Lost Love

Lost love and loneliness are reflections for another holiday alone. I read some Thoreau, some Hannah Arendt, and avoid calling anyone. I'd bought a couple of packages of stuffed shells, Bertolli, frozen, because I never make them for myself, and they were on sale. I made some garlic bread, from the left-over baguette from the board meeting. The acidity of certain foods bothers me more than it ever did before. It's weird, actually, because I've never had to watch what I ate, I always could, like the Great White Shark, digest anything from shoe-leather to plankton. I've always had great control over my gag-reflex, so that I could ingest things like peyote, and datura, back in the day. I once took a bag of roasted morning glory seeds, Pearly Gates, into an art movie house in Jacksonville, and sat through three showings of a film version of Joyce's "Ulysses". Stories I could tell. In the early 70's, when I was still working at The Cape Playhouse in the summer, and madly printing the rest of the year, 7 NEA grants in a 13 year period; a bunch of us would meet, summers, on Tuesday morning, at the print shop, drop acid, and do the four or five mile walk down through Crow Pasture, out and around the beach, then back up to the print shop. We only had Tuesday off during the day, and we had to be back at the theater that night, to run a show. Interestingly, we ran great shows, were notorious, on the circuit, for our technical proficiency. It's a matter of focus. I thought about the opera libretto all day, in the back of my mind; I was doing other stuff, leaching acorns, sweeping dust-bunnies from corners, but I was thinking about the fox, and how she is the girl and the honey. I figure I'll give TR a couple of thousand lines that he can choose from, for the fifty or sixty lines he might choose to use. I already told him he could use anything he wanted, in whatever form. It's just text. The power went out, just before seven, soon after that the phone rang, and it was Adams County Rural Electric, wondering if I had electricity, and I told the nice man, that, no, I didn't have power, as he well knew, because my meter reads remotely, and he said they'd probably have it restored before midnight. I ask him what time it was, as I don't have a clock when the power is out, and he said it was nearly nine. I asked him if they usually called a residence at that time of night, and he said no, not usually, but someone thought my place was probably a hunting camp, and if no one was there, they wouldn't send out a crew until in the morning. I told him it didn't matter, but they did send out a crew and I had power again by 11:30. I sat in the dark, for a couple of hours, reading by headlamp, and I was startled when the refrigerator and my two lights came back on, and the computer said "Please Wait". The power company must build a huge amount of slack into their operating budget. I cost them a fortune. I mean really. Two guys (they can't work alone) and a truck from West Union, which is more than an hour away, at night, on a holiday? What did it cost to send them out to manually trip a relay on my transformer? I've cost utility companies a fortune over the years. It seems I'm always at the end of the line. I'm proud of it, in one way, but I know it costs everyone else money. The phone, for instance, they can't send someone in with a dish, so that I could modernize, because I can barely achieve the ridge in 4-wheel low, and their installation vans would mire at the bottom of the hill. It's easier just to accept me as an added expense. No, listen, it is. I'm cheaper by the job than I am by the hour. Phone was out also, so I couldn't send last night or this morning. Debris everywhere on the roads and I could see the tree that took the phone out. When I got to town I found a Frontier truck and told the driver where it was. I'm taking some Doctor's wives (that's the way they were described to me) through the Carters tomorrow, so I worked on my Carter routine and polished some fine points. Spent a couple of hours reading about the Renaissance. There was an obnoxious child at the pub, when I went over for lunch, so I got mine to go and went down below the flood wall to eat in peace. I hate bleating goats and small children crying out their pain. It's just a reflex, it doesn't mean anything. Oh, but wait, it does. Rolling thunder and I have to go, you have my number, right?