in america 2 part 3 - 2003 may-june  work & days: a lifetime journal project

10th May 2003

Standing out of a glass cylinder across the room are yellow iris, white wild carrot umbels, and olive branches turning up their silver undersides. It is a handsome combination, but what else - brassy somehow.

11

It's 5:20 on Sunday morning.

When I look at the olive, though it's a branch in a flower arrangement, I see wind, and even more powerfully I see a white light, the white light that comes onto for instance willows when the sun shines sideways during rain.

Looking at the flower arrangement I see a garden that's elegant in a new way, ravishing, mysterious, unworldly. A line of olives and under or in front of or behind them a line of foaming wild carrot, and among them clumps of yellow iris. What's unworldly is the effect of pure yellow with that touch of brass. Imagine that with the green/silver slate.

It has been gardens for three days. Thursday and Friday in Clairemont at the edge of the canyon. Thursday I worked with José Luis and Benito clearing the steep cross-slope. Its concrete steps came up clean and strong. Through the cleaned mesh fence the canyon shows wide and lovely, apart from the two lines of high tension wire. There is a young olive under one of the iron legs of a pylon. Orangey sand.

The yard is a wonderful space, a warm shelf walled on either side with ivy thick as trees. In one of the corners onto open fence yellow nasturtiums have swarmed the mesh. In the other, red apple [groundcover] with a branch or two of iceplant. Up top I set stakes to test positions of three trees at the edge of the slope.

On Friday Benito dug the path from steps to gate. The gate opens now. I walked out among stones, buckwheat, toyon is it, other chaparral. Oaks. Down in the crack I could see willow. On the horizon, exactly along the horizon line, tiny garbage trucks at the Miramar dump site. Traffic on 52 in a gap between canyon shoulders. Across the way a high school sports field with yelling kids.

On the slope I'll plant proliferating clumps. Make it a self-sustaining thick zone that cascades downhill.

12

Having a Dawes Marketing house meeting sets me whizzing so I can't feel to write here though I'm at David's Café. In the shade now, sun too strong.

Look at that - a fluffed contrail dragged through bitty cloud, with its shadow line drawn parallel and divergent alongside it. The contrail is above the cloud and partly obscured, but I'm seeing the shadow from below. It's there quite clear its whole length.

14

I give Leo a check and he gives me a kiss.

16

Rivers and tides, Andy Goldsworthy. The image I am remembering is the clay wall in the museum in the south of France seen drying over days. The form of a snake in darker clay came up, faded back, returned, as cracks grew.

There was also the simple image of leaves with a green thread looped through them, connecting many. Under a tree a slatted image made from bracken stalks brown and black. A web of image hung from a tree, straws tacked together with thorns. A hole in a rock next to a torrent solid yellow with floated dandelion heads. A hive-shaped circular hut made of driftwood, lifting and beginning to drift as the tide came in. An egg-shaped stone cairn sunk to what I felt as the eyes in rising water, and then submerged, and then revealed again when the tide fell. A snake made of icicle seeming to transverse a coastal rock, glowing like white neon as the morning sun struck. A ribbon of green leaves tacked together in a chain, released downstream and rippling with snake's motion. A waterfall turning red as ground hematite was dropped upstream. A shaggy-headed flat-horned russet-red Highland bull rubbing against an egg-cairn in a field of red bracken. An egg-cairn made of flat sheets of ice beginning to tilt into a spring-melt river. Snow thrown into the air hanging and drifting in glittering bits. The lovely wife frying bacon, five blond kids milling around the table. A line of rocks set in a shallow river, color grading from purples through white through browns to white again. Rivers of water, air, fish, he said. Life flowing.

I thought of Neal Gunn's serpent god of the Celtic highlands.

An irised eye in primary green, orange, yellow, made of leaves, very intense. A graded flow of those colors across an irregular puddle in rock. White wool running along the many shapes of the top of a stone wall, a backlit white line glowing.

We came out onto the Ken parking lot and there was the full moon in eclipse.

In the squabble after, Tom admitted he's been powerless over money, running up tabs of $300 at Azi's every two weeks so his check was gone as soon as he got it. Other debts too. He's driving the car unregistered, uninsured.

He admitted he's chipping dope throughout the week. Every day? No every four days he said. That's probably a lie. He chips at lunchtime every day, he chips when he gets off work, is my guess. It is medicating him to stomach a job he should be leaving.

He's denying the import of any of this.

That line means keep letting it unfold, don't invest in him.

Neil Gunn 1978 The serpent Souvenir Press

-

In the next two weeks: six packet-5 people, three second reader people, evaluations for ten people, supervising shopping and planting at Dawne St and Scott's, some days on site prepping soil. Evals may spill over into June and so may planting.

-

At Eliz's opening at the People's Food Co-op I was looking at women's high hard jutting little rumps, Eliz's and Genevieve's. They had the same green-peach curve and narrow hips.

Eliz's neighbour Bill, eighty-something, said I shouldn't worry about Iraq. Bush is doing a good job and everything will turn out fine. There will be ups and downs but when you've been in the business community you are used to that. He kept touching my bare arm.

17

After I had locked the gate last night Tom shouted by the stairs and I let him in. He lay with his head in my lap. The radio was playing classical music just audibly. We basked in lamplight. I told stories about the winter I was a camp attendant on oil rigs. Tom looked hair-mussed and handsome, hard-lived and alive in the eyes. As he was getting up to go home we were looking into each other's faces. He said he couldn't believe how good it was. I didn't say it but I thought, Yes it is one of the moments when my one is here.

18

And then the next day an evening drive. We walked in the canyon at Clairemont and parked at the water's edge on Fiesta Island to see the sun set. He shot into rage because I objected to his music. Since he bought the car he has been buying nostalgia tapes. I have been putting up with them. Keep on rockin' me baby. Eventually I rise up. He was yelling and throwing tapes. In those fights I keep coming. There is no reason I have to like the music he likes. He has given me a lot of music I like but I don't like music of that period. We wrangle in the car until it's over. It blows over the usual way, when he has squalled himself out and I find a way to show him he's taking himself as the only thing in the universe. We laughed.

But the evening doesn't end well because when we are settled in my little room I bring up dope. He whines on miserably about how he hates his room and the job is a sink of corruption and it is taking him forever to get out of his financial hole. I say I have seen him for three years in a row make plans to leave the job after he gets his tax refund. Every time he has some other use for his money. He is divided. In some way he doesn't want to leave, he doesn't have intent. In that context, I say, his chipping doesn't help. He says it's who he is, he is always going to smoke dope. I say he is not admitting the implication, which is that he is not going any farther.

I float through his rages with lightness these days but his commitment to dope puts ice into my gut. I say to myself, it means I'm wasting my time.

19

Scripps emergency room.

They are not hurrying me so I must be okay, but what was that?

A fat woman in a wheelchair moaning, gasping, Oh Jesus. I don't believe her.

It's quite a small pink room. The young and the restless on an overhead monitor.

I'm still fluttery and queer.

If it turned out to be a heart attack I would feel I had crossed a line into a zone of fading people. I would look at the confident healthy through a curtain. I used to be standing there, I'd say.

Somebody dying in the back room? Members of a black family arriving, coming and going, wet eyes.

The moaning woman was given a blanket and has settled, looking around at the others.

-

Some hours later on a gurney in a corridor.

There's a needle in a vein on the back of my hand.

Your EKG is stone cold normal, said a doctor who had that smart personal alertness one loves in doctors. I liked that he knew he could say that to me.

So many people move through the corridor. I'm at a crossroads. There's a quarter of a silver globe overhead. In it I can see all four corridors. I see myself with a black sweater on (over my hospital gown) sitting up under a white blanket. Security guards, ambulance guys, male nurses, family members trotting through to the cubicles in ER. The male nurses, I think they are, all have plastic-handled scissors tucked somewhere about their waistbands. My nurse is stout, laconic. She doesn't smile.

The shape of the head of this gurney is very coffin-like in the reflector.

I will be paying for the tests so I should wait for the results. They aren't getting to the ones who are doing okay, the nurse says, because they are so busy in the other room.

I got here at 11, it's 6 now.

20

It cost me $700 to discover I was not having a heart attack.

Evangeline Walton. She came unhidden to her fame, blue-grey of face. The book that led me to Rowen was Island of the mighty, which I found in Edmonton at the YWCA about 1983? [1980] She wrote it in 1936 when she was 29, republished in the 70s. b.1907.

He loves the Father now. The Father who claims all power and soon will overturn and break the Cauldron of Rebirth itself. For the Cauldron is the way of the Teacher, the long slow way, by which all learn at last, and if the Father promises eternal life to His friends, He also promises eternal death to His foes. That is the gift that comes out of the Eastern World to the West - eternal torment, eternal death.

Will you still call on Her that fashioned the birds and steeds? She is part of the Mother - of Her who brings forth only to destroy! From Her belly we all come - and back into the darkness of Her belly we all go!

Beauty sprang vivid before his eyes, in his heart, justifying its own existence, all existence.

Useless as that blow must be, he would do his best to deal it; he would not die cowering.

the birds of Rhiannon ... one green, one white, one gold

the World of Middle Light

the foes every man must master for himself, fear and despair

only those who have beauty within them can see beauty

-

Everyone's packets in, I've closed the gate on my creatures - some feeling like that.

The shape of a semester, the arc - [they are so shifted that] I have to make an effort to remember where they began.

Tom has an appointment this aft to interview for a job at the New Palace.

-

Tom came back from the interview blanched - the property manager had pulled up his DUIs and his bankruptcy on the internet. He can't get away from his record.

He spent everything he had to look good and asked me for $10.

21

Today he came in looking beautiful. He got the job.

Instead of packet letters I was on site today supervising someone digging holes. Pruned a lime tree so it looks beautiful.

Leo was setting pipe. Walking with his arm around his wife when she came with the baby to bring him lunch. Leo is warm, calm, responsible. He greets his baby son with joy. He is feeling all day long. He felt Eliz's eyes. I said she is a painter, she draws. He said, Then she has good feeling. Yes, I said. We stopped for a moment at the corner of the house to talk about how he chose his good wife. He trusted her right away. He tried many, he said.

23

Have to be at Scott's at 7 to set José Luis on the road to San Marcos for compost, and then spend the morning in heavy work distributing and mixing when he gets back. Have packets stacked. Don't want the labour. I noticed yesterday, running around all day buying stuff, getting lunch for José Luis, I had less presence, I was cutting corners mentally. I mean everywhere, all day. I didn't see José Luis, I didn't get into the packet I worked on in the afternoon. That feeling of anxious skimming reminded me of other people - I thought, this is how people live. They are thin in their being because they are working this way. They do poor work because they don't come to grips in the leisurely way that deals with everything fully enough. I noticed it even in my emails. I noticed the fullness of Ralph's email about my letter to Kevin - there was that unstinted focus. This is why I don't have a busy life.

Janet is postgraduate fellow at two institutes, head of another, and has her book at U of T press for consideration. I am writing letters to ten students, coaching a recovering alcoholic, and working on four middling gardens. It is because I like leisure, have to have it to be able to dig down. And even now am not digging down enough. Not nearly enough. I want to be all the way engaged with something again, and something that's not as isolated and barren as the last years of Being about, and I want money to do it in leisure.

-

José Luis got lost on the way to the mushroom ranch, and again on the way to Point Loma. It took 9 hours of his time and about 6 of mine to get compost and work it into half the beds at Scott's. He is a small man, smaller than I, short in the legs and long in the trunk. He was born April 1 1955. He wears good boots, jeans, a thick belt, a baseball cap, and quite lurid orange-coated sunglasses. Has a small face, finely lined. He's a joker. Merry all day long. Works steadily, thoroughly. If I am too definite in my orders he says si señora ironically. He can dig for ten hours without tiring. I give him ten dollars an hour and lunch, and pay through his half hour at lunchtime. Introduced him to Leo and praised him so that Leo hired him for tomorrow.

26

These days come grey - sea cloud is there when I wake and stays all day. Parked cars on 4th are sprinkled with jacaranda. The birds in the heater still come and scritch but they seem toned down. In two minutes I have to be up and out to Clairemont to get José Luis started on the day's digging. And then come back and write the last student letter and start on evals.

27

Tom in the parking garage of Ralph's last night, smiling as I look back at him with my head half out the car window. I had got dressed up and gone downhill in the dark to visit him on his last night at the West. His smile is very beautiful to me. It is a change of person. He flashes someone else. I can't describe the man I see when he smiles. He's pink, he's whole, he's shy. It isn't a social smile, it is a burst of youth.

We sat shoulder to shoulder on the bench under the clock and saw the 20 foot pillars, pale blue; the plaster swordfish; the desk clerks' cage; the red, flowered carpets dirty at the edges where the janitor slops his mop. The telephone booths where Tom used to stand dialing 604-253-9618. The balconies facing each other above the stage. Cigarette smoke from the south wing of the lobby slightly stinging the eyes.

Tom was reminiscing formally. That's where I saw you coming down the stairs. Where were you standing? Right there (by the mail window). He gave me back a copy of a photo I took of the east doors of the lobby. An old man I think of as Irish because of his flat cap has his hand on the glass door passing into the light. On the far right, a ways back, a younger man sits gazing after him. It's a good picture. Tom wrote on the back a renewal of the vow: "5/26/3 Going for broke. Still." That would be well done if it were true.

When I drive to Clairemont in the mornings I have been listening to Rush Limbaugh praising evil Bush. The enemy of terrorists is also the enemy of intelligence and art. That is a strong congruence.

It is as if political division is between the educated and/or intelligent and the uneducated and unintelligent, plus those willing to exploit unintelligence for their own gain.

29

A milky dawn. Mist.

The first words written in a day, surprise to see the hand revealed.

All yesterday I lay under the white quilt with the white door open onto blue sky.

Tom came from his first day at the new job. He looked handsome. His hair is quite dark and silver at the temples. I was sick and had been very sick all night, and was not impressed by his absorption in how impressed everyone had been with him.

The new job is respectable. He will be cushioned among pleasant ladies, old men with sufficient credit, heavy furniture, and HUD paperwork. He will come to the end of his day still fresh. He will be frisky on weekends. His pay will rise. I will have to hear about people who interest me much less than the people at the Golden West.

But he is safe there. He could run out the rest of his life there. He has command of a community. He can be parish priest and company chaplain. I could slink away once he's established there, because it can be a real home.

30

Clean bedding and I turned the futon so it's fluffed up. Spent the Saturday on Sharon's evaluation letter. Then took the bike to see the concrete steps at Scott's. Sat on them with him. They were warm. Scott had been sitting on them earlier in the day, he said. He liked the openness of the sky.

The steps are quite beautiful. My guesses about proportions were right, I think. Adam used concrete-column forms cut in half to get the planting lunettes. They are perfect half-circles. Now there'll be the stone paving. I rode up Ft Stockton looking at gardens and found the vine for the new end of the arbour - it was a Giant Burmese honeysuckle, strong dark green leaves and large honeysuckle flowers two of which I am smelling now. It will race over the north end.

1 June

My goals in the beginning are irrelevant. What I learned within myself was to push. Ellie kept pushing. These poems are taller than I am and Ellie helped me peer over the edge of myself.

I wrote more in the past three months than I had in the last five years. I wrote poems. I wrote automatically until I had to gasp for air.

This is the praise I care about and it happened twice today. Logan wrote an email whose title was writing like remembering his little dogs. He got into 5 of the 6 schools. He wrote that he had dreamed he was thanking me. And Michael had his glorious semester because he had confidence that I could see his best and defend it with authority. I did brilliant work with Michael and I did it fast.

It's only the poets I care about, the hungry poets. Michael, Logan, Maggie.

What if I'd had a writing mentor like me when I was 32-40.

2

What if I had one now.

It said I only care about the poets because that's where I can be subtle intelligence. I have been doing without.

Look at this dry small hand.

I am defending myself against Tom. I hate it when he runs out of money and borrows from me, and then, when he gets paid, spends without thought. When he gets angry because he feels criticized he calls me a bitch. I hate that, I refuse that. He does not want to write, he wants to be a hotel manager. He wants to live in a little trailer. He wants to have a woman. He wants to play music all day long. He wants the mediocre to think well of him. He wants to fuck as if he has paid for it. He wants to keep up a screen of strategic flattery and think his own thoughts behind it. He wants to keep me hooked. There's someone better in him but he doesn't defend that person, he doesn't fight for him. He hasn't built a life for him.

I've often been really frightened when he's angry when he's driving.

With José Luis and his heavy friend Jésus at Scott's, they digging. After we stopped at 2 I rushed to Walter Anderson's. When I'm scanning for plants I'm on full grok, had half an hour and found marvels. A salvia madrensis 5' and yellow, beautiful strong green stalks. Now I'm starting to think out Scott's garden. A step sideways off the verandah under a big yellow buddleia. Something else under there. Water jar. Ivy. It's shallow soil.

Green pink silver yellow white maroon.

3

Noticed something about Tom - I'm angry at him and feel he's nothing to do with me. Then I can remember the feeling of being with him. The sensation is of stepping into a room.

What I am thinking now is that I don't actually like him. He keeps me attached by constant currying of some gender aspect of me. My native and non-gender self despises him as a lout, is frightened of his lack of intent, wants to stay away from his rage, hates his lack of sense about money, and pities and has contempt for his weakness in craving what he won't bother to earn.

The book has kept me going in spite of this compassionlessness which is like his. It is a great coldness that says he's not worth having in my life. And it's true, he's not.

Has the book been a way of letting the gender part have the illusion it wants? No, it says. Is the weakness some reciprocal of the coldness? No.

June 3rd

I've been in the slip-stream of anger and very busy but today I feel hollow-heartedness a bit - there've been things I have no one to tell.

It is another white day.

I was sitting on the back of Eliz's truck yesterday shoveling mushroom compost, talking to Leo. Leo said that his mother lived in the city and his father on a little ranch. In the city, from the age of seven, he worked after school packing in a food warehouse, carrying trays to the truck. In the summers he'd be at the ranch. His dad had a firewood business. He would send Leo with two mules to the hills ten miles away to transport wood. He would sling wood carefully on either side of the animals and lead them back home. He began doing this when he was six. Later his dad said, You sweat so much, you should go to school, do something with computers. He did finish high school, but then he wanted to start making money. His eldest is seven, so he would have been married when he was about twenty-four. I met him five years ago.

Louie called yesterday to say she has found a room for Rowen across the alley.

4

I said I don't want a relation where people are together a lot, dropping in, and he needs that. He said he would not contact me again. As I write that I feel like I'm asleep, out.

Out the door now to supervise José Luis and Jésus at Clairemont.

7

Saturday morning - birdsong and dead white sky at 6:10.

I woke at night with my solar burning. It's mourning. It isn't that I miss Tom. I am remembering mostly his abuses. But I feel alone, bereft. My middle is the scar where the stem was plucked off. Now I have no one here. No connection.

Checking through Sept 2002 - Feb 2003.

The important thing is what I found at Christmas and forgot, depression, which is isolation, lack of energy for action, disappointment with people, lack of hope. Power snaps me out of it, travel, extreme fear, attachment loss. Instinctive medications: romance, risk, fear, beauty. Instinctive evasions: novels, food. Depressed I've lost love woman, it says. She stopped loving Tom. I miss her.

And then: I don't understand how I am to get her back. It is not about finding a better man.

Such damage to the quality of my time. So - what word - disrupted - it's like being ill - there's no freedom - the ache is all. Wanting to escape from what I now am. It will go on for three weeks. I feel illegitimate with people. I feel wormy, craven.

These white-sky days are like blanks.

But also the moment I am free of Tom my time opens up.

God's grace, I want to say. Life generous and just.

And then Tom's thuggish look became a look of naked self in balanced force.

Would it be alright now to write the story of Tom?

Lines like that make me want to turn around and take him back.

The pivot, the undeniable, is time. It's too much time in what isn't mine.

And: is graduation the simplicity of it? Tom's fixed? It says yes. If I think of it as graduation, is it love I feel. Yes. And is that the story?

I asked for a strong heart and was given Tom to haul out of hell, because he asked.

Am I leaving him at the sill? It says no, he's out. He's not where I want him so he can be my true love forever, but he's where he wants to be, respectable, responsible, not drinking, healthy, with credit cards, driver's license and a car. He knows where Joseph is. He kept track of Mathew 'til he got to college. His teeth are fixed so he can smile. He's handsome, presentable. He doesn't look like a drunk. He knows how to deal straight. He can hold his temper when he wants to.

I am still whipping to and fro:

1) he gave me a platform of great security for eight years. I miss it. I have a yawning gap under me now.

2) I have been under heavy attack for eight years. He has continually battled my gifts, assaulted my clarity, punished me for being what I am. Punished me too for doing what had to be done to haul him where he now is glad to be.

9

I gave him the cardboard watch and pray motto that was on my wall at 824 - it came from the farmhouse near the red-and-white house in Valhalla. Note said, This is yours now. And that I want the tapes he made me.

Mistry's A fine balance, 1995. Maneck Kohlah, Ishvar Darji, Om Darji, Dina Dalal.

A moss-green linen long-sleeved shirt, olive linen pants whose ankles I can gather, moss-green wide-wale velvet corduroy zipped jacket, red towel, polka-dot black short-sleeved shirt. Goodwill and Macy's, this summer's res clothes.

- I don't like to hear myself think, they are useless thoughts,

At that moment a knock. He was glad to get watch and pray. I said I still want to break up but I want to do it on good terms. The moment I liked was when he said he could reinvent himself too.

His face steamed up. He said, I wasn't worthy of you. I said, Every time you came through, you were.

Mistry's book is grim. It's fine and grim. Staying alive is the fine balance his people achieve for a time.

I said, I don't have time. I have things to do before I die.

11

For Dawne lovely cistus populifolius which has white flowers each petal with a dark red blotch at the base, and an ivy geranium, white flowers with pink specks.

Do I have anything to say about Mr Tom.

It must all be said. It's better since we spoke. I know he's there, I know I'll see him again. We aren't mad at each other. He'll be able to feel for what to do next. Maybe I will.

Oh and there's ache. No one to go places with. Daily life, no one to tell. No one to show my green new shirt.

Doubt, should I have fought longer.

What is the sensation. Stress maybe. Almost fear.

12

I went far enough back - the end of 2001 - and found a crest of happiness. Tom was happy, I was happy with Tom. It was a work crest too. Seeing it I want to go on with him. I see what happened. We both fell back. He was checked at work when Tom said he was bringing Trent from the Maryland. I shut down on him when I was getting ready for the defense. I stopped keeping up emotionally. Then he slipped and I wouldn't forgive him. When he was checked he lost it with money. I held that against him. He stopped writing. We both forgot where we had been. It was our leading edge - we fell back from it without realizing. The implications are, figure out what was working and go on with it, or not. I mean in relation to Tom. In relation to work pick up where I left it.

Second, there's movement and feeling in this journal, should I try to make it publishable, Work and days? Story of writing Being about and simultaneously working through with Tom. It would be another way of telling Being about and showing the bookwork. Is that what I should do this summer?

13

At David's -

Two days doing nothing but transcribe Nov 2001 - May 2002. Left out a lot about students. Put in bookwork. It gets bright and free when I let go in sex. Stiff and dull when I'm who I am now. That means something.

There are two places too, Tom's room and 824. We had safe and beautiful bases.

The bookwork spells out the meaning of what happens.

Margo yesterday, faculty evaluation conversation, said she loves to read my letters, their professionalism. The writing. I said that is sharp on both sides. I put so much energy into them, why aren't I writing and publishing? Why aren't you, she said.

I didn't want to write that. It is weak, pitiful.

Landrovers are nice - ladder on the back. I want a Jeep.

14

Clothes - $14 at Amvets: J Crew Irish linen shirt, sage green, long sleeved, large. Cornflower linen shirt. Sage cotton teeshirt, long in the midriff, well cut. Black cotton muscle shirt.

I'm doting on this Irish linen shirt. The inside has nothing but clean seams.

I'm lonely. It's a sick, caved-in feeling.

It's a helpless, hopeless feeling.

Saturday evening.

-

What I did with it was copy the story of the last of summer in Vancouver, the journey here.

15

And today worked back into all the wrangling with myself about Tom. Sick of it. It cures me of thinking I miss him.

16

Monday - glum - a grey smother day after day. Wondering whether I should miss my house - there were four rooms and a corridor - it was quite beautiful - I'm here in a closet with bars on the windows - I don't have enough money to rent a place - I'm lonely. I keep pathetically checking my email -

I have time, tho' - I can go carefully and find the life I want -

17

What was it when I was awake at night - the dark pressure at the solar - when I attended to it did I feel it dissipate in waves through my back? I was remembering the last while with Tom, his rages. It was unpleasant and I wanted not to, but then thought it was needing to unwrinkle - I hadn't unwrinkled it enough at the time.

At Taft today, a whole day. Planted four from my pot collection - the reed, s.lanceolata, s.albimaculata and s.equador. They were looking so zapped from being on the asphalt and in pots. I place them like placing children in foster care, melancholy. Especially in the back garden I have whiffs of memory of my feeling of that garden when I first knew it. It was my first California garden. I was a stranger in the house, anguished and charmed. Tom is in the garden I made. The many times I came to the house and worked, I would go home to belonging with Tom. But when I began there I was alone in my single bed in the back room. I felt the orange tree and the pines, my red plaid blanket.

18

Shopping with José Luis. He picked me up at 8:30, we rented a cargo van, came back here and loaded plants from my car and from this rooftop. Up 163 to 15, up 15 to 78, west to Twin Oaks Valley Road, north to Buena Creek Nursery, north to Deer Springs Road, back to San Marcos Boulevard, back up 15/163 to Clairemont with plants piled sideways four pots deep, unload at Dawne St, south on 5 to Washington St, unload at Mission Hills, sweep out the van, get it back for 6 o'clock, stop at the credit union in José Luis's car, come home, pay him. In San Marcos lunch in a taco shop.

That was the rushing and planning. The rest was pleasure. I was wearing the blue shirt. José Luis got a Mexican station playing old songs he could sing loudly and sentimentally, which pleased me. The freeway slopes are no longer green, buckwheat color, buckwheat froth everywhere. Deer Springs Road wound into beautiful dry hills, hills with rocks, avocado trees. At Buena Creek Nursery there are salvias flourishing in many edges and hedges. The sun came out because we were far enough inland. José Luis would speak and fall silent. At Plant World in the stony hills I found a silk tree with three stems, seven and a half feet in a 50 gallon pot. We bent it into the van and built around it. At Green Thumb I walked back and forth over acres finding grapes, fig, South African reed, Boston ivy, silver lace vine, a chocolate vine (akebia). The cart José Luis was pushing was a garden on wheels. Matilija poppies - I had the two tall ones riding up front with me, exquisite beings - crinkled white around a thick fuzz of yellow that shows through to black like the fur on a bee.

19

Email from Therese somebody in Switzerland. She is a bookseller. Someone has asked to buy Being about, what is the ISPN number and how much does it cost she asks.

Too speedy to sleep last night.

Look at this chilly day. Construction guys in white hard hats standing about on their platform. Fourth floor. White against grey.

-

I worked hard. Started at 8 looking at pots with Eliz, Canyon Pottery. Planting the lovely pittisporum eugenioides in a pot, buying another. Had to dig out the cavities in the concrete, mix topsoil and compost, bonemeal, bloodmeal. Filled the pots - baby's-breath, tall rudbekia, salvia buchananii, needlepoint ivy. Planted the three Boston ivies, two passifloras.

Should not be thinking about work before I go to sleep. But during the night I did see to plant at Dawne what I have in my glass on the table - orange nasturtiums, purple verbena nodding and poking high above.

I am hardly thinking of Tom.

20

At that moment Louie phoned.

I do miss his strong language, driven language, writer's language. And then I say, But it was all his strong language, he couldn't tolerate it from me.

At my worksite yesterday I saw reflected in a window a short square of a person. I am shorter and my hips are wider, the distance from wide shoulders to wide hips is smaller. I think nostalgically of a day when I was only fifty and wore a black jersey fitted to the waist as I waited for Tom outside the Golden West: tight jeans, black docs, tight jersey, the black embroidered vest that stopped two inches above the waist. That was the day Tom held out his arms to me above the ocean at Leucadia. I had read in a book that if you want a man to want to marry you, you should wear clothes fitted at the waist.

21st

Two days planting, Scott's on Thursday, Dawne yesterday.

I got that down and had nothing more to say, sat and stared.

Designing Scott's veranda room tomorrow - pink, silver, maroon, yellow, white, green - I'm quite thrilled with the color plan - made it up to work with what he has, bougainvillea, jasmine and pink roses. Yellow somehow fixes the pink and magenta.

22

The [college residency] theme - what is it I hate about it - "I have a dream" - what they are talking about is not dreams, it is wish and intent. I could talk about real dreams, the fact that the sleeping body can tell a story about its present circumstance.

The silk tree looks nice - I can see it over Scott's fence. The many-stemmed guava looks as if it has grown there. The goat willow is down the far end with the salvia involucrata. Waverley in front of the jasmines' feet.

23

I underestimated my own time by about $450 - more - but will make $1330.

24

What. Tired, sore, empty. The sky cleared today. Scared of what I'll find when I start into smog-testing. Have to run around and do little things, buy brass eye-screws for vine support, wash my car.

Feeling obscurely something about Tom, dejection that nothing good is left. Looking back I see delusion and exploitation. I see him cold, self-absorbed and beside himself with dislike, hurling tapes in the car. Trying to pass on a hill, refusing to fall back.

I don't even say, and yet - not at all - but I'm flat - my muscles ache - it's evening - nothing to do.

25

Open sky this morning, glow behind the palms in Balboa Park. It's just after seven and the construction workers [on the site opposite my west window] are standing about. A bareback man with a carpenter's belt hauling down his pink surfer shorts. A Latino with a red kerchief on his head.

-

This day was intense. Visiting Bellevue, Taft and Dawne with José Luis doing a tool inventory and instructing him. I kept worrying aloud about smogging my car. The longhaired Vietnamese last night said I had to have a heat stove and a plug for my carburetor lid before I could even do a test. José Luis said he'd take me to an auto-wrecker's yard. We flew down 5 to the barrio and stopped in front of his house, which is a good small house but terrible, stained carpet, drawn curtains, layers of calendars. A huge German shepherd.

Ah I'm tired. Want to tell about the wrecking yard and smog test but I can't tonight.


part 4


in america volume 2: 2002-03 september-february
work & days: a lifetime journal project