Emily's Tombstone

If you're read by enough people, eventually someone sends you an actually rubbing of Emily's tombstone. I need to get it framed and under glass right away. The inscription is from the last letter to her cousins, 'Called Back' and I want to hang it to the left over my desk, where Faulkner currently reigns, a poster from the 1996 Yoknapatawpha Conference, 'Faulkner and the Natural World'. Suffice it to say that my day is made. Which is good, because it's another brutal day. Brutal isn't the correct word, what I mean is fully engaged and challenging. I didn't sleep well last night, worrying things like a dog with a bone. I'm fine flying solo, especially with James's help, the newbie, and he's good, a brilliant organizational mind, and, as Sara said, a systems guy. With an MFA in Library Science he tends toward the complusive, and this is a good thing hanging a show. The real problem wall ended up being a panel, which is wood under carpet, and I used a story-stick to level across. Eight inch framed side-show postcards, three rows of six, and they hang on two screws, four inches apart, two inches from each end. James marks a stick, the straightest stick I could find, and we level it against a piece of wide masking tape stuck to the panel, transfer the marks. I put a dry-wall screw at every point. Screwing if fraught with variables. The angle, the grain of the wood, the point of entry. The variations are less than a sixteenth of an inch but over eight inches they're ugly and skew the view. I hand James a small finish hammer and a level. You can tap them up and down, soft metal. He asks how good do I want them to be and I tell him whatever he would accept. Hell, his standards are higher than mine, I've got too much on my mind, so it's perfect to give James that task, because he does better than I would have. The show is spectacular, it's mostly all hung, we'll fly the Monkey Aviators tomorrow, maybe do the signage, maybe do the lighting. The labels are extensive and necessary and will require almost as much time as setting the show. A week from tomorrow this show opens as a major event. Arts people from all over the state. I want the installation, and the site, to look good, I want mouths to drop open. Originally centered around the Carter's, and the horses hold center stage, that Vermeer horses's asses is a great painting. It's all about light, really, that subtle thing that happens.This time of year there might one tree lit, from an errant shaft of light. It might be glorious. This morning there was one of those displays, and I didn't know what to say to myself. Hey, Tom, you're hanging a show, it could be ironic or not, what do you think about that?