So here it is June 5, 2019, and however we got here, somehow it happened. Responding to a friends' posting about Amor Fati, I remembered the very strong and very moving work of Alix Kates Shulman on her marriage and loss and survival, To Love What Is, of which the ninth chapter is "Amor Fati."And that brings up what we each can do about what is coming at us, sometimes hard.
I walked up to have a glass yesterday evening with the wonderful poet Grace Schulman at the place I hang out,  the Barking Dog. We talked and talked and then, thanks be, she walked me one block home, and being with someone you can talk about everything with is major important.

Just an hour ago, I walked back up that same hill, having decided I would either go to the wine store to renew our Ouzo and Prosecco, exactly four blocks away on the same level, but up, up that hill. Not much of a hill, but how you notice when your left knee is Kaput and has to be changed, and can only be replaced when your shoulder can bear the weight of a crutch, and your shoulder has just been replaced, and there you are in a heavy black leather and such sling. Now I know noticing and paying attention are essential, but how noticing this and that change things.

Never mind, I get to get home and look at what I am writing, always fun. Just as seeing poet or any other intense friends is a joy. Here is to joy!

swimming with friends

So, even though I get up in the night, excited to write whatever I am writing,  now a catalogue for an exhibit of Surrealism: New World, to be held in San Francisco, I sometimes --  read: frequently but not always -- get up EARLY, as in between 7 and 8, to swim in an aquacize class with friends. It helps to see the same faces, none of which are remarkably youngish, which also helps. Not that the mind sticks to the exercises, it rather runs about, nothing being extra-strenuous in the exercise mode.

My friend Jane Isay, just back from Georgia and Armenia, just saw the First Shoe, in a cave, in an expedition led by Ian Tattersall, if I have the name right. It sounded stupendous, and set me up mentally, I  hoped, and still hope,  for what I would like to be a day's writing -- no chance, have to design my seminar in Letters and Lives for next semester at the CUNY Graduate Center, have to go to Staples to renew my yellow cartridge on the printer (grrrrr: no one told me they expired! people, yes, all around me, but cartridges???) and perhaps to my Women Writing Women's Lives biography group to hear about, oh you know, twitter and facebook and linkedwhatever it is and so on, so how is it one makes uninterrupted time for writing?

difficulties

this is like when you get up in the middle of the night (I realize that is a relative term, well, my night), and you think: right, I should get more people reading my blog, just in case it might interest someone and how do you do that and then you join some presumed websites and they keep asking for your password and you give it to them and they don't like it and say: we will send you a way to change it, and you change it, and they say INVALID KEY

this just happened to me with Wordpress, about which I know zero, except it is, as I said, the middle of my some-would-call-it-night, and it is very irritating indeed

I would rather go back to writing, even writing a blog no one reads -- I actually like writing, WHICH IS WHY I WRITE, even cookbooks -- not because I am such a great cook, but I like reading great writers on cooking, like Nigel Slater (turns out there is a new film on his TOAST, hooray) and Elizabeth David, the greatest, and M.F.K. Fisher -- it isn't the recipes I love, it is the writing