August 1, 2004

• It’s the first day of August and the last day of Chapter 6. Now I will start with a new scrapbook for Chapter 7 and it will probably be at least a month before it arrives here. Thanks to everyone who commented and encouraged me through this one. It’s so interesting about Xanga that after you’ve been here awhile (for me a year) you begin to settle in with a little found microcommunity within it whose work and thoughts you respect and value. I must say about Ch. 6 that I couldn’t get a lot in about the emotional internal stuff going on because there was just so much activity and I was trying to hold to my page-a-year plan. But perhaps one day when I’m really completely retired I can return and flesh out this chapter more. Oh, and I know the poem is a mixed metaphor but cripes I was only 24. The next chapter will be pretty busy too – years 25-30 (1964-69) were when my children arrived and I was in the Haight-Ashbury. Stay tuned. (BTW I can’t believe I just discovered my Guestbook – sorry to anyone who posted there and was not read till today)
  Chapter 6 – Metamorphosis (cont. – for previous chapters click here)
  

  By the beginning of August 1963 we were installed in an apartment where my young companion would write the great novel and I poetry when not working at the United Nations typing pool, a job for which I had to pass an IQ test and a security clearance. This laundry list of activities should have been enough drama for a five-year period of my life but before the end of this year I would meet the great love of my life and father of my first child. With him I would make one last voyage across the ocean to live on the Balearic Islands, then return to Paris and New York City before I turned 25. I will leave this for the next chapter. ______________ Huge is the shore. Though I whimper with the weight of my shell, the track I carve upon it is futile and anonymous. Incongruously, I dream of the triumph it would be to crack this prison and escape into the street of butterflies.

  Deep Thought: Every summer we’d get our baskets and buckets and go out into the hills and woods, looking for wild strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries. We never found any, though.
  Today I am grateful for: Address books
  End of Day – 8:46 pm
  + = Stopped in Barnes & Noble today and bought a few books including a tiny one called Selma, who is a sheep and it shows a little drawing for each page and says (one sentence per page): When I just couldn’t take it anymore, I went to the wise ram…What is happiness? Happiness? Let me tell you the story of Selma…Once there was a sheep named Selma…Every morning at sunrise, Selma would eat a little grass…She would play with her children until lunchtime…exercise in the afternoon…eat some more grass…have a little chat with Mrs. Miller in the evening…and finally, fall fast asleep. Asked what she would do if she had more time, Selma replied…Well, I would eat a little grass at sunrise…play with my children until lunchtime…exercise in the afternoon…eat some more grass…have a little chat with Mrs. Miller in the evening…and finally, fall fast asleep. “And if you won a million dollars?” she was asked. Well, I would love to eat a little grass in the morning…play with my children…exercise in the afternoon…eat some more grass…and it would be nice to have a chat with Mrs. Miller in the evening…before finally, falling fast asleep.
  - = Went to see The Manchurian Candidate and the theater had the sound turned just low enough it drove me crazy. I mean it’s already a movie about paranoia and so there’s lots of whispering and mumbling, but when you lower the sound to the point of needing a hearing aid it’s a tossup between falling asleep or tossing a grenade back up into the control room. Otherwise it looked like it must be a great film.

  • 9:34 am
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