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Tuesday, October 4, 2022

In bed by 10, awake at 00:32, 02:02, 03:03, unable to sleep, out of bed at 03:29.  One glass of red.  A bit cold outside at 43 degrees but a high of 70 is expected, tomorrow is 72, the last of the70s before autumn temperatures set in. Feast of St. Francis.  Geri's friend Chris Nolan expected for dinner with her significant other Dave, from Ridgefield, Connecticut.

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Deborah Kerr in an Actor's Studio interview: "“I don't like getting old. I hate it, in fact. I don't know an honest person who likes it. You just thin out and all your energies go toward surviving or moving safely from one room to another. But the mind thrives, thank God. Or mine does. I used to try very hard not to regret it. I thought that regrets were a waste of time, a sign of weakness. I think only the most insensitive of people have no regrets, because in this time, this slower time, your mind goes back to so many instances when there should have been more kindness, more attention paid to others. I missed so many opportunities to be a better friend, a better mother, a better actress. Of course I can't remember now what I was in such a hurry to get to that I grew so bad at the important things. So I regret and I think. Old age is the big index to the foolish young people we were."

William Butler Years, Vacillation:

Things said or done long years ago,

Or things I did not do or say

But thought that I might say or do,

Weigh me down, and not a day

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled.

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Geri told me yesterday that she had let Lilly out during the night (as always) and that while Lilly's on the north lawn, a coyote approached from the south lawn.  Geri stepped out and yelled and clapped and pounded on the storm door to drive the coyote away and Lilly made a mad dash back into the house.  Now Geri is keeping a metal kitchen pot and spoon on a little table we bought decades ago at Bombay Bicycle Shop at Bayshore.  When she let Lilly out at about 4 this morning, I said (as always) that I would let her back in so Geri could get back in bed.  She muttered something indecipherable through her CPAP mask that must have been: 'No thanks.  I'm staying right here to keep an eye on Lilly and an eye out for that coyote, kitchen pot and noise-making spoon at the ready.'  Yet another reminder of how much we all rely on her and of what a wonderful caretaker and caregiver she is, for humans and for animals (white-tail deer and rodents excepted😉).

Coyote, en garde!

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Recalling that I made kind of a big deal of October 4ths during my time at the House of Peace - Feast of St. Francis.  I found a large outdoor statue of him which I purchased and placed atop a considerable mound of dirt I purchased as the base of a shrine.  I had it lit up at night as a beacon of sorts (wrong metaphor) for our impoverished crime-ridden neighborhood.  I liked the story of Francis who struck me as the saint who said "fuck it" to the mercantile world of his father, to much of the urban world he grew up and existed in.  He was one of the earliest hippies, Mr. Counter-cultural.  William Wordsworth wrote romantic poems and lived comfortably in England's Lake District; Francis stripped himself naked and walked down the hill from Assisi to what?  A life of poverty, a form of madness, celebrity, and rejection.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Francis was something of a poet himself, in the form of his prayers, most notably The Canticle of the Sun.  (Praise to you, Lord, through all your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun, etc.).  Francis had followers (disciples?) who eventually became the friars of the now multiple Franciscan religious orders.  They eventually rejected Francis as their leader,  as too demanding in terms of poverty and discipline.  Geri and I visited the Franciscan sanctuary of La Verna about 200 miles north of Assisi.  It was Francis' hideaway, where he slept in a cave, really a recess on the face of the mountain, now known as Letto di San Francesco.  It was at La Verna (a/k/a Alverno) that legend has it Francis 'wrestled with the Devil' on the side of the mountain and where Francis was said to 'preach to the birds.'   I'm persuaded that the fight with the Devil was Francis' impulse to commit suicide by leaping off the mountain when his followers rejected his leadership and that it wasn't Francis who taught the birds, but the birds who taught Francis.  It was there also that Francis supposedly received the stigmata.  One can only speculate . . .

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The visit with Chris and Dave was very pleasant with much conversation.  Geri made her rolled lasagna and a big salad for dinner, very good, and a delicious lemon sorbet with Grand Mariner strawberry sauce.  The visitors left at 8 and we partially cleaned up the kitchen, leaving much for tomorrow but putting away refrigerated stuff.  Despite 3 or maybe 3 nodding off episodes earlier in the day, by the time they left and stuff was put away, I was ready for bed, having awakened at 3 a.m. and out of bed by 3:30.  Long day.