Nylon Fusion

 

June 7, 2025

Email from Nylon Fusion in New York:

NyLonFusion <ny.lon.fusion@gmail.com>

Fri, Jun 6, 7:37 PM (12 hours ago)

Hello David- GOOD NEWS! Thank you for submitting.

We’d like to present Roses and Violets as part of our festival-on June 27-28 at Tada! 15 West 28th. 

I can put you in contact with team if all is good with you. 

I look forward to hearing from you. 

The festival will have new plays by John Patrick Shanley, Lyle Kessler (orphans) and Migdalia Cruz (fur) 

Ivette 

I looked at the play after receiving the news. I wish it were longer. On the bill with me are Migdalia Cruz, John Patrick Shanley, and Lyle Kessler, who turn out to be famous people. 

Trimmed the droopy-down big-flowered magnolia. Trimmed the mulberry branches that extended out into the street and whacked cars as they passed.  Weeded mightily in the beyond-the-fence garden

The loud crash last evening– I thought a car had hit the back of the house-- turns out to be a bear pushing over the (quite empty) garbage bin. They still maraud, but by night, like little gangsters, so one doesn’t have the pleasure of seeing them. 

Booked flights to and accommodations in New York.

Deerfield

 June 6, 2025

Concert at Deerfield last night, more nearly a success than one expected. My voice was 70% clear. Appreciative audience. They seemed– the choristers too-- to appreciate my readings of Millay and Shakespeare in particular. One wasn’t sure they would. R said the poems were the highlight of the evening. I argued for master poems because the original suggestion was for spoken-word testimonials from us choristers concerning love, the thought of which made me cringe. We’d never dream of doing songs we’d written for ourselves (knowing they would be, largely, terrible) but poetry is apparently an amateur sport, wherein everyone has equal say. Sincerity counts in art only if technique has already been mastered. Fought hard, and in the test there was victory. Many people came to talk with me, including the mother of a former student –SW– who said she recognized my name immediately because I had changed her son’s life, and he mentioned me often. He mastered Chinese practically on his own, and now teaches in Taiwan. In the lobby of the Community Center at Deerfield is a huge vitrine housing exotic finches, at least one of which has tiny golden fuzzy babies with their heads sticking out of the nesting hole. 

Trump and Musk hissy-fitting like schoolgirls. Anything that weakens this presidency is good for the future. 

 June 4, 2025

Meditated on the back porch last night until the stars came out. The Big Dipper hangs directly over my garden. 

The chorus of cicadas softens. Bits of them, wings, hollowed out bodies, severed heads, lie everywhere. Every other spadeful of dirt while I’m gardening buries a body. 

Flickers gathering ants (I suppose) from the grass. One stopped every now and them to feed the other– father still doing his job even after the chick is fully his size. 

Three days now of quite heavy gardening, today the least of them, but still, progress. Fiddled with the pond.

Meditation

 

June 3, 2025

Madame Towhee is building a nest in the laurel tree. She flits around, gathering sticks and dry grass, conceals herself in the thick leaves and builds. My weeding has aided her in this, causing an abundance of dry stalks to be seasoned just right for the purpose. Is she repairing an old nest? Building a new one? How many broods do the towhees raise in a summer? She seems so happy at her labor. 

Transcendent night in meditation on the porch. I don’t remember getting to bed, but I surely did. 

 June 2, 2025

Last night was particularly dark. Magna nux animae. Again. So with some surprise I woke today with alacrity and seemingly inexhaustible energy. Were the concerts, or the thought of them, wearing me down? Hard to see why. Some demon passing in its own sweet time? Whatever the case, I rose and made the most of the day. Dug, spaded, weeded, put in three more small plots of 4 o’clocks, to try to do justice to the magnitude of seeds purchased without apparent forethought. GMC meeting, underlining the perception that I should never be part of something that moves forward gradually, needing to recap the last four steps before getting on to the next one. I do keep from screaming, and for that I give thanks. 

New vision for painting.

Whole scenes for my play waiting to be typed onto the computer.

 June 1, 2025

Parents’ 78th anniversary. 

Spring concert at St George, the one planned for AS last fall and wiped out by the hurricane. Though all the music was Baroque, copyright issues allegedly muted most of it from the You Tube feed. What I heard was disappointing. The soloists were wonderful, the audience was pleased, so all is well.

Disappointed and exhausted tonight. It has to be more than the concert. 

Eileen Goodnight

 May 31, 2025

The half & half I bought yesterday at the Fresh Market was soured. The first gulp of coffee was a bitter awakening that has not yet faded in memory.

A father downy woodpecker brings his chick to feed from the winter’s seed column. He pecks out a chunk, puts it in the baby’s moth. The baby is at least his size.

L texts that E died this afternoon. Spent time looking at an old photograph of the “S” grandkids. E is sitting on the ground smiling an enormous smile. Every one of the faces in the picture (except grandma and grandpa) stood at the open door of their life. None of us came through unscathed. It is possible– though my bitching and moaning about every little cross disguises the fact–that I knew the least tribulation. I hope every one of us would say that. It is a strange thing. One world fades. In twenty years, no one will know who those faces are. 

So exhausted after rehearsal that I went to bed. Woke in pale yellow of late rainy afternoon.