the golden west volume 15 part 2 - 1998 september

work & days: a lifetime journal project

Vancouver, September 12 Here it is 4:30 AM on the day. My house looks nice, clean and perfectly bare. Quiet. I sat in hot water with coffee in the dark. Stars and last quarter moon. Now here I am with all four kinds of grooming stuff applied, clean clothes, everything done. Luke last night - there's a rubbish-picker rattling cans in the alley - left his hat on the window sill next to the big chair. I started carrying out my boxes last night just as he was arriving to get his. He held out his arms both before and after. My ear at the level of his heart. Okay, here I go. - Oh Tom. You held me around and stroked my hair and talked. You knew what you were doing. That was perfect, that was what I needed. And then you didn't linger, you said, Well, waddaya think - The freeway is packed, stupefying. I figured out what was wrong with the car at the first stop after Bellingham. The handbrake. It's knob was released but the brake was holding. I cinched up the bike too. Getting up to speed. Mentally I'm not there yet. Need sleep and better gas. There was the smell of the ocean at the train station where we were sitting together on a good bench like the travelers we are. You delivered yourself of Bill Clinton, who is on front pages looking shamefaced for all philanderers and liars. It's always happened but men aren't covering for each other any more, I said. You did not want to think about Abe Lincoln being blown in the Oval Office. Something about American men - they ride their heroes too high. It's inflation (if you want to know). Sheer shallow ocean slopping amongst the rocks. Blue. You aren't at work yet. (It's two.) Rest stop seventy miles this side of Portland. Alright, get off the freeway. Take the 30 west at Kelso to Astoria. Where am I. Daylight. Okay. 13th, Wave Crest Hotel, Brallier Road, Cannon Beach A Sunday morning. This is a place where there is always the grey noise of surf. I am in the life of Don Thompson, who has died, and Violet Lane Thompson, who is a tall woman with long corners on her mouth and a duck's-bill nose. She met me at the door last night and offered her arthritic hand. White-haired and briefly spoken. Behind her a room so unexpected that I was searching her face to know what sort of treasure I had come to. Books to the ceiling. Faded masks. She didn't want to spend energy on the meeting. I was exhausted too. She sent me ahead up the narrow stairs, crawled up behind me and opened the door on this room. It is a room from the '20s, gabled, paneled, sash windows opening toward the sound of the sea. A rocking chair, a faded rug, a good needlepoint hanging. A little Scandinavian chair with a needlepoint cover with unicorns, and a painted chest that, now that I look at it, has unicorns too. The needlepoint tapestry over the chest is placed well, the colors are right together. The door and window sills are a dark burnt orange they have taken from that tapestry, which also has an oxblood red there is in the chest below it. - But I started to tell how I came into the room cross-eyed after the miles and sat on the floor and opened a drawer in the painted chest and found these photos of Vi Lane, a life. This one where she's thirty and standing looking up at her left hand, to which is strapped a wooden device from which hang the six strings of a puppet. It is an intense, speaking little Pinocchio standing at the level of her hips, which are showing broad and strong under large print dahlias. There is a mole on her neck. Her face is wonderful, a broad clear forehead and that long shovel nose sloping down over the short bow of a long mouth. It's a publicity 8x10 glossy. She's getting it over with, averting her eyes. But her strong hips are presenting themselves with their bold painted targets to the peg nose of that manic little boy. Here's another photo taken sometime in the forties. She and her younger sister in saddle shoes, and their folks already old, the mother in an apron, father in overalls. Trees nearly bare. They are standing together having their picture taken with the car, as if the two girls in their good coats are about to drive back to the city. The small mother has her arms crossed. The father has his hands in his pockets. The parents are flanked by the two girls who both have their arms hanging at their sides. Class picture, Wilson Creek class of '32. Here's what I was looking for, a wedding picture. I imagined them marrying at fifty but here they are young in the dress of the 1940s, he in a doublebreasted grey suit, she in a white hat. She's older than he is. He's beautiful. Here he is greyhaired with a beard, a radiant man with a long chin. Here she is in her fifties caught in a dressing gown, laughing. When they are in photos together they have their foreheads tilted toward each other. She has run the Wave Crest Hotel since she was my age. I got off I5 at Kelso, circled around looking for the 30 west. The wrong bridge, and then the right bridge, the Lewis and Clark over the Columbia delta. Coming across to the sea I was driving west into declining sun. It was like driving blind. The long slopes of parkway would come into stretches of such dazzle I had to slow to twenty miles an hour and hang onto the white line on the edge of the road. And it felt like something wrong with the car again, as if the brake was on, though it wasn't. Through Astoria still blind. Looking for a place to camp but it is resort country, there are no campgrounds. Cannon Beach in the dark. The left front wheel is clunking heavily. Wheel bearings maybe. There's a cheap motel. No vacancy. But across the road a little market. I'll ask about a garage and a campground. I tell my story to three men of increasing age. It is Labor Day weekend. No vacancies anywhere. And then a woman comes to the counter. Are you on your own? She knows what to do. She goes into the back room and makes a phone call. "Vi Thompson says she'll take you." She gives me directions. "It's a yellow building on the corner. She said she'd leave the light on for you." I lie down in a clean bed feeling my little aches and the intense nervous buzz that is system noise after the ordeal of driving. When I wake at night it's still going. But I know I'm going to sleep. The buzz in the solar and the sound of the surf. In what happened after I left the freeway there has been the structure I know from other journeys, ordeal ridden out in an innocent stretched givenness, and then arrival in marvelous places. It makes me feel I'm dreaming. This morning before it was light I was looking at the beach, which is at the end of a lane. It's a wide tan beach with large black outcroppings. The breaking zone is broad and messy. Rows of clapboard cottages. I came back and arranged the campstove next to the car and made bacon and eggs and tea while the misted dawn came up. In daylight I can see this room is quite dirty. Is there anything you want to say to me?     yes, about the anguish Driving?     yes. Bravery balances forces, breaks what's stuck in the relation of feeling and thinking. Then immediately life opens up?     yes Do you want to say any more about that?     common creation It's a dream but I'm not the only dreamer?     yes The world is real     yes But the way we see and feel it is a common creation     yes Was I in real danger in that passage through the dazzle?     yes Is the danger that I don't drive very well?     no Is the danger that my system is too broad?     yes And driving overstretches me     yes 14 I dreamed - lying under star-spangled firs with the ocean loud somewhere beyond pines and dunes - that I came downstairs in my house and found half an envelope folded over, stuffed through my mail slot. A pencil stub. No, a pencil broken in half. I understand the message, but who sent it? It's silver. Where was it made? There's very fine print on it. Made in New York. Other specifications. I wake as if remembering that one morning recently when I came down on my way to do the sorts of things I've had to do, there really was a broken pencil, but that one yellow and in a clear plastic bag. I lit a match and looked at the time. It was 5. I would make tea and go. Driving fast through white fog with the radio muttering inaudible under the motor, still wondering, if it happened, why I would have forgotten it. As if suspecting witchcraft. Last night it got dark at eight. I was asleep by nine but woke while I could still hear a campfire in another stall. There had been the sound of one short sharp sniff. An animal stepped out of the bushes next to me, the size of a large dog but silver grey. It hadn't noticed me. When I moved it startled and streaked through to the trail. It was lighter and faster than a dog. There is a witchy feeling about forest. I'm not the right kind of Indian for this country. When I stopped at the campground in the last of the afternoon sun I took off my shirt and socks and lay on the slope of a dune hearing broom pods rattle, shore wind in the sand pines. A pocket of desert. What else. I miss the inland route. Saying goodbye to Vi Thompson yesterday. She was sitting on a bench in front of the hotel reading a book. She was younger than before I knew her age. Beautiful. Bony and quirky, bare spare humor and affection. Are you an artist? I asked. Yes, long pause, I am. My husband was a weaver, comma, we were both draftsmen in Seattle. - "Hi Daddy" says the waitress. "Now she's gotta behave" says the white-haired man in the plaid shirt, sitting at the mother-contact counter with the other old men. - Koo must have rubbed down the car with cutting compound. It looks brighter. It has begun to be California - cougar-colored hills and green and white waves. There's a redolent kind of bush. The book says it's true, they did put a broken pencil through my slot. Are they evil witches? No. But witches? Yes. They want to break me as a writer? Yes. Out of jealousy? No, envy. Can they harm me? No. Why did I immediately forget it? You were in passage through difficulties. Did they plant Tanya? Yes. It was their suggestion that she should live there? Yes. And then they fed her stories. Yes. They were standing there like that because they didn't know what was happening. Yes. Do you want to comment? They are waiting. For what? For you to do something foolish. Can't they put the effort into getting what they want directly? Yes. But they're afraid to? Yes. Was that scene somehow a tip-off? Yes. Do you want to say more. Unconscious, feeling and thinking, anger, will come through. Their anger affects me. Yes. But this is going to resolve. Yes. Do you protect me from them? No. Something else does? Yes. What? Your wholeness. Does Tom protect me from them? In a way. My willingness to be with him. YES. She was embarrassed about accidentally opening my envelope because there's a true prying she does. Yes. I doubt it physically happened. You dreamt it. Did I dream it twice? Yes. But the fact is true? YES. The crows know I'm here and are telling. I've come a long way today. It's two hundred miles to San Francisco. Can't get over the surreality of driving. Parkways where it's steady 65 down and up in curves that take me sideways into orbit. I hold onto the road with my will. There's a sound the engine makes when it's overheating, like a jet fighter overhead. This evening I turned on the heater to cool it and kept going. It sounded right. Here's California, tawny grass on the slopes above a creek, which slips shallow over gravel. Not a ripple, but there a fish jumped. Frogs, I guess. Sky's white and fading. Will California girl tell her pa, who'll phone the cops? I look like I'm sketching. 15th, Sebastopol You would hate this place though the coffee is good. That couple - he in off-green Thai pants and a tight curled beard, a cranky spoiled-brat look, she in old jeans and shirt, the sort of thin, lined skin backwoods hippy women their age get. A coffee shop where they have painted clouds on the ceiling. Self-pitying girl singer. You wouldn't want to overhear the conversation of any of the clientele. I guess real people have better things to do on a Tuesday late morning. I gave up on that creekside spot and got back on the road in the dark. Big white stars, transport trucks, climbs and descents. I was thinking of Luke: vol de nuit. At Laytonville campground, a spot on the hill, ten dollars, a shower included. The office a trailer. I filled out the registration form tottering and trembling. The young girl of the household sitting on the floor, on trailer shag, doing her homework. A TV on. Then my bed alongside the car so it would cut off the far reach of a yardlight. It was warm. I put out a hand from my bed and patted the left rear tire. Thank you, darling. It was cooling, refitting its metals. Patted my body too. I was attending my aches and buzzes, too stupid with fatigue to have a thought about the stars. 16th, Santa Cruz Yesterday was miserable. Janis wasn't in the phone book. I thought I'd see Bolinas but had no idea what it would take: hours of the kind of road that's so difficult I can't feel what I see. Tight corners, bumps, narrow two-lane, up and down through woods. All day and a tank of gas and I'm only at Santa Cruz where I took the worst room (next to the Coke machine and under the stairs) for forty dollars. Homeless in California, the way the freeway shoots you through. The women on TV in their grotesque masks of makeup. Laura Schlessinger, barred teeth and glittering eyes, a skeleton with the voice of a living woman. Patricia Ireland at a press conference, hair undyed and no makeup, looking both grey, like driftwood all one color, and quietly real. The lesbian spokesperson for something or other delivering a speech with automated fluency from a dog face framed by power earrings and gelled dyed hair in copper coils. A woman preacher, also with dyed red hair and power earrings, delivering a sermon, also with automated fluency that included the whole body's turns, pauses and raisings of a hand, on the evils of homosexuality, from which she had been delivered by the power of god. (A black preacher on the radio as I waited at stoplights in the Mission District telling stories of being led by the lord in ways that remind me of the book.) The man on a bike, a bandana on his head, who tried to recommend a cheap motel but was so burnt out he couldn't give me directions I could follow. The black East Indian manager of this Motel 9 who got excited when he saw me carrying a gas cylinder into my room. "Why don't you leave right now!" His wife put her hand on his arm. The roads. So much money spent on the roads, so much craft in the design of the center strips that rattle when you cross them, the reflectors on railings, the freeway postings, the banked curves, the engineered surfaces. It belongs in the category of sport, huge national priority given to moving fast, being able to feel oneself moving fast, even if slotted like a bobsled. Yesterday was bobsledding all day. What kind of priority is that. A teenage boy's. There's hardly any music on the radio. Inane talk. The excitement about a teenage boy president. Bad boy! Impeach him. Don't impeach him. Resign. Don't resign. Immaturity suddenly shaking down. Gargoyles and people of spirit on both sides. Trying to get away with the camp stove in the motel room I guess was immature. What else. Picking a bunch of grapes at the winery where I pretended to taste wine so I could use the washroom. This journey is kind of soulless isn't it. No. Will you say something about the soul in it? Processing. Is there anything more you want to say? Yes, you think soul is early love, but it's not. Soul is hardship? No. Are you going to tell me what it is? Tempering - feeling and intelligence. More? Soul is responsibility. But it is responsibility to feeling too? Yes. So soul is an act? No, a state. You want me to live in minute impeccability. Yes. Anything else? Yes, you're succeeding. Do you mean at something in particular? At moving in the world. That's what this is? Yes. 17th, El Capitan In my last dream I was singing. I'd found a corner that amplified my voice so I could sing without pushing my voice. I liked the way I was floating the ends of the lines. I was singing in French always finding a rhyme I hadn't seen coming. Then I was walking and singing. Walking uphill next to a wall I could hear a chorus, ah les chiens, ah, les chiens. When I met a woman who asked for advice about Pagemaker I was brief. I didn't want the life of singing to stop. 18th, Friday, Leucadia It's noon at the corner café where I picked the wild melon. A lot of traffic on 101, and the Coaster beyond. My bike's getting fixed, laundry's done. There's my car at the curb, fine dust. Drinking orange juice and coffee under an umbrella. I'm weak, sore and blank. Homeless. There was one email message about my ad. A cottage in La Jolla. Am I here? Am I somewhere? Yawning. There's eucalyptus, twisting out of its bark, relaxedly wriggling its leaves over the road. A huge blind beetle - green - blundering into that young woman with beautiful tattooed skin. I used to have a back like that, but I didn't know it was beautiful. - I have almost nothing to say. Worried about how much money I'm spending even with anxious care. I and my car and tent and all are shabby strangers in the land of sleek late models. I've spoken to almost no one in a week. By next week I have to be in place enough to write the SSHRC application. Dave Carter's candle lantern was a good gift. He drinks in summer, Pilgrim said, because women in bikinis make him nervous. When I arrived his right eye was so much bigger than the left that I noticed myself not looking at the other one as if it were a deformity. As we talked his eyes started to come into balance. 2800 km. Golden West Hotel, 20th Now I can start working. There's a bit of blue. Dirty window. I have ten days before the deadline. Is it now? Can I start? It's the dip of the moon. I dreamed a broken pencil but in the last week before I left I found pencils in my path. This one was new, unsharpened. I think there were three. 21 Stiff and sore, like being turned to metal, heavy and slow. Here I sit on a bed in a room. Feebly milling. How to begin. What kind of time is this. Is there going to be enough money. - Evening. Here's my lamp. Paid for a month. Red plaid blanket. Wicker lap desk where it began. I forgot the plates were in the box. Table cloth and blue plates, our little home. Monday night, did you get my email? Rowen [picture of] on the wall reading. The tree is good. There's tender western sky if I lean out. I took my fate in my own hands, spent $3.29 on a pint of Haagen Dazs butter pecan, ate it watching Superman in the TV room. And now I'm more what you'd call grounded. I've got emails, and at a computer no one signs for. Car and bike parked. There's a little ant from Carlsbad South. 22nd Did I do that right? I wrote [to the La Jolla cottage] that the thought of the garden evoked hot blood but I'm worried I won't be able to be vulnerable enough to be able to work if I feel like a house guest who is staying much much too long. How would they manage feeling invaded by a stranger? Yesterday a parking ticket, today I got towed. Washed the window best as I could. 24 A lot to worry about. I've said to Tom that when he comes he needn't think of leaving again. I'll commit myself to living here. But that means I have to get the post doc or have no means. And I don't think I can get the post doc because I don't have a project. I don't have enough money to live here for the time I've sublet my house, and I don't have any money to go home to. I've said to Rowen I'll make sure he gets to school. And somehow in the midst of these anxieties I have to write something that will be good enough and arresting enough to launch me out of this shore break zone where I'm attached but separated, skilled and hard-working but unpaid. Tom can smile. He did his teeth. He wasn't very forthcoming about thanking for nagging though. Getting my car from the tow lot in the flatlands to the southwest. It's a Hispanic lot. She can't find the slip though the girl this morning said they had the car. I look through the slats and see a bit of dark red between other cars that look wrecked, abandoned, dirty and crammed together. She can't release it if she can't find the slip, she says. I see evidence of cars for resale. There's one being detailed next to the office hut. Is this a kidnap racket? You hold on baby, I'm coming for you. I have to get the registration papers from under the front seat. A young man escorts me so I won't make a run. With the papers in front of her, she manages to match the license plate. They didn't know the make. They misdescribed it presumably. An older man wants my keys. I don't want to give them to him. Be nice to it. I keep my eye on the proceedings. Then I have to back out over a gate rail they haven't blocked up properly. It's high enough to damage the gas tank. What a primitive outfit. When I got into the front seat to start the car I had a rush of love and regret. Oh sweetie you had to be in this terrible place all night by yourself, you must have been worried I wasn't going to come for you. I would never leave you here. - That session at two this morning was full of anguish but didn't come through. I don't know what's going on. I'm ignoring the postdoc application and haven't talked to Paul. I don't know what to do. I'm less worried about money though I'm spending it. $93 to recover my car. I ate twice today. There is a beautiful new moon I can see when I lean out the window. Tom's reasons for shame are being undone one by one. Are mine? I'm ashamed of my grey hair and of how old my skin looks. I look much older than I did three years ago. It's fuckin' menopause cutting me off. I'm ashamed of being poor. I'm ashamed to be this age and a graduate student, begging for student support that should go to young people. I'm ashamed to live with cockroaches and bathrooms strewn with stinking garbage. I'm ashamed to be so hated in my neighbourhood at home. I'm ashamed that the insides of my upper arms have a droopy ripple. What am I proud of. Most of what I'm proud of isn't with me. I am proud of the way my intuition in work has been ahead of developments. Deacon is confirming things I've said about brain regions getting function from where they are. I'm proud of the hand index page. I'm proud of my photos of Pat and Frank. I'm proud of Brain and imagining. Really I'm proud of my whole program, and I'm proud of the way I handled Phil's limits by giving him what he could see in a way that was still useful to my project. I'm proud of the bookwork. I'm proud of the way I keep learning, I always go for deep principle. I'm proud of the bravery and clarity of my work in the last four years. I'm proud of the design of the community garden and how much politicking I knew how to do. I'm proud that people like Terry Dawes can see the relation of Trapline and Brain and imagining. I'm proud that I helped the child to speak in Leaving the land, and that people like it. I'm proud that my movies are beautiful in a not-easy way. I'm proud of Colin's letter. I'm proud of Luke and Rowen, and Louie and Nathalie. I'm proud that I have done what seemed essential to me for nearly all of my time, no matter what the hardships. I'm proud I have come so far from what was offered where I began. I'm proud of my drive and talent. I'm proud that I look distinguished, because I've made that too. I'm proud of my freedom of mind. I'm proud of the way I can be really moved by people sometimes, and can really move them. I'm proud of the way I have sometimes written though I am not writing well now. I'm proud of the natural world though I didn't make it. I'm proud of the lines of my car though its skin isn't in good shape. I'm proud that I really went for sex in my forties and got it. I'm proud that Joyce said she was honoured to work with me. I'm proud of my sense of color. I'm proud of some art, the best art, and the best of other kinds of human making too. I'm proud of what will we know and charm, value, ethic, tactic and gender, in writing. I'm proud of states of vision I got to with Jamila. I'm proud of the experienced directness I can get to with Cheryl. I'm proud that I've found ways of supporting myself to work at what makes sense to me. I'm proud of the land I come from. I'm proud of my simplicity and efficiency about stuff. I'm proud of Tom's manliness and heart. I'm proud of the way I went for broke with him. 25 6 AM, after the neighbourhood convergence on non-time-limited grey curb zones. I got into the grey block. Three other cars were pulling in as I left. Big Dave and the Mexican security guard in the cage. I was lying in the dark waiting for the alarm to go off, remembering - listing - times with you in Bellingham and Vancouver. Not only good times. I wanted to be doing it with you, so that, when we're back, those times don't disappear into a pocket or oxbow, lost from the story. When we were saying goodbye in the car in Fairhaven, you were stroking my head in your perfect way. You were saying something about being on the same wavelength, your form of confirming ritual, which is lovely of you, and I said abruptly, even if we're not on the same wavelength, it doesn't matter, for me you are it, you're the one. I took the risk, as it felt, marveling. It's wonderful not to have to be looking anymore. In fact I still feel us to be a connection full of marvels. When you're in manic pour I can't stand you, and I have no use for your canned lowbrow facetious act, and I'm frustrated by the lag time your ADD and especially your ADD denial put into practical matters, which affect basic quality of our life together, and even our ability to be together at all; but altogether I'm interested in the enterprise and my heart honors you to the depths. That said, what's next. I'm doing yoga but I ache. Fix that. Get further into where I am. There's sweet California light on the tree, in the sky of seven o'clock. Churning of motors dense and dark but invisible in the sweet translucent day. Pittosporum probably. This window is a gift from Vince. 26 I'm here a week. Reading Deacon this morning. Finally at the brain localization chapter. After making very good tea in my Melita coffee maker (bought yesterday at the Goodwill for $5) I got briefly to the kind of focus I've built, something like text-diagnostic. What's wrong with this, what should he be saying. Mailing deadline for the postdoc is next Thursday. I can't imagine asking Paul. I don't know what the project is. I'm afraid of the next step. Is this balkiness simply fear of asking men for something     YES I really, really don't want to do it     think of your quest Can I fix my fear of asking men     NO, persist Eagerness and joy about what I want     no Some other kind of persistence     Explain faith     in improvement Faith that I can better my lot     YES Something like when I was in grade 12     YES Intense faith and intention     YES Have I lost that     YES How did I lose it     something about creation My work wasn't creative enough     YES Academic work     Creative of me     YES I have a very rich life already. Yes. Is it okay to ask for it to be richer? Yes. But many people are destitute. No, you have strength in reserve. You mean it is wrong to hold back. Yes. It doesn't help them. Yes. Have a sense of doing it for them too. Yes. As a human. No, as a woman. I'm responsible to take myself as far as I can? Yes. And that is helpful to them. No, enough that it is helpful to you. I was making a sacrifice hoping to gain something. Yes. And I did gain it. Yes. I sacrificed love woman. No, the social use of love woman. So that sacrifice was correct. Yes. But it wasn't enough. Yes. I also had to fight for her. Yes. Will you give me a sentence about making money? Slow growth of wealth by processing love woman. Integrating? Yes. Love woman being instinctive femininity. No, feeling. I'll slowly get richer by integrating feeling. Yes. Do you know in what enterprise I should make money? Yes, liberation. More? Bound search will come through to your reserves of strength. Bound search is like self-forbidden, searching in ways that refuse too much. Yes. But I've held high standards. It's not that. Freedom is itself a high standard? Yes, look for improvement in aggression. Practice wanting and getting? No, going after. 28th Monday morning of the week where I do the hard things. Mexican café with a beautiful jacaranda - is it - flourishing feathers over the cracked sidewalk. I'm happy in California, being good company all day. I like the private aloneness and public multitudes, my room just big enough for everything I do in it, and an outside impersonally friendly, casually interested, busy with its own selves, not greedy for anything about me. Downtown monastic. Somewhere different every day to find a meal. Now the library to try to do the SSHRC printouts. 29 Tuesday. I was up at 4:30 organizing material for the application. Stopped at 8:30 to eat. Whizzed [on the bike] up to 10th to check my car. At 10:30 phoned UCSD to check Paul's schedule. She said, He's teaching now. Oh. Alright, change clothes, gather papers, out the door. Whiz back to the car, make the mistake of going up 13th not 11th and end up on the wrong side of Balboa Park. West through North Park looking for the I5. Zoom to La Jolla, pray for parking. As I'm coming onto campus I get it, the VA lot, it's packed but I find a space, nobody else has a sticker though it says to. Bike to the Humanities building, up to the 8th floor, listen outside the doors. I can hear Pat in her office and don't want to knock in front of her so I wait on the loveseat in the hall. She's talking to a student but she comes to the door. I'm glad to see her. She looks the way she does, real and a girl. She says Paul isn't in today. I say I'll be glad to talk to her. She's encouraging a grad student. He leaves. She calls me in and offers her hand. She's tall but it's a narrow frail hand. I say what I want. She says, sure, no problem. I am amazed. She'll do me a letter. Get Gilles for the other. The departmental nomination she'll see to today. It's done. It's easy to talk to her. I'm out the door looking for Gilles. He's not there but I collect timetables and course specs. There's a yellow sheet on a bulletin board - Language and the brain. I borrow it. Stop at Babette's studio on the way back to the VA lot. She isn't in but there's a flyer for her course on women and experimental film 1960-1970. Fly home on the I5, find parking where I parked last night, near the library. Compose email to Gilles. Back home. Now what's left - write project description with Pat in mind. - I had jumped off my bike waiting to cross at the intersection and a black man crossing the street toward me gave the bike seat a pat - Yo' got a big butt too! he was saying, and when I turned my head after him, puckered his lips and touched them. Mm. I burst out laughing. And now it's 5 because I lay down and had a sweet efficient nap under the plaid blanket. All kinds of street noise, and now light and a breeze coming into the tree from the side, it's stirring and glowing and I'm all slowed down and creamy after the race. Was lying down imagining Rowen here. 30th I have a completed print-out of the application package. Paul said yes though Gilles said no. I still have to edit the program description, reprint it tomorrow, pick up the departmental nomination, find some refs and type the bibliog, mail it. Next week I have to get together a PR package to help their letters, and deliver it. But the hard things are done, the asking, the writing, and the cunning patient laborious struggle with the public library computers in - let me count them - Social Sciences, Arts and Music, the California Room, Fiction, History, Science and Information - seven different sections, each of which allow me one hour per week, and need reservations. Only two didn't need me to call Tech Support and wait till someone came down. Every failure to get into the SSHRC file meant trying again through maybe fifteen screens of preliminaries and privacy warnings. It took a day to figure out why it wasn't saving, another day to figure out why it wasn't printing. I kept feeling that a perfect set of eleven pages filled out and printed in time must be a first-round test for the fellowship. I have a lot to say suddenly, after having had almost nothing to say for weeks. What it was like to see Patricia suddenly and feel nothing but liking and just say what I needed and have her easily agree. As if I'd changed socially, become simpler and friendlier, the way she is, in her way. The way it was to see from the notices and brochures in Cog Sci how right it is to be here, how in accord my instincts are with what happens here. Happiness. The field is coming toward me. Now it's time for me to step out of cover and show what I can do, and let people fight with my picture and give me their disagreement. I feel as if everyone I've spoken to feels I'm ready to join them. I feel it's heaven and I will make social mistakes as before, but I'll forgive myself and be forgiven, because I'm not mad at people the way I was. Is that true? (It says yes.) And is this related, Tom sending me a money order for another hundred? No, but it's good for us. There's something else I feel too, that difficulties of small kinds come up because I cut small corners, steal in small ways. I don't know whether that's superstition. Can it be that a screen freezes because I've signed up elsewhere under a false name? Was it wrong to spend four dollars on those pink carnations when the tree is more than enough? Could there be a kind of ease in life exactly coordinate with the finest-cut impeccability? Does it have to do with being interconnected within a gigantic sort of mutual sequencer? No it says. Is the program well written? Is the writing worse? I'll read it tomorrow morning when I'm fresh. It seems not polished in my old way. Flow, Elizabeth would say. I came through the fear and difficulty and am a grey-haired woman with red sneakers, on a bicycle, zipping up the streets, looking with eyes so strong they half scared me in the mirror. I haven't written about the trip. The way for instance I shot through the funnel of the Golden Gate Bridge and then looking for gas took a cross country shortcut to Half Moon Bay and found myself among the nursery wholesale yards where I was circling mistakenly last time I came through, that time in agony suddenly believing I'd never see Tom again. Heartbroken, crashing, hating the town with its olden-timey boutiques. This time they overcharged me $10 at the gas station. An evil place. What else, Luke before I left, sitting in the big chair with his cap on the sill, in the bare house with me. That was the right goodbye. His hug hello and his hug goodbye. Stay safe my Luke. And Dave and Francie making me dinner, with such delicious red wine, in their civilized nice house, dog, baby, young responsible people, pretty woman with her bare foot under the table touching her husband's leg. He walked back with me to get poppy seeds from the heart dish. Sometime during the night he came back with the candle lantern, because it was there at four thirty when I came out the door. The poppy seeds I suppose we both dimly felt were a way of making a loop to a time when I made him dinner and gave him poppy seeds and he was leaving. Something odd happened I don't know how to describe - well, yes, I do. I saw a picture on the fridge of Francie three years old with her mom dressed in what looked like a 60s coat. I was talking to Dave about it and then when she'd got Jacob to sleep and came upstairs she said her mom was born in 1945. She's exactly my age, I said. Later when we sat down together before dinner I suddenly said "Your mother is exactly my age." I'd forgotten talking to her about it twenty minutes earlier. I forgot saying it to her because it was saying it to him that mattered?     Do you want to say more about the writing?     partial loss Partial loss of polish?     YES I won't get the fellowship because of it     YES Then I'll have to support myself as a gardener     Is that what's going to happen     Do you want to say more     no   part 3 the golden west volume 15: 1998 august-december work & days: a lifetime journal project