December 30, 2020

Received a greeting card from Governor Cooper.

Revision of An Age of Silver.

 

December 29, 2020

The actual price for Childhood is $1000.00. $800 for paperback, though I don’t remember there being a paperback. ABE books offers it for $2000. I have no idea of the math that went into this. Turns out I myself have only one copy. Hope it’s on the hard drive somewhere. 

Reading through OBN– “thought” for “though” and close quotes at the end of something that wasn’t a quote. But it does give me pleasure to read it, as I have observed before, as though I’d never seen it before. 

Paid off the Toyota with one mighty check. Biggest check I’ve written since I paid off 62. 

Cop murders– which is to say, murders committed by cops-- continue and continue. No one seems to come to what seems, barring the perfection of human character, the clear solution. The firearm. If it is at hand, it will be used. Make sure the cop does not leave the car with a weapon in his hand. Make sure he does not patrol the neighborhood or the playground with a weapon available. Make real penalties for conducting a traffic stop for a dead taillight or a wide turn with a weapon in hand. Make real penalties for drawing, ever, regardless of what the officer “thought,” on innocents, or those being merely “suspicious.” Make sure the weapon is defense and never intimidation. Cops have a hard time talking to civilians without a hand on their weapon. This is universal and almost unconscious intimidation, and penalties must make the offender mindful. Make sure the weapon is hard to get to, so he must think twice about using it, bypassing the instant reactions of panic and ego. The immediate outcry is But what about the officer’s safety? This will enhance officer safety. Frightened people will not assume, accurately, that contact with the police will likely prove fatal and therefore lose nothing in shooting first. What about citizen safety? Can you imagine a citizen barking to a cop, “Take your hand off that gun for my safety!” Every police jurisdiction should enact the law “Don’t kill anyone who is unarmed or who has, objectively, offered no threat to you,” and that the violation of that rule be treated as murder. Do pause long enough, officer, to approach objectivity. Take that extra second to decide if a cell phone is a gun, if a toy is a weapon. If you are too scared to be on the street, you need not be on the street. It should be easy enough not to shoot people. Just don’t do it. Just don’t do it. If you’re panicky or arrogant, leave the gun in the car until you actually need it. It is not your place to be obeyed.  It is NOT your duty to get home at night. It is not even my duty to get home at night. Our corporate duty is to look out for one another. Actually, truly, serve and protect, so we can stop sneering at the irony of those words.

Holy Innocents

 

December 28, 2020

Ice has closed the Parkway almost everywhere and in every direction, but I did manage to get to the Headquarters and Visitors’ Center (where I had never been) and follow a trail that leads from there to the MST, which I then followed for about fifteen feet before turning around. Cold, gray, overcast, the complexion of winter as I remember it from my youth. The advantage of going early and cold was that what was clearly mud yesterday had frozen solid, walkable. The mud immortalized the tread of the shoes of the last one who had passed. 

J says that Childhood in the Milky Way is $400 on Amazon. I could pay off my house, then, with the copies I have on the shelf. 

 

December 27, 2020

Morning light on the back of my head. Bach on CD. Have been dreaming enormously since retiring, the dreams tenacious; even getting up and going to the bathroom does not always interrupt the narrative. Last night I had applied to college, and the college was a colossal atrium, with all the classrooms surrounding a central space. It was exciting to stand in the center, hearing the hum of learning all about. It was a standard anxiety dream, in part. I’d registered for a particular course, and couldn’t find the room where it was held. The course was called “Yule.” Diane Zabik–of whom I have not thought since high school– found me and said, “David, the professor called your name and everything!” I transitioned from dreaming to thinking, and wondered if I would like to teach again. The answer was yes, under certain conditions. Still partially in the dream, I told Diane that colleges had gone from providing educations to selling degrees, and until that was reversed there would be friction between me and the system. That remained true when I stood full awake. Diplomas used to be the sign of wisdom–or at least expertise– acquired. Now they are purchased with as little regard to the training as the institution can get away with. I’m not sure most college administrators would even deny this. Everyone gets a trophy for participation. 

Spilled a bottle of vitamin D tablets, and decided to swallow all the ones which spilled. This was a mistake. Mildly nauseated all morning, a feeling just now easing away.

Bad ending to yesterday. It came from watching a renowned cast enact a filmed version of a play, whose mediocrity, blandness, and predictability they treated with solemn respect. Anything I have done would have been better. Anything. Yet there’s no work of mine with Maggie Smith and Tom Courtney and Michael Gambon featured on Netflix. I guess you could call this envy. Or you could call it amazement.

The INSTANT I finished writing the disgruntlement above, Facebook went “ding” and the following was messaged from K: Finished The One with the Beautiful Necklaces last night.   What a spectacularly beautiful book.   It needs multiple readings.  I look forward to returning to it. 

And from SS: “Beautiful” is the word. It’s in the title, it’s used more frequently in this book than any I’ve read before, and it earns all those “beauties.” Gotta admit, I found myself deeply resistant in the early going, because mystical/magical elements tend to repel me. But the story and the enormously appealing language kept me going till you beat down all of my defenses. Soon enough, I was completely won over. And, my god, the scope! The smooth movement through era after era, from one character’s rich, engaging story to another’s as rich or richer. I loved so many of these people you’ve conjured that, once I realized they would leave the story almost as quickly as they entered, I was a bit saddened: what happened next? But once I caught on to the internal rhythms, that bothered me not a jot. I was too busy being engaged by whom I met and what happened next. And it held not just beautifully but majestically all the way through. Also, more than even before with your work, I was soothed and comforted sentence by sentence. Once upon a time, I felt similarly about Robert Stone; though, in the last decade and a half of his work, I was far less taken with the novels overall than I was with, say, A Flag for Sunrise and, perhaps more than any other, Outerbridge Reach, I was still so taken with his sentences that they made me feel better no matter my mood. Your work, of course, is very different, as are the sentences, and yet they give me a similar feeling of having the world slowed down sufficiently for me to enter wholeheartedly into it. It’s a gift. So: bravo! And deepest thanks.

OK then. Never hurts to ask. 

Longish videos on You Tube of driving around Akron at various times in the past. Mostly I know where they are. 

 

December 26, 2020

St. Stephens Day. Wrote some before the light.  In a spasm of detective work I think I found most of the data wanted by the mortgage company. This is uncharacteristic behavior for me, who usually waits and frets and finally does it late in a flurry of resentment. My social security payments are remarkably small. There must be a reason for that. Some interchange of waking and sleeping made me think it was a day later than it is. Joy to find it is only Saturday, the day after Christmas. Drove the car into a sunny spot and let the sun thaw it out for me. Nearly berserk with entering user’s name and passwords, not knowing them, extracting them from the site in an agony of application and redirection. This affliction is likely to increase with time rather than lessen. 

 

December 25, 2020

Feast of the Nativity. Snow began late last night, but with such ferocity that a white Christmas was assured in half an hour. Great whirls of it against the street light, cars spinning their tires trying to get up Lakeshore. What I did upon waking was get out the colored pencils and begin to draw. In five minutes I was back in artist mode, and the change of medium didn’t seem to matter so much. Minutes with the pencils taught me things I didn’t learn from the facility of oil. Fed the birds. Fried a pork chop. Made hot chocolate for myself from scratch for the first time in forty years. Watched the birds that used the dogwood outside the window as a stop before the feeder. That was my Christmas. I was perfectly happy.

Red-shouldered hawk

 

December 24, 2020

Red-shouldered hawk perched on the wire opposite the window where I was typing. He looks a little redder than the photos on the Internet which mean to identify him. A bold, decorative animal. The weather was so bad the crows left him alone, and as I watched through the binoculars I saw him shake rainwater off his feathers.

A dismay of the season is how many composers make bank from ruining Christmas music, adding a discord there or a momentarily interesting rhythm there and calling it an arrangement. There are certain situations in which one does not long for novelty.

This is the first Christmas Eve in 33 years when I will not be singing at the Cathedral. It is a loss, though being able to sit on my house looking at the festive lights while sleet storms whirl is a blessing. 

Went to REI to buy a sports watch. While I was there, my mortgage rep phoned with an offer of a reduced rate, etc, and there I stood among the sleeping bags relating intimate financial information. December 24 will be from now the day when my insurance is renewable and the day when that refinancing hell began again. He kept asking me how much money I make. I truly, honesty don’t know without rifling through papers. The last refinancing was less than a year ago. I signed the forms just before I went to Ireland.  While I was at the story a crazy lady came and wanted to shop without a mask (I think that was the issue), and there was terrible conflict at the door. 

I am as happy–or at least as without anxiety– as I have been for many Christmases past. I sheltered in place, and the sheltering was productive. I take an hour each morning after waking and before rising to inject by imagination the tenderness that was lacking in my actual life. It has made a difference. I scarcely dare look at old journals of Christmas, for I was always miserable. I am not miserable tonight.