It's pouring down rain. Very Seattle. I've covered the new patio furniture, and now I'm trying to get the cushions off and indoors. There's three inches of water on the patio. Yesterday Kevin and I climbed up to Bridal Falls on Mount Index. Went about as high as the Columbia Tower, but much more fun. My calves hurt just the same, however.

The memorabilia for the day is a little Valentine from my then 6-year-old brother Brian. He is now 48, and balding. I remember someone asking him once where he got that white (blonde) hair, and after thinking hard for a minute, he replied, "The milkman."

Another time capsule from my friend Jan at St. Olaf's. She sends a program of chamber music which includes "Improvisations" on "Wah-Watusi" and "Roses Are Red (My Love)".

She begins, "Well, I've decided that I can't leave. I mean only in the St. Olaf bookstore would Ferlinghetti, Kierkegaard and Winnie-the-Pooh be the best sellers." She and friends have had discussions about "what constitutes literary tream-of-thought as used by James Joyce one way and differently by other writers." She's been to see Miriam Makeba, and will soon see "La Strada" and Bergman's "The Seventh Seal." Her friend Ira got fined $8 for writing poetry on the walls of his room and refusing to clean it off. "You never did write me you know and tell me if you have read ferlinghetti, so do so, please and thank you. Witzke and i gave each other copies of winnie the pooh for our birthdays last week and i read mine as a bedtime story for devotions."

I don't remember reading Ferlinghetti that year. I was probably too busy baking chocolate cakes for the Devil's fucking Darling Dance.

September of '62. Letter from Ft. Knox. Basic training. Written in very tiny letters on very tiny paper. The notebook he's to carry with him wherever he goes. He uses it to write letters. Every day, he says. My god. Did we really do that before e-mail? He talks of army life as being totally "on quite a different pitch or level...completely out of harmony with the outside world..." and compares it with life on the Carthage College campus - both instances of isolation. "Here," he writes, "it is quite different in that all convention and conformity are absent. Now I'm not speaking of the regimentation, etc., which is imposed upon us all by the gov't. I refer, rather, to the diversities between the men themselves and the effect it makes upon our interpersonal relations." That's all. This is obviously before "diversification" hit the college campuses. Carthage was so very lily white in the sixties - I'm surprised there were any brunettes! If there was a black student (I don't remember any), he (and it would have been a he) was from Africa.