Skipping Town

Today in excavation, I went through two boxes of files from graduate school. That's right: a program whose coursework I completed in 2003. That's seventeen years ago. I kept the papers I wrote but otherwise stacked up all the handouts from courses like Technologies of Heartbreak, Eloquence of Objects, Reviewing, Twentieth-Century Literary Nonfiction, The Literary Representation of Social Reality, Arts of Ecstasy, Writing America, Conspiracy & Paranoia, and Poets on Poets. The stack comes up past my knee. I also found workshop notes from the seven-page short story that eventually--many, many years later--became the 250-page Each Vagabond by Name. This cleanout is a personal reckoning and an eerie experiment in time travel. It all ends up in bags by the curb, bags and bags and bags, but all that is just the runoff of many many experiences and changes and mistakes and wrong turns and wonder and serendiptous events. None of that disappears, even though I can safely say I do...

Officially changing my post titles to Summer, because quarantine has long ceased to be some remarkable, temporary period of time and is now looking like the New Normal for the foreseeable future. In NJ, things are opening up, but we're still pretty locked down in our house. I just can't see going out to eat anytime soon. I read something that said six people touch your fork before it makes its way to you at your table, which, as a former waitress, seems totally possible. Everyone has their own comfort level. Mine is very very very low. Or high? Whatever. I am not comfortable going out in public, is what I'm trying to say. The girls were out of sync this morning, probably because I unwisely let Lucia sleep till 11am, so when she woke up she was crabby and spacey. She is a sleeper, that one. So there was a lot of petty bickering until after lunch, and then they just kind of did their own thing and read in their rooms. They had piano lessons. We read some Harry Potter togeth...