The morning is almost foggy – it’s definitely foggy out at sea. At the very top of the sky a few burnished curlicues of cloud edges hover, no movement discernible. Otherwise, all is grayness and still. Last night felt oppressive. Even though we had all the windows open (and consequently all the noise), it felt like nothing moved – much as the sky now, looking at it. Cars continued to rip up the asphalt’s top layers on E.-Street, their too-high-speed abrasions making enough noise to wake the dead (or keep the tired awake). But the atmosphere? Not a budge. It abided stoically, cruelly, perhaps, watching all the commotion below. We tried to be leaden, like the sky. It wasn’t to our profit – perhaps we should have gotten up and joined the driving queue… To what avail, though? That’s always the problem in most places: here you are, and where do you go from there?
Met C. for coffee at T.-café, she stylishly turned out as always, fussing with her hair which she had carefully arranged in “wet” curls (product) to suggest an upscale messiness. It worked quite well. We talked about our kids generally. She said something quite useful. When her eldest, D., was in a not-so-beneficial relationship with a girlfriend named G., whom he’d met while in college and continued to see for months after graduation, C. found that G. (the girlfriend) tended to isolate D. (her son). And she gave him a lecture about how he can’t let this happen – that the “friends family” you make in your twenties, when you’re open and have no oppressive responsibilities, are the “family” you’ll have for the rest of your life. And how you should not ever limit yourself at this time in your life, or let yourself in with people who will limit you.
I worked on some 5-year “increments logs” yesterday. It was a continuation of what I’d been scribbling in a notebook, except I realized I needed to write out, literally, the date of January and of December for each year, and tell myself how old I was in any given year versus the age I became at the end of it. So, in 1973 I may have turned 17 in December, but I was 16 years old for the entirety of that year. End of year birthdays are (or can be) confusing.