To my one and many readers

There always comes the time of day when I wish I was someone else, though that time often comes at night now.

I’d done nothing very practical with the day, starting a piece of writing I may never finish, picking up a paintbrush but only twirling it around in my fingers for a moment or two, not yet seeing the canvas the way it wanted to be seen, writing some form letters to voters in swing states…

…earlier, I’d read the Auden poem, “Tonight at Seven-Thirty” (dedicated to M.F.K Fisher). It begins with the lines, ‘The life of plants/is one continuous solitary meal,/and ruminants/hardly interrupt theirs to sleep or to mate, but most/predators feel/ravenous most of the time…”

Reading Auden made me feel that I was doing something—that’s one of the great things about reading poetry, its most misunderstood, under-appreciated benefit. I’m so grateful to Auden and Hannah Arendt, Joseph Roth, Jules Renard, and so many other writers of insight and good-will. I raise a glass of fresh air to all them! And to most all the poets on my bookshelves, and the visual artists too, at least to some of them; they know who they are.

I’m grateful also to FD in Los Angeles who’d spent the day before yesterday reading Paul Celan and Kafka in order to, “cheer myself up.” FD and I had a great long laugh about what he’d said.

I suppose I’m a writer, but when I write now I feel from the time I start writing that I must get up from my chair and go outside so that I might pretend that I am a bird, a small bird but strong enough to fly house-to-house for the water and breadcrumbs left out for me in the backyards of my fellow neighbors.

I don’t eat as much as I once did, but I eat much better than I did before the current crisis started. And I taste everything in what I do eat, as if from the ground up. The pecan cookies Lea Ann made the other day were not only delicious, I could taste the pecan tree, the milk from the cow from which the butter was churned, the soil where the seeds sprouted for the oat flour.

Our lives are now as far from idyllic as they’ve ever been, but we’re still all neighbors. If you don’t think this is so, look at the earth from a GPS satellite as if you’re not looking down at something, but are looking up into a physical heaven populated by people like you and me.

I walk my neighborhood at night now. It’s cool, quiet, the air’s fresher then. After 9 p.m. or so, walking along the avenues for a mile or so, I am convinced that I live among solid-citizens who can also fly like birds. We all like go to bed early, listening through our ear-buds to an audio book of Don Quixote read by a distinguished Englishman.