In the spring of 1971 when I moved from NYC to Cape Cod, I planted a white dogwood outside the kitchen and a pink dogwood outside the livingroom. A few years later I added a Japanese dogwood to the back of the house, near the outdoor shower and visible from the bedroom. That’s flourishing nicely to this day. The white dogwood lived for ten years, then succumbed to an illness. The pink dogwood hung in there. When we had the roof replaced [after many leaks with many buckets going plonk plonk plonk all day and all night every time it rained] the roofers threw old roofing on it and broke the tree in part. I didn’t think it would survive but did what I could. Gradually it has come back and recovered. In the last few years, it produced some babies around its base. I let a couple of them grow, not knowing how long the pink dogwood would last. Now one of them has grown to six or seven feet high and is covered with ivory blossoms. The pink and the ivory blossoms mingle right outside the livingroom bay window. It’s very satisfying to contemplate. We went off to New York by train on Wednesday. Everything was on time but we had a hard time locating the person from PEN who was to take us to a car. Finally we connected by cell and got together. The Washington Square Hotel was a pleasant place to stay, small, intimate, very clean and convenient. It reminded us of European hotels we’ve stayed in, sometimes ones we liked, several times. In the morning we had breakfast with my agent, Robin Straus, who took over the Wallace Agency and added it to her own after my longtime [1974 till her death] agent Lois Wallace died. It was good to meet her and discuss things in progress. Then we met Ram Devineni who was organizing my event and much more and went with him to a tiny studio in one of those lower Manhattan buildings that are a maze of narrow corridors with small offices off both sides. Ram asked questions and I, locked in a hotbox about the size of an old payphone on the street, answered them. It was for a podcast Ram does. When we returned to the hotel, we had lunch at a diner – where for the first time since arriving in Manhattan and excluding males in charge of things, we actually saw people over forty dressed in ordinary clothes. The Village seems to have sent into exile all the old lefties who used to live there, all the bushy bearded eccentrics, all the grungy wanna be artists and writers [the ones without trust funds]. Everywhere the streets were crowded with gorgeous young people perfectly coiffed in designer jeans and expensive tops, not a one with an ounce of flesh more than would be allowed on a runway. I had understood the event at the New School to be a political panel discussing power, gender and dystopia, so I wrote a very political speech. The other people on the panel read excerpts from their fiction, so I felt a bit duped and out of place, although the audience seemed to react well to the speech. I heard one of the PEN officers call me a rabble rouser. Well, I thought that was the point of the panel, not to push our own work but to actually discuss what the title of the panel suggested. The train was late Friday and when we got to Route 128, Woody couldn’t find the car. It turns out E3 is not on the third level, but the second. We drove home through a rainstorm. The cats were ecstatic to see us. Xena has not let me out of her sight since. We were both completely exhausted. It was hard to unpack and make supper. Now today we have the Derby party. When I finish this and dry my hair, I will get started on the cooking.