June 6 1975

A lesson I want to teach myself as if a child: that which you want most–maple sugar, gum, great lovemaking, a baby, the ability to write–you cant get it by desiring.  Fate, the tide which brings and takes, is a sexual person, beautiful and proud.  She gives only of her own volition.  Insistent craving doesn’t attract gifts.  So turn your longing elsewhere and learn to do without, only then may it come, a surprise, a mystery, grace.  Its enemies are lust and satiation.

Last night at the dinner table drinking white wine in the wet sunswept yard and watching Jonah.  He’s in the field wrestling with his training-wheeled bike, kicking it, crying, spitting, calling it fucken asshole, finally abandoning it, going up the hill where Ezra rides the toy tractor.  He grabs it from Ezra, who struggles to hang on to it.  Jonah lifts it over his head and threatens to smash him with it.  Ezra goes back to the cabin where Jenny is riding the smallest car, rips it from her and starts hitting her.

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