Old Tom at table sips his hot tea in the hot room and thinks a man may have, as Okakura Kazaku wrote, too much tea in him, but too much of nothing, Dylan sang, makes a man ill at ease, while bottles of chardonnay and riesling from the night before and the night before that stand on the table with crusts and crumbs of French bread. Out in the light of day Sonoma Valley lies green of oak and brown of grass under a haze of blue sky, sky-blue, distance.
15 September 1981