My dear love, I am feeling like a bit of an airhead on my trip to New York. Just now I've been alternately regarding my fingertips, poised above the keyboard not quite ready to alight, and admiring my new watch - silver bracelet, oblong face, analog hands reading nearly quarter past six, only the even numerals enumerated around the square circle 2 * 4 * 6 * 8 * 10 *12 * odd hours implied by tiny crystal dots that glint as I move my wrist. How are you, my dearest? I miss you, I wish I could take you in, as that Brooklyn song intones, wouldn't that be nice. I wonder if together you & I might have gone out on the town a whole lot more than I have on this visit. I haven't been motivated to go to Manhattan at all, except my first full day here when I felt impelled to buy my watch. I've felt quite content to be parked here, and strolling the various neighborhoods that are within walking distance. I don't feel like spending any money at all on public transit. That watch really was a splurge and a treat. It turns out that a couple of days after D dropped me off down here, the car died - and it turned out to be not the alternator or the battery, but both - the alternator (if I'm getting this right) put out too high a voltage which killed the battery. Fortunately close to home - and we live a stone's throw from a very good repair shop - D was able to drop off the car and it's a five-minute walk home. But the repairs were several hundred dollars. The same thing happened a while ago to our neighbor's car - only they broke down near Poughkeepsie - which entailed a several-hundred-dollar towing charge as well. So we were spared that. And what a nightmare if the car had died on the way down or on the way back up from the city, on the Taconic, or the Saw Mill.

So I'm not doing the NY culture thing exactly, but I've been enjoying my stay. The pool reopened so I enjoyed a glorious swim this afternoon, and hope to again tomorrow and Thursday too. I've decided to stay an extra day, I'm relishing the pool so much, in so many ways - the sheer joy of being buoyant in water, moving my limbs amphibianly, gaining nice color from bright midday sun, the peaceful languorous scene with the pool's relaxed denizens, the vigorous walk there and back, save for the brief harrowing crossing-under-the-highway part.

My dearest, so little to report this evening, and maybe (though I try not to ever let myself feel this way - anymore) a little cowed by literary talent. I did a workout to Charlie Rose yesterday, and he had on a preternaturally gifted young novelist whom I'd heard of but never read. She had started out as a poet, and I googled her name and read a couple of poems, and was quite blown away. I had this sense of her too, watching the interview - she's a genius, there is just some unmistakable transcendent quality. She sees into the essences of things, is attuned to them. It shows on her face, even her mischievous grin. She speaks in full formed cogent smooth paragraphs. She's self-aware, but unpretentious. Actually, she reminded me, her physical appearance even, of what E.D. might have been like, if one could have encountered E.D. - that kind of rare keen intelligence. Here's a link to one of her poems, written when she was quite young - before she abandoned poetry (if she did?), or at any rate before she turned to writing novels.

I think 1.0 might like that poem - or, as I read it, it reminded me of him. He strikes me as being on a similar quest as that of a poet, grasping phenomena on a very detailed and at the same time broad-scaled epic level, and getting at the truth, the bare essence, which he reveals within the form and conventions of theoretical scholarly prose, with economical - given his vast subject - exposition.

Like that, darling. I don't get cowed by others (more than occasional sideways pangs) too often anymore at my age. I felt very overwhelmed by others' genius voices while I was younger - which only silenced me. So I have my own thing, my own schtick, and perhaps I'm aiming too low, but I don't know. Belle, you should attempt a novel! You should attempt a serious poem!, sternly admonishes some mostly muffled inner voice.

No, that's not the quality of who I am. Let Nicole K. be who she is - I'm happy to have discovered her, and let me be who I am.

Approaching ten to seven now.

I love you. Not everyone writes directly to his or her muse. I'm glad that I do, and I'm glad it's you.