Lenten roses

 

February 26, 2022

Jimmy Jackson died, a peripheral but enduring figure in my youth. His obit reads as though all his good humor and agreeableness rewarded him in life. 

Listening to Cecilia Bartoli. 

The box of The Ones with Difficult Names arrived. My intelligible but outsized fury over that subsided.

The card my Internet search prompted me to write to E hit pay dirt. The one I chose was the right one. He sends a card back today saying, “It’s been twenty-five years.” Felt it in my throat. I do not want him to send a photo. I do not want to link up on Facebook. I do not want to see his face, to know if he’s been a failure or a success. I remember that fatal night at the bar saying to the universe he is the one I will have. I did have him. The having of him must have supplied the universe with a great laugh, the greatest and bitterest of what I’m bold to call my love life. I thought at the end of it the catastrophe of all that would make love smooth sailing from then on. That must have been the loudest part of the laugh. Yet, I did want to hear from him, or I wouldn’t have sent the card. Maybe I assumed he just vanished when he didn’t have me to haunt.

Opened RG’s new novel randomly to the passage: “Do you know William Butler Yeats?” “Is he in our class?” Not promising.

The Lenten roses are in lovely bloom. 

 

February 25, 2022

Did a turn writing thank-you notes to people who had pledged. I picture the poor souls’ consternation when they try to decipher what I wrote. 

Tried to escape the cleaning lady by going to my office, but a giant delivery truck blocked the entire parking lot. Drove to the Woodfin Riverside Park, where huge rain made it best to stop and wait a while. I wrote a poem. It is uncomfortable writing in the car. When the rain slackened I found I was being visited by a beautiful black cock. He gleaned the wet earth a little, flapped his wings and crowed. The river had risen perceptibly when I continued on. 

Return call from my new mortgage people, responding to a call I made THREE DAYS AGO. 

 February 24, 2022

Angry day. All of my anger is specific and phenomenal. That doesn’t seem to make it easier. Maybe it does. 

Wind blew from the south, tattering and swirling clouds in various grays. Speeding from the north against the wind, and yet barely flapping their wings, came long-winged hawks, forty of them anyway, heading south. It was a moment of beauty and mystery. At the end of it I was still angry.

 

February 23, 2022

FICO score 745. One month it was 621. I had done nothing different one way or another, proving that these scores wander like deer in the forest. 

Voice too mucus-y to be any good at rehearsal.

2/22/22

 February 22, 2022

2/22/22. 

Unable to get down to a task through most of the day. Late in the afternoon I took to Bent Creek, at its last hurrah before it joins the French Broad. A woman wandered through the woods picking up pine cones, examining them, setting them down. I’m always amazed that there’s so few fish in Bent Creek, even in places where it would be a delight to be a fish. 

Grand-nephew

 February 21, 2022

Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump– what would it be like to know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the world would be improved by your vanishing from it? I dreamed last night of putting a hex on Russian war equipment, that nothing electronic would work. They’d charge into battle and a great silence reigned over the tundra. 

Vestry. Perrin spoke barely a word, in contrast to John, who held the floor, I would guess, 50% of the time. After every treasurer’s report I am reaffirmed in my lack of any interest whatever in accounting. How did my father do it? 

Call from Jonathan. He and Miriama are pregnant with a boy. He sent an ultrasound image. Confidentially, ultra sound images sicken me a little. As I thought of this driving home from church, the image came into my mind of a small boy with yellow hair and solemn eyes sitting on a porch swing. I realized this was my son, left unborn by the swirl of events. The grief and remorse of that moment cannot be put into words. Of course it is not my “fault,” but many thing not one’s fault nevertheless happened or failed to happen because of one’s choices. The sad little boy . . . .

 

February 20, 2022

Email this morning: Anyusha Schmitt <nickellcxtempiezy@outlook.com> 2:47 AM (5 hours ago)

to me

Hello there.)

It's really interesting for me to become acquainted with you.

So I have a wish to start our conversation.

I expect u and I will manage to build committed bond.Hopefully that you are trying to find long-term romantic bond so I decided to acquaint myself with a fellow via date matching site.

You know I have never tried such way of communicating.

I had in mand the idea that that men and women meet via internet dating relationship website only in a movie. Nevertheless I have heard that a lot of men and women were lucky to find their soulmate and I hope I will be in luck too.

I am an ordinary girl and I am hunting for an honest fellow. I want my man to be open and clearly I do not want him to cheat on me. Truthful feelings are too necessary for me. This is what I value and I want my beloved to do the same.

I am keen on comedies, thrillers, romantic movies and dramas. I really like 'Titanic', 'The Great Gatsby','Shawshank Redemption', 'Escape from Pretoria' and 'Catch me if you can'. I enjoy hiking, tenting, fishing, swimming and lying in the sun).

I think I 'm attractive, nevertheless I understand that it's a matter of taste. I am a white girl with light-coloured hair and gray-blue eyes. I 'm of a middle hight. I am quite slim. I am going to send pics of me in the next e-mail.

I will look ahead to a reaction enthusiastically from you.

Have a good day. Anusha

Respond to the poor girl and put her out of her misery? I am not, in fact, on a dating site, though the Internet seems to think I am. 

Was reading on the Internet of a mother and her boyfriend who tortured her eight year old son to death, trying to fathom the dark wing of cruelty that shadows the world. For one second, I dared to perceive the possibility that my having been essentially solitary all my life was God’s way of saving me from the infliction of horrors I probably cannot understand now. What if I’d had children and was cruel to them? What if I’d been a dark shadow from which souls strove to escape? What if there were people in the world (more than there are now, and with better reasons) who hated me with hatred renewed with every remembrance? Exactly what is meant by “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” a prayer in my case, possibly, answered before it was uttered.

Church today oddly discomfiting, like a video with sound and picture out of synch.