7/9/23

 Sunday, July 9, 2023

In bed at 11 and up at 5:15,  59℉ with a high of 76℉, sunny day ahead, AQI=45, Good.  Wind WNW at 5, 2 to 7 today, gusts up to 13.  Sunrise at 5:21, sunset at 8L22, 15+12.

Started another Camille Claudel yesterday.

My printer's copy of the original,

with grid lines

The beginning sketch, used colored chalk

for grid lines, easy to efface

Dinner at Andy and Anh's last night on the patio with all the kids, Sarah and Anne, was Very enjoyable with lots of spirited conversation.  I picked Peter up at his friend's house at 9467 Fairway Circle.  Andy grilled a ton of ribs, plus there was corn on the cob, with Anh expertly demonstrating eating it kernel by kernel, and Drew winning the corn-eating contest.  Excellent caprese salad brought by Anne and watermelon-strawberry salad as dessert.  Sarah brought me a bottle of Gewürztraminer grappa from the distillery in Northern Italy.  She seemed tired or perhaps a bit out of sorts. . .  I was pleased that she texted me this morning to see whether we could visit this afternoon.

Cur scribo?  I often wonder.  Is this just some form of narcissism?  Is it just to have something to do while idling on my recliner?  Am I just using this exercise as a daily check on cognitive decline, a clue for creeping dementia?  Is it because I have so few interactions with other human beings, so few friends that I have regular contact with?  Just a silent way of blowing off steam over the sorry state of the world and the U.S.'s deep polarization?  Am I trying to leave a record of having been alive the last days of my life, expecting that I could kick the bucket anytime now?  Is it, as I have long thought, just a very inadequate substitute for my daily morning chats with my beloved sister with whom I shared a relationship like no other?  Or is it what I suggested in an earlier journal entry, just the need to write, as in 'fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, a writer gotta write'?  There was a fairly long period after my grandmother died in 1995 when I reestablished (or first established) communication with my father that I sent him a handwritten letter every day.  Trying to make up for lost time?  Or just trying to give him something to look forward to, because I knew he enjoyed receiving those letters?  And I enjoyed writing them, just as I enjoyed sending long, thoughtful text messages to Kitty all those mornings, for 5 or 6 years.  I kept sending her those morning messages well after she was no longer able to write back, when she was in her last days, and even for a week or more after she died.  I didn't want to stop even though I knew she was not with me anymore.  A form of denial perhaps, but of course I knew she was gone and had been pre-grieving her loss long before she finally died.  Fish gotta swim.

In any case, I'm very casually browsing Donald Hall's book of essays titled Life Work, appropriately about life and about work.  He is better known, I think, as a poet and the Poet Laureate of the United States for a year, than he is as an essayist, but I have read two collections of his essays, Essays After Eighty and A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety and enjoyed all the essays.  For the most part, his essays deal with very ordinary incidents of his everyday life and I wonder about him what I wonder about myself - why does he write them?  In his case the answer is clearer, at least in part because he supported himself by writing.  He gave up a cushy teaching post at the University of Michigan, with health insurance and other fringe benefits, to move to his ancestral family farm in New Hampshire, relying only on his writing for his income.  I believe he started writing Life Work sometime after his wife (and former student at Michigan), the poet Jane Kenyon, died of leukemia.  So far I am not enjoying the writing as much as I enjoyed the essays 'after eighty' and 'nearing ninety' but I'm using the book as my throne room reading and will probably read much, perhaps most of it.  I own a collection of Kenyon's poems and enjoy them, especially Otherwise, Woman Why Are You Weeping, Trouble With Math in a One-Room Country Schoolhouse, and Depression in Winter.   Kenyon died at age 47, leaving her husband bereft, forlorn, crushed - but he kept on writing.  So it goes.