“…she had in mind the dead as well as the living.”-In Cold Blood

A lot of dead lately, and death. Cards of condolence. The island has been rocked by the passing of four-or is it five-residents, the youngest nineteen, in a car accident, naturally. The driver is the son of a good friend, and fortunately survived. I have tried to contact him but I hear he is camped out at the hospital every day, in the intensive care unit. God. It must be awful. And now a mystery, a teenaged girl missing.

Walking the dogs this morning, I was annoyed to find SamIAm had killed a duckling. Poor thing. Out of its element. Sam can never catch them in the water, they just calmly swim away, but this little guy was on the ground; there was no way he could out run my maniac dog. I dashed over to the sound of frantic quacking, pulled Sam off, hoping the creature was okay. I tried to pick it up but it was all floppy, its neck must have been broken. I leashed Sam, took him back to the house, returned to find the thing dead and Mother duck swimming circles in the pond, waiting for his return with her lone remaining duckling. So sad! Man, life is cruel. All the while a helicopter hovered above, searching for Jodi Henrickson missing since last Saturday, a girl from Squamish who hasn’t been seen since attending a house party over here. Now I wonder as I watch turkey vultures circling, could she be dead? They didn’t realize she was missing until about three days later. I hope she will be found safe and sound somehow. I feel for her family, what a nightmare.

Wind picking up, skies are clear as I bask in a spot of solitude, recovering from hosting three days of Junior’s annual School’s Out/Summer’s In party and entertaining seven 14-year old boys. They ate a truckload of eats! (A hummingbird just flew right in front of my face! The other day a hummer was checking out the pink mosquito net I hung from a tree as though it were some kind of giant blossom. I love it, that birds and bird song surround me.) We made sure the house was stocked with the essentials-pop, chips, pizza fixings, ice cream, cookies. A tradition, we’ve been doing this since kindergarten. He’s pretty popular for an ASD kid. I hope, and have to think he has quite a lot of empathy for others. He’s done quite well at maintaining his friendships, they are important to him.

I’ve been feeling an incredible amount of pressure the last few days regarding our RDI therapy, duties. My perfectionist tendencies paralyze me at times. The tasks are so nuanced, I feel so unsure that I keep putting them off, then feel guilty for doing so. Vicious circle. It’s much easier to sweep a floor or empty the dishwasher than revamp your communication style. Mindfulness is required, vigilance, or one lapses into time worn patterns. The camera is set up though and off we go.

I lose my writing groove all the time! Obviously. What kind of writer loses their writing groove all the time? I suspect many. Why can’t I journal the way I do when I’m on the road, or in crisis? When my mother was dying and I drove two hours a day through a bleak prairie landscape, breathing in my chronically ill sister’s cigarette smoke, to sit by Mom’s bed in the hospital, I wrote. At least I wrote when I wasn’t dodging ornery nurses and Mom’s cursing. It sustained me, the writing. (Man, I hate hospitals so much I had my one and only baby at home, and if I’d had the privilege of more, I would have had all my babies at home.) I wrote, crap mostly but ultimately gleaned a gem or two, in my view, from my journals. But I can’t keep it up. What the hell is wrong with me?

Potential. Human potential. I saw a documentary about Truman Capote recently, still a fascinating character, and realized after reading so much true crime that I had never read his masterpiece, In Cold Blood, that I had only seen the movie. So I borrowed it from the library and not surprisingly, I am astonished by the writing, recalled it, that I had read the Grass Harp in high school. “Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there. The inhabitants of the village, numbering two hundred and seventy, were satisfied that this should be so, quite content to exist inside ordinary life-to work, to hunt, to watch television, to attend school socials, choir practice, meetings of the 4-H Club. But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises-on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistle. At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them—four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives. But afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy recreating them over and again—those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.”  Dazzling. Capote was brilliant in so many ways and I admired him too for his uncompromising (homo)sexuality.