AUSTIN, Texas, May 8, 2005 — In retirement, I want to be an artist. I want to be a philanthropist, too, but I don't have quite enough money. (My little joke.) I think about the art thing often. Should I be doing movies, screenplays, documentaries, short stories, novels, photography, collages, plays? I have friends and acquaintances who have written plays, novels, screenplays, done movies. I know people who sing, dance, choreograph, write scholarly works, create food.

I've been corresponding with a guy who has a movie made that needs editing. (Some people

think I am a philanthropist and put such people in touch with me.) I am reading a revision of my friend's play. I've watched FFP set up a studio for painting in the storage room.

What about me? What is my art? I joked the other day with my friend SuRu that maybe it was right in front of me. That my artistic purpose was to set down something every day in a journal. To illustrate it with a growing collection of digital pictures of shop windows and Austin views. Maybe to someday mine this material for something like a coherent work of art. I dipped into a an online journal I hadn't visited in a long time and found in the latest entry a discussion of this online journal thing. These things are a certain kind of record of a life.

Since I've thought about it, I think that may be my purpose. To do the very thing I'm doing. Maybe that's sad. But there it is. Another thought has occurred to me, however. Maybe my purpose is to get people together. Artists with artist, artist with patron. To make connections for good.

The day dawned rainy. When I let the dog out at six-thirty a front was moving in. I squeezed hardily when I went back to bed. When I got up at eight, it was really raining. FFP and I decided to watch Sunday morning TV, eat bacon and eggs and coffee, read a little of the paper. I worked on my journal and read those of pals in England and coast to coast. I talked to Dad, who seeemed to be doing better. I told him I'd come see him.

At 10:30 I headed to Dad's in my workout clothes.

At Dad's I was right in the living room (I came in the garage) before he heard me. He was engrossed in his paper. I gave him the books I bought for him. I picked up all the papers he'd read and tossed in the other chair and put them in recycling. He asked for apple juice and I got that and cleaned up the kitchen a bit. He asked me to cook an egg and toast for him. "I will set you free for the rest of the day," he said. I shredded some more stuff from my mother's files. Prescription receipts for muscle relaxers, Cipro, Vioxx, Fosamax, SSRIs. So much medicine. So few results.

It came another storm while I was at my dad's. The second or third of the day? It was still raining when I headed to 360 and 2222 and over Mt. Bonnell to the club. It had let up a bit when I got there.

My workout. I did 52 minutes on the stationary bike. Some leg extensions (one leg at a time with two plates and with pauses holding the weight), some dead lifts (a couple of sets) and one set of tricep pulldowns. Then I felt like leaving.

At home, FFP said we should go visit his mother. Mother's day and all. I ate some snacks, showered, dressed and we went over. There is going to be an article about FFP's dad in the paper and his mother had drug out a bunch of old pictures. We looked at them, discussed them. I brought an interesting one of Forrest age five or six with two friends home to scan.

That's Forrest on the right. The little girl in the middle, he and his mother say, is Sarah Woolrich who lived next door. The smaller guy on the right? Roky Erikson. Yep, they say his mother was friends with Sarah's mother who lived next door. It certainly could be Roky. He is a year younger than Forrest and appears a bit smaller here. I wonder what happened to the little tomboy. They moved away, say FFP and his mom, and they just don't know what happened to her. I think she's holding a toy gun.

FFP's mother and dad talk about old times. Often at cross purposes and with amusing results since he can hardly hear. She's expounding on a job she had in the sixties at Scarborough's downtown when she claims that Roky's mom stopped by the glove department and talked about Roky's problems. They both try to resurrect their memories of the Scarborough family and they seem to be talking at cross purposes about different generations. FFP's dad goes off on a discussion of the lake that used to be in Hyde Park and the drainage ditches along Guadalupe (until the twenties). He talks about catching crawdads with a piece of bacon.

They enjoy us and they never want us to leave, but we do.

At home, I do some writing and I scan the picture. (Well, OK, the writing is just this journal.) I do a little thinking. About what I should be trying to create. And about an idea I have to creat a salon-style cocktail party called 'Art...the Frontlines' where people who do art for a living (or without making one) interact with patrons and appreciators. I have a feeling I will continue having a lot of ideas like this one...fleeting ideas, not exactly implemented.

So it's 4:30 and we have taken care of our parental responsibilities (to some degree anyway). How to spend the rest of the day? Well, I start trying to clean up just a little part of my office desk and end up spending an hour on it, filing some stuff, thinking about correspondence (graduation cards, get well cards, mailing something to my cousin) but not doing it.

FFP suggest going out to eat. We consider our neighborhood hamburger joint, Billie's, but we end up going to Banzai a Japanese fast food place on Lamar. I get a pork cutlet but later wish I'd gotten the box FFP got with rolls, a tofu cutlet, salad, etc.

We go home after a stop at the new Half Price on Lamar. We haven't been there yet. It's like the old one only bigger and brighter. I have been reading that article in the ancient fiction issue of The New Yorker about James Wilcox. So I decide to find a copy of one of his novels. I pick up a copy of Sort of Rich in paper. It is a discarded book from The Griffin School, a private school. I don't know much about schools since I have no kids. In the back is the Date Due sheet. No one ever checked it out. How appropriate for this apparently unappreciated writer.

FFP and I have drifted apart with the promise to meet at checkout in fifteen minutes. He has some tapes of a book for his dad and a copy of Pete Hamill's Forever which he says he has 'been wanting.' (I do remember him picking it up in the regular bookstore.) I hold up the Wilcox book and say, "I have been reading an article in an old The New Yorker about this guy and I thought I'd buy one of his novels.

"Really?" he says. "I was reading an article about him in that collection The New Gilded Age." We had picked up this collection of essays from the magazine the other day on the bargain rack at B&N. So, it turns out that we were reading the very same essay. One of us in the old magazine, one in a collection from the magazine. Out of the hundreds or thousands (millions?) of words in the house we had come to the same words from two different places without knowing it. Maybe reading the same stuff while exercising (he on eliptical with headphones listening to TV; me on the bike ignoring the TVs except for an occasional glance). That just seemed weird to me.

How is it that I get sucked into TVland every night? We set up to record a few shows and then watched Cold Case, Desperate Housewives, and Grey's Anatomy. We moved to the media room in the second hour in order to record two other shows. After these we moved to the bedroom to watch the two hour beginning of the Elvis mini-series. (Of course, this was off the DVR so it took less than two hours to watch.) I did read a lot of the Sunday papers and the Sunday The New York Times magazine. But still. I'm going to have to get more choosy about TV. This TV phase has to stop.

And so, bleary from TV and the Manhattan FFP made me, I go to bed.