Every Day Above Ground

Dreamed I was with Ben. We were giving the domestic situation one more crack, spending a week living together.

The week wasn’t fun.

But neither was it not fun. It was ordinary time, every day above ground etc. etc, and it had the luster (attractive) of the familiar.

At the end of the week, I asked him, So? Should we go on doing this?

No, he said. It isn’t working for me.

And the only real disappointment I felt hearing his words was that I hadn’t been the one to say them, my motto (when I was young and beautiful) always having been, Do it to them before they can do it to you.

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I fasted. It was one of those Lost-Jews-in-the-Honduras kind of fasts since I refused to do a Zoom Kol Nidre.

I felt surprisingly good throughout the day. This is where all those years of practice as an anorexic really pay off!

I went shopping. Shoes, weird little toys, terrific cards—I have this notion that I want to start writing letters to people, pen meets paper, that kind of thing.

I bought a tent for RTT whom I will be visiting this weekend:



I vetted the gift through a texting session with his best friend Will. It’s a birthday present.

I baked a strawberry pie. The recipe called for cornstarch, but there was none in the house, so I substituted gelatin left over from the last batch of jam I made. But, of course, I didn’t know how much gelatin to put in, and too much gelatin will turn the filling into rubber, so I ended up using not enough, and the filling didn’t set.

Oh, well.

It still tastes good, and I suppose I can freeze it for cohesiveness.

I broke my fast on the front porch, staring at the amazing three-quarter moon and chattering to Zee, the lastest addition to the household.

Zee is a Culinary Institute student; he originally hails from Bangla Desh. I really wanted to ask him, So! What’s Bangla Desh like? but thought that question might seem—I dunno. Intrusive? Offensive?

So instead we talked about Priuses, how much we love them. His is the same year as mine.

And he showed me how he’d bought an external rear-view cam and wired it up to his rearview mirror, and I thought, Wowwwwww! I need to do that! Because if I have any small criticism of the Prius—small! tiny!—it’s that it’s hard to see out of the rear window for backing out of parking lots and such.

Well, you could have come over and borrowed a cup of cornstarch from US, Neighbor Ed told me during what has come to be a more-or-less regular evening texting session in which we recite to each other the high points and low points of each day.

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Also, Alicia posted a number of photos of Rik on FB. Apparently, yesterday was the sixth anniversary of his death. (So many of those anniversaries this time of the year.) I was particularly struck by this one, which makes Rik look like a minor Bloomsbury member—you know, one of the ones who had an affair with Duncan Grant and later married a ballerina:



Rik is actually one of the people I’ve found myself missing recently. Rik and Tom Mandel. I would so like to get their take on this crazy, crazy, crazy world.