Blood Remembrance

Just came in from seeing "Things Change" with Don Ameche at the Avon with Tom. And so they do. I'm a very different person today than the woman who signed that mortgage two years ago. Getting dropped off by Tom is still a bit unsettling, but it only lasts a short while and I am centered again in my safe place. J.T. Walsh had a small part in the movie. It was good to see his face, and hard to remember that there's a guy in that movie who stayed at my house one night. Not only stayed, but ate, showered, even used the bathroom. Life is going so fast: if this happened two months ago, and I'm as centered as I am, I guess I'm getting to be a grown-up. Jim (the actor) left me with a book, Rilke on Love and other Difficulties, I read it almost every night for a month. Rilke writes: "I am of the opinion that marriage, as such, does not deserve as much emphasis as it has acquired through the conventional development of its nature. It does not occur to anyone to expect a single person to be happy." And about Rilke: Rilke had much to say about the difficulty of writing poetry. Not about the craft so much as about the inner life discipline. We have seen an example of that in the midst of his words on love. Jim and I went to the bookstore. He looked, and read up and down the aisles, as I stood gazing at the best-sellers. Yet, he in his patience, finds this book for me. Few people, if any, have come so close to my perception of life as my friend in the movies and this book about life. Ah! But verses amount to so little when one writes them so young. One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, and a long life if possible, and then, quite at the end, one might perhaps be able to write ten lines that were good. Yes it was good to see that face tonight.

Copyright; Ruth Mahoney 24-Feb-89 Saturday 9:00 p.m.