Sold a café journal to a woman with short grey hair and tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, who is a professor of anthropology emeritus at Cal. (She is the second emeritus professor of anthropology to frequent the café, the other being from B.U. I had lived 70-years without meeting an emeritus professor of anthropology, and now I’ve met two. What’re the odds?)
“You’re losing your library,” I said, having read the article in the “Times.”
“A tragedy!” she said – and filled me in on the sit-in, the depth of the depravity, and the chances for a reversal of fortune.
“Why is the university doing this?” said a woman to whom I had said, “Mind her own business” the last time she had butted into a conversation of mine. (See earlier “Adventure” where I am called “Old Geezer.”)
“Because they need to pay the football coach more money,” I said.
“Exactly,” the professor said.
She didn’t have enough cash but I let her take it anyway. She promised to bring me the rest before she and her husband left the country, but she didn’t.
In other news…
1.) My display drew the attention of a very thin sixty-something fellow, dressed in – from top to bottom – baseball cap, unbuttoned camo-shirt over Mount Tam Bikes t-shirt, cut-off jeans above leggings, multi-colored wool socks within paratrooper-length canvas lace-up boots and accessorized with multiple rings and bracelets. He had been born in Marin but not, he made clear, to affluence and, four years ago, had decamped for Mexico because the US had become unbearable. He is a journalist, specializing in politics and the environment, with 30-years of credits with “The Progressive” and was in town for Wavy Gravy’s 87th birthday celebration. In the course of a lengthy rap, which included no questions of me, he dropped the names of, among others, Joan Baez, Peter Coyote, Barbara Dane, Daniel Ellsberg (“Very ill”), Allen Ginsberg, Mountain Girl, Ken Kesey, Pete Seeger, Gary Snyder, (“Not seeing anyone”), and Ron Turner (“Recently lost his wife.”). I can’t say to whom else he would have gotten if he had not been joined by a well-known local political and environmental activist with whom he moved outside to continue conversing for another half-hour.
2.) The Introduction to – but not the contract for – my new collection arrived. It is about 1500-words of nice things said about my work from the perspective of someone looking down on one solid block assembled over 20-years, rather than as separate fragments laid one-at-a-time upon the table. It was also cool to have an outsider evaluate who this was and where it came from and how it fit into what I may not have known was there.
So many Bob Levins on the Internet; I'm the Bob Levin who writes.