"Nothing is wasted on the writer."

Are you a real writer? The sure way to find out...

It's 9:24 a.m.

I have to leave at 10:00 to drive a deeply depressed friend to her therapy appointment. I am in the middle of writing one of my long, thoughtful, typical essay-type posts, which my friend Ronni Lundy calls "blongs." I left it, and began writing this instead.

I have a bowl of Irish oatmeal beside me, cooked with diced apples, which melt to creaminess as the oats cook, studded with pieces of medjool dates, which also soften to caramel-like bits, added in the last few minutes. The bowl, brown and grey pottery, with visible finger-rings, was thrown by my late husband. If I lifted it up I'd see, on its bottom, his scratched-in signature: Ned Shank, 1971. Stirred into the finished Irish oatmeal is a heaping teaspoon of almond butter, and a drizzle of maple syrup, from the trees tapped by my nearest neighbor, here in Vermont.

I am going to see if I can write an actual short blog post, and get it done before I hop into the car to do my mission of mercy, which I both want, deeply, to do, and am slightly irritated at having to do (I have been hanging in there with my depressed friend for many months now. It's getting old. But I am ridiculously loyal, to my friend, and stubborn;  insistent, internally, that I know this is part of her life process, and mine, and that she and I will get through it, and that it will someday have meaning).

I am trying to finish this because nothing in the universe, that I have found, makes me feel as "God's in heaven and all's right with the world," as writing, particularly when I finish a piece. (I accidentally wrote, and just found and corrected, "all's write with the world.")

I have 50 published books out: all with name, traditional publishers: HarperCollins (Harper & Row when they published me), Simon and Schuster, Macmillan (now also part of Simon and Schuster), Charles Scribners (now defunct), Workman. And I have one coming out with Little, Brown (leading at times to peculiar, hilarious, but truthful statements like, "I'm going in to have lunch with the Little Brown people tomorrow.") 

But I don't believe, in my heart of hearts, that I am a real writer until I have written that day. That day, being each day. Being today.

It's the holidays. Should I go to a party that is large enough so that I don't know everyone and strike up conversation with a stranger, it is likely at some point he or she will say, "So, what do you do?"

And I will say, "I'm a writer."

"Oh," he or she will say. And then that subtle shift in tone. "Published?"

Meaning, are you a real writer or an amateur, just futzing around. Meaning, where do I put you on the one-up one-down scale. Should I be impressed (are you famous? have I heard of you?), interested and slightly respectful (oh, you write a column for the Brattleboro Reformer which I may have read) or merely polite (how interesting, excuse me while I get another deviled egg).

I say yes when so asked, because I am a published writer, after all. Yes. True. But if I haven't written that day, I feel, in my heart of hearts, like a hypocrite.

The outside world, in the form of real and imaginary people at cocktail parties, teachers, parents, and siblings, will tell you, directly and indirectly, that a real writer equals a published writer.

Except every writer was at some point an unpublished writer. And even every published writer returns periodically to being unpublished, during the time they are writing.

This is so obvious. Except, evidently, it isn't.

Twitter is a medium I use (I'm @cdragonwagon) and simultaneously like and loathe, in part because the same limitation of characters that forces you to be succinct and pithy also forces you to write "U" for "you" at times.

Here's the one sentence version of this post, as I put it on Twitter a few days back:  "Act of writing makes U 'real' writer. O,U thought it was publication? In his lifetime,Van Gogh sold O paintings; was he a 'real' artist?"

I said above, vis a vis the location where I feel like a phony if I haven't written on the day --- any day --- when I'm asked about being a writer if I haven't written that day, "in my heart of hearts."

By which I mean, in that interior True North by which one steers; to which, if one is true, one feels in alignment, living life with purpose and integrity.

Veer a few degrees from that compass point, and one becomes a hypocrite in one's own eyes, whether or not the world notices (and it usually won't, until the degrees are so many that the degree of offness is blindingly evident).

At least I feel that way if I deviate by even a couple of degrees.

But not today.

For now it is 9:50 a.m. And though I have not finished my oatmeal, I have written.

Like one of the ads for one of the airlines used to say, "We earn our wings each day."

Today I earned my wings: I wrote. Therefore, I am a real writer.

It's a relief.

9:55 a.m.

All I have to do is hit "publish" and I will both a real and a published writer.

Again. Until tomorrow.

uncovering: a yak, a six-year-old, and some witches walk into a post...

The little girl who asked me the question was a first-grader then. Assuming she is still alive, she's 36 or so, probably with children of her own.

But our paths crossed just the one time. That was in 1982, in Atlanta, Georgia. I came to her class as a visiting writer. So I know her only as a six-year-old, and only from one interaction. In my mind she is today exactly what and who she was then: an adorable, very solemn little girl, with light brown skin and black hair caught back with pink barrettes.

The reason she's in my mind today has to do with children books and their illustrations. I have a new children's book,  All the Awake Animals (Are Almost Asleep), coming out about a year from now, which will be illustrated by David McPhail. I am so delighted with what I have seen of the pictures so far that I have posted a few of them on Facebook. Which prompted a comment that reverbed me back to that little girl's question.

All the Awake Animals is my first new children's book to be released in almost a decade (for reasons I describe on a video here, made at a talk I gave about a week after the book was accepted by Little, Brown... and in which I slip up in a ridiculous way at the end).

I am loving working with Little, Brown's Andrea Spooner, Senior Executive Editor of Books for Young Readers. She is one of the most attentive and respectful editors I have ever had; even when the discussion runs to, say, at what time of day and in what manner a vole, otter, lion, yak, walrus -- shown here catching "forty wet winks" after "wading into the waves"--- or an urubu actually sleeps. (An urubu is an African vulture; few animals start with  "u".)

The book begins:

My little one,
Lay down your head
It's time for sleep
It's time for bed

You tell me,
"I'm not sleepy now,"
"Just try," I say.
You ask me, "How?"

After a few more exchanges, the mother takes the child on a slow, dreamy visit to 26 different animals, all in various stages of snooze or near-snooze. They go animal by animal, one for each letter of the alphabet, from Antelope ("asleep all the way to his antlers" ) to Zebra (who "just zzzzzzzs...") before returning to a final dozy reiteration of rhyme.

Andrea took a lot of time finding just the right artist, and she is taking a lot of time working with him, and me. In 40 years of working with different publishers, I can remember no other children's book editor who has ever involved me quite so much in the selection of the artist, and has engaged me so thoughtfully in discussing the pictures and my reactions to them.

Nor, for that matter, has that happened with any cookbook editor/art director (for non-photographic cookbooks, too, have 'spot art' and 'chapter openers' and while they are less essential than in a children's book, and though the reader may be only aware of them peripherally, these illustrations either do or do not enhance the words and recipes).

Yet this indirect collaboration I'm now experiencing with David is so good! It's so easy! It's so much fun! I wonder why, in general, there seems to be, in many editors' minds, a separation-of-church-and-state thing about writers and illustrators?

At any rate, I am deeply grateful. And, as I see the watercolors David  is doing, I am delighted; exhilarated, even. Though perhaps that's not quite the right word, for the pictures are sleepy, cozy, dozy, soporific. You can hardly look at them and not start yawning, like yak is doing here: just what you want in a goodnight book.

Yet their perfection does exhilarate me. They are luminous and tender, but not anthropomorphic or cute. The textures --- of the animals' fur, feathers, hides, tusks --- are so vivid I can imagine children stroking the paper to feel them, and growing puzzled that they can see but not touch the softness or roughness. The backgrounds are soft, impressionistic dreamscapes, suffused with soft light; light which makes shadows,  refracts on water, or pierces clouds.

As I say, I am so delighted with these pictures that I have been sharing a few of them, as they progress, on Facebook. First the sketches, now the almost-finished drawings / paintings. And my Facebook pals --- many of whom are readers, parents or grandparents, or artists themselves --- are also enthusiastic, and many have been commenting on them too.

It is in this context that Cathy Smith, who blogs marvelously at "Growing Curious", and who farms, cans and preserves at Curious Farm and sells at local farmer's markets in her area, just outside of Portland, Oregon, asked me

what is it like to have your story brought into the visual realm by someone else? since you're so comfortable in this publishing world, do you just go with the flow at this point, or does it stop your heart sometimes?"

Let's leave aside the fact that I don't think I or anyone else is exactly "comfortable" in the publishing world. Which is not only changing at this moment with dizzying rapidity technologically, but which has always been at least anecdotally on the verge of collapse, for as long as I can recall.

I still remember my mother, the writer-editor Charlotte Zolotow, who was active during the period which, we can say in retrospect, truly was children's book publishing's golden age, muttering darkly and scornfully about Harper & Row being taken over by "the Harvard MBA's" and "the eleventh floor" --- synonyms for management.

"Can you imagine?" she said once at the dinner table, indignantly, when I was young. "They want me to do something called an ROI!" "What's an ROI?" I asked; I was maybe 10 or 11. "I didn't know either, honey," said my mother. "It's --- " she could hardly splutter it out --- "It stands for return on investment!"

"Well, what's that?" I asked.

And thus, in what was said and the tone in which it was said, and what was not said, I learned business 101; and that it was implicitly in conflict with art, beauty, and purpose. I'm still trying to undo the imprinting on that one. I would like to break the paradigm/archetype of the impoverished artist or writer who lives in the garret. I would like to think that Mammon and the Muse can sit down and have at least an occasional cup of amicable tea, and some hot buttered scones, together.

Don't worry, I'm getting back to that little girl in Atlanta.

My fourth or fifth picture book, Katie in the Morning, was given to a very young artist who had never illustrated a book before. This was in 1982/ Full-color illustrations were rarely done at the time; instead, colors were made using transparent overlays, a very tricky business, and in the hands of someone who didn't know what they were doing, could very easily result in muddied, unsatisfying hues. This artist's inexperience showed, and did not, I thought and still think, do justice to its text.

But justice... who are we, finally, to say what it is and isn't? For, here's a remarkable thing about the present era's access to information: I'd forgotten the name of the woman who did those illustrations, so I went downstairs to get a copy of the book (and, yes, the pictures seemed every bit as unappealing to me as they always had).

But... I Googled her. And there she was: Betsy Day, Illustrator. And my-oh-my has she ever matured as an artist! Take a look at those dancing chickens, for example, on her website. She does gallery work, too, and she's written and illustrated one title, Stefan & Olga, left and above.

Assuming I had written something with the right fit for her current style, I'd be delighted if she was to do one of my books today.

But, though I didn't care for her work on Katie in the Morning back in 1981, on reflection it is good that Harper & Row (this was before they were Collinized, as I like to say) took a chance on Betsy. Their doing so helped enable her to develop into the artist she has become. That is, one might say, a truly good ROI, with, perhaps, a whiff of "justice" in a cosmic sense. Yes, I wish they'd asked her to redo Katie, or ... Well, but I've lived long enough, now, to know that I haven't a clue as to the really big picture. I've kissed the dream of understanding why fully, about much of anything, goodbye. 

Here's a slightly expanded version of how I answered Cathy Smith, on Facebook: I told her that when I had disliked the art that had been chosen for me, and about which I'd had no say,
      
... it was, and sometimes is, pretty unhappy-making. Some editors ask for and welcome feedback which they transmit, politely and kindly, one hopes, to the artist. Some do not. If I  can have a beneficial effect and help improve, from my perspective, the fit of the art to the text, I do... If not, and I truly dislike the art, generally what I do is get very disturbed and unhappy about it, cry some, and then live with it. I get over stuff pretty fast. There are only a couple of books where I feel the pictures were truly disastrous;   after all, the publisher, too, wants the books to be good as a whole and they do try hard, if sometimes misguidedly, to get the appropriate illustration. There was also one in which I really didn't like the mood of the pictures, though they were good --- just so not what I would have chosen.

That book was Bat in the Dining Room, well-executed by S.D. Schindler in a funny, cartoony style. These pictures are charming in their own way, I think now; I probably would have enjoyed them in someone else's book, or even a different one of my own. But in this one, I so wanted the mystery and wonder of night, such as Jerry Pinkney had created so rapturously in my Half a Moon and One Whole Star, and later, in his own recent retelling of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Though I never truly loved the pictures in Bat, I eventually came to peace with that one more easily than I did those of Katie in the Morning, which made me wince, and still do.

(If you should read this, Betsy, I'm sorry. Truly, I am. But I'm guessing you wince, too, as I do over some of my own early work. I hope we both accept these things as part of the process; impersonal, implacable, difficult, with exuberance and disappointment in something like balanced measurement. We must, though maybe it's presumptuous of me to say so: but we're both working artists, who've been at it awhile. And if we didn't get that this is how it is, often uncomfortably, we would've surely given up, no?)

Katie had come out around the time I paid the visit to that first grade class in Atlanta. Though I think children in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade get much more out of a writer's visit than those kids in earlier grades (who still aren't too clear on the whole concept of "author" generally --- and why should they be, they're in the psychedelic, improbable mystery of being so young that anything... could turn out to be anything!), of course schools always want you to at least pop in and read a book to the youngest students.

And of course I always ask if there are any questions; though at that age, there usually aren't. It's more like, "Does anyone have any questions?" and a small face will look up earnestly and say, "I have a cat."

But that particular morning, that little girl in Atlanta did have a question. A real question, and, as I have said, she asked it with solemnity and gravitas. Her manner  made me wonder later if she, literal as all children are, had perhaps been puzzling over it for weeks, as I remember puzzling over why "witches" were in the Pledge of Allegiance. ("And to the Republic, for witches stand...")

"Do you believe," that little girl asked me, "that it's true that you really can't judge a book by its cover?"

This was a question I had never been asked before, or for that matter since. 

I thought about it.

"Well, " I finally said, thinking of Katie, "I wrote a story once that I really liked,  but I didn't really like the pictures. So I guess, if you picked up that book, and you looked at the cover, and you put it down without reading the words because you thought the cover was ugly, I think you would have judged the book by its cover and made a mistake. So, yes, I think it is true that you can't judge a book by its cover."

Judging. These days I try to replace judging, and certainty, both of which are fixed and static, with curiosity and inquiry, both of which move, change, and flow. As life itself does, and with it, our perspective.

I would have sworn, based on those long-ago illustrations of Katie in the Morning, that Betsy Day had just called it quits. I am so deeply glad that this not the case, that she has grown into her talent, and her talent continues to grow.

And I am glad that I tell students in Fearless Writing that every piece of writing is essential to the writer, regardless of whether it works as a piece or not: because this is true. Seeming unsuccess is as important as seeming success in our lives, as artists and as human beings.

And I love the mysterious fact that somewhere, out there, is a 36-year-old woman who has no clue, no clue at all, that she lives forever as a child in the mind of a woman of whom she almost certainly holds not the faintest memory.

And I am glad my mother, now 96, who has now completely forgotten Harper & Row, was once so deeply passionate about books and art.

And I am glad that I neither accepted nor rejected her scathing views on ROI's, but continue to wrestle with them (a match I think is now taking place on the international level, with the Occupy Wall Street movement, by the way; in essence, can there be enlightened, good for people-planet-and-profitable capitalism, or not? "People" presumably including artists and writers and those who self-nourish from seeing or reading their work.)

And I am glad to be witnessing David McPhail's illustrations move from sketches to completion: more flow and process. This is the best part of "what is it like to have your story brought into the visual realm by someone else" --- the art doesn't just 'illustrate' what you've put there but expands the story, in a way that is both compatible and surprising. I am amazed and delighted to see David's insertion of what my mother used to call "a visual sub-plot" --- in this case, the animals creeping to the now-sleeping child's bedroom window and peeping in.


Why are they there, those animals? To listen to the story the mother is telling, about them? Because, to them, a little boy is exotic and strange? Or perhaps they are not "really" there; perhaps the sleepy child is "only" imagining them. Who knows? I don't, and neither will the book's young readers. And this isecond story is what the artist has added, layering what I wrote with his own, subtly mysterious and charming. 

And what expression is on the faces of those animals as the gaze into the window of the sleeping human child, jaguar hanging upside down to do so? Perhaps they gaze with longing? Perhaps curiosity? Maybe.

But, I think, certainly not with judgment.

You can't judge life by how it looks and feels at any given time; that is only its cover.

You have to open it up. 

elegy for a tomatillo ... and Steve Jobs

We planned to go for a walk at twilight tonight, David and I, but when we stepped outside the dusk was chillier than we'd anticipated. "I wonder if I should go check the forecast," he said. "Yeah, you should," I said, "because if it's going to get below freezing we probably need to do some harvesting."

He went back inside, and came out again through the French doors, leading to the garden, where I'd already gone. "Supposed to go down to 28 degrees tonight," he reported. "Yikes," I said, and we both returned to the kitchen to grab several large bowls and the yellow colander. Then back out.


David worked on the beans, which have been producing generously all season long, the pole beans, climbing their rustic tee-pees, tendril by tendril, at the edge of the garden, adding what to my eye is such charm, the sunflowers behind them. He picked my favorites, the exuberantly abundant densely podded Spanish musicas. Then he picked the others: the flatter white and scarlet runner beans that are so good when cooked slowly, the rattlesnake beans, with their green purple-mottled pods, encasing white beans also mottled purple. Then he crouched to work on the bush beans: the limas, the Kentucky wonders, the yellow waxes, the black valentines (green pods, shiny black beans inside), and the royal burgundies (wondrously purple-podded, and though the pods turn green a few moments after they're submerged in boiling water, the water, after their cooking, turns turquoise, which keeps the wonder going, as far as I'm concerned).

I love beans, as you can tell. In fact my book about them, Bean by Bean, will be out early next year.

But. Given the quantities David was picking, I would clearly be canning, pickling, and freezing in the near future. (Below, last year's Green Tomato Mincemeat, which I'm about to make again, from my own Passionate Vegetarian)


While he worked on the beans, I turned my attention to the tomatillos.

I was thrilled, three years ago, to find tomatillo starts at the farmer's market. I love tomatillos (for those of you who don't know them, they're in the tomato family, usually bright green --- though there are purple varieties --- and protected by an elegant papery husk; and they are the stuff of salsa verde). I think I bought six or seven plants that first year, with little idea of how enthusiastically and messily they would grow and produce.

At harvest that year, after canning a dozen half-gallon jars of salsa verde and the same again of just plain tomatillo puree, for our household of two --- yeah, we have a lot of guests, true, but still --- I called it quits. When I added the pulled-up plants to the compost pile that year, I am embarrassed to confess I did so, consciously, knowing I was still leaving plenty of perfectly good tomatillos on the vine: me, to whom wasting food is morally repugnant. I begged the pardon of the plants, and every hungry person in the world, and the generous universe itself, for forgiveness as I discarded them. But I did discard them.

So, last year, I planted cautiously: just two tomatillo plants. They bore, but not with nearly the fervor of their kin the year before. They were far fewer fruits per plant, and, strangely, in quite a few cases the husk would grow full-size, but the tomatillo within it would be only the size of a cherry tomato. I ended up canning just 1 half-gallon and a quart or two... which I kept aside for what is now an annual tradition at the Labor Day Fearless Writing: the Whole Enchilada. Because one dinner at that event, of course, must be enchiladas, which I sauce in long beautiful stripes of red tomato salsa and green salsa verde, and I couldn't know how well the following summer's crop would bear.


This year I hedged my bets. I put in just three tomatillo plants, gave them a corner of the garden in which they could flop uninhibitedly to their heart's content, and basically left them alone, harvesting just a few to freshen up and round out the last year's canned ones, for the Whole Enchilada dinner in early September, which is too early to justify wholesale harvest.

Otherwise, I left them alone. That is, until tonight.

As David did the beans, I pulled tomatillo after tomatillo from the spreading, generous stems, many stems per plant. They bore, this year, as abundantly as they had that first year. I'd break off a stem, and pick the tomatillos from it. I'd drop the husk-wrapped fruits into the 2 1/2 gallon stainless steel bowl, then toss the stem to the side of the garden to pick up later during the serious fall garden clean-up, which we'll do in a few days, at the same time we plant the garlic.

(Plant garlic in fall; harvest the next summer... as I did, one hot, hot day a few months back, on my way up from a dip in our pond, as I passed through the garden. Silly picture, but so true to that moment.)

I brought one full bowl of tomatillos in from the cool darkening night to the warm, bright kitchen. I emptied it carefully onto the kitchen counter, returned to the garden, and began to fill the bowl a second time. There was still some light, the sky still recognizably blue, but it was growing darker, more chill by the minute. A sudden half-moon rose in what's east this time of year (here in this northern latitude, the directions change so radically, disorientingly, with each season). Very large, very bright, the moon was more cooly silver than golden, and a few wisps of haziness veiled it. Three or four small puffy pink clouds, still colored by the departing sun, hovered near the moon, seeming like slightly anxious handmaidens: "Is there anything you need?" "Is everything all right?"

Harvesting under this illumination, I suddenly thought of the Edna St.Vincent Millay poem my mother, now 96, used to quote when I was a child, the line "she weeds her lazy lettuce by the light of the moon" sounding in my inner ear as if she had just spoken it in her young mother's voice, getting across, somehow, how succulent those words were to her. My mother, who has forgotten every poem she ever knew, but who, paradoxically, seems to me happier moment to moment than she ever was when in her so-called right mind.

I pulled another large stem from the tomatillo plant I was working on, and, as I pulled the fuits off of it, completely unexpectedly, my heart gave a sudden contraction of grief. Because there, arching out from it, was another stem, covered with the robust fleshy leaves... but also, blossoms. Small bell-shaped bright orange blossoms, star-like in the night, dotting that whole stem... maybe fifteen of them.

"Awww," I called out to David. "I just found a whole lot of blossoms here. They didn't get to be tomatillos!"

And then, surprising myself, I added, "I wonder if it was like that for Steve Jobs." 

"What?" asked David, in that startled, did-I-miss-something tone, which suggests if-I-didn't-miss-something-you-may-be-insane.

"I wonder if he felt like he still had all these blossoms that weren't going to have a chance to bear fruit."

As I continued picking, that thorn still in my heart, I thought about Steve Jobs, the little I know about him.

I'm still a PC user and I don't own an i-anything, though I can't count how many people I know who've had an Apple moment where the heavens opened up and everything stood revealed, and I have no doubt that one of these years I will have an i-something, and maybe my own Apple moment.

But I do have a mouse. And I do have a laptop. And I do know how much he revolutionized the world. And how much people who knew him, along with the countless many who didn't, revere not just his work, but him.

And then, there are all the things he said that are circulating now: About how he'd "wanted to leave a ding in the universe." And "... the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on."

But his rolled on only to 56.

And from here, standing at the cusp of 58 and 59, blessed with work I love doing, I know that if I received a terminal diagnosis tomorrow, I would feel like one of the plants I was pulling tomatillos from: partially able to be harvested from, partially fulfilled, but with so many, many unpotentialized blossoms.

And, I guess inevitably, I wondered about Ned, about the seconds when his bicycle flew through the air before landing in and breaking the windshield of the oncoming vehicle --- if he had a chance to know, wonder, regret all the things he was not going to have a chance to do. (Ned, right, as a 16-year-old, long before I knew him, throwing wheel pottery in high school. When we were affianced and went to meet his parents, he opened a door in their attic and showed me boxes of his pottery. "My dowry!" he said proudly. I still eat from his soup bowls).

I talked to the young man whose pick-up it was --- this was early days, just a week or two after Ned's death; not six months later, when he decided to sue "the estate of Ned Shank" for "pain and suffering due to PTSD" --- on the phone. I told him I didn't hold him responsible; that from what I could tell, from the accident report, it was an act of God, and the laws of phyics.

Then I asked him a question I maybe shouldn't have asked. But I wanted to know, I wanted some clue: how did he feel? Did he know? How much?  "Did you see his face, before the moment of impact?"

"Yes, m'am, I did. "

"And... did you get a sense of ... what was his expression?"

"It was like, 'Oh... crap.'"

But balanced against that is the story of the lovely woman named (and how poignantly this struck me)  Grace. Grace was 2/3 small-town acquaintaince/ colleague, 1/3 friend, and she was in the car behind the pick-up which struck Ned. She got out, and sat with Ned in that two-lane road, as traffic backed up on both sides, until the EMTs got there.

She told me that when she first sat with him, bloodied and broken but still alive, she said, "Ned, this is Grace." I always wonder how he heard that; how, in that state, he interpreted the word 'grace'. And afterwards, from the first time Grace described the scene to me (very late that same night, after he'd died) to her words at his memorial, to the last time we spoke, identically: she talked about the feeling of peace that descended over the two of them.

And that, when she told him I had been notified, he repeated my name.

Ned's first children's book, The Sanyasin's First Day, had been published just six months before his death.  One of the first condolence calls was from his editor, Judith. Judith is a person whose emotional affect is not so much flat as consistently placid, unflappable. For the first time, in the many years I had known her, I heard her express unbridled emotion. "He would have written so many more books!" she said between the sobs, gusts of feeling shaking her. "I just know he would've!"

And he would've painted and drawn countless more pictures. Curled up with me so many more times. Had so many orgasms, and contributed to mine. Closed his eyes in pleasure as he let the first bite of any dessert he particularly liked dissolve slowly in his mouth. Laughed so hard that his whole face scrunched up and all you could see of his huge eyes with their absurdly long eyelashes was the tiny edge of the lashes. Made, on days when he woke up, staggered down to the bathroom, first beheld himself in the mirror and saw his hair crunched from either side into a tall, odd thatch, a "Woo-hoo-HOO" sound, which we referred to as the call of the Great Crested Droon, and which he would make while standing on one leg, indeed, looking oddly like a very peculiar, leggy shore bird.

He would've done so much: in and of himself, but also for and with others.

But, like the tomatillo blossoms, now and forever, he would not.

Ned was 44. An early, killing frost.

Steve Jobs, 56.
                                                                    xxx

One set of my present-day neighbors, Beth Kaplan and Jim Jordan, who --- with their daughter Stella --- live right down the hill from us here in Vermont, work for Antioch University of New England. Both Beth and Jim are in the Department of Environmental Studies.

Beth runs their graduate center in ecology and primate research, in Nyungwe National Park, Rwanda. She comes and goes from that country several times a year. At any given time, a couple of Rwandan graduate students live in Beth and Jim's downstairs.

Last Thanksgiving, we had dessert with Beth, Jim, their daughter Stella, William and Yves, the students staying with them, and a host of their other friends, in the educational, environmental, local and international communities in which they move. At one point, Yves and William and David and I were talking. They were astonished to learn that David was 71 (true, he looks young for his age). They were also astonished to learn I was 57 (true, I also look young for my age).

But their astonishment had little to do with looks.

"How old people live in your country!" exclaimed Yves. "In my country, 45 is old."

Perhaps a blossom isn't an immature fruit, but a blossom, perfect, orange, bell-like (if it is that of a tomatillo). Perhaps it is complete, completed, in itself.

Perhaps not.

Perhaps we write stories, and for that matter, blog posts, because there is no way we can ever answer questions definitively, in a world where loss and beauty and incomprehensibility all exist, side by side. Our narratives attempt to give shape and form to something so much larger than form itself, something that began long before we were here and is ever hurtling towards an outcome that will be forever unknowable to us.

Our narratives, by contrast, have a beginning, middle, and end. A story is, or can be, shapely.

It is not as messy as a tomatillo plant, as disorienting as a moon that rises in one side of the sky in October and in a wholly different place in June. It can have an equality and balance and sense a Rwandan student who witnessed the murder of his older sister (who had just, William once told me, bought him a soda, before the militia came) can never have when he considers ... well, life, or America and Africa, or me, or you, or Steve Jobs, or books about beans, or enough wealth that you could ever, under any circumstances, knowingly discard any food.

Yet, a story can include all these things.

Tomatillos: I have planted them, harvested them, cooked them, and even wasted a few.

But maybe not the latter. Tonight, the night of this fall's first frost, however imperfectly, I've written about those tomatillos, including the discarded ones, and the insights and longings they managed to evoke for me. This being so, nothing, even the tomatillo plants thrown, still fruiting, in the compost, is wasted. Nothing, when it can take you inward through writing, at all.

 

in which I thank my plucky stars, though not without regret

The way my father always told it, as it turns out, was better.

"On his ninetieth birthday, the late Maurice Chevalier ..." my father, himself the late Maurice Zolotow, would begin, relishing the telling so much he almost gave off sparks of pleasure, " ...was asked how it felt to be 90. 'Marvelous!' he replied, in that suave, beautiful, wry, French voice of his, 'When you consider ze alternative.' "

I decided, for this post, to check, to see if the ever-exuberant Maurice, had gotten the exact birthday correct. And what did I discover?

What Chevalier actually said, and not, as far as I could tell, in response to being asked about a particular birthday, was this: "Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative."

Which, compared to my father's version, is pretty lame.

What brings this to mind is that today, as I was making the bed, I found myself considering alternatives.

xxx

My late husband was, uncharacteristically, very particular about certain things relating to death. I say 'uncharacteristic' because he didn't, for instance, keep the life insurance premiums up to date nor leave a list of Quicken passwords (thus, when he died in a bicycle accident at the absurdly young age of 44, my bereavement was not just emotionally and physically devastating, but financially so as well). But, some time in the late 1980's he had been to a funeral he found "gruesome" and he came home, wrote up a funny, acerbic little note about it, and made three copies.

One he gave to me: I laughed and promptly forgot about it. But 15-some years later, after his death, I found the other two: one in a file labeled "important papers" and the other in the safe deposit box at the bank. (The location of its key, however, was as unknowable as the Quicken passwords; it cost $25 to have the bank get into that box. Which was still much less than what Intel charged to "de-encrypt" the passwords. But when a sudden "I", as opposed to "we", must find out how much money I have, well, you pay Intel and you pay the bank). 

One of the things Ned had deemed so important that he wrote it three times was that he wanted his body cremated, not buried ("Who needs to be lugging around 225+ pounds in a box?" was how he put it). And he also wanted his ashes placed in a certain river in South India.

(Damn. I was going along fine, not one shred of the automatic tears-well-in-the-eyes, heart-horripulating grief-moments until, unaccountably, I wrote that last sentence. Which proves one of the points I will be making: that when grief wants to be felt, it will find a way to make you feel it.)

By the time I took his ashes, in a plastic bag, to India, still relatively early days after his death, I still had the ridiculous idea that you could somehow outsmart grief.

I had discovered that almost anything associated with him, activities we had done together, places we had had conversation, taken walks, eaten together, and on out to infinity, could bring on those spasms.

So, I cleverly decided that to avoid this I would travel to India via a route we had never taken. I would not go New York and then via London, or Zurich, or Frankfort, to Bombay. I would not go Los Angeles, and then via Singapore or Seoul, to Bombay. Instead I would travel to San Francisco, and go from there to Hong Kong, and from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka, and from Sri Lanka to Trivandrum, in  southern India, skipping Bombay altogether.

I also decided to take the well-meaning but essentially impossible to deconstruct advice given to me by many people: "Be kind to yourself." "Be gentle to yourself." "Be good to yourself." So rather than bullheadedly charge my way straight through the journey, I would stop along the way, give myself a chance to rest and recover, in these new, not-associated-with-Ned places.

So there, grief, I remember vaguely thinking as I made these travel arrangements.

Thus I found myself in a hotel room in Hong Kong, looking out the window across an expanse of water towards Kowloon, at a beauty and terrain which seemed to me singular in both its beauty and its Chinese-ness.

Thus I found myself knowing that had Ned himself been with me (instead of that improbable plastic bag of ash which I was supposed to believe was all that now remained physically of that big handsome fellow with whom I had spent 23 years), his watercolors, brushes, soft pencils and pad would already be out, and he would have been sitting, riveted, beside that window, jet-lag be damned, his tall form curved over that pad, his attention absolute, painting or drawing for probably a couple of hours.

Thus, I discovered grief, far from being outsmarted, had outsmarted me, in this form: "Why couldn't Ned be here to see this? Why will he never get to experience this?"

And thus I found myself, on the way back from India, having completed the task the once-living, now-dead Ned had set out for his still-living widow, at the Mount Lavinia Hotel in Sri Lanka.

xxx

The Mount Lavinia is a 4-star hotel, an over-the-top architectural artifact of the days when Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then called, was ruled by the British. The good old, bad old days. The days when the sun never set on the British Empire and the underlying "nice country, we could use its resources, we'll take it" ethos ruled.

Built in 1806 as the grand country house of Sir Thomas Maitland, the second governor of that small island country, the Mount Lavinia is sited on a promontory above the Indian Ocean, which surrounds the mansion on three sides, an easy scramble down to an immaculate white-sand beach. 

The place, an elegant, beautiful, impressive pile, enormous, embodies everything one might think of as the romantic style of the colonial tropics. (For you must be able to hold romance, appreciation, and aesthetics in one hand while at the same time holding history, imperialism, theft, oppression, and racism in the other... at least, I think you do, especially at the Mount Lavinia and similar places, like Raffles in Singapore, at least before Raffles was Disneyfied. If you can't grasp both sides, what you hold when you try to understand a Mount Lavinia, is a literal half-truth).

So picture the Mount Lavinia. Tall ceilings, ever-circulating fans. White marble expanses indoors and out. Terraces with vintage rattan couches and chairs and tables. Enormous windows. Gigantic potted palms. White walls, mahogany paneling. Velvet-covered sofas and arm-chairs, very cushy, inside, beckoning a guest to sit and have a cup of tea or a nip of sherry. Polished brass. Views and more views. Manicured gardens. Statuary.

And everywhere, as it is today (or was when I was there), the brown-skinned servitors who keep it all running smoothly. Some uniformed, standing guard or offering assistance or leading guests to their table. Others mopping, sweeping, polishing, gardening, tucking in, folding down, endlessly and mostly unobtrusively.

What did I do during the three or four days I had allowed myself there before my return to the U.S.? How was staying there being kind, good, or gentle to myself, as I had been told to do? I'll be damned if I can answer either question with full accuracy. I can only answer in pieces.

I swam in the warm sea, aware that the Lavinia's lovely and near-deserted beach was bordered, on either side a half-mile down, with walls, on the other sides of which the same beach teemed with native Sri Lankans, messy, populous, loud.

I slept and woke at odd hours.

I kept finding myself shaking my head, over and over, at the unreality of every single part of my present and presumably future life --- where I was and where I would be, without Ned.

At one point I remember looking at the room service menu and seeing the snack items described as "tit-bits", and rapidly dissolving into laughter which quickly turned to those endless, exhausting sobs. Because how Ned, who adored large breasts, would have roared and carried on at that! And how instantly it would have become a riff, a reference in our ongoing private personal language of references and experiences.

And how that language, which had ever and always had only two native-speakers, was now, to all intents, dead, as absent of life as the ashes I had scattered by the handful standing in the Pamba, as they swirled around me and then slowly floated away: light gray ash, dark brown water.   

At another point, in my small room, facing the sea, I sat at the dark wooden desk, writing, crying, thinking, or all three. Without forethought, I took my wedding ring from my left ring-finger, where it had stayed for 23 years. It was as if I had slammed into a wall of emotion as forceful as the physical tsunami that was to strike Sri Lanka years later. Before I could be sucked completely under, I immediately shoved, jammed, that ring back on my ring-finger.

Shortly after that, sitting at the dark wood desk on a tropical night, the surf audible from my room, I wrote the following poem:

How It's Done

I don't know how
to not be married to you

I guess like this
I wake up every morning
and you are still dead

xxx

At one point I went up to the formal dining room for dinner. I was not eating much, but "You have to eat," as people kept telling me, and there was enough of the curious experience-glutton in me to still want to check out the atmosphere, the food... though when I ordered, or went to the buffet, I found I could only swallow a bite or two before my throat closed over.

It must have been a Friday or Saturday night, because every single table except mine was filled with people in groups. Most, from the speech, were Australian; there were a few Europeans. No other Americans present, as far as I could tell. A few tables had couples, most larger groups. There were many groups of 4 to six; families, I imagined, older parents with adult children and their spouses, vacationing together. And there were several very large groups, 12 people, 20, well-dressed, cheerful, laughing, at long tables, a lot of standing up and sitting down and going over to talk to someone and then coming back, the occasional toast made. I learned later that the Lavinia was a popular wedding destination ("one-stop", as the hotel's web-site helpfully explains).

In all that room, humming with guests and servers and kitchen staff refilling the buffet, the fans swirling, the windows open to the ocean breeze, the potted palms rustling with both the wind and the fans circulating the air, I was the only solo diner in the restaurant.

Now I am not and have never been one of those people who hates to eat at restaurants alone. I do it often, and always have, and kind of enjoy it. I always bring a book. I read some of the time, but if the food is really good or the atmosphere interesting, I make an effort to put it down and just be present with the experience, eating, watching, and thinking my own thoughts.

But that night, under those circumstances...

I watched as a man and woman, in their late twenties or early thirties, walked towards the buffet. I remember she was wearing a brown skirt of a light loose velvet with burnt-out designs, swirly, with a deliberately uneven hem. She walked with her chin slightly turned up, a bit ahead of him. He was gazing at and focused on her; she had a kind of pride and arrogance, as if she knew he danced attendance on her, as if she knew she were beautiful and desirable (though, to my eye, she wasn't particularly). It was the gait and stride of a woman who is aware she is adored and takes it for granted without knowing she does.

I recognized all this, or thought I did, because, as I watched them I thought, with a pang, I used to be like that. I wished she had been able to turn around, to tell her escort (husband or boyfriend), "I love you! I bask in your admiration!", to suddenly kiss him on the cheek or the mouth, or to catch his eye and laugh. But she couldn't, or didn't. She was enjoying being the beloved too much to love. I had done this in some of my years with Ned. But, and for this I will forever be thankful, I had woken up a few years before his death. I believe that by the time he bicycled out of this world, Ned knew that I loved and wanted him every bit as much as he did me.

I had a small paperback book with me at the Lavinia dining room. I don't remember which book. I do remember making a conscious decision, though, to put it down. To look, observe, feel what I was feeling, to not zone out with the slight addiction of somewhere else a book can sometimes afford, though probably nothing could've that night.

I put the book down. I noticed the girl in the brown velvet skirt, the cant of her chin. I noticed the indoor palms (one just behind me in an enormous pot), as I sat at the small linen covered two-top for one ("Will anyone be joining you, madam?" " "No", and like that the silverware and napery across from me had been removed).

The table was towards the center of that busy room; I was a quiet island in that ocean of movement and sound, business and joviality. I noticed the sublimely temperate night air, the fragrant steam released as silver domes were removed from large white dishes, the waiters in their whites, the maitre d in his black jacket. I noticed the music; incongruous but of course apropos in a globalized world, in a colonial luxury hotel that catered to westerners: James Taylor, singing, "You've Got a Friend."

I noticed, in a strange almost anthropological way, that my heart was breaking; had broken. The grief, the still-gradual sinking-in of from now on, for forever, he is gone and it is non-negotiable, there is not one thing you can do about it. You will never be happy again. This is your life now. And observing, observing, observing.

As I felt and watched myself feel, a thought, distinct as if lettered in a dialogue balloon, appeared in my mind.

This is brave. What you are doing, Crescent, right now, is brave.

Then, an instant, internal, screaming rebuttal, as noisy inside me as a toddler shaken by frustrated desire, tantrumming by the candy display at check-out when his harried mother refuses to buy a Kit-Kat:

But I don't WANT to be brave! I don't want to be! I don't want to be!

Observed. Duly noted. As was the next line of the internal dialogue:

Well, would you rather be cowardly?

xxx

Three years later, during my first winter here in Vermont, the pipes froze. I called the plumbing and heating company, they came to thaw them, but used a propane torch which was, unknown to them, defective. My kitchen exploded.

Fortunately, the young men doing the thawing suffered no permanent scarring or damage to their lungs. They were, however, out of work for six weeks.

And me? I was out of my home, the home I had just bought, just moved into, for six months. The rental house I found was nice enough, but I couldn't believe this latest turn of events. Just simply could not believe it.

One night I called up one of my oldest, dearest best friends, Bill Haymes.

I said, "I'm sick of it!"

He said, "Yes?"

I said, "Ned and I go through that really tough spot, I stick it out, we don't divorce, it's great. Then he fucking dies! He DIES! Then I lose the ... " (we will pause in this telling for an allusion to the loss of something else tender to me in my old life) " and the..." (pause for an allusion to the loss of yet another something else tender to me in my old life). "But no, I pick myself up, I sell my stuff, I move fucking across country and I start all over again. But then... and then... then my fucking KITCHEN blows up? My KITCHEN blows up and I have to spend half a year in a rental house? I am so goddamn SICK of being the resilient plucky little heroine, I hate it, I'm sick of it!"

Bill listened thoughtfully, as ever. Then he said, "Yeah, but you know, Dragonwagon, what's the alternative? Whiny, depressed, angry victim?"

"I know!" I snap at him. "I know! That's why I'm opting for plucky! But I don't like it!"

xxx

 

Why was I thinking about all this, and recalling my father quoting Maurice Chevalier, as I made the bed this morning?

Because, frankly, my life is pretty good at this moment, at least in the world within myself. I'm happy, my writing and teaching are going well, I'm learning some new things I'm very excited about, I live on an indescribably beautiful piece of property in the most progressive state in the union. If it was just me on the ride, right now I think life would feel almost perfect (although then I would probably be lonely, so maybe not so perfect.)

But it's not just me, and never will or can be. And, though I feel pretty calm and happy, frankly things could be easier.

I'm carrying some extra weight: I'm carrying oversight and deep involvement in the care of my 96-year-old mother, with whom I spend one week each month (it's a four-hour drive to her place), and about whom I have just gotten over a brutal two year struggle with a sibling. I "won" in the sense that I now have truly exceptional caregivers in place and she is now being well and lovingly taken care of, and his campaign of unceasing verbal abuse and threats towards me has abated for, oh, five months now. But still.  

And, I'm carrying a friend, one of my dearest, who is suffering from deep depression. To carry this friend, to leave room for her to experience what she experiences, to refrain from attempting to fix it while making sure she gets to therapy and goes out on walks and takes her meds, making sure that I remain compassionate and open to her, but also self-protective of my own heart, making myself immune to her mood, unaffected by it... this is wicked hard.

I am not at all sure I'm doing it right. I am not at all sure, just as I wasn't when dealing with my impossible brother, that there is a right way. You just do the best you can, and keep checking in with your integrity, and hope things turn out. And they may, or they may not.

Another friend, aware of all I was working with --- I am, thank God, rich in friends ---, asked me last Saturday, "So how are you doing with all of that?"

We were swimming together in the pond. I took a few strokes in that deep, cold water before answering, letting it clear my head so I could reply honestly. Thinking about this is like thinking about the Mount Lavinnia: opposites coexist. Right now, I am happy. Right now, I am troubled. These things are true, side by side.

Finally I said "I think, really, that I'm doing about as well as I possibly could under the circumstances."

And, that's true.

But, it still doesn't feel particularly good.

And that's just my little immediate world. When it comes to the daily bad news about climate change and pathological partisanship and fringe-owned hate-broadcasting mass media and the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer and the world going to hell in a hand-basket at such a shockingly, alarmingly fast rate of speed... well, as Truman Capote said, "Honey, don't let me commence."

Making the bed this morning, I felt sadness and worry at my friend's suffering lapping the shore of my well-being. I felt exhaustion as I edged up to the fact that the weekend caregiver for my mom is not remotely as good as our heaven-sent weekday caregiver, and will have to be replaced again soon, a destabilizing, time-consuming process that could possibly (for no rational reason) bring the return of my brother's wrath. And again, as I almost always do, I felt the back-beat of terrible sorrow about the future of a world that will soon be too hot, too dirty, too crowded, too impoverished, with too many species of flora and fauna heedlessly, thoughtlessly swallowed and gone forever, as "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. " (Wordsworth.)

And yet. I chose, instead, well-being above suffering. Or, not above exactly, but along side; yes, that again. To continue as I have, compassionate as I am able to be at any given moment, but immune.

Like Candide, I have an abundant and well-cultivated garden.

This is not perfect. Things could certainly be easier. Better. I would certainly like them to be. I would like my brother and I to be at peace. I would like to find a weekend caregiver for my mother who is as perfect as our full-time one. I would like the dark gray screen in front of my friend's eyes to lift, so she can be flooded with sunlight and reclaim the creativity, energy, stick-to-it-iveness and joy in which she once resided. And the world itself --- my wishes, hopes, and prayers for it are so vast and muliple that they cannot be numbered. This  --- things, my life, the lives of those I love, life itself --- is so not perfect.

But when it comes down to it --- and it does, every day --- I would still rather be brave than cowardly. I still feel I have to opt for plucky.

And, as the two Maurices said in their different ways, when I consider the alternative, it's marvelous. 

Aunt Dot & the Splendid Sunflowers

When I came to 410 East 57^th Street that night, it was already dark, but not late. Early winter, then, it must have been, maybe about 7:30 or 8:00. A Sunday evening.  

Aunt Dot, then 95 or 96, was seated facing into the living room, in one of the two 50’s-era Danish modern recliner chairs (blonde wood, cushions covered in turquoise leather; she had a fondness for turquoise, which played up her blue eyes).

Though neat, clean, and well-kept, I could see all was not well with Aunt Dot. She radiated discontent: boredom, restlessness, general discombobulation. This was unlike her usual composed and authoritative self.

For she managed to keep these attributes, as well as give off intelligence and social grace, even when she was deep in the gnarly woods of dementia, where she spent the last decade of her life.  

If you are in and out of the lives of the extreme elderly, and those who care for them, you grasp very quickly that the relationship between elder and caregiver is the determining factor when it comes to ease or its opposite. That night, Aunt Dot’s regular and much-loved caregiver, Zorina, was off. A replacement aide, found by the agency, was there. I’d never seen her before and wouldn't again.
         
This aide was clearly competent in the physical sense: Aunt Dot was safe, well-dressed, not alone. But, the aide also had no real clue as to who Dot was and had once been, and no interest in finding out. To her, Aunt Dot was a generic, out-of-it old person, whom she would cross paths with probably once or twice, for a few days. With no affection for, connection to, or understanding of Dot, as an individual, how could and why should she possibly connect or engage? And she made no attempt to do so: that night when I came in she was sitting across the room near the window, facing away from my aunt, flipping through a US Weekly.

Understandable and unavoidable, I guess, at least sometimes, though this kind of custodial care may be, it's one of the daily tragedies in the lives of the very old. 

"Aunt Dot,” I said, “What’s wrong?”

She looked at me and said, very crossly, “I don’t know who I am, I don’t know where I am, and I don’t have the slightest idea why I’m here.”

I took off my coat, hanging it over the cast iron half-railing that served to divide part of the living room from the front door, making a quasi-hallway. I squatted down on the floor next to her. She looked at me with interest, though no particular recognition that I could tell. 

“Well, Aunt Dot,” I said, sitting next to her on the wall-to-wall carpet --- also turqouise blue --- which had seen better days, “Let me tell you what I remember about you, and let’s see if that makes any difference.”

I told her I was her niece, daughter of her sister Charlotte. I told her she was Dorothy Arnof, that she had been married to Joe Arnof and that, after Joe died, she had lived for a long time with her boyfriend Jim Cherry. I told her she had been a textbook editor at Macmillan’s for many years. I told her she had traveled all over the world with Joe when she was young. I told her she used to love reading murder mysteries. I told her she had once taken me to Disneyland, and that we had ridden on an Alice in Wonderland ride, where the cars were shaped like giant tea-cups. I told her she had owned a home in Vermont, and spent many summers there, and that I lived there now. 
       
She listened attentively, and her agitation fell away. She looked at me with great interest, but without comment. Though at other times when I’d reiterated her life-history to her, she would ask me question after question ( “Was I married?” “Did I have any children?” “How did I make my money?” “Was I good-looking?”), this night, she was quiet.

The relief caregiver, utterly outside our circle, turned over pages. 

But Aunt Dot was visibly calming, becoming happier as I told her about herself and our life together. A faint amused smile came and went around the edges of her lips. Those blue eyes, about which she had been so understandably vain, were bright and engaged.

But suddenly she did speak.

She was looking across the room, at the low coffee table in front of the fireplace. It was stacked with magazines and photographs and mail and the small knick-knacks that had been there forever (reproductions of ancient Egyptian cats from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s gift shop, a small inlaid box of colored stone brought back from Greece or Turkey as a souvenir… she had traveled the world with her by-then-long-dead husband, an importer of what were then called ‘curios’. Even after his death, she continued to adore traveling. Her favorite trip, which she had often talked about, was a Smithsonian tour to Turkey, where she worked on archeological dig. She was in her late 60’s or early 70's then.)

Among all the coffee table detritus was a bouquet of flowers in a basket. The bouquet had probably been there since her birthday three months before. It was completely dried up, and brown.

"Those flowers,” said Aunt Dot, out of the blue, very decisively,  “are dead.”

I looked over at them. “You’re right, Aunt Dot, they are very dead,” I said. “Would you like me to throw them out?”

She said, “Yes!” with that same decisiveness. It must have served her well during her fifty years as an editor, and then editorial director, at Macmillan’s.

I stood, walked across the room, picked up the basket of dead flowers, and carried them to the garbage can in the small kitchen. I pushed them in; it took some shoving. I came back to sit next to her again.

"Is that better?"

"Yes!"
         
“Would you like me to get you some new flowers?”

"Yes!” 
         
“What color flowers?”
         
An imperial wave of the hand. “All colors,” she said.
         
“Okay,” I said. I got up, put on my coat, and left the apartment.

On the way down in the elevator, lined with dark polished wood, equipped with padded leather bench and operated by a uniformed elevator man, an elevator in which I had ridden since I was an infant in my mother’s arms, here’s what I was thinking, “Food Emporium, please, have flowers, have flowers.”

The Food Emporium being the supermarket right around the corner from Dot’s. A quick run out on a Sunday night in New York? Where else was I going to get flowers? 

Food Emporium, on 1^st, did not let me down. Their mixed bouquets, a little the worse for wear but still presentable, and certainly far more alive than the flowers I’d disposed of, would have to do. I chose one of the cellophane-wrapped bouquets, paid for it, stood at the light, crossed, and reentered "410", as my mother and I always referred to Dot's building. Total elapsed time, maybe 6 minutes.
         
My aunt, in addition to her professional Macmillan letterhead, also had both casual and formal engraved stationary with her home addresses, both in New York City and in Vermont. Her casual notecards, later in life, were yellow, with red decorative print and flourishes, the words “Deductions from Dorothy” on the top. I received more than one “Deductions from Dorothy” letter from her.

My aunt, who’d been as bright as those notecards when I’d left, had not lost her alertness in the few minutes I’d been gone. I was so glad to see this. She was sitting up, still with-it, seemingly expectant. Though the disengaged caregiver could almost not have been there, Dot definitely was. 

“Here are your flowers, Aunt Dot.”

“Nice.”

“Would you like me to put them in a vase?”

“Yes!”

Back in the kitchen, I rustled off the cone of cellophane and went to look for a vase. Having visited her in that apartment all my life, I knew in which closet, off the narrow, bookshelf-lined hall that led to her bedroom, they’d be. I knew they'd be to the right of the table-linens, above the wrapping paper, below the towels. I found a vase; this one more aqua than her typical turquoise. I returned to the kitchen, rinsed it off, filled it with water, inserted the bouquet, and brought it back, putting it on the small table next to Aunt Dot.

“What are they?” she asked.
         
“Flowers,” I said.

“ I know that,” she said impatiently, “But what are they called?”

"You mean, what kind of flowers are they?”
  
“Yes.”

And so I began. “Well, this white one is a chrysanthemum, the big kind they used to call football mums. Maybe Jim Cherry might have brought you one when he picked you up at Wellesley in the Model T to go to football games, and you both wore raccoon coats.”

Dot gave a nod which I interpreted as, “Yes, go on.” So I continued around the bouquet.

“And these are alstroemeria, some people call them Persian lilies, they keep for a long time. There are two pink ones in this bouquet, and one yellow one.”

Another "go on" nod.
        
“These frilly ones over here, white with those tiny red lines, they’re carnations.”
         
Aunt Dot then pointed to the one huge bloom which clearly dominated the bouquet.

“And what, “ she said, pointing, “Is this pretty thing?”   

“Oh,” I said, “That’s called a sunflower, Aunt Dot.”

I thought about it for a minute. “Did you know, Aunt Dot, when sunflowers are growing in a garden, their flower-heads follow the sun?”

I stood up and began to demonstrate for her, turning my face and head illustratively as I spoke, as I might tell a story to a little girl. “In the morning, the sunflower faces towards the east, where the sun rises. " I turned my face to the right. "At noon, the sunflower turns itself straight up overhead, to where the sun is. " I gazed up at the coffered white ceiling, a little dingy; God knows when it had last been painted. "And when the sun goes down in the late afternoon, the sunflower turns to the West.” And I turned my head to the left.

Aunt Dot watched this performance closely.

And then she said, with extreme skepticism,“Have you personally observed this?”

I now live, as I said, in what was Aunt Dot’s summer home, in Vermont. I am a passionate amateur gardener. In the summer of 2009 I grew an ornamental annual sold as “Mexican sunflower.” It was pretty --- orange petals, yellow and brown centers --- and about 3 or 4 feet high. But it was not at all what I picture when I think “sunflower.”
         
In January, 2010, Aunt Dot, by then having lived to 100 years and nine months, died.

Her feet were growing gangrenous from lack of circulation; it was important that she leave this world before she was put into a hospital and the system --- which would have begun by amputating her feet --- could get hold of her. Her doctor told me as much, saying, “What am I going to do about your aunt?”

I asked him not to hospitalize her. I got hospice in. By then she was unconscious, but would stir every four hours or so, when the painkillers wore off. When they wore off and Dorothy would awaken, moaning, the caregiver --- by now a lovely woman, Dita, who had been a doctor in Romania --- would adminster the medicine and offer her food or beverage.

Aunt Dot fought fiercely against so much as a swallow, turning her head angrily. The second or third time it happened, Dita turned to me. “Do you want me to stop trying to feed her? Unless she asks for food, or shows us she wants it in some way? ”

I knew what she was asking me.

I thought of the friend, ironically a chef and fellow cookbook author, who had told me that when she stopped forcing her dying father to eat, he had stopped needing painkillers, and a kind of high, she said, kicked in. At the time I thought, "Yeah, right. That's some nice fairytale to tell yourself."

But now, I said to Dita, “Yes. Yes. "

Dita turned and left the room with the spoon and the small can of Ensure she'd been trying to put into Dot. I remember noting the Ensure's flavor, "Chai Latte."

I stayed with Dot. And that was the point --- that final round of pain medicine, that last spit-away, resisted spoonful of Chai Latte Ensure --- when she stopped waking up, moaning and in pain. Four hours later, six, twelve, she had not stirred, or moaned or cried out; the signs which we had taken to gave her painkillers. With that decision, less than 24 hours after hospice had arrived, Aunt Dot seemed to cross a border.

Yet, though now unagitated and out of pain, unconscious, calm, peaceful, she was still here.

Later that afternoon I stood beside her. When I put my hand on hers she grasped it, with astonishing strength, though seemingly without waking. "Oh," I thought, "This is what's meant by 'death grip'.”        

First I told her how much I loved her, and how much her sister loved her. How much Joe and Jim, and “Mom and Dad” had loved her. And her friends the Locallios. And her other friends, among them Beryl, and … there was quite a list.

Of course, I was wiping away tears with my free hand. Of course, I kept going. You do what you have to do, sometimes, because it's clear that it's needed and there's no one else to do it. You can't duck some things, not when they have your name on them. Not when they are as much priviledge as burden. Not when you understand that life, and love, and being born into a body, has a price tag which is always much greater than you imagined you could or would have to pay, and yet, which you pay willingly.

Finally I said, “Aunt Dot, I want you to know that your passport’s been renewed, and it has all the visas stamped in it. Your tickets are in order. The suitcases are packed. Everything’s taken care of. When you’re ready to go, you can go. ”
         
She maintained her tight grip. Her eyes remained closed, her breathing was regular. But as she heard this, or at least, as I said its, her eyebrows raised slightly, and lowered.

I said, “I’m not sure exactly where you’ll be going. I don’t think you’ll be on an archeological dig. But you never know. I just know that when you’re ready to leave for your next trip, you can.”

At about 11:30 the next night, she did.

When David and I had packed up her apartment, given away much, boxed what we wanted to keep, we went over to the west side to rent a U-Haul. Standing outside the U-Haul place under a sky striated in shades of gray, the air bristling with a cold, hostile wind that blew the raindrops into something sharp and stinging, I watched David and the U-Haul guy check the van for dings. And I noticed the company slogan, painted on the side: "Where will U go next?"

I looked up at that sky and thought, "Yeah, Aunt Dot, where?"




In the summer of 2010,the summer after Dot's death, I bought a package of seeds called Mammoth Sunflowers, and I planted them in the garden. With great satisfaction, I watched them get taller and taller.

Their hairy, woody stalks shot up: 4 feet, 6 feet, 12 feet. Their flowerheads, much larger than the ones in that mixed bouquet or those of the Mexican sunflowers, were almost as big as a dinner plate.

Now that, I thought, that is a sunflower!



Though I used some of the sunflowers as cut flowers, most I left standing. When they died back, the flower head was left, diamonded in the middle with seeds. Finches, jays, and chickadees came and went, feasting on them with great enthusiasm.

And all summer long, I watched the flowerheads turn, attentive to the constant revolution of the sun. A turning that never stops.



I have personally observed this. 

This year's sunflowers are planted and now up, beginning their brief season on this turning earth.

"fixing to" ... and a message via indigo bunting

The original inventers of twittering have been coming and going from the feeder all day today. Whenever I look out, from the bathroom window upstairs or the french doors in the kitchen downstairs, different visitors are at the cafe. Finches yellow as canaries,  finches as reddish-purple as if they'd bathed in grape juice. Sparrows, in tweedy brown-gray-black-white. Black-caped chicadees. Grosbeaks, with their rosy-red neckerchiefs set off by the chic understated black, gray, and white, the bright slash of their busy yellow beaks. All those dear active feathered bodies, at work, play, feeding, in flight.

And then, twice ---  at midday and then again in the late afternoon --- a rarity at the feeder. An indigo bunting, its turquoise so vivid my breath caught in my throat. (photo, courtesy of Thundafunda)


Which reminded me.

About six years ago, I was fixing to teach my first Fearless Writing in Vermont.

By the use of "fixing to" you can tell, if you didn't already know, that the majority of my life has not been spent in Vermont,  but in Arkansas.

"Fixing to" has elements of "getting ready to" or "about to" , but it's more elastic, less definite. This indefiniteness has to do with time and preparation. One could be fixing to do something in a year or in 15 minutes. And while this could involve doing a particular task in a timely manner (if you're fixing to go a potluck, for instance, you might be making a skillet of cornbread, or cutting up and transferring it to a basket), it --- fixing to --- also, to me, also implies a kind of thoughtfulness, a mental preparation or pre-preparation. You're deciding less what, than how, you'll go about whatever you're fixing to do. You're rolling it over in your mind, meditating on it, cogitating on it, considering it.(Left, one such basket I did take to a potluck, here in Westminster West, Vermont, in 2010; photo by David R. Koff.)

The fixing to I was doing around this particular Fearless Writing had elements of both thought and action.

Not only was it the first Fearless I was going to teach in Vermont, it was going to be in my own home, not a conference center or similar facility. Not only was it going to be in my home, instead of being a quick one-weekend intensive workshop, the way I most often teach it, it was going to be one full-day Sunday every other week for six months; twelve sessions, in other words.

We would go more slowly. The group would get to know each other very well. The seasons would make a half-circle. We would change, individually and together, with and through our writing and our shared time. I knew this, though I had no idea exactly how the particular students would all mesh together with each other and with me, only that they would, in some unforseeable way.

The fixing to was given further depth by the fact that I was still fairly new to my Vermont life. It still felt like a still largely unknown after, filled with question marks --- to the before that had been Arkansas, period.

The Arkansas life: as many readers of these posts know, I'd assumed I'd have for the duration, but had been abruptly exiled from it by the sudden death of my much-loved husband, Ned Shank. His death that unspeakably large domino which knocked over almost all the others constructing my old life.

Ned's before-and-after happened within the space of four hours. BEFORE: a tall, handsome blue-eyed guy in early middle age, with disgracefully long eyelashes; a writer, an artist, an innkeeper, an historic preservationist, an imperfect but loving, affectionate husband, and an all-around sweet, funny guy. Don't know who took this picture of him, laughing with my Aunt Dot on the side porch of what was then Aunt Dot's Vermont home, and is now mine... I believe it was a visit we made here in September, 2000, just a few months before his death. Now both Aunt Dot and Ned are gone from this world; but strangely, he, at age 44, before her, at age 100 + nine months. This picture always twinges me, but i love how it shows the fondness these two had for each other, their good humor in each others' company, and their relative sizes and ages.)

THEN --- which I guess is the "and" in every before-and-after: he, on his finch-yellow bicycle, on his tri-weekly ride, flew through a pick-up's windshield. The impact, on 62 West, just past the Lake Leatherwood turn-off; the ER doctor at St. Mary's in Rogers, Arkansas, wearing black scrubs with an incongruous pattern of bright fruit, coming into the "family room" to say to me, "We lost him."

AFTER.

My own after was not a literal death, of course. Only the death of an old life.

Call it, more accurately, an amputation. One that took place with agonizing slowness and only gradually dawning awareness. Pyschic gangrene just about had to set in before I was willing to say, "Okay, cut it off" and hobble the hell out of Dodge; which is to say, the town that had been my home for 33 years, Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

And move on to the slow, incremental creation, or perhaps revelation, or unfolding, of my new life, begun so tentatively. But one I have now been living, in Vermont, for the past eight years.

It now seems to me that in part I got through all this loss and change because writing itself had taught me a lot about uncertainty.

Showing up, working, walking and writing the same way, one foot after another, without much idea of where I was going. But somehow arriving somewhere that was often surprisingly good: despite unknown, unguaranteed, uncertain outcome, and swimming in the tidal rise and fall of anxiety with its unpredictable, lethal-feeling undertows.

Teaching Fearless Writing (a misnomer, because fear is always part of the process) had deepened my abstract and practical understanding of this. Each time I watched students get it, I got it again, too.

"It" being: that increasing one's ability to tolerate anxiety is the price of admission to writing, creativity, and finally, life itself.

This is something one never stops learning. Like all the big, important stuff, you don't learn it once, but over and over again. And each time it feels both familiar and like a shockingly new revelation.

So. There was a lot of "fixing to" as I approached this first extended Fearless Writing. Given a death, an emotionally unclean and needlessly cruel severing from a non-profit organization I had started back in Arkansas with my late husband, the sale of one house, the purchase of another (that second house being Aunt Dot's former home, bought, as I always say, "...with financing, so creative I should have gotten a Macarthur.) Then, a cross-country move to a part of the country with so different a geographic, political, and civic climate from that in which I had lived for the prior 33 years, that I could as well have moved almost to another planet --- a lot of "fixing to." Right, the day of the great loading of the moving truck, on my then-front porch in Arkansas. I got by with a little help from my friends. Make it a LOT. Here, embracing and being embraced by Cheri Wright, Charlisa Cato, Starr Mitchell, & George West. Ah, the poignant problem of a late-in-life move: you can make new friends --- I have, and I do --- but you can never make old friends. (I believe the South is so much more easily friendly on a personal one-to-one manner than the North, yet remaining unbelievable harsh on a civic level, while the North is the exact reverse. But there are exceptions, and I digress.)

But I had done most of the fixing to by this particular Saturday, before the first Sunday of this extended Vermont Fearless Writing. And I was surprised to be... happy.

It was early May, as it is on the day I write this: miracle greeness after the long cold white winter. The one after which I gave that extended Fearless must've been my second or third in Vermont; now I have been through eight, to my own astonistment.

Non-New Englanders always imagine winter to be the biggest climactic challenge; this is not so. It's Mud Season, which follows winter: incredibly inconvenient, mussy, muddy, mucky, unwalkable, undrivable, sloppy.

But then. Spring.

Now --- both as I write this and the "now" of the day before I taught that first Vermont Fearless --- the white snow and wet brown mud had retreated. Almost everything was green or becoming so, a green pale and yellow-tinged, as if trees and grass, so long covered and sodden, now thirsted for and feasted on sunlight to excess, imitating it, exuding it. A greeness omnipresent, almost palpable, and impossible for human eyes to get enough of.

And me? That day I too was beginning to green-up and grow golden, in a new, double-barreled way. First, I was filled with anticipation about the class, jazzed, psyched. Second, on top of that, just astonished that I had it in me to be happy again.

One does not understand life's own hunger to live, quite apart from individual will, and the resilience it brings, until one has experienced it. While for several years after Ned's death, my own life felt to me like a long prison sentence, a non-negotiable term that is served with grim endurance, because it must be, that resilience was there, as improbably alive beneath the inner snow and cold mud as is spring beneath the outer.

That Saturday, I was cleaning the house. ("Thank God we have people over," Ned used to say, cheerfully, running the vacuum, "Otherwise the house would never get cleaned!"). David, my present and, in so far as I can see, for-the-duration partner, did not yet live here full-time. So that day it was just me and the two brother-and-sister tabby cats, asleep in the room we use for work-outs and DVD-watching.

Like everyone in Vermont, we "zone" the house in wintertime, so as not to heat the whole tresidence, only the parts we're using at any given time. The room where the cats were asleep, and the guest room next to it, have no central heat. Instead, there's my old Ashley Automatic woodstove, which I brought all the way from Arkansas. In the winter, when David and I want to watch a movie of an evening in  that frigid room, we crank the Ashley up, and pretty soon it's cozily tropical in there.

In addition to the Ashley, the house has two fireplaces, one in the living room (where Fearless would be held) and one in the dining room. Counterintuitively, we shut the damper of the fireplaces in winter and do not use them; more heat gets sucked up the chimney than even a blazing fire puts out into the room.

But in spring, when the days are pleasant and somewhere on the medium to warm continuum, but the nights still nippy usually well into May, ah, those fireplaces, and the fires we light in them, are perfect.

As part of my clean-up, I swept the fireplace free of ashes, and began laying a fire. I am a great and devoted fire-builder. It's kind of a Zen thing. The way each fire goes together slightly differently, because the exact pieces of wood vary. It takes being  very particular in stacking, layering kindling, selecting and placing just the right branch or log in just the right order and position. I should be good at this, and I am; wood was our sole source of heat all those years in Arkansas. But beyond all the shoulds, I love building a fire. And then lighting it. And then, watching as it catches, mesmerized --- as humans have been since prehistoric times ---made happy and warm by the flames.

That Saturday, I saw that one particular log was a little short for the fireplace. "Oh," I thought, "I might as well lay a fire in the woodstove too, while I'm at it." The short log would be perfect for the woodstove, and so I carried it in there and lay it on the hearth.

I heard a small unusual thump which I couldn't identify as I came in the room with the woodstove. The cats, utterly sacked out on the orange couch, did not stir. I opened the woodstove and there was another sound, and a small puff of ash floated out. Cautiously, I leaned over and peered into the woodstove.

And there, at the far end of the oval shaped stove, was an indigo bunting cringing among the ashes, its feathers slightly puffed. I heard myself say out loud, "Oh, I know we can do better than that for you, " and I closed the woodstove door.

First I got the cats (drugged with sleep, oblivious to the indigo bunting) out of the room, carting them upstairs and shutting them in the bedroom. Then, I went to the kitchen and got a rag. I even remember the rag: blue flannel, with small white fleur de lis on it. The rag had once been a sheet, in use at the inn my husband and I had owned back in our Arkansas life. When it had gotten too ratty for the inn, we had used it on our own bed. Finally, it became rags. It is strange, what lasts and what doesn't.

With one of those rags, I returned to the woodstove, opened the door and yes, there was the indigo bunting. I imagine it must have been terrified, but what human knows, really, what a bird feels? But it was crouched in that far corner still, its feathers dulled with ash, its head tipping one way and then the other, its eyes still bright, alert, very wary.

I reached in and tossed the rag over the bunting, and, just like that, reached in and carefully picked up the rag from below, the back of my hand in the ashes, the bird inside. I carefully carried the small rag-wrapped bundle out to the lawn on my palm, hoping deeply that the bird inside was in no way injured. But expecting, I think, that it would be a little dazed.

There, in the sunlight, I lifted off the rag. And that tiny bright blue bird was not in the least hurt, or dazed. Instead, liberated from stove, rag, and human hand, it simply and immediately flew away and up.

"Took flight" makes it sound more dramatic than it was; there was no burst of feathers or sudden flapping of wings, as if it was in fear. It was wholly natural. I'm here, I'm gone. Just up and off. I followed its its blue with my eyes, up and to the maple tree by the stone wall. I watched until it flew away again, on whatever errands were on its things-to-do list.

Brilliant indigo bunting, trapped in a dark cavernous place filled with ash; then, liberated, back to air, sun, flight, its own nature.

That day, could my life, my starting-to-be-new life, have felt to me any more like that bird's? And my students, who would come at noon on the following day --- would I be helping them open a door to some cast-iron place, so that some imprisoned part of themselves might flutter out and back into its own nature?

Do we not each have, and need, a dark place? Maybe it's a prison; maybe it's a stove. It can trap us, warm us, burn us; it can, if we are a small blue bird and it's May and we perhaps tried to make a nest in what seemed like a good place but turned out to be the stovepipe of a then unused stove, keep us cold, isolated, and in ash and shadow.

As humans, we need containers in which to create warmth. But we, no more than that indigo bunting, are not meant to live imprisoned, in a woodstove or anywhere else.   

I can still remember the names of every person who attended that long class, which ran from the longest days of the year through the shortening fall and early winter. I can see the faces in my mind, where each person sat, the sunny day we met inside and just outside the opened french doors on the lawn facing the garden. The breaks where we ate, or sometimes ran down to the pond for a quick, chill dip. I can recall some of what everyone wrote, read aloud, said, and how often they surprised themselves and me and the class.

The one who said, at the beginning  "I want to write, but I'm afraid I'll be revealed as a phony." "To whom?" I asked. He blinked in astonishment, as if this was self-evident. "To myself, of course."

The one who said "I wish that every time I start to write, all of these negative thoughts wouldn't rise up in me." "Define 'negative'," I said. "Oh..." she said, pausing. And then, wonderfully, "Introspection gone ballistic." (Something I quote occasionally, with attribution to her, in Fearless workshops to this day.)

The one --- a lef-wing management consultant to non-profits --- who discovered, in some of our practices, that some of what he was writing might be poetry, and that he could write sympathetically as an out-of-his-depth George Bush. Discovered that he could write with transparent brutality about a well-meaning conversation in a restaurant with his young daughter, in which he tried to explain the divorce from her mother.

I looked at that indigo bunting today and remembered all that. It happens to be a challenging time in my life and David's right now. My mother is 95. My brother and I disagree about her care. David, his mother, and his brother mirror, in a fun-house sort of way, that same sibling/eldercare dynamic at play in his family. He has issues with his old life, and property he still owns in it. Time is doing its relentless tick-tick-tick number, asking us both at every moment, "Is this really what you want to be doing with me? I'm infinite only to myself, you know, not to you, you mere mortal." The industry with which I've been connected my whole working life --- publishing --- is undergoing tectonic changes due to various forms of online publication, all of which affect my financial life and future and demand new responses and decisions from me. Risk and uncertainty at every turn. Anxiety's causes are always current, yet it is also, again always, the same-old same-old.

And yet. And yet. Sometimes the door of the dark prison opens, and, with as much seeming randomness as one was got in there, one is suddenly free. Free, if one is an indigo bunting, even of the memory of ash.

And free, if one is a human writer, to remember and recall both entrapment and freedom, to consider them both part of the "riot of opposites" as the Gita puts it, the tidal turning that is life. Free to use the happenings, the mishaps, the happinesses, the mysteries in creating narratives with which we can live. Experience and its utility: the same old ticket to whatever is next, beginning and ending with the creative invention and reinvention of meaning. For nothing is wasted on us, we writers, and in that, we find our greatest luck and purpose.

whimper while you work: life-density, writing, very dark chocolate

First, let me say how humiliated I am that I haven't done a new blog post since (OH my GOD, this is ETERNITY in Blogland!) ... since last July.
 
Actually, I did do one. It was, juicily, about older babes who are still sex-positive in their late 50's and onward, sometimes way onward. I number myself, gladly, among this group, despite being 58 (see left; the 'after', by David Koff). This is an age when, had you told me when I was a teenager (see right, the WAY 'before', by Vernon Tucker), I'd still be desiring, enjoying, and having sex, I would have said 'ewwww'. You may have seen this post, in late March, 2011, but you probably didn't: I had it out there for about 15 minutes before I pulled it. (Here we have the down-side of being able to push a button that says 'publish', instead of working with an editor and having a delay of years, in the case of books, or months, in the case of magazine pieces, to reconsider, rework, and get an outside opinion).

It wasn't inhibition that caused me to pull it; rather, though it was a good post, I decided I hadn't quite said what I wanted to say in the way I wanted to say it. Sigh. If nothing is wasted on the writer, that includes drafts, and the hours of times spent on them, and other pieces --- any length, any genre --- which may or may not finally work out to one's satisfaction. Yet each one increases one's development as a writer. It's that old practice makes practice thing again.

So, I'm reworking the older-babes-in-sexland thing. Consider this reference as a preview of coming (yes, that was intentional) attractions. And, while I would have prefered ending this long near-silence with a bang (yes, intentional too), I am going to start instead with a whimper.

With two whimpers. Followed by a groan of a pleasure and ah-hah, now-I-really-get-it wave of observation. (All of which also pertain, at times, to sexual activities, now that I think of it.)

This first whimper is metaphorical: the subject of this post, chocolate- and writing-related, is seemingly much more minor than the highly-relevent-to-baby-boomers SHOUT of sexual seniority.

The second is a real, actual, literal whimper, one I remember making shortly before indulging in a little strictly legal but serious self-medication. Which, when you hear the circumstances, I think you'll agree was more than justifiiable.

This was was a while back, too: in the, oh gosh, probably late 1980's. If you think this makes both the pained whimper and its palliation memorable, you are right.

So memorable that it all surfaced as I read the following innocent, offhand Twitter post this morning, from @simmertildone:  "I know many writers report that when running or driving or gardening, they're 'writing.' How about 'standing in kitchen eating brownies?' "

Well, yeah. Why would that be any different?

Digression:  I would be remiss if, before telling you more about the whimpers et al which that tweet pulled for me, I didn't introduce @simmertildone, aka Marilyn Naron, a little further. Marilyn (pictured left; from her site) lives in Lawrence, Kansas. She describes herself on Twitter as "Recovering pastry chef. Writer, blogger, dumpling-eater and chief dog-walker."

She also has a blog, also titled Simmer Til Done. I will add that she A) updates her blog somewhat more frequently than I do, B) writes with a nonchalant, charming, hey-we're-just-hangin'-in-the-kitchen together personal voice,  witty and gently self-deprecating, about C) not just food, with lust-wothy recipes that actually work, and musings on same, but stuff like her daughter, Josie, the writer Judy Blume, and the odd non-craft craft. Too, she happens to have a black Labrador named Cleo --- the same name as our family's black standard French poodle when I was growing up.

Something else about her blog: while really good, professional-quality photographs have become almost de rigeur in
food blogs, Marilyn's are over-the-top. You might drool over them; you might gaze at them as longingly as Cleo the dog does here, at some brisket (which almost though not quite looks good to me, and I've been a vegetarian for more than 30 years --- this is Marilyn's photo, obviously).

But she (Marilyn, not Cleo) also does drawings, too. Her Baker's Alphabet, which I think one of these years will develop into a children's book, if there is any justice, is what first led our paths to cross. See her sketch below. But that's another story.

Now you might have been wondering about how a pastry chef could describe herself as "recovering," which is going to slowly lead us back to the point. Marilyn elucidates this statement on the "about" page of her blog: "I’m a pastry chef – but I don’t work in restaurants anymore, so you can just call me giver of dessert happiness." She also gives more details on Lawrence, Kansas, "the coolest college town in America", which she calls affectionately, as perhaps many there do, "Larryville."

As you'll see, I really, really understand the "don't work in restaurants anymore" bit. Which leads us back to whimpering. End of digression.

I have written here before about my former life as a writer-innkeeper (at Dairy Hollow House, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas), and the truly insane (as it appears to me now, from this remove) daily schedule I kept, more or less as follows:

• Somewhere between 6:30 & 9:00 am: get up, breakfast, a little time with Ned.
• 9:30 am to noon: write
• Noon: eat lunch, sometimes with Ned.
• 1:15 to 2:15 pm: nap (very occasionally, not nearly often enough, with Ned).
• 2:15 to 3:15: work out, then shower, dress.
• 3:55 pm-ish: walk to the inn, a few minutes away. As I wrote in that previous post " ...as I approached the inn's door, I'd feel my other, non-writer life, as an innkeeper, kick in."
• 4:00 pm: get into the inn's kitchen, and start cooking dinner for the evening's guests --- anywhere from 15 to 45 people.
• 5:00 pm: Ned would arrive, to maitre d'  (a rare, if blurry, in-action photo of him, right... imagine! Phones still had curly cords, and look at that antique computer! Oh, Ned.) 
• 7:00 pm: dinner at the inn; Ned "front of the house", me "heart of the house", waitstaff the intermediaries
• 8:30-9:00-ish pm: "make the rounds," as Ned used to call it, visiting with guests at the table usually as they were having dessert.
• 9:30-ish pm: staff dinner
• 10:00 pm at the earliest, 1 or 2:00 am latest, leave inn/restaurant/kitchen, Ned arriving usually an hour or so later

Any sane person who says, "I've always wanted to have a restaurant" should read this schedule as a cautionary note.

And I feel sure any person, of any degree of sanity or insanity, who has worked in, or is presently working in, a restaurant, is probably heaving a sigh, relating all too well, and maybe having their feet give a twinge or two in symapthetic recall.

And anyone, period, who didn't understand why Marilyn refers to herself as a "recovering pastry chef" --- well, now maybe you get it.

But: I was productive in those days. As a writer, as well as a cuisinere ('chef' always felt a little high-falutin' for what I was, but 'cook' a little too greasy-spoonish; 'cuisinere', French for 'cook', felt, maybe irrationally, just right).

With so very little time to write then, there was always a heavy-handed external deadline: I had to go cook at the inn, in a very few hours. In memory, I did not waste time. I did not procrastinate much or at all. I did not play computer Hangman or Bedazzled like a person could do if they didn't have to be up at their restaurant by 4:00 (This is theoretical, not confessional, please understand. Just because I have a lot more time to write these days now than then, doesn't mean that I... Oh, okay, it is confessional.) (Left, me in the wonderful writing studio, Moonshine Cottage, where I worked so hard during the inn days. Will I ever have another writing room that suits me as well? Seems unlikely. I still have the sweater I wore in that picture, though, and the mug that's in my hand. Odd what lasts and what doesn't, isn't it?)

Back then, I think the writing time kept me cooking and the cooking kept me writing. 

But of course those solitary mornings of writing rested on uninterrupted time. And that was the great gift Ned, my dear late husband, gave me, on an ongoing basis. (Left, on our wedding day.) For while he appeared at the inn at 5:00 (or at least, was supposed to; he was frquently late, to the ire of our front desk people), he did all, or almost all, of the other stuff before then.

Other stuff like fixing things, doing repairs, maintenance around the property. Paying bills. Stacking the wood. Meeting with purveyors and staff. Occasionally firing or hiring someone. Covering for a dairymaid who had a sick child, or a front desk person on vacation. Doing legwork for the eternal, infernal City Council and Planning Commision and Parks Commission meetings that anyone who did anything in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, was periodically having to go before. Making sure vehicles worked, getting windowshields replaced if a rock dinged the glass. And on and on and on.

The minutiae that is the basal metabolism of life doubles when you are an innkeeper, if you take seriously the safety, needs, and delight of your guests. Ned and I did. Ned also managed to scoop in civic duty and volunteerism; he himself headed up a comission, the Historic District Commission, known to us in-house as "the H-Dick." (Right, just about a month before he died, withe writer Pat Carr, cooking up big plans about the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow --- which is another 'nother story.)

Actually, I don't know how either of us did it.

Where this already tenuously balanced schedule fell apart for me was when or if Ned was out of town. Which brings me to the literal whimper.

One morning he was out of town. It was spring, almost Easter, or Mother's Day --- one of  those Sundays where there's a big-ass brunch crowd was coming up, occasions where  we dropped brunch into the usual go-round of meals we served the general public (as opposed to just inn guests). I think also it was a Friday morning. Since Eureka Springs was and is primarily a town built around a weekend influx of visitors, I knew I'd be cooking late and hard that evening, and Saturday, with that killer turn-around-get-up-early-and-do-a-bang-up-brunch on Sunday.(This picture doesn't exactly match, but I've been wanting to use it for awhile, and it is of a brunch at the inn, held circa 1980 as a fundraiser for the Arkansas Literacy Foundation. You can see me, seated, the strap over my white-shirted shoulder. And you can barely see my mother, Charlotte Zolotow, cattycorner to the right, gray-haired. Sitting at the head of the table? Then-Senator Dale Bumpers. And standing? You guessed it: a very young, impassionaed, articulate Hillary Clinton.)

But back to the day of the whimper, when Ned was out of town. Although he may have been just in Iowa, seeing his parents, if memory serves this was one of his longer trips.
Many years, if we could afford it, he went for two weeks or so to South India, a place where, improbably, he felt wholly at home; a place he so loved that he had wanted his ashes put there (as I did, in fact, in the Pamba River, right, as he had requested).

I have the feeling that this particular Friday was in the middle of such a trip; I do remember he was not available even by phone.

In summary, then, a long, very long, weekend, made longer by whatever would fall to me with Ned being gone. I knew that Friday morning would be my last alone-time/writing time for the next several days. So I was camel-ish... drinking long and deep at the oasis of solitude, because it was going to be awhile.

Except. I was interrupted mid-drink. That morning was one of those where everything that could happen, did happen, most of it typically in Ned's bailiwick. A Dairymaid 
called to say that tehe toilet in Summer Meadows (left) toilet was backed up. Ned could have unblocked it; I called a plumber. Then the front desk called; Becky, Ned's replacement as maitre d', who was going to be in in the late afternoon, had some kind of family emergency; who did I suggest we call to step in as replacement for her? Then the front desk called again; didn't I remember that Rose, the prep cook, had a doctor's appointment and had to leave early, meaning I would have to come in early, to prep for the dinner we'd be serving (and I'd be cooking) that night? Well, no, I hadn't remembered. (Had I been told? If so, I hadn't written it down. Mistake.)

Okay, I remember thinking as I struggled with resentment at having to leave my precious cocoon early; I might as well try to get in a good space about all this, I'm going to have to do it anyway, and I want good vibes in my heart and in the food I cook, yes?  Yes. I thought all this as I opened the French doors from my studio to step out on the porch and walk across the valley to the inn. Or, wait, should I take the car? I'd probably be prettty damned tired by the evening's end...

That's when I saw, on the doormat, a gift from Z-Cat, the then-resident calico: a small dead bloodied snake. Oh-kay. Shake off the doormat, dropping the dead snake into the shrubbery.

And then, I looked down to to the Chevy Blazer, parked below in the driveway: ah yes, of course. Flat tire, passenger's side. Well, I was going to walk to the inn anyway, right?

When I got to the kitchen, David Crough, our erstwhile handyman, popped in to tell me the Eco-lab repairman who was supposed to have come the Monday before and put in a replacement part had not, in fact, come on Monday, and the odds were slim or none that we could get him on the Friday before a holiday weekend which meant the odds were also slim or none that we would have a working commercial dishwasher on this upcoming, particularly busy weekend.

This was the moment I whimpered.

I remember clearly exactly where I was: facing the long, stainless steel table in the kitchen, my back to the little window where guests could look in and I could look out. My feet were on the webby black plastic matting that, at the end of each evening, got run through the now non-working Eco-lab. I remember that it was about 11:00 in the morning.

And suddenly one clear, urgent thought clear appeared as if it had unfurled in 36-point lettering on a screen in my mind above my head. It was this: "I wonder if we have any Double-Density in the walk-in?"

Double-Density was Double-Density Chocolate-Mocha Walnut Torte, one of our two go-to regular chocolate desserts at the inn (the other was Chocolate Bread Pudding Maurice, with Raspberry Sauce). Double-Density was a very adult chocolate dessert; really, you ought to've been over 21 to order it.

It was a very, very bittersweet moist chewy cake with a little inn-made coffee concentrate added to the batter; something like a very rich, extra thick brownie in texture, baked in a round, deeper than usual cake pan. When we reversed it out of its pan, we iced it with a rich-as-sin, velvety-smooth, also very, very bittersweet glaze, shiny-glossy, pretty much just bittersweet chopped melted chocolate (Vahlrona, we used) and sour cream. Fairly liquid when its main ingredients were first whisked together, the warm glaze was poured over the cake. There it firmed nicely; just enough  to set, yet soft enought to stay menltingly voluptuous. And toasted walnuts, hand-chopped, pressed into the glaze around the cake's sides, completed the cake.  (I know you'd like a picture. I don't have one. I am not going to make a D-D now in order to take one. But... the Harvard Square, left, made by famed chocolatier L.A. Burdick, is pretty durned similar in taste and texture, though it's much more refined-looking than our D-Ds were; too, the D-D's were cut in triangular wedges. The L.A. Burdick in North Walpole, New Hampshire, is about a 20-minute drive from us here in Vermont, making Harvard Square or any number of wondrous pastries or confections a dangerously doable local possibility at any time.)

Curiously, my always-active sweet tooth largely abated during the restaurant years. I suspect this was because I did so much baking and dessert-making and plating I got sated by osmosis. My taste, after a long night working the kitchen, ran to the cool, tart, icy sorbets we made in-house (the basil being my particular favorite, followed by the ginger).

But. On the rare night when I really wanted a serious dessert, it was always an after-dinner, late night thing.

And on the really, really rare occasion when I had a yen for a serious sweet midday, it would be after lunch, maybe with a cup of hot tea in the late afternoon. (Still true, to this day.)

For I didn't eat sweet stuff early. Still don't. Not ever. No continental breakfast or danish for me. Have, usually, something proteinaceous, some form of whole grain, and a piece of fruit: typically, a soft-boiled egg or some sauteed tofu, a piece of multi-grain toast, half a fresh grapefruit or a fresh orange or a cup or so of berries. That combo, varied slightly, seems to be just about the perfect fuel for me.

But that particular morning in the way-back, it was 11:00, lunch still a good hour and a half away. Yet stressed beyond endurance, what appeared?

"I wonder if we have any Double-Density in the walk-in?"

Without hesitation I walked across the concrete floor, past the Eco-lab, up the one step to the pantry. Turned left at the bin of onions and the potato bin, past the shelves loaded with jewel-like homemade/inn-made jams and preserves, and to the walk-in, pulling up on its long handle.

And there it was. Two slices left, from the day before yesterday, so it wasn't going to be served tonight anyway.

I carried the pan back to the stainless steel table. I cut a thin slice off one of the two large slices, got out a fork, and put a bite directly in my mouth.

And as immediately as a sedative injected directly into a vein would hit, I instantly felt noticeably, remarkably better. Ahhhh. I mean: as that sugar-chocolate-buttter combination, at the verboten time of day, melted into my tongue, at that milli-second it acted like a drug. Calm and soothe kicked in. I'm sure I closed my eyes for a moment, easing into that sudden Laz-Z-Boy of relaxed feelings and pleasureable sensation. And that was when I let out that soft groan of relief.

But even as I stood there, relieved, drugged with and by chocolate, I was at the same time having the ah-hah moment, with the part of me that stood outside watching and observing.

Being a food-writer (and cuisiniere) I knew cognitively something about chocolate. That its family name is theobroma, which means food of the goods. That in Aztec society  priests, warriors and royalty drank a thick, frothy, bitter beverage called chocolatl/xocolatl. That this was cooked to melt the chocolate but served cool, and was  spiced with chiles, vanilla, and achiote. It was said to be an aphrodisac, a stinulant, an elevator of mood; it was said to strengten one, and banish fatigue. I knew Montezuma (right) supposedly drank 50 small golden cups of it a day; his court as a whole is credited with downing 2000 cups daily. (But, I always wonder when I read figures like this: who was there actually counting? Are we supposed to believe the accounts of conquistadors, as notable for their bragging as their cruelty?)

Anyway, I knew that recent neuroscience had borne most of this out. That chocolate contains a host of phyto-chemicals associated with mood, emotion, addiction: though I couldn't have named all of them offhand, I knew that at least four of them --- phenylethylamine, theobromine, anandamide and tryptophan --- did trigger mood enhancent, via neurotransmitters in the brain's own private pharmacy. Phenylethylamine, for instance, is a brain-manufactured chemical  similar to amphetamine, kicking off feelings of giddiness, attraction, euphoria and excitement, while phenylethylamine open's the brain's apothecary to release pleasureable mesolimbic dopamine ( a substance which, by the way, peaks at the moment of orgasm; there you go). Tryptophan is an amino acid associated with calmness and relaxation, while anandamide triggers a mild version of goofy well-being that some compare to a mild marijuana high. Yet the theobromine, plus a little caffeine (much less in a cup of coffee) balance things out with their wakifying effect. To boot, it has more anti-oxidants than red wine, or green or black tea.

I knew all that about chocolate abstractly. But until that controlled-substance-like first bite, I had never experienced it. I've heard it said that however true something is, if you merely believe it, it's a lie. The truth comes only via experience.

So there it was: the wham of that chocolate kicking in, side by side with epiphany. Oh! Now I know what all that theobromine stuff is about, and what the heck do you know - it's true!

(And although I didn't know it them, chocolate was also going to be discovered to have a prophylactic effect on heart disease, promoting heart health in effect by Roto-Rootering the arteries.)

And yet, did the exact what and why of theobromine at all really matter to me? Not much. Not at that moment. As Emily Dickinson said:

     The pedigree of honey
     Does not concern the bee;
     A clover, any time, to him
     Is aristocracy.

That stressed-out morning, in time, place, and circumstances utterly removed from my present life except by memory, that glorious Double-Density kindly, sensually played clover to my bee, and  made it possibile for me to begin that intense weekend un-freaked-out.

Un-freaked-out, I called the Eco-lab people, threw myself on their mercy, and got them to come out and fix the dishwasher. Meanwhile, David Crough changed the flat tire, and I started cooking.

So. In answer to Marilyn's tweet: yes, while I do mentally 'write' while walking, weeding, driving, I also, as this post proves, do it  'standing in kitchen eating brownies.' Because, when don't I do it?

Even if there is a 25-some year gap between the two, it --- one's whole dense, bittersweet, nut-studded, messy, satisfying wedge of experience --- remains alive and vital somewhere within, waiting to be called forth by the act of putting it into written words.

For nothing is wasted on the writer.

P.S. The recipe, please... this is from Passionate Vegetarian.

DOUBLE-DENSITY CHOCOLATE-WALNUT ESPRESS0 TORTE
Serves 10 to 12
   
Chocolate for grown-ups: no-kidding, we-really-mean-it, bittersweet; an intense chocolate experience, with a faint touch of coffee. Make it with cold-filtered coffee concentrate if you use such a system, or do a quickie version using concentrate from freeze-dried coffee crystals. It's a one-layer, intentionally very heavy cake; please note there's no baking powder or soda. Fairly simple as tortes go, its dense, moist fervently chocolateness put it is right up there. Be sure to pay attention to the notes on pans and baking time. And try the variations, especially the Chocolate Torte Ibarra.

8 ounces best quality unsweetened chocolate
1 cup butter
4 tablespoons boiling water
3 tablespoons freeze-dried coffee or decaffeinated coffee crystals
5 eggs
3 cups sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups unbleached white flour
oil spray
1 recipe Creole Chocolate Icing, below
2 cups walnuts, toasted and chopped

Preheat oven to 375.

Melt unsweetened chocolate and butter together over very low heat in a heavy saucepan, stirring near-constantly. Remove from heat and set aside to cool for a few moments.

Meanwhile, combine boiling water with freeze-dried coffee or decaffeinated coffee crystals to make a thick coffee syrup. Set this aside.

Set up an electric mixer, and add eggs, sugar, vanilla, and salt to the bowl. Beat together, on high speed, at least 8 minutes, or until light, fluffy, and nearly doubled in bulk. (A hand-held mixer takes a little longer than a stand-type mixer).

Add half the coffee concentrate (the remainder goes into the icing), and the somewhat cooled chocolate-butter mixture, and beat until ingredients are combined.

Remove mixing bowl from stand or put away hand-held mixer. Stir in by hand, using a wooden spoon, the unbleached white flour.

Spray a 10-inch round layer cake pan, preferably one with fairly deep sides, very well with oil. Do not substitute a pie tin, or any round pan with curved sides; do not use a glass pan.

Turn batter into prepared pan, and bake about 35 minutes, or until surface is dulled and edges of cake have started to pull away from pan. It will still look a little underdone in the middle; ignore this. Do not overbake this cake; its moistness is an essential part of its charm.

Leave cake in pan for ten minutes after baking. Run knife around edge of pan and reverse onto rack. Let cake cool completely, and ice with Creole Chocolate Icing, pressing toasted walnuts into the top and sides of cake. Serve at room temperature or slightly warm.

Creole Chocolate-Espresso Icing

Makes Enough for 1 Double-Density, with a bit leftover

Though simplicity itself to make, in flavor and texture this is the most sophisticated and divine icing you will ever taste. Astute Dairy Hollow readers will recognize it as a variation of one which appeared in our first cookbook. Very bittersweet --- again, adult chocolate, not kid stuff. Once you discover this you might not make any other chocolate icing, ever.

12-ounces semisweet chocolate (either chips, or diced squares of semisweet)
1 cup sour cream or whole milk plain yogurt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
Leftover coffee concentrate from above recipe ( 1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons)
   
Melt the semisweet chocolate over hot water, stirring often.

When smooth, remove from heat and stir in sour cream or whole milk plain yogurt, vanilla, and coffee concentrate.

Beat by hand until smooth and glossy. Let cool, stirring occasionally, until of spreading consistency, about five minutes.

Pour/ spread over cooled torte.

Variation:
Bittersweet Chocolate Torte Ibarra : Mexico’s favored with-chocolate combinations are brilliant, unique, complex: ground almonds, canela cinnamon, and distinctive Mexican vanilla extract. I developed this excellent, even more rich variation of this cake to take advantage of these complex, multi-layered flavors as my contribution to a South of the Border menu’d dinner benefiting the Arkansas AIDS Foundation, with the flavors, held at Eureka Springs’ Center Street South, now Caribe. It's now neck and neck with the previous as my favorite chocolate torte.
    First, coarsely chop 2 cups whole almonds into chunks in the food processor, and toast them at 350 about 8 minutes or until fragrant and lightly browned. Return them to the processor and pulse again, until they are a ground to a coarse powder. Set aside.
    Now, follow the previous recipe, but omit the walnuts, as well as the coffee in both cake and glaze, and substitute pure Mexican vanilla, available at any Hispanic grocery, for the conventional vanilla extract.  Cut the flour back to 1 cup. Add, with the flour, ½ teaspoon canela cinnamon (available in Hispanic groceries, and sometimes in bags at the spice sections of supermarkets), and ½ cup of the toasted almonds. Bake the cake, and make icing, as directed. Press remaining toasted almond powder into top and sides of frosted torte.

practice makes practice: part one

"Practice makes perfect." We've all heard it. Many of us have said it. But what a damned lie it is! And what assumptions that damned lie makes!

That there is "perfect", first off, and that once you've reached it, you've reached it. That there is a clear linear progression. It goes  from where one is (imperfect) through "practice" (an activity undertaken solely to achieve a clear, previously decided-upon goal, perfection) to where one should be (perfect). (Pictured above : the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, who had something remarkable to say about practice, and who we'll meet later in this post).

"Practice makes perfect" also contains many implicit questions. But it answers not one of them. Questions such as: If I get to 'perfect', what then? Where's the next? Am I just supposed to stay perfect once I've achieved it? Is this perfection static, final? And, once I have made it to perfect, do I have to keep practicing to stay there, or not?

I much prefer the truth: practice makes practice.

This elegant, accurate, precise maxim is not original to me. And whenever I use a direct quote of someone else's piece of wisdom, I like to give attribution. But here's the problem with this one: I heard it from a woman named Susan, whose last name I don't know, and whose phone number I don't have. She said it to me after a Powerseed Yoga class with Sandy Curry almost four years ago ( Sandy pictured left; I took with her weekly, sometimes a couple of times a week, for four years, in Walpole, New Hampshire, until  she moved to Philadelphia about a year ago. I am not the only student of hers who still grieves her departure.)

After this particular class, Susan and I were discussing some poses neither of us had been able to come close to executing that day, among them, for me, Crow; I couldn't even get one foot off the ground.

And Susan said, "It was an off day for me, too, I couldn't even do Tree without standing next to a wall for balance. But, as my old yoga teacher used to say, 'practice makes practice.' "

Like a stone thrown in a pond, I watched the ripples of this statement, delivered so offhandedly, spread out and out into my understanding. I'm still watching. I'm still understanding.

This statement comes up often in my internal, eternal dialogue with myself (you know, the conversation within, in which all of us engage in constantly). Time after time, in activity after activity.

For instance: When I just don't want to work out or go on a walk but do anyway, sometimes turning out to enjoy it midway through, sometimes resenting every step or bicep curl, but almost always feeling glad I have done it afterward: I find myself thinking "practice makes practice."

For instance: When I procrastinate about writing, finally start writing, find writing that day like bicycling through hot tar, am sure that what I've written is flat, contrived, lifeless... When I find, sitting down to write the  next day, that what I had written the day before was actually pretty good and that it takes a little less angst to get into it... When I find, the day after that, that I leap into writing as eagerly as I dive into the chilly pond on my property on a hot day, a thoughtless,
hungry, OH-I've-been-waiting-for-this plunge, quickly losing all sense of self, time, or evaluation in the act itself...Only to repeat the whole cycle on the next writing project...

Again, considering this, I find myself thinking "Well, you know, CD, you're never done, you're never there, it's practice makes practice."  (Our pond, pictured above, photographed by David R. Koff: been spending a lot of time in it, this exceptionally hot July of 2010).

For instance: When I feel anxious --- about the perennial sense of not-enough-time, the sometimes-sense of not-enough-money, and the brand-new and at times exceptionally ugly dispute that is looming between my brother and myself about my 95-year-old mother's care --- I think, first, "Why is it, that since I know anxiety is part of the process, and is an unhelpful emotion, that I'm still so affected by it? Why haven't I learned to accept it and just not get too wrapped up in it?"

And then I think, second, "Knowing how it works doesn't exempt you from it." (After all, just because you're an electrician doesn't mean you dont have a fuse occasionally blow. Just because you're a plumber doesn't exempt your pipes from  freezing if the winter's cold enough).

And then, third,  I think, "Oh. Right. Practice! I just get to practice what it's like to hang out with anxiety some more, not worry about getting over it. Feel it, but don't let it run the show. Use it. Practice. Practice makes practice."  

I often think of this, too, when in conversation with others.

When my friend M., pregnant with her first child, said to me, "I just don't know if I'm ready to have a child," I said. "Honey, I don't think anyone's ever ready for anything big. Not beforehand. Doing it makes you ready. Being a parent is the only thing that really teaches you how to be a parent."

This is advice I have more or less given for years when anyone tells me they don't feel ready to get married, study in a foreign country, read their writing aloud to others, or quit their job as a dental hygienist and become a landscape artist.

Because I deeply believe that doing something is what teaches you how to do it.

I'm not saying you shouldn't take classes, read books, develop business plans, talk to others who've done whatever it is you want to do but feel unready for  --- I'm just saying, if that's all you do, if you wait till you feel fully ready to do it, you probably never will. (Left, cellist Pablo Casals, another great practice devotee, who we'll meet below)

And if you do feel fully ready, well, I think in most cases you are probably the proverbial apple cart. Get ready (not that it's possible to get ready) to be knocked over.

And being knocked over teaches you how to be knocked over - and how to get up again, paradigm altered. Practice makes practice.

As I gave M my "nobody's ready for anything, readiness is an illusion" reply, I heard myself adding, internally, yeah, it's that durned 'practice makes practice' thing again.

I knew, pretty quickly, that "practice makes practice," which was teaching me so much, would be incorporated into my work as a teacher (for instance, in the Fearless Writing workshops I teach; and of course it became a cornerstone of Build Your Writing Practice).

So naturally I had to find out to whom to attribute it.

The next time I ran into Susan was on a cold day several months later, outside the Saxtons River Village Market.

I was coming out, with two containers of Liberte Yogurt in an environmentally-correct canvas sack. She, holding her two canvas sacks, was about to go in. The first snowflakes of the season flew. We greeted each other. I said to her, quickly, because it was cold, "Hey, Susan, I've been wondering about something, and I was hoping you could clear it up for me."

She said, "Yes?", drawing her black coat around her a little more closely.

"You remember that thing you told me about practice, after Sandy's yoga class back in, oh, it must have been August, September?"

She looked at me blankly. "Hunh?" she said.

"You know, that thing you told me your previous yoga teacher told you. About how 'practice makes practice' ? "

She said, "I'm sorry, Crescent, I don't remember this at all."

"Well, what was the name of your old yoga teacher?"

She said, shaking her head, "I'm really sorry, but I have no idea what you're talking about. And I've taken yoga with a lot of different people. "

I said, "Well, thank you anyway." We said our goodbyes. She went into the market and I went back down the bricked ramp to my car. Perplexed: I knew she had said that to me.

I'd first met Susan at the home of my neighbor Peter; they were intermittent friends. I asked him for light-shedding. "Oh," he said, with a dismissive flutter of the hand, "her memory has a tendency to come and go."

So, dear person, whoever you are, who told Susan "practice makes practice," and dear Susan, who, though you've forgotten it, passed this on to me, thank you.

Or maybe I should shortcut all this and just say, "Thanks, Universe. I needed that. Much appreciated."

Here is what the great Polish-born pianist Arthur Rubenstein  (pictured left) said 
about practice.""\When I don't practice for a day, I know. When I don't practice for two days, the orchestra knows. When I don't practice for three days, the world knows."

And here is what another great Polish-born musician, harpsichordist Wanda Landowska (pictured at the top of this post) said on the subject: "I never practice, I always play."

And when the New York Times asked the equally 
great Spanish-born cellist Pablo Casals (also pictured above) why, at age 93, he continued to practice three hours a day, here's what he said: "I'm beginning to notice some improvement."

The great American-born trumpeter Wynton Marsalis also had a lot to say about practice. In fact, he wrote an article about it (very trumpet-playing specific) back in 1987, early in his career. But as time went on, in interview after interview he continued to allude to the importance of practice. He later refined his views into 12 rules for practice. He stated and restated them many times, in many different ways (as you might expect from a master improviser). Here are my Wynton favorites, cobbled together from several of his iterations: 

• Focus while practicing.
• Relax. Practice slowly. Take your time. You can't be in a hurry if you're going to get better.
• Practice things you can't do. Don't rehearse your instincts.
• Don’t try to impress those that can hear you practicing.
• Always give maximum expression; invest yourself, participate. Don’t hold back.(Did you find Wanda Landowska's statement cryptic? I think Wynton is saying exactly the same thing here)

But as you probably noticed, what all these greats are practicing is music. 

Do writers practice, too? If so, how? Any why do we rarely hear about it?

What is the difference between "practicing" writing and writing? Is there a difference?

Why do we assume that musicians of course need practice ---  we expect that a person who picks up the violin for the first time will produce squeals and squawks, not concertos --- but  seem, unconsciously, to believe that those who want to write (especially if the 'those' happens to include ourselves) ought to be able to more or less nail it the first time out?

Does this have any relation to why we never hear about "musician's block"?

I think I have some provisional answers to all these questions.

And (with 50 published books to my credit and God knows how many unpublished ones, having worked with and known hundreds of writers, both as colleagues and as students) I know I can tell you with some authority about some of the ways various writing practices look, even when they're not called practices by their practitioners.

But that will have to wait for a few weeks, say, till the end of July.

Because this concludes my own writing practice for today.

a sound of wings unseen, inadvertent wisdom: a fathering day post

Walking yesterday, up near Frazier's sugar shack here in Vermont, I heard an animal rustle in the underbrush edging the woods by the gravel road. Though I stood stock-still and watched, I couldn't see what it was. Too large for a chipmunk or a squirrel, smaller by far than a deer, I was left only with the sudden sound of its movement.

But  that was enough. It brought back a particular moment to me as vividly as if it had happened an hour earlier. This was a moment with my late father, the writer Maurice Zolotow, who has been dead now almost twenty years.

But, when I heard that unseen animal, he was alive to me again. "No one ever steps in the same river twice," wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, "for it is not the same river and one is not the same person. " I feel that way, too, about memory's river, into which I necessarily step when I think about Maurice.

Another river, the King's, in Northwest Arkansas, is involved in the moment I recalled.

As is a great blue heron.

(The one pictured left is not "ours" , which I'm about to tell you about, but one photographed by Sheila L. Chambers for Birdwatcher's Digest).

As is the inadvertent transmission of wisdom, with which sometimes, if we are fortunate, our parents gift us, almost incidentally.

I've written about Maurice here often, most notably in this post. So I''ll give only a brief back-story. For it was a long way from the circumstances of his birth and later life to the King's River.

Born Morris Zolotoff on November 23, 1913, in Brooklyn, New York, he was a first-generation American who was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Like many of similar background, his idea of sophisticated, upper class America was informed by the movies, and it was towards this world he gravitated, eventually writing magazine articles (for Billboard, Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Look, Life, and, later, Playboy, Reader's Digest, and Los Angeles) and books, mostly about entertainment figures, musical, theatrical, and cinematic.

Sometime between his graduation from New Utrect High School and his entry into the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Morris became Maurice.

He could (and did) legitimately drop names and anecdotes across an astonishing spectrum: Duke Ellington ("The only place we could eat in together in New York  was a Chinese restaurant," he told me many times. But no matter how many times he said it, it was never without a tightening of his mouth, a slight shake of his head, and a tone of outrage. Racism of any type was incomprehensible to him. He recognized its reality, but, to him, it was so despicable it defied belief, let alone acceptance).

He gave Count Basie his first national review (in Billboard), and interviewed most of the sex goddesses of his time: Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe (about whom he would write many articles, and then the first of her countless book-length biographies), Ursula Andress (best known for her role as Honey Ryder, the Bond Girl in Dr. No), and Grace  Kelly (she may have been a princess, but he wrote about her --- making her his subject!).

The now all-but-forgotten outrageous show-business personality/actress Tallulah Bankhead  remained memorable to him: during an interview he did in her apartment, she got up to use the bathroom, and continued talking, leaving the door open, as she urinated. She also had a parrot, which she allowed to fly uncaged, It swooped around her living-room room, to my father's great unease, its droppings cleaned up by a maid who stood on guard. Comedians? He interviewed dozens: Jack Benny, Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen, Dudley Moore, Fred Allen, Allan Sherman, countless others.

For a change of pace (and probably because he needed the money) he even took on John Wayne. In the picture above right, there's the Duke, with Ann-Margret and my father. This was taken on the set of The Train Robbers, released in 1973, a year before my father's biography of Wayne, Shooting Star, was published). 

As I said in the previous post I did about him, at the time of his death he was working on a memoir to be called "Famous People Who Have Known Me." Which about says it all.

Except it doesn't. Not even close.

"I contain multitudes," Walt Whitman may have exulted in Song of Myself, and I think most of us do. But few collections of multitudes can have been so wholly contradictory as those contained by Maurice. I'll touch on just one here: side by side with his enchantment with celebrity, talent, glitz, and being where the action was, was his abiding love of nature and the solacing quietude that comes with immersion in it.

Where did this come from in him? How did it get there? I don't know: I only know that it was always part of him intermittently. And in the last twenty years of his life, it  became one of his transcendent, transforming refuges.


Once, sitting on my porch in Arkansas, he saw a black-and-blue mourning cloak butterfly lit on a snapdragon. Maurice leaned towards it, then stayed perfectly still. The butterfly, likewise, remained on the flower for a long time, its only movement the two wings, fanning like breath. 

I had come out the door, and I too stood still, watching not only the butterfly, but watching my father watch the butterfly. When it flew away, he turned and looked up at me. Normally ebullient and wildly talkative, he was wholly quiet. His usually animated face was  both illuminated and still, silenced by wonder, even awe, and peace. He looked as if he had seen the face of God and creation itself, and was still stunned by it.

Whatever he found in that butterfly had been with him for awhile. He attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he met my mother, the former Charlotte Shapiro, in a class on French Romantic poetry. And one of the ways he courted her was by taking her canoeing on Lake Mendota. Where and how did a wholly nonathletic, overly intellectual, skinny, neurotic, glasses-wearing Brooklyn boy get that?

Later, after they married, Maurice and Charlotte rambled England's Lake District, as famous for its natural beauty as its poets.

Still later, as a couple with children, they resided uneasily in the suburbs of New York City,  Westchester County. My mother would have preferred "real country", my father, Greenwich Village or the Left Bank. Westchester, a compromise, left them both unhappy and resentful. Yet even there, Maurice, Charlotte and I (I don't remember my 7-years-older brother ever coming along) occasionally went on long walks together, often around the less-developed parts of Tibbett's Brook Park.

By then, they were both famous, my mother as a children's book author and editor, my father as a biographer. The Zolotows were, as the above cover, from the September, 1951 Writer's Digest says, a "Big-Time Writing Team. " They were also, increasingly, big-time unhappy. My father's drinking, my mother's martyrdom, and the generally anxious, repressed, and sexist tenor of the times, captured accurately in the television series Mad Men: all these played a part. I've written, too, about both their casual, medically and socially sanctioned drug-taking in this post. They divorced in 1969 (I was sixteen.) A year later, my father moved to Los Angeles. A year after that, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous.


And it was in those last twenty sober years of his life that his love of the natural world took its deepest root in him. He became a member of both the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society and went on Sunday hikes sponsored by both
organizations, often. (Left, a picture of Solstice Canyon, one I believe he hiked, from the Los Angeles Sierra Club's site).  "Isn't it amazing, Cres?" he would ask me rhetorically, bursting with his customary enthusiasm, when I came to visit him in LA. "Here we are, in the middle of a city, but you can smell the night-blooming jasmine and orange blossoms, and do you know, in just 20 minutes --- 20 minutes! --- I can be out on a hike or a bird walk in a canyon!"

It was in this phase, too, that he had that encounter with the mourning cloak butterfly on my porch. He came to visit me at least once a year in Arkansas.


And sometimes we floated the King's River. "Oh, yes," said my father confidently before we put in the first time. "Of course I know how to canoe. I used to take your mother canoeing on Lake Mendota, you know." But that was a lake, 40-some years earlier, and this was a river; albeit a gentle one, there were little rills of white water. My father wasn't kidding anyone. He was scared, but he was psyched. He was up for it.


My friend George West, who organized the whole thing, always remembers that my father showed up wearing a safari jacket. George still says, fondly, "Here it was, the King's, to me a very placid little creek, not at all challenging. I looked at Maurice and it was clear that to him it was like, The African Queen. And I realized, anything could be, with that level of enthusiasm and adventure. Walking to the mailbox could be The African Queen. And that was what Maurice gave me. "

The first float we took together --- that time 'we' being me, George West, my late husband, Ned, and my friend Suzanne, then Suzanne Euler, now Suzanne Tucker, and Maurice --- he was still youngish, maybe 63 or 64. He still had some pretty good vision, was in decent shape, and, with George's help --- George being the most experienced canoeist present ---  Maurice could participate fairly fully. (Left: a family portrait of my friends, the dear Mitchell-West clan, left to right: George West, Starr Mitchell, Logan and Cane West, their sons, to whom I am a Cres-Aunt).

But there were a few Mr. Magoo moments that day on the river: George calling out, "Watch out for that branch, Maurice!", Maurice whispering to me (I was in the bow, he in the stern that trip) sotto vocce, "Cres? Do you see a branch?" two seconds before starting to get lightly smacked in the face by the branch, and then, belatedly, ducking. (Of course everyone present could hear his covert whispers to me.)


These days I live in Vermont, not Arkansas. Ned, my husband, has been dead for almost ten years; Maurice, almost twenty. My present, and for-the-duration partner, David, is older than Maurice would have been on that first float. And I take a lot of walks. 

Rarely is there a day, at this time in my life, when a walk in the green cathedral of the woods does not, at least for a moment, lift me out of myself. Most often it's the light: the way it comes through the trees, dappling the leaf- or pine-needle covered path or sending an almost Biblical ray down to illuminate a single leaf or, as I wrote about here, the ears of a deer. Since the land I walk is honeycombed with water, springs and seeps and little creeks and marshy areas, sometimes it's water, or light on water, or the sound of water, or a combination of all three.


But often it's wildlife: bird, insect, reptile, mammal. Wild, life: both the wildness ---  untamed, unpredictable  --- and the life .  A tiny burnt-orangey-red salamander (an eft, they're called) on the path, can thrill me, as can a bumblebee, droning drowsily as it moves from wild rose to foam flower in the deep woods, if I stand still and just watch it for awhile.

And the other day a plump brownish gray and white chickenish-shaped game bird ran across the old gravel road, the part hardly anyone travels, right in front of me.
It was making first a soft, melodious clucking, which later, as it rustled in the brush & ferns, turned into an almost purring sound. When I came home, I spent a little time trying to ID it on the Internet (as if that would or could have made it more wondrous). I think it was a Spruce Grouse. (Picture, right, from audobon.com, taken by a Glenn Tepke.)

But it was its sound, especially that strange almost-purr that spoke most to me, even more than its shape, beauty, and, for me, rarity.

For sound, like light, water, and greenness, often brings that lifting-out-of-one's-own-small-world, too. The woods and meadows are loud with birds this time of year, in contrast to the near-complete stillness of winter in Vermont.

Which brings me back to the rustle I heard in the woods the other day, and to my father, and to the King's River --- the final float we took together. By then my father's eyesight was very poor, but he still wanted to go.

What did I learn from my father? In that earlier post, I mentioned much of what I imbibed from him about writing and being a writer. But of course, there was - is - more.

Enthusiasm. Joie de vivre. Digging under the surface to find the deeper intricacies of the story, of almost anything and anyone. Reading. Quoting the greats, always with attribution (it is his influence that has brought both Heraclitus and Walt Whitman into this post, for instance.)

Most of all, I think Maurice gave me a sense that a continual falling in love with the world was possible and desirable, despite its --- and one's own --- losses, sorrows, and limitations.

On that final float, we rounded a bend, and George (with Ned in the canoe ahead of Maurice and me). said suddenly, softly, urgently, pointing with his paddle, "Blue heron! One-o'clock!"

My father, the bird-lover, with equal urgency: "Where, where?"

Me (softly, pointing a few feet to the right): "Just there, Maurice."

He turned his head in the direction I was pointing, and said, in a voice wretched with disappointment, "I can't see it." 

Just then the great blue heron took off from the stream in which it had been standing. They are big birds, with a wing-span that ranges between 5 1/2 and 6 1/2 feet. And this one flew right over our heads. Right, directly over the canoe in which Maurice and I sat.



Those huge wings beat the air, bearing the heron up and over us. Slowly. Audibly. A pause between each wingbeat.

Beat.

Beat.

Beat.

My father tipped his chin up. And he said, in a voice that was overwhelmed with a joy, gratitude, and a deep satisfaction even larger than his sorrow of a few seconds before, "I can hear it, though."  


(Picture above, again not "our" heron, but by Jules Frederick. I am so grateful to have found this image!) 

the deer's ears: Mose, me, misery & moments

Today, coming down to the hill towards the pond, beginning my morning walk, two animals --- one large, one small --- standing in the middle of the gravel road. I caught my breath, stood stock-still, blinked and waited, blinking a few times to clear my not-so-good vision so I could identify them.

Ah. A white-tailed deer, and - what was that smaller creature? If a faun, the tiniest one I had ever seen, and low to the ground, and dark. No, surely no, not a faun.I waited on my eyes and brain...

Ah. A cat. A small, peripatetic black cat named Bootsie, belonging to my neighbor Andrew, who lives about a quarter-mile away (across from the graveyard I wrote about last time). Bootsie often wanders over here to play with my two cats --- at least, they play when they are all outside, but hissing and yowling begins if mine are on one side of the screen and Bootsie on the other. (David's portrait of Bootsie, looking spooky, which he's not, and half-wild, which he is, taken the April afternoon David visited the graveyard with me to take pictures.)

The deer (I had a side view, and I believe it was a him, a buck, though too young to have antlers) was facing the right, where the large meadow begins. Only his white tail moved, flickering upright occasionally. Bootsie, with all the delusions of grandeur that only a fearless young half-wild black cat can have, was crouched, in a stalking position. Both, at the sound of my feet, as still (except for that white tail) as the figures on Ode on a Grecian Urn.

Then I began to walk, slowly, towards them. The buck took off for the meadow, Bootsie in pursuit.

That glimpse would have been enough to transform that walk for me, to take my brooding heart from itself back to its true home: wonder. The life-work of seeing and loving the world and what's in it as it is, without being caught on the briers of fear, self-doubt, self- or other-hate, anxiety, all the thousand small things that remove us from the vastness. Yet knowing when and how to move in action, however one can from as it is to as it might be. Or should be.  Yet to stay loving, seeing, eyes --- however imperfect one's vision --- open.

But when I got down to the break in the trees edging the meadow through which the two had disappeared, there stood the young buck, facing me, perhaps a hundred feet away. (No sign of Bootsie; the grass is tall).

All I could see was the buck's head, held nobly erect.

And here is the surpassing wonder of that moment:  with morning sun behind him, the two thin-skinned upright elongated triangles of his ears were illuminated - a bright translucent deep red, each outlined by a two-sided triangular rim of brown fur.

As brilliant, and to me, more uplifting, than the rose windows at Notre-Dame de Paris.

I had never seen deer's ears like this before; I will almost certainly never see them again.

At that moment, the troubles I had begun the walk with dropped. "Such a perfect moment," as Mose Allison, sometimes called "the William Faulkner of jazz," sings, "Nothing you can say / One such perfect moment / Gets you through the day."

David, the resident photographer, is not here now, but in Los Angeles. He'll be there about a month, getting ready to sell a home he owns there. But even if he were here, he rarely goes on walks in the morning, so the only real way for you to picture it is through my description.  Maybe that's enough.

(My friend Traca Savadago, the Seattle-based food maven and blogger said, generously, in a post about our friendship,  "I photograph everything. Crescent photographs nothing. As a skilled observer, I’m convinced she “sees” more. I lean on the image; she expresses it through words.")

However, as I walked on down the hill, and then up, and then to the right, up and up through the woods above the pond, into and through more woods where Frazier has his sugaring operation, along one of the paths he keeps clear for access to his
sugaring lines, I remembered a picture David had taken on another walk. Not of a deer, not of a wild creature at all, but of a domesticated turkey, albeit a 'heritage' variety (you can tell because it's not pure white, and its breast is not so gargantuan that it is falling over).

But the sun was behind that turkey, too, and lit up its red wattle as if it was a blessed and sacred thing, as the deer's ears appeared to me.

As perhaps anything in the world is or would be, if we looked sufficiently closely, with sufficient illumination.Or, perhaps, if we had sufficient distance, to see the whole picture; a God's-eye view.

But who among us has that?

Deer were a problem in Eureka Springs, that sweet and vitriolic, contentious, lovely little Ozark Mountain town in Arkansas where I used to live. No one could agree about what should be done about them. 

The deer there had no natural predators left, and had gotten complacent about the human inhabitants. They bred and bred and bred, and they lived close-up with the people. On the one hand, I could watch a doe nuzzle her two darling dappled fauns just a few feet from my kitchen window. Sometimes they stood; sometimes they knelt, napping. No one could have watched them and not said "Awwwww."

Yet no one in town had had a tulip bloom in years (the deer adored tulip bulbs); and, indeed, it was reaching the point where no one had much of a garden, vegetable or flower, at all, other than one composed of those plants the nurseries labeled "deer-proof."  You had to be careful driving certain stretches of road, those in town but bordered by woods or brush-covered patches, because you were liable to hit a deer.

Certainly you would see the deer, even if you didn't hit them, all the time back in Eureka Springs; you could not avoid them. I still remember fondly a remark made by my first post-Ned boyfriend. We were driving into Dairy Hollow the back way one early evening in late summer; it was still a little light. It must've been a weekend, because he lived in Little Rock and would come up, driving his large loaded brand-new pick-up (he bought a new one every year, an affectation since he had grown up in Westchester, gone to Groton and then Duke, and was, in his business, billing $12K a month. But he lived in Arkansas now, and thiought he should have a pick-up).

A herd of deer, maybe 30 or 40 of them, on either side of the road, were calmly decimating the flora.

He pushed down the window-button, leaned out, and yelled at the deer, "Get a job!"  
"The deer problem" was one of the countless things in Eureka people got exercised over (I used to think it was because we cared, because we weren't apathetic. Now I think maybe that that community just has some kind of magnetic pull to people who enjoy arguing, litigating, and busybodying. Probably there's something to both theories).

Shooting inside the city limits was illegal, besides which many opposed hunting on principle, although just as many engaged in it. Having someone from Game and Fish come and shoot the deer with birth control pellets was even discussed, though perhaps that was just a joke someone made, or one of the wild rumors that boomeranged around that place with such force that they took on the patina of truth.

Meanwhile, the deer multiplied, and went hungry.

Whether the town ever solved the this, I do not know; I moved away in 2002.

Here, though, on 35 acres in Vermont, it's rare to see a deer. Coyotes and weasels,  natural predators, abound. That's what balance looks like.  Things eat each other. That's what life looks like. If you're born (or "take a birth" as I heard said in India) , you eat and, eventually, will be eaten. Basic contract of inhabiting a body.

I stood and watched that deer with its ears like a sign from God, and it watched me, for perhaps 30 seconds, neither of us moving.

Then it stamped one hoof, took a half-step towards me and then turned, gave that strange loud snort they do and bounded away. Those huge leaping effortless bounds! I could see only the top of the deer, its white tail and reddish brown back, at the top of each bound. Then, it was out of sight. I heard one more snort, fainter, as vanished as if the whole episode had never taken place.

I continued my walk through the ferny, now starting-to-be-buggy, woods. There were more shades of green than I have names for troubles. Yet I still walked weighted: there are no good alternatives for my 95-year-old mother. Every option has drawbacks. I don't have answers, let alone good ones, on to how to make her last years on earth as good as they can be. Every time I think it is figured out, things shift. Hundreds of hours have gone into finding a solution. My brother and I try hard, and come in and out of harmony with each other.

But I kept remembering the deer's ears.

When I came home I looked up the lyric's of that Mose Allison song, Perfect Moment. And then, because both sorrow and the illuminated ears of a wild creature are both themselves, and, to a writer, material, I came home and wrote this. Nothing is wasted on the writer. Like Mose, whose words follow, I am still in the game:

Mountain sheen, ocean shine
Miocene valentine
One such perfect moment
Never twice the same
Such a perfect moment
Will keep you in the game.