The Far East Report

Duxbury Free Library, 3pm, view of lawns and Percy Walker (not Walker Percy) Pool, with lines of yellow school buses doing drill team drills at the stop sign behind the oak trees. My hair is damp, I've come from PWP where I swam 36 laps, 1800 yards, thinking of my daughter, who rows 2000 meter races, training multiple 2000 meter pieces daily, or at least that was true until NCAA Nationals.

I'm here at the DFL to research the 2005 Tour de France, think yellow jerseys, think Lance, think our family around the television, Jim deep into radiation treatment and every yellow jersey an omen for him.

Dizzying to be so far from home in this distant yet familiar place. I'm out of sorts this year, disgruntled at the loss of some of my work-avoidance places like the las Olivades store with its Italian dishes, now replaced with a bland interiors store called Octavia's, its wan attempt to woo me with a glass counter of sea glass bracelets failing, all those complacent pastel rectangles.

Following my extra beat heart experience, I am off caffeine and now off French Memories Bakery where I used to buy lattes. They don't make decaf. "Only high test," said the counter girl. Their petit fours and tortes were obscured by condensation on the display glass - what I cannot see I refuse to miss or long for.

What is the function of a blog? Is this a literary blog? I write, I read, I write about what I read and everything else, so yes. I can boast zero comments, a perfect score. Talking at the dinner table with my writer housemates (I cannot say "fellows" as we are all women), we discussed blogs and websites. Two women have websites, I am experimentally blogging. Who reads your blog? Apparently nobody, I said. I am not sure of what use I want to make of it. It is odd to journal so publically, but my blog, arguably, is not public, so there is no invasion of privacy, no questions raised about the expansion of the public sphere into the private. Perhaps I am an exhibitionist, but an exhibitionist flashing inside my own bedroom with the drapes drawn, or maybe just a teeny bit open in case someone might be hanging about in the shrubbery ready to view something really really interesting and distressingly alive and vibrant. Junior high school discovery fantasy, redoux.
Adieu.