did i mention that we had snow on christmas eve? well... you saw the pictures from two days later... but we had snow on christmas eve... so much by six in the evening that meg's car could not - at first - climb to the top of the hill whereon stands the church. we had to slide and roll three quarters of the way down again and find a slightly milder incline. (they say the old protestant town fathers would sell only this hilltop site to the catholic newcomers - strategically fine from a military perspective, problematic from all others - in hopes of sending them elsewhere. but the catholics stuck it out... and stick it out to this day) well... it snowed on christmas eve... a pretty snow...

in contrast to this first day of the new year. we woke to gray... later than we'd like (we? the cat and i) because i had passed the eve fiddling with that silly previous entry... then considered some of my adventures with indexing fiction (there's a little story here... for another time) until the computer clock beeped midnight and an outer explosion or two startled the cat. then i snuggled into bed to read myself to sleep for the next two hours. i was looking at schuyler's Diary and found his chronology in the back of the book... packed with all kinds of stuff i'd never known (we never do know much cool stuff about contemporary poets unless they are allen ginsburg or get themselves arrested... or we find ourselves on the gossipy margin of some college english department... those folks are always in the know... but the biographers haven't caught up with our contemporary poets yet) i - as they say - couldn't put it down... until i forced myself at two a. m. to turn out the lights... but my brain kept rolling with this vision of schuyler (and i) hanging with o'hara and ashbery and porter and auden and freilicher and rivers and elmslie and brainard... new york, you know... in the fifties and sixties... lots of energy... lots of doing and making going on. my brain kept rolling... wondering what i learned about indexing a novel and why i learned it and what strange light it threw on the mystery of me.

then this morning after mass we (all five of us minus one who's in new jersey, we think) tilted out in my feeble car (white, dirty, low on air) toward ely's pancake house for a brunch. i was going to work today. i was going to knock off these last sets of essays today so the rest of the break might be devoted to doing final exams, but my now-cinnamon-apple-crepes-besodden brain is unfit for anything more taxing than this right here which you are reading. coming home we followed a big guzzler that had JIMMY written all over its rear. i guess it was a jimmy, but it reminded me of jimmy schuyler, of course, whom you haven't read... but should.

yes it is unusual of me to post twice for the same day... but the previous entry was so odd... (was actually written on december 31 but i was too eager to get the new year's look loaded)... i wanted to try a different mode... just to let you know that i am a man of several modes... a happy, busy enough, not-so-hungry man of several modes... trying to be ready to take on whatever the new year cares to deliver... hoping i'm up for the job.

To the old, the new is usually bad news.
Eric Hoffer

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