove to chorus. Its muffler was shot, so loudly and aggressively it wove through lanes on Patton Avenue, trying to inch ahead of traffic. I was stopped at the first traffic light west of the Smoky Park Bridge, looking at the cars stopped a little ahead at the second one. The pick-up wheeled around me, cut the red light, and in five seconds hit the car in front of me with considerable force. The back of the car disintegrated, while the pick-up reversed, found a new angle, and took off through the red light, having committed a hit and run. I waited for somebody to get out and check on the driver, but I was first in line, so I realized it was me. I got out and ran (as much as I can run) toward the wreck. The driver was visibly unhurt, but stunned and disoriented. He was either very stunned indeed or was Hispanic and didn’t understand what I said. He looked at the back of his car, struggling to comprehend. Patton Avenue, especially at that hour, is the busiest street in Asheville, so I knew I couldn’t leave my car where it was. Another driver and I kicked the largest and pointiest debris to the side of the road, and I got back in the car and drove on, over the remaining debris, which I assumed would shred my tires, but seems not to have. Cars going around us shouted ugly things about getting out of the way. When I got to St George’s I called the police, and when I got home received a call asking for details. I knew how incredibly unhelpful my testimony must have been. What kind of truck? No, I couldn’t read the license. . . all I had was the blackness and scruffiness of it, and that fact that its muffler was shot. It must have been bashed in considerably at the front, by I didn’t actually see that. The cop on the phone was very pleasant. As I drove on, I had to remind myself that I hadn’t been the one in the wreck.

Dug weeds and grass from the iris bed, then put in zinnia seeds and watered. While I watered, a cock robin came and stood in the spray. He dug for worms a little, but mostly stayed for the spray, and moved to follow the spray when I moved it. Spent a length of time providing cok robin with a shower. As I worked in the garden, a rabbit grazed unconcerned ten feet away. 

My father’s hoe finally broke, as I was tugging on bamboo. It broke right at the head, so is still usable as a staff and a hand cultivator. 

Rehearsal was unexpectedly merry. 

Huge fire in the River District.

 

April 21, 2026

Removed covers from the plants I covered last night against the frost, which apparently didn’t happen. Perhaps they felt looked-after regardless of the need. 

Coffee with TB at Riverside. T has no need for employment, which means he can spend all his time worrying about his writing and being a writer, which is the sadder because he is not good at it. He blames his failure at innumerable schools and with innumerable applications on everything but that. I finally had to stop writing him recommendations, having run out of ways to do so while at once telling the truth and attempting not to disadvantage him. How long can you hope someone has potential, and claim it for him without evidence? I thought that would end our relationship; apparently it did not, or only for a while. Affirmative action and DEI are his present enemies, excluding him as a straight white male in order to accommodate any number of less talented people of color. I do not doubt that this is an actual issue– I have faced it myself– but it's not helping to dwell on it to the extent he does. He’s getting his painful depression under control with a battery of self-prescribed botanicals, medical professionals having failed him. It’s the same litany from eight years back, and one feels equally helpless to be of assistance. Dogs came as we talked to me and not to him. I thought that meant something. 

The lamp my mother covered with tiles during her mosaic phase lit my desk at UNCA, and languished at riverside after my retirement until I rescued it yesterday and set it in my living room, lit again after nearly six years.

Peculiar anguish after AVLGMC meetings. I am doing no good. I am having no effect. When I was at Boy Scout Summer Camp, there’d come a time when we’d plan Skit Night. We’d decide on a funny little story, develop a script, think of songs we could perform, or adapt, to move the story along. We’d make costumes and find bowls to give us bosoms and somebody somehow would have a tube of lipstick. The more knowing among us would compose tiny Broadway shows for us to star in, everybody cooperating in the spirit of fun & comradery. On Family Night, when our parents came to visit, we’d put on the show. Though it wasn’t very good in any objective sense, we liked doing it and our audience liked witnessing it, taking exuberance and good fun as sufficient for a night’s entertainment. We were good because the people who wished us well wanted us to be good, and took our every effort as an actual achievement. What happy memories! I’m less comfortable with that process now. With the differences of better performances and a good deal more money, this is PRECISELY what happens with AVLGMC shows. (can’t really call them concerts) today, and there looks to be no deviation from that, or modification to it. What we did at camp was oh so relatable (to use Thomas’s word) but is to be relatable the only virtue we’re aiming for? Can we sometimes be challenging or transformative? Can we sometimes teach as well as satisfy? Could we exceed expectation as well as indulge it? Can we imagine that improving our range and skill as performers may, in some way, please and serve our audience?  Time grows short, and I have planned more than my share of Summer Camp Skit Nights.

Fretted over this until I realized how little it matters to the onward flow of things. It mattered in the moment.

Skinks

 April 19, 2026

Almost 90 yesterday, almost freezing today, with a stiff, petulant wind. Tiny, unforthcoming rain barely enough to wet the pavement.  

The reading at the Black Mountain Center for the Arts was better than I expected. What an odd thing poetry is! I’ve dedicated my life to it, and should be more articulate on its behalf. What is it? It’s something that happens to words to brighten and sharpen them beyond their ordinary force. Why is the poet not king of the world? Because every warden of the Kingdom of Poetry misdefines it and conceals its power. Even your teacher tells you, “write about how you feel today,” as though lacing on your boots were the whole of the journey. Some of the student poets were quite good, some were not– the same spread detectable in the “professionals”– yet I believe the value in the effort of composition to have been roughly the same in every case. A poem is a victory over confusion, though of course some victories are more consequential than others, some include the listener while others are for the poet alone. Poems that intentionally take up causes are invariably bad. A, whom I have missed since he moved to Virginia, is performative (I wonder if that’s the word I want?) in the sense that all is effect, designed to illicit immediate recognition and response from an audience. He is good at it, and has made a living at it. My poetry– I recognized as I was at the podium reading it–is exploratory, probing into unknown spaces, hungry for revelation, as is nearly all the poetry I prize as a reader. The response to my work was, in any case, electrifying, gratifying, and I ended up being glad I took the gig.  Several invitations to read elsewhere. I knew my words were different when I sent them ringing into the air. I continue to be the last poet. 

Meeting at church to reveal that first stage of rebuilding– long delayed, it seems to me. I’d planned to attend, but didn’t, assuming my presence would change nothing and merely being informed seeming, at this point, frivolous. I’ve never needed to be informed when I wasn’t instrumental. 

First skinks appeared on the porch last week. They huddle in their caves today. 

 April 17, 2026

Huge gardening day. Hollyhocks in the street garden. Nicotiana tabacum in a cedar planter on the front porch.  Angel’s trumpet in the back. Much watering against this blistering drought. Filled the watergarden, raised slightly the level in the pond. A squirrel got in through the bear’s tear in the screen and confronted me in the kitchen. Tonight’s task is to choose poems for tomorrow’s reading in Black Mountain. When the question of what to wear to the reading went through my head, I thought first of a blue Nehru jacket I had when I was a junior in high school. I must have thought I looked good in that. 

Brown Thrashers

 

April 16, 2026

Two mice huddled in the kitchen trash bin this morning. It was absolutely empty, but for them. What were they thinking? Were the memories of scraps so strong the absence of scraps did not dissuade them?

Drinking from my Meissen cups for the first time. Wonderful coolness, slimness, an unexpected luxury.

Kept awake Monday night after the AVLGMC meeting by anxiety over same, the way we fall into cliches and are pleased to identify them as traditions. I compose a screed against our reflexive adoration of drag, and am unexpectedly supported on several sides. 

Lunch with SS, who knows everybody. His cynicism concerning the art scene is unexpectedly comforting: my failures are not the fault of my attainment, but of a corrupt apparatus. It sounds like sarcasm, but the comfort (and the recognition that it is mostly true) are real. Purification bumps toward achievement. Can’t wait to meet the actors he so vividly describes. 

Despite the lack of rain, my garden in glory. Mostly peony and iris. Planted giant callas yesterday, and expect ro set up environments for Venus fly-traps today. Exhaustion follows intense gardening, but not the shortness of breath and immediate debility of last season. 

Extended and intense dreams. 

Was in excellent voice at church choir last night, for a change.

The brown thrashers are back.   

Inexpressible relief that my podcast interview with B today was by Zoom, and I didn’t physically have to trudge downtown. It went well, except that I was unprepared and kept answering “I don’t know” to things. 

Cleaned off the east porch, so now it is fully living area. It’s the first time the door between the living room and the east porch is usable since I moved in. Why do things happen one day rather than another?   

I think Kristina and I would be an item had we met thirty years earlier. 

 April 12, 2026

Orban loses in Hungary. Does the tide turn? 

Tree peonies as big as I am. 

Picked up a brush and began to paint, felt anxiety leave my body like waves down a beach. 

April 11, 2026

Days of happy garden labor, and exhaustion coming on too soon for much writing or painting. 

The cold I caught drifting down the Elbe prevented me from singing at AVLGMC rehearsal.  

Smear of blood on the comforter this morning. Need to switch to black. 

A single turkey hen takes refuge in my garden. Is she an outcast? Did she lose her babies and has nothing to do? 

My garden is blessed with rabbits. One who grows vegetables would not say such a thing. 

Critique of the cruise: I have definite and specific memories of the cruise, but general and hurried ones of the lands we passed through. Praise of the cruise: I thought I’d be rather solitary, but I was popular, and invited to and sought out at table.  Maybe because I was the only one who didn’t have stories to tell of previous cruises. 

Argument for reincarnation: few days go by when some sad memory from my past arises, and I suddenly understand what it all meant, and what I should have done, and didn’t do. That is a waste of time– perhaps a cruelty–unless there is some opportunity to put late-gained wisdom to effect. 

 

April 8, 2026

My stock losses passed $90,000 when I was away and not looking. They’ve turned around slightly, though still almost everything is in the red.  

Woke last night to a loud rustling that was clearly inside the house. After tamping down my terror, I investigated, to find that a mouse had gotten into the birdseed bag and couldn’t get out. The birdseed was treated with hot pepper, which was supposed to make it unattractive to mammals. Out the door under the misty moon went seed and mouse and all.

 

April 7, 2026

Recalling that a return from Europe gives me a period of early rising– which was better when I was working, but still useful now. This morning before light I saw a rabbit shape under the hollies, silhouetted against the faint gleam from the street. This afternoon two big rabbits played in the west yard, sparring a little and then leaping over one another’s backs.

Heavy day of gardening– industrial removal of bamboo, planting of one of the boxes that accumulated in my absence– this time day lilies, dried out but, I think, viable. 

Reading at Swann’s Way. I was going to take it on the cruise, but feared the book was too fat and would be a burden. I’m impatient with Marcel while admiring the fineness of his observation. 

Mailman delivered the pent-up mail. I leafed through to see if there were anything dire or exciting, and there wasn’t, except news from the Buncombe County tax people that my house appraises at $614,000. I wonder if it does, or if that is a fiction to increase taxes. 

Tomas and the bartender were the only actual Europeans (other than our guides) that I managed to meet at any depth. It’s all fine. I’m glad I went and glad to be home. 

 April 6, 2026

The security people in the European airports were mightily interested in my swollen legs. One guys rubbed and rubbed, as though his fingers were going to work everything out. I should have been patient, but I was angry. My curses weren’t sotto voce enough, and he must have heard. 

I asked Alexa, “Did you miss me?” She answered, “I don’t experience time the way you do, but I’m glad you’re back.”

Ostersonntag

 

April 5, 2026

Easter Sunday. 

The flights were endless but otherwise uneventful. Ten hours between Frankfort and Fort Worth managed to be whittled down by one movie after another, only the lightest and least demanding fare. Watched Merrily We Roll Along.  I could see why it bombed its Broadway debut. The reboot was tolerable because of the energy of fully committed performers selling as hard as they could. A successful composer bewails what in his life remains imperfect regardless of the success: self-referential, narcissistic, exposition-heavy, almost incapable of arousing sympathy for the main character, of interest now primarily to those who are as interested in Sondheim as he was in himself. One side (channel? track?) of my earphones malfunctioned, so I heard only select parts of the films, the soundtrack but not the dialog of How to Train Your Dragon; not one word from the witches in Wicked but every syllable from Michele Yeoh; I saw the movie, but never heard Daniel Radcliff sing, or any of the others who happened to be standing by the wrong mic.  

Talked with a TSA agent at Passport Control at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport.

“Have they paid you yet?” I say.

She answers, “A little. The bare minimum. Just in time. I thought I was going too lose my house.”

I am. . . we are all. . . so sorry.”

“Thank. I appreciate you saying that.” 

She was a black woman with the most stunning green eyes. 

On the drive home, Billy asked me about the trip, the first time I had to reflect on it. I had a good time. Arrived home as I hoped I would before midnight, so I could have Easter in my own space, the wet, quiet dark, with the fragrance that only then I recognized as my own garden.

Certain things must be dealt with, first the catastrophic failure of my body. I limped along the neverending airport corridors sometimes literally crying with pain and frustration. At one point a man driving one of those motorized carts stopped for me, and I literally could not lift myself into the vehicle. I was the first out of the plane and last to make it to the luggage carousel. Have I let myself go? Can this be amended by stretching, by walking? By working out? By getting better shoes? I’m used to the pain of movement lessening with repetition, but this time it got worse, from not bad to all to literally unendurable. At every step my bones uttered, “We will never do this again.” Is it encroaching age, and nothing can be done? That would be odd. That would be unlike the balance of my experience. This morning I felt perfectly well, so at least the effects do not linger. I felt well, I correct, but for the jet-lag that hits me this side of the ocean, and prevents me from staying off the bed for more than a few hours.

Considered going to church. Did not. Watered my planets. Wandered in the garden enough to know that beautiful things have happened: the dogwoods have bloomed, and the bluebells, and my ferns have come back from the devastation of the last freeze, and the miraculous pond pump pours out a stream three times the volume it was when I left it, the motor inhabited by a wilful spirit. 

Fully unpacked. The Meissen survived the ride back in my checked luggage, as its meticulous packing by the girl in the shop suggested it would. 

Wakening bears overturned the trash bin but could not get through the bear-proof lid. I should write a testimonial. 

At exactly the right moment I opened a door and found the ancient cardboard rabbit cut-out with which mother used to decorate Easter. I put him up, to preside over festivities, such as they were, for perhaps the first time in sixty-five years. 

Berlin

April 3, 2026

Good Friday. Bright sky, wintery cold. I’ve tried to be mindful of the sacredness of the day through sightseeing and fitful naps and episodes at the Greek restaurant across the street. Good Friday in the city which was the cross upon which half the world was crucified. No one alive in Berlin today is responsible for that. No one alive in Berlin today can fully escape that. Forsythia branches are hung with colored eggs. Too many sights for a single day– when all I really wanted to do was wander through the Tiergarten, lying tantalizingly just down the street.

John appeared in the lobby after five. We drank in Marlene’s and not so much went over old times as tried to catch up on the new. 

Potsdam

April 2, 2026

Frost on the banks, twisting mists from the surface of the waters. 

Beautiful land between Wittenberg and Potsdam, twisted dark forests that reveal Friederich to have been a realist. Potsdam hugely elegant, sophisticated and expensive. Turned loose for lunch, we found My Keng Vietnamese on Brandenberger S, one of the very best restaurant’s I have ever eaten at, tiny as a hotel room. I don’t see how one managed actually to live in Sans Souci, pretty as it was. The nature room delighted me. Frederick the Great deserves more notice in the arts than he has received, I wanted to wander in the park identifying birds. Bought a tiny volume dedicated to Franz Marc. 

Now in a magnificent room in the magnificent Intercontinental in Berlin. Topkapi. Wish I had more time here than the 1 ½ nights given to us.  

Sometime during the bus ride I decided that this would not be my last journey, and I began making a list in my head of future destinations. 

 

Wittenberg

 April 1, 2026

Wittenberg. The Door of the Theses, St Mary’s, the Mother Church of the Reformation with its haunting Cranachs. Gray and then blazing blue skies. Quick snack in a friendly café, where I managed to order in German. Leg pain like a bucket of cold water dashed in the face, but all right now that I’m sitting. 

Ich will nach hause.

Goodbye toasts and rounds of applause for staff and crew. 

Full moon arising in glory over the Elba.

Ich will nach hause.