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November 5
Dear Bob,
I expect you must be home by now… otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this. Not that you’ll be able to if I don’t do a better job of typing. Thank you for the postcard, and I’m glad you like Glastonbury and Welles… so do I. And I’m sure they liked you. Did you get to the Chalice Well? Did you dig up King Arthur? Did you, I hope, get some marvelous new ideas for statues of griffins? It is interesting… not very nice, perhaps, but interesting… that you found Mr. Dedrick a tad tedious (perhaps I shouldn’t mention this, as you may have got rid of the feeling later)… I had the same reaction once when I’d made a special trip across the country to see one of my former art teachers, of whom I’d been extremely fond and with whom I’d been socially close in addition to being her student, and I had precisely the same reaction. |
I still loved her in a respectful and studently way, but I found that I’d apparently been outgrowing her (or she me) and I hadn’t realized it. Seeing a person in a different context can give one a jolt. Perhaps art teachers don’t transplant well… though I must say this one had gone right on making herself universally beloved in her new setting to new generations of students. The simple answer, I suppose, is that sooner or later, one is no longer a student, and one gets to see the former teacher merely as a person instead of an all-wise demigod or goddess as the case may have been. Or perhaps it’s that if you see each other constantly you learn to shut out their little quiddities and if you let the door open on their simple humanity, as happens after a lapse of time and space, you have to look at all the stuff you don’t want to know about and it’s too much of a strain when you’re already having to adjust to different surroundings.
Getting back to thank-yous, I must also, since I didn’t have time to write before you took off, thank you for all you did to make my visit a pleasant one, and particularly for the birthday party. I will think of it next week when my actual birthday rolls around, mentally put on my birthday hat and blow out my candles again and enjoy it all over, thus saving the cost of another party and the effect on my waist line of another birthday cake. Once perfection has been achieved, why try again?
Have you seen Laura, Ro, Kathy, Deb, or any of the others since you got back? I wrote them but haven’t heard back yet… no reason why I should, of course, as bread-and-butter letters don’t need to be answered, and I expect they are all resting up… except Deb, who will be busy with Christmas decorations for Dayton’s, and Laura and Kathy who will be busy setting up holiday displays of books at Odegard’s, and Ro, who will be busy glueing bits of holly to his epees, I suppose.
Me, I am busy too. I’m correcting galleys for A DISMAL THING TO DO… have just finished my third and final read-through, marked all my corrections and then read the directions and discovered that I violated all the tenets of gallery-marking as laid down by Doubleday. Tough toenails.
I am writing a new Sarah and M-x story, and you’re going to hate it. I will leave you to ponder why. It was all your fault. If you hadn’t about it so much, it wouldn’t have happened.
The big news from here is that my sister Alexandria has in fact completed her move to Brunswick, along with her friend Chris, dogs Harry and Coco, and cats Tiger Lily and Lord Grey. They are only twenty minutes drive and a no-toll phone call from me, which is nice. Saturday they went to the animal shelter and got me Walter and George… they weren’t Walter and George at the time, but have since become so. Walter is now nine and a half weeks old, give or take a few days, a tiger with white paws, white nose, white vest, and white tummy. He is graceful, playful, has a purr you can hear from Durham to Brunswick, leaps ad curvettes gracefully, and likes to carry a piece of crumpled-up paper in his mouth. George is a little ruffian from the wrong side of the tracks, may be more than six weeks old but still has his spiky tail and baby fuzz… some of it, anyway… is an orange marmalade color, eats most of the time when he isn’t sleeping, and is in complete charge. The idea was to give Mollie companionship since she’s been so distraught over her bereavement… so far it has NOT, repeat NOT, worked out very well. She has been spending her time upstairs… had to have a shot yesterday because George was sneezing and the vet was afraid he was coming down with something awful. So today George is fine and poor Mollie is miserably sick… from the shot, I hope, unless George had a cold and that’s what she caught. She is sleeping next to the radiator upstairs and I’m keeping my fingers crossed. The vet said yesterday she was in wonderful shape for her age, so I know she can sustain a day or so of not eating or drinking, but I can’t help worrying.
On this fretful note I shall leave you and go up to check on Mollie. Welcome back!
Charlotte |
