Monday, April 10, 2023

Holy Saturday

 

April 8, 2023

Holy Saturday

Enduring rain.

The brown thrashers have returned with their aggressive body language. Beauties. The male (I think) hammered away moments ago at something at the edge of the back garden.

The dogwoods outside my window make me think, upon waking, that it has snowed. The dogwood volunteer I pruned and left in the west garden bears its first flowers. 

JN has died. We met several times, and I liked her, but she was married to one my dearest high school friends, whose kindness and manliness (though that is a trait difficult to define) have stayed with me through the years. I remember the day he appeared among us in first grade. Michael and I were locker-mates in the eighth grade. He chose me. I couldn’t believe my luck. 


Saturday, April 8, 2023

Good Friday

 

April 7, 2023

Good Friday. 

Baking a potato last night, I discovered that the convection oven would not turn off and the house was heating up fast. Had to go downstairs and flip the circuit breaker. Assumed the stove was new when I moved in, but maybe not.

Horrific dream. A new professor, I couldn’t find my classroom and couldn’t get on line and couldn’t find any documents to help me, and when I finally found the room it was like a saloon and I had to lecture on the Gothic by shouting over drunks and boors. One young man whose dorm was nearby said I could lecture to the few who wanted to hear what I had to say in his room. 

Inevitably when I miss a service, this time Maundy Thursday, K Facebooks that it was the best the choir has ever done. Should send me a message. 

G has died, less than a month after his sister, of dementia and Parkinson’s, the obit said. G was the main character in my first published fiction, wherein I recounted the backyard football we used to play. I was G’s preferred receiver, because I had “great hands,” he said. Made me wonder what might have been had I been able otherwise to get onto the field. My other memory of him is when my friend Laurie and I brought a basket of baby mice to show him, and he threw them in the fire. 

Sang the Good Friday service. No one would say that was our finest hour, but I believed those who came to be moved were moved.

Foot in agony from faciaitis. 

Barrier-breaking painting of a bear standing at a spring roadside. 

Guy on Facebook says I was the best professor I ever had. Needed to hear it. 

Friday, April 7, 2023

Carol

 April 5, 2023

Carol has died.  During the Hiram year and thereafter I thought of her as my best friend, and though the feeling wasn’t reciprocal, it was warm and lasting. D writes from Hiram: Her leaving was unexpected. Late Covid became pneumonia, as well as riling up long term rheumatoid arthritis. Her daughter Karen said yesterday that she went "peacefully but not passively." Al died 4 years ago (on Christmas Day) and she had become quite reclusive. I had known her for 63 years, taught with her, enjoyed her as a colleague and fellow troublemaker. It's strange to have entered the stage of oldness where we are lined up at the door just waiting for the call.

Wrote abundantly by the river, and watched a man playing with his dog. K appeared with a big, dark man I mistook as her husband, but whom she introduced as a new Board member. I got shot out of that organization as soon as New Year’s Day passed. It’s OK. It’s gone down a path of goofy, where I cannot follow. She congratulated me on a production I still don’t know that I have. 

Tony’s giant son mowed the yard today, with a woman I think is his mother, though she looks very young. They were going to creep away without being paid. 


 


April 4, 2023

K does his best to justify Mrs Beach’s crappy Mass. We walk out of rehearsal into the weird bath of a full moon. A woman who used to work in the hospital prophesied a full emergency room. Third night with no alcohol. 


 April 3, 2023

Dream of visiting New York, a vast and more spacious New York, where snow fell but I was comfortable in short sleeves. One vendor at a street fair carried two books only: The Falls of the Wyona and Pound’s The Cantos.


 April 2, 2023

Palm Sunday. Read the St Matthew Passion at three services. Asked Alexa to wake me a 6:00. She did not. I woke in full daylight and screamed “What time is it?” Alexa said, “It is 7:19 AM.” Zoomed down to Biltmore unshowered and unbathed to get there for the 7:45. Was moved when the earthquake began. The Gospel reading did get me out of the procession. Inflammation so bad I walked like a cripple. Better now. Flat cool beauty of spring. 

Watched a production of Jesus Christ Superstar deep into the night.

Wearing the shirt I wore for my first North Carolina Driver’s License photo.


 


April 1, 2023

Passion rehearsal at the crack of dawn.