Doors close, doors open. J. caused Craigslist to submit to her and found us a sunny apartment next to Stanford, with garden space and room for all of the books and guitars: I’d been entertaining such shameful fears of losing the books and guitars. It’s ours as of tomorrow: we just have to get everything moved, which will have its own mythos and peripeteiai. Prior to that going to Kansas, acquiring a car, driving it across the western half of America; I am an old hand at this, will bring the cows back safe. Greetings for Colorado and Utah. Y’all I remember.
I’ve had my uneasy twinges about Palo Alto, its wealth and flatness, its unconsciousness of itself; but you could be excused for calling these minor differences of shade in the great wash of yellow ochre that covers all California. The sun was brilliant as we stood around waiting for the apartment manager to come back; next door’s porch had two caged cockatoos carrying on. There are lemons, and things that look like cherries, growing in back of the property. Stucco walls, I remember from childhood, are good for keeping the heat out.
Anyway, now I have an address where my Ph.D. diploma can be sent, since the university promises me that it’s official. The startup launched its product, signed and delivered on its first contract, I finally built it a real website: more legitimate all the time, for whoever’s watching. And at last I finished my manuscript of nine short pieces, apparently not publishable in periodicals great or small. They were experiments in the fullest sense, and I know not everything works, but there’s much in there I’m proud of. Four or five years ago, at a writers’ meetup in Austin, Marlowe asked me how I felt about the prospect of not being appreciated in my own time. Hi, Marlowe! I feel all right!
