Date: Friday, 10/17/69

I’m imprisoned in the library for the weekend. I’m working on my paper for Dr. Fish’s class. I chose to write on the Coleridge poem, “Frost at Midnight.”

The day has been gray and nasty. Perfect weather for a long stay in the library.

If I don’t waste the time by writing in my diary, I should be able to complete my paper. How can I complain after all? I have such a fantastic life and so much to look forward to. I’m going to write in here in little bursts of freedom from work. Otherwise, I will waste this precious time.

(later)

Yesterday was a gray day too. I went back for my interview and then began work immediately.

(It’s nice having my diary next to me. Whenever I’m bored or need to think, I turn to it, write something down and get it out of my mind so I can focus better on my paper.)

My first tutee is Jason, a 5th grader, about the size of a 1st grader. We worked on his math homework. Lauren said her form of interviewing is to watch me working with a child. So she sat nearby while Jason and I tried to get to know each other while getting some work done.

Jason’s rather shy, mostly because he is so small, I imagine. He has a brilliant smile that when he trusted me enough to put it on his face made everything around him look much brighter. One of his treasures, as he calls it, is his imaginary trumpet. We made up a game to help him learn his multiplication tables. I play in an imaginary rhythm section. The challenge is for him to answer the math question on the correct beat. When he gets five correct, he can play his pretend trumpet and march around the room blowing out his favorite tune, which only he can hear.

That was my first day at work. I made the team. I now will work with Jason after school. I walked back to Charles’ apartment and for some reason didn’t tell him about the job or how good it made me feel. I didn’t even write about it in here until right now.

(Later)

I love working in the library and playing my games. Today’s game involved me randomly pulling a book from the shelves and then finding something inside it that had a message just for me. This game is called, let the library book tell your fortune. So easy to play, all it takes is a library card.

I walked into the stacks and pulled down a book. I cheat a bit and find a book title that is worth the game. It has to make me curious and excited to be exploring between its covers. The game is supposed to feel as suspenseful as any game of chance would. I’m supposed to feel as if my life could change based on the outcome.

I found something that made me laugh the way I laugh in a library—that behind the hand clamped to my mouth so no sound escapes laugh:

and I am perpetually waiting

for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn

to catch each other up at last

and embrace

Two things made this book a winner for me—its title, “A Coney Island of the Mind”—and those lines that made me think of Keats. It didn’t hurt that the author’s name was Ferlinghetti. What a great name that is.

I don’t know anything about Coney Island but the sound of the words were so playful that I had to pull it off the shelf. When we read Keats I didn’t think about about the particulars of those two figures on the vase. It never occurred to me they were lovers or that they might be running anywhere. I never saw them in my mind at all. What always captured my attention were the lines about truth and beauty. I was seduced by the abstract nouns. They said, “Baby if you don’t understand what we mean, don’t bother with anything else.”

The game is helpful. I see I’m having a similar problem in my paper.

I’m having trouble with one section. A similar kind of problem. One of those spots where the poem says things so much better than I could ever say it.

I feel like such an “idjit” when I can’t think of a way to paraphrase what the writer has written. This isn’t a stop sign but a train wreck.

(later)

I went outside to clear my head and to read the poem out loud. The trees heard me go over and over the poem as if I had lost something in it.

The light was going fast. Like the leaves, it diminishes quickly. The crunch of the dead leaves on the ground below our hovering library sounds as rich as the words pouring out of the Coleridge poem. The whole poem is rich.

Taking it apart to explain how it has affected me is really the point of this paper. Somehow I have to be able to explain why this final stanza takes my breath away:

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

To have spent the whole night with Coleridge as he muses on his life’s experiences while worrying over his young son’s crib was a unique experience. The night went on and on for me too as I tried to figure out what was going on in this poem. I felt like Coleridge was telling himself a ghost story. His past sounds like that kind of tale—cramped, unhappy, waiting for someone to rescue him. Then he ends with a prayer that his son’s life won’t be like his. He will grow up in the countryside where circumstances will be richer and better.

I can dive back into my work now because I have recovered my passion for this poem.

[later]

I took a longer break to go for a run. My head cleared up but now I’m tired. I know what that means. Time to force myself to work, because this is the best time to work. Work will come out of me as if I am in a dream. Insights will appear that won’t come to me any other way. It’s okay if I actually fall asleep. Something gets released in sleep. It tears down walls that stand in the way of me seeing more clearly the problems I have to solve.

I could never make Mama understand how this works. She would come into my room and find me asleep at my desk. She’d close my books and pull my pen out of my hand. I’d wake up, screaming at her to go away and leave me alone, I was thinking. Later, I apologized. She never got it or why it was such an important part of my study routine.

(later)

I fell asleep and dreamed I had control of time. Not that I had the control levers but just had this ultimate ability to control its flow—to go backward and forward and to speed it up or slow it down. Also to go into the time frames of other people so that I knew what they were doing and when they were doing it so I could calibrate it to what I was doing at the same time. I have no idea why that dream got me so turned on, but it’s a good thing Charles is away this weekend or I would be running out of here and all the way to his apartment to jump into bed with him.

Inside my head I hear wheels moving, gears shifting as if this were the sound of the rolling forward of the hours and the days and the seasons. The rolling wheels. Inside the wheels are corn and cotton and all the things we do with them. My dream was more like what Charles and Tony describe when they take acid.

I know that Coleridge was a drug addict and that Charles got kicked out of the College because of his drug use. I don’t know what to think of it. I hated it when Pops drank too much but he drank too much because he was so unhappy.

I won’t condemn Charles because I don’t know why he takes drugs or why Tony does either. To me it is one of those mysteries that at first was just way too frightening because I saw what drinking did to Pops. When I fell in love with Charles, and in a way with Tony, it became harder to think about their drug use, so I don’t think about it. I mean, even as silly and stupid as they are on drugs, they get their work done. Why should I worry?

I think I don’t want to think about it. That’s my answer to that question.

The sound of the wheels rolling though me means I must get back to work. My paper is already too long. Tonight when I revise it and type it, it’ll come together in a shorter version because I hate typing. My plan worked. The paper will be on time.

[later]

Paper completed. Now all I have to do is wait for Charles to return. I can’t wait. I feel like I did when we went on our first date.

I missed him, I really did.