August 14, 2008

1:08 p.m.

Salem

Oh, the air is so sweet today, it smells like Spring. I wonder why. I slip off my slipper socks and leave them under the table. My head is full of ideas. A collaboration with an artist friend. Reiki trades. Thinking about what a great time Dar and I had yesterday in Salem. The skin on my fingers is flaring up again, angry, but it doesn't feel too bad yet for some reason. I continue to medicate and meditate.

We met around eleven and headed up to Salem. Some road work on 95 going the other way had traffic backed up for more miles than we could count. It was incredible -- one of those moments of intense gratitude that we were heading the easy way. I'd packed us lunches, since I knew it would be tricky for me to eat out twice. My pantry was limited so I made him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich -- "A kid lunch," I explained, and he was delighted. "I'll just have a bite or two," he said, and then inhaled the whole thing. All day whenever he ate something I couldn't, I'd ask him how it was, and he'd screw up his face, saying, "Oh, it's awful -- you'd hate it. I can barely swallow it."

We walked and walked in Salem. Walked through the Peabody Museum: the wedding exhibit, the Maori tattoos. Walked in and out of shops. I let him buy me some hematite rings. Cheap and fun. We laughed and laughed everywhere. I tried not to talk incessantly about myself, about the things I go over and over in my mind here at home. It's only with others that I figure out how obsessive I am about this small packet of things. My health! My plans! My concerns! My touring! My books! I tried to look around instead. We lay on the grass at the harbor, smelling the sea air, listening to seagulls, holding hands and talking about childhoods of repressed emotions and how they make us angry later. He's a little Irish scrapper. Prone to road rage and railing against idiotic behavior. I asked him if he was a fight-picker as a kid, and he said no, he was picked on all through gradeschool. Finally one year he beat up one of the school bullies, and it got all over school. They stopped picking on him then. Meanwhile he grew up trying in vain to please an icy stepmother. It's made it hard for him to put his needs first.

He said something that surprised and delighted me. First of all, last week he started running, and is up to half a mile. (He's in his mid-60s. This is amazing to me.) As if that wasn't interesting enough, he said he's always wanted to learn Karate, and he might join a school soon. I said, "Won't you be in a class with a lot of 10-year-olds?" He replied, "Yes, and I'll be old enough to be their grandfather. But I've wanted to do it all my life, and if I don't do it now, I never will."

When he moved to Boston many years ago, there was a gym and a Karate school right next to each other, and he deliberated a bit, and then walked into the gym. He's been a member ever since. "But," he muses, "think about how different my path would have been if I'd walked into the Karate studio!"

I was cold in the rising breeze, and hungry by then, so we walked across the grass to a restaurant to have dinner.

The waitress brought fresh rolls and I had to sniff them, in all their gluteny splendor. "What if you were a ghost," I said, "and could smell food but couldn't have it?"

"Ghosts can't smell food!"

"How do you know?! But just imagine, what IF?"

"That's ridiculous. Ghosts can't smell; they're ghosts!"

"Well, just imagine it, because that's how I feel right now, like a ghost who can smell but can't eat!"

I had a perfectly grilled swordfish steak and some little French green beans with carrots. I did eat about a scant tablespoon of the (FABULOUS) rice, but since I'm technically not supposed to have grain with protein, it was just a taste.

Hours later when I got home I had a bowl of "safe" cereal, as by then I was dying for some grain.

My stomach was pretty good all day, though I was often hungry.

********

I'm trying to get off my butt and do two loads of laundry. Torn between doing it at the laundromat -- a quicker proposition -- or driving to Rose and Marc's and doing it there -- cheaper, and would put me in the neighborhood of some other errands I want to do, pre-England. That would take up the whole afternoon, though. I also need to practice in a big way. I think the laundromat might win out.

But I just remembered I have to make new CD signs for our gig this weekend. That first, then.