House guests

We don't have many house guests. H's son is spending the night tonight, and we just returned from Thai food. Needless to say, I didn't get all my student scripts done, so I'll rise early to finish them tomorrow morning. The opera tomorrow night.

My most "exciting" house guest / work conflict was way back in the 1960s. My first wife and I were summer-housesitting my parents' home in Medford, Oregon. Two couple friends with their kids came up from L.A. to spend a week with us. I had the summer off before grad school but one morning the postman delivered a special delivery book: The New Republic magazine, to which I had sent a book review, wanted me to expand it to include the attached book. They wanted the review back in three days! Well, I couldn't turn the opportunity down. I was publishing reviews regularly in The New Leader and The Progressive but hadn't made this credit yet. So I hid out in a bedroom, read the book, expanded my review to include it, and sped it back to them -- all this with a constant party buzzing all around me, through which I came and went in spurts. It was an experience I remember fondly.

The icing on the cake was that the issue of The New Republic appeared early in the fall, on the very week I started graduate school, so that the first thing the chairman of the English Department said to me was, "So nice to see your review in The New Republic this week, Mr. Deemer!" With an introduction like that, no wonder it was all down hill from there.