Three Score Years and Ten

I have the unusual pleasure of writing this entry on my laptop from the lap of what I can only see as dark countryside. My son is on the bed beside me playing with a toy diver in a frogsuit while voices drift like bubbles through the old and commodious farmhouse. We have begun celebrating the artist's father's seventieth birthday and it is already a fine and handsome occasion. I am still feeling for the artist, though, as the gallerist, I am afraid to say, cancelled again at the very last moment. I had already blown up the balloon the artist promised would be flying as humorous indication of where on the busy road we lived. In fact I had just tied it to the tree outside and was about to disappear when I saw the artist on the phone looking dejected. Twice the gallerist has done this. She has rescheduled for next Thursday but still it gnaws. Again, I suppose, the party-line must be to be patient, to make allowances, but deep within I know the artist is disgruntled as well as disappointed. At least she knows it is no reflection of the work, I hope. Meanwhile my son tells me that where we are staying is no one's house because no one lives here, an absence not dissimilar to the one experienced by the artist today. Still, her father's seventy years are being celebrated and this is why we are here. A special person. Very. The type who would be embarrassed by such accolade. The artist's mother read out an accurately sprightly and endearingly unpretentious poem by the fire. Our daughter read one too, full of the cadences of the right kind of hope. The artist for her part has made a beautiful book, each of the drawings depicting various moments of the father's impressive and intelligently constructed life so far. (I watched her draw them with bowed head as if in a kind of melodic trance.) Now, I can smell the firewood on my hands from the fire I made and will return upstairs to the firelit party. (We are sleeping downstairs.)