one thing today

  I go to Home Depot and eyeball cheap, ugly rugs and then walk to Madison Park to Shake Shack. I order and wipe raindrops off a chair. This big, young, friendly looking lug of a guy at the next table over says … this one here is dry. Take it. I think for a few seconds - I’m not sure if he meanstake the chair back to my table or - if he means I should join him - so I sit at his table. He’s Bill - something close to that but fancier, Billem maybe - from Germany- call me Bill. He’s Bosnian and 27 and has a lovely accent and writes short stories and teaches wrestling to very young kids after leaving a job in publishing. He looks like a big good ole Southern bearded bad boy but speaks very intelligently about his trip and home and work. He lives with his troubled mother in a forest outside of Stuttgart and is here until Sunday and then he’s off to Texas. We eat burgers and fries and he talks about Hemingway. I tell him I am on my way to Rizzollis bookstore and invite him to join me....

David Sedaris was on my favorite podcast Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud. He said last night at his reading a man gave him a taxidermied baby chick his little sister was gonna throw out because it was her first try at it and she didn't think it was any good. He (David) gave it to another kid at the event, a seventeen year old boy - and told him to give it to his younger sister for Christmas.  Bella thinks aiming for comfort in fashion is the beginning of the end . It makes me think of a certain someone close to me who personifies that belief.   his (Davids) nyc home is full of expensive paintings and bad furniture & design choices - like ceramic owls and too small wildly expensive, famous art on big walls. surprising wow is all ... 

  I just met my new doctor. He doesn't look old enough to be one. He's been one for a year. I like him a lot. He's very personable and has big teeth and a great smile. He didn't know that women couldn't own credit cards in the 70s.  I went on an app just now ... how old do I look. you just download a recent pic. I'm feeling good. Told me that I look 14 years younger than I am. Yay.

  His sister is touched  By our rememberings  She met him the day after his birth & then had no memory of him for years & years She entered the Junior High classroom  the kids are circled round her brother  doing something,  they want to see I would give a lot gladly to know what it was,  that held all of them there in that room that day Am wrapped in memory this soft & windy morning  Listening to Bobby D Who has - I checked last night - over 2,000 books Written about his life and times that go on still he still shares his magic  that's still afoot  & still in time  still becomes ours

  Two workers in the bookstore the other day.  And how my library honored our doll. Did you hear about Dolly? Yeah.  Yeah.  We still have Willy. 

This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern - to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.