A Journal: January 1979

1979

TUESDAY, 2 JANUARY. Last night a wind was up. I lay on my pad in the dark on the living room floor. I felt content. I listened to the wind chime hanging on the front porch. It was so delicate and pretty. When I tired of laying on my back I turned on my side. By dawn the wind was blowing only occasionally. Once, in a little puff of air that came in under the front door, I caught a whiff of skunk. I thought about how the skunks and possums and raccoons had been out in the night among the houses and garages and how the warm wind had blown through their fur.

SATURDAY, 6 JANUARY. Tonight I took some ice cream home and was dishing it out when Mother wheeled into the kitchen and said: “That's what makes your feet hurt, Boy.” I was struck by the complicated compression of her thought – that I'm overweight, that ice cream is fattening, that I eat too much, and that after the jogging my feet hurt.

SUNDAY, 7 JANUARY. Reading the Sunday paper I find that Ira Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, wants to force me by law to participate in a program (Medicaid) to pay for abortions on demand by pregnant women. I don't want to. Glasser suggests I don't want to because of my religious beliefs. I don't have any. Not only does Glasser want to direct my acts of conscience by the threat of force, but he wants to justify his initiation of violence by falsely attributing to me beliefs I don't have.

Glasser writes that the beginning of human life in the fetus is essentially a religious question but that there's no religious consensus about when it happens–and no scientific consensus either. His response to lack of consensus by priests and scientists is that I should follow the direction of government when I have to decide what value a fetus has. What could be more vulgar? Just as I don't worship a god, or a godless science, I don't intend to fall on my knees before the idea of an all-knowing government.

Glasser draws an analogy between the anti-abortionists now and the conscientious objectors to war in the past. He points out that while government gave to the C.O. the right to not personally kill living people, that government did not exempt him from paying taxes so that government itself could get on with it. The point being that while the government gives me the freedom of choice to not personally tear the fetus from a living woman, it insists that I fund the program whereby government does it in my name. What kind of (aborted) sense of “freedom of choice” is that? I am not going to comply with it.

I have a different attitude toward freedom of choice than that of Ira Glasser and the ACLU. I don't feel that government has the right to control my acts of conscience through forced taxation and the threat of imprisonment. And I didn't come to feel this way because I'm religious, or scientifically trained, and certainly not because I'm a lawyer. I might as well admit it. I don't know how I came to be the way I am.

WEDNESDAY, 10 JANUARY. This morning I thought I heard Mother calling me. I was lying under my covers on the living room floor. I realized that I'd turned off the alarm at five o'clock but hadn't felt like getting up. Now the room was filled with the gray light of breaking day. When I realized where I was I understood that the voice I'd heard resembled Mother's but wasn't really hers. Something in my own brain had called out my name in such a way as to give the impression it was she. Why?

I got up and dressed. I felt good. I felt healthy. I thought about how it might be a good day to begin a fast.

At the newsstand on Cahuenga and Hollywood Boulevard I looked through a copy of Soldier of Fortune. There was a long article with photographs of the French Foreign Legion and their drop in Shaba Province in Zaire. The story excited me, the adventure of it, the colorful historical connections with other campaigns, other wars. I never buy Soldier of Fortune, but I note that I always look at it. I can't deny the way it appeals to me, or the embarrassment I feel because of that appeal.

Began fasting this morning and by early afternoon my head was aching over the right eye. By late afternoon the eyes felt as if a breeze were blowing into them and they couldn't blink. By tonight the head was worse and I went to bed with it. I hate it when the head aches. I tried to not make so much of it this time, to not take it so personally, as if I am I and the head is the head and the head can hurt if it must but I am someplace else.

THURSDAY, 11 JANUARY. Walked to the office this morning, aware that the headache was gone, aware of how good I felt. Typed and napped and typed all day. In the afternoon my eyes felt as if there was too much air against them. By five-thirty I was tired of drinking plain water. Tried some diluted consommé. That made me uncomfortably hungry. I could see I was at the edge of ruining the fast. I am unwilling to experience even a moderate level of hunger without taking it very personally. To get away from the refrigerator, I went out walking. It was cold. I wore my sweater and put my jacket on over it. I went straight as an arrow to El Burrito and ate a soft tostada and a tamale and drank a cup of coffee with sugar and milk. Then I went next door to Me and Me and ate a Bavarian creme with chocolate syrup. Then I beat it across the street to Jumbos for six chocolate covered coconut drops. I staggered upstairs to the office to read. I felt awful.

FRIDAY, 12 JANUARY. Billy Carter has been partying with some Libyans and now he's being quoted as having said: “There's a hell of a lot more Arabians than there is Jews,” and that: “the Jewish media tears up the Arab countries all the time, as you well know.” What an uproar. Our own Congressman Waxman waxes absolutely hysterical over it, calls Billy Carter an anti-Semite and demands that President Carter publicly disassociate himself from his brother.

While I'm not sure Billy Carter is an anti-Semite, I do know that there are more Arabians than there are Jews, and that the American press has been pro-Zionist for as long as I've been reading it. The truth is that for thirty-five years Jewishness has been a taboo subject in this country. It isn't my experience that Jews are better than other people, but the policy of the press and government in this country has been “hands-off” and it still is.

The Libyan government is a dirty little thing and no one with normal sensibilities would want to associate with its representatives. My guess is that Billy Carter's failing of sensibility is not rooted in anti-Semitism but in a cultural and moral shallowness that is not able, and has no interest, in identifying what government actually does, his own or any other. While he enjoys partying with the Libyans, that doesn't mean he wouldn't like to party as well with Samoza of Nicaragua, or members of the Supreme Soviet, or perhaps Pol Pot. Billy is interested in partying, not in what the partygoers do next day when they're on the job. If that were not the case, Billy Carter would disassociate himself publicly from the President for reasons of conscience.

Restless, out walking the streets, thinking bout how I am publishing myself and all the things I can do with my own periodical, I got myself into a state of high excitement, my mind flying from one subject to another- licensing boards (let's get rid of them), the Confederation of Iranian Students (Marxist-revolutionary), Joe Karbo's book on how lazy men can get rich (send for it, send for it), the California Arts Council (get rid of it), Libertarians (they want liberty), socialists (they want to help the needy), the manufacturing cost of a hydrogen bomb (how many people could be fed for how long at the same expense?).

Decided to drive to Cal State to see an exhibition of California literary magazines. At Hughes Market one of the lenses fell out of my eyeglasses. Just dropped out beside the garbage bin. The frames are beyond repair. I bought some white glue and glued the lens back in. It didn't look too good. At Cal State the exhibition of literary mags was closed down. Drove to downtown Los Angeles and went to the library. I felt at loose ends. Went through a couple back issues of Libertarian Review. I was still agitated, couldn't concentrate. Leaving the library I spied a large photograph of Nikola Telsa in the foyer. In a letter dated 1892 he wrote: “Is there anything more fascinating than the study of alternating currents?” I looked at Telsa's photograph. I couldn't stop grinning.

Out on the street the air was chilly. Sat in the pickup in the parking lot and ate some old bran muffins and washed them down with club soda. I felt myself calming down. I took a nap. When I woke it was dusk. Ahead, to the West beyond the Union Bank skyscraper, a few clouds were faintly tinted with red. Above, the sky was already dark. The twin black ARCO towers loomed up to the left, the Bonaventure Hotel to the right. The great buildings with their lights turned on were beautiful against the black sky and against the red and gray light on the horizon. The lights of the Bonaventure were small and warm compared to those of the Arco and Union buildings. The exterior elevators of the hotel, a light at the top and bottom of each, glided up and down between the round, black, mirrored towers like silent carrousels.

When the horizon grew dark I started the pickup and drove out onto Fifth Street. I turned on the radio. A Tchaikovsky waltz was playing. It was lovely sitting in the warm cab listening to the music. I drove up the Fifth Street entrance onto the Harbor Freeway. Ahead, the traffic was backed up solidly. The lines of red taillights stretched out before me beautifully in the clear black air. Columns of white lights swirled down off the interchange and swept past in the opposite direction. The warmth inside the truck cab, the music, the red and white lights in the blackness, the great expanse of view toward the northeast, the tremendous buildings–all of it together created in me a sense of elevation. I felt moved by the wonderful accomplishments of people everywhere.

SATURDAY, 13 JANUARY. A photographic display of scenes of the “Holocaust” has opened in the Martyrs Memorial at the Jewish Community Building on Wilshire Boulevard. Students from three Catholic high schools were the first official non-Jewish visitors. “We would like to see this program expanded throughout Los Angeles,” said a spokesman for the American Jewish Committee. The purpose of that program would be to spread the “Holocaust lesson” to all faiths.

What exactly is the “Holocaust lesson” that the American Jewish Committee wants to spread? That it's not right to incinerate living persons? That it's not right to starve people to death, and gas them to death, and shoot them to death. All the kids I know already know that. I think something else is going on. I think that the memory of the Holocaust is used as a technique to unify and bind together the “Jewish people,” and as a way of creating for Jews a special place in the consciousness of all of us. It creates “Jewishness” on the one hand, and on the other it creates a “space” for them to be.

The drive Jews feel to “share” the Holocaust with others also performs other functions, among them the tendency to be absorbed with a repression that exists only in memory at the expense of repressions that are living realities today. The difficulty in talking about these matters is that those who lived through the Holocaust are still so seared by the experience that they don't believe others have earned the right to comment on how the feel or what they do with how they feel.

But the Holocaust was then, and here we are now. Why not get on with it? I've never met a fifteen-year-old kid who would think it proper to incinerate his neighbors. But I know plenty who were willing to grow up and incinerate foreigners under the direction of the United States Government, and I know one boy today who's looking forward to joining the Air Force where he will sign a contract with the American Government agreeing to incinerate or otherwise destroy any living person that the government chooses in exchange for learning how to fly airplanes.

I maintain a studied indifference to the “Holocaust.”

I was at my table this morning typing my daily entry into the Journal when I saw a black snake glide across my crumpled sweater onto the table top. I felt something like an electric shock pierce my heart. In the next instant I saw that the snake in reality was my black-bound copy of Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind.

SUNDAY, 14 JANUARY. On the television tonight the newsmen were talking about what a difficult strategic position China is placed in by the fall of Cambodia to the Vietnamese, what with the Russians on her northern border and so on. My suggestion is that the Chinese government try something unique-that it just go about its business. People in government love a crisis just like people in news love one. It's their key to having others thinking they are needed.

A newsman interviewed our Senator Cranston who talked about the problems of getting the state budget under control in light of Proposition 13. The interview was followed by a program commercial for the California State Colleges urging people to register for instruction of how to become a photographer's model. What a wonderful coincidence, I thought. Here's the State claiming the right to extract money from my wages in order to instruct people I don't know on how to pose themselves for photographers. I don't want to bother paying for something like that. It's ridiculous. No wonder there are so many people unwilling to contribute to the State educational system.

MONDAY, 15 JANUARY. Worked in Topanga Canyon today. At noon it was raining heavily. I sat in the truck cab eating a sandwich and reading a paper while the rain poured down on the metal roof. A photograph of a feminist named Adrienne Rich showed her to be in her forties with short-cut hair, square hands, a comfortable face. Some way into the interview it was revealed that Rich had been married and had mothered three children.

At that moment I realized that I had adopted the attitude toward Rich that she was a lesbian. There was nothing in the interview itself that suggested that was the case. I'd formed the opinion, somewhat below full consciousness, on the basis of her hair cut, her (feminist) point of view, the shape of her hands, the fact that she wore no wedding ring. On the grounds of her being lesbian I had discounted something off everything she had to say. I was very taken to observe how abruptly my attitude toward her softened and grew more accepting the moment I discovered she had been married and had borne children.

Then I realized that while she might well have married and borne children, that is no assurance she is not lesbian. I saw what a swamp of confusion I had gotten myself into by attempting to imagine what her motives might be for saying what she was saying rather than simply listening to her carefully. I had been unwilling to be in a simple, straight-forward relationship with Rich as she was being interviewed, but had chosen rather to complicate the matter by shoving into it a (prejudiced) projection of my own imagination. I might have been correct in what I was assuming, but even if I had been, how would that help me understand clearly what she was saying? In the end, she said what she said, that's what she gave to me, and she gave it freely, and the least I could have done was to treat her as simply and clearly as she had treated me.

I oftentimes have feelings of hostility toward the opening gambit of feminists. I resent the implication, the repeated observation, that I am somehow responsible for the plight a feminist finds herself in. Men and women are in this thing together and have been from the beginning. That's what I insist on. We have all been in it from the beginning–together. To say that we live in sexist societies is one thing, to say that these societies have been created by men is to suggest an almost unimaginable lack of responsibility on the part of women, an abysmal failure of courage in the face of history, a profound weakness of character, lack of imagination, self-serving repression, and the pathetic cowardice of an entire gender.

My own experience with women doesn't suggest that that's how it is.

If men are responsible for what men do, and men are responsible for what women do, what are women responsible for?

Drove the five miles up the mountain to check on the construction site where I still have a little work. The rain fell steadily. I became as if mesmerized by it's movement and by the sound it made. When I drove back down Topanga Canyon toward the sea the rain was falling so heavily and the sky was so dark it seemed like night was falling. Turned north on Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu to pick up some blueprints. When I got there it was five o'clock. I realized it really would be dark in just a few minutes. I felt confused. It was at least three hours later than I'd thought it was. I tried to recall what I had done between the time I had finished my lunch and the time I'd driven up the mountain to the construction site. I must have lost my awareness that time was passing. I must have sat there under the falling water and its sounds for three, maybe four hours. I thought I had taken only enough time to eat and read the paper. I can remember, very sketchily, observing prehistoric scenes of humans living in dark forests.

TUESDAY, 16 JANUARY. Drove up the coast this morning to Malibu, the rain falling heavily. Rocks and small boulders fell off the cliff sides and bounded across the highway. Traffic drove around mudslides. An unrecognizable little pile of guts and bones and flesh was near one of the slides. I wouldn't have known it was, or had been, a living thing, except that in one place on the mangled pile was a tuft of red hair that moved softly in the breeze from the car ahead of me. Farther along a coyote lay in the middle lane, seemingly unhurt except for the blood running out of its nostrils and eyes.

Did some business with the county engineer then tried to get through Malibu Canyon but it was closed by slides up at the tunnels. Back down the coast and up Rambla Pacifico Canyon. At six hundred feet I stopped and looked down through the rain to where the creek was pushing its muddy water in a perfect half circle out into the gray sea. At fifteen hundred feet two new waterfalls were pouring over flat glistening rock faces. At twenty-four hundred feet, up on the crest of the mountain, the rain fell off. I could see out over the San Fernando Valley to the San Gabriel Mountains and beyond them to the San Bernardinos covered with snow and thick white clouds.

Driving down the grade to the site I saw that some more of Gary Harryman's “For Sale” signs had been broken off and thrown down. Environmentalists. The “Save-Our-Topanga” people, with the emphasis on “Our.” The “Save-Our-Topanga” people don't want any more development in Topanga Canyon, they want it to remain like it is because it's so beautiful. They're enraged at the real estate people and developers who are willing to go on selling and developing and changing it. The Save Our Canyon people don't own any of the empty land in Topanga Canyon, they just want to control it and manage it. They're willing to use violence and coercion to do it. They're particularly eager to use the government to control and confiscate the property of others to enforce their own desires. It's never occurred to the Save-Our-Canyon people in the past to put their money where their hearts are and buy into the land, and from what I hear it doesn't occur to them now. They're not willing to organize, collect money, be responsible to get something done on their own. Always the turning to government, the exploitation of the force of the State apparatus to see one's own will enforced.

Worked on the site a couple hours sealing windows, everything wet and cold. The storm broke up, patches of blue appeared among the clouds. I felt disappointed. I love it when it storms in the mountains. Driving down the grade I caught myself looking for signs that the storm was coming back in, wishing for it to build up again, wishing for the thunder to roll, the rain to fall, the clouds to close in on me. I saw how I was trying to hold on to something that was finished, how I wanted to manipulate, direct the future. And how at the very moment I was trying to do both those things that I was out of relationship to what actually was. That I was full of disappointment on the one hand, and longing on the other, and that the possibility of the moment was escaping me. Driving around a turn in the road then I saw the whole basin laid out before me in the pure rain-washed air and the great city spread out between the sea and the mountains all creamy and white and perfect.

THURSDAY, 18 JANUARY. Bella Abzug was quoting Eleanor Smeal, president of the National Organization of Women: “…. we will never trade the rights of one group of women for the rights of any other group….” I think that concept is so admirable I should like to have it applied universally to all persons. That the rights of one man or woman never be forcibly traded–and especially by the courts of this country–to someone else.

FRIDAY, 19 JANUARY. Samuel Beckett says that “the problem is to find a form that accommodates the mess…..”

Met Jim Hubler on the street. He's been to Ireland, sports a new beard and moustache, and complains about the degradation of Irish beer by the arrival of American breweries. The conversation turned onto Libertarian thought. “I agree with what they're saying,” Hubler said. “But will it work?”

“I think it's mostly educational,” I said.

“Just talk, eh?”, Hubler said. “Just like the socialists. All talk.”

I felt annoyed. As if my people were being disparaged. But I'm not a libertarian, and I don't intend on becoming one. I've got good reasons. It's the attachment to party that's so destructive in human affairs. Everyday's a new day, every issue a new issue. Attachment to party causes thinking to become “historical-minded.” That's what obscures every issue. It isn't now what it was then.

I think that if one Libertarian and one Marxist could join themselves together that between them one decent person might be created, free and compassionate.

Driving down Hollywood Boulevard I see a man on crutches crossing the street. He has a cheesecloth sack over his head and face and tied closed at his throat. He moves confidently through oncoming pedestrians so apparently he can see where he's going. A sign on his chest hangs from a string tied round his neck. There's one word on it. “Corrupt.” There's smaller printing beneath that one word that I can't make out. Other pedestrians can not help but notice the masked man. I try to guess what he is protesting. There are no clues.

I think about how I probably could never do what he's doing. That I would never take the chance he is willing to take to appear foolish in public. I think about how the desire to not appear foolish to others is one of my particular weaknesses.

MONDAY, 22 JANUARY. Reading Timothy Crouse in Rolling Stone on Black Harlem. The mindless, stupid violence. The mindless, stupid way of living. I find myself raging inwardly against the law, against the prohibitions on dope, sex and gambling, against the impotence and servility of the courts. I find myself asking why the local residents don't form vigilante committees, take the law into their own hands. People in Harlem are being murdered because of their supine respect for aimless, incompetent, corrupt city government.

Government is absorbed with law. Government is law. Without law, no Government. Law is always good for government, that's why government has so much of it. Government swills law like a hog gobbles truffles, and it waxes fat on its hog diet. Men who work for Hog Government ought to look carefully at what they force down the gullets of the citizenry, trading off the rights of these for the rights of those. In Harlem, where the going gets tough, government gets out. If the law isn't working somewhere, why not do something else? Law is the government's game. The game for a living person is right relationship.

TUESDAY, 23 JANUARY. Ali Hassan Salameh, Arafat's top security officer and the man thought responsible for organizing what turned into the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes, has been reported assassinated, blown up in a car filled with high explosives, detonated by remote control. It's not known who killed him, but it's thought the Israelis did it. I hope so. I think that up to this point the Israelis have been altogether too discreet with respect to the PFL. They should have knocked off Arafat years ago. They've killed enough other people, tens of thousands of them, so why they don't get rid of that creep is beyond me, especially when they're perfectly willing to murder Lebanese and Palestinian children with bombs and artillery shrapnel.

I was rather set back at seeing the photograph of Hassan Salameh in the paper. Young, trim, handsome, modishly turned out, an appearance that would have fit him in well at the discos in West Los Angeles. Knowing the sort of acts he's been responsible for I'd expected to see the photograph of a snake. Someone who looks like Arafat perhaps? I'm fascinated by Hassan Salameh's photograph. Perhaps by the thought of what attachment to party can cause a good face to do. Perhaps by my confusion over what significance a good face can possibly have and what it means to have a good face. It shouldn't seem to mean anything, yet we put so much store by it. All of us. The fear and hatred of “monsters” is universal. If one's eye is even slightly out of place, if one's head is rather too small- the size of a grapefruit say–if one should discover a second tongue sprouting from an armpit ever, these little irregularities would cause disgust and even horror.

This evening Irene was helping me transfer some manuscripts from one place to another. “Be careful with that file,” I said in Spanish. “It's got two years of my life in it.”

“Doesn't weigh much,” she said, grinning at me.

WEDNESDAY, 24 JANUARY. Dreamed I was in a bare-fisted boxing match with a man much bigger and stronger than myself. I kept in close, hit him repeatedly in the face. My tactics were good, correct, but my blows were weak. While I fought for all I was worth I sensed that my aggressiveness was going to make my opponent grow angry with me personally, that I was going to get myself into bad trouble, but I couldn't stop attacking.

At daybreak this morning I parked the truck on Las Palmas and was walking toward the side entrance to the building where my office is when I stepped on something crunchy that squirted up inside my pants leg and all over the calf of my leg. From the crunchy sound I'd heard I supposed I'd stepped on a snail. I started to feel disgusted. Then I saw I'd stepped on a container of strawberry jam, one of those little individual servings packaged in a plastic tub that I get in a cafe when I order toast. I rolled up my pants leg and wiped off the jam with my handkerchief. I felt relieved that it hadn't been a snail.

When I returned to the house for brunch, Mother had just gotten off the phone with one of her elderly friends who has been stricken with cancer. Mother was giggling. It seems the other night her friend had gone to bed with a heating bag on her stomach and fallen asleep without turning off the pad. The next morning while she was dressing she noticed three burn marks on her belly and got scared. She telephoned her daughter at work and said: “Oh, Honey, please come home as fast as you can. That cancer has eaten right through my stomach.”

Mother thought the incident was just too funny. I thought it was funny too, but it made me feel uneasy.

“I think you could understand the ethical muddle of the Western world today, perhaps better than any other way…. by making the distinction between the idea of men being equal and that of men being brothers….” (Malcolm Muggeridge discussing Solzhenitsyn in The Human Life Review.)

SATURDAY, 27 JANUARY. Sitting at the kitchen table this evening reading the Jaynes' book on The Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind. He describes how in Ur the rulers were sometimes buried alive along with their retainers. What caught by attention, what made my hair stand on end, was that some of the people were buried crouched over. It seems so horrible to be buried alive, but to have your body manipulated and held in certain positions while being buried in dirt was just too rich for me. I felt the horror at first, then the anger that one person would do that to another, and then I had the curious, repugnant sense that that is what any animal would be willing to do to another animal, that it's only animals that use each other, and that when men do it they are mere animals and that the use of the other is what makes animals of us all and what connects us most strongly to the animal kingdom.

It's all really unclear, but it was something like that. I only got a glimpse of it, the hint of a revelation.

MONDAY, 29 JANUARY. Stopped at Topanga Center for brunch. A tanker from Gene's Pumping Service was in the parking lot pumping out a cesspool. The odor sickened me. At the entrance to the cafe I stopped, considering whether to go some other place. I asked myself why I was at the point of nausea, whether it wasn't merely culturally induced. I asked myself why, which I suspected it was, I should habitually fall for something like that. I went on inside and ate–lightly. The smell of shit was everywhere.

Afterwards drove up the mountain to the Saddlepeak site and marked out the distances on the driveway to be built up with a berm. Driving back down toward the canyon there were icicles a foot long hanging from the sage along the tops of the embankments.

TUESDAY, 30 JANUARY. On the television tonight a man named Friedan talked about flying saucers and was at the point of convincing me they exist when a commercial break came on. Suddenly I had to void my bladder. I made a run for the bathroom- I didn't want to miss anything the flying saucer man had to say. But in the bathroom I decided I should change into my caftan. Then I thought–no, I don't have time. I'll miss the next segment of the flying saucer program. Then I decided to go ahead with it anyway. If I got organized, if I focused, I could do it. But I wasn't quite sure. I probably could do it, but I was not absolutely completely sure. All this back and forth took only one fleeting moment, but I was aware that time was passing. I made my decision. I would do both at once. I could do it, urinate and change my clothes at the same time. Trying it, I pissed all over everything.

WEDNESDAY, 31 JANUARY. The rain fell and the wind blew all night. It was very nice. This morning when I woke on the living room floor, I didn't get up right away. After awhile I became aware that I was watching hypnogogic dream. I watched myself enter the reception room of my superior, which was richly furnished, where I was greeted coldly by a tall, dark, middle-aged secretary. Over her left shoulder a vertical, rectangular light flashed on and off. That startled me. I sat up and looked out the front window. Sunshine was flooding the little yard. The asphalt street sparkled with points of light. The needles of the south side of the Japanese pine were tipped with points of light.

By the time I was down on the Boulevard a storm was blowing across the city. Telephoned Jonathan to ask him to breakfast but he said he was going skiing. I felt a trace of envy. When I was sixteen I wasn't in the habit of going off skiing with a bunch of chums. No one in our neighborhood even skied. I recalled how my own father had pointed out to me how his boyhood had been so much more strenuous than my own. It was the truth. Mine had been easier that his, and now Jonathan's, is more fortunate than mine had been. I wondered if my father had been envious of me. I supposed he had. I'd never thought about it. I made a mental note to tell Jonathan about what I had thought and how I'd felt and how it is with the fathers.

End of January 1979

February 1979