Today six of us rented a leaky falling-apart rowboat and rowed out to a little rocky island on Lake Malawi to dive off the rocks, snorkel and swim. Before I left I promised I would not swim in Lake Malawi because of parasites, but it is so sparklinbg and pristine here I couldn't resist. It was such a good feeling to stretch my body out in the water, and snorkelling I saw angel fish striped pale blue and black and other tropical fish.

Last night Masankho's father, Alekey Banda, arrived and spoke to us about the history of Malawi since it got its independence from the British in 1964. I forget all the details but I have a sheet of paper with the salient facts and will put them here later.

Meanwhile, I just feel in bliss. I want to stay in Africa forever, want to drink mango beer and learn to play bao and just wear a bright cloth knotted around my waist the way the village women do. I feel so sorry for the members of our group who are sick--it's a nasty flu-like bug. So far no one has bad diarrhea (that I know of.) I'm eating as much protein as I can, and taking drops of grapefruit seed extract in my water and I feel fine. My period started yesterday, so I am deliciously relaxed now. It helps that I boycotted the rattley old bus--half-hour rides from our sleeping accomodations at Kande Beach and Masankho's family home in the village where we all gather for meals and Interplay and to travel around and see the aid projects.

We are in the village, Tukombo. It's very poor. People eat cassava three times a day. Cassava is a white root vegetable, covered with a dark brown skin--mostly starch. They soak it and ferment it, and scrape it and bake it into a hard fluffy gluey ball and eat it rolled in their hands, dipped in sauce, or with meat and vegetables. We, the foreigners, have meat and fruit and vegetables with every meal, but the villagers don't.

My intestines are pretty well glued together with cassava at this point. 'Nuff said.

They greeted us singing and dancing. A whole troupe, moving together, singing, "Thank you, Masankho, thank you for bringing the visitors from America." It was overhwelming. They had been dancing and singing for hours, with an accompanying drum. We were overhwelmed, but then, everywhere we've gone, we've been greeted by a singing and dancing contingent. The Africans redefine graciousness.

The women wear bright cloths wrapped around their waists for a skirt, and a shirt--any shirt. They carry huge burdens on their heads; buckets of laundry, bundles of firewood, baskets piled with cassava. The men wear shirts and pants. They make wood carvings. They should be fishermen, but for complex political reasons, in this region they have not been supported to fish. Almost everyone is ragged and dusty and many people are very skinny.

Yesterday we were taken by bus to seven of the hundred and something projects that Masankho's family funds and organizes through their organization, Kudo. The visits included a trip to a girls' school, a trip to an elementary school, a piggery, an orphanage, to see the cassava wells where the women soak and clean the cassava, skill-building centers where students learn to use tools and a market where we bought crafts. On the bus, off the bus.

The old cassava wells are in a muddy swampy area, where women have to stand up to their ankles in filthy water, where leeches, snakes and crocodiles are a danger, as well as predatory men who lie in wait. With funds that Masankho#s aunt helped raise, they have built some new clean cassava wells from concrete, which are safe and protected and raised up.

The rest of Malawi eats maize, which is more nutritious than cassava, but for political reasons, this region, Khata Bay, has not been given seed for maize.

The orphanage was the hardest place. The children there looked hungry--they were skinny, with old eyes. I asked how old one little girl was--I would have guessed four. She was seven. Another I thought was ten was fourteen. They clustered around us hopefully, but we didn't have anything for them. We give cash to the foundation, some of which should come down to them. But those kids--to see kids literally in rags, and all dirty, some with eyes swollen and red from conjunctivitis, the bigger ones carrying the smaller ones around on their hips, just out there in the middle of the woods. The adults who worked there looked as skinny and ragged and exhausted as the children. I wished so much for something to give them. I want to go back there.

The weather is beautiful, warm, not too hot. I haven't had to use insect repellant once, although I am faithfully taking my malaria pills. The land is gentle and inviting, leafy, green, and African. I love this land!! I can understand how homesick an African would feel for it--the air is gentle here, we are on the shores of Lake Malawi, which is so big it feels more like being at the shore of an ocean. It even has waves.

For all its problems, the village is a beautiful place, with little paths connecting everything. We've seen plenty of chickens, some monkeys in the trees, African cattle, which are much smaller than genetically engineered American ones. Because of the weather, people mostly live outside. They have thatched-roof hits, some with one or two or three rooms. The children play with toys made out of straw and sticks and a stray wheel, or an empty plastic bottle. There is no trash. Nothing is wasted.

I feel completely at home here, drinking Nescafe with powdered milk, eating rice porridge for breakfast, holding babies on my hips, trying to learn the rudiments of Chichewa, practicing the dances. For me, the pain and fatigue of the journey to get here have dissipated and I feel good, but about a third of our group is complaining of congestion, head colds, or other ailments. I feel like I want to stay and stay, helping out in the kitchen, holding babies, doing whatever I can to make myself useful.

First impressions of Malawi: the faint smell of smoke from cook-fires hangs in the air. It smells like Haiti. This morning, from my window, I saw a boy with a load of sticks on his head.

I thought it would be hot and full of mosquitoes. It's cool and rainy. I haven't got one mosquito bite yet.

I'm typing this wearing my jeans, a white t-shirt, a shirt over that, and a sweater. That's all I have with me right now. My luggage never arrived from Heathrow. Eight others in our party are in a similar boat.

It doesn't matter. Other people are giving me sunscreen and insect repellant, I have my malaria tablets, and my glasses and toothbrush. I washed my underwear out in the sink last night and wore it again this morning.

Last night we went to a family friend of Masankho's for a feast. His father was there, elegant in a three-piece suit. We were all in various stages of falling-down exhaustion. Malawi is called "the warm heart of Africa" because the people are so warm and gracious. And they are. Hospitality is a religion for them. There were platters of food, which we Westerners approached with trepidation because of all the warnings the travel doctors had given us. It would be hard to be a vegetarian traveling here. Not that there aren't vegetables, but I'm reluctant to eat the raw ones and there's only so much breadfruit and potatoes you can eat.

After dinner a troupe of dancers and drummers came and danced for us and that was amazing. Sheer raw physical joy and grace and power, sharp vertical pelvic thrusts, wide-hipped stance, arched back, the kundalini energy traveling up and down forcefully, rhythmically, deliberately...

There was a dance which women dance for the young men's initiation ceremony. A dance for girls as they are initiated into becoming women. There was a dance they had made up after African soldiers returned from the first world war and the second world war. The men danced their part in military khakis with colored sashes. Their movements showed how they had to clean and load their rifles and other things. The women danced around them in African dresses, signing and chanting and shouting. It was almost like a homecoming, healing ritual for the returning soldiers.

Beautiful drums in a deep black night. I had heard about the darkness of an African night, that it is more dark than in the West, and it is. A soft black blanket.

Im in the lobby of a Marriott Hotel after having "slept" sitting up on a Virgin Atlantic red-eye flight last night. Some of our group went to see art Museums--the Tate and the Modern. Some went to just tour around downtown London. I knew I didn't have enough energy for either. For six pounds (about twelve dollars) you can use the pool at this Marriott. I swam a little, then collapsed in a chair and fell asleep. A hot shower, and I feel semi-human--with another all-night plane flight in front of me.

This settles it. I am not going to be Angelina Jolie when I grow up. I don't have the stamina.

But the really great news is that I found out a poem of mine won the Writer's Digest award for unrhymed poetry. I get money--always welcome--and more importantly, a chance to meet with editors and agents. This is what I've been waiting and working so intensely for--a week after I was feeling that nothing was happening, it was all at a standstill.

Yesterday the air was so poisonous that I ended up not going into the city. It was as if a big gray-white sponge were stuck to the sky. Hot, muggy, smoggy and still. Today seems a little fresher.

Random notes on race: Oakland and the Bay Area are diverse--that's why I love living there. And Massachusetts is not. I didn't notice that so much growing up--it was just the way things were--black people were mostly in Roxbury, there were only a handful in Lexington, except for the Metco kids who got bussed in to our suburban school where they ate at their own lunch table and were seldom (never) in my A.P. classes.

We had a great time in Massachusetts this trip with my family, but saw very few black people--or any kind of people of color. And at this point in my life, I notice. At the train station, waiting for Amtrak we even caught ourselves counting--"Okay, there's one." "There's another one--but he's working as a janitor."

This phenomemon of segregation is a weird, silent disease--it's just an absence of color, a sea of white and pink and blonde and red hair, which we blend into seamlessly. After spending years in inter-racial couples I notice it especially. When we got to New York, of course, we were back in diversity-land--and what a beautiful rainbow it is. We both noticed, not just that there were a lot more black people--but there were tons of well-dressed, professional-looking black people, visible in every walk of life. In the museums, in the tony 5th Avenue shops, everywhere. It felt good.

Meanwhile, C flew home yesterday to find someone text-messaging him from my missing (now presumed stolen) cell phone. The messages were obscene and anti-Semitic. He made an executive decision to suspend service for which I am very grateful. I had just assumed the phone was under the bed somewhere and I would find it when I got back, and wasn't it stupid of me to have mislaid it just before traveling, but no, someone must have picked my pocket, or...I can't imagine. Scary.

The juvenile tone of the nasty messages makes us think it was a kid, but whomever the thief was also used the word "schmeckle," a Yiddish word for penis; how would they know that? C has been reading the new T.C. Boyle novel called "Talk Talk" which is about identity theft and the book is putting the fear of God into him about all the bad things creative miscreants can do if they put their minds to it.

I also found out that a lama named John--I forget his last name--used my poem "At the Corner Store" in his new book. Can't wait to read it. And I want to read "Eat, Pray, Love," by Elizabeth Gilbert (maybe use it the next time I teach Memoir) which my friend Carla says is amazing, and a book by a woman physicist, Lisa Randall, about Unravelling the Mysteries of the Universe or something. I've been dreaming on the new play(s) while I'm here--it's a very creative place. C and I could see spending a few months in N.Y. someday, if we could swing it--maybe an apartment-swap of some kind...

It has been a most amazing week, and I have been a lame correspondant. Amazing times with my family, all 100,000 of them--siblings, spouses, step-siblings, step-siblings-in-law, nephews, nieces, and my Dad and stepmother whose new Buddhist name is Samayadevi. Everyone healthy and doing well, and so loving, it's hard to put into words. I am lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky!

For the last three days we've been at a little hotel close to JFK airport in NYC. Everyday we've taken a shuttle to an airtrain to a subway and tramped all over NY in the 95 degree heat. I am beginning to get a grasp of the subway system. I now understand the differences between downtown (the Village), midtown (all the expensive stuff, plus Central park, plus the big museums,) and uptown (Harlem.)

Today we went to the MOMA to see the Richard Serra installation. He has these huge sheets of iron that make curved round walls you walk through and around, like a labrynth, or a ship listing at sea. C commented that he felt like a paramecium crawling through the sculpture. I felt like a bit of food being passed through the small intestine of a giant. It was a parasite's eye-view.

I couldn't help thinking of the incredible expense--in all ways--monetary, time, effort--to make these monumental pieces and then somehow ship them and install them. It's inconceivable. It's like the Pyramids or Stonehenge or something. What nkind of ego would you have to have to conceive of such an artwork and then be confident that the resources would be there to help you execute it and exhibit it? I'm not sure how I feel about that but I'm glad we saw the sculptures. They were inspiring and humbling.

There were also six floors of other paintings at the MOMA--everything from Monet's Water Lilies--I hadn't realized it was so big--to Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon by Picasso, a bunch of paintings by Miro, by Chagall, by Jaspar Johns, by Joan Mitchell (my favorite), by Jackson Pollack. and Matisse, and dozens more which I am neglecting to mention.

The women are so well-dressed in this city I was constantly gaping and appreciating. I am embarrassed to say how much I love fashion. It's not politically correct, it's completely weird given that I am on my way to one of the poorest countries in Africa, but the sight of all those well-constructed flouncy skirts and interesting drapey tops, and colors and patterns and textures made me happy. The women were like walking works of art themselves.

In fact, I've been blown away by the beauty of New Yokers in general. I don't know if it is because I am in love and seeing everything through rosy-colored glasses, but the average Joe or Jane on the street just glows to me. And the city is beautiful, even in the stifling August heat. It's amazingly clean and user-friendly, probably one of the best-organized places I've ever been. Central Park is like Paradise. Tomorrow I say good-bye to C early in the a.m. as he gets on sa plane and goes back to California. And then I'm going to go back to the Park and just sit on the grass and people-watch and write all day. And then tomorrow night--the plane to London--and then onward to Malawi!

I am typing this from my sister Emily's house in Northfield, population 2,000. C has earned good boyfriend of the century points by tirelessly playing frizbee, carting my nephew Eli around on his shoulders in the 90-degree heat, bringing my nephew Theo into Harvard Square to a bookstore and an art museum, letting the kids crawl all over him, letting Lucy, age 3, decorate him with Mardi Gras necklaces, playing restaurant with Anna, age 3 (she wanted to charge him $23.00 for coffee, cereal, and strawberries,)preventing Eli and Noah from throwing a little rubber ball up into the ceiling fan of a toy store, and other acts of heroism too numerous to mention.

I asked him if hanging out with the kids so much made him glad or sorry he'd had a vasectomy years ago, and he said, "I think I want another one." The truth is, he's great with children, much better than he knew back then. The other truth is that they're exhausting, they vacuum the marrow out of your bones, they demand every last ounce of energy and attention available, even from three attentive adults.

After lunch, C and I both passed out and were dead to the world, and only a 90 minute nap and a cup of iced coffee revived us. And we're just filling in around the edges, while my sister does the grunt work of parenting. I don't know how she does it, lifting, bending, feeding, disciplining, cleaning, driving, dressing, combing, straightening, soothing, scolding, and all the logistics. Plus, she works. I don't know how any parent does it.

Back at my brother's house, there was good news about my little niece Anna's health; she was given an all-clear, thank God and all the angels. And Theo is preternaturally precocious and well-behaved. After a very hot day shlepping through Harvard Square and the Fogg Museum, he said "My tootsies are barking." Anna has this very cute habit of saying "Helloo-o?" whenever she wants to get a word into the adult conversation. We have been up to our eyeballs in family since we got here and so far so good.

My sister bought me a haircut at a place renowned for their treatment of curly hair--it has become something of a religion among curly girls. Okay, now Noah wants to play cards, so I have to go.

Yesterday, amid packing and cleaning, and reading my student's thesis, I took myself to see A Mighty Heart, the film about Mariane Pearl, starring Angelina Jolie. I find myself completely haunted by the movie.

Jolie is restrained, anguished--all the pain is in her eyes. I read one reviewer who said he couldn't shake the thought that he was watching Angelina Jolie--he couldn't lose himself in the movie. I could. Her over-the-top beauty is distracting in a few scenes--they try to tone her down a little, but you just can't--and that's a handicap. But she balances it by finding the core of the character--her serious love, in which joy and grief are inextricable and (for a change) sanely entangled.

To see real Jewish journalists on screen--Pearl and his Wall Street Journal colleagues are all played by Jewish actors--was unexpectedly moving for me. Maybe because they looked, talked, and moved like the Jewish suburban guys I grew up with: eager, curious, articulate, with a mix of naivete and worldliness. I've rarely felt such complete and complex identification with characters onscreen. I knew these guys--I knew what it felt like to hug them, I could smell them.

And seeing that gives me empathy for those people who would like to have seen Mariane portrayed by an actor with real Afro-Cuban heritage. Much as Jolie does a beautiful job with the heart of the character, there is something inimitable and culturally specific and satisfying about seeing one of your own portrayed by one of your own that choosing a less-known actress might have accomplished. Thandie Newton springs to mind--she certainly has gravitas, and she is the right age and build for the part.

I was fighting a headache when I went into the theatre and as the movie progressed the pain in my head and body grew more and more acute. While the closing credits rolled a wave of nausea swept over me and I stumbled to the Ladies' Room and hung over a toilet bowl. I don't know if it was a stress-related migraine, or the grim conclusion of Pearl's life--seeing him in his last photos, hearing the character onscreen softly admit: I'm Jewish, knowing that that admission sealed his fate. Right after the movie ended I had to go teach my essay class. I wondered how I would make it, but a couple of cups of tea restored me, and the class went great.

Back at C's house I couldn't get to sleep early enough because he needed to stay awake and read past midnight, and then his cat was yowling at 5:30 a.m. Finally I got up and left around 6. We're both a little scared and stressed about this upcoming trip--excited, yes, but also nervous. And now I haven't had nearly enough sleep to deal with all the last-minute details. I hope napping will help.

Later: I'm supposed to be writing the comments on Storm's thesis, and I am, I am, but meanwhile I keep researching Mariane Pearl. She has based her life on the idea that she will fight to be happy, to create happiness in her own life, by any means necessary, and she does so. It reminds me of the title of Ellen Bass' book, The Courage to Heal; it takes enormous courage to risk feeling happy, to risk loving and feeling at all, especially when one has been grievously betrayed. She does this through little actions, like turning on the radio and dancing, and big actions, like parenting her child, or doing the work she loves.

I keep meditating on the lesson of her life, in between writing sentences that alternately praise Storm's work and point out what still needs to be done. Meanwhile, my own room is still messy and there are dozens of things I've still not finished.

The Sun published my third poem in three months; Willing, which I wrote, oh, four years ago (although I only found the final lines this year.) I feel like it could make a good art song; I hope C sets it to music.

I'm glad for the publication because left, right, and center, I'm getting rejected. All the essays I wrote this spring with airy confidence that they would finance the Malawi trip, are languishing, "not quite right" for whatever editors I sent them to. "Not quite right," the dating equivalent of "Not enough chemistry," or "It's not you, it's me."

Today, C and I played basketball in the blazing sun, guarding each other hard (alright: fouling,) using elbows, pinching, tickling, jostling. (Honesty compels me to admit that I may have fouled him a few more times than he fouled me, however this was justified because his arms are two feet longer than mine are, plus he's taller.)

We both shoot about the same I think, that is, okay. No one in the NBA need lose any sleep; their jobs are safe from us. But C took more shots than me, and thus had more misses, but also made more baskets. I tell myself that's what's happening now with sending out and publishing. I'm taking more shots, thus getting rejected more.

And, as with everything, so much depends on timing. A few days ago I showed C some new lyrics I'd developed; he was preoccupied and didn't have a very enthusiastic response. Today he read them carefully and now he thinks they're great and has started writing great music to go with them.

I sent my friend Suzanne My Hot Tub With Andrea, She's a good director who directed a reading of Kaddish back in '04 or '05. She didn't like Andrea at all--in fact, she didn't like either of the characters, the set-up, the dialogue, or anything about the play.

On the other hand, Carla loves the play. Ellen loves the play. Nike loves the play--and all of them are pretty sharp critics who would not lie to me. So I'm thinking maybe Suzanne was preoccupied when she read it--maybe she didn't give it enough of her attention. Or maybe it's just not for her. Or maybe the play does suck--that is always a possibility. At any rate, my mantra remains the same: just keep going.

Okay, it's summer, it's really summer. I finally went boogie boarding with Marci, finally finally, in Bolinas. And of course, it wasn't the same ecstatic adventure it had been two years ago, because...you can't boogie board in the same ocean twice. But it was good to paddle ourselves out there, and catch up and giggle, and my pecs were nice and sore for two days afterwards, which made me feel like I had actually done something.

And I had tea with Alan's widow, Sharon, a good, healing talk, long overdue. I'm also thinking of a new play, something about the three widows of X--because I was wife number 2, and there was one before me and one after me. We're like the three blind women with our hands on different parts of the unknowable elephant that was this very complicated man.

That's one more project for the hopper. Meanwhile Carla likes the first scene of the musical--which means a lot to me, she knows tons about musicals, having been in a bunch of them and directed a bunch of them. She says it has a realistic feel which is hard to achieve in that form.

And C and I went to see his mortgage broker, to discuss the financial ins and outs of him buying into my house, and us living together. When you're in your twneties, you just talk about getting married. I remember many conversations about the food we would serve and who would sit next to whom at our wedding.

In our almost and just over fifties, we are talking about life insurance and interest rates and capitol investments. And to me that's no less romantic, and actually more absorbing, because it's the business of real life. I embrace it. But it's a big deal, and we both felt tired after the meeting, winded, as though we had covered an enormous amount of ground in one hour, which we had.

We went toy shopping for my nephews and nieces at Mr. Mopps toy store, a wonderful emporium in Berkeley that has everything from fake plastic cockroaches for fifty cents to sophisticated educational toys. Spent too much money and enjoyed every minute of it.

It's been a consumerist couple of days, collecting supplies for the Malawi trip: malaria tablets, lethal amounts of mosquito repellant, SPF 45 sunscreen, a shirt from Wilderness Exchange that has special sun resisting properties and cost $22.00. I wonder if I should be bringing supplies to the Malawians, but that will have to wait until the East Coast as my suitcase will be full of gifts for the family.

Now I'm trying to clean my room, get papers off the floor and filed, clear out stuff. I'll try to get a swim in today as well. I perform with Wing It! this evening at the Sacred Dance Guild in Berkeley.

Meanwhile, the NY Times Modern Love section rejected my piece about Wing It!, so am trying to publish it elsewhere. The SF Chronicle also can't use it. Elizabeth is sending it to the East Bay Express for me. I'll also try to send it to More, after my editor there gets back to me about the essay I sent her last week. I'd really like to see some of these essays get published, they are supposed to be the money-makers and I can't seem to place them.

I read Shopgirl, by Steve Martin, a sweet little novella, about the consequences of the erotic in both men's and women's lives, filtered through the experiences of one lost young woman who is working at Neiman Marcus in the glove department. He has an omniscient narrator who is truly omniscient, indulges in a lot more telling than current MFA students would be allowed to get away with--and it works. He gets away with it. Perhaps because it is obviously and painfully the voice of intimate experience talking.

And C is reading Autobiography of a Yogi, a book I gave him when we had just started dating, my favorite spiritual autobiography ever. We saw Paris Je T'Aime the other night--one of my writing students had raved about it. It was okay, a little bon bon, not enough protein to satisfy me, just a bunch of appetizers. I kept waiting to get to the main meal and it never really happened although some of the vignettes were very poignant. I'd like to try to see A Mighty Heart before we leave.

Yesterday C and I set out to find Bolinas. It only took us three hours, a detour in Pt. Reyes, discovery (by me) that he has a built-in compass on his rear-view mirror, and by both of us that we can get lost without losing our tempers. Good thing to know. The woods and mountains and ocean were dazzling--we had all three. By the time we actually got to Bolinas it was too late to rent a wetsuit and the tide was all wrong, there weren't any waves anyway, but we had a romantic walk on the beach and more talking talking talking, flirting, teasing, splashing and just wallowing in the unbelievable luxury of free time.

I had started feeling stress yesterday because my work life keeps intruding--got to prepare for a one-day workshop I'm teaching on Saturday, there are still details from last year's New College advising, student work to read, essays to send out, the house s a mess, I should be preparing for Malawi, I'm 12 pounds overweight and it never ends. I was longing for the pure freedom of my twenties when I ate all the peanut M&Ms out of the gorp and stayed skinny, when I ditched all responsibilities and took off for three months at a time with nothing to think about but the next meal.

But I was free then at a cost--I hadn't yet built a life. Now I have and it needs tending. So even though I want to lose myself deliciously in C, and this new love, I broke away and slept in my own house last night, because I knew I needed to face what I faced this morning--a pile of papers that need sorting, emails and phone calls to return, lessons to plan.

There's pleasure in coming apart and coming back together--that rhythm. It's a dance, it will always be a dance, his life, my life, our life. Always moving, like the tides, sometimes even seeming to cross each other.

I let go of the goal of completing a rough draft of the musical before I leave--that would make me crazy. Meanwhile, I know that there's an essay/memoir about Alan lurking in the shadows of my subconscious, waiting to be written. I've tried and failed to write about our time together before. Or rather, I've written bits of it--the light-hearted parts, and only touched on the shadows. I don't know how to hold the whole of it in one piece, but perhaps the time has come for me to do that. the other day a line ran through my head about how restless my dead people are--my mother and Alan. How they died with so much unresolved and unfinished between us.

I am going to have tea with Alan's widow tomorrow, the woman he was married to when he died, the woman who took care of him for the last four years of his life while he battled leukemia. I'm trying to organize a meeting of all three of us, his first wife, me, and his third wife--maybe for September.

Yesterday would have been my twentieth wedding anniversary. I don't feel envy of the bride I was--well, maybe envy for my own slenderness--but I was so nervous and ungrounded about getting married. I didn't know how to connect with my partner the way I needed to before we took such a huge leap. So we took it anyway, we leaped, and flew, and fell. And now I get the best gift of all; a second chance.

My Dad called at eight this morning to tell me he liked the pages of the musical which I had sent him. It meant a lot to me, as I am on that artist's see-saw right now of giddiness with how easily the process is coming, balanced by the sobriety of knowing how much I don't know about how to write a musical. Plus, the subject matter.

C and I are researching as fast and as hard as our middle-aged brains can stand, watching DVDs of musicals, reading musical theatre, and in his case, finding soldier's blogs and videos on the Internet and looking into song-writing software. There's so much to this project it's mind-boggling.

I took a walk in the redwoods today and prayed continuously, "Dear God, help me be present, help me be present, let me be present." I feel so speedy and a little heady with all that needs to be done before leaving for the East Coast and then Malawi in two weeks--and there's some demon spirit in me that keeps wanting to pile on more, even while I know that the best thing would be to go to the ocean and take deep breaths.

We saw La Vie en Rose, the Edith Piaf movie today. The performance of the lead actress Marion Cotillard was incredible. I've never seen such a complete physical and psychic transformation except perhaps, Charlize Theron in Monster. Usually, with other actors, some bits of separate ego shone through. In this case, I felt like the actress completely disappeared into the part, and I understood the core of what she was giving us: Piaf--someone so raw, so essential and childlike and damaged that you could only respond to her with full humanity.

C liked the script better than I did--for me it was about half a dozen flashbacks too many, all the jump cutting made me feel confused as to time and place and era and trauma, but he found himself completely engaged throughout. It opened up a discussion between us about flashbacks in general, just as watching Rent last night opened up a discussion about the uses of counterpoint and themes and when songs do and don't advance the narrative. I feel like we're in an intensive two-person self-designed tutorial about musical theatre, where we are attempting to teach ourselves and each other by absorbing and discussing as much curriculum as we can stand.

I half-assedly tried to organize a group of friends to go boogie-boarding in Bolinas today, but plans fell through as half-assed, ill-conceived plans are wont to do. Mercury is still retrograde.

I spent all day yesterday hunched over my laptop--six hours of it sitting on C's bed while he brought me coffee and breakfast and read the paper and commented on my drafts--writing the second scene of the musical.

I got ten pages, plus the beginnings of lyrics for two songs which could be a duet between husband and wife. But I haven't even gotten to the most interesting ideas, about service and sacrifice and the military and change.

I'm excited by this project--it's by far the most ambitious thing I've ever worked on. C ordered books from Amazon about how to write a musical, which he says are helpful. He says he feels like a do-it-yourself-er with the instruction manual in one hand and the tools in the other. That's how we're approaching this thing. He asked me if I ever worked on a big project before that failed. I answered: my novel.

I wrote a novel about Haiti called Where Spirits Walk in the late eighties. it took me two years, during which time I planned a big do-it-yourself wedding, got married, made a couple of quilts, wrote and published a lot of journalism, and struggled with depression.

I did not know how to write a novel. I never took a class on how to write a novel, or even read a book about how to do it. I just started. I wrote it from all different viewpoints, American, Haitian, male, female, in little pieces, like a patchwork. I even wrote a chapter from the point of view of Baby Doc Duvalier. Some of the pieces were good; a couple of them were published in The Sun during the nineties.

It was hard sledding. I worked in the little basement study I shared with Alan, who was cheerful and manic and ate pizza and talked and whistled and sang while he worked on his computer programming. It was just a hole in the wall with barred windows set high up, at street level, through which a little wan daylight filtered on summer afternoons. I worked on a Commodore 64 computer that we had bought at K-mart for one hundred and fifty dollars.

We also had a daisy-wheel printer that Alan had scavenged at a yard sale; it took up a whole wall and sounded like an airplane taking off. Very technologically cutting-edge. I wrote my first feature articles for the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe Magazines and the Boston Phoenix on that thing.

I worked on a desk made out of an old door that was propped up on crates and filing cabinets. Alan had a similar arrangement against the other wall. It was cozy; it was claustrophobic. I spent most of my time procrastinating and wallowing in feelings of worthlessness and meaninglessness and loneliness and isolation. Towards the very end of the novel I could not stand to sit at my desk at all. I remember asking Alan to tie me to my seat, which he did symbolically, with a loose bathrobe cord so that I could finish the book on April 28, 1988. Afterwards we went out to dinner. Kostly what I felt was a dull sense of relief and a desire to get out into the woods.

It wasn't a good book, although as a document of a time and place and experience it's vauble to me now. I needed to write in order to come to terms with everything I had experienced during my VISTA year; Haiti and Haitians and trying to come of age into this crumbling society. Poverty, injustice, mystery, spirituality, love, squalor and despair. And cockroaches.

I sent it out haphazardly to a few publishers and got no nibbles. I'm glad of the pieces that were published, and glad that I finished it, because no doubt it built character, but it's no big loss to the world of literature that the novel as is is not in print. I used to think about resurrecting it with all I've learned in the intervening years about structure and character development, and God help us, plot, but I haven't even had courage to reread it. C asked for, and received, a very dusty copy of the thing that I retrieved from my basement.

Am I scared that that will happen again? Another failure, another deeply-felt but poorly planned project that comes to naught? On a deeper level, am I scared that this partnership with C, which has begun with such generosity and imagination and willingness and cooperation, could founder the same way that my marriage to Alan did?

Well, yes. Hell, yes. My novel failed, my marriage failed, and here I am again, back at square one, with another hugely ambitious project, another sensitive creative man to negotiate and collaborate with...except it's decades later, and I find myself a little dented and lumpy and smarter and more scarred--and still willing. Willing and wary at the same time, because I know more this time around: I know that the musical is a long shot, I know that both C and I are complicated people and partnering is no walk in the park, I know that marriages always end in death or divorce, and that creative projects either never see the light of day or else go through so much blood, sweat, tears and change along the road to production that by the time they actually do come out you are often beaten down and wrung out and already engaged with the next thing.

I know that I'm signing up for a process with no guarantee of a product. So I'm trying to build in little rewards, little safety nets: I'm going to keep writing and publishing poetry and essays and other plays while writing the musical, I'm trying to keep my friendships and my independence front and center even as C and I spend more time together. But in the end, there's not much of a choice for me. I'm already signed up for this ride--I paid for my ticket ages ago.

Waaa...I want more poems! I want longer poems to come through! Instead I keep writing these fairly short things, and then my good friend Ruth shows me where I can cut the last seven lines, and they end up being miniscule. Microscopic. Ah, Ruth. She's an amazing writer and a very good friend and she's ruthless.

I tried to combat this tendency by writing a long acrostic poem, using the title line as a runner all along the left margin. She cut three-quarters of it and informed me that I had a witty little sixteen-line poem buried in the middle of all that.

Shambhala Sun rejected the essay I sent them, saying it wasn't quite right for them but they'd like to see more of my stuff, and Beloit Poetry Journal rejected the last batch of five poems, also with an encouraging note. I know those notes are a sign I'm on the right track--hell, I knew I was on the right track before the notes even, but it would be nice to get an acceptance plus some cold hard cash right around now.

Meanwhile, I've got the musical to work on, so I shouldn't even be whining about poetry, or publishing, but just immersing myself in the joy and pain of creating new stuff. Thank God the heat broke and big breezes wafter through the bedroom windows all night, blowing the curtains against the shades and making the room feel like a ship at sea. The homemade fireworks were a little less, and I think--I hope--people's supplies of gunpowder and/or their patriotic fervor may be dwindling. Possibly we'll be able to sleep before 2 a.m. tonight...

C is downstairs hammering, fixing a window that got broken during the 4th of July festivities. I had a delicious breakfast of a cold barbecued spare rib and hot coffee. On with it...

Last night sounded like Beirut in my neighborhood. Illegal personal firecrackers exploding into the wee hours--cannons and bomb blast noises which set the car alarms off and made panicked dogs bark all night.

Inside my house it was peace, it was friendship and family as C and I brought some of our intimates together--C met G--finally!--and I met C's ex-girlfriend, J, who is like family to him, as G is to me. I revelled in the new connections and the old, the intermingling of our different circles, teenagers with dyed blue and purple hair, old-timers discussing jazz, Theron and the other guys out by the grill, discussing the merits of soaking corn cobs in water with their husks on versus wrapping them in tinfoil.

Meanwhile, C has made a rough, tentative outline of our musical, with fourteen scenes for me to write--don't worry about lyrics, he said, he can cull them from the dialogue. I am so excited to get going on it, and yet I have done nothing today except work on poems and finish cleaning the kitchen from last night's wreckage. A lot of dead soldiers (empty beer bottles,) spoiled guacamole, broken bottle of ginger beer that exploded in the freezer.

I emailed the Revelations essay to Shambhala Sun. The Wing It! essay to NY Times Modern Love. The Barack Obama piece I sent to Newsweek's My Turn. All of those publications have a don't call us we'll call you policy, so it's just wait and see to see if any of the essays get taken (and if I make any $!)

I went to my tax guy Tuesday and finally got my taxes done. The good news is that I am contributing a minimal amount to pay for the war in Iraq. The bad news is I am making hardly any money, despite working hard and having a fair bit of success publishing. Last night, at the party, my friend Carla asked her date, and G and C, and me "What was the moment when you fell in love with your discipline?" Music for them, poetry for me.

G remembered hearing his elementary school band play and wanting to play so badly, but he was only in third grade and had to wait until fifth when his mother bought him a horn in a second hand store. C remembered growing up on Motown, figuring out the bass line, how that made everything fit together. Later, he taught himself how to work through two Beethoven sonatas. Carla remembered her first performance as an eight-year-old at a talent show. I remembered the book of poetry I had as a child, A Child's International Treasury of Poems, edited by Louis Untermeyer. I read it until it was in tatters.

And here I am, forty-some years later, with Carla, my friend of over twenty years, minus the husbands we married in 1987, still writing poems and singing and playing...

Summer is here, the air is sparkling, birds are chirping, smells of jasmine and fig are wafting, and I am jonesing for physical adventure...a camping trip, going caving, windsailing, river rafting, boogie boarding, anything...to be outdoors, to use my body fully, to be wild and reckless and abandoned.

Instead I am still at my desk at my computer, typing, typing. Another one-act play idea has occurred to me. Don't want to over-talk it now, while it's still just a twinkle in my eye, but maybe I can get it written quickly. And lesson plans for tomorrow night's poetry class, including new poem of my own, and copy and send out the new revised improved hot tub play.

Meanwhile C and I continue to deepen intimacy. And the paradox is that sometimes deepening intimacy looks like pulling apart for a minute to get some breath and some perspective. Sometimes things deepening feels like slowing down. Sometimes it feels scary in a different way than the first heady rush of "I've met somebody!" feels scary. Sometimes it feels awkward, like "I want to just clean my own room, is that okay?" and sometimes it feels lonely and sometimes it feels clear and good.

I see how far I've come. When I was younger, I depended on men to expand my world for me. I wanted to have a big life, but I didn't know how to go after it myself within the context of a relationship. (That is still a conundrum.) Alan taught me to drive and use a computer and he showed me the country. Years later, when I saw the animated Disney film Alladin, I related to princess jasmine, who had been shut up in a castle. With Aladdin she goes flying on a magic carpet and sees the world.

I had not been shut up in a castle--not by any means. I had been to Europe, on my own, and to Haiti, with a girlfriend. I had hitchhiked across Canada with another man. But with Alan I felt like the world was my oyster, like I could finally get out and touch all my dreams. The irony is that by the end of our nine years together I had used marriage as a way to shut myself away from the world. I had to become single again in order to fully participate.

In the past I was always attracted to people who seemed to have something I lacked, some passion or competence that I felt was missing from my own life. It's not that way for me with C. I don't covet his life; I'm not trying to steal his energy or his time the way in the past I wanted to do with other men. I love his gentleness, his tenderness, his care for me, and his sly, goofy sense of humor.

In the past I called that coveting and projecting "love"; I wouldn't do so now. I would call it poverty. Out of the poverty of my own sense of lack, I'd become fixated on what I imagined another had and could give me, the happy and beneficial transfer of their vital energy into my own coffers. Men with children, fathers, were my especial targets; I imagined I could hitch-hike, or even hijack their hard-won family. It never even came close to working, but that was my fantasy.

C has a family, but they're not a big part of his life. If I am to help fill that gap, I'll have to do it from the ground up, as everyone does. I'll have to face whether or not I want to do that enough to do it, or if I want to spend the time banging out this new play I'm incubating. Or volunteering, or meditating, or wherever my deepest passions lead me.

Meanwhile C has been playing a lot of his own piano and organ music lately, coming up with bits and pieces of things that may become part of the musical. He has his own process, more private than mine. I have the most public process in the world--every time I write anything, I immediately email it to my whole family and about a dozen of my closest friends. C is quieter, slower, more thoughtful. That's good. It just leaves space for me to feel some of the insecurity and fear that drives my whole frantic process.

Last night I watched Brokeback Mountain again with G, who had rented it under extreme pressure from me and all of his other female friends, what I call his "harem." He liked it more than he thought he would. The cinematography is pure poetry. The second time around I caught a lot of tender subtext that I had missed on first viewing.

Back to working on the musical...it occurs to me that this blog is full of half-finished projects. Not surprising, since so is my life. Whatever happened to that Gee's Bend quilt I started months ago, after seeing the exhibit in a museum? Still in progress, I have a date to go over my friend Beth's house next week and work on it.

I did three more pages of what C calls recititif (is that how it's spelled, or does it have another syllable or two in it?) that operatic kind of sung speech. Very fun. I'll finish the scene today. Also, I quizzed G at our tennis game, about chants he sang in the Navy. He said they had chants for marching, chants for running, chants for disassembling and reassembling their rifles.

Both G and C know how to take a gun apart, clean it, and put it back together. I have fired a gun exactly once--at a target, in Alaska, which I missed. Got a sore collarbone for my efforts. The mystique of guns eludes me.

Some chants, courtesy of G: "I don't know but I've been told/Russian pussy is mighty cold." (It was during the Cold War.) And: "I don't know but I've heard said/Air Force wings are made of lead./I don't know but I've been told/Navy wings are made of gold." Apparantly, there's rivalry between the different branches of the military. If anyone reading this blog knows of any military songs or chants, please write and tell me.

Questionnaires continue to trickle in--thank you! to everyone who filled one out. Now I have to write up a book proposal for the project. Some of my friends report that the questionnaires brought up feelings of sadness; writing about unrealized dreams. James Baldwin said, "In order to have the lives we want, we must first be honest about the lives we have."

I saw Hurly Burly, a play by David Rabe, with Marci last night. It is indeed virtuosic, the language that tumbles out of every character like machine gun fire or Niagara Falls, or any unstoppable force. Just torrents of dysfunctional, colorful, provocative, obscene, musical verbiage. Torrents. And the despair of the characters is well-drawn, and it's an actor's dream, because each man is so well-delineated (the women a little less so.)

But that's just the thing--everyone talks the same way, which leads me to believe, of course, that it is really David Rabe speaking. And it's all drug-fueled, alcoholic dysfunction, more floried and dramatic and scary and sad and grotesque in each succeeding scene--for three hours. I didn't want to stay until the bitter end as I'd left my car at West Oakland BART, so I snuck out after the second intermission and before the very short third act. It makes me glad My Hot Tub with Andrea is just a one-act--no need to hit people over the head with language just because you can.

My friend Nike wrote me some very good feedback on the hot tub play, feedback that makes me want to reenter the script and have another whack at it, get a few layers deeper and more risky with the characters. Meanwhile, the guy who is going to direct Saying Kaddish in Michigan in January, Chris Bremer, wrote and asked me to write a few more little scenes. And C is kind of architecting the musical, thinking of scenes and requesting I write words for them. I can't wait to hear some of the songs and musical settings he's composing.

G and I played a good hard game of tennis today, bright and clear and hot. We weren't as stellar as last week when we had just watched a Billie Jean King documentary and were all inspired to play the best we've ever played, but we ran each other up and down the court and sweated and cursed and exulted.

I love summer!!! I love C being free and happy and relaxed, I love the late light afternoons and balmy evenings, and the dry hot tennis courts.

I am reading Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, about Dr. Paul Farmer, the doctor who went to Haiti and established a health clinic for the poorest of the poor there. This book is kicking open doors in my memory: Haiti, the smell of burning shit that pervaded the streets--peasants burn dung, they burn whatever they can find for cookfires, now that so much of the island has been deforested.

Barefoot women with heavy loads on their heads, their dresses open completely in front and nursing babies hanging off their long breasts. Naked little children, the chickens and goats wandering in the streets, the skinny men harnessed to giant sledges like mules, every muscle and tendon and nein in their bodies swollen as they pulled and strained and pulled impossible weights, their hearts visibly bursting out of their bony chests.

Every sentence in the book reminds me of the road not taken--I could have stayed working with Haitians, could have married a Haitian, as Farmer did, could have settled there or in Miami and worked as a translator, English teacher, health instructor, counselor. Instead I abandoned that line of work and came home to write and teach poetry, do theatre and live in English speaking culture. I live in a big house with good plumbing instead of a small shack. I drive everywhere instead of walk, I am safe and comfortable and protected and published. It's not a bad life, not a bad life at all. And yet...

I went with my grrlz to Pt. Reyes for a quickie retreat. We sang the Shabbat morning service on the way up, courtesy of Beth, who knows all the sacred music. Stopped at Cafe Gratitude in Marin, which is the most Californian of possible California experiences--all raw food, (but delicious!) and the atmosphere is permeated with irony-free positivism. To that effect, dishes are all named things like "I am worthy," and "I am blissful," "I am peaceful," etc. I looked in vain for "I was raised on the East Coast and am still attatched to the one cynical edge I have left," but no luck.

They do have a kick-ass chocolate shake, made with raw cacao, almond milk, kelp, vanilla, and agave nectar--amazing. Add fresh mint and go crazy.

The cabin that Ellen rents 10 days a month for a writing studio is in the middle of the woods and there were millions of butterflies. It must have been the one day of the year they all decided to hatch or mate, or whatever. Clouds of butterflies and moths. The air was alive with them.

Honesty compels me to confess that in the midst of this idyll I was cranky and headachey. I think I was having a touch of typhus from the oral vaccine I've been taking for the last couple of days. I felt feverish and had to nap. Also, I love Ellen dearly, but us living together is a Bad Idea, since she is totally neat and clean, meticulously detail-oriented, a bit finicky, an obsessive planner and a worrier and I am not.

I think it's easier for me when we Libra girls go to Harbin, where there are the hot tubs and the swimming pools and hiking trails, and the library--tons of places to go to get away from each other, and then come back refreshed. In this place it was just the three of us confined to one room. But Ellen and Beth don't like Harbin because the men are always hitting on us, and ogling, and the heterosexual energy is too strong. Whatever.

We went to a wonderful yoga class together in the morning--God, this is sounding so Californian--and ate the most fantastic, expensive, organic produce for lunch and dinner--especially a triple creme cheese made with sheep's milk that is produced locally and melts in the mouth like butter. Had lively arguments about SM and Paris Hilton (don't ask.)

All the while though, I was aching to reconnect with C--it had been a week, he had a hellacious, stress-filled final last few days of school and could only go to work and collapse afterwards. I was wringing my hands on the sidelines--it was like watching my father suffer through running a marathon when I was a kid. Finally, finally, he would stumble over the finish line, his face white with salt and exhaustion. C more or less finished up his school year like that.

At our retreat, Ellen and Beth and I all showed each other the main projects we are working on. Ellen has a wildly imaginative novel for young people that's half-finished; Beth is planning a concert of songs for her 40th birthday; I'm brewing the Questionnaire Project, plus the musical with C, plus some revisions of plays and a new play, plus poems and essays.

I showed them the chart I made last year to track my project-ideas, and how many of them had come to fruition--a surprising amount. I myself was amazed at the harvest. I made a new chart, with a sun in the middle, with God Is All There Is, and rays going out holding all the new and old ideas. I did it in black pen on white paper, so it's very plain; as I complete each project, I'll color it in, so by next year it will be rainbow.

God, this is a terribly Californian entry. I can't help it, it's the midsummer madness of the long long days, the butterflies drunk with sunlight and scent, and finally, Sunday evening, the tender reunion with C--a bath, lovemaking, a dinner out with red meat and red wine, a perfect balance to all the spiritually correct wheatgrass lesbian food.

Got my shots Wednesday, five altogether; yellow fever, Hep B, tetanus, measles and mumps and rubella and I forget what else. Ouch! I also have to take oral medication to prevent typhus and malaria. It was a little scary, and exciting-- made me feel as though this thing is really happening, I am really going to Malawi.

The nurse put the fear of God into me. Can I swim in Lake Malawi? Sure, if you don't mind getting parasites, many of which are tiny and invisible and burrow into your skin where they then ravage your entire body starting with your small intestine. Oh, there's also dengue fever, which is mosquito-borne and has no known treatment; there's also bird flu, and rabies, HIV, seventeen dfferent kinds of hepatitis, and God knows what else. Don't drink the water. Don't eat any salad or fresh fruit. No ice cubes in drinks. Yeesh!

I've never forgotten to be grateful for my health, because my mom was sick for decades with MS. My ex-husband struggled for years with chronic fatigue that morphed into cancer, which killed him. The man I'm dating now has diabetes. Believe me I wake up every morning and thank God my legs work, my breathing is good, I have some spring in my step. I don't want to lose that--not now, not ever. My health is the one "possession" I guard most jealously--if it's possible to guard that.

But I've always wanted to go to Africa. People there live with parasites--they live with all of it. I don't want to spend my whole life is beautiful, climate-controlled comfort, typing away on my little machine and going to the corner cafe for a latte when I "need" one. So here I am, two days after the shots, my left arm is sore, but I'm madly typing away on my latest idea for a project; something about dreams at mid-life. Not the night-time dreams (although I've always been interested in those), but the dreams which those of us North of forty once harbored, still harbor, tried to fulfill, didn't fulfill, etc.

I'm thinking maybe this could be a book; I told the idea to my friend Tim and he got excited about the possibility for a documentary film. I made up a questionnaire and sent it out to some of my friends. If anyone reading this would like to take it, here it is:

Questionnaire at mid-life
male/female/other age occupation (optional) ethnicity/nationality (optional) Would you be willing to be filmed at some later date for a documentary project?

Only answer the questions you feel comfortable answering—feel free to skip, add, amplify. Please pass this questionnaire on to your friends who are 40 or older. Ask them to return it to aluterman1@aol.com with the word “questionnaire” in the subject heading.

Thank you!
Alison Luterman

1. What were your dreams for your life when you were 18? How is your life like or unlike what you imagined it would be? Is it better or worse than your fantasies?

2. What was the best money you ever spent?

3. What was the worst financial mistake you ever made?

4. Looking back, what advice would you give to your younger self?

5. How has sex changed as you’ve gotten older? Any sexual experiences you have yet to live out that you still want to? Any surprising revelations about sex and romantic love as you age?

6. What dreams do you still hope to fulfill that you haven’t yet? What dreams have you given up on? Why did you give them up—what makes you think they are no longer attainable?

7. Who was your hero when you were 18 or 20? Who are your heros now?

8. What did you major in in college and what do you wish you had majored in? Do you still dream about continuing your education? What would you go back to school for?

9. What books, movies, people or experiences influenced you most—created turning
points or openings in your life?

10. What achievement are you proudest of? What’s your biggest regret?

11. Are there any new dreams, influences, or movements that you sense on the horizon?

12. What’s your wildest dream for the rest of your life?


You can send responses to aluterman1 (at) aol.com.

Good habits alternate with bad; I work out, I eat potato chips. I write five pages of an essay; I waste untold hours playing Sudoku. I'm emotionally mature with my boyfriend; I let my room be a mess, and don't clean my desk or do my taxes on time. Perfection eludes me. The best I can do is be nice to people and try to write at least a few pages a day. That's not much, but practiced consistently it has gotten me here.

And here is...ten pounds over ideal weight--(alright 13, but who is counting?) Five unsold essays in the pipeline, awaiting/hoping for acceptances, publications and paychecks, a couple of new good ideas, queasy stomach from switching to black tea instead of coffee in an effort to lose weight (I know, but I can't drink coffee without cream, so...)

Poetry class was stellar last night--it always is. I feel like this group of people is bringing out the best in me, and frankly not having to teach 15 other classes a week means I can be more present for them as well. We have been having a fine time, word-playing, divining, shape-shifting, musicking the language. I've been learning and writing right along with them.

Today I get my shots for Malawi! Excited and nervous--I hate shots. When I was a kid I used to scream bloody murder whenever I had to get one, embarrassing my mother who said I frightened all the other kids in the waiting room. Now I'm an adult--I drive myself to the place where they will stick me. Actually the only one I'm afraid of is the tetanus--I've heard that really hurts. It might put a crimp in swimming for a day or two. I still don't have my return ticket--the travel agent who is handling all that is on vacation this week. I have to get better at making those phone calls and setting the wheels in motion. See what I mean?

Great games of basketball and tennis yesterday with G, then a turkeyburger on pita bread at Barney's, and today a long hike up in Tilden Park with C, followed by a lovely session of singing and playing with his new toy, a machine that you sing into that automatically creates different kinds of harmonies (and even corrects your pitch so that you sound AWESOME,) as well as some more good loving and eating and back on meds and I feel much better.

Carla said, "Yeah, you seemed really tired when you were over my place." That's how I used to be ALL the time, just dragging my wagon from one place to another--barely.

My sister, who is very understanding, said she wished she didn't need medication to prevent migraines--that is, she wishes she didn't get them in the first place--but she's glad the medicine is there. There's less stigma with migraines than there is with depression, but it's basically a similar thing--debilitating brain farts that fuck up your nervous system and zap energy and zest.

So, thank you, all the people who pioneered medication and tested it, and came out of the closet about using it before I did, because that helps to create a climate in which it's possible to be a person with this kind of vulnerability and still have a good life in the world. I wish this for all people with mental illnesses--that good drugs and real healings take place.

Elsewhere in the news, I just got a phone call from Michigan--my play had a staged reading in the festival of new plays and got a good reception, although the audience (composed mostly of older people) argued fiercely about the ending. I don't mind that although I had the impression that the director did. I like the way the whole country has been fiercely debating the end of The Sopranos this last week. I think it's fine not to tie things up too neatly with a bow.

But I also heard from the director that I need to rewrite one long monologue--the stand-up comedy routine that Lydia performs in a dank little basement--modelled on Val's Pizza parlor and underground theatre performance space in Berkeley. I agree that the monologue needs to be rewritten--it was always a weak spot, for one thing, she's supposed to be a comedienne, and it's not really funny--but the prospect is daunting. It's like trying to go back and redo part of an oil painting when the paint has long since dried. I already tried to rewrite it several times and didn't get any improvement--in fact I think I made it worse. But I owe it to the play, and to the fact that finally there is a real production in the offing, to try and try again.

Meanwhile, C and I had so much fun singing into his new voice machine, tinkling along on the piano, and researching the musical we are writing together by watching a governement-ssued video called The Selective Service and You, aimed at eighteen-year-old men--scary!--that now I want to write a commercial hit song with him so that he can quit his day job and we can just create art and music and theatre all day long. We have the summer to do it--but only until the end of July, so I better get cracking.

I hate it that I need to post about Prozac and depression, but here we are again. My doctor suggested last year that I experiment with lowering my dosage by skipping a pill one day a week, and then increasing it to two, etc. Of course, with my habits, all I heard was "It's okay to skip," which is what started happening anyway as I began to get used to being healthy, and then, in one seamless step, to take that good health for granted and turn my attention back to creating new work.

Consequently, I began skipping not just the Prozac but the thyroid as well, relaxed my vigilance about sugar, and oh yeah, exercise--although I still made and make valient attempts--is hard to schedule when you're working, writing, and dating.

Which leads me to to today; PMS, a semi-sleepless night after a lovely evening with C at the hot tubs--and I awoke with a headache to the familiar awful old feeling of depression--a tight gray plastic rain-bonnet tugged down over my skull. Deep bone-crushing fatigue.

At least now I can recognize the symptoms clearly, and I've had enough experience not being depressed to know that it is an illness and not part of me. It does not mean I suck; it doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with my life. I managed to make it to Carla's and help her unpack and hang curtains and then the car drove itself across town and home where I collapsed into bed for a bottom-of-the-ocean nap.

I feel better now, but will see my doc in a few weeks. Meanwhile, I know what I have to do: more serious animal protein (potatoes not Prozac diet.) More serious exercise. Supplements. Back on meds.

My career is going great, my relationship more intimate than any I've had before. Friends and family are wonderful. Depression is not about any of those things. Depression is a collection of physical sensations and mental aches and pains that add up to a state of being unable to cope with daily life. I'm not all the way there yet--thank God, I still have plenty of cope left. But I can feel the ropes of my nerve endings fraying.

I have been noticing irritability--driving, parking, responses to the stress of city living--as a symptom, creeping up. It's not like me to be irritable--irritability is a warning sign, a marker. Next step down the ladder is this fatigue and the feelings of lightness and heaviness in the head, as if there were an energetic elevator randomly stopping off at different floors. It gets harder for me to stay present.

My doctor, whom I love, has talked to me a lot about learning to recognize and log these markers, so that I can catch myself before the elevator plunges into the sub-basement. That's why I'm outing myself here on this blog, My aim is to stay out of the sub-basement--it's an arduous road back up.

As luck would have it, my copy of Elle Magazine arrived today, with an interesting article by Lauren Slater, a memoirist (Lying,) and recovering mental patient as well as a mental health professional (and damn good writer) about when anti-depressants poop out and the differences and similarities between prescribed pharmaceuticals and narcotics. Opiates, in tiny doses, worked well for her in interrupting the cycle. Fascinating. I've never used narcotics, for anything, knock wood--never had surgery or needed major pain killers. But all substances have their uses and their limitations. I'm just grateful I live in a time when this stuff is talked about openly and without the kind of prejudice that characterized the debate even a few years ago.

If there is one thing I that makes me really mad, (oops, irritability, warning sign!) it's people who haven't experienced serious depression themselves inveighing against the widespread use of anti-depressants. Sure, SSRIs are prescribed a lot these days, and maybe too much, but as someone who had years of ineffective talk therapy while I felt like my head was going to detach from my body and my body was going to fall off the chair, after years of being too tired to live, drugs have been a miracle to me.

I know they are no panacea, and self-care is a long and winding road. My body's changing now, in my late forties; menopause is right around the corner and I'll probably have to be more vigilant and continually adjust my self-care in the years to come. If there's one thing I've learned in the past twenty or thirty years of dealing with all this stuff, it's how physical my emotional and spiritual life is. It's humbling; I am not in total control--I cannot rigidly will myself to be healthy with the proper attitude, sad to say. There is a component--a large component--that is affected by hormones, bio-chemistry, and physiology. The best I can do is respect that and ride it.

When my mother died, Ruth stayed by my side for the next thirty-six hours as I felt as if I were riding an energetic roller coaster. I mean that literally--I had sensations of rising and falling waves of energy going up and down my body. I kept saying to her, "Grief is so physical!"

At moments I needed to work and so I crawled outside into the sunshine and cleared weeds and moss from her steps. I just needed to get my hands in the dirt. At other times I sacked out and napped. At night I only slept in little bursts. I was on a train, strapped to a locomotive called grief and trauma release. I couldn't get off it--my body just had to do what it needed to do.

She hung with me as long as she could, about a day and a half, and then a couple of other friends baby-sat me for the rest of the week, and then the obvious symptoms subsided. It's possible that the six years since then have been characterized by deeper and deeper releases from trauma, mostly informal, without any practitioner to monitor them, since I had quit talk-therapy the month before, convinced that it was a waste of time.

C and I have been talking about seeing a couples counselor to see us through the delicate process of joining two highly individuated lives, lives full of creative projects, musical equipment, unfinished dreams, and important outside relationships. We want to see how we can fit it all under one roof--thankfully, one big roof--without damage. That's good, and/but I know I should do some individual work now too, preferably with a therapist trained in somatics and depression.

One of my oldest dearest friends who has a healthy thirty-year marriage, attributes the happiness of her union to the fact that she and her husband both have done their own work all the way through--that is, each of them went into individual therapy as needed, instead of blaming their problems on each other. Frankly, I have found most of the individual talk therapy I've done prior to going on meds to be pretty useless--I believe I have all the communication skills and sorting out skills--or have access to friends who have them--that I need, but I'm willing to try again with someone who has a deep understanding of the way the brain and the body work together.

My checklist for a therapist these days includes: someone who understands and speaks the language of neuro-transmitters and physiology, the yoga of trauma recovery, muscle memory and all the rest of it--a tall order, and one that can't be satisfied by just a nice person who's available for supportive conversations, which is what I had with my last therapist.

Date with G now, to either walk around the lake or play some hoops or some tennis. And later--meat! Viva recovery!

Last night my grrlz, Ellen and Beth, came over, and I made a big salad and we just hung out and toasted all the changes. New moon. What do you want to plant now?

As usual, I'm plan-challenged. This is what comes of being an improvisor. I got a taste of what it is like to relate to me when I flew to Detroit to meet Evelyn orbach. She was very breezy and relaxed about all the logistics of meeting up, didn't go into much detail, and seemed confident that everything would just work out. I was anxious because I'd never been to detroit before and didn't know her from a hole in the wall. Of course everything worked out.

So now I have to plan my return date from Malawi. And learn how to plan lessons weeks ahead of time and plan financially, and plan C's move in here--we're starting to think about it a year ahead of time, so that's good. Planning, my challenge. I got clinically depressed in high school because I couldn't plan my future--deferred going to college for a year because I didn't know what I wanted to major in, didn't declare a major until the last possible moment (I think it was senior year.)

I've had dreams, yes, but dreams are different than plans. Plans are methodical. Plans involve dates, applications, knowing what's in your bank account, what you can afford. Plans are work in the material world. The one education course I took in college was also, not coincidentally, the one class I ended up taking an incomplete in. The reason? Lesson plans. I could not for the life of me imagine how I would know a full month ahead of time what I would teach on any particular day.

I've got a friend who said she had "more five-year plans than the Kremlin." (This was back in the day when the Kremlin was still the Kremlin.) She followed her plans through law school at a prestigious university, a good career, etc. and found herself miserable. I have had less five-year plans than Peter Pan. I have no idea how I got to be almost fifty, a homeowner, or a writer with an actual career.

Now, in this new relationship, which actually has a future, I need to step up to the plate and plan. Moving-in, physical space, financial responsibilities, work, retirement, vacations, all that. And if I want to teach another class again at New College--which I do--or at another college--I need to be able to plan a syllabus, to break it down by class meeting, what we'll cover and when.

Planning gives a certain kind of power--or at least the illusion of it. Is that why I have a block against doing it? Am I afraid of that power? I'm afraid of not feeling like doing whatever it is I've planned to do when the time rolls around. Afraid of locking myself into something unpleasant. Afraid to just sit down and think methodically about these huge things--it's easier to focus all my energies on getting a poem right, or doing a Sudoku puzzle.

Instead of plans I've had obsessions. I was obsessed with finishing the play. I'm obsessed with getting my second book of poems published, and with the new poems that are beginning to emrge as a possible third book (new love poems!) I've been sitting here in front of this laptop for what feels like two weeks, first with the play and now the new poems tap tap tapping away and ignoring the necessity of calling the travel agent to choose the Malawi return date. Good work has come of it, but it's also, let's face it, denial.

So, now it's 11:20 a.m. already and I've successfully procrastinated calling the travel agent all morning. Now I've got to go to the eye doctor, and then to Carla's house to help her move into a new apartment. Way to go, Ali! Good procrastinating! One thing I did plan: hot tub tonight with C. I actually called and made a reservation. And a tennis game before that with G. Proving that priorities are priorities.

Someone stole a wheel off our green recycling bin. I noticed it as I was dragging the cart to the curb. Someone has been throwing their own old moldy cardboard in with our weeds and green waste.

Someone discards plastic bags and they end up in the garden. Someone smoked a cigarette in our driveway and left the butt. Sometimes I find a beer bottle out on the low stone fence of our front yard.

The night that recycling goes out, people with shopping carts and huge plastic bags slung over their shoulders like pack mules go scavenging through the neighborhood, looking for bottles and cans. Many are older women; Vietnamese, Mexican. Yesterday, it was a petite Mexican woman with her young son, going through our recycling at six in the evening as I put it out. Then they fingered the green figs on the big tree in front, the tree I planted when it was just a tiny gray stick, which has grown in five years, to a towering fruitful presence. I could hear them talking about how many figs were on the tree, how they were waiting for them to become ripe.

When Ruth lived here, one of our favorite things to do was to take walks through her neighborhood and scavenge for fruit. Loquats, figs, blackberries...O taste and see. We only took a few here and there.

Okay, the truth. I feel possessive of my fig tree. I love figs. I want to claim them for myself. I'm afraid someone's going to come and steal them all before I get my share. There's a selfish, hoarding part of me that wants to throw a net over the huge tree and sit under it and eat my own figs until I burst and ooze.

Fortunately, this is impossible. The birds are going to get a lot of the figs. The tree has grown so tall that unless I get a good ladder and find someone willing to climb it, I'm going to miss half of them anyway. And the tree, being a tree, is going to keep offering herself to any and all passersby without regard to ownership or possession, because that's just how she is.

Same with my sour green little guava tree by the driveway; the guavas never get really ripe anyway because this isn't the right climate for them. I have never eaten one, but I've often run across a Mexican family harvesting some when I come out to my car. I'm sure they know something about preparing them that I don't--add sugar, maybe?

I had a friend who loved flowers. When she was poor and worked a crappy job in the city, she used to walk home hiding a small scissors in her pocket. When she passed by a yard with beautiful roses, she'd snip off one or two to take it home. She needed flowers like she needed food; she needed beauty, so she stole it. Later, she became a single mother, and then opened up her own flower shop. At which point her attitude towards flower-stealers may have changed--I don't know.

Gleaning, that's what the Bible calls it. The wealthy landowners were supposed to set aside a corner of their fields for poor people to glean. I have been a scavenger myself, and a friend of scavengers. I've lived off my wits and exulted in the ingenuity of finding "free" resources in a land of excess.

Now I "own" the tree. Now I am planning to go to Malawi, a small poor country in a continent bursting with natural resources, where people live on less than a dollar a day and babies die from malnutrition.

How does this happen?

I know; theft, rape, pillage, slavery, corruption, theft, greed, theft.

I know, and yet I don't understand. How can babies die of malnutrition in a tropical country where fruit drops off the trees, where forests and jungles teem with life?

Last Friday, I danced with other Wing It! members at a benefit for Malawi. After our performance there followed a short presentation by Masankho's aunt, who works to improve conditions for the poorest villagers, especially women, who have to soak cassavas in leech-infested, human-waste-infected stagnant ponds where they are in constant danger of being raped. The average life expectancy in Malawi is 36 years due to AIDS. I've already had twelve more years of life than the average African, simply by the luck of being born in a first world country.

I know, and yet I don't understand. I can hear my neighbor next door, watering his gardeen. His young corn is calf-high already. Every year he does this, plants corn on a tiny strip of land, a city yard. I get to wash dishes and look out at an urban cornfield. Talk about a contradiction in terms.

He also grows hige dinosaur cactus, big broad flat green leaves with tiny flowers. I think you peel the succulent arms, and slice them and fry them. He also has a little arbor on which hang chayote, a green-skinned fruit with a white inside, like a potato. I bought some at the supermarket one time, to try it. It's a very delicate flavor, boiled with butter and salt.

This neighbor is so enterprising that when he noticed my yard going to rack and ruin, he just stepped in and weeded it and watered and pruned it. Of course I ended up paying him. He didn't come hat in hand, asking for a job--he just saw the work that was there to be done, the abundance of earth not being properly cared for, and went and harvested. And harvested.

I can hear the garbage and recycling trucks making their rounds as I type. Last night I talked to my poetry class about fruitful moments, the moments when worlds collide, which provide an occasion for poetry. Male and female energies. Sparks. Fecundity; abundance. These moments are always happening, I said. The world is an abundant place, abundant in meaning, magic, music, poems, and fruit.

Why do we (I) fear scarcity so much? Why this impulse to hoard what cannot be controlled?

There's so much that I still haven't said, so much life that flies by unrecorded, undigested, uncelebrated.

The guys in the jacuzzi at my gym, a former football player who is now 54 who showed me the scars on his shoulders and back from numerous injuries.

"We used to butt heads with our helmets, it was understood that if you ran into someone hard you could break a few ribs, maybe puncture a lung. Nowadays they play sissy ball."

Stringing word-beads with my Little Sister, she asked, "Do you like to kiss boys?" (There's a new boy she likes. She met him on the bus.)

Given my current situation the answer is a resounding YES! Especially one specific boy, but let's be honest, kissing in general is fun, and we can extend that category to girls as well.

But what did I answer? "Yes," I hedged, "But sometimes you know--kissing can lead to other things, so it's important not to get carried away."

"Oh, I'm not into that," she replied quickly.

"Not you, but them," I said. "You know, you start kissing and then sometimes--especially boys your age--they find it hard to stop." That's EXACTLY--practically word for word--what my mother told me--back in the Pleistocene era!! They can't stop themselves, it's the girl's responsibility to put on the brakes. Which, of course I sucked at, and thence follows history.

I couldn't believe I was still regurgitating that old chestnut!! She just looked at me the way teenagers look at you when they've asked a real question and you give them some bullshit answer--devestating. And we went on stringing word-beads. (Thank you, Robbie! for the beads.)

This morning I heard from C that one of the schools where he works was fire-bombed over the weekend. Thank God no one was hurt. It was a crappy school, falling-apart, badly-run--but still--firebombed is a pretty strong statement. He described the smoldering wreckage as he stood there--walls blasted open, desks burned, walls charred and smoking, the electricity all out. It sounded like an unholy mess.

I read to him from Adrienne Rich, twenty-one love poems. Several of them speak to me about where we find ourselves now.

111.

Since we're not young, weeks have to do time
for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp
in time tells me we're not young.
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,
my limbs streaming with a purer joy?
did I lean from any window over the city
listening for the future
as I listen here with nerves tuned for your ring?
And you, you move toward me with the same tempo.
Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark
of the blue-eyed grass of early summer,
the green-blue cress washed by the spring.
At twenty, yes, we thought we'd live forever.
At forty-five I want to know even our limits.
I touch you, knowing we weren't borm tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
--Adrienne Rich

I read this to C first, and he said, "That's beautiful." Then I read him this one:

(unnumbered, the floating poem)

Whatever happens with us, your body
will haunt mine, tender, delicate
your love-making like the half-curled frond
of the fiddle-head fern in forests
just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs
between which my whole face has come and come--
the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there--
the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth--
your touch on me, firm, protective, searching
me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers
reaching where I had been waiting years for you
in my rose-wet cave--whatever happens, this is.
--Adrienne Rich

"Oh my," he said when I had finished. Eight-thirty on a Monday morning, he's standing among the smoking wreckage of his school, holding his cell phone in his hand. "That's incredible. I think I have to go soak my head now."

Mercury is retrograde and that means reminders of the past crop up everywhere. I went out with C Saturday night to hear Paul Drescher's new opera The Tyrant, (interesting, but static--just one man singing the whole time. I thought it would be better to bring in other voices.) At the theatre we bumped into one of his old girlfriends, and then afterward, when we stopped at Le Bateau Ivre for a glass of wine, another of his old lovers.

I teased him about it, but it doesn't feel bad, it feels right and rich and strange--we are both entering something so familiar and still new, that state of in-loveness when you tell your story to the other person, the layers and layers of story, the old lovers who hurt you, the ones whom you hurt, the mistakes you made, the things forgiven and not forgiven.

Afterwards we went to the Rose Garden, climbing down in the dark past frangrant rustlings, to the center of it, and tilted our heads back and looked at the stars. The Big Dipper is still the Big Dipper, and will be after both of us are gone, which is a great comfort.

Love in mid-life is more passionate than I ever would have guessed, but also tinged with melancholy. Just now, after a date with my little sister, stringing word-beads on a necklace and then seeing Spiderman 3--a terrible movie, but James Franco was great, and the allegory of the Sandman was kind of cool if overwrought--I took a wrong turn off the freeway bringing her home. I ended up getting off at the same exit--16th Ave.--where I used to get off to go home to Alan in our first apartment in Oakland, the first year we lived here when I was so lost and he was so sick.

Just that old obscure dark exit brought back so many feelings to me, like a physical rush of melancholy, and I remembered with painful clarity just how desperate I was, how grinding reality was, how hopeless, how it seemed I would never be happy, had never been happy, could never be happy.

This after a lesbian Jewish-Native American wedding today where everyone told me how well I look, and it's because I'm happy, happy, happy, and I'm reminded what a miracle that is when I get off the freeway at 16th Ave and am immediately transported back in time to 1990. Alan and I lived in a cold blue apartment in a Victorian, above a photography shop and across the street from some other industrial building that wafted dangerous chemicals. He was sick a great deal of the time, and when he was awake he was working. I was so unhappy I could barely breathe and our aprtment was cold and bare, all gleaming wood, no rugs, no carpets or natural warmth, no plants.

I didn't know how to make the place pretty, and I didn't know how to heal myself or Alan and I didn't know anyone except co-counselors whom I couldn't socialize with, and Alan's family. I was desperately unhappy and ashamed of myself for not being able to make a better adjustment. Every time I got in the car I got lost, and the neighborhood was grim--prostitutes worked the strip on International Blvd, around the corner from our apartment, and I'd find syringes and condoms in our parking lot.

There was no green around us and I didn't know how to get to the green places. I didn't know how to get to anything. Every time I got behond the wheel I got lost and kept ending up at the Coast Guard Station in Alameda. That winter of '90-'91 was so cold and we had no heat; we closed off the kitchen and sat in front of the open oven door like Russian peasants.

There was a claw-footed tub but no shower so I took baths. One of my few pleasures was going to the Farmer's Market--I went religiously, every Tuesday afternoon and Friday morning--and I got to know some of the farmers. One of them told me how to make zucchini--saute a garlic clove in olive oil, add the zucchini, add some red wine and cover. It turned out so well, and I liked the garlic so much that I sauteed cloves and cloves of it. I ate sauteed garlic until I threw up; the whole bathroom stank of it, and Alan could barely get near me, I was excreting garlic through my pores.

Persimmons were a revelation to me--I had never tasted them before. Jicama was new. Poemgranates I had seen and tasted before, but never in such abundance. Our relationship to food was fierce and unbounded; our relationship to each other full of silences, secrets, things we couldn't say.

C and I have been saying even the things we are afraid might freak the other person out; so far nothing has. Intimacy. I felt so far away from even the possibility of having this a few months ago and I am so in the soup now. Everything changed so quickly. Is changing, and ever-changing, and I am just open-mouthed in gratitude. And all the while the awareness of death dogs our footsteps--C is much more firm and persistent about facing it than I am; he is getting his affairs in order--I am sill in some kind of adolescent denial, acting as if I will live forever.

I want to live out this love. I pray for time in which to really know what it feels like to circle the seasons in love, to keep growing this intimacy, to watch his dreams evolve and fruit, to watch my own dreams flower and change. There was so much I didn't know the first time around--I had no clue, really. And the membrane is that thin between knowing and not knowing, between darkness and light, between joy and despair. I am on this side of that thin line now; I was on the other side of it before. I was on the other side of it for many years, God help me, and I see other people on the other side of it and I want to reach across and pull them over but I can't.

As I drove past the dark and gritty exit where I used to live I felt so sorry for that young woman, 31 years old, completely isolated, thousands of miles away from friends or family, with no clue how to be intimate with her husband, and no life of her own established. It has taken seventeen years to grow from there to here.

I finished, I finished, I finished! Sweet God in Heaven, I finished.

And it's good--I have the sense that this is a good play. It's lively--it moves. The dialogue is natural. The plot has forward drive. There's even suspense.

For the last eight days my butt has been glued to the seat of my chair. I don't know what kept me here. Stubbornness? Compulsion? These voices coming through.

I finished at 7:45 p.m. Flew out the door and was in Redwood Park by 8, hiking. I felt feral, like I could eat the bark off the trees. Finished my hike in near darkness at nine, the whole city glimmering below me.

I feel wild. Feel like I could live in the woods, feel fierce and shaggy and unwashed and untamed.

Tomorrow I'll do a load of laundry and get my hair trimmed and make an appointment to do my taxes and rejoin the human race. But right now I haven't really landed yet, I'm suspended somewhere between imagination and reality, still talking to myself, still hearing these characters in that ghostly hot tub.

I wrote myself into a raw, vulnerable, chaotic, dark and jumbled state yesterday. Bottom-feeding in the soup of the psyche. Bumped into Masankho on my hurried way out the door, hair sticking out (mine, not his,) keys in hand, all askew. He was beaming beatifically, with a little paper lunch bag in his hand.

"Working?" he asked genially.

"I'm swimming in the cesspool of my consciousness," I blurted out.

He laughed. "Surely, it's not just a cesspool."

No. But there's plenty of cess in there--not just mine, either. Cultural cess, which is the whole point of taking the dip.

C confessed that he also disliked my character Jack--wanted to kill him in fact--and I myself had been contemplating various ways of doing him in. Except that I don't want this play to be like The Beauty Queen of Lenane which played at the Rep a few years ago and was an international sensation and was/is a well-constructed, but so goddamn depressing that at the end of it I felt the need to go jump off the Golden Gate Bridge--or take some Prozac. It was just so godawful grim. And violent. The only solution to the characters' dilemma was violence.

There's enough grim violent unrelievedly bleak theatre out there, I don't need to add to it. I have a redemptive image for this play--I know what it has to be--I just have to write my way towards it. And it feels like crawling through the jungle with a 350 pound man on my back.

I figured out a fix to the problem of Jack's unlikeableness--not a fix, but a complication, a needed and necessary correlative to all his bullshit. Put it in this morning. I now have 34 pages--nowhere near a finished full-length play. But this, here, is good, I think. Feels good, feels right, feels like I'm finally getting to the pay dirt.

And there's a matinee of Death of a Salesman this afternoon by A Traveling Jewish Theatre at Julia Morgan on College Ave. Only 15 dollars for Kehillah members, of which I am one. I want to go. but I haven't finished Eli The Super-Hero yet, my nephew's seventh birthday present. Or made the doctor's appointments I promised C I would make. Or cleaned up the mess in the back yard which is a fire hazard. Or figured out my return flight from Malawi and booked it, or gotten my shots. And I haven't worked out yet and I'm fat, fat, fat. Up fifteen pounds from my slender and buff era, only a year ago. I miss that feeling. Somehow, although I'm swimming and walking and everything else, the pounds won't come off.

God, I'm in the thick of it. I'm in the soup. Twenty-five pages into a new/old play that I'm trying to bang out quickly (ha!) and my characters are really getting to me. Especially the guy. He's me, under the skin, his terrible fear that he can't love, his narcissism just covering up all this crap. And deep down the seed the spark of life.

Not having to deserve love. That's what I think I'm writing about. i didn't know that when I started. I emailed the first 10 pages to my friend Ruth and she wrote back that she liked them--they were funny--but she didn't like either character very much, as a person.

But that's just it. Not having to be "good" to be loved. The nut of it.

Meanwhile, C and I had a beautiful weekend. Saw the new comedy Knocked Up (okay, but not as good as the 40 year-old Virgin.) Went out to brunch with friends of his and then to my friend Lauren Ari's Open Studio and saw all her amazing artwork. (Check her out at www.laurenari.com). I told her about Saying Kaddish getting produced in Detroit and her face transformed--there is no other way to say it--just glowed with pride and joy and kvelling, then broke open and burst into tears.

"I'm so happy for you!" she kept crying. "Oh my God, you've been at it so long, I'm so happy for you."

I was awed, stunned, humbled by her tears. This capacity to feel so much, for another person's good fortune. Her open-heartedness.

Evelyn Orbach, of the Jewish Ensemble Theatre in Bloomfield, Michigan, just called, and said they want to do Saying Kaddish--a real production!!! Costumes, sets, a real theatre and most importantly Equity actors!!! Seven years, innumerable revisions (and more to come, I'm sure,) several staged readings, it is finally happening!! Seven years!!!

It will be in Michigan on January 26, 2008. I will pack up my long underwear, unearth the eighteen year old snow boots I brought from Massachusetts and go. A real production. Just like that.