Mallory's Camera

Whaddiya know. The cheap weed wacker did exactly what I needed it to do once I reassembled it so the retaining cap didn't keep falling off.

Of course, the feature I really wanted—six little green men who crawl out of the box, fall to their knees, and begin weeding out stumps and roots—was not available. That still needs to be a by-hand shovel job. Hey! You get what you pay for.

###

The kiskas are hating heavily on each other this morning. They spend about 30% of their time grooming each other and 40% hissing and batting at one another. (The other 30% they spend sleeping obliviously on opposite corners of the Patrizia-torium.) But this morning, they were going after each other tooth and nail with such fury, I had to get out the spray bottle.

What set them off, I wonder?

Mabel was so pissed off about something that she actually woke me up around 5—leaving me under-rested for the Schlock alumni luncheon that I have somehow agreed to go to later today.

When I went downstairs, I found the front door wide open.

This is another one of the peculiarities of the House of Icky: The front door does not stay closed when it's windy out.

Fortunately, the house is in a remote rural area. Unless a serial killer has recently escaped from one of the local prisons, an open front door is unlikely to endanger me.

However! Molly likes to think of herself as an indoor-outdoor cat, and I have found her wandering outside a couple of times after the door has blown open. That is worrisome because if a hawk will go after a chicken, it will also go after a cat.

Did Molly wander outside last night?

Did Mabel wake me up to tattle on her?

###

Chatted a little with Ichabod last night.

Realized that while I was quite good at keeping myself occupied and productive when I lived on the other side of the river, I am miserable at it here. Though I did try when I first moved here.

Really not much I can do about that: It is the place; it is not me.

But, of course, it feels as though it's me.

I'm part of an epidemic! Isolated senior citizens.

If I were more of an egomaniac, the Work in Progress would sustain me. I would think of this isolation as a kind of literary retreat and funnel all of my energy into words.

But my ego is simply not strong enough for that kind of role-play game. Yes, the words are important. To me. But I have no idea if they'll ever be important to anyone else, and I need involvement in stuff that is important to everyone else to round out my resume as a Real Human Girl.

Anyway.

I'll book the Michigan trip today.

If that doesn't work out... It's Ithaca.

One way or another, I need to start thinking about packing and moving logistics (ugh).

I was thinking I might hire Sarah to help me pack. Sarah is the sweet, over-burdened single mother who appalled me that one time at Schlock by dressing so the crack of her ass showed when she sat with a client. (She was actually a reasonably competent tax preparer.) I am probably going to need someone to help me pack. I'm really going to that luncheon today to get her contact info.

It's still snowing, and I don't want to jinx anything, but...

It's looking like we were well outside the bombogenesis perimeter.

Yes, "bombogenesis" is a real word! It refers to a storm where barometric pressure drops by at least 24 millibars in 24 hours. With this particular storm, the barometric pressure dropped a mind-boggling 44 millibars, but it dropped somewhat to the south and east of where I'm located. Which made for some crazy totals over comparatively short distances: Like 15" in Fishkill but only 5" in Poughkeepsie.

We ended up getting around five inches of the Hideous White Stuff here.

###

We expected snow all day yesterday, but it didn't come. Instead, it was just dismal and grey and awful. I went into the office and sat there reading Midnight In the Garden of Good & Evil, which left me with a deep desire to visit Savannah even though the best thing about Midnight In the Garden of Good & Evil is its title.

###

In the evening, Ichabod upset me on the phone by reminding me my housing options would be considerably better if I didn't have pets.

Of course, I know he's right, but the kiskas have more-or-less saved my sanity these last few extremely difficult months. They have functioned effectively as a family for me; they are good company and affectionate in their highly idiosyncratic way. As awful as this place is, I'd rather live here forever than give up my gurlZ.

But I hope it won't come to that.

###

Writing-wise, I am preparing to embark upon the Daria portion of the novel.

Ideally, I would pull this off with a Jennifer-Egan-style switch of the PoV voice. Realistically, I may not be a good enough writer to do this. The important thing here, though, is not to show off my dazzling writerly gifts but to finish the damn thing however best I can.

To that end, I am setting up an interview with real-life Daria.

###

Here is a photograph of real-life Daria:



She's very beautiful, as you can see! Kinda Snow White-ish with that pure white overflip.

What I'm primarily interested in is her sexual relationship with Brian.

Grazia and Neal don't have a sexual relationship, so in the first part of the book, Neal combines the best qualities of a father and a wisecracking teddy bear.

But in the second part of the book, Neal must come across as an erotic god!

Which should be challenging.

I've read my share of porn & erotica over the years. And written it, too. For pay! 😀 My porn was always criticized for "too much story"! I guess the sexual tropes that turn most people on do very little for me; it's always the relationships that drive the sex that make it hot for me. The single most erotic book I ever read was Susannah Moore's In the Cut, wherein a professor of English stumbles into an affair with a homicide detective who drives her mad with desire with a strange little crooking gesture he does with his forefinger.

So, yes, I have to study up on real-life Neal's kinks.

But I also have to figure out what it feels like to be so fluent in three languages (as Daria is) that the languages all swirl together in your brain, and what it feels like to be that seductive—because real-life Daria is oh-so-seductive.

Also, I have to come up with a rescue situation that can play analogously to Grazia's cult rescue. Doesn't have to be as dramatic. But that's a connecting thematic element in each of the three parts of the book: Neal saves each of the women in some way.

If I'm braindead, so be it!

I'll spend the rest of my life watching movies.

###

Last night, I watched something called The Friend, in which Naomi Watts inherits a massive Great Dane from Bill Murray after he commits suicide, and it was the saddest movie ever because even though Naomi Watts eventually comes to love the dog, at the beginning of the movie she doesn't, she's just stuck with him because nobody else will take him, so the movie made me think of the fragility and ultimate unenforceability of the compacts we form with companion animals.
This hit home for me because I don't love the two cats currently my companion animals as much as I've loved companion animals in the past.

Molly & Mabel are not cuddly cats.

They don't sit on laps. They don't like to be picked up and... packaged, enfolded with affection. They will struggle if I try to do this. They are wary & guarded with everyone but me: Gus reported he did not see them once while I was away in Ithaca over Thanksgiving, and Icky reported that while Molly kiska would sit at the head of the stairs and stare down at him, she would never come down.

Sometimes, they are even wary & guarded with me.

Mabel will still hiss at me occasionally—not because she is an aggressive cat but because she is a very frightened cat. She has a scar on her head swooping down from her ear to her left eye, and I suspect she was badly used as a kitten, poor little girl.

Clearly, they love me in their own way.

Molly always trails me downstairs whenever I cook and at night, crawls into bed alongside me and kneads on blankets there; Mabel is forever flopping down on my feet and exposing her plump belly: Pet me please!



It's so odd the way both of them adore having their bellies rubbed but can hardly bear to be touched on any other part of their anatomy! Most cats of my acquaintance have been the other way around.

They are quite the most talkative cats I have ever been around. Molly will meow to me for 15 minutes straight if I keep asking her, "What, Molly? What?"

"It's good that you have the two cats," Brian told me. "They're like your little family. You need a little family."

###

But I am disloyal. I keep thinking, It would be easier to move if I didn't have the two cats. It would be easier to travel.

And I feel bad for thinking that because I take the animal/human compact very seriously. These kiskas are so eccentric and idiosyncratic that no one would ever want them except me—and I only half want them.

They trust me.

They hardly trust anything else outside their own bodies and instincts.

But they trust me.

Betraying that trust would be like betraying the universe somehow.

But I'm tempted to sometimes.

Watch on YouTube

Watch on YouTube

HIDEOUS WHITE STUFF FROM THE SKY!!!!!

Plus Icky is being an absolute dick, telling me I can't hire someone from Rover to look out for the cats while I'm gone over Thanksgiving because "I don't want strangers in the house."

I mean, like really, Icky?

What do you think they're going to steal?

Your "Burning Man" t-shirt? Your priceless collection of aging hipster metal ratchet jewelry? Your Viagra stash?

If I'm going away for five days or less, I will typically load the kiskas up with food, water, litter boxes, and toys, and just depart.

They are not the world's most interactive cats.

I mean, they interact with me, but it took them a long time to become interactive with me. They certainly won't yearn for the calming presence of other humans in my absence.

But I'm going away over Thanksgiving for a week, which is too long to leave them unchaperoned and their litter boxes uncleaned.

Anyway, I called Christine, the spawns' mother, & she said she would be very happy to do it.

"I'll pay you!" I said.

"No, no," she said.

If she won't take cash, I'll get her a gift card!

Win/win situation!!! 'Cause nothing pisses Icky off quite as much as anyone having positive interactions with his X.

###

In other news, the gym yesterday was an absolute delight. I had to force myself not to go in today! At the age of 73, I am thinking one-day-on, the next day-off is the right schedule for the gym.

I may force myself to go tromping today.

May.

It is currently only a single degree over freezing here, so the idea of spending time outside is not very enticing.

Interview with the T-burg household is now a definite for 8/16.

Which makes me feel somewhat less invisible.

I mean, feeling invisible 'cause you're emotionally distraught is all kinds of crazy! For one thing, it makes you even more emotionally distraught; for another, it's not a useful kind of invisibility that might allow you, say, to rob a bank or slash the tires of your enemies.

No, one must strive to keep distraught emotions in check. Stay the course! Do the prep work! Chop wood, carry water—or is it the other way around?

###

Anyway, yesterday was rough because I entered into my eighth straight day of Not Hanging Out With Anyone In the Flesh because there is absolutely no one to hang out with here (Brian is dead, Brian is dead) though my little tentacles stretch wide with texts & phone calls throughout the virtual universe.

The kiskas are good girls though not what I would call good company in times of emotional duress because they are not snuggly in the slightest—though Molly follows me all around the house & spent an hour and a half last night, meowing plaintively while I sat outside, chattering on the phone, counting the fireflies and watching a pine tree pin a blood-orange crescent moon. (There is a lot of smoke in the air.)

And Black Chicken has developed Horrible Habits! She has become a Welfare Chicken! Instead of ranging freely across the property when I let her out of her coop in the morning, she runs to the house & sits on the porch & clucks at me: Feed me tortillas! If I sit on the porch reading, she pecks at my toes!

###

The gym is a great solace. Endorphins, doncha know. And I suppose it's just possible I'm getting physically stronger (though I think it's more likely I am merely slowing down entropy.)

And books—I just reread Gone Girl and read Sharp Objects for the first time. Interestingly enough, Sharp Objects is the more accomplished novel. (That's interesting because it was Gillian Flynn's first novel, and usually, first novels are not as good as the ones that follow.)

And phone conversations—chattered away last night with a good friend who is recovering from Major Medical Issues. He will recover in full, but omyGAWD, what he went through, plus the conversation evolved into a discussion of assisted suicide—possibly not the most tactful conversational segue on my part—and from there into non-assisted suicides: We started talking about that man my friend knew who'd committed suicide in the parking lot of the Grand Rapids airport—

And the phone went dead.

Just like that!

It took a couple of minutes to reestablish the connection.

"Well, I guess he doesn't want us talking about him," I said.

"No shit!" said my friend.

So we started talking about Larry McMurtry instead. Who wrote lots of books. And didn't kill himself.

The kiskas have baskets & baskets of toys, but the only one they care about is Scrunch, a distinctly unprepossessing proto-rodent with weird blue fiber tendrils.

Every morning begins with a hunt for Scrunch. Where did they hide him last night? In the Patrizia-torium, in the bathroom, in the closet, downstairs? Scrunch turns up all over the house because when Icky is not on the premises, the kiskas scamper madly up & down the stairs and hang out in the living room.

I wish I could figure out the secret to Scrunch's appeal. It is a great mystery.



In other news, yesterday morning was difficult because the night before my computer charger abruptly gave up the ghost. (My computer battery has been telling me for months now it needs to be serviced, but me being me, I have been ignoring it.)

A computer charger is nothing, right? $25 bucks. A 30-minute drive to Best Buy at the Middletown Galleria.

And I absolutely knew it was the computer charger.

But (again me being me), I drove myself to the verge of a nervous breakdown by imagining, What if it isn't the charger? What if it's the computer? (USB ports, some motherboard mojo, something.) What if Computer Hub in New Paltz can't fix the computer, what if all my credit cards spontaneously stop working and I can't buy a new computer, what if the collectively-minded Cornell professor shoots me an email—On further reflection, Patrizia, I have decided you are a complete asshole—and I am forced to live in thrall to Icky for-fuckin'-evah, what if a meteor hits the earth—

Brian was one of my grounding rods. Without Brian, my anxiety is a volatile compound.

And the thing about this kind of anxiety is that it's so ridiculous, you can't really talk about it. You have to hide it. Though it seeps out, of course: When I drove to Best Buy yesterday, I was driving erratically and almost got into two accidents.

Thing about Brian's death, I suppose, is not just the death of an immeasurably dear friend but also the sheer unexpectedness of that death.

One morning you are shooting the breeze about how best to impress a Gardiner Bakehouse audience with your impressive storytelling talents at the open mike, then the next morning, the recipient of your charming windiness has toppled head down onto his kitchen table, never to rise again. Does Not Compute.

The hypervigilance of the abused & neglected child.

If something happens that you have not foreseen and prepared yourself for, the whole infrastructure crumbles.

###

Came home. Remunerated. Chatted with Neighbor Ed for a bit. Chatted with my friend Tom whose medical crisis has had a happy ending. (I never asked what the medical crisis was: I figure if people want you to know about stuff like that, they'll tell you.)

I'm so glad, I said. Just lost one good pal, don't wanna lose any others.

I hear that-I’ve lost a couple of pals/work mates in the last week, Tom said.

And proceeded to tell me about a guy he knew who'd just commited suicide in the Grand Rapids, MI, airport parking garage. Crazy! In the midst of a late life divorce, between jobs, but the craziest part was that the guy was a hardcore Christian, used to travel around doing revivals in a family gospel group.

And there was absolutely no one he trusted enough to confide his despair in.

Life can be really hard.

And we are the people on this planet for whom life is easiest.

Woke up yesterday with a throbbing—& slightly swollen (medial collateral ligament)—knee.

This is something that happens from time to time.

I'm fairly certain it's due to an ancient right ankle injury that causes me to pronate overly when I'm wearing the wrong shoes & not paying attention. I really should go to Montano's, which has a pedorthist on staff, to buy a pair of shoes that will correct for the pronation.

Anyway, because my knee was throbbing, I did not go to the gym, which, of course, was the sensible thing not to do. But I put myself through all sorts of mental punishment! Surely, if I were a real trouper, I'd soldier through the discomfort! I was just being lazy! Blah, blah, blah.

Thing is I am very lazy. Left to my own devices, I would lie around on my sofa all day long scarfing chocolate hazelnut truffles and watching Halt and Catch Fire on continuous loop—except for when I was reading some movie star or movie mogul autobiography. And I would thoroughly enjoy myself.

I'm not sure from whence this Calvinist sub-personality emerged that won't let me do what I like best.

###

Also, Mabel the kiska is really pissed off at me.

The enormous mat on her back is responding to the detangler solution, but she hates when it's sprayed on her and has begun running away or lashing out at me when I try to spray it on her. I now have a big scratch on my left arm.

Mabel the kiska is one distrustful cat.

I figure she was severely abused as a kitten. I am fond of her despite her intractable personality; I'm sure—just like the rest of us—she'd rather not be intractable—but she is, it's what her life has taught her to be. I'm one of those people who enter into covenants with companion animals, so however much I would prefer a cat with a more placid, loving personality—oh, Sybyl! I will always miss you!—I would never dump Mabel.

I guess I'm gonna have to end up taking her to the vet to get the mat shaved.

Which does seem like a waste of money—because, honestly, I could take care off it by myself if only she'd let me.

###

Other than that...

It rained all night, but the sky does seem to be lightening.

If it clears up by 2pm, I'll be able to make it over to Hyde Park to put the finishing touches on the self-sustaining garden.

Next week I'll tackle the New Paltz garden!

First frost of the season: Temps last night dropped into the low 30s.

So after the vampires at the Institute for Family Medicine feast on my blood, I must head over to my much-neglected communal gardening plots to collect my tomato cages & bring them over to this side of the river.

I’m not going to sign up to garden there next year.

Driving over the bridge on any kind of a routine basis does not appeal. Plus, I must confess, when head garden honchette Deborah outed herself as the worst kind of fulminating Trump-head, I lost a lot of enthusiasm for the Hyde Park Community Garden.

I’ll wheedle Iggy into enlarging his garden and garden here.

###

What else?

I forced myself to tromp between rainstorms.

You have very little control over anything that happens to you, I reminded myself. Tromping is something you have complete control over.

It was bitterly cold, and autumn was flaunting itself:




Clever Molly somehow managed to snag a whole bag of kitty treats I’d stashed away. She is the brains of the kiska duo, the safecracker. Mabel is the brawn & braggadocio.

Also, Iggy wants to further monetize the dacha by renting it out as an Airbnb when he isn’t here.

“I have no problem with that,” I said. “So long as the Airbnb-ers don’t come upstairs.”

And I don’t. I actually liked the Airbnb-ers that came through L’s house back in the day.

Though I’m kinda bemused that Iggy thinks this house would live up to Airbnb cleanliness standards.

He is proposing to rent out his bedroom.

“But what will you do with your stuff?” I asked. “And what about the bathroom? Do you really think tourists are gonna spend the big buck$ to visit Wallkill and view your toothbrush collection?”

I expect if this plan gets off the ground, after the first negative review, he will be importuning me to clean the place between guests.

Which I’d consider doing in exchange for a significant discount on my rent.

This is the popular new campaign sign on the Walker Valley canvassing trail:



It joins these two standbys:



I don’t quite get the controversy surrounding Tim Walz’s military service. I mean, at least he has military service—unlike Trump, who was a draft dodger.

Apparently, Walz misrepresented something?

People do have a tendency to tell small lies about themselves & their experiences that often don’t stand up to the more scrupulous fact checks of the data superhighway.

At least he’s not on record saying soldiers who die in wars are suckers & losers.

Anyway, we—the few, the proud, the brave Shawangunk Dem canvassers—soldier (heh, heh, heh) on.



Nancy, my weekend canvassing partner, casually remarked she runs four and a half miles every morning.

“May I ask you a personal question?” I said. “How old are you?”

“Seventy-five,” Nancy said.

Seventy-five!

I stopped running—if you could even call it running—at 69.

Of course, Nancy is built like one of those Cretan bulldancers out of The King Must Die whereas evolution designed me to give birth in ditches & sub for the donkey when the donkey was feeling too indisposed to pull the cart to market. I’m a great big hulking peasant lass. I’m not really designed for activities that put too much weight on joints.

Still.

Nancy did put The Shame in me. (Inadvertently, of course! Nancy is the nicest person in the world.)

I really must exercise more.

###

But I didn’t exercise more yesterday!

Instead, I came home from canvassing & promptly fell asleep.

I don’t much like taking naps. When I wake up from them, I always feel groggy & extremely out of it.

So, all I did yesterday after I awakened, was Remunerate (inefficiently) and mediate cat disputes.

At this point, I think Molly would be quite happy to drop territorial disputes, but Mabel is still angry at having her Only Cat status yanked.

The Fellliway is scheduled to arrive today.

Molly Cat has vanished.

I mean, Whoosh! She disappeared.

Iggy’s new heartthrob brought her dog over Thursday night, & all I can think is that the dog freaked Molly—although Heartthrob was actually pretty respectful of the cats, kept the dog on a short leash.

To the best of my knowledge, Molly had never seen a dog before, & Molly & Mabel are very skittish, shy animals.

I have searched everywhere in the house, and to my immense shock, Iggy searched everywhere in the house—I returned from NYC yesterday to find Iggy sifting through one of the cat boxes, trying to determine if any of the cat shit was new. “I’ve looked everywhere,” he told me. “Looked in every drawer in every room. I even went up into the attic. You think you’d hear her meowing if she was trapped somewhere, right? She’s a pretty vocal cat. But no, nothing.”

“She must have gotten out of the house,” I said.

“But how?” he said. “The door wasn’t open.”

But some door must have been open. Because the only other explanations for the vanishing act are (A) that Molly dematerialized into another time/space continuum or (B) that Molly was abducted by aliens, both of which seem unlikely.

If, on the other hand, Molly is outside, the probability is high that she will turn up in a couple of days. Cats rarely roam more than 1,500 feet from home.

I feel more guilty than heartbroken

Like I failed some fundamental duty of care.



On Thursday, lots of things were going wrong.

My Belkin powerpack stopped charging again.

Then my phone wouldn’t charge using the regular charger.

I felt weird & shaky—not sick per se but off.

Lots of other bad things were happening, too. Not major bad—my children were okay, a meteorite didn’t crash to earth & take out my car. But more than minor annoyances. The baddest thing that happened, though, was the missing cat. And I felt bad that I didn’t feel worse.

Did I love Molly?

Love for me seldom registers as an emotion; I’m not good at feeling emotions. Love is an intellectual commitment: I have an ongoing investment in this living creature, therefore I am committed to ensuring they thrive.

Neither Molly nor Mabel are particularly cuddly cats. They don’t sleep with me; they don’t like to be picked up & snuggled. They like me, that much is clear, because they like to hang out around me. And both of them like me to pet their tummies. But the fact that they don’t snuggle means I don’t have the same tenderness for them that I had for Sybyl or Rutger.

When Molly disappeared, I thought, Maybe if I’d felt more tenderly toward her, she wouldn’t have vanished.



Thursday night, I didn’t sleep.

I mean, literally. The brain churn was so intense, I couldn’t turn it off, couldn’t sink into the bliss of no churn, no consciousness.

This was a real problem because on Friday, I had plans to travel down to NYC and hang out with Barbara Angell, in town for a couple of days before flying off to Switzerland to trek around Mount Blanc. The plans had been made months ago; I didn’t see how I could possibly renege.

Somehow, in the morning, I drove myself to the train station, managed to make it onto a train. Once on the train, I felt more & more awful.

Ichabod called. I told him about the missing Molly. “I was so upset, I didn’t sleep. I probably should have stayed home to look for the cat—”

“Either the cat is fine and will turn up sooner or later, or the cat is not fine and will not turn up,” Ichabod said. “Either way, your immediate presence is unlikely to affect the outcome. I think it’s good that you’re seeing Barbara.”

It is always good to see Barbara—though it immediately became apparent to me that I was not gonna be able to carry through on the Exciting Activity I had planned, to wit a visit to the absolutely fabulous New York Botanical Garden (I’m a member), which is doing an Alice in Wonderland show with White Rabbit topiary and playing cards made of flowers.

Instead, I lay on one of the beds in Barbara’s sumptuous hotel room feeling awfuller & awfuller. The expresso I had had with lunch hadn’t put a dent in the awfulness, some unfamiliar compound of intense fatigue & something… wrong… inside my body.

Finally, though, we decided to go for a walk.

Barbara’s hotel was on the Upper West Side, the neighborhood where I grew up and right around the corner from the Museum of Natural History. We walked just as far as Theodore Roosevelt Park outside the Hayden Planetarium when it became suddenly clear what the wrong thing was inside my body: I was about to have explosive diarrhea!

“I’ll wait for you here,” said Barbara.

I ran inside the Planetarium. “Do you have a bathroom I can use?” I gasped.

The security guard scowled at me. “Ticket! You’ll have to buy a ticket.”

“All I need is a bathroom!” I said.

He must have sensed I was serious because after frowning at me for 30 seconds—30 seconds in which I could hear as well as feel my intestines becoming unblocked—he did a precursory search of my handbag and nodded me down the stairs: “To your left.”



Downstairs, there were 2 (count ‘em!) two sets of security guards, on opposite sides of a large hall. I can’t tell you how many times I ricocheted between them, how many minutes that took.

They kept saying, “You have to have a ticket.”

I kept pleading, “Bathroom! Bathroom!”

Finally, one of them said to me, “You are never going to find someone more compassionate than me, but it’s just not possible, we can’t let you in without a ticket. Rules is rules!”

“Look,” I said. “If I don’t get to a bathroom in about 15 seconds, I’m gonna shit on your floor. That’s gonna be disgusting, and you’re gonna have to deploy a lot of resources to clean it up—”

Something about my face convinced her I was serious.



Afterward, Barbara & I discussed the dynamics of the situation.

“It’s the post 9/11 world,” said Barbara. “The simplest acts of kindness must be seen as suspect.”

“I felt so humiliated,” I said. “I mean to lose control of yr bowels! That takes you right back to the shame of potty training. I guess I’m lucky the ordeal took place around you because you still love me, right?”

Barbara laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course.”



We went back to the hotel. Barbara went out for a walk. I lay down on one of the beds and fell into a kind of stupor: I still couldn’t find sleep, but I could ring Sleep’s doorbell.

Iggy texted: Still haven’t seen the cat. She doesn’t seem to have come down here at all. Unexpectedly considerate of him. He is, after all, a dick. Later I deduced that this was around the time he began scouring the house for her.

I recovered sufficiently to go out for dinner, chatter animatedly for several hours. Life & Love! In the final analysis, what else is there ever to talk about really?

And I slept that night.

In the Times Square subway station, I noted my dead grandfather is still trapped in his mural.

And on the train back to the Hudson Valley, I started feeling ill again. So ill, in fact, that I canceled my canvassing plans & did not search the woodsy tangles for Molly. I lay on my couch in that now-familiar semi-stupor. My stomach ached. My back hurt—or was that my kidneys? I felt as though I might have been running a temperature. I wondered if this was some new strain of COVID that bypassed the respiratory tract entirely and set its scope on the intestines. But the COVID tests I had in the house had long since expired, & I felt too feeble to negotiate a trip to the pharmacy (plus, of course, I didn’t want to expose innocent bystanders to maybe-COVID.)

Mabel was very happy to see me and does not seem to miss her sibling in the slightest.



Today, I still feel like shit though possibly not as much like shit as I did yesterday.

Iggy’s very charming friend Nancy is staying for a couple of days. She is a soignée woman approximately my age or a little bit older who spends half the year running a guesthouse in Angola (Africa!) and half the year living in North Hampton, Massachusetts.

“So you’ve moved in with this crazy family,” she said.

I laughed. “Your word. But, yes.”

“I met Rahav when he was 18 & tried to sell me an air conditioner,” she said. “Somehow we hit it off & became lifelong friends.”

“Did you buy the air conditioner?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” she said.