8th October 2002
Now, Louie. Louie leaves the house at 5:30 or 6 to 'meditate' and 'practice'
at her yoga studio. Friday is her day off but she is spending all of it,
until 8 tonight, taking classes with other people. Sundays are often social
duties, a roster of many, including many family persons. She frets about
whether the kitchen cloth is hung up and the knives wiped. There is constant
house-repair concern. She has zoomed up through the Iyengar hierarchy, local,
national, international. She is paying off her house, supporting a nephew
at college, funding a month's trip to South Africa in December, subsidizing
her brother with construction work she has to oversee. In the midst of this
she has me staying with her for three weeks while my father dies, and Rowen
sleeping on the floor for two nights. She has hair-dyeing, dentist, massage
and Larry Chan appointments. She goes to bed in gorgeous luxury, fine white
sheets and the best quality down, and cannot sleep. Just now she is offended
because I shouted at her about yet another spell of oil paint fumes, after
I had already put up with three coats. She has held the resentment for four
days so far. I didn't say regular classical music concerts, much very polite
phone conversation with students.
Is Louie off the rails into some sort of post-menopausal rigidity and
drivenness? Or is she just high-functioning. It says yes to the former.
Is there something she's avoiding? She didn't let menopause rocket her through.
Is there anything I should do? It says yes where I expected no. Instigate
slow growth. Say, what are you staying ahead of? Yes.
9th
Amtrak. In Oregon, dark at the window.
It was a day of beauty I can't describe. Wet, a grey light. Three weeks
ago this countryside was nothing special. Now, in November, the leaves were
not only colored, so that each tree and bush shows its individual shape,
but also thinned, so that it's possible to see into the whole three-dimensionality
of that shape. There were bushes a pale coral, cottonwoods that are shaped
like feathers with large loose leaves high in the tree and thicker smaller
leaves in the lower third. The most inarticulably wonderful were the willows,
passing always too quickly so I couldn't satisfy myself with seeing them.
What color is that? I couldn't tell. Can I see it now? Brown-silver, the
whole of the tree drawn in thin flexed lines of leaf brown on one side,
silver on the other.
As I look into the dark from the light on the page I seem to see ghosted
the day's colored volumes, larger, smaller, high, low, shaped in luminous
bits.
Years ago when I cried in front of my father I didn't know he would one
day cry in front of me. When it was happening I could only half-feel it.
It was so unexpected. The long gaze was right, though. Simple.
San Diego 11th
In Tom's room, 7 in the morning. Fresh air, softer light than where I'm
from.
Tom has let his hair grow, so that the man who met me on the platform
had an egret's crest. I told him my stories, he put his arm around me, we
fell asleep. In the morning there he was ironing his shirt, looking like
Beckett, jumping about.
Eddie and Teo, Zev, hazed sunset over waves white as milk. Eddie had
a navy blue wool hat pulled over his shocks of felted hair, was wearing
the boy uniform, white tennies, loose jeans hung low showing the waistband
of his underwear, loose shirt. He had a stunning smile. He flumped down
with Zev and Teo who were playing guitars in the lounge car, and his brother
Teo introduced him. He smiled at me. Teo looked Hispanic and later was talking
Spanish on his cell. When he and his brother were singing he had a look
of devotion on his face, a smooth cushy mouth. Eddie had a narrow nose.
Because of it and the felted hair on both brothers (Teo wearing a baseball
cap), I thought the mix in them must include white and black as well as
Latino.
Zev sang a couple of blue grass tunes. Zev a whole 'nother kind of person,
thirty-one where they were seventeen and twenty-two, copper-colored, apelike
in his movements, a stiff barred smile, smart, eager, a Toronto half-Jew
whose dad is a Marxist sociology professor and whose mom a Marxist history
professor. We had been talking earlier. He had slept in the lounge car in
a sleeping bag.
Then Zev was teaching Teo the chords of a song called Blackberry blossom
so Teo could back him while he played the melody. Scrunching his face with
concentration. They were playing in seats opposite each other across the
aisle, having to swivel sideways to let people through, smiling into each
other's eyes as people do when they play music together.
Eddie was on his way to LA to be on American Idol, Teo his chaperone.
He was in a glorious state, electrically attractive. I didn't want to take
my eyes off him. Later he was on a seat by himself, singing one thing and
another. When he started Amazing grace I jumped up and was next to
him, leaning over the seat singing with him, instantly. He thumped the seat
next to him and I sat down. I had to track with his voice very strenuously,
because his sense of tune was not mine. He high-fived me. We looked for
other hymns we might both know.
On the platform at LA, narrow space with redcap electrical carts squeezing
us to the middle, the brothers came past me on their way into the station,
Eddie first, Teo a few steps after. "Good luck you guys, it was fun,
it was so fun." "I'll give you a hug," Eddie said. "I
want a hug too," Teo said. A really nice hug, felt.
Monday morning, quiet.
There was another man on the train, early 30s, maybe, jeans, boots, tattooed
arms, a paisley handkerchief on his head, everywhere talking to someone
or other, drinking steadily. He was an Apache from Apache Junction, given
up by his family, adopted by a white couple with a horse ranch, 160 acres,
at Ojai. Four months ago both parents, in their early 50s, killed by a drunk
driver, he said. Years ago a carved wooden chest arrived for him at the
ranch. He was away working on an offshore oil platform. The chest was from
Apache Junction, from a friend of his mother's. He hasn't opened it. I said
steadily that in my experience life cannot start until one deals with what
is to be dealt with. "It is terrifying, I know." He looked at
me. "Yes, it is terrifying." "You have to be a hero for your
life," I said. He fell silent. His neck jerked. He got up, went downstairs,
came back with a fresh Corona. He had thick-fingered big hands like Monty's,
a grieved slab of a face.
In Oregon we ran alongside a black creek with white riffles. One of the
things I saw when I closed my eyes at night was the sheets of color on the
ground, pink, gold, under half-bare trees.
At the dinner table last night a Jewish science teacher from Philadelphia,
late fifties, and a bookkeeper and her mother from Ukiah OR, listened carefully
as I told them about the significance of the monkey mother picture on Being
about.
At breakfast yesterday two dull women dressed similarly in formal suits
with big brooches, said they were a pharmacy clerk and a nursing assistant.
We were getting along pleasantly until the plates of food arrived. Would
you like to join us in saying grace, said the one next to me. NO! I was
startled and affronted. They closed their eyes and bowed their heads and
the nurse said my mother's sort of prayer aloud. "We ask this in your
name, amen."
Who else. The first night for dinner an ENT doctor with the glossy humane
look doctors often have, and his pale small quietly firm wife of 35 years.
He listened with remarkable patience to an Oregon woman living in Hawaii,
a watercolor teacher in a community college, relentlessly enthusing about
out-of-body travel and rebirth evidence. She had a lot of rough blond hair
and a big shapeless face. Sitting across from that composed father with
his attentive eyes, I noticed that the squab female and I were competing.
One more. On the bus from Vancouver to Seattle, as daylight began to
show the dark and luminous day, I talked with a man in the seat ahead, young,
white-haired, wearing a black overcoat. He had a laptop briefcase like mine.
A Bell exec moving from Seattle to Vancouver, Justin Webb. Grew up in Gibson's,
worked in sawmills between university terms, sometimes for whole years.
Had a dot com startup in Seattle, an immigration lawyer. When I saw him
getting onto the bus I thought he was gay. Three daughters 8, 6 and 1. He
plays catch with the 8 year old. He was mild, an equal listener. When I
talked about Ed's death he dilated into something real though still mild.
I'm in Starbucks. A woman has just walked in with wonderful hair - spiked,
shaggy, half platinum white, half black, sorted down the middle. She has
dimples, brown eyes.
What is it today, an open world, marvels. Something.
Bird Rock 13th
Exquisite mornings, dawn milky white and then coloring to powdered pink
and blue. Then bronze light on the palm fringe. Small birds.
Reading David Adams Richard's grim true account of La Glace people among
others.
I'm anxious, some. Running into responsibility after none. Am I doing
enough to earn my rent here, was I sounding stupid in the meeting with the
contractor.
Louie phoned yesterday, said she'd broken through after her crumble.
Got up after almost no sleep and taught a superlative class. I noticed after
talking to her that the boy with the guitar was called Eddie.
- David Adams Richards 2001 Mercy among the children
Arcade
14
Woke from a dream in which I was thinking, and wondered whether it is
thought I miss.
I go from there to [students x, y and z], who don't think and are unbearable
because of it. Is thinking always painful? Is thinking always a heightened
state? Is it always about solving something? Does there have to be a question?
Do you have to be smart, past a certain level, to be able to think? Is there
any personhood without it? Could my father think? Can my mother? Does thinking
mean sustained thought? This is the key to [x, y and z].
The phone has rung for two days, each time some stranger asking for what
I no longer have. The bricks are gone but there are still some plants, I
say, and then miscellaneous persons ring the doorbell. I also was trying
to write something accurate to [x]. Stroppy letter from [y], who strenuously
disagrees. He keeps seeming to say, I'm the rock star, and who do
you think you are? I'm the writer, dude, and you can't write for
shit, and writing is what we are doing, here.
17
It is 6 o'clock Sunday morning. I've been awake since about 3. The sky
is beginning to whiten. First bird, a crow, I think. - There, pink on a
cloud.
I need intensity and now it's work I should get it from - and if it's
intensity, what work should it be?
I like the idea of poetry, but when I look at some, I don't like it.
Oh, but that means it is not the right kind.
20
Have been wanting to think a little about politics. On the morning I
was hearing live reports of the towers falling in New York my first thought
was that this would guarantee Bush re-election. The midterm elections have
given the Republicans both houses, and Bush had a slew of initiatives ready
- citizen surveillance, drilling in Alaskan preserves, the mawkishly named
Homeland Security Department, approval for war in Iraq. Bush will now be
able to name antiabortion judges, fund religious indoctrination in schools
and social service agencies. His little weasel face is everywhere. He is
cutting estate taxes.
In relation to war, citizen surveillance, abortion rights, girls' sports
funding, affirmative action in university entrance, I would certainly have
things to say, but because I am not a citizen here I am not in a position
to say them. That is worrying. I mean that I would shut up because I can
be tossed out of the country.
Second, I am noticing that I am not really sure the Republicans are not
right about defeating Iraq and being able to spy on would-be guerrilla warriors.
Notions of smallpox and suitcase nukes, attacks on nuclear stations, are
enough to dissolve certainty. That is something I didn't know before - the
effect of even the possibility of certain kinds of attack. There are people
who know whether these are strong possibilities, but we who depend on media
do not.
Meantime, after heavy destruction of countryside in Afghanistan, bin
Laden is still sending taped messages. Bush waged that war to win seats.
It is in his interest to have bin Laden still at large, and to have new
threats uncovered every week. These are surely the worst times I've seen,
politically, in my lifetime. If better times recur, these will be seen as
infamous. Will better times recur? Will we have seen the end of the golden
age of confidence and liberality, in relation to gender, race, international
relations, sexuality, intelligence, cultivation? There's a feeling of timidity
and hopelessness in opposition - I mean I notice myself feeling that. I'm
longing for the intelligence, pragmatism and sanity of Bill and Hillary,
who also had charm enough to carry a country safely.
Meantime COPE did win 8 of 12 seats on council in Vancouver, last weekend.
Ellen Woodward got in. The man who will be mayor seems to have won on the
issue of harm reduction for junkies, against the Chinatown merchants who
allied with the NPA. Maybe something new can grow out of local politics?
Opposition to conservative paranoia and grasping is going to have to be
something it hasn't been before.
I wonder how much of the conservative sweep was organized by radio demagogues
like Schlessinger and Limbagh.
Writing Steve4 this afternoon I realized something I hadn't really
understood at the time, that my misery and isolation of the first half of
the 80s had to do with being starved out by the grasping and reactionary
times, that had no use for what I was. I've thought of it as Jam/Trudy/Rhoda,
but it was more that all of us were being sidelined out of the funded and
active places we'd had in the first half of the 70s.
21
When Tom is a fountain of invention - he was, this week - he's brilliant.
I'm too slow to follow. I don't join him in the splashing, as I should.
Usually I say, You're really on, today, or something similar, which is ungenerous
because it implies he's normally less.
At the same time somewhere in it, some little obscure where, I am feeling
shy with wonder at the friendship found.
22
Yesterday woke from a grieved dream that Luke was
gone, dead.
23
In a bed downstairs in the living room, homeless. In the other room four
raucous women, drunk, stoned, yelling, howling with laughter. I go into
suspended animation, doing nothing but wait for them to go home. Mo, Nora
and Eliz alike in the way they take the stage. I have never been able to
speak in general conversation. I'm used to that. Whatever I am, I can go
far and deep in my own timing but I cannot flap my wings in a common breeze.
There's a reason, surely. I assume that if I could do what they do I wouldn't
be able to do what I can do. That's the end of the question.
Meantime - is this endurance a price I am willing to pay for the moments
of morning in the upstairs room? Yes, I'm willing to pay for exquisite light.
First light on the fringe of the palm's dangling grass, bronze light on
the palm's orange fruit. The last few nights of the Santa Ana, the sun went
down in molten metal south of east behind the lacy trees. Evening in the
perfect temperature of the four-bulb lamp, with music.
Ah but now Brenda is stomping through the house yelling Hey Ellie.
Stomping, a coarse blank energy. I haven't been writing what any
of that is like, out of prudence. Nora is something else. I never look at
her without pleasure. She's flamey and present, she's light, she's alert,
she's tuned. She has some clue who I am, though she's surrounded by people
who don't. I can do this because she can. She's a universal solvent, as
I notice with unfinished wonder.
24th
It's good these women can be raucous. I'd like centuries of women to
hear them. But, but, I'm homeless. I was yesterday. I couldn't stand Brenda
leaving lights on, doors closed, shades down. It strikes me as deep neurosis
(in her).
At Pannikin's this aft I'm similarly offended by that blond - her brown
spike-heeled boots, her thin rapacity dramatized by her makeup. She is married
to a particular type of weak hairy wet-looking orthodox Jewish man with
pop eyes, bottle glasses, red lips. She's walking back and forth in sunglases
pushing a baby. Her hair has the metallic glitter of bleach and dye. Her
baby is ugly. "My feets are killing me," she says. What? She repeats
it. Her husband has a high silly voice.
[about students, not transcribed]
That's my six and I work hard for each of them. I cut no corners. I give
as much time as it needs, no matter. I show them how to care and how to
press.
This year there are all sorts of unpaid extras, MA program stuff. I resent
the latter. Don't resent anything with students because it's creative, I
can go to the root with it. If I did not, I couldn't stand it.
Sparrows picking at a muffin-skin on a plate. A bougainvillea fountained
red and green on blue and white, bright, bright and clean.
26
Spent money today, books then plants. Small picture book of Frank Lloyd
Wright, Harry Crosby Cave paintings of Baja California. A dry strange
little geranium with green flowers, pelargonium quinquelobatum, a crassula
shaped like a butterfly, three salvias - a pink that smells of pineapple
(elegans Frieda Dixon), small mauve-flowered s.equador, a beat-up s.regla
Huntington, an echeverium blooming pink-yellow, a cereus aesops that is
three purplish thumblings standing straight, another little cactus like
a tiny beavertail, opuntia rufida Desert Gem, a rue, a rose-scented geranium.
Downtown 28th
Tom cried when he read my obit for Ed. To him my childhood is exotic,
'story,' Logan says. Still, I like it that he read it, and listened to the
journal story of the funeral day.
Thinking in the [college] work, sending Margo, Lise and Karen the letter
to Melissa saying the feminism she likes is the feminism she would earn
by feeling her situation fully and dealing with it, sending Lise and Karen
the notes on why I don't like peace and justice and would propose embodiment
as a concentration, sending Karen the section I wrote for Elissa on theory
and experience. It's all forming/resolving work. I satisfy myself quite
fully in the questions I take up. I'm wanting a better audience than the
students and so am sending to the faculty, and at the same time wondering
whether I am over-killing with virtuosity. These are student letters. I
am writing them as if they are Harper's pieces. Sort of; in what
must seem an idiosyncratic manner, brilliant but unfashioned. Alright, I
should be publishing.
I like the modesty of [this college]. I like the schedule, heavy and
light weeks. I like getting email. Some of it is love letters. Jody wanted
me to know it's a ride to anticipate, open and read my letters. Last time
he quoted a wonderful passage from Being about without comment. Students
from last semester write, Corin to say she misses me. She meant Laura is
professionally helpful, not a sweettalker like me. Ed. Logan is corresponding
like a pal.
More. What's happening at Bellevue. David is around this week and looks
at me always with a wrinkled nose, a strong chill. He's a polite person
so it means he's really annoyed. So far Nora has taken up my suggestions
for the shape of the terrace, moving the house entrance, squaring the corner,
positioning the Bellevue gate and path. Brenda adds a complication. I have
not played along with her and assume she is working against me as she can.
Nora is sharp enough to read all of this correctly, but I also don't see
enough of her to keep up our best connection. And then having to move out
of the upstairs room, fumes and days without water. But wanting to work
out that garden and plant it.
Things I could be doing [list]. Why am I not doing any of these things
- because I don't want to be in harness, yet, or maybe ever - want mornings
with nothing I have to be doing - and yet, sometime I will have to be able
to pay rent again.
2nd December
Monday morning in Tom's room. Saturday night Tom bombarded me with music
and when he made a move to apologize somewhere around 1:45 in the dark I
said the music was not the point: it's the fact that he doesn't do his laundry,
it's the indolence it demonstrates, that makes me think it is over. Driver's
license, dentist, laundry - I feel I've got to the rind that doesn't shift.
This unthought speech put Tom in a rage. He said, then and in the morning,
that he had seen through me, he hates me, I'm a cold using bitch, and he
never wants to see me again. We lay alongside not sleeping until he jerked
up at 5:30 and went to type the sheets. When he came back he said more of
the same. I packed my stuff. I hadn't answered any of what he'd said. It
seemed he should be allowed to say it all without interruption.
I had to pass him going out the door, and he grasped one of my bags as
I squeezed past. Stay and talk for a bit (not exactly that). So there I
sat on the foot of the bed. Eventually took off my coat. He said he had
hardly seen me in four months. I said that was because he broke up with
me two weeks before I defended my doctorate and we were not back together
yet. He said I won't live with him and am always away in my own life. I
said he is always working or tired from working and does not have the means
to offer any other option to the way we are living separately. He said we
haven't had any good times for years. I said we had a good time the morning
before last. He said one robin doesn't make a spring. I laughed. He laughed.
He started to make a promise about his teeth. I said I would write it down.
I showed him the front page of this book, which has his photo glued onto
it.
And then on with the day.
3rd
I asked Tom whether he thinks I am too hard on my students. He said,
You have a heroic spirit. The shadow side of that is contempt. When you
are teaching you have to buffer that contempt. The way you do it is to work
very hard at figuring them out.
That makes sense. It is just what happens - I use my rages of dislike
to drive hours and depths of analysis, and fleets of long springy sentences.
Does it matter that I don't feel love for them? I ask. No, he says, you
have to be what you are.
-
I am in and out of 324 [in the Maryland] today. In the afternoon, at
the sky shack scrubbing the bathroom. I coast downtown after, in the starting
chill of 3PM. I get into Tom's room and there is Tom with a red face. I
don't have time to get suspicious before he confesses. He had no sooner
lit the joint than he heard the key in the lock. He stuffed it into his
pants pocket, pinching it out. He reckoned he had an hour before I got back.
Someone at work said to him, You look like a stoner: here. "It's creepy
how you always do this."
Last night when I saw he had been to the store on Broadway I flew into
shock. He'd been spending money. He has only paid a week's rent and if he
is spending wildly it means he is going to have to borrow money next week
and then his next pay check will be shot so he can't go to the dentist.
I was willing to say the one who flew into shock is a child, but I didn't
open up again. We watched a violent movie and he was speedy before bed.
The worst, when I make my lightening calculations into heartbreak, is that
he denies what I see, he denies there is a problem.
4th
Tom's room. The night swimming in golden haze.
6th
Conference call. I tap in the code number, there's a pause, a recorded
voice says, You're in conference. Ralph's voice saying, Who just joined
us? It's only voices but the sense of people is very strong. Voices in a
dark room somewhere.
7
I ran into Nora yesterday next to the mesquite in the patio. She was
dressed for a business trip, long fitted jacket, black. She's thin, pale
and beautiful. I watched the corners of her mouth with pleasure. We do what
we do, admire something together, the mesquite, which has spread its fringy
arms and is blooming in yellow brushes. I say I thought it could go into
the mall area of her office building. She says that's a wonderful idea.
We are soon talking about the psychologist she uses for office relations
diagnosis. She tells me he always gets it right. She draws a swift zigzag
with her index finger, and then a dart. The motion is lovely, tight-knit,
well-drawn. I stand admiring her. It is a moment where I am myself, next
to my island of plants in pots.
She's up to four million a year.
Saturday morning, 6AM.
-
7:47AM - in the interim I designed the garden for the house on Dawne
in Clairemont.
8
Ooch what a night. I was asleep by nine. Sometime later I was being brought
out of sleep by men shouting. I was still dreaming something about drunken
doctors, until gradually I realized there was some quite violent ruckus
going on nearby on the street. Men shouting, a woman shouting, what sounded
like a gunshot. The motion-sensor light came on outside the deep bare window,
meaning the fight had come onto our lawn, though I couldn't see anything,
and then the phone rang. It was in the kitchen and I got to it too late.
Meantime I was realizing I was sick. Diarrhea, vomiting. It was only 10:30.
I lay there under the heavy pile of covers sweating.
Some things to catch up on - in the last two weeks I had the company
of Richard Holmes on Coleridge, two volumes with fine portraits on the covers.
1989, Coleridge: early visions; 1998, Coleridge: darker reflections
1804-1834.
I can hardly ever read biography because the sentences shuffle along
unbearably but I read Holmes avidly. My Coleridge is only slightly seen,
the Coleridge of cognitive dynamics, natural intuition, but it seemed the
whole Coleridge was there - politics, money, acquaintanceship, health, obsession,
journalism, religion, family. Holmes (1945) has absorbed the feminists,
so that his story has a woman's sense of nuance in relations. He's a journalist
freelancer as Coleridge was. There is the whole stew of wild intention in
which some bits got done, a lot of bits, as a lifetime goes. Many lively
quotes.
Something of Tom in his cork-bobbing on the turbulent chop of his own
emotionality. "Would not such drama necessarily be the question of
acceptance by someone - someone with something important at stake - of the
general responsibility of rising to the height of accepting him for
what he is, recognizing his rare, anomalous, magnificent, interesting, curious,
tremendously suggestive character, vices and all, with all its imperfections
on its head, and not be guilty of the pedantry, the stupidity, the want
of imagination, of fighting him, deploring him in the details - failing
to recognize that one must pay for him and that on the whole he is
magnificently worth it." - that is Henry James on C, quoted by Holmes.
It describes my situation over the years with Olivia, Roy and Tom, and Louie's
with me. Though Olivia, Roy and Tom are not in Coleridge's way worth
it, and the worth it must also be differently judged for friends
than for lovers.
- Miz you,
- Have you landed somewhere yet?
[Louie:
- landed hot dry grassy day
- slept two
- oh it's home
- have been talking with you and journal in
london where you were in a small hotel
- but they don't drink tea in england
- anymore! unless starbucks
- the pickup so astute as she is
- and right for landing here where some
- proteas are as large as small watermelons
Nadine Gordimer 2001 The pickup Bloomsbury
9
Looked at waves yesterday afternoon -
10
I have been opening their last packets eagerly, looking for love and
praise. My letters have been beautiful. I've poured time into them. Four
out of six are saying they want me again, and yet I'm disappointed every
time. I feel I've done nothing this semester. I've made enough money to
live as a poor relation. I've had a week of exquisite mornings in the upstairs
room. I've seen my father out. I drove for five days. Apart from that it's
been this crop of hand-reared mediocrities.
What else - this week is all whichway, having to move, having six packets.
Frank after his life has my dad in it too. I didn't bring the
materials - I thought I was going to.
I do so much writing to so little effect.
11
Dreaming sharp, small and odd. I was watching men,
telling men things. The last man was a certain kind of maybe Mennonite man,
plainfaced, not large, curly haired, a broad acne-marked face. I was beginning
to tell him about Frank, had only got as far as going to Clearbrook to pick
berries when I was 16 when I woke.
Do I need the right kind of listener for that story? Maybe the sky shack
will be a place to work.
Men I saw were Dave Rimmer who jumped up to welcome
me in a meditation room, a compact rock musician with turquoise eyes, standing
with other men after some public event, a young academic man I was telling
about my doctorate who afterwards joined I think five women on my right.
Walking afterhours past shelves in a second hand store, picking up a small,
very small, glass pitcher, about 3", with awkwardly formed handle.
Somewhere else, somewhere high, strikingly beautiful. I can't remember it.
13
This semester caused me to think more than I
have in a very long time. Going in, I thought I was writing about music,
which is my passion. I did write about music, but I discovered so many things
about my life from studying the time in which I lived. My advisor encouraged
me, dogged me, sparred with me, praised me and chastised me. I deserved
all of it.
My writing improved. I have always been good
at telling a story but being a product of the American educational system,
I have trouble with simple things like punctuation and use of grammar. When
I can tell that I am doing something in a better way, a truly remarkable
change has occurred.
When I read this I imagined people standing in a group looking at me.
It was as if in heaven: Ida, Michelle, Mike, Maggie, Logan, Elissa, Joan,
Kim, Ed, Jody, Corin, Sharon - and maybe, in the end, though not yet, William,
Mary, Kevin, Tim. I got down with them.
It is the Friday I am going with Tom to Mexico to have his teeth fixed.
I believe. It is also my last weekend here. Yesterday I began to move into
the skyshack, which is like a sound, clean, tiny cabin on a shingle beach.
When I opened the window clean air blew through. The floor is waxed hardwood.
I moved the big desk under the window that looks across Mission Hills to
the sea. The couch will go under the two north windows. I'll cut those windows
open and scrape the whitewash [that covered all the windows]. The Amvets
goodwill has an army-green filing cabinet and a padded chair I'll be able
to endure for hours. The rooftop of a business building - it's a version
of David McAra's penthouse. And it's lovewoman's business building, where
she controls four million a year. Balboa Park and its museums are a block
east. Hillcrest and its coffee shops and bookstores, half a mile up 5th.
Tom downtown half a mile the other way. Mission Hills Nursery, the canyons
and cottages of Mission Hills and North Point round about. No lacy trees,
though, no Bird Rock birds, no sound of waves, no beach. But I'll travel
to three gardens.
15th
I went with Tom to the dentist Friday afternoon, in Mexico. Yesterday
he woke in Bellevue with me and we moved boxes from here to the skyshack,
two flights of stairs, futon from Grand Ave, file cabinet from Amvets, armchair
from a goodwill in Hillcrest. Back to Amvets for shelves for Tom. Took them
to the Golden West, room 345 on the men's floor. Today we moved Tom out
of the Maryland.
Quite a few things to notice. Room 324 is gone, the beautiful room, the
beautiful window. Deep sill, Tom's plants, the desert sunrises, Mexican hills, the
lights on Coronado Bridge. Visits for five years. Music. This morning Willie
Nelson and Emmy-Lou Harris singing Gulf coast road: We'll fly away
/ on blackbirds' wings / some sweet blue bonnet spring. Heart-rending. This
morning Tom on the bed, me on the floor by the cassette player, both with
tears hearing it again.
Handling Tom's things today - his dirty broken things.
I drove him to the bus stop after he'd brought the blue truck back. Gave
him two dollars for the bus, his green terry jacket. He got out of the car,
crossed the street, didn't stop at the bus stop. He looked like a lonely
teenage boy. We had quarreled at the end, after two days working together.
16
This afternoon I went to the sky house and put my new bed together. I
have never bought a bed. I've never had a new bed. The frame was in a long
box, in parts, the mattress folded in a stout plastic bag. I sat on the
crowded floor with a garbled instructions sheet and figured it out. When
I had dropped the mattress onto the assembled frame and tried to lift it
into a couch, it slid back and lifted. Amazing. Four kinds of washer, four
kinds of bolt, three little wrenches.
The green stone tile with white freesias in glass, a silver cup with
nasturtiums and silver sage, my two lamps, the red cloth square, the red
Haida mask of a girl with staring eyes. A desk with a chair. A couch with
the red plaid blanket and a green cushion. [skyshack sketchup jpgs
2015]
17
[still in Bird Rock] 3:53 in the morning. It is Luke's birthday. The
storm in the air has passed but I can hear that the storm in the water has
not. There's a large continuous sound as if across the west side of the
sky. I want a more particular word than 'sound' but there is none for this
large dark evenness of texture which doesn't roar and doesn't boom. I could
say dark grey noise but that does not say how directional and yet distributed
it is. It is not a wall of sound but a towering reef of sound. Meantime
the cloud has separated into diagonal streaks. A bulging last quarter moon
far into the northwest.
Laurel, Maple, Nutmeg, Olive, Poplar. Street names on barren Bankers'
Hill.
Nor describing her carpenter: "I haven't found what he wants to
do, that would make him loyal."
No phone and a pile of stuff in the middle of the room at the sky house.
Brenda here, cold, urethane fumes, no desk so I have to sit in bed to work.
No 324 any more.
It's wet. My muscles hurt. I'm bored, uncomfortable, on the leash with
[college] stuff like the body statement, which is making Lise hate me. Six
evaluations to write, bored. Sleeping badly night after night.
part 5
- in america volume 1: 2002-03 september-february
- work & days: a lifetime journal project
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