mittens in july

[Christmas Day, '77

I stopped in Baton Rouge at a Holiday Inn.  A man came up to me and said, "Hey.  You see good?  Read this number for me."  He handed me a piece of paper with a phone number written on it.  I read the number aloud as he dialed, then heard him begin talking.  He said, "Called you to see if you'd let me come by and mess around.  My mother is in a home.  She can't walk.  My brother and I are on two hundred acres with no one to talk to.  His wife left him.  I got no wife.  That's why I'm calling.  I got a new brick house and two hundred acres."  The difference between us is that he'd made a realistic assessment of matters, and had a sense of possibilities and limits.  As for me, I assessed little or nothing, but just wanted to record my thoughts, even the most negligible of them, like a poet.]
Time Out of Mind - The Diaries of Leonard Michaels