All mass shootings are horrific, but for me the Brown University situation has been particularly upsetting. I grew up outside of Providence and spent my childhood and youth among the university music buildings and bookstores, among the East Side shops and streets. Then in my twenties Tom and I lived for several years on Governor Street, a block or so from this shooting, while he was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. Our son Paul later lived in the neighborhood, too, when he was enrolled in a Brown summer drama program. Providence was my first city, Brown was the center of my music life, that neighborhood was the spring of my love affair with Tom, and so this shooting is geographic distress, memory distress, in addition to all of its other distresses.

I sit here now, in a couch corner, in a living room, in a little house, in another small New England city neighborhood, one not so different from the East Side--watery, tree-lined, domesticated; shops and sidewalks and students.

We cling to our innocence because what else can we do?

Yesterday was a sociable day--haircut at 11, lunch with a friendly author at noon; then out again at 6 with Tom to the Bakery Photo Collective's annual auction, which is a giant hoo-hah, packed with people, a band, an open bar (he always donates work and we like to see what others are up to), then driving back across town to my friend Marita's birthday party, and then at 8 T suddenly says, "Let's go out to dinner," so the evening turns into a date: we drive home, park, and stroll around the corner to our local, where I eat mussels and T eats a croque monsieur, and we hold hands on the icy walk home. "When's the last time we went three places in one evening?" he asks, and I say, "Maybe never?"

Portland is such a nice city to be social in, partly because it only takes 10 minutes to drive from one end  to another and yet there's a variety of neighborhoods and things to do: lots of arty stuff, excellent food, the ever-present bay, and then back to our old-fashioned little enclave, with its walks and gardens and friends so close by. The best thing, really, is that T has taken a shine to my poets; it makes me so happy to watch them get to know one another better. He is pleased to hang out with them, to go on outings with them, and I am so glad to have my varied sweethearts take joy in one another.

And now here we are, Saturday morning, still dark outside, no doubt still cold and breezy, the sidewalks still slick. I've got various this-and-that plans for the weekend: cleaning the basement, working on Christmas cards, cogitating over summer conference stuff, going to the fish market, finishing up my Christmas shopping. I've had a busy week, and I'll have a busy weekend, and next week will be busy too.  But that is the tale of December.

It's cold and windy outside, the kind of weather that rumples up house sparrows in the hedges and makes oak trees creak like old men. Yes, I will go for my walk this morning, but I'll feel as if I'm atoning for sin.

Friday: recycling day, wash-the-bedding day, run-errands day, then back-to-my-desk day. The furnace huffs and puffs against the cold. Cavorting among the legs of the dining-room chairs, Little Chuck plays chow hockey with his breakfast.

I've been editing madly, reading Tennyson madly, trying to catch up and keep up, solve and speculate, juggle Christmas planning with class planning, project planning, poem writing, and I don't have a clear idea about where most of this is headed, though I'm hoping something will surprise me, and not in a bad way. I could use a week alone to stare out the window, but alas.

Still, I'm lively, so there's that.

This has been such a buckle-down-and-get-stuff-done week, mostly involving my piles of desk work. Yesterday I turned in one editing project to the press, finished a large section of another, and figured out next week's high school plans. I also made a lot of progress on Tennyson's "Idylls" and read some Fussell--which, coincidentally, happens to mention Tennyson's "Idylls" as a culprit in the era's urge to romanticize war language.

Today will be more of the same, plus housework, and then probably I'll go out to write tonight. But I also need to fetch a library book; I need to do some editing of the Poetry Lab Substack drafts; I need to read a few more crowns of sonnets so that I can talk about them with Jeannie and Teresa; I need to think about the faculty performance that Gretchen, Gwynnie, Teresa, and I are beginning to create for the summer conference in Monson . . . 

Too much, too much, and then Christmas on our heels . . . My work life seems to require one invention after another. All I do is either make stuff up myself or help other people figure out what to do with the stuff they're making up. Yesterday, as I was standing in line at Walgreens, I was a little jealous of the cashier. It seemed like a restful job, just being cheerful and telling customers they've stuck their debit cards into the slot upside down. But no doubt Walgreens is really a bubbling cauldron of evil, and the cashier goes home every afternoon wanting to slit his throat.

Well, Chuck, for one, is fully satisfied with his lot. After a nice breakfast, he's in the kitchen chattering to Tom--chirp, yeek, chirp. He sings like a chubby little round-eyed bird. No one is happier than he is. 

On this dark morning, under a new skim of snow, the street-lit houses and cars look like toys forgotten outside, a dollhouse town frozen into a wintry Pompeii . . . until the first car door slams and the scene jolts back to plain old Wednesday.

The days unroll. Last night's reading morphs into today's doctor's appointment into tomorrow's housework. Yards crisscross with squirrel tracks. Fat juncos flutter like leaves. A wrecked car yawns in a ditch. In the windy parking lot at the post office, I clutch a box of Christmas presents as a woman begs me for bus fare to the warming shelter.

It is winter, it is winter, and the sky is streaked with cloud, and the city dogs wear their jackets when they go out to pee, and the country dogs dig up chipmunk burrows and bark at the plow guy, and the man who collects cans has to shove his grocery cart through ridges of salt and slush.

I open a book and a serious person tells me, "Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected," and I believe him, I believe I should read more, should absorb this suffering, I should take it into my deepest self, but the print in this book is very small and my eyes wander off to the high corners of the room, where the spiders refuse to be squelched; every day they tack up new webs, little laundry lines, little hammocks, little traps. "In the Great War eight million people were destroyed because two persons, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his Consort, had been shot." Why is it Consort and not consort? My mind sinks into trivia, I am the least of god's creatures, I wander into the kitchen and fill the kettle for tea.

Seven degrees this morning in the little northern city by the sea, and the doughty furnace is hard at work.

My busy week continues. I've got scads of editing awaiting, tonight's poetry reading to prep for, a Christmas box to pack and ship. I need to get onto my mat, deal with Monson planning, catch up on my Tennyson homework, and by 4:30 I'll hit the road with the poets, heading north for our event in Gardiner.

Despite this to-do list, I did somehow manage to oversleep, which for me is always a coup even if it also throws our weekday routine into an uproar. But the bustle is over. T's truck has vanished around the corner, and I am finally sitting down for a minute, listening to the kettle heat, listening to Chuck chirp to himself.

That guy, as usual, is full of thrill and wonder. Yesterday he hurled himself into the hysterical joys of gift wrapping. Now he is wedged against my shoulder, purring lustily. He's the happiest kid in town, this guy: not a speck of grievance or side-eye. My neighbor thinks he'll probably grow up to be an asshole like the rest of the cats. But I'm not sure. He seems entirely clueless about such responsibilities.

This week I've been reading an odd combination of books: Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, a serious and complicated tome; David Trinidad's semi-crown of sonnets "A Poet's Death," which I am puzzling over form-wise; Lord Byron's "Idylls of the King," which, to my surprise, is a fast and absorbing read; and Kate Douglas Wiggin's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, a beautiful first edition from 1903 that is a pleasure to hold but that also clarifies why Louisa May Alcott was a far superior writer in the American-girl-grows-up-to-be-a-moral-and-imaginative-being genre.

Now, at first light, I am trying to inspire myself to leap into action. Outside the cold seems visible--an aura of blue stillness, snow as stiff as porcelain clay. Laundry awaits, and the litterbox and firewood and all the rest of my trivial round.

Though Fussell writes: 

Two nights before participating in the attack on the Somme--perhaps the most egregious ironic action of the whole war--[the poet Siegfried] Sassoon found himself "huddled up in a little dog-kennel of a dug-out, reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles." Clearly there are some intersections of literature with life that we have taken too little notice of.

Usually I am the primary Christmas shopper, mostly because my schedule is more flexible than Tom's. This is a default situation, not a preferred one: I am not a shopping enthusiast. But by some magic, the two of us managed to get much of our shopping done this weekend--together, in person, in town, from local stores and artists we like. Plus, Tom made a fantastic shopping coup for himself: in a vintage clothing shop he found a pair of pale blue suede Italian dress shoes, with red laces and soles, that fit him perfectly. Blue suede shoes for our son's wedding! What a magnificent find.

So despite my dislike of shopping, we had a pretty good weekend. And now I must gird myself for an intense week, starting tomorrow night, at 6 p.m., when I'll be reading at the Table Bar in Gardiner, Maine, with some of my favorite people: Gretchen Berg, Marita O'Neill, Betsy Sholl, and Meghan Sterling. In the interstices, I'll be dealing with stacks of editing and class planning, plus various appointments and obligations, plus cold and ice and holiday chores. Ugh, December is a ridiculous month.