the letters of amitodana

I worked on the letters of Amitodana last night. Letter number three. One and two are already written but I went back to them thinking I would rewrite them then caught myself and moved forward. They're short chapters; the first one is two pages, the second one is four pages. Chapter three looks like it'll be six or seven pages. They each get longer because Amitodana is writing to a stranger, and opening up as she goes, telling the stranger about the main character's condition. He is in a hospice far from home and she is the only person who knows him, but she doesn't know him very well -- she only knows him because of his illness, or because he's her neighbor who is ill -- and she is trying to let the stranger know where his sick friend is in case he wants to visit.

There are five letters in all from Amitodana to August. The third one (the one I wrote last night) implores him to visit or at least make contact, for the good of the patient. The fourth letter is a letter of resignation and disappointment that August hasn't yet made contact. And the fifth is a compassionate description of the patient's last hours. Or will be.

***

Sunday night, P, A, and R came over for dinner. It was P's birthday. S made a delicious meal and I made a delicious cake. A brought wine; R brought an appetizer. P brought flowers from her yard (we think they're pink oleanders) and I made two arrangements from flowers in our yard, bougainvilleas and flame something-or-others and another bright red flower that the hummingbirds love along with live and dead weeds and rosemary stalks.

P was going to bring a guy she's dating so we could get to know him better, but she changed her mind that day because they've been getting to know each other a lot since I made the invitation a few weeks ago and they needed to take a break. That was why I invited R. I saw him driving up to his house while I was cutting flowers and invited him. He's a good neighbor that way. He's hung out with P before, too, and likes her -- she reminds him of someone special -- and so it was fun to have him there.

P had requested S and I sing to her ("serenade" was the word she used), but we didn't have time to rehearse and didn't want to rehearse (we don't like to rehearse together), so I offered to read to her since I used to do a lot of that and haven't in months. I read to all of them chapter thirty-one, "Journey Home," which I'd written a few nights earlier, stayed up until 3 a.m. writing. I hadn't even typed it up yet; S hadn't even read or heard it yet. It was fresh.

S liked it a lot. They all liked it. I was quite proud of it. Am quite proud of it. It's the fifth installment in the five-installment Houston section of the book, so I felt a certain amount of explanation was in order, particularly for R and A, since neither of them have read or heard any part of the book. I stumbled through explanations of the preceding four sections but decided the next night to write out as brief as possible explanations of each chapter so I'll have them for later similar occasions.

It took two hours and ten pages to write out all thirty-four chapter descriptions, but it charged me up. I really didn't have to write the fifth segment descriptions -- since these were intended to be "preceding chapter descriptions," but I was on a roll.

***

Last week I went to the movies with MV; we saw a great movie about the last days of Bertolt Brecht's life. I dropped her off at MN's where she was staying afterwards and went up to say hello. MV sang us a new song she had written and I read a dream from my journal that I happened to have with me (because it has drawings of my cobbing plans that I wanted to show MN). Then MV sang another song and I read another something.

I decided that night that I want to have a salon for my birthday. A Soup Salon, I decided. A dinner party in which all of the attendees offer something they're working on, or something they've created previously, or somebody else's work that inspires them in their work. It could be a song, a story, a poem, a journal reading, whatever. S's offering will be the soup (though he might sing or read something; I hope he will but won't pressure him). He wants to keep the event fairly small because of his busy school schedule, and I want it to be a diverse group, so I'm gonna have to do some thinking and planning.