February 7, 2020

Took art bought at Blue Spiral down from my office walls for the AGMC silent auction. You do accumulate in 37 years. 80% of my voice back. Michael must add his idiotic movements, like a man who passes through a gallery and must add a pink heart at the base of every painting.  We look like codgers at a rest home trying to be adorable.

Brought my mother’s frog planter home from the studio, gave it a good wash. The yellow of its flowers is gone, but it glows its own old malachite, It makes me happy to see it there. Mother put in pink flowers she got from father’s garden, until he would grow a garden no more.

This rain, cold rain, makes me glad I had Circe cremated. I could not stand to think of her in the cold ground with the winter rain around her.

February 6, 2020

Most unaccountable and ceaseless rain.

Read my last set of senior comprehensives. Only one was really good, but none was an outright failure.  As noted above, some astonishing gaps.

All but driven mad by the string of crises connected to Will’s re-financing. The bank is being absurdly petty, but, at the same time, Will customarily plays fast and loose. It may not have caught up with him in any other circumstance. Trying to write, but anxiety about the next phone call, the next knock at the door interferes.

Bought euros for Ireland and Greece.

February 5, 2020

Yet, at the back of my mind is the discovery that my creative writing students didn’t know who Thomas Wolfe, James Joyce, Percy Shelley, Plato, Virginia Woolf James Fenimore Cooper, or Dwight Eisenhower were. One remembered vaguely the Cyclops, but no one else had read The Odyssey, or heard of Ulysses. They thought that stream of consciousness was when there was no structure to the writing. I got into huge trouble in the Humanities by insisting that sometimes a student should be taught something in particular, and that it was our duty to teach that.

February 4, 2020

Caught between Will’s re-financing and my own, resulting in a flurry of irritating phone calls. Mine will be easy, finally, but his snags on a variety of corners he cut. Though the paperwork showed he should pay me something like 1209 a month, he rounded down to 1200. I didn’t care, but the people hammering put his re-financing apparently do. It is a lesson I hope they let him learn and move on. For one thing, I have gotten used to the idea of receiving a big fat check when he buys me out. Good creative writing class this AM. We all wrote on an image one of us brought of a dirty diaper with a cigarette snuffed in it, in front of an optician’s on Patton Avenue. They did better on that than the material they’d actually prepared for class.

February 2, 2020

Brigid the Blessed.

Mostly read Narnia for class discussion tomorrow. Allowed myself to forget how wonderful they are.

Went to the studio and removed some necessary possessions, finally acknowledging that era is over. The water had mostly dried from the floor.

Revised In the Paramount Hotel.

All this day I was happy.

February 1, 2020

Worked early in the morning, theater beginning to flow again.

Renewed the literary blog that I keep neglecting.

Sang for Jones Byrd’s funeral. Huge event, the church and two overflow rooms full. Southern lawyers invited to speak, the longest-winded people in the world.

Will takes me to see the house he wants to buy in Spooks Branch. I’m bemused (it’s smaller than the house he has now) but one wants what one wants.

Mired in a situation I have not known in forty years: bitter reluctance to address any of my schoolwork.

Maud makes caves in the comforter, sleeps like a bear out of sight.

January 31, 2020

Left rehearsal last night unable to sing a note. Throat not sore at all, just froggy. My low notes are now past the piano.

Snow visible through the study window, falling prettily.

Will sets things up to buy his new house on Spooks Branch, which involves paying me off for 62. It looks like I’m owed around $170,000. That will take me to Europe a couple of times.

I decide to re-finance 51 Lakeshore. Because everything is set up already, it appears that I have done so before the morning is out. The reduction is small, but small more than nothing. Refinanced my house and revised two plays before noon.