1) After nine hours of solid sleep, I wrote my morning pages by the grey-gold sunlight coming through Diane’s dining room windows with a cup of hazelnut coffee. For a couple hours I had to the house to myself and caught up on yesterday’s doings and the news.
2) It’s wonderful sometimes to have nothing definite on the schedule and to be able to move at a relaxed pace. When Diane joined me we had some good coffee talk while she prepared two dainty breakfast trays of frittata, fruit salad, and croissants. We chattered over breakfast about everything, eventually being joined by her housemate Michael.
2a) Conversation whirled and eddied like the water of a stream, never really remaining with any one topic for very long, and sometimes bringing new things from unexpected currents.
3) Before I knew it it was practically 11 AM! We completed our morning tasks and then Diane showed me some wonderful photo albums of her favorite places. Then we had to take a picture with her celebration tree, an all-year all-celebrations aluminum Christmas tree that used to belong to her mother. I just love it.
4) In Boston people talk about snow shoveling and parking. In Palm Springs they talk about pool maintenance and irrigation. And in Atlanta they talk about traffic. And now I’ve had a true taste of it, I see why. Diane sweetly and generously drove me into town, and the interstate is a true molasses roadway.
4a) Diane dropped me at my destination, my friend Jane’s, and sadly had to return to Hapeville immediately. And I had so wanted to take her to lunch, but I bravely and affectionately bid her farewell. Of any of my cousins she is a true real and pure Ray of Sunshine, and I absolutely adore her.
5) The skies of Atlanta appeared as dark and foreboding as the news from the Supreme Court, so I felt no guilt at all about settling myself and not investigating Atlanta and just reading and napping.
6) Jane arrived, and there was much rejoicing. We had not seen each other since our 40th high school reunion last October. Before that, we had not seen each other since roughly 1986. The average gap between our meeting is reducing dramatically, and Jane is actively conspiring to reduce it further. Over drinks — and then dinner at Pasta da Pulcinella — she gave me some of the lowdown on Atlanta cultural life.
6a) Near the end of dinner, chatting with the waiter, we told him we went to Interlochen — and it turns out he’s in the theatre department at NYU!
Anton Walbrook as the attractively sinister Boris Lermontov in The Red Shoes.
7) Back in October I had sold Jane on the idea of seeing The Red Shoes. So while the Atlanta sky faded to black we were absorbed in Powell and Pressburger’s masterful, colorful, modern retelling of the old Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. It will always be a favorite movie of mine, in part because I do see something new every time I see it.