Fri 4 Nov 2005
5:23pm

Still in my housecoat. Tsk! Haven't lifted a finger all day. Woke with the neck thing, stayed up a half hour, took medication and went back to bed for an hour or two. The rest of the day I have spent in my housecoat, unforgivably self-indulgent — feeling fine, just not ambitious.

The one thing I feel good about is being able to reach a dear friend whose husband has been diagnosed with an incurable cancer. When I received the news on Wednesday I kept picking up the phone to call her and having to put the receiver down because I'd dissolve into tears. Yesterday they were out when I tried. But today I got through and got to talk to them both. They're pulling together, with their devoted daughter, as I knew they would; they are a very close family. But it was hard news to get, and there is nothing I can think of doing, to help. Sometimes that's the most difficult part — how helpless you feel when you can't fix things.

Sigh.

***

The pictures. Let's see. Emil was four, I'd guess, when they were taken. I'd have been 31 or so. The good old days? I guess they were; not that I'd go back, given the choice. The house was built in 1916 by my great-grandparents on my mother's side, and Emil and I spent a summer there when he was three.

I've been reading the journal of Helen Bevington, called Along Came the Witch. It's filled with many snippets of what she, a university professor, read in other books. I could relate to this one:

"It is the tone of voice I want to change. Why sound indignant, why scornful? Whatever the fault (a student hasn't read the assignment), it has happened a thousand times before. I grow tired of caring, bored with my impatience.
Iris Origo in the Atlantic tells of asking George Santayana in his old age whether there were many things he would like to change. No, he said. 'I feel I have much the same things to say — but I wish to say them in a different tone of voice.' "