Late Call

I was asleep, on the floor downstairs, when the phone rang. 2:46 in the morning, you don't expect good news at that hour, and I almost didn't answer, but they were persistent, and the ringing was driving me crazy. Let this be a lesson, sometimes it's best not answer. A friend, no, too strong a word, it was an acquaintance, a friend of a friend I built a house for in Mississippi, decades ago. He's on the verge of suicide, his bride has left him, the dog died, and the truck won't start. I tell him to stay on the line, while I go get a drink and roll a smoke, then listen to his plaintive whine. I don't have the patience to be a therapist. Either you roust the where-with-all to lay another course, adding bricks to the hod, or you don't. Always seemed like a simple equation to me. In this situation, there's always a cascading event and that's the thing you want to talk about. I have to poke around, then realize she left last night, and this is the first time in years that he's been alone. I point that out, then talk about being alone. I can tell he's not really going to kill himself, and I just want to get off the line: "Seven Tigers, nothing unusual, never mind.".But I talk to him for another half-hour, just to be sure he's ok, end the call, hang up the receiver, and walk around in circles, wondering if I had said the correct things. Most of my friends are over-extended. I don't know why that is. The company you keep. The inner circle is a magic place. I don't use the term loosely, magic. I have to look up illusion and delusion and several other words, then it's very late, and I have to sleep. Lovely ride into work, a thousand shades of green. I go into janitor mode at the musdeum, while D does some graphic design. Lunch with D and TR, then, in the afternoon, we walk through all three floors and on the roof, TR keeping notes, while D explains the esoteric mysteries of the building. We spend an hour on light bulbs, which goes where, and all the other operating systems, AC, heat, breaker panels (of which there are a dozen), the phone system, the security system, the new sound system. We spend hours discussing things, and D's leaving a complete set of contacts, for when systems fail, as they are inclined to do. He volunteered to take the print show back to Athens, since it was his show and he knew the people. And I readily agreed. I don't want to take the show back, I'm busy, always, right then, patching and painting and unwrapping a new show. Despite the fact that Athens is cool and there's a good Indian restaurant with a lunch buffet. I'll be on the road, next year, though, no doubt about it, art to pick up and art to deliver, and I can do that, but I can't do all the things D has done for a decade at the museum, and I won't even try. I can only believe, at this point, that Pegi intends to plug the holes with Cirque people. Which might work in the short term, but in the long term the museum is toast. Finally got a dozen eggs from TR, like pulling eye teeth, and had two of them, perked up, basted with vermouth, on multi-grain toast, with morels fried in butter, tonight. So good they defy description. I used the dry toast points to establish a base line.