Hello sweetheart, big kisses hello. Oh thank you thank you -- I am feeling a great physical palpable sense of relief at the moment. This after ten minutes of aghastness followed by panic followed by self-flagellation -- but -- darling - don't worry -- crisis averted, resolved favorably. It's just that I'm going to have to go to Bard again tomorrow -- to get my camera, which I obliviously forgot I had in my hand, so happy was I to find a computer there, on which I could check emails and for your pagehits -- that I forgot all else, including that I had just been outside, on this beautiful afternoon, taking pictures on a short break. Why was I there at all? To attend a Persian-inspired-estate-sponsored academic symposium, having to do with cutting-edge new interpretations and approaches for considering 19th century artists of the 'Hudson River School'. It was only $20, and I've always enjoyed art history, and more to the point, love the landscape here, and am aware of the more famous of these artists, and simply wanted to learn more, expand my knowledge (especially as a cheerfully submitting audience member, given my difficulty in concentrating on books lately), deepen my appreciation. I'm glad I attended, I learned a lot, including intriguing perspectives, ways of thinking that I have yet to digest (so - for another time, maybe). And also it made me feel, as this utter lay person there (not an art-historian, or in that world) that, at least in my frame of mind that's been developing in recent years, as much as I would have loved the lifestyle of academia - probably one that I might have found quite congenial - at the same time ultimately I'm not quite as analytical and narrowly-focused as a scholarly academician, not for the long-haul anyway. Ah, anyway - such thoughts are all behind me now -- I am who I am. But anyway - so I got home from the symposium, and was fishing in my bottomless pit of a bag for my camera, to download snapshots for tonight's post -- and no camera! But D very valiantly and kindly whipped out his cellphone, we figured out the number for Campus security, and within minutes -- one of the officers, in phone contact with the dispatcher I guess - found it, on his stroll through the science building.

Oh sweetheart, so little to report tonight. I missed you, thought about you so much on my drive shooting back north up Route 9G. You really are in my thoughts a whole lot. I wonder where you are - are you having a nice time, wherever it is? Here, it's just starting to inch towards dusk. There's a "super moon" tonight, I believe -- I wonder if I'll see it from here? I haven't researched it. But I'll be on the lookout for it. I'm inhaling the aroma of roast chicken. A pan of roast vegetables is about to go in the oven. The cedar barrels I planted with annuals yesterday look cheerful & summery, especially with a backdrop of a still-blooming dark violet French lilac.

Man, I'm so glad they found that camera, that it didn't get permanently lost, or found - and simply stolen.

Sweetheart, I simply haven't got any poetry in me tonight, it all went out of me, along with the adrenaline I expended fretting over the whereabouts of the Canon.

It was interesting to hear all these different perspectives on art. Really, the individual academicians -- each incredibly illustrious, stars in their field, in a way that, since I'm not in that world, I don't quite appreciate -- but truly they were all towards one another like -- an assemblage of rock-star luminaries.

They happened to be talking about painters of the Hudson River School, but my take-away, from my perspective, was to relate at least some of what they had to say to my own experiences. My head is spinning a bit. I don't write towards a 'market' - does that make me a privileged aesthete? My writing isn't epic and panoramic in nature - it's rather intimate, private, small-scale. I'm a writer -- the marks I leave are words. I'm not a calligrapher, or a painter -- oh there was a really wonderful talk, by one of the scholars, comparing, as one example, an 11th century Japanese calligrapher -- his marks devastatingly eloquent, full of drama and movement, fixed representations of the motion of swordplay -- with the bold, sure, physical brushstrokes of, an arguably similarly spiritually inclined, Hudson River school painter, in his deft portrayal of pines, that got at the very essence of pines...

Many kisses, dearest, have a wonderful evening --

xoxo