Any time

I used to confuse Valerie Miner with Isobel Miller, author of Patience and Sarah. Must be the cover art of Winter's Edge in the Crossing Press 1985 edition — two women conversing by a window at a cafe ... in any event I'm intrigued about the possibilities of Winter's Edge being adopted into an opera just as Patience and Sarah has been. It wouldn't be a grand sweeping affair; it might be more like an oratorio focused upon a meditation on friendship and jealousy, a meditation framed by one's sense of mortality.

An important voice in such a work would be that of the character, Chrissie, who pauses in her work day as a waitress to offer some musing that given the workplace setting of their delivery inspire a sense of quotidian thoughtfulness rather than morbidity.

Yet as she grew older, it was hard to sleep in the mornings. Maybe the body's timer was saying, "You're closing in. Take as many hours as you can." Death was a curious shadow, a kind of companionable silhouette nowadays rather than the dark pathway she imagined as a girl. When she was younger, she would stare at old people and feel melancholy, thinking how sad that life was almost over for them. Now sometimes she looked at young folks and felt great sympathy for all the miles ahead. Doubtless, she would leave fighting, but she no longer felt any panic about her own death. Occasionally she regarded the notion with a certain serenity.

It strikes me now in transcribing this that the novel itself is serene in that the narration can end at any point in time along the way and one would still have a satisfying aesthetic experience as if one were browsing a set of snapshots.

And so for day 446
03.03.2008