January 6, 1997
On Sunday we awoke to a dense fog. Sort of suitable for the day after the Moby Dick marathon. What do you do the day after a Moby Dick marathon? Almost anything would be an anticlimax. And so it was yesterday. After finally dragging ourselves out of bed and to brunch, we stopped by Watchemocket Cove intending a quick stop before going on to find a way to access the bike path at the point we left off last Tuesday. Sixteen swans sailed out of the fog like full rigged tall ships. It was an amazing apparition. We stayed for a long time watching swans glide in and out of the fog. Igor joined them after awhile. The lone Canada goose among his more spectacular relatives. An old Portuguese man arrived with bread. He told me in a thick accent that there are usually a lot more swans. He counted them aloud arriving at 16, same as I did. I told him one day I counted 63. He said that was more like it. The bread attracted gulls who squealed and wheeled in the mist like ghosts barely visible. The whole spectacle was unearthly.
After such an intense weekend, I found it hard to get going today despite my cleaning lady's waking me up at 7:30 AM to explain why she didn't show up on Thursday. I was out of the house by 9:00 but never really woke up enough to be effective. I am now procrastinating on a long list of things including the accident report and returning a bunch of phone calls that accumulated over the weekend. I spent about half the day at Starbucks writing in my hardcopy off line journal and then schmoozing with Tom & Julie. I spent the rest of the day at the library researching some stuff on "women's writing" so I can comment intelligently on "postfeminist writing". More about which sometime this week.
My knee and ankle ached like crazy about halfway through my one hour walk with Joan in the freezing cold wind chill and once I got home all I wanted to do was sit in the recliner and watch sitcoms. I didn't though. I scanned and manipulated photos. Then Nancy called to tell me she'd stumbled across a book that had historic photos of Spring Lake (an important place of my childhood and setting of part of my nonexistent novel in progress). I was excited. Somehow over the years, I'd gotten the idea that Spring Lake existed only in my memory. She relayed the info re Spring Lake, then I read her the article from the New York Times about the Moby Dick Marathon. So for a day I "wasted", it was pretty rich.
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