April 9, 2017

Palm Sunday felt festive this time, with the undercurrent of dread, which it is meant to have. The music was good. Rushed from church to school to set up for my students’ senior readings. Everything went well there, too, except that in the midst of each reading I fell asleep and was awakened at the end by the applause. No one mentioned it, so maybe I got away with it. Have been enjoying Cantaria rehearsals, perhaps because of Simone’s greater precision, perhaps because we are, after a long drought, doing decent music. Supper with DJ at Avenue M.

April 8, 2017

Theater last night with Sam, Peter and the Starcatcher, a lively and satisfying production, many of my friends on stage. The show depends unusually on charismatic cast, and luckily had it. Staggering in the parking lot with exhaustion.

Saturdays are the best days. Rose early, had my cappuccino at High Five, went to the Tailgate Market (where I bought $25 worth of worms for the raised beds. $25 gets you a thousand worms, the man said) and then to the studio. Painted briefly, well. Came home and dug and planted for the balance of the day. Many square feet of new planting beds, and into the ground with a selection of exotic arisaema (tried this before, failed; more careful this time), cornflower, touch-me-not (which I remember from my father’s garden), black sunflower, cosmos. Less tired than I was yesterday after doing nothing.

At the café I pondered the realization that I may never have “followed my dream” because I hadn’t precisely settled on one. Since the first I wandered toward the light, thinking that going in the right direction with all deliberate speed would reveal the proper course. I wrote poetry without considering what it would be like actually to be a poet. I went to grad school without considering how it would feel to be a scholar. I walked onto a hundred stages without any firm idea of being an actor. I began writing for the stage without much though of BEING a playwright. Was this a mistake? I thought the universe would appreciate my keeping an open mind about these things, my doing without specific attachment to the outcome of the deeds. I want to say “it doesn’t seem to have worked out very well,” but maybe if I had determined on a set identity, my sorrow at failure would be keener and sharper than this vague, gray sense of disappointment. What was it I wanted anyhow? To find the way, I suppose.

April 7, 2017

Readings yesterday in the Glass House. Local school poets were funny and inventive. My colleagues were. . . I don’t know. . . my mind was somewhere else, and I was fighting massive chest muscle cramps that made it hard to breathe. Got through “YMCA”; people seemed to like it. Fought reading The Awakening for years. My class made me read it, and it is quite good, despite being, thematically, pretty much what I expected. Outside is terrible wind. It’s supposed to get worse as the day goes. My wind chimes are frantic out in the dark garden. Our VP has pulled out of Cantaria because he likes his Sundays and “would rather enjoy them uninterrupted.” Someone must have looked at him sideways; we’re trying to decide whom. People can be such asses. Outstanding, besides poetry and fiction, at the Glass House was the level of hatred aimed at the Boy, who is on sabbatical now and cannot feel it as he ought. All my new planting is seeds, which are not going to be hurt by this inclemency, unless they’re blown right out of the ground.

April 4, 2017

One of those great days when everything gets done and everything gets done well. Coffee at High Five, accidental contact with TD, still (like me perhaps) beating the waves of hopeless ambition. Then off to the studio where I painted well and happily. Tiny animal portraits for framing. Then most of the day spent gardening, digging new fragments of beds, filling containers, gradually getting into the ground the mass of annuals, bought last fall: nasturtium, alyssum, yellow lupine, black violas, red achillea, spearmint, a big orange annual daisy plopped down in a vast blue urn. Never sleepy, never particularly spent. Not even a nap. The only thing that didn’t get done was writing.

April 3, 2017

Baroque recorder music from the kitchen below. Heavy rain, straight into the ground, chilly, wishing it were a winter rain.

My voice is back, and, allowing some hoarseness, gets through whatever I need it to get through. Great Praise. In Cantaria rehearsal we belabored our customary jazz-pop standards, and then pulled out Bibel and Cassals. The difference was immediate. At the end of the hour I felt that I’d had fun, that I’d accomplished and learned. Jack said, “That hour just flew by.” I searched my understanding for the difference. I don’t think it’s just that I reflexively favor “Classical” music; I think the serious music we do is probing, exploratory, necessary expressive of an artist’s spiritual and aesthetic quest. Most of the pop music we do is a second level arrangement of what is already a second level composition, made to make an impression and therefore a buck in the crowded pop market. Do people like it? Probably. Ought they to? Another question entirely.

April 1, 2017

Someone banged on the door while I was watching TV, and by the time I answered was a running blur in a yellow jacket at the end of the driveway. Worried a little until I remembered it was April Fools night. Second time that’s happened, though the first time was a pair of girls.

Sam and I intended to see the play at UNCA last night, but it was, remarkably, sold out.

My Mexican yard guy appeared and apologized for vanishing at the end of last year (I hadn’t noticed). He had photos of the wreck of his truck, which had prevented him from mowing the lawns he had contracted to mow. I said yes, welcome back, but wondered if I should have paid him immediately (He’s very bad at billing) or helped him buy a new truck, the replacement looking like it itself had been in a wreck. He is apparently bad at everything except mowing the lawn.

Planted johnny jump-ups in the open space gouged by the men putting in the new sewer, Might not get enough sun.

Huge progress on the Hiram book, The Book of the Roses, which I had actually not intended to write. I take out huge once-precious passages, but the text seems always to be just as long as it was.

March 31, 2017

Extreme clamminess, and odd feeling all about me. The Internet says the feeling of cold clamminess is probably related to anxiety, but I cannot locate any particular anxiety.

Hauled myself through “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” unsuccessful in my determination not to weep. My poor students.

Staggering with iron deficiency. Buy a new bottle of iron pills. Oddly, planting he final new tree peonies (total cost with shipping over $200) does not seem to exacerbate it. Anemia is a diseases which doesn’t hurt, and I should be grateful for that. Well, the cramps brought on by dehydration hurt mightily. Anyway--