A Writer’s Diary Entries From Late June, 1998

Saturday, June 20, 1998

9 PM. I just got in after spending a couple of hours reading books at Borders and then getting a few items at the supermarket.

Marc left at 4:30 AM for Prescott, and I haven’t heard from him, so I don’t expect him to be home tonight.

After he left, I went into his bed to lie down for a couple of hours, but I had to meet Sat Darshan at her house at 7:30 AM. She was already waiting for me outside, as I was a few minutes late.

I followed her second car to a service station on North 7th Street past Indian School, and I drove her home once she left the car to be repaired so that Gurudaya can use it to pick up Tyler and do other errands in the neighborhood.

Gurudaya went to New Mexico for the Sikh solstice celebration, but Gurujot was still in bed when we arrived home.

I’d offered to take Sat Darshan out for some herb tea, but she suggested we go back to her house and sit out by the pool, which we did for an hour, until it began to get uncomfortably hot.

Today’s high was about 105°, which is normal for this time of year, and Sat Darshan said that even at 6 AM walking Tippy was no longer comfortable.

I read in the Republic that La Niña has replaced El Niño, and so the weather is going to be weird some more, but in the opposite way.

Maybe that’s why Florida is so dry that the whole state is under an emergency due to fires. (At least the residents of Waldo, near Gainesville, were allowed to return to their homes that were spared from this fires raging all over North Florida.)

Sat Darshan and I talked about Phoenix. As she did in Brooklyn, she prefers living in an old historic district to the more suburban areas.

Logging on to Sat Darshan’s computer, I got word from Mark Savage that his ultra-Orthodox son and daughter-in-law in Israel have presented him with a new granddaughter, his first, named Pinya Chana or something like that.

“I’ll tell you,” Mark wrote, “it feels weird being a grandfather.”

Mark said he hoped to have moved from New Jersey to his new co-op in Brooklyn by the time I get to the city in July.

I also got email from Josh, who wondered where I was and wants me to meet his woman friend from Germany who won’t be in New York for much longer.

Back in Mesa, I went to CompUSA this afternoon only to discover that after lying there two days, my computer hadn’t yet been looked at. So I did the prudent thing and got a refund of my $109 service charge and took it back, the modem still not working.

I’ll get it fixed in New York, I guess.

Most of the rest of the day I spent reading and eating and exercising, though I also did a small load of laundry, went to Kinko’s to check to see if I had any AOL email, hung out at Borders, watched the local news, and was grateful not to be nauseated the way I was last Saturday.

My cold finally seems appreciably better, as my nose has definitely stopped running so much.

Tomorrow is the first day of summer, and I’m surprised at how comfortable I’ve felt living in Phoenix. My brother’s neighbors all seem to assume that I’ve been living here all along.

Professor Weyrauch was interviewed on All Things Considered about how Europeans handle legal aid for the poor. It felt comforting to hear his German accent, so familiar from law school.

The U.S. Supreme Court, In a 5-4 ruling, has put all the IOLTA (interest on lawyers apostrophe trust accounts) fees in jeopardy. That could kill Florida programs like the Public Interest Fellows at CGR, not to mention millions of dollars for legal aid.

---

Tuesday, June 23, 1998

8 PM. Due to jet lag, my body and brain weren’t functioning very well today. I didn’t exercise, but I feel as if I’m sore from a workout; it’s probably from lugging my luggage yesterday.

I fell asleep at midnight, woke up at 2 AM and stayed awake till 6 AM, and then I fell into a coma-like sleep that I couldn’t rouse myself from until 9:30 AM.

I did manage to accomplish a few things today. First, I made an ATM deposit of my small Ucross deposit refund  and my Unemployment check.

Libby sent a photo of Wyatt and Lindsay from the Daily News of Los Angeles and wrote that they’re going on a two-week camping trip so they won’t get my most recent check and my packages until they return.

But I went to the Unemployment office on Oakland Park Boulevard and waited in line for an hour, finally changing my address from Woodland Hills to Fort Lauderdale. By tomorrow I should be able to claim benefits over the phone system.

Needing caffeine – or thinking I did – I went to Barnes & Noble, where I got iced tea and the New York Times and read about yesterday’s Supreme Court decisions at their cafe.

From there, my next stop was the Nova library, where I checked my email. Josh was offended when I said I was too busy to meet his friend, and Alice couldn’t figure out where I was.

Upstairs at the Bachelor of Professional Management program office, Shelly told me that Larry Brandt had gone out to lunch and Micki told me that I had lost weight.

The regular Nova undergraduate fall schedules don’t seem to be out yet, nor are the FIU or FAU schedules.

John Childrey wasn’t in his office at the FAU Liberal Arts Building across the street at the Broward Community College Central Campus.

The BCC schedule is out, but there seem to be very few TBA English sections, and I think I would be better off working in an office during the day than teaching.

Last night I got upset when I read my FAU Creative Writing students’ evaluations, which are the worst I’ve ever received. Students felt they learned nothing.

Still, there were too many students in that class, and of course most of them were education majors with no interest in creative writing themselves, taking the class only because it was required of anyone who wants to teach public school English.

Also, the three-times-a-week, fifty-minute schedule doesn’t work for a creative writing workshop. With no lead time to prepare, I did the best I could with that horrible group of students.

No wonder Dan Murtagh didn’t reply to my email about classes for the fall semester.

Even though my English 102 evaluations were much better – “You couldn’t find a better teacher,” one student wrote – I’ll probably never teach at FAU again.

My confidence in my teaching ability has been shaken a bit – though I know I do better with “adult” students like those in the BPM program at Nova and in night classes at FAU.

This afternoon I went to Publix to buy frozen fruits, vegetables and dinners, and I xeroxed the Mercury News article about the Sylvia Ginsberg fan club.

I’m vaguely getting used to being around my family, but there’s a definite coolness on all our parts. When I called Alice in New York and told her what was going on, she said my family “never learned to separate” and she expects my parents and brothers will all end up living together in Phoenix.

Mom seems ignorant of the simplest logistics of selling this house before they move to Arizona. She rebuffed my suggestion that they get a real estate broker and got angry when I said I wouldn’t help her revise the leaflet she has outside next to the “For Sale by Owner” sign. They seem in no hurry to move.

I won’t detail all the ways my mother gets on my nerves because I’m certain I get on hers in just as many ways.

Tonight I spoke to Gianni as he and Alejandro were preparing dinner. He really loved the vacation the two of them took in Spain, and he prefers, as any sane person would, the quality of life in Madrid and Barcelona to that in Miami and Baltimore.

Work at the salon is okay, Gianni said, but he is not any more taken with South Florida than he was before I left, and their long-range goal is to move somewhere else.

There’s a lot more I could write, but I’m too tired to do it now.

---

Friday, June 26, 1998

10 PM. Even though I’ve been on Eastern Time for four days, I’m still struggling to get up in the morning, and I tend to go to bed later than usual.

Last night, of course, I didn’t get home from the movies (The X-Files, at the Fox Sunrise: not bad, and I’m not a fan of the TV show) till after 10 PM. And tonight I’ve just come from Kinko’s.

Rather than use my printer and get Mom any more discombobulated, I rented a computer there to print out some letters I’d written earlier and sent out my résumé via email to a job opening as information manager at the Sun-Sentinel. While I was on AOL, Camille IM’d me and said she hopes to see me in New York.

Two of my letters were to the University of Maryland. Today I got a new letter from the dean, admitting me for the spring 1999 semester, but I accepted for the summer 1999 semester, and I hope that will be okay. I also sent the registrar written cancellation of my fall registration so I don’t get billed for it.

I also printed out a two-page letter to Thien. It’s been over a month since I got his heartfelt letter from San Jose, and I’ve felt bad about not writing him sooner.

After I exercised this morning, I went to Barnes & Noble and nursed a couple of glasses of iced tea as I read the Times, starting with their four pages of yesterday’s Supreme Court decisions.

I read the excerpts from the opinions, and later, at Nova’s library, I printed out the full text of the decision upholding the decency provision in National Endowment for the Arts grants. (The Court construed it to be so vague and hortatory that it didn’t discriminate against any viewpoints.)

On the Web, I saw that Justin Clouse had decided to take his diary offline so he can live his life away from the public. I think that’s very healthy for him, and I wish him the best.

Basically, I didn’t exchange more than a few words with anyone in my family today, though it’s hard to tell if that’s normal for them or what. I was in and out all day, going to the West Regional Library, to Wendy’s for a baked potato, and then to Kinko’s.

I feel very uncomfortable when I leave this room. Just to hear the way Dad talks to Mom disturbs me, as when they brought their dinner home from wherever; he screeches at her.

They all screech here. I am not used to people talking that way. It reminds me of the way Grandpa Nat and Grandma Sylvia used to scream at one another all the time and not have any awareness of what they were doing.

I can’t imagine hearing people talk like that at Montalvo or Ucross or at Libby and Grant’s house or at Sat Darshan’s. Unfortunately, it’s very easy for me to slip back into that mode. No wonder why my parents and Jonathan don’t have any friends; they don’t know how to talk with people.

The Florida Cultural Affairs Division newsletter arrived today, and I see that the Florida Arts Council is scheduled to vote on all the grant panels’ recommendations at its July 23 meeting.

After that, I guess, Secretary Mortham has to give her final approval, and then they’ll send out letters to grant recipients in August. Last year the first press reports appeared around August 22. So it may be a couple of months before the official word comes.

When my first fellowship came in 1981, I read about it in the Herald at breakfast, and the Herald’s Broward section did a story on me. In 1988, there was no publicity about my fellowship, but I was in New York City and happy to keep a low profile.

This year I’ll probably fax the grant letter to the media because I’d like to be profiled and interviewed. Except for my Boca Raton News columns and the Herald Black History Month essay contest, I’ve been out of the public eye this year.

---

Sunday, June 28, 1998

9 PM. Last night I couldn’t sleep, so I read most of the Sunday Times.

Just as I was about to leave the house at 11:30 AM today, Gianni called. He was on I-95, had realized he’d forgotten his wallet, and was it all right if we met forty minutes later at Borders?

It was no problem, of course. Even though I stopped off at the Main Library downtown to check my email – which was just a note from Sat Darshan – I was still at the bookstore before Gianni.

He looked pretty good – even better than I remembered – but we didn’t kiss or hug or shake hands or anything. So that he could smoke, we sat out on the patio in the uncomfortable heat and humidity.

I suspect both of us were a little bored, and in the end we spent only about an hour and a half together.

Gianni’s big news was that just before they left for three weeks in Spain, Alejandro was told that he was being sent back to his firm’s Manhattan office.

Although Gianni could find work in the city at the salon’s Midtown location, neither of them wanted to move back to New York.

I was a little surprised me to hear that, but Gianni said living in the city is be too much of a struggle. Florida is much easier, but neither he nor Alejandro wants to stay here permanently, and so they’re planning to leave when the Coral Gables lease expires in November.

Gianni has also decided that he could only go so far in his profession without a degree, so he wants to go back to school and get his bachelor’s in international business.

They considered the usual East Coast big cities, but right now they’re planning on moving to Madrid. Gianni liked it a lot there, which I can understand, and it’s Alejandro’s home, where he grew up and where his family still lives.

However, Alejandro is a U.S. citizen, and to live in Spain, Alejandro, like Gianni, would need a job offer.

Actually, that shouldn’t be hard to get – and Gianni may go on a student visa instead and go to school there. His Spanish is fluent, and he prefers the sophisticated atmosphere of Europe and its more progressive social welfare state.

I told Gianni that I think it’s great that he’s proactive about this. He and Alejandro will probably spend the next couple of months dealing with the Spanish consulate – a short walk from their house – and then Alejandro will go ahead and Gianni will come later.

For Alejandro, the hard part will be giving up all his possessions, but it’s too expensive to move all that furniture to Spain.

I’m glad for Gianni if this is what he wants, and it sounds like a good idea to me.

Yet our meeting left me feeling a little sad. We hugged in the parking lot and I kissed him on the cheek, but it was like being with a casual friend, not someone I’d once been so intimate with.

But not discussing our past relationship today was something that I was as responsible for as Gianni was. What would we have said, anyway?

I think he’s more embarrassed about the two of us messing around than I am, but who knows?

Even though I always knew Gianni was not the person I wanted to be in an LTR (long-term relationship) with, I do miss the intimacy – and I don’t mean just the sex.

When I got home, my parents were showing the house to a young couple who seemed very interested. They have to be out of their own house by August.

Dad – who was off from work today – seemed shocked by the prospect that he might have to leave here in a month. And Jonathan, when he came back from work, was quick to discount the possibility of a sudden move to Arizona.

I’ve been talking a lot to my parents and Jonathan since yesterday when I found a sixpack of iced tea in the car.

(Mom had gone back to Publix to get another sixpack after complaining that the bag boy hadn’t put the first sixpack in the car. See, she is confused.)

But now I wonder if I was better off when I got the silent treatment, for my parents and brother say such odd things that keep telling me how disturbed they are. I haven’t heard people talk so rudely to each other as I do in a typical exchange between my parents.

Even Jonathan is like an old Jewish person; the first thing he asked about the couple who saw the house was whether they were “gentile,” a word not in my vocabulary.

Although I wish I were in contact with Teresa this week, I feel the need to get off to New York now. At this point I’ll be happy to stay in a Long Island motel if I have to.

If my parents do sell the house and have to get out of here by August, I’ll need to come back early – but it will probably be worth all the trouble if my parents and Jonathan really do move to Arizona.

They can’t be any more miserable than they are here.

---

Monday, June 29, 1998

9 PM. I’m going to bed after writing this, as I have to be at the airport around 7 AM. Teresa called this evening and said she’d be at LaGuardia at 11 AM. I’m looking forward to seeing her and to getting out of this nuthouse.

What’s really scary is that if I stayed here long enough, I might think that the behavior of my family was normal. That sounds snotty, but they are sick. None of them has friends or wants any, it seems, and they just sit around together in front of the TV set.

I had lunch with Aunt Sydelle today, and whatever her faults, at least she has a social life and outside interests. My parents are not simply cranky old people; they’re bizarre.

Why Mom never visited or phoned her mother or brother, much less her in-laws, is beyond me, and I don’t know why Dad never visits his sister, either.

The last time Sydelle saw Dad, she told me, was when I drove her to the hospital last October after his heart attack. Of course, Sydelle has a fear of driving to Broward, so he would have to come to her.

She showed me the photos of Amy’s bat mitzvah; all Scott’s kids got big, and Michael is nice-looking but getting close to 30.

Sydelle gave me Michael’s grandfather’s number in Bayside – where Michael is currently living – and the number where she’ll be staying with her niece in Manhattan.

She also gave me Robin’s number in San Pedro but said that even if I’d called Robin while I was in L.A., she might not have answered. She’s on SSI because of her mental problems.

On the other hand, Sydelle mentioned that when Dad had his heart attack, she called the Littmans, who phoned Dad and reported back to her that he was “very unfriendly.” I can just imagine.

Both Aunt Sydelle and I spent our lunch at a deli telling each other stuff neither of us wanted to get back to Dad.

At least she has Scott, who’s a fabulously successful lawyer. She doesn’t realize how successful he is, plus he’s got a good marriage and three great kids.

Instead, Sydelle complains that Scott’s wife is cold to her and that Scott himself is always getting exasperated with her. (I can imagine.)

Sydelle is close with her cousins on both sides of her family, her Anenberg in-laws, and her surviving aunt and uncle.

I actually enjoyed my two-hour lunch with my aunt. My parents and Jonathan never go out for lunch, of course.

Last night I called Marc, who’d gone to Prescott for the weekend and did even less business than he had the week before: virtually nothing. God knows why he went to the flea market after a first week of work during which he felt overwhelmed by the information about cell phones that he had to learn.

AirTouch offers – no kidding – 4,153 different plans to its customers. Marc took a test on Friday and got 52 of the 60 questions right, and today he begins working at their Mesa store at Alma School and Broadway, just a hop, skip and jump away from his house, saving him the commute to Phoenix.

The electric company was threatening to shut off his service, but Marc hopes to give them a token payment. His first paycheck tomorrow will have to go to his July rent – although of course it won’t cover that in full.

Hopefully Marc will thrive away from our parents. He did say that AirTouch seems to treat its employees well, “and I’m not used to that.” They’ve given him an alphanumeric pager, of course.

This morning I went to the cybercafé and wrote Sat Darshan about my week in Florida. She said to give her regards to Teresa and the other old New York friends she remembers.

In the mail I got my JCPenney First Visa secured card, with a $300 credit line; that’s the $300 money order I sent out as a deposit from Phoenix. Today I sent out a $150 deposit to increase my credit limit on another secured card, from FCNB. These secured cards may be stupid, but they’re forced me to put away about $5,600 in savings accounts.

I got home from Aunt Sydelle’s in Aventura by 4 PM and finished the packing I’d begun this morning. For the first time in years, I’m taking only one suitcase to New York. I took two suitcases to San Jose and from there to Los Angeles to Wyoming to Phoenix and back to Florida.

Of course, I needed more clothes for the change in weather from winter to early summer. But I still ended up taking too much stuff.

Now I’ll just be in New York for the summer, so it’s better that I buy things I need there than take extra crap with me.

My wanderyear continues, at least for a little longer. And I like it that way.