in america 8 part 6 - 2005 july-august

work & days: a lifetime journal project

6 August 2005 Took Rowen to Clearbrook yesterday, then home to his apartment in Surrey. Mary offered him $2000 for school. Mary in a pink shift trotting busily between us looking for a restaurant in the heat. I did my laundry. Anne's book on Konrad history with her parents' wedding picture on the cover. Just then I felt my mother's face in mine. The relatives, Mary's life in the thick atmosphere of family. I try to change the subject and she veers back. Ponderous, humorless. She tries for humor and it's flat. Such an amount of lifetime given to those grim-looking pious people. Anne trying to get an overview. Many details must strike her differently because she knows a distance into their history, but to me they're mud people. She's trying to keep them alive not building a mind - isn't she? "Ellie chose an unconventional life." Even that way of saying it tells me how far outside the family I am. I come back to David and his mother in the evenings expecting another kind of welcome. It's as if the welcome in my own family is blind. I keep feeling I want thinner air. Such dich nur die schöne Menschen aus. This while I wait to go with Luke to Strathcona this aft to get my boxes from Louie's. She said to Mary, Ellie and I aren't friends anymore. And Tom is not writing. It's 2005. New cycle. Can I find everything again? Dear larger one, are you with me in this? Is this how it's supposed to go? Karen has scheduled all my [workshop] presentations unopposed. - Waiting for Luke in the library. He's already half an hour late. I haven't said how waiting is always an anguish. From yesterday - a photo I liked - there were many of me that I don't like - this one was unfamiliar to me as if I'd never seen it before - a light poised person - hair up - hands a bit boneless like Rowen's - right eye strong and bright - I didn't see it until I looked specifically - don't remember when it was taken - might have been by Dennis Stamp in second year. Aw Luke don't do this to me. 8 Strung out - trashed night - first the kids then the trains. Motel tonight, has to be. Feels like a kidney infection starting. Michael de Courcey last night - his kids - second family. The twins, William and Julia. When we arrived in the back garden they were competing at limboing under a bar, both very leggy, ten or eleven, Julia in a tight short skirt and William with long hair and a hippy bandana band. All three of the boys with sleek long hair. Michael in the midst having turned 61, beautiful. His littlest with Loreen, Anna, who used to trail into the store in Strathcona, grown up and lovely in a black dress. Dorothy dressed up in a long loose red print silk dress with a red neckerchief and swinging triangle earrings. She sat in a chair looking beautiful. When we arrived, the three of us, I carrying the bowl with figs, David giving Dorothy his elbow, the first person I saw - from the back - was Rhoda. Above her, catching every psychic breeze as always, Trudy. She smiled, probably at David, but I smiled back. I was ready. Rhoda did not look so great. Trudy looked fine. Michael said later that she's working with Photoshop and scanner and printer. "They're quite cut off." Michael was sensible. I liked him. He said he's gathered a group of maybe 65 people who are interested in what he's interested in and he stays in touch with them. He's working on the history of [the group] Intermedia, in Vancouver. It'll be a website, a book, a film, and a show. We were in the backyard of a big old BC house, cedar shingled, with a tall cedar tree and large salmonberry and thimbleberry bushes, one each, that Michael said had taken 15 years to establish. I think we were all feeling the good fortune of the kids in that house. Yesterday morning, after many delays, and a beautiful breakfast of blueberries, peaches, mangos and figs, we got in the red car and drove very fast almost to the border and then followed the country roads east. On the way back we stayed on Zero Avenue as long as we could. Country I'd never seen, in some places quite high, with a view back over the valley to the mountains. Baker looming and anomalous, the only mountain with snow. A couple of beautiful farms on hillsides, red barns. David and I watching for barns and sheds. Everywhere a lot of damp but dried-out looking leaves. In August they're already fading. Finally the dreaded uncle Neil, a young 80, drinker's belly and thin shanks, rather dead eyes. Yard beautifully kept, green. Cherry trees, raspberries, loganberries, apples. Six dairy cows and an old horse. Sheep dog. In the house a lot of original paintings of the western scenes kind - horses, cowboys, mountains. A lot of books. Well off bachelor with a poison secret. David can't take the step over the line with him. I say, It would be good for you to do it, but I know he won't. The photo of David as a boy standing in a wading pool with his sisters sitting around it, holding something across his chest to look like a bikini top. He makes delicious meals and takes sweet care of Dorothy. I've seen how much he is his mother in his manner. He doesn't really want to be fixed. - City Centre Motel Shower - clean bed - ironed shirt - no night parties, no crashing trains - Cher and the moon on TV, and a Sicilian house in the Bronx. "We're made to love the wrong people and break our hearts and die," Johnny says. "I want you to get into my bed. Come on. Come on," holding out his artificial hand. "You're a wolf," she says to him, "there's a big part of you that can't talk." This time through I could see something else about the way it was directed. I want to say a comic book aspect, was it mainly Nicholas Cage, maybe. A tale. The hideous old man with the dogs. La luna, la bella luna. Norman Jewison dir 1987 Moonstruck It's Tuesday morning, cool breeze through door open to the upstairs walkway. I'm packed. I slept. There's hardly anyone here this time, parking lot empty. When I get back I'll likely be in Louie's house. She was here looking curvy - fetching - with her hair the right length, and a white gauze shirt tucked into the kind of pants that look good on her. She took June off and went to Italy. Much better. She got her mortgage shifted to G & F and doesn't have to have anyone co-signing anymore. There's my alarm. Flight not until 11:15, four hours, but I could go. - In the air - mountain lakes deep turquoise, little tanks in rock hollows. Crests looking so naked, ashy, just shreds of dirty glacier left. They're sharp but now they'll start to wear. There's Ranier I guess, or is it St Helens. Blue murk. Now we're over dry foothills, white roads in pretty jags. Is that the Columbia, broad and flat. A town where the current would have spread it. Brown-yellow fields, is there a name for that color - putty. Why was everyone being so nice to me at the airport, I look different someway. Customs man called me out of order, I wasn't even in his line, another one in the immigration office called after me, when everything was done, "Go and save the world, or at least film." Screening officer jumped up to carry my shoulder bag, put it on the belt, though there were people ahead of me. Either I'm limping more, or I look elderly, or I look pleasanter than I did. Then that big responsible Dutchman wanted to make conversation. He said that after the war, in Holland, at night, in bunkers, there would be gatherings of artists, painters, writers. It was exciting. He'd wanted to be part of it. Now it's rough country, patches of clearcut, very thick haze, forest fire probably, rising toward the Rockies. - Oh brown moleskin, green scribbles of drain lines. Plainfield VT 10th Stepping into scented air this morning. Giggling with faculty. There's Margo's quick eye. She always catches a glance.   Clean clothes. My bag arrived finally. Empty campus. What are those little twittering things. It's just enough cooler. This nicest bath of air under a crabapple tree with rough scabby bark. There we all were again, Lise, Margo, Karen, Tomas, Ralph, Francis, Caryn, Katt, Jim, Ellie, and a new one who won't fit at all, the business thing. 12 Dots of rain on the window. Evening lamp. Miz Mol's legs and other parts and new girlfriend. Beautiful Juliana crying at the supper table. What else, the smell of my armpits, I passed Barbara on to Francis. Susan gave me a beautiful introduction that said if you're fearful and want to be fearless you should work with Ellie. Speaking to Cyndi just now suddenly inspired to remember I'm allergic to dogs. 13 Six thirty Saturday morning. I don't have crowds signed up for me. Am I going to make enough money? Anything else. The way we giggled all through faculty meetings this time. We had a business person looking at us and so we whacked out on being silly. That was fun. There was also the moment we had to step up individually and have our picture taken and were trying to crack each other up and Tomás when I was on the spot in the spot of sun said Jesus Christ my Lord and personal Saviour. Two people yesterday crying because they had changed so fast. Does that mean I rearranged them without care? It says no. A dripping misty daylight through the maples. What am I doing today - a crow barking - more interviews this morning, time off 11 to 1, Astro and Juliana's presentations, advisor assignments, first advising meeting, student-fac reading tonight. Prep for presenting Carolyn and Astro tomorrow. Prep for embod colloq. After tomorrow all the small stuff will be done. - I read a bit of the travel journal. I knew I couldn't read it well. Knew it wd seem banal next to the sensational stuff. Wanted to read it anyway. Wanted to satisfy something. Susan's reading was voiced wrongly. I'm still thinking about what to say about how. She read it socially and it's not written that way. It wasn't at all her voice. Is it because she's teaching? I used to read it unvoiced, somehow, the rhythms very precisely indicated. She didn't trust her audience. She was trying to accommodate them, she likes to be popular, and it didn't work, she came across as high-toned. Walking through the cafeteria, her beautiful shoulders and straight back. Carolyn's black dress, spaghetti-strapped. Juliana's standing ovation, haybarn full of people. First advising group on the mown grass. First interview with Gwen. She remembered when it came from - innocence - her grandparents' kitchen that she lost when she was 10. Who I've got. Cynthia. Strange Richard. Becci who was beaten by her father and defends her son. Lisa sharp and wary. Margaret looser after the exercise? Mainly David. (The men sat next to each other.) 14 Don't have the energy to say this - Juliana wanted to have something she can continue to belong to. I set up the colloquium to talk about that. Last night she said, Oh I hate talking business, let's not do that. Rich girl, daddy looked after the business. (Her nifty American lesbian sister.) What else - sitting by while Lise does her empathetic I'm-all-involved-in-your-life thing. I'm so reserved in comparison. It's the girly squealing practice - I don't do that. Anyway - about the colloquium today - I guess we're not ready to take it forward into organization. I don't want to work with my squealing sisterhood. And you Miz Mol, moaning overcome by the wonder of Lise's manuscript on her feminist glory days, you're gonna seduce Lise now? Oh well, I'll watch. But what shd I do about the colloquium? Talk about my vision, talk about research associationships, funding, targeted marketing, the reader, the magazine, the structure of embod studies. - How was that. I'm so tired - so. I don't want anything to do with mbo studies - I want to drop [my college] - there's so much still to do - Miz Mol is taking size wherever she can - I saw her using what I'd given her yesterday and today to look central - saw her scaring Lise - she savaged Millie - did she lose us Millie's participation? (Ugly Rebecca began by asking me whether I have a prosthesis.) (Anybody dumb enough to join the Amish.) [looseleaf from this point] Sunday 14th Aug Susan came in stroppy wanting to talk about the meeting. Twice today I started to laugh when I was with her and don't know why. Enough for today. Who was it said this morning that she'd woken thinking of my journal bits - it was Patricia. 15 Have the afternoon to work on the lectures. It's 1:30. Would I rather have a nap? I'd rather something - Woke at three and stayed awake a long time it seemed, processing imprints. Had two song phrases going, That's amore from Moonstruck was one. I thought of a way to stop it by fattening the phrase - slowing it and as if puffing it up like tubes of risen but unbaked bread. There was some struggle about Susan, I'm seeing it as slashes but it was more a speed or tone, the aggressive tone she comes in with that I imitate because I want to find out whether I can. The laughing - I said maybe it's my larger self laughing. She said, Your larger self likes me more than you do. I said My larger self likes everybody more than I do. But what was it really - helplessness? It says no it's a way of putting a stop to something in myself, it's cognitive interruption. Of what? Liking. Evading something she's set up? No just evading. Is it correct? Yes. Tues 16th First Margaret. She's jealous of the ones who are broken open. Asshole academic father who said dinner table conversation had to be for the grown-ups, so she presents herself analytically always - smooth control - and can't say you. I say, You get a Fed-Ex package, cardboard box, taped. Open it up and what do you find? Books, five. Take out the first without looking at the cover. Open it at random. What sentence do you see? And then each of the other books. I say, This time open the package with your left hand. Keep your eyes closed. What do you feel? Clay. Take out the clay. With your left hand make something with it. What do you make? A bowl. Alright the bowl is finished. It is standing in front of you with water in it. The water is reflecting sky and something else. What do you see? Then Nicole meets me as I'm midway to the help desk. She's confused. I say put your left hand to your head instead of your right. You're standing in a room. There's a room on your left that you can enter through a door on your left. Stand in the doorway and look into that room. What do you see? Natural light, cushions on the floor, colors. What does it feel like in that room? Optimistic. There's some sort of table with papers on it. They are your first packet. What are they about? Myself. What do they say about you? That I can change. (Then some talk about how long that would take.) Okay, there's a paper folded on the desk. Walk over and pick it up with your left hand and unfold it. It tells you how long it will take. What does it say? It says I'm doing it. 17th The left hand room exercise. You're in a room with your study plan. There's a door to your left and the door is open or closed, however you prefer. You go to the door and open it if it's closed, stand in the threshold and what do you see? How large is the room? Are there windows? What does it feel like? Then after a while I said, There's a folded piece of paper somewhere in the room. Go to it and unfold it. What do you see? More silence. It occurs to me to say they can choose whether to stay in that side or go into the other side. Three of them seemed to be staying far away so I said, If you're asleep you can come back now. Gwen - Work room is [this college] dorm, desk Left side room is a knitting store, wall with all the kinds of yarn. In real knitting stores the yarn is too expensive but this all seems available. There's a spinning wheel. Lots of bluejays. Baby blanket. On the paper a circle with a dot in it. Happy about the yarn. Chose: to stay in the yarn room. Richard - Study plan room "stacked" with papers Left side room pale grey walls, no floor. Frightening. He puts in slats. Paper says, What is dead? Lisa - Study plan room: [this college]. Left hand room: big room with Roman pool, marble floors, skylights showing sky and trees. Paper, "I can (something) dream." Chose: to stay. David - Study plan room grey overcast soft dark. Walked out into open air, sunny and breezy, was just out there, Wow this is cool, "reminder that I can create reality," "joyful." Stayed. Is left hand room something specific     The uncon     no   The theme seems to be about groundedness somehow. Richard and Becci floorless. An attitude to the unknown?     Fri 19th The viewer visualization. A being is looking at you from whatever direction or distance you choose. Feel what it feels like to be seen. If it wasn't a look you liked, now imagine a different being who is looking at you with complete comprehension. It can see everything about you, and is looking at you with utter pleasure. How does it feel to be seen that way? Now step into the viewer's position and look at yourself the way that viewer was looking at you. I neglected my students for the lectures. I hardly looked at the study plans. So far I have no personal interest in any of them. I had only one session in which they talked about study plans. What I've learned about Susan. She comes in raging about some neglect, mine or someone else's, and I will stroke her thigh or her arm and tell her she's such a babe. Treat her like a petted little girl. She's younger than she was last res. She's not coming on to me, that helps. She's such a thin fine little body, so smart, so hungry. I'm looking at the lake of meadow grass beyond this shelving bank where two nights ago was it I set these two adirondack chairs and smoked a cigarette. What a glamorous idea. There are spots of pink, a few, joe pye weed. These dark stalks of some dry weed. Tansy where it meets the mown edges. Goldenrod. Dry grass. Burdock I think. American Spirit tobacco. Held the smoke under my palate and felt it hit my brain. Boom. Pines and apples on the shore. - Yeah and what else. The way Lise crawled over top of her and hugged her.   She was driving away with me as a chore     They bonded last night     She's that bonding kind of girl       I'm miserable aren't I. I feel abandoned. So here I am until tomorrow.   Sore heart. sore heart.   Is it the goodbye I'm feeling     no Jealous     Is she going to prefer Lise to me     no I hate that Lise hugged us because she wanted to hug her     What she said about the fir tree was about Lise     Something you want to say to me     exclusion, decision, Tom, child Let Tom handle the child     She's now finding me ugly and boring     no Her feeling for me was a complete con     no I think it was    no I was generous     She was bad about our collaboration     And I was generous       Was Margo concerned for me     All of those glances were to see whether I was taken     Margo can see I'm a limpy with a popular girl       She's a lot like Tom     Self-absorption     Scalding self hate     Calculated charm     Manipulation       Will you tell me what the pain was     YES conflict between slow growth and withdrawal from betrayal The betrayal was real - she turned off     The moment her session was done     She couldn't settle on who to entrain with     She can't work independently     She has to have a guarantee for her gifts     Will you tell me what slow growth would be     outlook, intelligent, processing, of loss I'm hungry to be seen, can I have that     no I can only see, right?     Always, everywhere, say, it's not about me     no Sentence?     young Ellie shouldn't say that It's alright for old Ellie to say that     - About what kind of res this has been. Becci was looked at by the sun, which became her grandmother's face, "unconditional love." "It was clear that the woods I run through every day are nourished with her body-being." Richard's white feather-beard and pale blue eyes. Something happened to him. He writes on yellow notepads and can only bear to write on the first five or six pages of each, he said. Gwen bulky, a five months' baby moving in her. She seems far stopped down. Old magazines - that's a sad thing to love. Margaret. The careful way she pronounces words with one side of her mouth. She interests me not at all. Everything locked down. Cynthia's two front teeth turned inward so they meet at angles. She'll do it finally, I think, make something. David's alright. Big, manly, a drummer, a good daddy. Grounded. Lisa's very guarded. Sharp little lesbian. Who's the one I'm going to always forget this time? Starting to even out am I - I want beauty and subtle mind so much that I lose my bearings - I wasn't fast to deal with what had happened, which was that she jumped during her meeting last night with Lise - she couldn't make her study plan until after our session was over, because she needed to be entrained with me for that and entrained with Lise for the study plan. So she buttered me even after she was in Lise's group, and fought with Lise because of it, and was in heavy conflict before the lecture yesterday - so much so that she panicked, couldn't get herself together. She doesn't have what I have, creative autonomy. So we won't do the anthology together. I've burned the false bridge. That was good. - Is there any way I can use Carolyn's offer? Shit - what am I going to do with the hungry self that wanted what she lured me with - beauty oh beauty (though not so much) and for instance that clever little hip-wriggle she spoke with this morning. I hate that she suckered me but I want something. What do I want - to be beautiful and instantaneous like that - though not an indulgent monster like that. The day after Grace broke up with her she wore a diaphanous piece of cloth over just her panties and would walk about letting the breeze lift it. We were in the jeep looking at the evening sky and she was naked up her leg. And Millie such another story - bear-body Millie barefoot last night on the grass with her ocean drum. "Today was an amazing culminating piece of that work." Her email yesterday. "I needed to leave today for that bit this morning because I had really seen you and felt your oceanic pain, sadness and anger and aloneness. All in two sentences you spoke. Walking away was not what I had wanted to do but sensed that you might be more comfortable than with what would have been my response. I was just moved completely." Millie has a lot of you in her, Susan very little, although she has smart tricks that make her seem to. - Margo says if I leave there's no embodiment studies, she couldn't hire anyone else, and I want something other than [my college] (real students she meant). I didn't make anything of advising group. I was bored. It was my 7th res. I don't want to raise love in miscellaneous people. I don't want to labor over miscellaneous people. The whole new group this term seemed poor to me, a poor lot. Their bad singing. Is there anyone with any zing in them - Millie the bear, scrawny Susan, tall Patricia with the raspberry jam we've gotten used to on her chin. Big Carol the cosmology man-woman. Enough. - 11:30 an email from Millie saying she went to Margo and freaked about the work we did. That after the sweet note last night. She's having a paranoid episode. Is there a relation between that and my own burst of agony? Sat 20th Here it is 6:43 in the morning. The eaves are dripping. I'm waking into the mess. I should have done something ceremonial with Millie to close her off. I didn't see this coming because of the way I am about leaving people. She's cured, she was praised by many people for her art, people are saying she should write a book, she's loved all over campus, what more does she fuckin' want, to go back to being an ugly lump with lupus, making cute fuzzy art? I'm stamping my foot. As for SM, she is what she is. Set like an image of the goddess above the closets in her room there was an image of her own head. These are the human materials for embodiment studies, these hysterical females including me? - Burlington airport. Sumac on the deep roadsides - let me comfort myself - leaves in the soft air - they like this kind of day probably - restful to them­ they don't have to work hard at devouring light, they don't lose water or fight not to, they're being quietly washed. I'm reminding myself that stupid people are needed to do the kinds of things I don't like to do. That's in relation to the man with a party having breakfast across the room, whose cell phone plinked out six loud bars of a tune before he got it out of his pocket. Caryn said she liked hearing my travel journal. She got points for that because it was undramatic. The evening Susan and I drove up the hill and saw wide land with blue hills banded in the distance, sun a spot of cherry red at the horizon, goldenrod yellow in green meadows. There was Susan next to me in the driver's seat, a scrap of a creature. She was turned away looking out the window and when she turned back to me her face was flooded with tears. She was protesting that I'd said terrible things to her, that she'd never loved Gia and didn't love me. I didn't think it was a moment to argue. I stroked her arm, her leg, her head. You can't stand to touch me! she said, You flinched when I hugged you. I was disarmed, I guess, a pretty small creature in tears. What else - the moment in the deck chairs at night, holding the cigarette above my head like a banner, watching it stream into the blackness, big dipper a bit to the right. The quiet night and shaven grass. - On the tarmac, buckled in. Was there anything else at all? Looking down into the river from the windows at Sarducci's. The fresh red berries on a honeysuckle bush. The Japanese beetle I found on a rock, little scarab brushed with gold paint on its back. I haven't said the way my hands breathe water - I will have my palm on a tabletop and when I remove it there's a water print. Why do I like that. It's a potency. I'm wearing my kung fu jacket. It's linen, a light weave so it hangs loose, and my loose cargos and red sneakers. We're high above two layers of cloud far enough apart so they're slipping over one another. 36,000 feet. Longing to be taken care of. No end of creatures starved for mothers, no one wanting to do it for me. My generosity backfired. What's the balance, I'm asking. Are there enough with whom it doesn't? Wd I know how to be better at being able to tell which? Favor, Jody, Michael D, Carolyn, Logan, Corin, Mike, Ed - is that it? 21st Louie's house. I'm just coming to, it seems, awake at dawn with the mountain blue. Now I'm going to write what happened at the end of the res. Yesterday I had nothing to say. Susan early in the week said did I have time to have dinner sometime in the week. I said I was staying Friday night. So we had an appointment for after the res. There was a lot of lingering sweetly from Susan during the week. I looked up in an evening interview and saw her two arms in a pale blue sweatshirt pressed against the glass of the outer door: help, they were saying. There was the moment I was on my back on the grass next to Amanda and she stopped on the path, Want to have dinner? Next to me in my office, I'm not as good at being lonely as you are. She was winsome, young. Next to me on the step facing the red pines, smoking a cigarette. Note on my yellow pad when I came into my office the morning of registration, hey u, s. Eating next to me in the cafeteria - always the sharp glance from Margo. The afternoon of our lecture she was there on the floor with her laptop scrambling. What was that - she hadn't done any prep. I showed her my outlines. She was panicked that she'd look bad. Do the breathing exercise, I said. I had the handouts ready and it was time to go. Out the door. There was Millie waiting to set up the Powerpoint presentation for her, Is Susan coming? I don't know. I started into talking about what a body is. She came in twenty minutes late, sat at the door. I was feeling, You didn't prepare and I did, I'm not going to let you wreck this. And then at the right moment I asked her to do the breathing exercise and she sat straight and slight in her bluejeans and white teeshirt and went through an induction very professionally though too fast. I let her have the rest of the session, said talk about the bridge. So then: she hadn't had a thought about her study plan and was complaining that Lise neglected her. After the cabaret they worked it out. Next day - Friday morning - I could feel her switched off. We were sitting on the adirondack chairs and Lise came jerking past from the library. Hi girls, she said. Susan called after her, Did you get your packing done? She'd been saying she wanted to go to Burlington to eat and now she said did I want to just check in the cafeteria for something to keep us going. And then she wanted to go talk to Lise. I saw her going upstairs, I said. Was lying outside next to Amanda on and on. S came downstairs, Just checking where you are, Lise wants to come down and say goodbye. So there were S, Amanda, Lise and I lying in a row joking about singing. Lise jumped up. She was going to hug us lying down. I was laughing, not wanting her to touch me. You're going up and down, she said. She crawled on top of Amanda. You're going up and down too. Then crawled over on top of Susan, which was what the whole exercise had been for. Melting hug with murmurs. You're not going up and down. Lise got up and walked toward the door. I'll deliver my packet to Montreal, Susan says. Hard glance from Lise. I did a quick check through the three issues of Trivia Susan was taking home with her. Quebec feminists etc. Alright, I thought - now Susan's going to be writing like Lise's raving old feminists. So then we had to stop at the library while she returned a book. I was looking at the pines lifting and sighing down. Look at the pines, I said when she came back. She studied them through the open sunroof. The way they're moving, I said. Compare the spruce - fir - next to it, it's so stiff. She protested, Don't say that, blowing kisses to the fir. That's about me and Lise, I was thinking. We drove away. I was starting to notice pain in my heart. What should I do, I can't do this. Got my safety pin out of my pocket. Should I go back? Yes. Could we stop for a minute, I ask. Not at a gas station, she says, I'll find a spot. This doesn't feel right, I should go back, I say. So it was you who didn't want it, she says. That doesn't necessarily follow at all, but whoever, I say. She turned around, drove back. Where do you want me to drop you, she said. The drive would be good, I said. She stopped in the upper parking lot. Do you want a hug or not, she said. I was stunned with pain. Another time, I said. Got out and walked toward the fringe of trees and went up to my room and lay there harrowed. Then that night Millie wrote that she'd trashed me to Margo. Twice betrayed. Really betrayal? Yes. Am I harmed? There's the orange corner, there's the grape ivy reaching into the light. Here's the house to myself for ten days, silent and clean though Louie adjusts it to her cosier friends. Short term memory - in advising group it happened twice that when we'd gone around the circle I forgot who had already spoken. This neighbourhood yesterday so familiar I was hardly there. Then meeting Sarah on the street, Dave Rimmer's Sarah, and having her introduce me as a filmmaker, remembering what it's like to be known by reputation. There is the balcony, leaves burning with light, bunches of grapes long as wisteria stems dropping in front of the black maple. Haven't spoken to Tom since the 5th of July, six and a half weeks. What's it feeling like here, morose, dejected, lonely. I stamped my foot with Millie and she wrote retractions to both Margo and Lise and said she was jealous of me and Susan. What I did was mention that she'd gone off her meds without telling me till months later and that I'd encouraged her to get second opinions and she'd reported only positive ones. I dump students after their semester is over, yes - 22nd "Smacking boundaries back into place while flaunting time spent with Susan" "devastated" "your generosity and kindness and pushing can feel like being used for some agenda" "It is odd to me how just turning my head a few centimeters either way makes me look at this whole thing in two completely different lights. One, you are safe and trustworthy and generous and kind. Two, no fucking way to any of that." "It's just messy now that you get to walk away and abandon this completely." "It's not okay to crack open people's psyches and walk away." What I said to her was, Until you sort out what part of your accusations is accurate and what part is memory, it is endangering my job to say anything at all to you, but I will say this. (Then about the medications and second opinions.) You were afraid you were going to die within two years and now you're full of health and praised everywhere for your work, and trashing me to Margo and Lise and other students. I'm stunned. I'm still angry with her, and at the same time I am thinking how to handle student closure better. It's true I'm always glad to be rid of them, because they are endless requirements for self-deferral. They consume my lifetime and want to feel I allow it because I 'care' about them. I do care, professionally, but what they mean by caring is that I'll continue to be available to them indefinitely. She's in the moment of disappointment that runs against the mother. The danger of that turning-against is what keeps advisors like Jim and Margo bland with students. And now ask whether nonetheless I'm doing to them what was done to me. Do you think so     no Is there any more you want to say about this     giving her this loss is instructing her in slow growth Can she use it       volume 9 in america volume 8: 2005 april-august work & days: a lifetime journal project