Mindwinter day (22nd December 1978)

I have an image of a beautiful man or woman who walks in the door like Christ and earnestly spends some time with us like the UPS man does.

An idea is to spend days walking nights writing never eating, sleep only when it rains and have an occasional beer.

A calm sentence like a story. I used to know a man who had a dog and I followed their steps in the snow, I got into the habit of walking just as far as they did every day. At the same time I also knew a woman whose husband had seven guns. I used to know a woman who’s the woman who married Neil Simon. I like the woman who used to work in the Lenox market, she never wears boots, then she retired. In New England the women are often more exciting than the men, Lewis thinks so too, I don’t know why. There’s a tribe somewhere where people say about the men, look how he’s changed since he’s had children, he looks awful !

I ask are you finished, you seem to want mine. There’s only time left to tell how the floors met the walls and we saw centipedes all the time crawling across the carpets which were green beneath the blue glass table which was a mirror with a plate of balls on it under the windows which on some days we cleaned but not too well so we wouldn’t fall out like my mother did not but someone else’s mother did and she died but my sister fell out once with a piece of cheese in her hand but she was so embarrassed and ashamed she didn’t tell anyone and just got up after I had already tried to compare with her how sex for us might be different but then we got into trouble again and resorted to the cellar to tear each other’s hair out and teach tongue-kissing.

The sauce is done. Then I went to visit a girlfriend of mine who was going to a Jesuit college in Syracuse. When I came home Bob met me at the airport, it was the first time I’d flown and I had fallen in love with someone and that was Ed. We went back to my house in Ridgewood, this was when I was trying to go to Barnard but it took me two hours to get there. Bob’s mother had given me a wedding shower because my grandfather had given me my mother’s diamond ring and she took that to mean we were engaged since she was worried anyway I’d get pregnant before we got married, though she was relieved that Bob wasn’t queer after all. I didn’t know anything about birth control. We had set a date for the wedding and arranged a reception but the place we were going to have it in burned down. Bob’s mother worked as a maker of wedding gowns. So that night in my house I told Bob to watch me sleep because I was afraid to sleep otherwise. In the middle of the night I sat up in bed, he said, and asked him a question. After that he always understood that I was no longer in love with him. I didn’t know what Ed wanted to do but a couple of days later he came to my house and said I want to live with you, meet me in two weeks. The night before I was supposed to leave I went out with Grace who a while before had been in such a bad car accident she was still walking with a cane. We went to a bar and I left with a minor league baseball player who had an MG, Grace left with somebody else and we met later at my house. I missed the taxi I had called to make the early plane but I caught a later one and when Grace woke up in my house all alone my grandfather mistook her for me even though she has red hair and he called her Bernie. When Grace left my neighbor Tex told her he’d seen the taxi and wondered what was going on, he’s the one who had said when my father died, « Who’s that ? »