All right, who missed me? 

Don did.  I know he did because he wrote me sweet notes and told me.  M. and D. did, too.  The rest of you seem wildly indifferent to my absence and don’t think I’ll forget it.  For two weeks I lived in New York, and then last week I stayed in a small town with tumbleweeds.  Have you ever seen a tumbleweed?  The first time A. rode out, in a jet airplane from Newark, that was all he wanted to see.  Tumbleweeds. 

Today I drove to the capitol of Oregon to watch Junie B. Jones with 10,000 little delinquents.  And I’ve got to leave in 10 minutes to bring two of them home.  Unrelated, Joyce Carol Oates wrote about my chicken-collecting Flannery in the New York Review of Books this week.  It’s downstairs.  I want to read it but can’t bring myself to go all the way downstairs.  If you get to it first, send me highlights.

Flannery’s dead, you know.  As are, I assume, her chickens. 

I’m not dead but I’m freezing, it’s freezing outside.  And I have phone calls to make that I don’t want to, and clothes to unpack. 

And I’m easing into this thing again gently.  So that’s it. 

Where have I been, you want to know.  Or maybe you don’t, but I’ll tell you anyway, I’m in New York.  This is where I’ve been.  And I’ve been walking around and working and deciding that when money comes my way I’ll grab the kids up and move.  There’s a townhouse across the street, they want to sell it.  It has four stories and a backyard and I think it’s the next place I should live. 

It’s 9:00am and I should have been writing since 6, but instead I’ve been thinking of how much I hate to pack.  The act of packing, I mean.  I’ve got to deal with it soon, it’s coming right up.  Sigh.

Monday on the phone with P., in the dark on a stoop on MacDougal Street, I saw three rats.  Not together, though I suspect they were friends.  They came from under the same car — one at a time, at 10-minute intervals — and they all ran for the same little cellar.  It looked like there was a party, one rat was carrying wine.  I went back for them Tuesday, sat on the same stoop, but no one came. 

Yesterday I went to a museum, a bit of a tourist trap:  The Museum of Sex.  You go mostly for anecdotes, I think.  You’ll catch me using a few when the small talk gets slow.  The duck, for instance, and the turtle, you’ll likely hear about those.  The 1st floor was all about animal sex — with each other, not humans, that was the VIP room.  And then upstairs there was porn.  The Anderson / Tommy Lee tape, for example (which I wasn’t all that impressed with), and the Tony Comstock films, which were standing room only. 

It’s funny to watch sex with a room of tourists from Kansas.  We were all very serious about it, it was a museum after all.

I followed it with jazz in an underground bar with H. and then dinner with H. which was lovely.  And then after that we walked and bought cookies and I took a slow cab ride home. 

Soon I’ll be in Mac again, and the buildings will be far apart and short and the newsstands will be missing. 

I don’t know how to wrap this up.  Dopo di lei. 

Closing a Summer Cottage, Quogue, New York
1957 Kodak Colorama by Ralph Amdursky and Charles Baker
[via Vanity Fair]

I am wearing my coat today while I work.  The big puffy warm one, because it’s cold.  I’ve paid the company that lets out the heat, and I’m the living room where heat is supposed to emit — I can see three different vents right here as I write.  And I’ve hit the buttons on the fancy panel to make the heat come out hotter, and still there’s nothing.  There is very little heat.  My fingers are cold, my coat is on, it doesn’t bode well for my work.

There are errands today, like yesterday, I’ve got to run them.  Plus I’ve added two or three more.  Ned or Ty is not yelling, but they were yelling yesterday.  There were yells, I couldn’t make them out, I thought they were mad at me for something so I hid.  It was disturbing.

I’ve thrown the pillows on the floor.  I’m on the couch and it came with lots of pillows, I find them annoying.  They’re too big to enhance the seating experience, in fact they take up valuable seating space.  They regularly wind up on the floor but when we bought the couch — and it’s sister across the room — there was a lot of attention paid to pillows.  I was under the impression that it’s unlawful to buy couches without pillows and that in addition they must be big and the fabric selection is crucial.  Anyway, I don’t like the pillows.

There are errands to run, I’ve added more.  There’s no heat. 

There is coffee still warm, I could drink some I suppose. 

It’s 43 degrees outside, there’s no yelling.  It should be a lovely day to work. 

Richard DiFalco is in the middle of a birthday today.  You might recognize the name – yes, we’re related.  In that sort of by-marriage, no shared DNA strings way. 

Deborah is coming with coffee and Richard is having a birthday and Scruffy only peed once on the rug today and life feels grand.  And last night I had the tagliatelle and a salad and red wine and that’s a good way to spend Tuesday nights, if you didn’t already know that. 

JJ had a blueberry dessert which makes me think of summer and my blueberry bushes which makes me want to jump in the pool which means maybe I’ll play Woody Allen – the standup sketches that M. gave me – because it reminds me of jumping in the pool. 

There are things I must do today, errands to run for a trip, I’m going on a trip.  I must square my license all up (I haven’t mowed down pedestrians, it’s just expired) and pack and make sure Scruffy has playdates, it won’t be easy for him all alone.  Maybe you can stop by.  He’ll bark, but a lot of dogs do that it’s nothing really.  He likes to be sung to. 

That said, I’m going to trot over to Facebook now, and throw my brother-by-marriage a cake and perhaps a mojito.  If my brother-by-marriage were here I’d bake the one and shake up the other.  I’d muddle the mint and tell him how marvelous both of our years are going to be. 

If it’s your birthday today, too, I hope it’s swell. 

Appointments are nice, aren’t they?  The ones where someone else does everything, you know — doctors, dentists, stylists.  I had one this morning and apointments are right up there with sleep on the list of relaxing things that kill time.   There are reasons.  First, making, and then showing up to an appointment gives me a small sense of accomplishment.  So there’s that.  Second, I know something about me will have improved, if imperceptibly, when I’m done.  But mostly, it’s a chunk of time where there’s no use thinking or worrying about the outside world at all, and that feels nice. 

I loved my appointment.

My brother-in-law Richard is having a birthday tomorrow, he’ll be 41.  If you want to go on a date with him, then send your reasons why here.  To the right of us is a category, I think, called Rich or Richard.  Richard DiFalco.  If you click on it, there’s a picture of him.  He’s pretty cute. 

That’s all I have to say about that.  I ate a salad, it made me sleepy, I’m going to throw back some Diet Coke.   And call you in the morning.

“Opus Nauseous,” by the way, is the phrase Flannery O’Connor used when speaking about whatever she had in progress. 

Cheever was in the Times yesterday, too, Charles McGrath wrote delightfully about him in the Magazine.  Sometimes the Times is not just a comforting Sunday ritual but a delicious little treat.  Cheever. 

It’s Sholem Aleichem’s birthday today.  He’s a dead writer whose work I’ve never read him but they’ve attributed good quotes, here are two:

“Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.”

“No matter how bad things get, you get to go on living, even if it kills you.”

I’m going to write all Cheever-y today.  Well, not all Cheever, maybe a sprinkle of Updikian.  And on my breaks I plan to imagine what B. is up to at the Edgewater.  The Edgewater is in Seattle it’s a hotel, and they don’t say this when you check in, but Bad Company — remember them?  80s, I think — was banned from there when they trashed their room and left a live shark in the tub.  You used to be able, and maybe you still can, fish right out your window at The Edgewater.  Bad Company, apparently, caught a shark. 

I’m going to pour myself more water, plop in cubes of ice and plough ahead.  If you don’t hear from me in three hours, bring me soup.

I want to be described, after I’m dead, exactly like Joy Williams described Flannery O’Connor Sunday in her review of Brad Gooch’s biography just out.  NYT’s Book Review, front page. 

I want to have sewn outfits for my chickens — Good Lord, I’ve got to get chickens!  I want to scare the boys to death with my irony, I want people to remember pot shots I took at long-ago dinners.  I want to have a Godchild but not be able to remember her name, I want an eccentric culinary tic that everyone recalls.  I want a menagerie of something I want to care for a widowed aunt (I’ve moved off Flannery now, that’s her friend “A” actually, it’s no matter).  

I want to have 17 versions of a porch scene in my archives, I want to be remembered for entertaining visitors, I want this line to be said of me:  “When asked why she wrote, she replied, ‘Because I’m good at it.’”

That’s not a lot is it?  I’ve got work to do. 

That said, it’s Sunday which is, for me, the best day to work.  There is almost always at least one little thing in the Times that fires me up, and Sundays are lazy and endless and carefree.  I can work while G. tickles piano keys, I can pawn off domestic chores onto others in the house.  I find a perfect balance of calm, somehow, plus energy on Sundays.  So I’m going to go use it.  You, meanwhile, should read O’Connor.  Aside from her mushy skeletal kisses and poor teeth (and the niggling fact that she is dead) – pretend for the moment she is me.