Two Funerals and No Weddings

My garden basks in the sun, planted, weeded, watered, and growing. Annuals, perennials, tomatoes and herbs vie for their own place in the summer light. And that’s all the good news.

On the writing front, I’ve had a fallow spell, and query packages have been returned with addressee unknown. Found contradictory information on the web, and emailed agent about correct address. No response. Sent out a lot of queries around Christmas—remember Christmas, 2004?—and have as yet no response. But hey, I’ve got my list and my own place in the sun at Boston City Hall with my poem on the wall or somewhere. So there’s beaucoup more sucking up to do. And on with the queries. I am going to start sending out feelers for the “Wisconsin Book.” I suppose with no synopsis and all the rest of the “reallys” and “justs” still to delete from the manuscript, someone will want the whole thing with a nice synopsis real fast. I will tempt fate.

The Scottish Highland Cattle have a new electric fence which gave me a shock last week. I was used to the old fence that required touching two wires. This new one does not. Even though the grass is high and luxuriant, the cows still come to the fence for orange peels and other good stuff. The broccoli stems are greener on the other side of the fence.

An old friend of ours died last week. Not unexpected, but still wrenching. He was in many ways the last of the Old School: didn’t like it when women swore, and insisted on certain niceties of dress and comportment; not a stick in the mud but a gentleman with rigorous standards. Can’t be many more of those. The summer home in East Hampton with its serene patio and lap pool will go on the market, and this summer the kitchen won’t be invaded by my friend and I who cooked for the house parties. We cook out of passion and love and not duty. We poked fun at the utensils, the haphazard arrangement of the cabinets and the beat up old tinfoil trays in the toaster oven. I’m sorry for not being more forgiving of other’s faults, because my own are no doubt even more annoying. No more shopping at Citarella and the Farmer’s Markets, no more wait for the Shelter Island Ferries, no more 4th of July fireworks on the beach, no more listening to the host grind coffee beans in the a.m. for our endless pots of high test. No more, no more.

Yesterday, when I was gearing up to write a “big” airplane scene in the current book, I went on line to look up some details about the BRS parachute. For whatever reason I clicked on another favorite site and discovered that a young man we met at last year’s Burning Man Festival had been killed this winter in a plane crash. Brilliant, handsome, cool, a golden boy now gone. Twenty-seven years old. Jesus, what a waste. I couldn’t sleep all night. Sure as hell couldn’t write. I had given him a copy of my book. Indirectly, he had inspired part of the current book. Now gone, and though I knew him only slightly, I am devasted.

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