Just a few words - it doesn't feel good to stay out of touch in this
space for too long. The underwater feeling days are back, but this
time for the last time, combined with the last of a cold. So things
kind of in soft focus, hard to think straight.
Just here at home, holding as usual.
october 4
october 4
And then suddenly up out of the water, and back to the shore and normal.
Turn around and wave goodbye to the people on the boat. Thank you,
thank you - I'm so grateful. But I don't ever want to come back there again.
People with plans. A writer spoke in the NYTimes of a year when she and
others in her family were sick and time stood still. She looked down one day
from a hospital window at the people walking around below - people with plans.
Everyone has troubles sometimes, health or other kinds, that make you feel
alone. Their love means everything, but people cannot be you, cannot take it away from you. They reach their
hands across a rope they cannot cross.
I'm glad to be back among people with plans - where together is part of the
natural state. Glad to be touching those hands once again. Plans aren't things
like troubles are, lonely by their nature. Plans are at their sweetest shared.
october 7
october 7
The House of Blues in Harvard Square looks good, but we decide to save
it for another time. Aptly named for the music, but not for the mood -
everyone here looks pretty happy, as am I - just came out of Newbury
Comics having put my hands right on a CD I never expected to find so easily.
Linger for a while in the side street, deciding what to do. Then in and out
the tunnel between Dunster and Holyoke to an Alsatian restaurant
we've wanted to try - warm and inviting inside on this cool evening. Good
food and a nice red wine, friendly wait staff and a window table.
I thought I was dressed warm enough, but a shiver reentering the cold
night air and a pleasant thought hits me - summer is over, a new season
at last. Life feels good. The car is close by and it's time to go home.
october 9
october 9
The Little Phone
october 11
october 11
The parking lot cashier is having a hard time staying warm, and I guess
it has turned pretty cold. People on the train wearing coats and boots -
spurts of color here and there, but mostly black again this year.
City sounds, and the Hummer parked on the street again - untouched
and untouchable. A friend once told me she didn't like being touched.
I couldn't think of what to say. My preferred schedule would be 24-7.
Can people be so different.
Some people's prickly armor - as forbidding as the Hummer's. Maybe
they're afraid it will hurt to be touched, or hurt even more if the touching
should stop. Real and scary thoughts. But it's still the better risk to take.
Train sounds and voices on the way home, people pressed together in
too infrequent trains. Sounds and voices, but not the ones I want to hear.
People pressed against me, but not the ones I want to feel.
october 13
october 13
a thousand words
october 15
october 15
No one coming for dinner tonight, so we decide to get
something to eat in Boston before going to Logan. A restaurant
in the North End, a walk through Quincy Market, a guitar playing
Dreams, a Fleetwood Mac melody I like, but whose words I don't know.
I'm always happier when there's music. Soft October darkness.
And tourists everywhere, everywhere.
New England has been crowded all weekend with "leaf peepers" -
people who come from all over the world to see the trees during
peak color season. Brilliant reds, oranges, yellows, and some
greens that remain from the pine. It only lasts a short time,
but it's very beautiful.
october 17
october 17
My words hit someone like disguised little punches, someone
who's too gentle to tell me that it hurts or to ask me to stop.
Words have power, to hammer and hurt or caress and enfold.
My words hammered in a place I only want caresses to land.
I can't seem to get this right, but I want to. I'll try harder.
october 19
october 19
Radiation is every weekday at 9:30 for 6 weeks. It's the last part
of treatment, and I was really ready for it to start. It goes quickly - in and out of the building in 20 minutes or so.
I thought I made up the expression 'live deliberately,' but I guess it was
Thoreau who came up with it. I try to live like that, though, ridding my life
of things that aren't satisfying and adding things that are. Dropped things
like investment group - very nice people, but I find the topic a bit boring. It's hard to add
things, though, with this daily commitment. So I have open time that can't
be filled for a while longer, a little frustrating.
T Parking overflowing by 9am, much less 10, so drove into Boston. Too
late for breakfast and starving by lunch. Crossed Boylston Street, past
the church with the steeple clock to the Parish Cafe, the place where we
stopped New Year's Eve to get a drink at the bar and get out of the cold,
watching people go by in the First Night parade, waving back out the window.
october 24
october 24
The guy next to me has come into Starbucks for one thing only -
cinnamon mints. Who buys these, I have often wondered, so look
beside me to see a member of this demographic group. He looks
pretty normal, though, and even comfortingly familiar - black clothes and
headphones, lost in his thoughts as I am lost in mine.
october 29
october 29
I used to have a problem I couldn't overcome when I tried to write a journal.
I couldn't figure out who The Reader was. I don't know if other people have
this problem. I guess, for me, it was hard to write for Any Reader until I
had a sense of The Reader.
When I need something so deep within my soul, my person, I have been
able to count on finding it, on trusting the way it guides me, on having it
reassure and comfort me, take me by the hand, as it did with The Reader. I can see
who it is - the one.
As far as what to write, I guess for me feelings, both physical and emotional,
inform my life. I'm not always as clear as I'd like to be conveying those feelings,
a hard thing to do, but they're what I want to have meaning in this space too. Otherwise babble about restaurants and the weather, nothing important -
sometimes that's all that it is.
![[pieces of time]](images/timepieces.jpg)
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