My problem is that I can't fictionalize...I lack the imagination...and that dismays me...I'm supposed to have imagination but instead, I feed off the imagination of others...

At one time I thought of creating a repository for fragments...bits and pieces and vignettes that others could borrow...

Someone has already taken Great Aunt Martha...At the age of 21 I heard her for the first time and realized that genetically deep voices were a fact. We growled at each other.

I met her for the first time at 7:30 in the morning. I had just gotten off a boat from Glasgow...actually it was a boat with a trailer...there was a trailer of very drunken Scottish football fans going to Ireland to beat the Irish...

Great Aunt Martha...aged eighty something in curlers and a dressing gown that was left over from rationing...opened the door...grinned and said: God, we're an ugly family."

I wonder how long she had been planning that one. For some reason or other, it didn't bother me...It still doesn't.bother me...

Several days into my visit we went walking in Belfast and suddenly she said she had to sit down. I understood true manipulations when she chose to sit down in her hair dressers and since we were already there, she said that I might as well get get my hair cut.

I got my hair cut.

After all she had managed a golf club near the Giants' Causeway, bought three houses (She had two sisters other than my grandmother and they refused to live together,) and married a Belfast banker at the age of 50. In Belfast, the bankers owned the bank...

So there's my fragment for today...