It has been a busy week beyond busy weeks. First of all, my 14 year old Abby Puck has not been the same since a dental visit to the vet about a month ago. He rallied for a while and then he did not eat for two days. I had noticed he is having trouble chewing. Finally I started feeding him baby food. At first he licked it up slowly. But after a couple of days on one jar a day, he went up to two jars a day, began coming downstairs and interacting again with the other cats and us and generally looking better. He was so skinny it scared me and Woody thought he was dying. But I have fed him baby food two jars a day and got some chicken into him last night. This morning for the first time, he had a little cat food. Tuesday I have an appointment with his vet. If I don’t get some satisfaction about what’s wrong, I’m switching vets. I did a live interview with a Detroit radio station and another print interview. I have another this coming week. May first was the deadline of getting in 15 poems and the second half of the fee for the juried intensive poetry workshop. Tuesday I’ll start reading their mss. and making notes. I try to do one ms. a day three or four days a week. I not only comment on individual poem but try to give an overview of strengths and weaknesses and how I believe each of them should proceed. We had to do a lot of straightening and cleaning Wednesday. I also needed to make a card and wrap my friend Lois’s birthday gift. I wrote two poems and revised an earlier one. Thursday at noon, we left for Cambridge. We did some necessary shopping – for instance paper plates, cups, cutlery for the Derby party on Saturday. Also bourbon for the mint juleps Woody always makes – his are the best. Also picked up some food like tacos for the party. Then we had supper at our favorite Chinese restaurant where we had not been since a few weeks before my second knee operation last year. Then it was off to Porter Square books for a poetry reading. They had an good crowd-- around 85-90 -- and they were a responsive audience. After I signed books, we drove to Salem. The directions to the hotel where the Massachusetts Poetry Festival was putting us up were arcane and complicated – go ¾ of a mile and turn left then go over the overpass and look for your 3^rd right and then go 1/3 of a mile and get lost. Which we did. But finally we got there. Salem is a workingclass town with an excellent museum – The Peabody Essex – a good hotel and lots of restaurants. In October it is mobbed by a couple of hundred thousand people because of Halloween and the witch trials. There are silly little “museums” about witches, a couple of dozen storefront psychics and shops selling all manner of witch paraphernalia. it is the home of the Massachusetts Poetry festival at the beginning of May every year; simultaneously MIT was hosting a plasma conference there. We spent the night and watched the last half of the first night NFL draft. In the morning I was supposed to meet a poet we had published when we ran Leapfrog Press and I was her editor, but she got the day wrong and I waited in vain for her to show up for breakfast. At the Hawthorne, they kick everybody out of their rooms @ 11 a.m and would not permit us to stay till 12, so as you can imagine, the lobby was crammed with poets and plasma scientists sitting if they could or standing around waiting for their next event or lunch. The poet Martin Espada, an old and very dear friend, arrived around 12:15 and we had lunch with him, his friend the writer John Murillo and the poet Richard Michelson. We were a rowdy bunch. Then we set off for my reading. The food there is good but the waiter was a compete ditz. He kept making mistakes. Since I still can’t walk too far, I was given the most distant venue. They had sold out the reading, so I enjoyed a full house and a warm audience. After I signed books, we walked back to the car [read hobbled for me] and set off. It was rush hour and took us three hours and forty-five minutes to get back to our house. We were dead exhausted. We did not even stop to have supper but just ate a little from the refrigerator when we got home. I was too tired to unpack and Woody was too tired to unload the truck. The next morning, I woke at eight from a dead sleep, realizing that 22 people were coming around 4 p.m. and we had a party to put together [once we had unloaded and unpacked]. But we did it. We had the public rooms tidied up and lots of great food set out. My assistant Melenie and her husband Jay [I was part of their wedding last September] came early and took over cooking the stuffed mushrooms I was preparing, so I got to sit down for fifteen minutes – which helped restore my energy. It was a great party and our friend Peter took home the pot when American Pharaoh won. Lots of mint juleps, a huge mound of shrimp, stuffed hot mushrooms, gravlax, fancy cheeses, guacamole and people brought fried chicken, lamb balls with tziki sauce, a chocolate cake, a rum cake and chocolate chip cookies. People ate up just about everything there was. Everybody was happy, noisy and full of mint juleps.