I'm not really ready to write this but there are only two and a half hours left of this day so I will try.

I met, by prearrangement, a friend whom I last saw on 9/11, 2001 - really. As you can see, the date was not hard to remember. Where were you that day? He didn't know I was coming so he took a moment to focus on this grinning old woman obviously waiting for him to say something. He recovered beautifully and what's more, he recognized me. At my age such a reunion doesn't happen very often. I've said before that I feel like a duck in a shooting gallery with all the ducks around me being picked off, one by one. This particular duck is younger than I (everyone is), and much better looking. He has a new (to me) Significant Other; it was she who arranged our meeting. I told you, he's younger than I. I'm past all that and relieved, if anything. Men are very time-consuming.

So: how do you fill in fourteen years in a two-hour conversation? The fill-in was not as much fun as the memories of the years before the last one. Some of them were, of course, identical, or similar, but others acted as catalysts or corollaries to our personal data. Amazing!

Yes, amazing, and I have not yet assimilated it. I'll sleep on it, see what happens. It was a wonderful day, and that's my blog for today.

Well, it's Monday and that should be a good thing. New week, new tasks (lovely word), new energy, new resolution. But I ran out of all of them. My Icelandic class is every Monday night and I did my homework: had to write a description in Icelandic of the events pictured on a page. I use a translator on the net to help me but even so it's hard, and I keep wanting to say it in French.

I had another job (task) in mind when I finished that but I didn't do it. So I puttered, made phone calls, knocked other things off my list, but not my other assignment. Wait until tomorrow. (After all, tomorrow is another day.)

So I picked up an early book of short stories by Lydia Davis. My co-op has a library, run and supplied by occupants. Davis's stories are sort of fun, the shorter the better. I feel I know her a little because her mother (Hope Hale Davis, 1903-2004) taught a seminar on diaries when I was at Radcliffe on a Bunting Fellowship. I was working on a play about Alice James, whose diary led me there in the first place, but I was allowed, as a Bunting Fellow, to take any course I wanted, at no charge, although the participants of the seminar on journal writing had to write to be admitted. Of course, Hope didn't teach, as such; she supplied us with lists and conversation and we (14 women) kept diaries and read excerpts from them aloud each week. After I finished my play, I wrote a book about women's diaries (Reading Between the Lines, Key Porter Books). At first I started doing double-entry book keeping: one diary for me and one for show, sort of, until it got to be too much work so I just did one diary fits all. I read the group the blow-by-blow diary account of writing the first draft of my play. They all attended the Symposium when I presented it, with professional actors reading the parts - not difficult because it was a three-hander - and they sent me flowers!

Anyway, I kept on seeing Hope after my fellowship was over because I had a daughter, Kate, who lived in Boston (and now in Quincy) so when I visited her I made a point of visiting Hope, too, and her (fourth) husband, Robert Gorham Davis. So that's how I feel I know Lydia.

She makes me want to write some short stories. Not hard to write, but hard to sell. Everything is.