Susan M. Schultz

Wednesday, August 02, 2006 8 a.m. --Mom is wearing a Kailua Surfriders Staff teeshirt this morning. That must be Bryant’s old shirt. No, she insists, it’s an Iowa teeshirt. The young man down the street, the one she’s never met, gave her an Iowa teeshirt when he heard she’d gone to Iowa. It’s Iowa. --I didn’t know she was coming today. -- She was sweet at 4 a.m., Bryant says. They had the first conversation about the shirt then. --Israel sends more ground troops into Lebanon.There’s an opportunity there, we read in the Washington Post. --I don’t like you. I don’t like them. I don’t like them either. And Susan? She laughs. --Compare and contrast the acquisition of a language to its loss. Avoid the trap of merely saying that the latter happens in reverse order of the former. You are likely to do better if you see them as similar processes, though one leads to gain, the other loss. Think chemistry. Think performance of a script. Think Harold and the Purple Crayon. Think Harold Pinter. --Think two old men fishing for a beautiful young woman in a lake. Think one of them might get “lucky.” --When are you leaving? Where are you going? Are you taking the kids? --Sangha and May hatch plots of their own. Go quiet when I arrive. In this life, you either make plots or have them hatched around you. Like eggs. Like poisoned ones. posted by Susan at 6:46 AM 0 comments

--The former President lost his temper. Loss of content in our public life. Only forms remain, intonation, affect.Why did you  yell in my mom’s house? Radhika asks our neighbor. --She sounded like she does when her hands shake. She does not want to be there. Bryant calls to ask about her things. A tape on osteoperosis. No. Foundations of Economics (from the 1930s). No. The Soviet shelf. No. The Nazi shelf. No. The Greeks, the Moslems. No. The speech and drama shelf. No. Encyclopedias, no. Check reigsters back to 1964. No. Harry Truman, no. Mrs. Ike, no. --Was her reading too intense? -- Grief is excess of sound. Anger is excess of form. Sadness can lack, or still exceed. Excess is overtone, the note beyond the note you sound. Without the tone, there is no object.Did I kill Bin Laden? No. But I tried. --My task is to inventory sentences, place them in order, box them up and ship them in a container. They are a sturdy furniture, haphazard art. They are boxes of papers, bills, pieces of a dissertation. A computer shopper magazine (discard). Titles whose aura was a life, or two, or three. The house is now full of light. A girl wanders through the rooms, trying keys at the windows. My mother knows none of this. --My father might be in the garden, or the scarecrow that wears his hat. Let him wander the house this last, inspect the plumbing, lights, air conditioning, the rows of beans, sort through medals, papers, release them as excess. posted by Susan at 12:44 PM 0 comments