Photograph by Marcell Nimfuhr. (Please let me know if you'd rather I not leave these up here, Marcell!)
Oh, my heart is a little broken over missing Robert Hass reading at UMMA yesterday. He is one of my very favorites. I even got out my old copy of Praise to lend to Katie after our late-night giddy return to e.e. cummings a few weeks ago.
(Late-night Monday edit: Oh, Marta, remember reading "Meditation at Lagunitas" aloud to one another with Ross, over and over again, when we were all ailing and huddling around together on the beds in our room in Spiti?
[It was Kaza, wasn't it? Where I hung on the shoulders of you both, and you dragged me, complaining the whole way, down the hill into the valley to the hospital, to get me medicine for my intestinal bug, only for us to discover a week later that I'd been taking sulfa drugs that gave me hives, and for Ross to discover a few months later, that the mangoes you brought me for comfort everyday were only further contributing to the allergy!? Those were the good old days, I tell you. The good old days of riding on a tractor to get between villages, drawing our tupattas over our mouths and noses to filter the dust, then taking turns racing to the toilet for our assorted ailments. . .] And then there was the night you went off on your date and the Scandinavian/Korean Christian Buddhist wooed me from below the wall where I was sitting and singing by myself, and gave me the book Living Buddha, Living Christ that I still can't quite let go of, though I've never quite read it either. . . Oh, how I miss being young, sometimes.)
Photograph by Marcell Nimfuhr.Fitting, by the way. . . I'm the Hermit today. I wish I could hide away for a few more days. I think I could finally get all my work done if I could just have a respite from the social and not have to prepare a face to meet the faces that I meet...
I'm putting off even writing to and calling people I love. Yeah, I think that "I" in the Myers-Briggs from years ago probably still holds, even if I do flirt more than anybody you know. :P
2 comments:
I share your allergy for sulfa...and what a way to discover it!
"Doctor, I don't like to complain, but I seem to be getting WORSE."
"Oh--you should probably stop taking those antibiotics."
we were so bewilderingly disoriented from so many things -- the landscape like the surface of a planet we had never seen before, the altitude that left you breathless at best, or vomiting at worst, and then the cognitive fogginess that comes with parasites (doctors there have an expression they call "giardia face") . . . it's hard to believe, but the unrelenting itchiness just didn't sink in, nor did the brilliant notion of reading a label for a medicine likely to be familiar, even in such unfamiliar settings.
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