Stories done and tomatoes to can

I finished a rough draft of my new story “Trajectories” this week and promptly revised it. I’ll look at it again in five or six days and see how much more work it needs. I was asked this spring to contribute a story to a new collection of Jewish noir. I wasn’t too clear what “noir” meant in a story, so I took an anthology out of the library. After I read about half of it, I realized there were elements in my early life I could reshape into a fiction – not anything autobiographical but pulled from my acquaintance with lots of noirish stuff. I found the voice I wanted relatively quickly but work proceeded siowly for at least a couple of weeks. It feels great to be working again. I’m looking forward to getting to work on poetry. Every year I can tomatoes in several ways. Paste tomatoes in jars in their own juices; Italian tomato sauce; hot tomato sauce with our own cayenne peppers; and simply sauce;, just tomatoes and onions. Some years I freeze Greek tomato sauce with lots of basil. Can’t can that. We had some tomatoes last year but it was a scanty harvest and we couldn’t can much. Now we’re just about out or very low on every tomato product. So we should start canning on Sunday. It’s a neck and neck race with the chipmunks, those quick and wiry little striped rats that take a bite our of every tomato they can reach. I planted one rose of Sharon many years ago. Now we have several that are nowhere near each other – a pleasant mystery. One of them that planted inself into a fence we then took down is growing so quickly Woody had to trim it to get by, so a huge vase of pink-purplish rose of Sharons is sitting in the middle of our diningroom table. Another is way down the hill near the road and that one is white. It’s all a mystery. I have been cooking regularly, either by myself or with Woody as sous-chef. I tried to go off oxycodone altogether but found the pain so intense at night I couldn’t sleep at all. The nurse and the PT urged me to go back on in a very limited way –just two pills, one in the middle of the night and one when I have breakfast. So far that’s working. I can sleep again before and after the severe pain wakes me in the middle of the night, usually around three and I can get two of my three sets of exercises done before the second pill wears off. I finished the book about the censorship and persecution of James Joyce’s Ulysses and have been absorbed in Dave Egger’s CIRCLES. He’s not much on characterization but like the early Pynchon, he has an acute sense of what’s happening, what our paranoia should focus on, how the government and corporations function to control us, to render us powerless. I admire the novel immensely. So few novels now are important in the sense of embodying great intelligence and a confrontation with real issues. CIRCLES does all of that and does it very well. The man can write.  I get so impatient with this process of gaining mobility and strength in my new knees, I often forget how I am mostly moving forward and how much more I can do when I compare the present day with two weeks ago or even last week. My assistant Melenie is getting married to Jay in September and I am convinced I should have no trouble attending and doing my assigned part in their wedding. They are going to spend two weeks in Paris for their honeymoon. I will be meeting with both of them some time in the next week to talk about Paris, where I once lived for a while and where I have visited many times since. I also have a lot of books which I have begun to lend Melenie. She has been so wonderful to me, I am hoping I can be at least somewhat useful to her and Jay. The vegetable gardens are lush and productive, but the ornamental beds, the perennials and roses, have been neglected and are overrun with weeds. Without my input, there is no way to deal with them. I can’t weed yet or even harvest, although I am hoping to be able to do at least some of that. What I can do is deal with the veggies as they come in – freeze, pickle, can or just prepare them for supper.