Lovely visit with Peggy. She even drove me home. Never pulled my guitar out of the case! (Did noodle on Otto.) I am glad I went; I showered and otherwise got myself in shape for a public event and then we drank lashings of tea, (I got the water on to boil and figured out where everything was in her kitchen to make tea while she was gone) considered our children and our recent losses and retrenchments. Is she still going to be living in that big house five years from now? Ten? I told her to stay put but I can see that a summer of overseeing a bunch of in-some-cases completely unexpected and ferociously expensive house repairs has shifted her opinion on being old and owning a house.
2609 words plus sketched out a confrontation scene while at Peggy’s waiting for her to come back from walking her son’s s/o’s dog Callie who is a very nervous rescue with a rangy frame and a patrician nose but who decided to like me.
Still no word about whether Janice is still in town or how she’s going home. Very hard to have discussions with your ex which desperately need having when he’s got his bodyguard with him. If he’s driving her home that puts the discussion off again for the best part of a week. Peggy’s face as I mentioned this was a study.
The ‘real filk’ is next weekend but in the meantime I have had a proper earflapping with one of my most beloved and respected friends. And I left the house.
Mike is coming over tonight! Hope to hear his tale of work, just brushed up against the subject on the phone the other day.
HALLOWEEN IS COMING
Someone else’s poem, but relevant to both my life and my mood.
221b by Vincent Starrett
221b
Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game’s afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears—
Only those things the heart believes are true.
A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five