Stillness

The morning routine goes this way: I rise and Sketch rises with me and wants his breakfast. After eating, he wants to go outside and do his business. And then, most of the time, I can wait while he sniffs around for the right place to unload, and in the waiting experience the remarkable silence and stillness of the hour, even in the city. Occasionally a distant car will pass by but not this morning. Absolute, total stillness. There's nothing like it.

Back inside I tell Sketch to go back to bed and he does. Usually I then turn on the Kindle and read the Post and Times (Washington and L.A.) but this morning I am downstairs because I have some changes in my work in progress to make while I remember them. They were in my head when I awoke.

More writing later today, and some piano practice, and some bills to pay. I call it the good life.

It was nice to see Barry Johnson's remark about "back in the day," remembering my local presence as a playwright then. So long ago. It also feels good to be secure in the fact that I've been doing my best work these past ten or fifteen years, even if few seem to appreciate it, but one day they will. I haven't inspired the last reader who discovers my work in a dusty library basement. The writer-reader process keeps on truckin'. The recent fan letter from Australia reinforces this. (My best audience may not even be in the U.S.)