Now that the track is closed, Clemente calls me every morning from Ocalla...I say, "Hi Sweetie" to the phone at 7 or 8 and he's on the other end of the line saying, "I'm walking and talking" and lots of other things I can't understand even when he puts his teeth in... His English isn't fabulous and the Spanish I tried to learn from him is non-existent, but it's a pleasant ritual...he calls me his white mother and says that he's 45, which is hardly true, and complains that someone hasn't arrived so he doesn't know what to do, no orders about what horses need to go to the machine and which are going to train...he's actually working in stalls, rather than just hotwalking horses...it was hard, I know, when he had to stop exercise riding in the last couple of years, and harder, I'm sure, when he could no longer be a jockey, but this might be an improvement because he's actually pushing a wheelbarrow and cleaning stalls...making more than he did up here, per week, which was $5 a horse he walked, however many horses he walked in a morning, 5 or 6... anyway, it's as if the circus has left down and left me without the sense I have somewhere interesting to go... until April of May...
Winter is hard, getting dark early, cold in here..I need to put plastic up on the windows... I'm not fighting a big depression, but a little down that's coped with by putting one foot in front of another and doing work...today was editing a video of a woman who grew up here in Chelsea, remembers all the fun they had playing games on the streets like China and three outs, burning effigies of Hitler and Mussolini in the park after carrying down Broadway, the main street in this little city... she laughs a lot and wants to go to Boston Commons, sit on the bench, put up a sign, 'Let's talk', since she loves to talk.
I love to listen...
Susan is working incredibly hard to prepare for the debut of Run to the Roundhouse, Nellie...
I'm still going to quilting, still resisting working with small squares, too much work...I hate sewing...but it's interesting listening to the stories these even older women tell...
the quilts are just lovely. for years, i've had a longing of one day doing a quilt of my own. but i can't sew and have so little patience, too, so that's that. just like my idle dreams of dancing or singing. the local hospice group has some volunteers who create wonderful smallish quilts. my wife had two of them, but like everything else in that nursing home, things just come and go -- one week the laundry hands you your quilt, the next week someone else's. wherever do you get all your energy? i've been down with sciatica for weeks now, hoping to get some relief with an injection next week. writing seems almost like a thing of the past.
ReplyDeleteYou love to listen and I love to read you. And I love those quilts, too. Many thanks.
ReplyDeleteGreetings from London.