August 19, 2003 Brookline
Last Monday a bit of a tooth splintered away while I was teaching, just a small bit, nothing really to write home about. Mars is huge in the southern sky. We spend the evenings on the terrace. I chew icecubes on the terrace and smoke small cigars with my uncle.

Last night my aunt and I finished a bottle of Côte de Rhone apiece. She told me about growing up in Newfoundland, how she gathered dandelion greens whenever she needed money for a dance, sold the bundles on the roadside.

There were long days before I saw C. off at Logan. I promised to steal something from her from a convenience store but couldn't pull it off as the clerk didn't like the way I looked. Feel like I'm going to pay for my cowardice one day. There are dead Americans in the news every day.

The bus broke down halfway back from Woods Hole. I joked with the driver and waited for the company to send another and was almost late bringing back tea for C. from the Dunkin' Donuts.

There is, as you see, little design to the days recorded out of synch. The day after C. left it cooled off and work was very quiet and I've been in a slow spell ever since of late nights and poor sleep. She isn't downstairs in the lobby, drawing pictures of the chandelier. The Mexicans at work next door wake me at six thirty, my aunt with the coffee grinder at seven. Everything seems easy and in control. I ride the train at the good hours. I, we, have so little money, but still we spend it. Plates rattle in the sink in the mornings because we have had too much wine on the terrace the night before and had let them to soak.

September 12, 2003 Boston
Just a note, added well after the fact, about going back home. I feel a little like Isak Dinesen, who once wrote, "I write a little every day without hope and without despair." This is a quote I have no need to tack up above my desk or save as wallpaper on my computer as it is one I live by. Returning feels a bit like this. Aunt P. braved the sun (which causes her physical pain) and paid for a cab to Logan. I had perhaps less baggage than usual, having sent many books ahead (without hope or despair of seeing them again) a few days earlier, but wheeled before me a silly cannister like bag that others use for golf clubs. I am, to the casual observer, one of those consumerist hacks who can do no better than hobble around for a carelessly struck little ball every Sunday. I expect every kind of security and baggage-handling unhappiness to happen to my five comptetition-grade épées. They are the last really fine things I bought with all the money I used to make in Chicago. One day, I will wheel them into the Nantes fencing club with little hope or despair of fitting in there.

Rode through Brookline on a beautiful day. How Boston shines in sunlight. How nice it has been to be here. I can never really see myself fitting in, as my ambitions to do anything but simply exist run thoroughly contrary to the smartypants ethic of this city. It feels sad, both leaving and my lack of ambition. I see my young student father in the fascade of every building, making his way to M.I.T. on his famous Lambretta scooter. How sad it is to leave Aunt P. and Uncle G.! What a welcome they have shown C. and me.

Aunt P. readily suggests a drink once we see the length of the security line. Jesus, how I want to speak to her in another language to express my displeasure at all these people standing barefoot who were never even asked to remove their shoes. So we sit in an awful bar and drink gin. She presents me with a copy of The Two Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi. It is such a kind gesture, as this is the sort of book I would never buy for myself. What an ally my aunt is. All summer she listented to my concerns, however inexactly and intemperately I stated them, saw that I received health care I would have never received if it weren't for her intervention, seriously suggested I look into what it would take to become a Canadian citizen. It was indeed hard to say good-bye and hard to stand in the security line with everyone keyed up.

Slept pretty much all the way to Roissy. Picked up my bags and my TGV tickets and talked with two South African orange merchants who were continuing on to St. Nazaire to verify a recent shipment. "In two days," one of them told me, "All the oranges in your local supermarket will be ours." (And it was true!) The train is so fast. Having a direct flight helped. How happy I was to see the wide Loire beside the window, the bridge at Ancenis (I could just make out M.'s lovely house on the far bank). And then there was C. to help me with my stupid golf bag/box, and there was B. with her car and we went up the hill by the lovely Jardin des Plantes. How I had imagined I would have to manage all of this alone, drop by the café on the corner to pick up the key from René. A direct flight. Bed. I got up one afternoon. Felt like the war was over. I went down and bought oranges. Nobody was going to come and get me. I opened a book in the garden.

September 28, 2003 Nantes
Up early enough that the toothpaste in my mouth hasn't yet soured. Am aided into the new day by jet lag, a bad back, and the one mosquito that always seems to find its way into our room. I'll make myself into a morning writer yet. I've even taken to enabling the software options to made my screen look like the one described in the charming novel A Box Full of Matches.

Not that it matters as I've taken to writing with my eyes closed. The best thing I've ever done for myself educationally speaking, was to learn to touch type. I am up, even, before the cat, who has taken up the room where I will have my office. I am, in point of fact, in C.'s office, sitting once again in the tiny African chair, placed in the middle of the floor, wearing a bathrobe that I must continually gather about myself as much to ward off the cold as to protect myself from the mosquitoes that somehow manage to survive.

It's an odd exercise, writing this way. I discover, upon opening my eyes, that I misspell certain words that must require some visual input for me to get right. Continually, for example--I will have to go back and put the word into quotes, as I've forgotten to type them (strictly speaking a second-semester skill in typing class, quotes). It is a relaxing thing, writing with one's eyes closed, and short-circuits an overdeveloped instinct to edit before editing is due. The blind are necessarily devoted to production of new information; I realized, while I was writing the preceding phrase, that I should have prefaced this thought with an introductory one, perhaps employing a metaphor, like: "I'm feeling my way into the unlit house of my head, barking my shins against typographical errors, mis-phrased thoughts, misspellings, poorly-parsed sentences."

I do know, however, that I know the house well enough to get up and walk slowly to the kitchen to let the cat out into the garden, so long as I go slowly. I know as well, that should I sit in the tiny African chair long enough, that the house will begin to glow around me, light will make its way through the blinds, devour the light coming from the screen, and I will open my eyes newly upon everything.