Hillside Life

9:30am: The blind man in the library

The man, obviously, wasn't completely blind, although he had a white cane and very thick glasses.

He was checking out a murder mystery and rattling on in a pedantic way about the author's plots. He seemed peripherally interested in my presence on his right side, which made me guess he had macular degeneration, which first takes away front vision.

"I am leaving now," he announced to Patty, the librarian, and I liked him--an older man, in his seventies, bent over and with a white cane, but by God, how brave and confident!

He almost banged into the wall near the door, and Patty yelped in sympathy, "Turn left! Left!"

"How can I turn left, being a good Republican?" said the man, smiling while he swept his cane back and forth to find the doorway.

My own books checked out, I had followed him to the door. I took a shy deep breath and said lightly: "I was going to help you, but I can't, being a good Democrat."

He mumbled amiably something political that attacked Obama and his assistants, and his cane tapped the stair railing and the three steps down. We walked together, I slowing my pace to his.

"We must protect ourselves from mindless change--" he muttered on, brushing along the sidewalk with his cane.

We came to the street, and he turned right.

"Well, see you," I said, then thought Oh, dear! and watched as, hunched over, peering sideways at his cane, the man moved slowly past the library.

I blinked hard in the sunlight, thought about my good vision, felt guilty, and then thought about how I would, if asked, move in with that man forever and take him to operas, read him the newspapers, make his morning toast, walk with him by the river.

Really, I thought to myself, walking home with my own murder mysteries under my arm, would it be so bad?

...What if the man lived alone, barely managing in his sad rooms with the table set just so, near the door, and the pots and pans always on the same racks, but soon (he would be thinking) it would be time for the Home.

What if I came to know him a little, so that we talked about his murder mystery favorite author, and slowly we came to like each other, and then I said one day, "What if we marry, and I would help you from now on?"

By the time I was walking through the churchyard, the man in my mind was weeping with joy and I was planning to read to him, patiently, stack after stack of Rex Stout paperbacks.

By the time I was climbing the steps to my house, the man was revealing that he was very wealthy and that we should travel to Europe, particularly Paris.

"You can describe the Eiffel Tower to me," he was saying while holding my hand.

I dumped my library books onto the coffee table and went to the kitchen to make coffee, seeing the man's bare brown bleak living room, where I was sitting with him on his brown bleak sofa.

"All of this can only happen, my dear," I was saying gently, my fingers playing with his soft white hair, "if you agree to become a Democrat."

And then he was taking me into his arms, his white cane falling to the floor, and he was saying fervently into my shoulder:

"For you, Darling. Whatever you ask."

8:32am:
My daughter and I were coming home from a movie Sunday afternoon when we saw a man crash his car.

We were almost home, on the state road just outside town, when Kate interrupted my chattering movie review with: "What's going on? Why is he driving off the road?"

I looked where she was pointing and a red car was running down bushes and flowers and a wooden sign, and there was no slowing down, no skidding or screech of brakes.

The red car drove straight into a telephone pole. Its front fender crumpled at once.

Blue smoke came out from under the hood, and the windshield wipers flicked back and forth.

I pulled over to the side of the road, but we'd already seen inside the car, and the man's eyes were open, his face still and gray.

"Oh, Mom, maybe he's dead," Kate said. "I bet he's dead."

"Quick," I said, turning on my emergency flashers. "Call 911."

Kate fumbled to find her cellphone, and said, "I can't think--oh, dear--how do you call 911?" She giggled nervously when I said loudly, impatiently: "Nine-one-one!"

As she talked to the dispatcher I ran to the car, and others had arrived behind us. A man was leaning into the open window: "Sir? Sir?" and a woman was using her cellphone.

I watched the windshield wipers moving uselessly back and forth, the smoke rising from under the hood, and yelled at the man by the car: "Turn off the ignition! Turn off the ignition!" and saw him reach inside.

Kate told me the dispatcher was sending an ambulance.

People were gathering, stopping cars by the road and coming out of nearby houses, so we drove slowly away.

Kate said, "My hands are shaking."

I said, "So are mine."

I drove her to her house, and she said, "Let's go get ice cream." She laughed. "We deserve a little treat, I think."

And we wanted to know: did the ambulance come? Did the car catch fire? Was the man alive and on his way to the hospital?

I drove the fastest way, and at the crash site we saw a firetruck, a rescue squad truck, two police cars, and an open ambulance; the man was being placed inside.

"Maybe he's alive!" Kate said, but we couldn't see much, so we got our ice cream sundaes at the McDonalds near the interstate. I told Kate I felt like that woman who was knitting at the hangings in Tale of Two Cities, and she said, "Nonsense. We need the endorphins. Eat the chocolate first."

As we pulled back out onto the highway, the ambulance drove by. Its lights were off, and it was driving slowly with the flow of traffic.

"He didn't make it, then," Kate said.

"I know," I said.

We went walking by the river later in the evening, and we talked about how the man's family was probably just being told he had died.

The light in the woods was particularly lovely. A big family had gathered on the foggy riverbank and were fishing; the children were chasing herons. We walked very quickly, and scared a baby rabbit into the blackberry bushes.

9:32am: A book about God

I once attended a workshop and was asked to draw a picture about my life. We were given crayons and a big sheet of paper.

I drew a long curling black line starting at the white paper's edge and made dots and swirls and stars around it--that was God shooting me out into the world.

The first picture I drew in that world was of me on a sidewalk next to a church and a black iron fence, leaves falling. My brother and parents and I had moved to this new place, a rectory by a churchyard.

While I could remember earlier memories--dancing in a striped dress, my mother picking cherries high in a tree--the churchyard sidewalk was where I began my story on the white paper.

Next I drew my brother and me wearing our new choir robes on the porch steps of St. John's Episcopal Church in Great Bend, Kansas, and then a blue car moving over the long curling line, and that was my family moving to Texas.

There was a long gap before I drew another picture, as if all my growing years were unimportant, because the next picture was of me getting married, and I drew stick figures holding hands, a sketch of a marriage that had become a dream.

Then I drew my children, one on each side of me, a boy with red hair and a girl with blue eyes. I drew us in front of a house with big trees. The house was plain and small, no certain house because the children and I had moved often. It didn't matter, because we made the same home every time, with books, trees, pianos, and bicycles.

Then my children left home, first Kate to college, then Richard, so I drew myself on the timeline, me alone, wearing a blue choir robe.

Then I stopped.

--

I've decided what I'm going to write about this summer: I'm going to fill in the gaps between the pictures I drew on my timeline, using my old journals as a guide.

I'll try to understand the gift of my life, my un-special but unique life.



Somebody told me long ago: Write, and it will be about God.

11:59am: A book club that reads thick books

A local book club invited me to join, and I did.

Today is my first meeting. I'm Jackie, New Girl.

And I didn't read the book, because it was over 900 pages long and I got bored.

Maybe they won't like me because I didn't finish my assignment.

We shall see.

Maybe I won't like them.

Anyway, I refuse to slog through 900 pages about people who fall in and out of love and in between knife each other over pigs in forests.

If anyone calls on me, I plan to say, looking down at my hands, that I didn't have time, but I understand the cathedral does get built by the end of chapter 76.

Or I can be honest and say I didn't care what happened to the characters and wished they would all die because my wrists hurt from holding the book and fierce amber-eyed heroines with messy hair just leave me cold.

"Well, perhaps we're the wrong group for you," the frowning members will say.

"Perhaps," I'll say, looking down at my hands.

The leader sent out an email telling the others that I'd been invited, and that I was "excited" about their book and had already begun reading!

They'll be expecting succinct remarks by me, possibly on little cards.

I thought about not showing up, but then they'll surely talk about me:

"I thought she was excited!"

"That's what I thought."

"Perhaps we're the wrong group for her."

"Perhaps."

7:14am: Monday morning, starting over
I like Mondays. I start my life over every Monday--this week, and forever, I'll be nicer, tidier, more frugal, more confident, more confrontive.

I'll eat less sugar, walk an extra two miles, and wear matching socks and clean shirts.

I'll wear earrings and not be a sloven.

Here's what my path looks like. As soon as I post here, I'm picking up my friend Cindy and going out to the river where I took this last year. The fog is back--we've had rain--and so we'll be walking through fish-fragrant woods this morning, and my hair will get curly.

Blue earrings, two socks that match.

8:16am: Creepy whirling babies

Yesterday at six in the morning, I switched on my new big TV and found creepy fat babies dancing in high definition.

I couldn't look away. My coffee got cold.

I stood transfixed while the rainbow-colored babies whirled and bumped into each other, to strange muffled music with muffled drums and bells.

They don't have mouths so they never smile.

They look from side to side at each other. They silently twirl around and move up and down, looking furtive.



They look like baby versions of the aliens that transport people out of bedrooms into blue lights:



At least the grownup aliens have mouths.

I felt hypnotised by the baby aliens' eyes, and began to twirl myself, and move slowly up and down in front of the coffee table.

When they finished twirling, the alien babies went inside a rainbow-colored bubble and lay down in their beds, which looked like spoons made out of felt.

--

This morning, as if by post-hypnotic suggestion, I found myself up early, moving toward the big TV.

I took pictures, and after the alien babies went back to their felt beds I went online to find out more about them.

They are called "Boobahs."

(YouTube has lots of Boobah clips, and awful teenagers add heavy metal music to videos of Boobahs dancing.)

The Boobahs' entire lives are about twirling and moving slowly up and down. They wake, they rise from their felt beds, they twirl and look around, they go back to bed and fly away, a succinct and tidy life.



And they have names:

Humbah, Zumbah, Zing Zing Zingbah, Jumbah, and Jingbah.

11:37am: Soaking

A comfortable, long rain.

I walked under my blue umbrella to the post office.

When I got home, I made coffee and opened up my library book--Willa Cather's My Antonia, and read most peacefully with the lamps on and rainy darkness outside.


Light through my kitchen window, rain falling outside

I saved a wasp in my kitchen.

It has been trapped inside, high above the cupboards where I can't reach, for two days, and this morning it was very weak, but while I was making coffee it suddenly flew into the room, surely its last effort.

I grabbed the broom, gently eased the wasp onto the broomstraws, opened the back door onto the breezeway, and the wasp flew onto a dripping white geranium flower.

May it fly home and be fed by its friends.

I am grateful for this long rain that is soaking into the flowerbeds and turning the grass green again.


Rain-soaked flowerbed on bank

9:34am: This is the first day of the rest of my (writing) life. I'm scared.



Here it is on my bed, the tiniest laptop, an Asus eee with 4 g, loaded with Linux and a freeware version of Word. See the pencil? That's how little my laptop is beside it.

My eee arrived yesterday at the post office.

Now I have no excuse about writing. My best excuse was: I hate looking at my wall while typing.

I'm going away from the house to write for an hour a day every day, forever after in my new eee life.

I'll sit under the maple tree at the library's picnic table or in the town gazebo where there are hanging flowerpots filled with geraniums.

See how teeny the keyboard is? Good thing I have flexible fingers from years and years of piano lessons.

I'm going to write about--

God.

Well, something.

I have no more excuses.

The battery's charged up.

Here's my first entry, done last night at Starbucks over a cup of decaf:



I've sprayed myself with Deep Woods Off. I'm leaving now.

Today, I think, I'll try the gazebo.

Everything's about atmosphere.

7:34am: A bug the size of a car.

Something woke me up at four in the morning, something thumping around, possibly under my bed.

I got out the flashlight, and saw under my bed only a paperback and a Lego left over from a child's visit.

At four in the morning, anything seems possible--thumping from flying-saucer aliens, ghosts in the attic--and I acted exactly like the trembly little old lady I am, pulling my faded housecoat around me as I crept through the dark house, turning on lights as I went, expecting something to leap out, possibly into my hair.

The kitchen looked plain, clean, untouched, and the back door was locked. No mouse droppings.

The house felt self-conscious around me.

I switched off the flashlight and the hall light, and then I saw, lying in the bathroom doorway, a bug on its back, its long long legs waving in the air.

It was as big as a ping pong ball. A tomato.

An individual box of raisins.

At least the bug was disabled, and not glaring malevolently at me and planning to attack.

I ran to the kitchen and pulled out the garbage can, took off the lid.

Get IN there, I yelled, and I flipped the bug into the can and slammed the lid down.

I ran and ran through the dark house to the back door and set the entire loathsome package out in the breezeway.

Then I went trembling back to bed (first checking under the blankets), and it was four thirty in the morning, so I turned on the local news because I would never sleep again.

I did, by five or so, and dreamed that the news anchor people took me on one of their interviews and I told them they should come out to my house and photograph my bug, which was as big as a car.

In the morning I thought, At least I can blog about this.

I must be very brave, and dump out the garbage can, take a look, take a picture.

I got a fresh garbage bag and the broom.

In a mighty surge of bravery, while wearing my big garden gloves, I knocked over the can into the driveway. Coffee grounds and Christmas napkins fell all around, but no bug.

Puzzled, I prodded an aluminum foil lump with the broom handle. Nothing.

I lifted some sodden rosemary and part of an onion.

I shook out the bag.

Nothing.

Maybe (I really thought this) the bug had come from a parallel universe and then returned to it.

Then I got as brave as I will ever be and I looked deep into the white bag smeared with coffee grounds, and there it was.



I am surprised I could hold the camera steady.

For scale, The Andromeda Strain:



The horror is that the bug was, at one point, under my bed.

What if I'd stepped on it?

What if it flew around and landed on my arm, while I was asleep?

Maybe it did.

ooo.

Tonight I will spray myself with Deep Woods Off before I go to bed, I swear to God.

9:15am:
A magnificent, cool morning, but no rain for almost three weeks.

I've begun watering sections of my gardens each day.



Now I'm as drenched as the snapdragons because I had to run under the sprinkler to turn off the water. I'm sitting here shivering under the ceiling fan.

Across from the school a man is mowing the commons for the 4th of July. I can hear the tractor through my open window.

I'm cold. I'm going to walk to the post office and see if they've hung the flags from the light poles.

10:50am: Sand
My friend poliphilo and I were talking about why I'm always drawing houses, and I wondered why I often want to move on.

When I walked to the post office I thought about it:

What I see is our tent, what I hear is the wind, what I smell is our animals.

I am the maker of homes, the one who goes first when we travel!

Of us all, I see the best places to stop, and I tell them: stay by hills, for shade and shelter.

They listen to me, because I care more than they do and know what we need.

Worst is to be alone on a flat plain, with the wind raising the sand.

Best is a valley with water and trees.

I dislike cooking and cleaning and sewing. That work is for others who like it.

Mine is a bigger view: I make our home!

I have no child of my own, and no husband, as both died young, but I am still young and am mother to all our children.

I sing to them and tell them stories (one is called Short Man, about a grown man so short he must wear a bell around his neck so he can be found if he falls into the sand, and the children love that story. They say Short Man eats one grape for his supper, and drinks one handful of water. Even the men tell stories about Short Man and laugh, so I know they listen at night).

--

My first memory is of being held over the sand, and then my feet touching its heat; I fell right down and my hands got sandy! I cried while they laughed, but I learned to love the feel of sand, cool in the morning, hot in the day, cool at night. When I was old enough, I was set outside with pots to clean, and I would fall asleep with my head on the soft sand, and be carried inside into shade. Even now I dislike scrubbing, but that is for children.

--

At night sometimes I slip outside and sit near our animals and look up at the starry sky. The animals are warm and the sand cool.

I look up, the sky looks down. It is a secret that I cannot share.

--

I have another secret: there is a small tear in our tent roof that no one has yet seen. I sleep under it if I can, and last night I saw a single star. I hope no one will discover the tear, and that one night I may see the moon over my head.

--

We travel close to the hills, partly because I know it is safest, and they trust me. I am the explorer and the finder of our homes! Because this need is stronger in me, it has become my work and they trust me.

One day some rough people came to us in the evening. They were tired and had no food, but I found a woman and we shared and set up our tents together just where we were, in a small valley under the full moon.

We cooked together and the children slept together, and I told them about Short Man while the parents sat outside and talked.

They said three days' walk away from here was a valley with trees and water. The young men got excited and wanted to leave right away. I didn't want to leave the hills, but it was right to go to the valley if we could.

We had two nights in sand with no real shelter. I worried about storms but it was calm.

Then I saw, sitting in front with my sharp eyes, the tops of trees! We went down into the valley and there was a beautiful shady pool surrounded by trees. Tents of other families were nearby.

We stayed for three days and met other travelers. We washed all our clothes and the children bathed in the pool.

--

I like best making people happy in our home.

An old woman who was with the rough people was left with us because she was too old.

I set her bed under the torn place in the tent roof and told her my secret about the sky, but she couldn't see it or didn't care, so I lay down beside her.

When it was hot I fanned her and brought her water.

Someday that will be me, lying in the tent, but for now I am the maker of homes and the explorer, the one who goes first!

2:27pm:

This morning during the sermon the priest asked us to close our eyes and imagine Jesus running into the church late, his clothes rumpled, his hair uncombed.

I didn't want to close my eyes so I kept drawing this house:



I drew a fire next to the house and then a hillside, and imagined that my bedroom wall was made out of rocks, one wall a hill, with maybe some natural shelves for my pictures and books.

"Jesus is late," said the priest, "because he was out teaching, but he wanted to come to Knoxville."

I bent over, shutting out the sermon, and pictured my house's cold kitchen, a humming refrigerator against a gray wall, and white marshmallows in a white cupboard, and then coathangers in a closet--I'd bend coathangers and toast marshmallows over the fire.

(My bulletin got crumpled during the psalm--it got crushed under my hymnal while I was sorting music--but that made the shadows more interesting, like moonlight.)

(I wondered if Pam, sitting next to me, had her eyes closed. Then I pictured a mean old nun rapping me on my shoulder and frowning: You are not meditating.)

Jesus in Knoxville, out of breath, late for the sermon.

When church was over I pulled the cover off my bulletin and tucked my crumpled-paper house into my bag.

All the way home I thought about what it would be like to live alone in a house that had a hillside for a bedroom wall, but intruding several times was a sharp image of Jesus standing on the chancel steps, straightening his robe and smoothing down his hair, feeling in his pockets for notes.

10:35am: Evening light, morning light by the river

At seven-thirty every morning my friend Cindy and I walk by the river, 2.2 miles on the Songbird loop.

In the evenings my sister Janice and I walk the loop twice, and that's 4.4 miles.

The river's full of blue herons in the morning. At about eight, a siren sounds and water begins generating from the dam upstream; wading fishermen scramble to the riverbank.

This morning, cool and peaceful, and a green river:



( Last night we walked late, and a tractor had come during the day and baled hay in the meadow: )

1:30pm: In the bookcase

I was looking for a book, and found a jumble of kept things--a bookmark made by a grandchild, postcards, old pictures, a little diary from long ago.

Here I am in one of the happiest weeks of my life, at a summer camp for choir directors:



That's me, with long curly hair, behind the bearded man (who directs my sister's choir at the cathedral).

It had just rained.

In my dorm room was a pitcherful of white flowers and a box fan in the window.

We sang every morning, afternoon, and night.

On Wednesday evening we sang Evensong at the big Sewanee chapel.

One evening I went to the convent and sang psalms with the nuns. They sang psalms slowly, like breathing.

On the final Sunday morning, we sang Sumsion's magical and demanding "They that go down to the sea in ships." It was like Heaven.

11:03am: Eat Catfish Every Day.




Poppy's Place: Home Cooking - Malts Special on Tuesdays has opened next to the police station and the fire hall.

Poor Poppy. I've seen him sitting outside by his petunias, waiting for customers.

Our town is mostly old people who (slowly) cook (I assume) healthy old-people lunches in their own kitchens, aluminum pots filled with, oh--cauliflower, or (shudder) brussels sprouts.

If I liked catfish, and if I had six dollars and ninety-nine cents for it, I'd be glad to help old Poppy out.

For all I know, he goes out at dawn to the foggy river four miles away and catches his own fish for the luncheon crowd, which seems to consist of his wife, his cook, and himself.

His wife comes out at ten in the morning and waters the flowers.

She looks sad and worried, I think.

They probably moved here and put all their savings into Poppy's Place. They brought in new tables.

There's something so wistful and hopeful about "Eat Catfish Every Day," and maybe I'm mistaken that Poppy is unpopular.

If only ten people begin to eat catfish every day, at six dollars and ninety-nine cents each, that's seventy dollars for Poppy, his wife, and his cook.

That's seventy times six, because they are open till noon on Saturdays.

7:43am: Gas. Freaked out.



Wally's full-service gas station. Wally's only customers these days are little old ladies who are too old or too weak to pump their own gas.

I'm going to, beginning today, stop driving, except for Sundays because I love singing in the choir.

Tomatoes were two dollars each at Walmart last night! Each!

No more tomatoes till my own are ripe.

I'm already wearing used clothes, even my shoes, and my socks cost one dollar, on sale.

Poor marigolds: no more water for you till it rains.

No more movies!

Or one movie a month. After church. Kiddy popcorn, five dollars.

And I'm going to stop eating, except for one slice of bread and some water twice a day.

Oh, God: Starbucks. No more.

Folgers coffee. Gag.

I'm very curious about how other people are coping with gas, and what gas is costing this week where you are. I bought a half tank yesterday for $3.81 a gallon, 3 cents off with a Kroger discount. It cost me $28.00.

7:20am:
I said goodnight to the snapdragons; touched the bean vine, told it to put out flowers during the night.

I poured water into the birdbath and had a jolt of memory: my brother and I are sitting at our red table, pushing toy cars back and forth across the just-washed surface; our mother is humming, cleaning the playroom.

Seven o'clock Thursday evening, my yard:



( More pictures )

4:39pm: What my brother did.



My brother visited this weekend.

He said, Give me your Bush $600! So I did, and he added to it and bought me a 42-inch high-def tv, and a surround-sound music theater with a DVD player and tweeters and woofers and little speakers for all around the room, and even a complicated outside apparatus that picks up high definition local stations.

Yesterday I watched Tristan and Isolde from the Met in high definition.

(My goodness gracious, but poor Tristan took a long time to die. I was afraid he was going to fall into the fire-pot while he was staggering around.)

I am afraid I'm going to be like the woman who never left her couch for six or nine years and the firemen had to unstick her.

Kate came over last night and we watched some dumb movie. There's now a subwoofer next to the fireplace, and we kept saying, This is JUST LIKE BEING IN A THEATER, because the air was throbbing in all the chase scenes.

I confess that I drove over to Best Buy after church yesterday and bought the History Channel's Universe series just so I could watch volcanoes erupt crispy clear in my living room.

My brother is a sort of saint, although I am sure he would deny it.

(I didn't tell my son or daughter-in-law yet because they don't own a television machine, and I think that's very admirable--for them.)

I walked my two miles today, but very fast, because I didn't want to miss Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC.

I think Hillary's maybe bowing out tomorrow night, and she's going to do it in my living room with a head bigger than mine.

Wow.

1:09pm: light

On a day with tasks as calming and useless as deadheading marigolds and returning library books, I came back into the house to find sunlight filling up the dining room.



It's hot enough now: I have the fans going. It's like childhood, when we waited out the long summer day heat and were rewarded in the evening with water from the side yard hose, and swing-the-statue until sunset.

I can't feel my mother's presence, although I've wished to, but she is here anyway as a moveable feast of her pretty things in all my rooms: the old table with wooden pegs was hers, and the chairs are from her shed; the little Hobbit pot came off her shelves, and the pictures on the walls she gave to me long ago.

I imagine (since I can't feel her anywhere around) that she enters our world sometimes and sees the shade of Kate's crabapple tree, how Michael has grown and loves blueberry bagels, how Nathaniel has new sandals and that Janice is getting a new fence, and how I placed near the sunniest window the red bowl I used to make tapioca in those last weeks Mother and I spent together.

10:06am: Sunday morning light

Skipping church.

Instead, I'm packing sandwiches and strawberries and cranberry juice for a walk by the river at noon.

Cars pulling boats are driving by my house.

This morning, the light in the living room was so beautiful that I took a picture, then opened all the windows:



My beans have put out little runners and are climbing the trellis, I have little tomatoes behind the kitchen.

Blue jays are nesting nearby and bathe in the birdbath every afternoon--the mother, then the father.

I'm wearing my white, white sneakers and my blue t-shirt.

12:07pm:
At seven I made tea for the day.



At ten I went to a book club meeting, my first. We met at the new Starbucks, next to the highway exit.

The Starbucks people were so happy to have us that they kept coming outside with samples of vanilla lattes and doughnuts in little white cups.

All the women said, No, thank you! I don't like sweets, and silly things like that, which made me feel sorry for the Starbucks people, so I always took a sample, being polite.

Trucks coming off the highway made so much noise that we had to yell out book suggestions.

The leader asked us what we had read in the last month, and we went around the circle. When it was my turn, I said I had read Alexander McCall Smith's African series about the detective and her husband who works at Speedy Motors.

I signed up to host a meeting next April, which will give me time to vacuum.

I'm going to review Krakatoa by Simon Winchester. Maybe I'll have a South Sea Islands theme, and serve a Volcano Cake.

9:01pm: Evening, almost dark


The light's gone Technicolor (that's what we called it, when the children were small: come outside and let's run around in the Technicolor light!)

A storm may be coming tonight. They said so, at six on the weather. And they said the wind would rise.

Next door, Boy Scouts are (unaccountably) playing trumpets in the church. I walk through the dark churchyard and listen, taking pictures of the Technicolor light on the long blue windows near the altar:



( My sidewalk has become watery blue: )

2:59pm:


This morning the sermon was about the George Washington Bridge in New York, how it had ten lanes of traffic that had to merge into four, and wasn't it marvelous and a thought for joy, how everyone merged without crashing, how it was like a dance.

I drifted into my bridge thoughts and my palms began to sweat, like I was about to fall over the balcony, because thinking about high bridges makes me dizzy, and I feel as if I'm on a fair ride, going higher and higher, and I can't get off.

I began doodling on my bulletin, and when the sermon was over I realized I'd drawn a bridge with an arch, but also a boat with sails, for my own imaginary traveling into New York City.

I am a failure at active life.

I find big steel constructions overwhelming, and speed, and being too close to trucks on the interstate, and being on high places where people merge very fast.

I prefer: the library on rainy days, watering the jasmine in the side flowerbed, walking through the woods to the post office, and gentle boat rides on quiet blue water.

7:46am: Good morning, world!



Hooray!

This is fascinating.

I love MSNBC.

8:10am: Money watch

I'm getting $600 from Bush sometime this month, and I want one of those swell big TVs so I can watch movies and pretend I'm at a real theater.

Or I'd like an Ipod so I can listen to, say, Bach's Magnificat while walking very fast up and down hills in my new huge sneakers.

I also have to drive back and forth to Knoxville, and $600 divided by $40 = 10 gas tank fill-ups, with $20 left over for a paperback book and a cup of Starbucks coffee.

Or I could totally pay off my one credit card. Snore.

I know that I'm weak. I want a swell TV.

I should be ashamed of myself, but I'm not.