Today I will go to the dealership and sign papers for a 2022 Mazda CX-30--white exterior, black interior, 59,000 miles on it, full of safety features, all-wheel drive, handles beautifully, a clean accident history, and costing more than I spent for a year of college at a Little Ivy so, please, fates assure me I'm not making a terrible mistake. The credit union is closed for Juneteenth today, so we can't move forward with the financing till Monday. But at some point next week I'll be bringing home a car, and you will have the pleasure of never hearing me talk about car shopping again. (This is probably a lie, as T's elderly pickup is next in line for catastrophic failure.)

Storms raced through yesterday, but today is dawning calm and bright. I'm not sure what's on my schedule, other than signing away our life's blood for a car at some point in the day and talking about poems with Teresa and Jeannie this afternoon. The beaten-up peonies are in dire need of rescue, so once the garden dries out a bit, maybe I'll find a chance to prune away the smashed blossoms. I'm plodding through The Brothers Karamazov, wishing that I was enjoying it more and hoping that once I get through this slow beginning I'll suddenly latch onto it. Part of my problem is that the print in this edition is really small. But also the characters aren't attractive in any way, at least not so far, so I'm having a hard time caring about what's about to happen to them. I've always loved Tolstoy much more than Dostoevsky, but I was hoping that finally, in my maturity, I might have learned to broaden my scope. Apparently not.

After packing another day with stupid car stuff, I was able to track down another option that we are close to buying . . . if all goes well with the loan. This time I was able to put a 24-hour hold on the vehicle so at least it won't sell out from under us. It's not as good a deal as the one we lost, but it's adequate, and it's more or less the same car. On my travels I did test-drive a new Corolla AWD hybrid, which I expected to love but I did not. The hybrid part was fine, but the car itself felt kind of tinny, like I was driving a toy. I guess it's some comfort to know I'm not pining over a car I can't afford anyway.

Well, everything could go south again, but I am hoping that maybe, please, finally, at last I can stop shriveling my soul with Carfax reports. Ay yi yi. 

One great thing that happened yesterday was getting a beautiful long friendly letter from someone I'm eager to get to know better. A hand extended is always a surprise and a delight, but it was especially comforting at a moment when my spirits are being crushed in the vehicular mills. So I'm feeling brighter this morning, a little more like myself, a little less like a cog in the vortex, and I'm actually remembering that I like to do things such as gardening and reading and writing and cooking and going for walks and hanging out with friends and hanging out by myself and playing cards with Tom and texting funny stories to my sons and entertaining the cat by poking him with a dust mop.

Not that I'm out of the doldrums. Ever more glop awaits--wincingly taking the plunge, haggling with a salesman, signing piles of paperwork, buying insurance, dealing with registration, getting the dead Subaru out of the driveway. But after that, in the hazy future, maybe I can relax and let myself enjoy owning a car that doesn't terrify me every day.

Today rain is forecast, so no sheets on the outside lines. I've got desk work to do, an afternoon zoom meeting, and I may end up hosting my writing group here tonight as our usual host has a conflict. I hope to tear my thoughts away from cars, at least for part of the day. And surely there's a writing prompt I could invent from a Carfax report. . . .

Someone else bought the car before I could get there, so we are back to the beginning of this ordeal. I'd spent all morning trying to pull together the various threads--trying to reach T who was on a construction site with bad cell service, trying to reach the loan officer, who was incommunicado at various times. The end result was crushing and I cried. I so hate this process. Every decision is wrong: be too careful and you lose the vehicle; be too rash and you end up with a lemon; do anything at all and you're saddled with a financial boulder.

My over-emotions were also linked to the fact that I'd been awake all night fretting. It's hard to be serene when I've had almost no sleep. Fortunately, I did manage to drop off last night, though I had to do some work to get myself there. And I do feel less tragic this morning.

Oy. This is not how I want to live out my days--combing through Blue Book and JD Power printouts, comparing the details of CarFax reports, researching complaints about reliability, watching T plot out the horrors of loan repayment for each possibility I track down. The fact is: I don't even like to drive. I would be delighted to never drive again. But my job--which I love--requires me to travel long distances in bad weather over bad roads. And thus I must have a car, and the car must have all wheel drive, and be in decent shape, and not have ridiculously high mileage, and cannot break down all the time. This doesn't seem like a lot to ask for, does it? However, such basic parameters mean that the car will cost more than $20,000. We're in a brutal situation, no matter how we look at it.

At least we like each other, so there's that.

I think I may have found my car yesterday, though we haven't yet had the final discussion about how I should move ahead. It's a 2022 Mazda CX-30 with 32,000 miles on the odometer, still under warranty for the big things (engine, transmission, and such) and with a fairly modest trim package, which is keeping the price sort of reasonable (not that reasonable is actually a word one can associate with car pricing). So I'll likely be spending my day in sales/credit union/insurance purgatory, and of course I got almost no sleep last night because of worrying about car stuff, meaning that I'm in prime shape for such a thrilling day.

But better to just get it done. I'll be relieved to have this over: to park the replacement car in the driveway, get the junker car towed to its final destination, and return the borrowed car with gratitude and a full tank of gas.

Otherwise, what's new? It's hard to recall, given that my brain and my hours have mostly been sucked up into the horrible car vortex. I met with Teresa yesterday afternoon to talk about Aurora Leigh and her lovely poetry manuscript, so that was a respite. I did some editing, and I did some housework. I dealt with an invasion of ants into Chuck's chow dish. (He was disappointed I got rid of them; he enjoyed the ants.) I've been working on poem drafts, though I don't much like where they're going. Still, better to be writing than not writing, even if the results are disappointing.

It's a dark morning, raining steadily. I've been sleeping hard lately, for some reason, and it was sweet to swim up from depths to a slow awareness of tap and clatter against the panes.

Monday has arrived: I'll be back to editing; I need to do my weekly housework; I've got a meeting this afternoon--but the rain is a silvery gate into the day.

I'm still finishing The Red Queen, but I decided yesterday that my next novel will be Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamozov, which I haven't reread for years. I also ordered Randall Jarrell's novel Pictures at an Institution from the library, on the advice of a friend. I've been thinking about Jarrell's poems since I shared that review of Bishop with you the other day. Maybe the one poem contemporary readers might know is "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." But there are many other World War II-linked poems, many set beyond the war as well. His poems are lonely. His characters mostly don't know what to do in this world, other than what they have to do.

Jarrell's poems are emotional, compressed, accomplished. I don't want to forget them.

We did venture out to a dealership yesterday, where I drove a used Mazda CX-30 that is probably too expensive for us, but I did like the car and how it handled, so at least I learned something. It's not going to be easy to find a car with 50,000 miles or less that has all-wheel drive and a reputation for reliability. I've had to give up my hopes of a used hybrid AWD: they're completely out of our price range. But a Mazda seems like a possibility, if we can find one that's a little cheaper than the one I drove . . . or, I suppose, if we can dicker the price down, though that is not a talent that either one of us possesses. Here's where my older son would come in handy: he is the family fast-talker; the rest of us just stand back and marvel. But unfortunately he is too far away to muscle in as our agent.

Once we gritted our way through the dealership ordeal, the day returned to being a regular summer Saturday. I weeded the front gardens, mowed the front and back yards, listened to the Sox win, made pizza, texted with my boys, sat in the shade and read my Drabble novel. In the evening I watched some of the Knicks game while Tom checked out a garage-band show at the VFW.

Now the house is draped in Sunday-morning peace. Cool air floats through the open windows. Chuck, full of breakfast, crouches at the screen door listening to robin song. Upstairs, T clanks his coffee cup against his saucer. Sunlight streaks the walls. A passing crow complains.

I might spread mulch this morning. I might wash windows. I might go for a bike ride. It feels nice to not care too much, one way or the other. Anything could change my mind.

The novel I'm rereading, The Red Queen, is set in the Korean royal court in the late 1700s. It overflows with repression and protocol and madness and disaster. The book is a sorrowful companion, yet the voice of the Crown Princess, the central character, is so very sane in the midst of insanity. I won't say that her voice is helpful to me, here in our own insane historical moment. But it is clarifying.

I always enjoy plundering the local free library boxes during my morning walks, and yesterday I was pleased to find two nearly mint-condition copies of Life from 1969: one a special issue about the moon landing, the other titled "The Incredible Year '68." Both contain many cigarette and cheap liquor ads. One encourages me to buy a Toyota because it comes with "backup lights." Both, oddly, include long poems by James Dickey. But in my view, the piece-de-resistance is a poetry review by someone named Charles Elliott, which opens like this:

When Judgment Day arrives in the seminars of Elysium, Elizabeth Bishop stands a pretty fair chance of being put down as a minor poet.

It then touches on the superiorities of Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Marianne Moore before spending two columns grudgingly admitting that EB has something going for her, though it can't possibly be lasting.

It's the oddest review--one essentially saying "Here's a book I like but I refuse to believe that people in the future will care about such things," as if legacy should be the prime mover in any discussion of art, as if simple present-tense pleasure is a lesser experience.

Of course the comedy, nearly 60 years later, lies in the Judgment Day that's already arrived: in our own fashionable pantheon, Bishop's star floats higher than any of the other names that Elliott chose to taunt her with. Lowell has been reduced to "crazy guy," Moore to "technician," Jarrell to nothing at all . . . who remembers Jarrell? This is just as unfair as Elliott's original review was, but so go "the seminars of Elysium."

**

Sea fog rolled into the little northern city last night, and it lingers this morning. The neighborhood is green and misty and freighted with wet, and the air smells of brine. But the air, though humid, is pleasantly cool, and I am wrapped in my red bathrobe by the open window, happy to be drinking hot black coffee, happy to be listening to a robin who seems to be pretending to be a thrush--those long liquid sad remarks, the music of a forest evening suddenly reenacted on a city morning.

I worked on a couple of poem drafts yesterday, finished the Erdrich novel, started rereading Margaret Drabble's The Red Queen, made garlicky pappardelle with shrimp, scallions, and chard, listened to some of the Sox game, stared out into the fog. Next week I'll start the move back into work life . . . it's time, and I'm ready, but my little early summer hiatus has been sweet, and I'll miss it.

Meanwhile today I suppose we'll do something or other about car shopping. The credit union still hasn't decided how much money to lend us, and T has been working out various scenarios which he has yet to share with me, but Saturday is our only window to visit a dealership, so I expect we will gird on our swords and stride into the fray at some point today. (Though why aren't dealerships open on Sundays? That seems like a stupid decision for a capitalist to make.)