Mid-Chanouka

Mid-Chanouka, Christmas approaches.  I must send cards though I've not received so many yet.  The mail will certainly be slow.  I am alone for the holidays but so far still content.  I have had friends to wile away the few empty hours I can manage.  I should wile some away alone.  I once did so much alone.  I want to go throw the fly rod on an empty lagoon and try my luck.  I want to walk some winter salt marshes to see the wading birds that flock here this time of year.  I want to smell brine and see men lonelier than I through volition working on boats in abandoned harbors.  Everyone with a happy life is heading for it now.  The rest of us, orphaned by time or circumstance, pay for our sins this time of year.  It is a blessing and a curse.

I found this photograph first thing when I was looking up Peggy and Pegeen Guggenheim.  There were many good ones, but this one especially caught my eye.  Is the lighted space on the wall behind her head painted?  Surely it is.  What a trick.  Pegeen will always be this portrait to me.  I want to know little else.  She died tragically, they say, from an accidental overdose.  She lived in Paris at the time.  I wish she had known me.  She would have been much happier, I think.  Each of us would.  While she is no raving beauty, she is certainly my type.  We could have had good times together, like Peggy and Sam.

I must report that I am getting the W.B. Yeats syndrome.  I want to get monkey nuts transplanted into my abdomen if it will make me younger.  I want fifteen year old Iseulte to propose to me.  What a fool Yeats was. . . to decline.  Later he would prepose to her, but we know about a women rejected.  I do.  Lately.  Never say "no" on a first date.  There will be no second.  At least for boys.