Aug 2 (backdated)

As it happens, I missed my bus from Albany to Boston because we got lost on the way to the place to buy slate, and by the time we found the man (Jim, a kind-faced old man in Whitehall, NY, who seems permanently sad because he’d lost his wife to cancer 7 years ago and since then his hair had been falling out from grief — ‘Are you Chinese?’ he asked me. ‘I tried acupuncture you know, but it didn’t help.’), and were taken to the slate pile (pavers heaped in a gravelly patch, not cut to neat rectangles but irregularly sized, in coloured piles — S. says he will cut them to size himself (I approve, who could never master the concept of straight lines) and finally loaded up the little trailer and strapped the slate down (subtle purple with green streaks! lake green! deep blue-grey!) — the car was huffing and puffing along like a walrus, not exactly a chase-that-bus-to-the-next-town sort of fast car. So it is bus from Syracuse this morning, and Boston by nightfall. (And we bought a portable vintage Hermes typewriter from a big man who lives in a ranch on a small hill in Corinth, NY.)