the edge

I wake from a dream. In the dream, my camera is broken. It exhibits its brokenness by having a lens that zooms out loose and wiggly and very long and fatter than the camera. My hand is injured, too. There isn't any blood or not much. However, there is an opening through which I can see bone and gristle. I am happy to have woken and to have remembered my dream. That hasn't happened much lately and I like writing about dreams. It is freeing, there is no right or wrong, just the impression of what you remember.

I find myself hoping I remember to write down the dream. I'm writing quite a lot in my head these days.

I get up and wander around for coffee, bathroom, let the dog out. FFP returns from the club and I go. I do my cardio (45+ minutes on the recumbent bike) but I don't do any weights. There are lots of people using machines. I will either rest the weight part today or do it later. The book I have taken to the club is one of those 'Best American' collections they sell around the holidays. This one is the best essays of 2001. I am thinking about writing a particular essay (in my head, of course) so this seems appropriate. A few pages into the first one (an odd recovered childhood memory) I realize I've read this book before, or at least this essay. I continue reading (my biking time is my favorite reading time) and start wondering what parts I will remember. I don't exactly remember that the father dies but I do remember that a path she walks to school goes diagonally through some woods or, ah, an orchard. I start the second essay and it is familiar but again, while each sentence resonates like a familiar face in a crowd, I can't actually anticipate much. Odd, this, rereading.

At home, I stop and glance at the papers on the (portable) dishwasher which is still in front of the sink, its water hose hanging down, still plugged into the wall for the dry cycle to complete. (I often say that we have the last portable dishwasher in America, but I suspect this is overstatement. Our house's fifty-two-year-old kitchen has never been extensively remodeled although we have purchased two (free-standing) stoves, a microwave-vent combo, painted the cabinets, papered the walls (but only once and twenty-five years ago). We also busted out the 'breakfast nook' windows and put in French doors to (what we call) THE ROOM. Only a slight redo of the electrical outlets was done in the kitchen for this.

Anyway, the open paper on top of the portable dishwasher finishing its cycle....FFP has been reading something in the arts section of The New York Times. I guess it is an article about a struggling symphony in Pittsburgh. The section is open to the end of some article like that and that page has the crossword. It's Wednesday. The puzzle on Wednesday is an unknown. Sometimes doable, sometimes way too hard. Monday is easy, Tuesday pretty easy and by Wednesday you are on the rise with obscure answers and tongue in cheek clues for even simple words. I start looking at clues and thinking...maybe.

FFP calls down from his office upstairs and says there is a cat high in a tree swatting at birds and squirrels. Chalow and I go out to investigate. As long as I'm out there I walk around, picking up some fallen dead limbs and thinking about the work I still need to do out there...chopping dead things, chopping back the weedish lamb's ear to let the more desirable rosemary go, trimming boxwoods, fighting back against the tide of bamboo, chopping back evening jasmine (which has sensed a false spring and bloomed a little) to reveal some sculpture, cleaning around, in and behind the shed (more bamboo, growing through old lawn furniture!).

Back inside, I start on the puzzle.

The garage door opens and my dad comes in. He is running away from the maid. At his house. She tries to talk to him from other rooms and his poor hearing means he can't hear her and it frustrates them. He usually finds an errand to do but doesn't really have one so he has come to our house. He reads our NY Times, an article about slow cooking. He writes us a check to pay his bills (electricity, phone, maid, yard, etc.). I tell him I have a lunch date. He says he thinks he will stop at Luby's on the way home and 'get some vegies.' He says he shopped for groceries and spent $20.

I have to get into the shower. I am meeting a fellow retiree at Satay. We meet, discuss trips to the wine country, upcoming charity events, wine.

I go to Grape Vine Market and look around and buy some after dinner chocolates with Texas theme wrappers for our benefit dinner. Dessert and such are at another location but I want to offer coffee if people want it and I'll include a chocolate.

I go home and work on the table setting, fretting over the centerpieces and how the tablecloths will look.

We eat. (I leftover tuna, FFP some vegetarian barbeque.) We watch a tape of Third Watch and Crossing Jordan and Forrest hands me the remote to bypass commercials and I can't control the fast forward very well. I drink coffee. I consider having some ginger ale but don't.

I go back to the computer. Boot when e-mail exhibits an odd behavior, cut out some of the menu cards for the party, go to bed with a book about The Dakota apartments in New York City. I don't think I want to reread the essays...there are too many books around here that I've never read.

Where does the time go? Somehow it disappears, clicking away, days flying off the 'page a day' calendar like in old those old movies.

Having time to wait for inspiration is both a blessing and a curse.

I've decided that the reason I'm becoming more, not less, protective of the open journal is that since there is not some mysterious 'work' that I can't really talk about, my life seems quite trivial. Be assured though, that I do things I don't write about. Yes, I do. There might be a morsel eaten, some clothes folded, dishes put away, a cup of coffee, a conversation, an intimate encounter that you, dear readers, don't get. For sure. I might even be doing something important that you don't get to hear about. Don't believe it? Neither do I. So, yeah, the journal is embarrassing because, yeah, that's about all I did!

I am also finding that I'm putting things off until this or that event. The charity thing on Saturday is the current thing. After that I'll, um, spend quality time writing, learn to make a movie, read more, make a birthday present for my great nephew and do all these other things. There is always just one more thing out there, creating an edge, beyond which the To Do list unfolds. Oh, but I do some of the things. Sure. And some just fall off the list, become unimportant without ever being accomplished. It doesn't help that I combine things on my list from ridiculous to sublime: (1) buy toilet paper; (2) get published in The New Yorker. I'm kidding, of course. Sort of.