1. Why did I move this box of graduate school and teaching notes written in journals and all these grade books and grade sheets to Greenbelt? Most of it is not going to Kellogg, I decided, as I launched into a significant purge of notebooks and other paper things that I no longer want. I am keeping some personal journals I've kept over the years, if for no other reason than to do what Joan Didion advises i her essay, "On Keeping a Notebook". She writes that ". . . we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget."
Indeed. I hadn't exactly forgotten how riddled with self-doubt, guilt, and anxiety I was in my twenties and thirties and on into my early forties, but the notebooks I'm not throwing away chronicle how much I obsessed on my fears and how much I recriminated myself. Other things popped up. This past April, at the Inland Lounge, Bob Casady told me he'd heard the Indigo Girls open for the Grateful Dead on either August 21 or 22, 1993. I told him I didn't go to either show, but today I read in a journal that I'd had a ticket to the August 21 show, but elected not to use it (did I give it away? sell it?). Instead, I drove to Portland and hung out at the Hawthorne Street Fair and, later in the day, went to the (now defunct) Movie House on SW Taylor to see Much Ado About Nothing for the sixth time that summer.
That guy who, in 1993, used to drive to Portland to see movies and wander around is attractive company. He didn't come knocking on my mind's door. He didn't feel betrayed by me. I found him today and I read and remembered that on that day at the Hawthorne Street Fair I was wearing a long sleeve T-shirt from Pelau (Belau) and ran into a guy named Stewart and we talked about why I was wearing this shirt because he'd been to Pelau and I was reminded today that in 1993 I wrote that Stewart was a jerk and a vague memory of this guy being a know-it-all pontificator began to rise up from the fog of my memory. I'm ready to be done with Stewart, but he will live wherever I am as long as I keep that notebook he appeared in.
2. After a day of sorting and packing and making arrangement to rent a van to move stuff over to the Diaz house, the Deke and I went to Quench. We talked about what lies ahead of us in Kellogg and how we might approach the refashioning of the back yard at Mom's house and shared ideas about Mom's house that will soon be ours. It was a great party, enhanced for me by the sweet, smokey, malty bliss of a couple glasses of Founder's Dirty Bastard Scotch Ale.
3. Molly and Hiram went to Wolf Trap to see Steve Martin and Martin Short. The Deke looked after Ana, David, and Olivia. I joined the Deke for individualized pizzas that Molly helped us assemble and bake and some salad and then I drove back to our apartment home and went to sleep, woke up and couldn't get back to sleep until around 1:30 and then went back to sleep again. My mind is racing with the details of this major change taking place in our lives.
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