My Country, 'Tis of Thee

 

July 3, 2022

Maud howled a howl I’d never heard from her before. When I went to her, she was looking out the guest bedroom window, but whatever she’d seen had disappeared.

Made pasta salad for the Independence Day picnic at All Souls, though I haven’t decided yet at this hour whether I will actually attend. 

Relief of rain in the last few days. The downpour reveals where the gutter guy messed up, or where some other issue has arisen. 

Eyes sore from– something.

Later: My pasta salad turned out to be just this side of disgusting. Sometimes things just don’t work. All day people remarked on how everyone who knew the identity of the new Dean was sworn to secrecy. I’m not usually the possessor of forbidden knowledge. It feels goofy, like a passage in a book. But it is gratifying to know that so many care so genuinely. 

We got to sing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”

Maud was howling at a cat and her five kittens who, when I saw them, were cavorting under the truck. If they are here Tuesday, when the shelter opens, I’ll try to scoop them up. 

 July 2, 2022

Very rough evening. Sleepless night. Woke in need of an aspirin.

 

July 1, 2022

Posed in various changes of apparel for Alan’s photography webpage. He figured he had to balance out the exotic young women wrapped in tulle. 

 June 30, 2022

Late morning, fan at my back. Weeded and watered the front before the full blaze came upon us. Driving a Dean candidate around to see the sights. One doesn’t understand until times like this how little there is to see in Asheville if you want neither to shop nor to hike. Blocked by a fallen tree on the Parkway, so there was some excitement.

 June 27, 2022

Daniel flew to NYC for the weekend, and is trapped there by cancellations and other ineptitudes of Southwest Airlines. Confirms my impulse not to travel for a while yet.  J had attended the AVLGMC concert, and I asked him how we sounded. He said generally good, except for the balance problem that is-- always and perpetually– caused by W trying to oversing everybody. 

 

June 26, 2022

Watched Emma Thompson’s Effie Gray on Netflix last night. Like Bright Star, a way to enlarge the role of a woman who may have been significant–or may have been incidental–in a great man’s life. Ruskin gets, I think, a raw deal. Regarding women, I always believed he was more squeamish than cruel. Thompson was clearly handing opportunities to her star, with long, lingering close-ups that allowed–rare in contemporary cinema–for actual plays of emotion. The night before, I watched one with Michelle Pfeiffer, Jack Nicholson, and Christopher Plummer. It was a werewolf movie, so its solidity did not lie in the plot so much as in the sheer pleasure of watching really good actors work and interplay. Where everybody is piloting jets or throwing thunderbolts, you don’t get that so much. Nicholson could portray the edge of violence by raising an eyebrow. He could portray equanimity by failing to raise that eyebrow. Pfeiffer was a steel dagger in a silken scabbard. 

Pulled Dreamflight at least temporarily out of mothballs after ten years. An extraordinary portion of the energy of the text was spent in excoriating the then much-hated David Godine. 

 June 25, 2022

Great, agitated din of crows in the morning. The anemone bed is pressed down where a bear struggled to get through the gate. I usually leave it open for just that reason, though Tony closed it when he was mowing. 

Finished the revision of Songs Strong Against the Powers of the Air. The parts I removed were as removable as a marble from a bowl of Jello. 

Before the Holy Temple is on stage this very moment in Wisconsin. I look at my publication history and try to explain the gap, then realize that for twenty years I did almost nothing but plays, which, for the moment at least, disappear into the trackless ether.