"Nothing is wasted on the writer."

Estimated Final Date of Frost: time's winged chariot, with lilacs & the fish

It's almost Summer Solstice. Here in Vermont, the days are extraordinarily long, because we are so far north. I often don't get out to the garden until as late as 6:00 p.m., yet there are still hours of light in which to work. I often don't come in until I'm ravenous and it's almost dark and it's dinnertime. Which, this time of year, may well be 9:00 or 9:30. Almost dark: but still a little light. Though it may not officially be summer yet, it's definitely past spring. The lilacs, for instance, have already come and gone.  (Right, there they are, or were, the lilacs in full bloom, earlier this year, mid-May. Photograph, like all those here, by David. We're going to go  on a little photographic lilac journey throughout this post). 

David, my partner, has more than once described these days as "deceptive" --- meaning, I think, that because it's light so long you think you can get much more done than you actually can. No matter how many hours of the day are light, there are still only 24 of them.

Since May, every other Tuesday morning we've been going to an "eco-agriculture" gardening class with Tatiana Schrieber of Sowing Peace Farm in nearby Westminster West (here's a piece she wrote on celeriac). Tatiana has a Ph.D in Environmental Studies; her focus was and is environmental  anthropology; that is, the way people and environment interact. She blends hard science and long garden experience with her personal pull towards social justice: so, the workshop might be summed up as organic gardening plus-plus-plus.

Yesterday, in one of the less-esoteric class discussions, Tatiana brought up succession planting (what you plant in the garden in the place that, say, the early crop lettuces and peas, now harvested, have vacated) as well as planning for the fall garden.

And she said that it was time to start seeds, especially the brassicas --- broccoli, kale,  the cabbage family --- for our fall gardens. Our fall gardens? It's June! It's not even officially summer yet! How can this possibly be?  (Left and above: we interrupt the lilac series to bring you this beaut of a picture David took, I believe autumn before last: a maple leaf on a still-productive broccoli plant, in that year's fall garden.) 

It's natural to think about time. Natural in a garden class, surely, for time and nature are inseparable.

But natural,too, as one experiences time. As one ages, and is humbled by it. As one's parents and partner and children and friends age. As the ones who cared for and protected you becomes the ones you care for and protect. As those who came before you die, and you find you must step to the front of the line. Right, the lilac bush outside our front door in early spring... if you enlarge it you can see that trees in the background are still bare and skeletal, but it knew --- in whatever way a lilac bush knows --- that spring was on the way, and that it would eventually flower into what you saw at the top of this post).

And natural at time's interstices, solstices and equinoxes, when the year inaugurates the next quadrant of its great turning wheel. There is so much I would like to say about these linchpins of time on earth.

How I got married for the first time, at age 16 (back when I was in "pre-Ned school", as I sometimes say) on the spring equinox.

How, almost 40 years later, I would have a friend named Ami and her 21-year-old daughter would die of a heroin overdose on that same day.

How I no longer celebrate Christmas (18 years of decorating 8 different Christmas trees at the inn got all that washed right out of me, permanently) but I do celebrate the solstice; sometimes by going to a party I'll describe later, but always, since I've come to Vermont, by going on a night-time horse-drawn sleigh ride at Fair Winds Farm.

How my beloved adopted parents, Louis and Elsie Freund, about whom I'll write a post one of these days and who lived with verve and luminosity until their nineties. managed the following: he died on the winter solstice. She died, a year and a half later, on the summer solstice.

And how on David's and my first extended trip together, a long several day drive up the California Coast, he arranged for us to spend a few hours in the middle of the night --- from 1:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. the only time non-resident guests are allowed! --- in the then-newly restored salt-water hot tubs set high into cliffs above the sea, at Esalen, at Big Sur. It happened to be Winter Solstice, and a full moon rose over the sea below. 

When I met David six years ago on an internet dating site --- before we took that up-the-coast trip --- I used Andrew Marvell's phrase, "time's winged chariot" in an early email (I can't remember the context). This slightly astonished him, in that way that things do when you're starting to consider the possibility of love or friendship with someone --- wow, you do that too? You like that, too? Every commonality signifies, or appears to, though perhaps, finally, it's what you don't have in common that keeps things interesting. The poem in which the Marvell phrase is used, To His Coy Mistress, was one of his favorites; in fact, he'd memorized it, along with several Pablo Neruda sonnets. (I got to hear him recite the Neruda, in Spanish, then in English, on the coast trip. He had the moves!). (Left and above, the lilac bush, a little further along... note the tree in the background, just starting to green.)

There's no way of knowing whether Andrew Marvell 's unnamed mistress did indeed give up her virginity when she read that poem, in which he tried to persuade her to do so. But almost 400 years later, long after her quaint honor and his lust are long since ashes, and even with our far-longer lifespans today than in his time, that chariot still hovers precipitously, ominously just over our heads. It always has and always will. Time rubs our face in our mortality daily, since, especially as we age, we discover every day is so full of beauties we will clearly miss or barely have time to see (like the lilac again, this time its buds, all green, in close-up) and it's just choice, choice, choice and the minute you say yes to one thing, you're saying no to something else, perhaps equally marvelous. The passage of time at the center of Marvell's poem is at the center of life... at the center of life itself and our individual lives. 

At least, our worldly lives, life as embodied beings, temporarily in residence on this beautiful, perplexing globe, with its endless seductions. (The spiritual life being the only place where we transcend time... except, conundrum-like, of course at that moment we aren't "we" any more, just That. Which takes it beyond the realm of discussion. Doesn't it?) 

Time is certainly much on my mind these days. It's a  rhythm steady as a pulse, a heartbeat. My mother, the writer Charlotte Zolotow,  is about to turn 94; my aunt, Dorothy Arnof, a former editor, is about to turn 100. My boyfriend, unspeakably... except I'm okay with speaking it... will turn 70 this fall. (70? Can I even call him my boyfriend? Would this mean I'm dating, like, my grandfather? But wait, I'm 56...) Left: the Charlotte, me and Aunt Dot on Charlotte's front porch, in September 2007. 

(Digression: when my mother and David --- pictured below that same day on the porch, jiving around with Charlotte's beloved decorative sheep, Baaa ---  first met, she was 88 and he was 63. She was in the hospital at the time, an old lady tiny even in a twin bed, wearing a bright blue nightgown. Now understand that even before she was elderly, my mother used to mix up words in a manner everyone who knew her found charming and hilarious. For instance, in Charlotte-speak a sangria became a "shangri la" and the city of Manila was located in "the Philistines." The other piece of back-story is that David, in his youth and still, has always been active in social justice movements, including racial equality. As a student in Stanford, he traveled with six African students on a "fact-finding tour of the South", during which they met, among other, Martin Luther King and Orville Faubus. So, anyway, Charlotte and David meet each other. Things go swimmingly. Evidently David makes the grade, for Charlotte starts bragging about to friends. Immediately! No sooner are we back home than the phone rings. It's one of Charlotte's pals, apoplectic with laughter. "As soon as you left the hospital Charlotte called me," says CZ's friend. "She said, 'I've met Crescent's new young man.'" Funny enough in itself since he was then 63.  CZ's friend continued, "And then she said, 'He was very active in the Civil Wars, you know.'")

(Meaning, just in case you didn't get it, Civil Rights movement.)

(This is why I have very mixed feelings about Facebook and Twitter, though I use them: you just can't tell a real story.  It's like the one-line poem written by the late poet, William Matthews, which appeared in an early '70's chapbook called "An Oar in the Old Water." The title of the poem: "Premature Ejaculation." The sum, complete total of the poem: "I'm sorry this poem's already finished." )

But back to time and the lilacs. (Another close-up bud, below, starting to take on to color).

I think it's especially natural to think about and be aware of time in Vermont, where the seasons are  radically different from one another. With the dramatic seasonal extremity and summer's brevity, consideration of time is unavoidable. If you don't get your wood in before winter... or your garden in in early spring, it'll be too late. (I have yet to really succeed with growing okra. a hot weather-loving crop, in chilly Vermont. Last year I got beautiful okra plants, with their sensuous, velvety saucer-sized blossoms, but only about three or four actual pods. I'll try again this year. Photo: the okra seedlings. Prosper and grow, little okras! As a Southerner who has only recently become a Yankee, I found it shocking that my favorite area farm-stand, Walker Farm, sold okra for 50 cents a pod... and hilarious that they labeled the okra basket "curiosity." !!! But now, having tried, and failed, to make crop of okra, I almost see their point.Though given how much I love okra, I might say "tragedy" rather than "curiosity.")

Sometime in late March or early April, Vermont begins its slow, gradual shift from winter to summer with what locals call Mud Season. My Southern friends often say to me, in a tone of concerned urgency, of the shift from Arkansas to Vermont, "But what about the winters?" To which I sometimes reply, "Aw, you just suffer from from claustro-snowbia," and at other times quote what my friend, neighbor, and fellow cookbook Deborah Krasner says on the subject: "It keeps the riff-raff out."

But in fact, winters are actually not nearly as difficult as Mud Season, when all the snow melts. This year, 2009, all the old-timers were saying "Worst Mud Season I've seen in 40 years." We got pulled out by Triple-A twice, and often just plain forwent driving rather than risk the mud. I had a Scarlett O'Hara moment in early April... "As God is my witness, I will not spend another Mud Season in Vermont!" I didn't fall to my knees, as Vivian Leigh does in the famous radish-eating scene, because the ground was... mud, and I might never have gotten back up and out. (P.S. So far, I'm doing very well, thank you, in setting up gigs in points considerably South in late March/ early April 2010.) What could be so hard about Mud Season? See picture, above right. That's my car, right in front of our house. It just... sank.

But how swiftly we went from that mess to full-throated spring! DK and I just couldn't stop marveling at it. "Two weeks ago the trees were bare! And now ---!" Do we marvel this much every year? Spring is, after all, a perpetual renewal and I think everyone whp experiences gets amazed all over again each year. But perhaps because this particular Mud Season was so extremely dreary, protracted and difficult, we were even more spring-struck than usual.

(Above, our house in early May. That bush to the left of the door? The lilac. And maybe a foot further back from where this picture was taken is the road... the exact spot of the sinking car above, only a month earlier! And below? Another close-up of a lilac bud. Enlarge the picture, look closely, and I bet you'll marvel, too).

One night recently, DK and I were talking over dinner, again, with wonder about the rapidity with which mud had changed to greenness. I said, "You know what? I think this has something to do with what you talked about in the car, when we were coming home from that party at Leslea and Matthew's, that first time we went."

That party had the celebrated the winter equinox two or three years earlier. It's held  annually (though 2007 was our first time), at the home of two doctors, Leslea Goldman and Matthew Pearce. Only Leslea is a practicing physician now ... several years ago, Matthew left medicine to pursue a second vocation which had always called him: painting. (That painting, "Bearing Fruit," is one of his, left. Look at how luminous the skin is! I think one can see the healer still, in the artist).

After the party, in the warm quiet car, traveling the few miles home alone the snowy road, in that coupled intimacy, checking in with each other, once again a dyad after a larger group event, we were talking.

(This after-the-event checking-in was one of the recurring experiences in which I missed Ned most achingly after I was widowed, in the years before David and I fully connected. To leave, or --- if you were the one entertaining --- be left alone after everyone leaves, and not to be able to check your reactions, explore your thoughts and perceptions, with a beloved partner! It was a silence so noisy, one's mind and heart became an internal emotional Times Square. I know a period is likely to come when I am again unpartnered, given the difference in my age and David's. Will I be able, by then, to experience that quiet in peaceful solitude instead of longing? I don't know. I do know that I treasure it all the more now, having done without it. I do know that never do I do a post-party deconstruct / decompress with David without being aware that to do so is both privileged and temporary.) 

Anyway, as we made our way home in the dark, snow so high on either side of the road that at times it was almost like traveling in a tunnel of white, after that solstice gathering, David said, "You know, I was looking around the room, and I thought to myself, 'you would never, ever see a room full of people like this at a party in Los Angeles'."

I thought back through the evening. Finding the house; the sudden bustle in the quiet night: many cars, figures visible inside in silhouette, almost palpable warmth on the longest night of the year.  Coming in, shedding our various layers of coats, hats, scarves, boots. (Vermont has its own winter-time etiquette: bring slippers or house shoes with you when you go visiting; take your boots off and change at the door). Entering into the warm people-filled kitchen, every flat surface and stove burner covered with baking dishes and bowls and jars with spoons sticking out of them and crumbled foil spoons --- the detritus of an almost demolished potluck. An equally people-filled living room and study adjacent the kitchen. Lights low; lots of candles, a wood-stove cranking out the heat. David and I separated, to eat and explore. There were many conversations , in and out of which we, like every one else, eddied. It was neighbors greeting neighbors, not fancy. Jeans, sweaters (the distinctive smell of damp wood and woodsmoke when you hugged someone, a scent I also remember so fondly from my Ozark days), lots of town vests and Polartek. The photo above has nothing to do with the party--- it's just in case you think I'm making this up: our mailbox, midwinter, in snow. 

We were still relative newcomers, and didn't know many people there besides Leslea and Matthew. I did talk with my own doctor, Gary (with whom I play Scrabble occasionally, and have hiked and swum with a time or two). I had my then-typical twinge: if I was back in Eureka Springs I would know every single person here, and my then-typical self-soothing internal talk: relax into your new life, CD, open, soften. Isn't it nice to meet people without having to dance through what they've heard about you? I remember I talked, that night,  with a woman who raised sheep, a potter, a teacher,  and a couple who replace automotive glass. And I had faith that with every year, I would grow more deeply rooted in the community, and come to know more people, and that some few of them would grow to be close friends. As has happened.

Faith. That's what moving to a new place and starting over takes, even if it's shaky at times. And that's what a Vermont winter takes. Left, a picture taken at Aubuchon Hardware in March: garden supplies, piled high with snow.

"What do you mean by 'people like this''?" I'd asked David in the car. "You mean, no make up, no dress-up clothes?" 

"That too," he said, "But what I was thinking of was, everyone looked their age."

"Ah," I said.

And, two years later, this spring, I continued (he immediately referenced the earlier conversation). "You know, in L.A. maybe it's not just the youth-and-movies thing. Maybe it's the climate. You have pretty much the same weather every day: that Southern Californian mild, sunny thing. Nothing to say 'Time's passing.' It's lotus-land. What seasonal changes that are, are very mild and subtle, compared to here. Here, because of the climate you can't duck the passage of time. It's in your face. Maybe that's part of why people wear their faces here, they don't attempt to alter them."

As if such alteration worked. Even when it works visually --- the person looks good, instead of surgically altered --- it doesn't work. (Left: oh so many lines around those alteration-free eyes...) You can't outsmart time, as Andrew Marvell knew. And countless others --- among them, Shakespeare ("Summer's lease hath too short a date.").

Contemporary gardeners can approximate that date; you look up where you reside to find the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone. From there, you get the estimated frost dates. After the final date of frost, you can, theoretically, plant in the spring. And, as Tatiana told us, you look at the estimated first frost date and count backwards, to figure out what you can plant that is likely to reach maturity before a killing freeze sets in.

One of my own poems is about that date. It  creeps me out that it was written two years before Ned died: 

Estimated Final Date of Frost


Estimated final date of frost, Zone 6: May 5.
You put your tender plants out two weeks later.
Climatically, the odds are good; it probably
won’t freeze, and they’ll survive. The ground
is warm, and your Big Boys and jalapenos,
impatiens ‘Little Twinkle’, holy basil
will be protected from inclemency, and harm.

Yet I remember 18 inches on May 9
And hail, two Aprils in a row, left us all peachless.
Fronts met and clashed above.
Five minutes made the orchards into holocausts
of beaten useless blossom-covered ground below,
odd white balls still melting calmly on the sodden ruin.
This has some relevance to love.

There are some calculations best avoided
by those who say, “Ah well, it’s for the best.”
They had to ship in fruit from California, twice,
to Clarksville, where they hold Peach Fest.

Protection’s not available
to those who raise a pig or grow a fruit.
We bite July’s Red Havens, sweet and acid:
juice, which trails our chins,
explodes in yellow, red, and pink,
the fleshy meat of summertime
within our mouths, and
fiber between teeth.  We don’t suspect
the work and the travail,
and all it took to give us what we eat.
In this, a farmer or an orchardman’s like us.
A day that ought to be pure spring may freeze.

you tend while knowing,
unprepared to be reminded,
there are no guarantees.

As always and with everything, Ned's sudden death in 2000--- for which, despite my own prescient words, I was wholly unprepared to be reminded ---  figures into my considerations of time. Ned is now, forever, in one way, a beautiful and vibrant 44-year-old.  (In another way, of course; he isn't; he isn't period. He  doesn't exist, is vanished: it' was hard for me to not be angry when well-meaning people said "Of course he's always with you, " or "He's always watching over you." No, he wasn't. He was and is gone; what I remember about him is precious to me, but it is no more or less than memory. Memories of Ned are not Ned.)

One strange gift of his death, an event I would never ever have chosen yet which is not without gifts, is this ever-present sense that there are deadlines. Some deadlines you know about, and to some extent they are negotiable: you can file for an extension with the IRS, you can ask your publisher for another couple of weeks or months. But some deadlines --- the big ones --- you have not a clue about. As W.S. Merwin writes in "On the Anniversary of my Death", "Every year without knowing it / I have passed the day..."

We all work and live under both kinds of deadlines. What message do I take from all this? Don't waste time. Or, as I sometimes say, "Listen to the fish!" The fish being a carp, as in "carpe diem."

This year springtime brought something unusual: I was invited to teach at Rancho la Puerta in Tecate, Mexico. This is a place about which I'd always had intense curiosity and to which I had always longed to go: click the link and you'll see why. (The experience there, which exceeded my expectations, is a subject for another post). The invitation was the good news. The bad news was, it could only be scheduled for mid-May --- right at the start of the time to get the garden in, in our part of the world where, as you know by now, every day counts.

Too, it looked like we would miss the actual blooming of the long-awaited lilacs, that sublime color and fragrance I love to bury my face into (which David has, several years in a row, taken a picture of me doing; you saw one earlier and there's one, a bit more natural, still to come).

But I wasn't going to say no to Rancho la Puerta.  I was listening to the fish! (FYI, I've been invited back for 2010 --- but will be teaching next in March and December, not garden prime-time). 

So, I determined I was going to plant all I could (potatoes, hearty greens and yes, brassicas, carrots, beets) before we went to Mexico. And, I was going to mulch it down so the weeds couldn't get a jump on me. Left, the garden post-early planting, pre-mulch. Looks pretty unprepossessing, right?

Only problem was, Mercury was retrograde and despite my best efforts, the mulch didn't get delivered until the Thursday before the Friday we'd be getting on the plane for San Diego.

Reader, I woke up at 5:00 a.m. without an alarm and got my ass out to the garden and mulched the whole thing that damp, overcast Friday morning.

David said to me several times that morning, "I'm impressed. I'm impressed."

He also said, eying my head-to-foot straw-covered, mud-covered clothes and shoes, "You might want  to get undressed outside."

Which is what I did when I came in at 8:00. After that I showered and we ate breakfast. Then we made our flight with time to spare, arrived in San Diego that night, ate great Thai food, and went off the next morning to a fitness adventure and beautiful flower-filled terrain wholly unlike what we had left. In Mexico --- my first trip to that country.

Above right, the garden as it looks today.

But, back to the morning of the mega-mulch.

I had exited out the side door to go to the garden, but I headed around to the front to come in, stripping off as I came. I piled the hay-covered clothes on the steps. And there I saw --- how marvelous, unexpected, kind, generous! --- that David could take his annual photograph after all.

For the lilac, just in time, was in full bloom.

 

letting an invitation become personally seismic: how I began to grow up

Greetings, dear blog-readers! May 1, 2009, is the one-year anniversary of "nothing is wasted on the writer", and I thank you, thank you for your generous responses.  I'm working on an anniversary post: it also happens to be the one-year anniversary of when I stopped using credit cards, as well as the general time of year I begin getting in this year's garden .. all fecund material for any writer who believes that nothing is wasted on her. (Speaking of fecundity: on the left is a lilac, still tightly budded in mid-April, but day by day getting more and more ready for   its annual shower of ecstatic fragrance and color, every time we come in or out the front door. David, already in plant-nirvana, took this.)

But posts always take me longer to write, link, get illustrated and tinker around with than I expect, so I'm putting something else up here for anniversary day.

A couple of months back, I was kindly invited by the magazine Little Rock Soiree to write a piece on "A Day in Little Rock. " My contribution is in the current issue of the magazine;  if you live in the Little Rock area you'll be able to pick it up. In case you don't, here it is.

It's not a "here-are-my-favorite-places-to-eat-and-things-to-do-in-this-city," article. That's what I initially thought the magazine would want when Amanda Morgan, the editor, contacted me. And I dreaded doing it, and planned to turn her down: I find writing that kind of story not too interesting --- though as a reader, of course, I find the idiom useful and sometimes interesting.

But it turned out Little Rock Soiree wanted something much more expansive and fun to write. It turned out that the piece would be part of a wide-open literary series the magazine runs, all written by Arkansas-rooted writer-writers. Amanda sent me several samples. It was the piece by the brilliant novelist/ memoirist/journalist/art professor Donald Harington that won me over. (I'm certainly not saying Don is "brilliant", by the way, just because a most flatteringly described children's book writer named "Half-Moon Berryfairy," who lives in Eureka Springs, happens to have a walk-in appearance in his novel Ekaterina. The protagonist of which is a Russian mycologist with a pleasantly twisted erotic bent... but I digress). 

But Donald's essay, and the fact that the magazine published it, made it clear that "A Day in Little Rock" would or could be just my kind of thing. The writers are free to go wherever that idea --- a day, a place --- takes them. As far, or far out, as they wanted.

Here's where I went.

__________________________________

I blame, or credit, Carol Gaddy.

She heard me reading poetry between sets of a bluegrass band at a now-defunct nightclub in Eureka Springs, where, if one sentence wasn’t smacking your audience upside the head, you lost ‘em.

Carol came up to me and said, “I’m with the Arkansas Arts Council. Would you like to be part of Arkansas Artists-in-Schools?”

I was 22. I said, “Oh, you wouldn’t want me, I’m a high school drop out.”  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. She told me about Artists-in-Schools. How professional writers, musicians, painters, actors, sculptors signed on for a school year, and for one week out of each month, they visited schools, doing what they did with children and teenagers. Four small classes a day. Regular income. Different schools, all over the state. (Left, me, a few years later, with one of my students at the Alexander Girls Training School).

“I don’t drive,” I told Carol.

"Now that,” she said, “could be a problem.”

But way down underneath I must have had some idea that I might be able to become the kind of teacher I’d never had, who might have reached the kind of indifferent, restless student I had been. For I stopped talking myself it of it. I let Carol Gaddy’s invitation be personally seismic. Over the next few months I learned to drive, bought a car, got a watch, had a telephone installed.  Shifted from identification with the so-called counter-culture to participating in that ecosystem of education, geography, history, art, and social interaction which we simply sum up as culture, period.

Driving down the Pig Trail to my first A-I-S gig, I had a serious discussion with myself. “How,” I asked myself, downshifting into the curves, “are you going to do what you do and be comprehensible and palatable to Arkansas school administrators?”  “Well, Crescent, are you going to speak the truth to them?”  “Sure.” “And isn’t truth truth? Recognizable, universal --- or it wouldn’t be truth, right?” “Yes, but ---”  “Well, then most people will recognize it if you say it clearly in language they understand. Speak truthfully in easily-understood language. Stay away from jargon, hippie and otherwise. Stay clear. Simple.”   
           
Thus do we talk ourselves into growing up.

Here’s how it turned out. I fell in love with doing Artists-in-Schools. I fell in love with the whole state, not just tiny off-the-wall Eureka Springs. Then I fell in love, period.

The next school year, I rented a studio apartment in the Quapaw Quarter of Little Rock.

Little Rock was dab in the middle of the state instead of way to hell and gone like Eureka Springs, which is tucked into the northwest corner of the state and not convenient to anywhere. Whether I was going to Crossett or Jonesboro, Walnut Ridge or DeQueen, whether I was working with the children of sharecroppers in the Delta or of attorneys and  real estate brokers in Maumelle, living in Little Rock put me closer.

The house in which I rented the apartment was the Garland Mitchell House at 1404 Scott Street, a two-story steamboat Gothic on a lawn punctuated with Tuscarora crepe myrtles. My landlady was a Mitchell --- Starr Mitchell, who was gorgeous and about my own age. She lived in the larger, usually messier apartment across the hall. I loved watching as each day she emerged from it butterfly-like: slim, shiny dark hair, immaculately dressed, the picture of order from chaos.         

Starr had a weekly potluck dinner. (Picture below, Starr and me in 2009, a full 33 years --- how can it be? --- after these events I've been describing took place. We're still laughing, still friends, still crazy after all these years. Taken by David at Cafe Bossa Nova, Little Rock). One Tuesday she waltzed in to 1404 Scott and said to me, “I get the prize for inviting the best-looking man in Little Rock to potluck, you just wait and see.”

  

And, that evening, setting down a hot apple crisp, I did.

And reader, I married him.           

Not long after that potluck dinner, before we married but after Ned and I had fallen in love, stepping into the shower one day, I thought, “I could die now, I know how it all comes out. This is the man I marry and live out my days with. “ This was not quite accurate.           

On an unseasonably warm fall day, about 23 years after I set down that steaming apple crisp on a trivet of Starr’s table and looked up and into the extraordinarily large blue eyes of that handsome man, Ned went out for the bicycle ride he habitually took, twelve miles out to the Conoco where they rented canoes, which he called “Canoe-Co.” On the way back, he and a small pick-up collided, about a quarter mile west of the Lake Leatherwood turn-off on Highway 62. (Map, strangely, courtesy of the Ozarks Offroad Cyclists Association).

The large events which shape one’s life do not appear large at the time. They appear typical. Ned had no idea that particular bike ride, out of thousands he’d taken, led to eternity. I had no idea that particular apple crisp, out of the thousands I’ve made (always with fresh apples, always with cinnamon and a tiny bit of black pepper in the topping but never spices on the apples themselves) would lead to Ned.   

And what if I hadn’t read poetry between bluegrass sets at the bar, that particular night?

That is why I blame, or credit, Carol Gaddy.

Otherwise, I would be forced to say, “Life is mysterious. It is as sweet and fragrant as an apple crisp straight from the oven. As round as a spinning bicycle wheel. As twisted as the Pig Trail. And at any time, it can change utterly and forever, as it did for me on a day in Little Rock.” 

Part 2: love/ let sleeping cats tell the truth

Here in Vermont, there is a moment of exquisiteness in the turning of each year. It only lasts for a few late summer days, days still warm and sun-filled, the outdoors still richly greened with only a few colored leaves, garden still producing. Yet in this charged moment, there's the slightest breath of fall.  These days, close to earthly perfection, are the year's moment that surely possessed strange fey Emily Dickinson, New England poet-genius when she wrote, "Inebriate of air am I."

Maybe I, too, get inebriated by the air at this seasonal juncture. Twice, now, that time has been the time of year when I've had unlooked-for, otherworldly experiences.

The story of these two occurencess is the one that I meant to tell last time, about becoming lovable, not, as I said, lovable in the twee sense but meaning able to give and receive love, love-able.  Beanblossom pre-empted that story; yet it is linked to her: by cats, love, presence and absence.

2002: at home on the aquifer

One day in late August, or early September, 2002, here in Vermont, I came upstairs to the bedroom.This room was reclaimed from attic space by my aunt's late boyfriend, Jim Cherry, who opened it clear up to the rough-hewn rafters, giving it a soaring cathedral ceiling, all the more startling because the other rooms of the house are low of ceiling. The bedroom floors are of wide smooth planks, so-called "king's lumber" (because in colonial days every board foot of wood wider than 10 inches was supposed to be shipped back to England; ornery New Englanders refused to send their wide boards and kept them hidden by using them to floor attics). Some of these floorboards in my bedroom are 24 inches wide.  (Left, the vegetable, garden, which can be seen from this bedroom's dormer window. This is an early fall glimpse, probably just about the time I'm describing here, taken by David).

Since this room is both opened up and on the western side of the house, it gets afternoon sun, and at times, can be too hot. But not for the resident cat or cats, who love to sleep on the bed even in summer. 

The day I'm thinking of was not too hot but at that perfect almost-fall moment. It was three or four in the afternoon. David didn't live here then; we'd only met recently and our connection, though genuine, was tenuous. So this particular day it was me and Z (my first cat post-Beanblossom). Just the two of us, in the old house, once my aunt's summer home, on top of a hill. 35 acres around us. 

That afternoon was not quite two years after Ned's abrupt death; not quite a year since I had realized the time had come to leave Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where I'd lived for the previous 33 years.

I'd had to leave for reasons including, but not limited to, Ned's death, and I was trying to work out how to live my new life unembittered by the less-than-kind circumstances under which I'd left the old. For some of what propelled my departure had given me many justifiable reasons for bitterness, and yet bitterness is an unsatisfactory state in which to reside, however justifiable. What was I to do with this?

These days, I've come to believe living through betrayal is one of the most difficult, important, and rarely written about of human experiences. For if you come through betrayal and (eventually) work out how to remain open to life and people, you do so as an act of choice, and not because you are innocent, or naive, or a naturally trusting soul. You make a conscious decision. You know the risks; finally, after weighing them, you take them with your eyes open. You take them as an act of integrity and with a kind of regretful wisdom:  you know that the world and those in it will sometimes betray you, yet to live without being open to allow those who betrayed you to also make you betray yourself and your life.

But that is another story, not the one I want to tell here.

Two years after a death, the "my deepest sympathies" are long over and done with; one is naturally expected to have gotten back to, or on with, normal life (though 'normal', as you knew it, ended with the doctor saying, "I'm sorry; we lost him.") But how else could it be? This is why grief is an experience inherently which one undergoes, finally, in isolation.

And who the heck would condole you because you feel you have no choice but to leave a town you loved deeply? There's not even a word for that category of grief.

Grief: ultimately you cannot share it any more than you can relieve it. It just has to be lived through. There is nothing to do but walk through it. Step, step, step, step.

The way I did this during those shadowed years was just by occupying my life, my new, very unreal-feeling life, as if I was functional and not hollowed out. By assuming that one day I would feel better. By knowing that suicide was the worst possible thing you could do to everyone you loved, besides being show-offy, pointless, melodramatic, and just generally not an option. 

So I made the bed each morning. Did the dishes each night. Kept the bird-feeders filled. Went on walks. And wrote.

What I was working on in 2002, that strange year, was mostly edits of Passionate Vegetarian, a book I had written while Ned was still alive and I was still deep into my old life.

The afternoon I'm writing about, though, was in my new life. Like most days that year, I had been working on PV edits all day. The chapter I had completed had just been picked up by Kevin, the very nice Fed Ex guy, and was on its way back to the editor (who, I think, was clueless about how devastated and barely functional was the writer with whom she was working. And I suppose I wanted her clueless. Fake it till you make it, as the saying goes). Kevin had brought me a new section. But before I got started on it, I decided to go upstairs and lie down , maybe nap. (Right, the final cover that 1278-page long book would end up with. It still blows my mind that I was a cover girl at age 50. And that Ned never got a chance to see this. I think he would have been so tickled, and proud.)

I walked up the stairs. Through the hall and its stacks of things needing attention, by the bathroom, and to the big open bedroom. The air was warm --- not hot, not cool, with that almost imperceptible sigh of a fall-tinged intermittent breeze. Light streamed in the windows, so bright the dust motes were illuminated. If the room had had a sound, it would have been that of a bumble bee: serene, calm, replete.

There, lying on the bed, curled into a ball, was Z-Cat.

I heard myself say, aloud, "Oh, Z-Cat, how did we get so lucky?"

And with that I stopped. Just stopped. Stood stock-still in that dozy room. 

Though by natural temperament I had usually felt, and now again believe myself to be, among the most naturally optimistic and up of human beings, it had been a long, long time since I perceived myself as "lucky." Sure, I'd made my gratitude lists, on paper and inside my head and heart, even since Ned died. They were and weren't authentic; it was, again, fake-it-till-you-make-it, the desperate reflex of a formerly happy person who cannot believe what has befallen her. Who, to her own disbelief, is not only presently unhappy but knows that even should she grow happy again, she will now, always and forever, reside above an underground aquifer of grief.   

Yet without forethought or premeditation, without talking myself into it, the words had been spoken. Lucky. It hung there, reverberating in the warm, quiet, gently moving air.

To discover feeling good again even just for an instant was as shocking as a sudden blow. I did not know what to make of it. I lay on the bed, aftershocked with anxiety and confusion, trying to calm myself and figure out what had just happened. No nap now. That sweet breeze flapped the window shade. I curled up around the cat, stroking her till she half woke, purred and purred, then went back to sleep. I just lay there feeling, thinking, feeling, thinking, in an atmosphere as calm as I was troubled.

My late father used to say, "Write your way out of it." I got up, went downstairs, made a cup of tea, and went back to work on the next chapter.

Laborare est orare; to work is to pray. That's another thing Maurice used to tell me. Writers write.  That's our work. And/or, prayer.

Step, step, step, step.

Lucky? May Sarton, in Journal of a Solitude, writes that the work, the writing, is often farther along than the writer.  Something like, "Thus the writing is the arrow of the person, showing us where we are headed." Though I hadn't reread that book since it was first published, in 1973, Sarton's idea had stayed with me. That 'lucky', I thought, maybe it's something like that. An arrow. 

2008: on loan

Let us fast-forward to 2008, the second occasion that weird enchanted pause in the year propelled me unexpectedly forward. 

I have again come upstairs. It is again late afternoon. It is again that poised moment in the seasonal circle.

The aquifer of grief? Yes, still there. But the person who resides above it has, in time, grown into her new self and her new life. She is again, on the whole, quite happy. She has managed to live through several Vermont winters, a fire, and two book tours. She has made new friends, and yet the old and important friendships, from the good and true part of her earlier life, have remained vibrant.  She's grown two of the best vegetable gardens of her life. She has managed to make the staggeringly large mortgage payments and stay one step ahead of the other bills.And David, with whom she had had the most tentative of beginnings, now lives in Vermont with her. Theirs is an amicable, piquant, interesting companionship, deeply affectionate, solid, fun. She is not married to him; that, she thinks, is a relationship she will probably always reserve for Ned and Ned alone. But Ned, it turns out, was her soul mate, but not her sole mate. David is her partner. If David and she walked into love, rather than fell, well, that may be the flavor of loving at midlife, loving as an adult, when you know no one can and will save you (except perhaps yourself), when you realize no one can be or will be able to "be there", as the phrase goes, because "being there" is ultimately not within the power of human beings to control. 

So, this last fall, I came upstairs to the bedroom again... the "I" that I am now, no longer hollowed out. 

And there, lying in the a patch of sun on the bed, in the precise spot Z-Cat had lain that previous day in 2002, lay one of the two cats who live with David and me now (Z-Cat died in 2006). He, the present cat, Cattywhompus, was curled in that round, pleasing self-contained cat shape of pure sleeping contentment that has pleased artists and cat-lovers for as long as their have been artists, cat-lovers, and cats. (There they are, the two of them, in their Scratch Lounges. Cattywhompus is the one looking up.)

This time I had come upstairs not to nap but to get a book. I picked it up from the night-table, and noted it all with a deep sigh of contentment:  cat, sunlight, the intoxicating temperature and air and slight breeze, the room's atmosphere.

I remembered, suddenly, the lucky I'd articulated  in almost identical circumstances, six years earlier. I remembered I'd said it to a different, now-vanished cat (the one who had followed the still longer-vanished Beanblossom). I marveled briefly, shaking my head at how very much more resilient we turn out to be when our choices are few (sink, or rise?). I turned and, book in hand, walked out of the room, heading back downstairs. 

It was at the top of the stairs that the insight hit with the force of a breaking wave. It felt as if it came not from within but from outside: the moment when the hand of God meets the human hand as in Michelangelo's famous picture.

Except, I hadn't even consciously been reaching up, and I don't even believe in God as such. 

I do believe in grace, though.

It was: As long as you want to love, Crescent, you will have someone to love. As long as you want to be loved, there will be someone to love you.

I sat down, hard, on the top step. Hanging on the wall to my left was the gallery of photographs of those I love and/or have loved. It happened that the photographs of Ned, including the one of him and Beanblossom which I used in the last post, was right next to me. I glanced up at it.

And I understood, clearly, that cats come and go, and those who love them come and go, but love stays.

That our friends, our lovers and partners, come and go, that we come and go, but love stays.

That love is love and not fade away, as Buddy Holly wrote.

If one is lovable, if one works hard to make oneself lovable, in the sense I talked about before --- able to love, able to give and receive love --- there is no shortage of those on whom to lavish that love, and from whom one will receive it.

But that, I thought as I sat on the stairs that day, that, wondrous as it is, is not really the point.

It's only part of it. For there's love of, and then there's just love, period. A state.

If one were able to live in that state, well then, though person or cat or circumstance may and must change, one would always, literally, be in love.

somebody to love

This post, and the previous one, began in my mind with an e e cummings quote an old friend of a friend sent me.  "Unless you love someone," cummings said, "nothing else makes any sense." This sounded so Hallmark-like, I could hardly believe that cummings, the wily rule-breaker word-bender poet, could have said such a thing. Not that he might not have believed it (as many people do), but that its phrasing was so un-cummings-like and pedestrian.

But I Googled it, and yep, sure enough, somehow, on some occasion, he said or wrote it. But I knew, too, it was not only the phrasing that bothered me; it was the meaning.

"Don't you want somebody to love?" asked Grace Slick in the eponymous Jefferson Airplane song, circa 1967 (off the Surrealistic Pillow album), "Don't you need somebody to love?". Then she warns, ominously, "You better find somebody to love." There's a distinct subtext to that "You better" -- an unspoken "or else".  The lyrics spell out different occasions on which you might want or need this somebody: when the truth is found to be lies, when all the joy within you dies. When the garden flowers are all dead, and your mind, your mind is so full of red. 

Well, I have had, at times, a mind, and heart, full of red (which I take to mean anger), as well as a darkness that goes beyond black (by which I mean grief's seemingly endless night).  And I am here to say that at such moments, the "someone" you feel you need so desperately is and can only be a temporary fix.

I think it's finally the love, not the somebody. Contrary to what cummings said in that quotation, I think it is the love that allows life and loss to make sense.

I also think cummings knew this truer truth, and stated this clearly in many of his poems. For instance, there's his line "Time is a tree, this life one leaf," which comes to me over and over again. When someone I know dies. When I am walking in the fall color and watching the leaves change. And also, at moments when I am overwhelmed with the great privilege of my new life: the privilege of getting to love and be loved, know and be known, a second time, albeit in a wholly different way, with David. Time is a tree, this life one leaf:  what can the sap that revivifies both tree and leaf be but love?

Sitting there on the top step I thought, whether or not there is a somebody, whether or not I feel it at a given moment, I know that love is there.

This leads to the great gift of betrayal can offer, if one chooses to unwrap it: if one chooses to love, and to be in love, the state of love, anyway.

Because finally, what else but that state can possibly make worthwhile traveling this excruciatingly difficult, exquisite life-path, where so much is given and so much is taken away? We say hello and goodbye, we love and lose our dear cats, our companions, our friends and lovers, our parents, sometimes (in what many perceive to be the cruelest and most unnatural category of loss) our children.If we are not "in love", how on earth do we bear it?

Life's outlines are, basically, love, loss, love, loss, love, loss, love, loss, love.

But I would rather end on love, not loss, as the final mode.

And I think that that love is a capital-t Truth and that, unlike the small-t kind kind Grace Slick referred to, it will never, ever be found to lie.  

From Wislawa Syzmborska:

NOTHING'S A GIFT

 

Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan.
I'm drowning in debts up to my ears.
I'll have to pay for myself
with my self,
give up my life for my life.
 
Here's how it's arranged:
The heart can be repossessed,
the liver, too,
and each single finger and toe.
 
Too late to tear up the terms,
my debts will be repaid,
and I'll be fleeced,
or, more precisely, flayed.
 
I move about the planet
in a crush of other debtors.
some are saddled with the burden
of paying off their wings.
Others must, willy-nilly,
account for every leaf.
 
Every tissue in us lies
on the debit side.
Not a tentacle or tendril
is for keeps.
 
The inventory, infinitely detailed,
implies we'll be left
not just empty-handed
but handless too.
 
I can't remember
where, when, and why
I let someone open
this account in my name.
 
We call the protest against this
the soul.
And it's the only item
not included on the list.

 

 

(Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh)

 

Part 1: love / dead cat

I sometimes tell my writing students "Start out with a clear purpose, but be willing for that to change in the course of writing. "

Well, case in point. In this post, sparked by an e e cummings quote, I set out to explore the idea of how one becomes lovable... and wound up writing, mostly, about a dead cat. (Disclaimer: not  the "lovable" that's the usual saccharine, adorable puppies-and-kittens-pansies-and-plump-faced-babies; a much grittier one --- becoming able, finally, to give and receive love.)

The course-correction probably began this morning. I was halfway thinking about the post, having started it last night, but not yet being at all satisfied. I was also making breakfast.

I cracked two eggs into a small stainless steel bowl for an omelet. I began to beat them with a fork. This, of course, makes a certain sound, a light, distinctive rhythmic metal-on-metal clang. And as I heard the fork strike the bowl, I also heard myself calling, "Beanblossom! Bean-Bean-Bean-Bean-Bean!"

Now Beanblossom, my first cat, has been dead more than twenty years now. It's not that I've forgotten this. But I habitually call the name of that small dear calico when I beat eggs in this way. It's as automatic for me as unscrewing the caps of the small brown extract bottles and raising them to my nose and inhaling the vanilla or lemon or orange or anise, another habitual gesture. Whether it's sniffing the vanilla or calling the name of a dead cat, in my view, you take pleasure and joy where you find it, and never miss an opportunity to do so. Eventually, some of these opportunities become habits. 

For Bean is, and isn't, dead. Yes, she's buried (in the back of my old house in Arkansas, under the mimosa tree; the daffodils Ned planted when he buried her are probably already blooming). But in memory as in dreams, where time and embodiment have little or no sway, Beanblossom is alive whenever I think of her. She is as quick and immediate as was her spry scamper to get to the egg bowl. Licking the little bit of raw egg inevitably left in it was one of her great delights.  Even as I would call her name, the clang of the fork in that stainless steel bowl would already have brought her running, however deep her sleep, from whatever part of the house she was hiding herself in. One favorite haunt was the top of the armoire, from where she could look down on us, blinking in surprise, as if to say "Oh? Who are you again? And what are you doing here?" Another much-loved Beanblossom place, in winter, was wedged into the small space between the end of the wood-stove and the brick chimney into which it vented. If you touched her hot tricolored fur while she laid there, you wondered why she didn't simply combust --- and indeed, one December she did actually singe slightly, sizzling the edges of her whiskers so that they curled comically into great rococo curls.  (I love that picture above left, taken one winter morning by our friend George West. Two great early lasting loves of my life, neither with me in form any more: Ned and Beanblossom. The picture was taken outside the little cottage that was my home for years, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.) 

Although I've called Beanblossom's name when I beat eggs for years, it's always been automatic; I only really thought about it today. I guess that by calling her name in the same way I did when she was alive, I call all this --- the curled mustache, the quick feet --- up in memory. And there, quickly, I can revisit our adventures during the years we were both alive in the physical sense simultaneously, and in connection with each other --- in whatever mysterious way a cat and a human being are in connection.

As I've said, Beanblossom was my first cat. She lived to be 18 ... a period that paralleled, in my life, the years from age 18 to 36. No one else on the planet knew me so intimately in a daily way that long, that closely, over that period of time. Though life is one change after another (why do we continue to cling to the illusion that someday it's going to settle down?) I think we can agree that for most of us, in young adulthood, the rapidity of change is stepped up.

Though I have had cats since her death ---  first another calico, and then two tabbies from the same litter (the current feline residents) --- Beanblossom was, and I think always will be, the cat of my heart.

One night, alone (as far as human company goes), lonely in my bed in the little funky cabin Beanblossom and I shared, I fell asleep with a backache, my last conscious thought, "Oooh, I wish I had someone to rub my back." This would have been, oh, 1973, 1974, which would make me about 21, 22. The next morning, I woke up on my stomach. And Beanblossom was walking up and down my back, kneading my spine with her four small paws, and purring loudly. 

Beanblossom used to go on hikes with me; not on a leash, but following or leading, a few steps ahead or behind. She also went camping out with me, both when it was just the two of us and at times when I went with friends. On one latter occasion, several of us were skinny-dipping in an Ozark creek, and someone called out to me, "Crescent! Look at your cat!"

I looked up to the shore and there, standing on a rock, was Beanblossom. You might not think that a cat's face would be capable of expressing distinct feelings of distaste and resolve, but that's what I saw on hers. She stood there a few seconds longer, looking towards me, gazing at the water, sizing things up, possibly screwing up her determination. Then it was: "Well, if I have to, I have to."

And she jumped into the creek and cat-paddled to me.

Her dear resoluteness. The way she elongated her neck above the water.  Her head canted up and back, her nose tipped up, as if she couldn't bear even the smell of the disgusting substance in which she found herself. 

And yet, and still, she kept paddling to me.

When she reached me, of course I swam back to shore with her. When we got out, I tried not to laugh as I toweled her cat body, ridiculously tiny with its flat wet fur, especially silly because poking out of that almost rat-like wet body was her dry, normal-sized head, with the v of caramel-colored fur that slanted down to her nose.

For how could you laugh at a creature, so loyal and willing and brave and peculiar as that?

I remember these things; and that when I fell in love with Ned, Beanblossom did too. Though a generally friendly cat, she took to him truly exceptionally. So much so that when Ned... Well, Ned then worked for the Arkansas State Historic Preservation Office. He was hired to write a how-to book for use in the Quapaw Quarter district of Little Rock,  and he did. It was called Fixing Up Your Old House, and it was published, as he never failed to say, by the Arkansas prison system.

He threw himself a publication party for it, and everyone from his office was invited, including Wendy, a woman he had dated a few times, not seriously, before meeting me.

We were then living in Little Rock in a rental apartment. I can still picture that living room and the dining room next to it, that night: filled with gaiety, people, food, friendly noise, laughter, the requisite old beige uncomfortable given-away couch, with which young people just-out-of-college (as Ned was, and as I would have been had I gone to college) invariably furnish their first living rooms. Now that I think of it, he proposed to me on that scratchy old couch.  Beanblossom gloated in all the activity, more or less making herself the center of attention: making the rounds: lap to lap, person to person, socializing and being petted by all.  All, that is, but Wendy, who arrived about an hour late.

And this is what happened: Wendy walked in, Beanblossom jumped down from whatever lap she was perched on, faced Wendy squarely, gave a single gigantic, dramatic hiss, and fled the room. There was a moment of awkward silence, and then the party went on.

Later that evening after everyone had left I came into the bedroom and there was Beanblossom curled up with Ned. He was stroking her between the ears and sweet-talking her, sotto vocce. "Noooo, Bean, it wasn't like we were even serious. Nooooo. You could have been a nice hospitable kitty, yes you could have been, yes yes yes, you could..."(Scroll back up and look at the picture above, of the two of them nuzzling each other. When I look at this one, what is so clear to me is a tenderness that was part of Essential Beanblossom and Essential Ned).

To think that all this story, it turned out, lay in the beating of some eggs this morning! I could have made and served omelets for a dozen people in the time it's taken me to recount this.

And as I say, I didn't even set out to write about Beanblossom.

Or Z-Cat, another calico (equally feisty but much less sweet-tempered) who eventually followed Beanblossom. Here's Z, pictured on a couch cushion in a 2003 picture taken by David Koff.

Or Cattywhompus (a neutered male tabby, who embodies an almost dog-like mischief and playfulness), who eventually, with his sister,  followed Z-Cat into my life. See his portrait below, also taken by David. I must add that the Whomp and his sister made short work, alas, of the couch on which Z is pictured.

Though Cattywhompus and Z do figure into the story I want to tell.The story I planned, and plan, to tell. About becoming lovable.

But I should have known that such a vast and audacious topic, deserves, at the very least, a couple of posts. Even if you're not writing abstractly, but specifically, as, in my view, you must, if you want to write well, about love or anything else.

As the Native American writer N. Scott Momoday once said, "The events of one's life take place, take place." It is this second emphatic  place, which in my understanding is not just geographical, but personal, sensual, historical, and spiritual, not just accurate and contextual, but above all truthful, which gives writing about any topic life.

This is why nothing is wasted on the writer: let the world in, be porous to it, and then, so long as you actually write, as opposed to think about writing, everything becomes the specific material of the place Momoday describes. There is no waste, all utility. (Cattywhompus, current resident, left).

I promise you Part 2, the post I thought this one was going to be, will be up no later than April Fool's Day.

For you can't hurry love, as Diana Ross told us, any more than you can the true disclosure of place.

And for me, it turns out that becoming able to love insists on beginning with a calico cat who had a v of caramel fur that tipped to her nose.

buffalo girl: adventures in children's book writing & publishing/non-publishing, screwing up, & being inspired by one very fearless child

It's not quite a month now since I came back from Little Rock, Arkansas, where, among other things, I met the Buffalo Girl. I will probably never know her name, but I'll remember her for a long, long time.

I went to Little Rock, this time, for several reasons. As y'all who read this blog regularly know, I now reside in Vermont, but I lived in Arkansas, mostly in the off-the-wall little town of Eureka Springs, for 33 years. But at this point, whether I leave Vermont and arrive in Arkansas, or leave Arkansas to return to Vermont, it feels like home on both ends of the journey.

So what brought me back to Arkansas? First off, I was to address the Arkansas branch of the Young President's Organization. Secondly, I'd lead a Fearless Writing workshop. And third, I'd give two presentations at Historic Arkansas Museum, one to those who work in and with area museums, and one to a group of 80 third-graders, from e-Stem Charter School.

First, just to set the background scene: of this trip: I was three weeks out of arthroscopic shoulder surgery (the necessity for which had become apparent long after I had already made my speaking and teaching commitments, which I was not about to break, being a the-show-must-go-on girl down to the nuclei of my cells). So there I was, wearing a sling, still needing painkillers to sleep partway through the night, but basically boogeying along in game fashion. And why not? Darling David (boyfriend; filmmaker) came with me --- I still couldn't drive, plus he and my agent had conspired and decided I really needed to have some of my talks on film, and DK was going to film them. All this was good enough, but we were ALSO staying at the home of two of my dear, dear long time friends, George West and Starr Mitchell. (Also present in their home was Scratch, George and Starr's very mellow old gray cat, who did everything he could to make us comfortable. Picture: here I am in George and Starr's  guest bedroom, just woken up, snapped by David, slung in the sling, with Scratch cozying up.)

I cannot tell you how much I prefer staying with friends to staying in a hotel. And when those good friends live in a welcoming comfortable home, complete with amiable cat, and when one has the chance for the odd late or early bit of easy, natural, catch-up conversation with either or both of said people, so much the better. In this case, so very much the better: these are two interesting, funny, kind people who are intellectually vibrant, loving, and deeply committed to justice and understanding (to get a sense of this, check this article, which touches heavily on George's work with Central High students and bringing the institution's difficult, meaningful history alive and into a very different present). That they are my loyal long-term friends is my great good fortune. That they loved my late husband, Ned, yet have welcomed David, as well and as compatibly, is almost miraculous.

How, under these benign circumstances, could things not be basically good, even with a shoulder that hurt like hell?

But back to Buffalo Girl, and my talks in Little Rock.

Now, any time I give a talk, anywhere, there's one question that I can be almost certain someone in the audience will ask me, whether that audience consists of YPO members, third graders, museum keepers. Well, actually there are two usual questions: "Is that your real name?" and "What are you working on now?"

A freelance writer's life being inherently unstable and unpredictable, this last can sometimes be a painful one to answer. But this time, thankfully and  happily, after a somewhat difficult and dry spell, I had a nice, gratifying three-fold response. Because, to my own joy and wonderment (for reasons that will become clear) I was working on, and actually under contract for, three new books.

The first of these is a cookbook, The Bean Book (actually a wholly rewritten version of a book I first wrote in 1972). It will be published by Workman later this year or early next year. (Left, you can see some of my hands-on work for The Bean Book.  This is what we had for dinner the night before last; a close-up of a plate of feijoada completa: Brazilian-style black beans over rice, with sliced oranges, cooked greens, and farofa, toasted tapioca flour --- that's the white powder which looks a little like Parmesan, sprinkled on the beans. Molho de vinagrete, a sort of chunky, non-spicy vinaigrette salsa, rounds out the plate. Not pictured: the tiny, beautiful piri-piri --- very red, fiercely hot little peppers on the side). I will just mention here in passing, that, quirkily enough, Little Rock has an extraordinarily good Brazilian restaurant, Cafe Bossa Nova, which had spiked my interest in that particular cuisine. If you happen to be in Little Rock, eat there. But I digress. 

The second book I'm at work on is a new genre for me: how-to/inspirational. It's Fearless Writing, about the writing process as I understand and teach it ... how I infect  (in the positive sense), others with it. This book will be published by Ten Speed Press in 2011. As I mentioned, I was also teaching a workshop on it, while in Little Rock. (Pictured right: most of our wondrous, energetic recent Fearless group in Little Rock, at the end of our time together).

The third book I'm working on is a children's book.

Now it happens that when I was answering the "what are you working on" question at "Ordinary Miraculous", the talk I was giving to the museum folks, I screwed up big-time in the part of my response where I was talking about this children's book, which will be published by Little, Brown (I don't know when yet; they have to decide on an illustrator, and publication date will depend on the illustrator's scheule). 

And of course, because David was getting tape, it's on camera. In that remarkable way the Internet makes possible, I'm going to include a link to a You-Tube clip of this actual hilarious, and completely unintentional, screw-up ... my story, inspirational and nominally informative at the start, eventually going very, very wrong. Watch, please, before we continue, or what happens next will not entirely make sense.

(Have not yet figured out how to "embed" a video here, though I've diligently tried... sorry.)

Okay, by now, hopefully, you have finished laughing at, and with me. 

And now let us fast-forward --- through the YPO talk, Fearless, and "Ordinary Miraculous." Let us come to the morning when I talked to the 80 third-graders from e-Stem (unfortunately, this was the only one of my presentations David did not tape, because by then he was understandably jonesing to be back online and working at his real work, which is not taping his girlfriend giving talks). So while I was with the kids, he was back at George and Starr's, with Scratch, working on his laptop while I did this final talk. It was on a Friday morning; that Friday, in the late afternoon, we'd fly back to Vermont. (Although I wasn't there, obviously, the scene may well have looked like this one George had photographer earlier in the week, with Scratch supervising David at work).

So, back at Historic Arkansas Museum with the e-Stem students, a morning not documented in pictures... so from here on my description will have to suffice.

When the third-graders asked me what I was working on now, I skipped over the cookbook and Fearless Writing and spared them the whole story about the long ten years of non-children's book publication. I just told them that I had just finished writing a children's book.  

     "What's it about?"

I told them, much as in the taped clip above, that a parent was trying to get a wide-awake child to go to sleep. I quoted the same bit of verse, and the same two animals, Antelope and Baby Bison. 

     "What's a bison?"

I started to explain what a bison was, but then asked  "Well, does anyone here know what a bison is?"

A hand waved wildly in the middle of the room. "It's like a buffalo!" said a young man, excited to know.  "Exactly so," I agreed.

     "Does it look like a buffalo? "

There was a large flip chart at the front of the room. Though I am not a visual artist, I might have made a stab at trying to draw one had not my right arm been in a sling.

Now it happened that my friend Mary Springer had driven down from Eureka Springs, the little town in which I'd lived so long, with three other dear pals for dinner the night before (at Cafe Bossa Nova, naturally). They'd stayed over, and we'd spent time that morning, and they were sitting in the back row of the auditorium behind the 80 third-graders.

Mary (pictured left), who is an artist, is also, like me, pretty much always up for anything.

"Mary, " I called to her, "Could you come down and draw a bison for us, please?"

Mary called back, holding one arm up, "Remember I told you last night I had carpal tunnel surgery? I still can't draw either!"

So I looked at the 80 e-Stem third-graders and said, "Can anyone here draw a bison or a buffalo?"

Many hands were waving.

But there was one little girl, right in the center of the front row of the auditorium, who caught my eye. She wasn't waving her hand; she had just shot it up and held it still; she seemed to almost be pulsing with confidence and conviction.  "Come on up,"I said to her.

With great self-possession she rose from her seat, walked right over to the giant flip pad, and picked up a green Sharpie.

And she turned to me, and looked up at me, and, in front of everyone, said --- earnestly,  sincerely, neither whispering nor especially loudly, but in a let's-get-down-to-business tone ---  "Now, what does it look like?"

I was, for a second, speechless. She waited, gazing up expectantly at me, clear-eyed and with complete trust. She demonstrably believed that we were, at this moment, partners. Her belief was numinous: her belief that I had the ability to describe, in words, so accurately what this animal she had never seen looked like that she would easily be able to render it on paper. Her faith in all this seemed absolute and complete. It was faith in both of us, and in our ability to instantly and perfectly collaborate. Faith that moves mountains is one thing; but faith that can draw a bison, never having seen one?

Calm, purposeful, utter fearless, she looked up at me, waiting.

"Well..." I said, "I guess its shape is a little bit like a bull..."

She uncapped the green Sharpie and began to draw. Not perfectly --- this is not a story about her being wildly gifted with natural drawing talent --- but te shape she made was definitely bullish, and drawn swiftly and confidently.

Mary, by way of help, called from the back of the room, "It has a hump."

Immediately the little girl put humps on the bull, two, like a camel.

"Just one hump," I added.

"Oh, now I got it," she said, nodding. Deftly she changed the double green humps into a single hump.

And she did get it, sort of. The four-legged horned green humped barrel-chested bullish-buffalo-bison looked amazingly like what it was supposed to be. It had pretty much the shape of a bison.

She completed the outline, capped the Sharpie, put it down, and turned to go back to her seat.

"Thank you," I said, and everyone, including me, applauded.  

Later Mary said to me, "She really did very well."

"Unbelievably well, "I said, and repeated to Mary what she had said to me. "Now, what does it look like? "

I shook my head in wonder, as I have several times, writing about this interaction, which took place in far less time than it takes to tell it.

As I said at the beginning of this post, it's not quite a month since I've been back from Little Rock. But I remain dazzled by that little girl and what she embodied.

She didn't know better than to suppose she couldn't do it. Or, more truly, she didn't know worse, the worse most of us carry around, the usual fictional parade of bad possibilities, what if this, what if that,  that goes on and on inside our overheated, overactive, fearful brains. That child was heedless of failure. That she might do it wrong in front of a large group, maybe be made fun of, never even crossed her open, fearless small mind.  

"We shall not cease from exploration, " wrote that most unchildlike poet, the cerebral T.S. Eliot, " and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time."

I think that arrival, which is both the beginning and the end, probably looks a lot like the gaze ---  bright eyed, certain, open, ready --- of that little girl.

The Arc of the Moral Universe: Bush, Barack, & the Bend Towards Justice

January 20, 2009: the swearing in of America's 44th president, Barack Obama.

I watched it quietly here in Vermont  ---the first state in the union to declare for Obama back on that glorious election night in November, as most Vermonters will tell you with modest pride. (Quietly, that is, except when singing. Above, standing for The Star-Spangled Banner, facing the television in a small inn. Read on.)

The tone of the day couldn't have been more unlike the deep depression that followed the last two inaugurals for me (in 2004 I actually wore a black armband for several days after the election). And for me personally it couldn't have been more different from the inauguration sixteen years ago (if you want a hint as to why, see Vanity Fair's online "Catching Up with the Clinton Crowd"  a kind of 'where are they now?' update on Friends of Bill... your dragon's on page 13 of the slide show).

Because David and I don't have a TV, we drove to Saxtons River, population 541. We don't actually live in Saxtons River, but our phone number has a Saxtons River exchange, and, at three miles from our hilltop, it's the closest place to go when we run out of milk or need to drop a Netflix at the P.O.

It was also the nearest place to find a TV and a group we could be sure would be congenial. Though we're not habitues, rumor had it that innkeeper Tim Clark of the Inn at Saxtons River was an extremely nice man, said to be most welcoming towards the community. The blackboard set on the downstairs porch backed this up : Join us! it said, WATCH INAUGURATION HERE!

The bar (pictured right), where the TV is, isn't large. By 11:15 the room was full. There, with neighbors I mostly didn't know yet, and my partner of the last seven years, David Koff, I watched. As millions of others watched from their corners of the world, or crowded next to each other in the bone-chilling cold in Washington DC (where I had stood on a far warmer inauguration day in 1993, watching Bill Clinton get sworn in). 

And I had the sense that those great creaking cogs on which this world's better ways rest,  wheels and gears which had rusted and ground to a terrible halt and then slowly reversed over the last eight years, were moving forward again. Moment by moment, word by word, the inauguration lubricated the machinery, and the corrosion fell away. Like many, I wept in wonder.

I wept when Aretha, in her goofy, wonderful hat (which actually has its own fan club on Facebook!), sang.

I wept when the quartet with Yo-Yo Ma  and Itzhak Perlman played. (If you haven't seen In the Fiddler's House, the documentary in which Perlman travels to Poland in search of the roots of klezmer music, please see it now --- it is tragic, triumphant, funny and just so worth seeing).

I wept when Elizabeth Alexander  read her Inaugural Poem, Praise Song for the Day (a lot of mean-spirited criticism is surfacing on the Net about it. People, people! It's almost impossible to write a truly great poem for such an occasion, since as anyone who's actually written poetry knows how much it resists appearing on demand or request for particular occasions; it's a form that is more comfortable germinating itself. What Alexander did with this imperfect source for poetry seems to me remarkable:  uplifting, accessible, appropriate. A fine and cogent post by Sharani, a librarian, and Shri Chinmoy devotee, about the poem and Alexander's other work, is here ). And of course,  I wept, and laughed at the same time, delightedly, through Reverend Lowery's benediction --- "When the red man, can get ahead, man," is just my kind of rhyme.

But most of all, I wept as our now-President Obama spoke. Above, as we saw him on the screen.

"The arc of the moral universe is long ," Martin Luther King, Jr told us just four days before his death in 1968, "but it bends toward justice." Obama, then senator, quoted those prescient words last April, on the 40th anniversary of King's assassination.

On January 20, nine months later, a watching, listening world witnessed that long arc's bend.

King used this phrase many times, including in what would turn out to be the last speech of his life. But during his lifetime, many were not ready or able to hear his words. Even those who did couldn't have imagined the future we glimpsed today. Nor could anyone have imagined how far we still had to go, or the strange twists the road would take, for us to get here. Here being the inauguration of Barack Obama.

This election, more than any other in my lifetime, seems to me to have renewed our contract with hope. It also renews our connection with what President --- yes, President!  --- Obama   called "our better history."

So rich, rounded, resonant and far-reaching was President Obama's speech, one could write an essay on every sentence. I'm sure it will be parsed for meaning, reference, and rhetoric for decades to come. What I want to talk about here is this idea of "better history."

America's history, our history, does contain a better and a worse. We have always lived at the extremes of both.

All of us, individually and as nations, have a best and worst self from which we can, and do, choose to act, in small matters and large. Maybe this is especially true in America, not only because of our position of power, but because we are one of the most deliberately created nations in the world. We can't afford to ignore either our better or worse: we're made up of both, and must learn from both.

But we must choose, ultimately, to emphasize and live by the lights of one or the other.  

By choosing our better history, we chose not the mindless arrogance that allowed colonizers to build America on land already inhabited by its native people. Instead, we chose the thoughtful, idealistic America that existed in direct contradiction to this theft by the Europeans. We chose the America that in its primal document articulated that we "held self-evident" the radical proposition that all are "created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and Happiness."

By choosing our better history, we chose not the America which could articulate such visionary words at the very time it prospered on the commerce, ownership, exploitation and oppression of enslaved human beings, men, women and children kidnapped from their native land and schooled against insurrection by the whip, the brand, and the chain. Instead, we chose the America which later went to war with itself over this fatally flawed inconsistency, paying the most terrible price but thereby bringing itself into alignment with its own ideals and winning freedom --- not only the enslaved but for the enslavers, too. 

By choosing our better history, we chose not the America which ran internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. We chose not the America which ran Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and legitimized torture there and elsewhere. Instead, we chose the America which, with its allies, liberated Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau and Buchenwald. 

By choosing our better history, we made possible this present: where we chose Barack Obama. 

I wept, as perhaps you did, in both joyful and sorrowing disbelief. The joy: amazement,  thankfulness, relief, nascent hope. The sorrow: all it taken to get Barack Obama where he is, and, even more so, to get us, as a country, to where we could put him where he is. 

There are many heroes and heroines, going back as far as this country's memory can hold, whom we might rightfully credit with taking us, step by incremental step, to this day.

But strangely, strangely, I believe, and I want to credit, the one person (save, perhaps, Barack Obama himself) who, though certainly not heroic, did more than anything to get him in office: George W. Bush.

From the moment George W. Bush stole the first election (and we let him! I don't know what we could have done differently, but, still,  we let him!), he presided over the step-by-step dismantling of everything that is good about America, virtually all that belongs on the "best" side of history's ledger. He's left us a disastrous legacy on every front : we're poorer, less free, and more imperiled in a world approaching environmental meltdown, peopled by nations who had begun to hate and feel contempt for us, and rightfully so. 

Yet Bush (albeit with as much ignorance about the consequences of his actions as he has always shown) propelled us forcefully towards where we are today.

See, I think most of us stick to the known, however bad it is, rather than risk change. Everyone likes the outcome of positive change. But that outcome, and that it will be positive, is never certain on the front end. And almost no one likes the process of changing: not only is outcome not a sure thing, but at least temporary destabilization is almost certain. Change asks us to risk chaos and maybe hardship, for an unknown outcome. Better the devil that you know, as the saying goes. Who, for example, would choose the huge disruption of leaving their homes and possessions to become a refugee unless they were quite sure they were about to be slaughtered or flooded? 'Pretty sure' isn't usually enough: as witness those who, rather than disrupt their lives by moving, lose them by murder or drowning. 

Looked at this way, it becomes easier to see why change, even when its the potential pay-off is vast, frightens the wits out of most of us.  Yeah, sure it could be better, we human beings seem to say reflexively, until we are completely backed into a corner --- but it could also be worse. Couldn't it? Much worse? 

Well, George Bush backed us into one hell of a corner. It's hard to imagine anyone who could have done so more impeccably. Consider his perfect storm of characteristics: arrogance, ignorance, carelessness, a heedless and unthinking disregard for any point of view but his own, xenophobia, incompetence, being just plain not-very-bright, and a fatal blindness to the consequences of his actions, for starters. There are plenty of people who have these characteristics, true. But can you think of anyone else who, despite being wholly lacking in any credentials or experience which might befit the nation's highest office was also A) wealthy, B) willing and C) dynastically positioned to become president?

Who else but George Bush could have caused so much suffering, could have tipped the scales so forcefully that even change  ---- chaos, unknown outcome and all --- looked much, much better than status quo? Who else could have caused us to lose so much that we feared that if we did not change course drastically, we might lose everything?

We will be reckoning the cost of George Bush's legacy for a long time. Some of us have already paid with our lives, or the lives of those we loved. Some have paid with their homes, or their once-secure retirements. Our nation's level of debt is a toxic, Katrina-high flood, and only the richest of the rich remain truly dry. Because of the last eight years, our world is less safe --- for Americans or anyone else --- and our water and air more imperiled than in decades.

Yet only a series of crises as deep and prolonged as those George Bush wrought while in office could have forced the nationwide self-confrontation it took to bring us to today. Could anything less have made us grow, and grow up, so profoundly? To overcome such ancient distrust and hatreds that would almost certainly have barred Barack Obama from winning an American presidential election at any other time? 

Because George Bush broke so grossly with our "better history" , instead embracing our worst --- by making us, for instance, a covertly governed nation condoning wire-tapping and torture, mocking science and rationality in the name of God, unloosing witch-hunts or firings of those who disagreed publicly with his and Cheney's regime's decisions, feeding fear, quashing hope,  inflicting blow after blow of profound unfreedom --- by turning his back on our better history so unwaveringly, George Bush finally helped us, at last, to return to it.

With Obama's inauguration,  America finally yanked up hard on the racism that's poisoned our country's roots since its inception. Of course, hatred and racism are not weeded out so with a single yank, no matter how dramatic. Yet, wonder of wonders, when it came down to it, we elected the most qualified person for the job: despite the fact that he happened to be a black man --- more truthfully, a mixed-race man. (Surely most of us over at least 50  are still murmuring to ourselves and each other in wonder, "Did you ever think you'd live to see the day when --- ?" )

When it came down to it, we overcame a campaign of perception, slander, innuendo, and over untruth  to vote as we did. For this most qualified person could easily have been defeated, in less desperate times, simply by having a foreign-sounding last name that is one letter away from being the first name of America's most widely known, hated and feared enemy.

When it came down to it, we also overcame, in our vote, our longtime national suspicion of intelligent, complex thinkers as over-educated, impractical, whiny, politically correct eggheads (remember how recently John Kerry's  "nuanced thinking" was derided?). Instead, when we chose Barack Obama, we chose someone genuinely well-educated, deeply thoughtful, unwilling to pander to us by speaking simplistically or playing to the old prejudices and their false verities.

We chose someone evidently personally developed enough to know that the old them-and-us ways of looking at the world no longer suffice. Someone articulate, smart, and both impassioned and cool headed enough to raise a clarion call to another, radically different way of seeing and living in the world.

I wrote the first draft of this post on the evening of the Inauguration. I noted  "it's late now, though the parties in Washington are still going on. I could go on, too, now  --- there's much more I'd like to say about today. About all it called up for me personally (at Bill Clinton's first presidential inauguration, 16 years ago, I did my share of dancing until my feet hurt at inaugural balls  --- but that's another story). About, also, teaching in Little Rock last week and the wild-ass gorgeous fearless courage of the little girl who offered to draw a bison --- but, that too is another story. I could certainly make all these improbable skeins all wrap together with the inaugural and my thoughts about it (something I love doing as a writer, and have already done in my mind).

"But. It is late, I have a cold and one arm in a sling and a very sore shoulder, plus I'm trying to learn how to write shorter posts."

Now it's the next night. Everything above is still true. Once again my shoulder is screaming in pain at its overuse, and I have let it, again, get shockingly late.  

So I will leave you with this: as I sat in the bar at the inn and watched on the television screen the image of that Army green helicopter holding George and Laura Bush rise above Washington and leave for Andrews Air Force Base, as I breathed out in relief, as millions surely did, also probably shaking their heads as I did mine, at the senseless damage inflicted, the waste, waste, waste... as I did all this, I also found myself thinking, to my own vast surprise, "Thank you.

"You may not know you did it, Mr. Bush. And you certainly didn't intend to do it. You have much, much to be ashamed of and to answer for, and perhaps you'll never do either, or if you'll ever even understand the damage you did, the evil you set loose in the world and why you leave the office disgraced. And no, I do not believe, as you say you do, that history will absolve you.

"But you left us Barack Obama. Thank you. Thank you for this gift."

"50 year old shoulder"

If I want to eat anything else, I have 15 minutes in which to do it. No solid food after midnight.

When I hurt my left shoulder about a decade ago, some now-forgotten person said to me, "Rotator cuff, probably. Rotator cuffs just wear out. You know what they call it in Chinese medicine? 'Fifty year-old shoulder.'"

Since I was only 45 or so at the time, I found this offensive. And it turned out not to be the rotator cuff anyway. Not then.

But now it is (only partially torn, however). Some other stuff going on in this 56-year-old shoulder, too.

Here's what the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center "What to Expect After Shoulder Surgery" sheet says: "Whether your shoulder surgery is done arthroscopically or through a regular incision, you should still consider your procedure a major surgery. You'll be living life with only one useful arm for awhile..." 

Here's what Gail, Dr. John-Erik Bell's orthopedic nurse, whose hobby is --- get this --- racing motorcycles --- says: "Look, it's a big deal. It is. Time, money, pain. Not being able to use your dominant arm is a biiiig hassle, I won't lie to you. But you need to think of it as an investment. Shoulder surgery is an investment. And it is so, so worth it."

She also says, "Stay ahead of the pain. Take the painkiller before you think you need it. We have good drugs. Use them."

I like her. I like Caroline, the scheduler, and Jessica, who was the first person in the department I spoke with. I like John-Erik Bell, too. Each of whom, though no doubt busy up the wazoo and no doubt sick of answering the same questions countless times, all gave me and David the impression that they had as much time and information as we might need in order to reach whatever the best decision for us might be. I don't think this was just "impression" either, for it's not possible to fake caring or thoughtful listening for longer than a few minutes before a glance at the watch, a set of the shoulders, a micro-grimace, gets across the too-busy-time's-a-wasting-can't-you-see-I've-got-a-job-to-do message. Those DHMC folks, at least all I've met so far, don't have jobs as much as they do callings: their attention and intention is aligned with being called to do do their particular work.  It's not only not just a job, it's not even just work; it's work with meaning: meaning for them and meaning for those they serve. Meaning is what makes work a calling.

A couple of times a day for the past week, I've been listening to the pre-op portion of a recording called "Stress Free Surgery: a self-relaxation program to help you prepare for and recover from surgery." Here's (in part --- it's 44 minutes long) is what it says:

"Breathe in ... re... breathe out... lax. That's right. In ... re... out... lax.
"You're at the top of a staircase of comfort. Each step down takes you twice as relaxed as the step above it. " (Don't get irritated at the grammar, Crescent.)
"Ten... Relax... Nine...relax.
"The doctors and the nurses will take such good care of you..."
"You'll feel the blood pressure cuff inflate, like a gentle hug..."
"Any sounds you may hear, unless said directly to you, recede into the background, and become a quiet... peaceful... lull, like waves on the ocean..."

For the first fifteen or twenty minutes of listening to this, I also listen to my mind, which chitters, ridicules, jeers, disparages, critiques the language use, wonders if the whole experience would be better if I had remembered to put the eye mask on and maybe I should get up and find it and put it on my eyes because it's really bright in here, and then I could relax. Things I haven't gotten done yet and really need to do before I am one-armed also run in and out, one after another putting in an appearance.

But eventually the part of me watching all this sighs, and says "Give it a rest, Dragon, chill."

And I really do. 

Here's what my mother's friend, the retired children's book editor Susan Hirschman, told her some years ago. "Oh, Charlotte, let's not waste time talking about our health. At our age, it's just one organ recital after another!" 

Here's what Gaelen, my down-the-hill neighbor, sweet pal, vernal wild-flower aficionado, and nurse says, "Do NOT take opioids without taking Colase and senna with them. " I demur, point out that I've soaked prunes and apricots, and David can make me fruit compote using them... I don't like discussions about intimate scatalogical matters. Gaelen repeats  "Do NOT take opiods without taking Colase and senna with them.Get David to pick them up when he has the painkiller prescriptions filled."

Undergoing voluntary pain and temporary disability --- it's anxious-making, no matter how good you are with anxiety, no matter how good the eventual pay-off from the investment.

Now it's 12:01 a.m. I've missed chance for eating the other half of that perfectly ripe d'Anjou pear I was eating at 11:28 p.m.

Here's what I say: how we tell our stories matters. I know this much is true, to quote the title of the Wally Lamb novel which is in turn based on a song originally recorded by Spandau Ballet and made popular by the 80's rock-pop group, whose music I never particularly liked, Tears for Fears. 

Here is what I say when I tell the story about this upcoming surgery to myself:

I'm glad I live in a time and place where people routinely live long enough to have 50-year-old shoulder, and that there is a medical intervention to fix it actually exists. As well as drugs to put you to sleep while it's being performed.

And that my doctor is a Johns-Hopkins graduate who did a residency at Columbia-Presbyterian just in shoulders, and shoulders are mostly what he does now.

And that the surgery is taking place at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, where they did such good work on David's spine two summers ago, and where, from the moment you walk in to that light, non-hospital-smelling atrium space and see the arch that says, "We, the employees of Dartmouth-Hitchcock, welcome you", and see the grand piano that a volunteer plays at noon each day, you know this is an astonishingly kind as well as well-practiced facility. (Left, DHMC's photograph of the info desk that centers the atrium --- a mandala out of which the life of the Center spreads)

And that David, the loving partner with whom I am privileged to walk through time during this phase of our respective lives,  will take care of me in the weeks to come. No doubt with a mixture of compassion, impatience, thoughtfulness, aggravation, and tenderness  --- much as I did when he had his spine surgery.

And that I made an extra lasagna, and extra black bean soup, and other stuff I fixed in the past few weeks, and froze it. Plus I taught David how to make a smoothie the way I like it, and that pasta dish with the garlic and chiles and loads of kale or swiss chard or broccoli and chick peas and lemon juice and Parmesan...

Here's something else I say to myself: it's elective surgery. You are choosing to do this. To that extent, it's within your control. You weren't in an accident. You got to pick.

Here's something else I say to myself: you fortunate girl you!

And sometimes, something else, something my old, one-time Eureka Springs compadre, Vernon Tucker, once said to me: "All this positive thinking is driving me to despair!"

I hear David coming up the stairs. Time to get offline --- for a month, six weeks? Time to get in the hot bath and let David scrub my shoulder with the presurgical Hibiclens. 

Time to say, goodbye for now, dear friends, readers, and colleagues.

Time to see what new insights this series of experiences turns out to have yielded. 

For here is what I also say to myself --- and if, again, I know this much is true, then it's the hugest and most comforting much there is, that of utility, usefulness --- I tell myself, nothing is wasted on the writer. 

 

fearless French toast

Yesterday morning I was making French toast, and thinking about my upcoming Fearless Writing workshop, which will be in Little Rock this coming January: two seemingly unrelated tributaries of thought and action joining together.

First, the French toast. Here in Vermont, there are lots of good artisanal bakeries. When I'm short on time, or don't feel like  mucking up the kitchen counter in that singularly messy flour-and-sticky-dough-bits post-kneading way (inevitable when baking bread at home), the choice of good local breads is abundant. When I purchase, rather than make, bread, our current household favorite is the crisp-crusted, texture-y  "Mad River Grain" loaf from Red Hen Baking Company, in Waitsfield, Vermont. How can you not like a company that describes this particular loaf on their site as "A veritable orchestra of grains and seeds! (Or maybe a 70's funk band is more your style?). " The Red Hen breads are made with levain, a natural, moist slightly soured leavening which helps them keep very well, for at least two days, right in their nice brown paper bags.

What was on hand yesterday was a part of a loaf of Mad River Grain that was four or five days old. We are talking hard. Not spoiled, not moldy, way too good to waste. But hard. Seriously hard.

French toast was in order, if I could saw through the loaf. 

Now, the day before, I had done sawing of a different kind. I had --- I think --- solved a consistent problem about set-up on a workshop I teach,  Fearless Writing (which will also be a book, to be published by Ten Speed Press in 2011). 

See, I just love teaching this workshop and I have infinite confidence in it. It substantively transforms the way people write and think about writing. It makes sense of and utilizes the feelings of anxiety that inevitably arise in creative endeavors. It works for writers, would-be writers, and even people who don't identify themselves as writers at all. Many people take it for the fearlessness, using the writing practices as a tool for personal development (though they, too, often find themselves better writers by the end of the workshop). There are always breakthrough moments (and pieces of writing done in session) that take my breath away: surprising, moving, strange, fascinating, funny, unpredictable.

And I get to witness all this! I even, as the teacher, get to "facilitate" it (quotes because the word "facilitate"  is too manager-speak for me). The process energizes us both: me and the students.

But even though I am the teacher, and a good one, I am also, at the same time, forever and always a student of that process. 

Fearless is, after all the same map I follow when I write (48 published books and counting, though the unpublished work is equally important to the process of growth as a writer). It's the map I use when I take on almost any challenging life-endeavor. And each time I teach it I get a refresher course, for, as psychologist Richard Price once said, "You always teach what you most need to learn. You are your own worst student." 

But when I was also the one who was responsible for organizing the workshop --- registrations, confirmations, promotion, and so on --- the experience was not energizing, but frustrating. 

Naturally, I want registering for the class to be impeccable and simplified. But this isn't easy when an individual, rather than a sponsoring institution, does it, and in a wildly varied number of locales. And when that individual is me, whose real work is teaching and writing, well, handling this aspect is like  speaking in a second language, one which I can understand and function well in, but only with effort, only if I pay attention to every word. Since each possible venue had different physical arrangements, parameters, expenses, directions, add-ons, and options, there seemed to be no way to make it systematic: each time I did a workshop independently, the registration-wheel had to be reinvented.

Besides being time-consuming for me, it wasn't simple and easy for students. I wasn't set up; I didn't take credit cards. Poor old Fearless Writing students had to go through low-tech high-bother shenanigans: printing out a registration form, filling it out by hand, writing a check, putting it in an  envelope, sealing, stamping, and addressing that envelope, getting it to the post office, etc: things that once might not have been a big deal but are now dinosaurish ways of communicating and transacting. For sure, though, my students, being willing to go through all that, were always a very committed bunch.

Doing this type of administrative organization was, for me, possible ... but as hard as the five-day-old loaf through which, yesterday morning, I was trying to saw. Which is why in the past few years I've mostly taught Fearless only when there was a sponsoring organization or institution (like Rowe Conference Center or The Studios at Key West, to name two of my favorite recent hosts). 

I did finally succeeded in getting through the very hard loaf, using a serrated knife and much determination. Thin, even slices were out of the question, but yes --- there would be French toast. And this was the point at which it and Fearless Writing began merging in my thoughts.

Because the day before I had finally solved the organization/registration problem, this, and problem-solving in general, were on my mind as I began the next step of the French toast: whisking together  eggs, milk, dash of salt, and a good healthy pour of Tahitian vanilla (first opening the small brown bottle and sniffing it, an automatic small kitchen reflex, simply for extra sensual pleasure).

Because how did I solve the registration? The same way, at least at the start, that I had just sawed through that boulder-hard bread: with frustration and determination. First, I'd gotten annoyed enough to think "Oh, for crying out loud! There has to be a better way to do this!" (I wonder how many good discoveries, small and large, have begun this way. Probably about as many as books written by former non-writers, who, reading something they were partially engaged with and partially irritated by, said to themselves, "Hey!  I could write better than this!" And then did.).

The Red Hen folks kindly offer a page they call "our favorite uses for day-old bread". French toast is not on it, presumably because everyone knows how to make it. But in case you happen not to know, basically what you do is beat everything listed above (except the bread) together. Then you put the dry bread in this mixture, allowing it to soak it up and soften. And then, after awhile,  you brown the soaked bread in a hot buttery pan.

About softening: bear with me for a second here.

Back when I used to live in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, I'd go to a remarkable physical therapist / healer, a sweet,  smart funny guy named Michael Avenoso (pictured, unflatteringly blurrily, left) who eventually became, and still is, a friend, as is his wife, Jae. (I've mentioned Michael before, in the post Blue-Ribbon Silliness. ) Back then, Michael did a kind of bodywork called myofascial therapy.

(He'd still be doing it today, were he not himself --- so unjustly! --- nearly crippled by advanced Lyme Disease, which he got when quite young, and which went undiagnosed for many years. Why this should happen, to someone who gave so much, and still had so much left to give, is one of those mysteries that stick in my craw big-time whenever I hear people say things like, "Everything happens for a reason." But now I am digressing).

Michael examined, with eye and hands, my left trapezius (upper back). There, for years, I'd had intermittent, sometimes debilitating spasms which could last days, even weeks, and for which I had tried every type of mainstream and alternative therapy I knew of, with no success. Michael was going to be my last last attempt at treating a pain I'd come to view as inconstant but chronic. "Hmmm," he said, "I think we can get it healed in ten, maybe twelve sessions." And we --- he --- did.

Now myofascial therapy hurts. Fascia, in case you don't know, is a type of connective tissue. If you've ever cut up raw meat --- how weird is this for a vegetarian to say? --- you've seen it. The red part of the meat is the animal's muscle fiber; the white, its fat. Now think of those very thin, translucent stretchy strands of connective tissue,  called, by chefs and cutters-up of meat, "silver-skin," for it is a sort of bluish-silver.  Silver-skin is fascia. And what Michael did was somehow, without actually breaking the skin, was to somehow reach beneath it and manipulate the fascia, ripping up the adhesions that presumably kept the dysfunctional muscles in place.

And I mean ripping.

It all hurt, but there were certain especially painful manipulations. When Michael was about to do one, he warned me. We had to work together, he explained: for him to get in there and do his thing, I had to unclench, relax. This --- in the face of pain I knew was about to be inflicted on me --- was about the most active, willful, focused relaxation I've ever been called on to do.

And here's what Micheal would say.   

"Soften. Soften to my fingers. Soften."

Somehow, I did. He was able to heal that injury, which has thankfully not been part of my life for more than a decade now.

Over the years, when I find myself tightening into resistance --- resisting getting down to work (or resisting finishing work for the day. even though it's one in the morning and time to go to bed), resisting listening to something I consider asinine, ill-informed, unfair or downright loony, resisting hearing news that I know I won't want to hear --- over the years, as I feel the quills rising and the tightening shell of anticipatory defense, I say to myself, "Soften."

I say to myself, "What does it hurt to listen?"

I say to myself, "Just start, set the timer for 15 minutes, do it, and then see how you feel."

I say to myself, "Listen, Dragon, strong people can stay open to anything. They stand on their own two feet, they know where there integrity is and they don't need anyone else to validate it. They know they're not going to fall over if someone disagrees with them, so they're not reactive, just open. They can just quietly take in whatever is being said to them, and then decide what, if anything, they want to do with it. They can afford to listen. Don't you want to be strong that way, CD? "

I say to myself, "Soften."

(Above right: a recent picture of me, taken by Walter Fogg, of the Brattleboro Food Co-Op. I'm the December cover girl for the Co-Op's monthly magazine, Food for Thought. They've named me Producer of the Month, though what I produce is not honey or wine or vegetables but books, though many are about food. When I looked at Walter's photograph, in comparison to earlier photos of me, I thought, yeah, I have softened. And no, I don't mean just around the jaw line. ) 

As I put that good but extremely hard bread, in its big chunky ungainly slices, into the egg-milk-vanilla mixture, I thought about the process of softening.

About how it had taken frustration to saw me open, and "There has to be a better way" to make me consider the possibility of finding some kind of new, workable approach to the registration problem.

Of course, I'd have to find the ingredients in which it would make sense to soften. Something which would be worth absorbing. ("Solution": both the answer to a problem and a liquid into which something has been dissolved.) 

That's where research came in (and where the analogy falls apart; obviously the Mad River Grain bread slices didn't decide to soften and then go out and research milk and eggs). But so what? Though the bread was still so hard it really didn't want to absorb, it was sliced and in the liquid and I I had it in my sights now, just like I had, the day before, the conviction that a potential Fearless admin solution existed.

Research is an incredibly easy, even fun, adventure, thanks to the Internet (I am of an age to have researched in libraries using card-catalogs; you still had the thrill of the chase, but it was clunky, slow, and full of dead ends). As I turned the bread pieces so both sides could bathe in the eggy vanilla liquid, piling the dipped slices on top of one another, and repeating the process, I reflected that at the research point, you could say that although I was still hard, I had been sliced, literally opened, to possibility. 

And it turned out there was a solution.

With a little persistence, Internet research is remarkable. It's one whoa! There are options! A lot of them out there! experience after another. And as I'd done it, the previous day, I began, like the bread, to soften in earnest. There were conference registration services!  This service does this? And this? You mean I wouldn't have to... And I'd be able to find out if... Research moved into analysis, comparison... I was absorbing, in short.

Gloating, and still in some wonderment at what I'd been able to do the day before, I left the bread in its egg-milk bath alone for a few minutes, while I began slicing some good Vermont apples of several varieties (Black Oxford, Macoun, Cox's Orange Pippin) to saute with brown sugar and cinnamon for the topping.

After the slicing, I visited the bread again. It was at last starting to absorb, sufficiently softened so that I could poke each piece, gently, with the tines of a fork, allowing it to soak up more.

On the previous day, I finally choose an online company called, logically enough, regonline. It does only conference and workshop registrations, hence A) has a system, B) it has it down.

By now, back in breakfast world, I had a little butter sizzling in two skillets. Into one, the apples. Into the other, the finally tender slices of egg-soaked bread, fragrant with vanilla.

Heat is the magical alchemist in cooking, changing one thing to another, in countless tiny increments. The apple slices soften, then brown; their juice, sweet and autumnal, cooks down and concentrates, its water turning into fragrant steam on the way. And because heat solidifies protein --- the eggs in the milk in this case --- the soaked bread, now sizzling in the buttery skillet, becomes firm and golden brown and a little crisp on its exterior, and moistly tender inside. Quietly, but automatically, given the right set of ingredients, techniques, elements, and just a little knowledge, transformation  happens. Hard bread becomes French toast.

The heat of finally focusing and taking action yesterday had firmed and changed me. My action, once I'd decided on the site, was the flame, the dynamic change element. Inputting the data, writing the descriptions, learning the program, spending some time on the phone with the amazingly helpful and available tech support folks. And then wow! No more reinventing the registration wheel for Ms. Dragonwagon! 

So now I can teach, and Regonline can do registrations (you can see what I did here if you haven't already). I am happy to pay Regonline a percentage of workshop fees for this service, which is not just registration, but full details,  payment, location (Little Rock, January 11-14, 2009). Everything is now there, even directions to the Historic Arkansas Museum, where it's being held. There's even the ability to take credit cards (but without my having to mess with them. for which, hallelujah --- it was a prospect that filled me with horror). 

But suddenly, it was figured out! Suddenly it was easier for everyone! As the Staples people say, "That was easy."

I flipped the French toast in the pan. I  stirred the apples, which were ready for a small handful of brown sugar now, and a bit of Saigon cinnamon. I called out to David and asked him to set the table. He did, and made tea.

Then we sat down to eat, in the dining room of our house (the short end of its L shape pictured left, about two months ago). By now the trees are leafless, and the ground dusted with snow, beauty still present, but subtler and chillier. But the dining room still faces out the two downstairs windows visible in the picture, and though it was a winter day, there were a few patches of blue in the sky and just a bit of sun shone in. And the French toast pieces, which at last had softened properly and browned nicely,  lay overlapped and golden on the blue plates. The fragrant apple slices, translucent and shiny with their glaze of brown sugar, barely holding their shape, were in a pile beside the French toast. The whole was topped with a dab of exquisite honey-flavored cream-colored Greek yogurt, and a sprinkle of chopped pecans. Veggie soysage, too, and half a pink grapefruit for each of us. Ah.

"I'm really impressed by what you did yesterday with Regonline," David told me. "It's really good." I smiled. "Thank you," I said. "I'm pleased too." And of course, I was.

Later that afternoon he and I would go for a walk, way up into our neighbor's maple-sugaring lot. For awhile we walked rhythmically, enjoying the crunch of the icy snow and the way it sometimes alternated with the shh-shhh of the leaves underfoot. "One-two-cha-cha-cha," called David, and we cha-cha'd our steps noisily through the woods. We agreed, panting, that dance-walking was not only much more musical but considerably more aerobic than just walking. 

But that was later. After we finished breakfast, David did the dishes and I went upstairs to my office (the two windows on the right, second floor) and went online.

And discovered that my first Fearless student had registered.

Eleven places left now. Maybe one of them is yours!

P.S. on December 24: only eight places are left now. Maybe one of them is yours!

happy birthday to me

Writing a post was not on my list of things to do today, though plenty of other things were and are.

I must say this: I love my planning book. Before I go to sleep, most nights, I write down everything I plan, hope, or have committed to do the next day. This nominally clears my brain for sleep, keeps me on track (again, nominally), and most of all, mysteriously triples every accomplishment: one mini-blast of satisfaction writing it down, a second doing it, and a third in crossing it off the list. I do have to remind myself that a "To Do" list is not the same as a "Want To Do" list  or a "Want to Do but Actually Could Only if Days Were Two Months Long" list. But on balance, my planning book is one small but essential component of what a good life for me looks like, and a component of actually writing, as opposed to thinking about writing. (Picture by David, November 26, day after I wrote this essay.  I don't usually keep herb sprigs lying on it, but "Here's rosemary, that's for remembrance," said Shakespeare's Ophelia, and it's still growing in the garden, despite a run of days in the low teens, and I just felt like it, so I did.)

On today's planning book page, there's less than usual in the writing area, and more than usual amount in the tasks area. "Make 1 more flan --- coconut? maybe 2?" "Vack dining room, kitchen, & rompus room. "  "Lay fire in fireplace and woodstove."

These are all because it's my birthday, and I'm having a party.

But because it is my birthday, when I woke up and lay in bed having my Good Think (see previous post) and found myself mentally writing this, I thought, well, okay then! Get up and write the post! It's your birthday, you can do what you want!

And so, after a little more nestling, here we are: me writing this, you, later, reading this.

Waking up this morning was exceptionally fine. It was early, much earlier than I usually awaken, but I felt well-rested. It was still dark, still raining as it had rained most of the night. The clean sage-green flannel sheets have a good thick very soft nap that is almost irresistibly cozy. On top of those sheets, and me, a rose-and-sage-green quilt, and a fluffy white duvet. One of the extreme pleasures of New England life, believe it or not, is the joyful discovery of sleeping warm and bundled up,  but in a cold, and I mean really cold, bedroom. The bedroom is unheated (my aunt only used the place as a summer dwelling; central heating never made it upstairs --- for which, given fuel prices, I am grateful --- and the wood-stove, or a vent from it, aren't  even close). But in addition to this, I actually open the window a few inches, even when it's in the single digits.  While I do have wakefulness issues at times (see insomniac lessons), I've never known better sleep than what I have up here: socked-in in coziness and warmth, the bed an island of comfort in contrast to a frigid ambient room temperature.  Too, when David is gone (he's been in Indianapolis since Wednesday, due back here tonight), I let the two cats sleep with me. (There they are,pictured above, adorable monsters, not in bed, but in their beloved Scratch Lounges, which, to some extent, spare the furniture the ravages of its function  as claw-sharpener). 

So this morning of my 56th birthday, nested securely in the chilly room, I awoke to two  calming sounds, simultaneously: the gentle, steady rain outside, and two cats, both purring, one within reach of each hand on the bed.

Happy birthday to me.

Yesterday, in the parking lot of Shaw's, the nearest supermarket (known to me, for no particular reason, as "Pshaw's" ), I was walking back to the car with two bunches of green onions, an item they hadn't had at either of the farm-stands or the Village Market in Walpole where I prefer to shop, and where I'd just bought all the rest of the stuff for the salad which I'll be serving as part of my birthday dinner.

And I suddenly thought: I'm glad I was born. Glad I get to spend time on in this body on this earth. Despite everything, glad. I thought it without disclaimers or talking myself into it. Just came into my mind walking across the damp Pshaw's parking lot.

(Later that evening, I called my mother, who if you've been reading this post you know is 94 and is early-stage dementia and, to my mind, much more amiable because of it. I said to her at one point when we talked, "... And I'm glad you're my mother." To which she replied, with cheerful enthusiasm,  "I'm glad you're my mother, too!") (Left, Charlotte, October 2007, on her front porch).

This time of year must be navigated carefully; it leads through dangerous territory. No matter how good one's minesweeper is, there's no surefire avoidance of potential detonation.  The flip side of memory, which on the one hand allows nothing to be wasted on the writer, is that for this writer at least, it's all there. Almost all of it. Almost always. With probably above-average vividness and easy emotional access.

November 23, the birthday of my late, much-adored father. November 25, my birthday. Thanksgiving somewhere in there. And, November 30, the day of Ned's death.

So, on November 24, it was a big deal to just feel deeply, unambivalently glad to be here.

This may be why, for the first time since Ned's death seven years ago, I decided to throw myself a birthday party. My friend Chou-Chou, pictured left,  bless her, threw a surprise party for me on the first birthday afterward. For which I will always be grateful. Her doing so broke what could have been a curse of pure association, the more so as, believe or not --- that first birthday? Not quite a year after Ned's death? --- I actually, unbelievably, had to give a deposition that day in a lawsuit filed by the family of the kid whose vehicle struck Ned, who was suing "the estate of Ned Shank" for "post-traumatic stress disorder." Though I could barely make it to what I thought was going to be a quiet dinner for two with Chou at our favorite Eureka Springs restaurant, the now-defunct Caribe (one colorful corner, pictured right), I got there, at her insistence. Some thirty friends were waiting. Guests told me I literally jumped when everyone yelled "Surprise!" ("Were you frightened?" one asked me later. "You looked frightened, you looked kind of deer-in-the headlights." "Just ... startled," I said, I think truthfully. "But then you got over it," she said, stating it, remembering, perhaps, both our mutual enthusiasm, later on, for the cake, chocolate layers, raspberry filling. "But then I got over it," I agreed. Got over being startled, tat is. You never "get over" a death, at least one like Ned's. But, as I've said before, you do, over time, compost it, gradually incorporate it, and your grief, into who and what you are. Into your very being, your core self.)

Each year, I think "Bless Chou, bless her, bless her," for this act of extreme, lasting kindness. Now, each year, sometime on or around my birthday, I recall that night at Caribe, and Chou-Chou's loving subterfuge. It comes to mind much in front of the surreal horror of that deposition come to mind, continuing to fade it, by contrast, into minor significance.The surprise party, as multi-colored as the fiestaware plates (in the picture above, taken by David) Caribe used, as bright as its cuisine.

But I hadn't thrown myself a party, not in seven years. I almost never do on the exact day of my birthday anyway; never did, because it falls too close to Thanksgiving and just isn't convenient for most people. (My 40th birthday fell on Thanksgiving, back when we had the inn. I spent that birthday preparing dinner for 60 some people, two seatings. We did do a mighty nice Thanksgiving, back in Dairy Hollow days, but good lord, it was exhausting. And then staff dinner followed, in the evening).

Since David was going to be away today, I decided to make the party girls-only. Very very simple food. Easygoing and kind of goofy. Here's the invitation I emailed.

What's the point of getting older if you can't stay up late & play?

Well, exactly. As you can see from the attached picture I've had this idea long before I was able to act on it. But now I'm about to be 56 and I CAN (and often do) act on it.

But not always with playmates. Of whom you are one! With whom I hope to play!
On my birthday! Hey, y'all ---

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!!!  Want to come to my party?


WHEN: Tuesday, November 25th, 5:00 pm until whenever (some of you can stay overnight if you want, but at least a token appearance and play, anytime between 5:00 and 10:00 will be delightful,  from my POV at least... I realize some of you work on Wednesday and/or are doing major Thanksgiving gigs and promise I will not guilt-trip you if you're in and out).

WHERE: My home

WHAT: my birthday party! It's:

O   Ladies  (often known as "women" in Vermont) only

O   Pajamas only (including slippers, robe, etc ... changing room available)

O   Dinner served at around 6:30 pm... bring something if you want but not necessary: on hand will be my famous Cuban Black Bean Soup with rice and fixings, a giant salad, and a cake-free dessert,  probably in the flan family.

EXPERIENTIAL, OF-THE-MOMENT, GIFTS-TO-EVERYBODY GIFTS ONLY, PLEASE! By which I mean... NO STUFF.

Instead...

Please come prepared to bring something experiential for everyone. For instance:

You could :
     o     sing a song or do improv performance or dance, inviting others to be part of it either as participants or audience.
     O      bring nail polish and hold a drawing for one lucky guest to get a manicure (or everybody could do one other person's toes).
     O      help us (or some of us) do pajama-appropriate yoga stretches or a Bollywood dance or T'ai Chi or a fake version of any of these.
      O     offer hand or foot massages, or teach one simple technique for same so those who like could do same for each other.
     O     pretend to be a cat. Or a sloth. Or anything else. You could ask us to guess. Or not.
     O     read your favorite poem or children's book.
     O     bring paper and crayons or finger paint or cookie dough or clay or stuff for a collage or scrap book or group creation or something we can change into something else.
     O     find something to applaud each guest for over the course of the evening, tell them what it is, and applaud them loudly.
     O     bring your favorite CD and lead a conga line through the house.

OR... your choice!

So. That's on for tonight, and here I am now. The black bean soup is made, I need to do that other flan. (Because, frankly, last night I decided to taste one of the two flans I made and, then I needed to taste it again, and then I ... well, I didn't eat it all, but I made a pretty good dent in it and enjoyed every bite.) I'll prep everything for the salad but put it together at the last minute --- several times, I imagine, as in my view a really good salad is made about two seconds before you eat it, and various waves of friends will be coming and going. My usual morning stuff's in order: bed's made, my sort-of meditation. I have work-out clothes on underneath my bathrobe; I am a devoted fitness person, not to shrink the body but to expand the life. It's primarily a feel-good thing, though it's also true that if I'm going to put away flan as I did last night, I better stick with working out or I will get to be the size of a small guest cottage.

Fifty-six. Widowed. Due to have surgery on my right shoulder in a few weeks for subacromial impingement which is indeed hurting like hell (and since I had it done on my left shoulder about a decade ago, I know more or less what I'm getting into). (Yes, this does mean I moderate my workouts fairly substantially for now). Grieving, at times intensely. Partner I love, friends I love --- ten of whom are coming over tonight! Gardens and cats. Hairballs. Happiness.

Glad to be here on earth.

Which, according to Eye on the Sky, is a very relative place. Driving home from Pshaws, listening to Vermont Public radio, I learned that if you think of the sun as a balloon, the earth is, relatively speaking, the size of a peppercorn, half a mile away from the balloon. If the planet's a peppercorn, what size does that make us?

When David and I first got to know each other, one of his more seductive moves was to recite (not read, recite, from memory, laying in bed) a few of Pablo Neruda's sonnets. To me.  First in Spanish, then in English. One in particular simply astonished me. David had no idea --- for we did not then know each other at all well --- what a perfect choice it was. I was in deep ongoing consideration of what it meant to love a second time, if such a thing were possible, late in life. I'd been schooled rigorously by experience: my understanding of choice and non-choice, and that difficulty was unavoidably inherent in joy and vice verse, was absolute.

Sonnet XLIV

You must know that I do not love and that I love you,
because everything alive has its two sides;
a word is one wing of silence,
fire has its cold half.

I love you in order to begin to love you,
to start infinity again
and never to stop loving you:
that's why I do not love you yet.

I love you, and I do not love you,
as if I held keys in my hand:
to a future of joy-
a wretched, muddled fate-

My love has two lives,
in order to love you:
that's why I love you when I do not love you,
and also why I love you when I do.

When I first heard this poem, spoken by my then-new lover, lying in bed together in a cabin near Big Sur, I thought, simply, "I am hearing the truth. This is how it is is."

This morning, lying in bed by myself (well, with the kitten-kattens), that poem again came to mind. New context: it's not just about loving another person, I thought,  it's about life itself.

A future of joy; a wretched muddled fate: which will it be? How about, at various times,  both? I'm learning, gradually, to love life in the way Neruda described the act of loving his late-life partner Mathilde, to whom the sonnet above and 99 other were written. (Probably many more were written, but 100 were published. Speaking as a writer here).

But. To love life when I do not love it, and to love it when I do. 

This led me back to thinking about David. Good boyfriend, even if he is in Indianapolis at the moment. But he's due to arrive shortly before midnight, and when I did get up and opened my email this morning there was this from him:

If your ship does not come in today, for sure your boyfriend will --  and your ship cannot be far behind!

x x x x x x x x x x o o o o o o o o o o x x x x x x x x x x o o o o o o o o o o x x x x x x x x o o o o o o o o

56 in Roman numerals is LVI  ... 56 for me is ILV you

Later I got that all those xxx's and oo's added up to 56. Smooches gracias, David.

It's now about an hour later than when I started this. Still raining peaceably, but now light out. The cats have been fed. The State Highway Department, bless them, has already been up the road to check that nothing has been washed out (they are so on it in road maintenance here compared to Arkansas.)

Flans to be made, workouts to be done, black bean soup to be put into crock-pot and reheated.

I bought candles, too, to light at dusk. I went on the candle-hunt yesterday, to the cash-only Discount Food Warehouse (the funky el cheapo what-fell-off-the-truck-last-week store where you never know what you'll find) in North Walpole, New Hampshire. They always do have candles there, but you never know what kind until you get there. Sometimes they have nice respectable votives, but last time all they had in the candle line were Yahrzeits, the 24-hour burn candles which, according to Jewish tradition, you light in memory on the anniversary of the death of someone you love, starting at sundown preceding the day of death. This time, no yahrzeits, no votives --- just great numbers of the tall religious candles, which come in glasses, the kind you see on Mexican alters, with Jesus, Mary, and various saints. For 89 cents apiece. I passed on Jesus and St. Jude, but found myself taken with the Angel de la Guardias candles (though my first association with "La Guardia" is the "New York airport that's much closer than JFK.")

The angel, against a kitschy bright blue sky with a white starburst his/her head, has long curly golden brown hair, a white robe with a large shawl of pink, and most impressive white wings. He/she is hovering benignly behind a small boy and girl,  dressed like something out of a German fairytale, hurrying across a rickety wooden bridge, barefoot, completely oblivious to the angel three times their size lurking behind them. The classic image, above keft, differs from the one on my candles, right. The candle's scene is way, way brighter, the bridge less rickety, and you don't see the threatening waterfall below --- it's all just smooth, bright blue water, benign and lake-like, below the bridge, and there's a very cheerful Mexican-looking border around the picture, green and red and orange, adding to the general fiesta feeling) .

On the back on the candle there are two versions of a prayer. The one in Spanish, directed to Angel de la Guardia, was much, much longer than the English translation which followed. Although the shorter prayer, in English, was way too morbidly Catholic for my religious taste, and though I don't believe in angels as such, I loved the way the prayer began: Let us, with confident trust invoke his aid and protection oh glorious Guardian Angel...

Vermont is an inland state. I'm on the top of a hill and the only water in sight is a small pond, which I can barely even make out today because it's pretty foggy.

But guess what? I can see that ship to which David alluded in his email.

Angelic presence or not, I have been, and am, aided and protected, even at moments when my trust is less than confident and when my love for life is expressed in not loving it.

And --- wait! I see now, the ship is already here!

And what cargo! It bears coconut milk for the flan, clean flannel sheets, the sounds of two cats purring and a gentle rain, my boyfriend, my girlfriends! It carries the huge relief of a new administration. It carries the fact that I live in a time when something can be done about injured, aging, painful shoulders, and the fact that, not having much money to begin with (it's pretty much all in the house and property here), I was spared much of the free-fall anxiety of those who saw their net worth and retirement accounts plummet recently. The ship carries the wealth I've always relied on instead (or in addition to): creativity and love, two resources which are not only renewable but which will become depleted only if we fail to use them. 

Look! Today, the ship is here, it's docked. Oh, as my candle says, glorious!

Happy birthday to me.

several big "O"s (including, but not limited to, October and Obama)

It is the best of times; it is the worst of times.

It is October in Vermont. It is an election year (and what an election). It is the month of the year that was Ned's last full month on earth.

The best: the transition of the leaves from verdant to plush flame, fuchsia, gold, ochre, orange, salmon, a hundred redefinitions and permutations of each shade, against that particularly sheer bright blue sky --- no matter how many times you've seen it, or anticipate its arrival, fall catches you. Driving, walking, a pour of light illuminates a particular sumac or maple which is so startlingly brilliant that you gasp, and it's  as involuntarily as when a spectacular firework explodes in a dark Fourth of July sky.

October in Vermont, whether in small pieces (a leaf, a bush) or scanned as the larger  landscape (a hillside, a vista, a meadow), is at every turn so unrelentingly beautiful. It's almost physically painful. One can only see so much before rebelling, overwhelmed: where to look next when there is so much? How else can I explain why sometimes, when on a walk, say, I stop and just do a 360 and look, really look, I find tears stinging in my eyes?

It's so much and so fleeting. It's as the poet Wislawa Syzmborska joyfully, perfectly laments in Birthday (read this one out loud, even if you're alone in the room, to get its gorgeous Dr. Seussian rhythms):

So much world at once --- how it rustles and bustles!

Moraines and morays and morasses and mussels!

The flame, the flamingo, the flounder, the feather ---

how to line them up all up, how to put them together?

All the crickets and thickets and creepers and creeks!

The beeches and leeches alone could take weeks.

Chinchillas, gorillas, and sarsaparillas ---

Thanks so much, but this excess of kindness could kill us!

... I could look into prices but don't have the nerve:

These are products I just can't afford, don't deserve.

Isn't sunset a little too much for two eyes

That, who knows, may not open to see the sun rise?

I am just passing through, it's a five-minute stop,

I won't catch what is distant, what's too close I'll mix up.

(translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczack and Clare Cavanagh) 

October in Vermont, an announcement of the end of summer. Loss, presaged: like the candle burning at both ends that will not last the night, the light fall casts, with its intimation of dark to come, is lovely.

Underlined in my case by the not-constant, but recurring, thought of this being the anniversary of the last month I went into and came out of (back several rotations of the earth around the sun ago), free of the knowledge that Ned would vanish from earth. It'll be seven years, on November 30, that he took that last bicycle ride into... somewhere (or, possibly, nowhere.)

Underlined a second time because October 20 is (was) in fact our anniversary. The day on which we married, in Arkansas, in just such bright beauty.   

Though few could argue that Ned's early and sudden death was terrible, unfair, shocking --- at least, by any accounting we have  access to --- it is also true that "until death do us part" is right there in the marriage contract, not even in fine print (unlike that of the note from a credit card company I got on Friday, informing me that on January 1 the interest rate was rising to 29% unless I chose to "opt out" by mail, by December 8, to an address --- very fine print here --- different from the address on any of the credit card statements or records). There is no "opt out" clause as far as death goes; both our own, and the deaths of those we love.

Knowledge of this non-negotiable fact may be one of the things that  makes us most what we are; which is to say, human. Ned was not "mine", any more than fall is. He was, like all of us, and like October in Vermont, unownable. Like all beauty, love, and friendship, like our own troublesome and pleasure-giving fragile bodies, he was on loan to life. 

Perhaps this fleetingness makes love and fall all the more beautiful, at least when we are able to "live in the now" , the wisdom-key, it is often said, to a life lived in joy. Perhaps. Certainly the now is, as so many have said, "all we have", and to do anything other than claim it with heart and eyes open is to choose folly and sorrow; to, as Shakespeare said in Sonnet 64, weep to have that which (we) fear to lose.

***

All right then, this particular fall, 2008.

The best: it looks like, finally, after a nail-biting political campaign, after an eight years that went from bad to inconceivably worse (as David once remarked, "Who would have ever imagined that we'd say, 'Ah, Nixon, the good old days'?") that Obama may be --- do we dare say "will be"? --- our next president. That we may have a leader who I think calls to the best in our nature --- our hope, our unity, our kindness, our ability to be, one more time, inspired.  Our ability to solve rather than be daunted by problems. In the I-Ching, crisis and opportunity share the same ideogram --- I've heard that just about as often as "living in the now," but, though none of us would choose for this to be true, it is. Obama seems to recognize this.(One of the many subsets of reasons why Obama is my candidate is as a writer of books  for children).

The worst: that this is still not a sure thing. That it could, conceivably, still be McCain (and his incomprehensible running mate; great SNL fodder but, Oh. My. God. To imagine her as president). These are people who, I believe, call out to the worst in us.  Who speak to our fears, divisions, distrusts, irrationality.

***
Like A. A. Milne's Pooh, sometimes I simply like to have a Good Think. This is best accomplished lying down. If and when I do this, it's most often when I  wake up, before getting out of bed, on the rare mornings when I'm not only by myself but have nothing more immediately pressing than what is on my mind (and also don't have to get it up and pee: can just, in other words, stay put, cozy under the duvet though wide awake). Left, one of the original Winnie the Pooh illustrations, by E. H. Shepard. These will forever, to me, be the real Winnie the Pooh: simple, charming, subtle, and everything the Disneyfied Pooh isn't and can never be.

I had a Good Think one morning recently: It was the 19th, the day before what would have been Ned's and my 30th anniversary. David was in Los Angeles; his mother, Geri, who is 94, exactly the same age as my mother, has just moved to assisted living. (Photo: Geri and me, in December 2007, when I taught a class at Let's Get Cooking!, a cooking school near where she lives in Westlake, California. Can you believe how pretty and put-together she is? I think this bodes well for David, too...)

My Good Think meandered among all the topics I've mentioned here so far, and many more. I thought about how, having liquidated my IRA in the course of buying this property (an ongoing challenge, since I am a self-employed freelance writer, who has income events rather than an income per se),  I lost a lot less than many people in the recent economic meltdown.

I also, I suppose inevitably given the date, revisited in thought Ned's and my wedding day; the wedding brunch (I catered it --- what folly! ---but it was served by others, in a reception held in a room at the top of the Crescent Hotel, which is no relation to me). On leaving the brunch my father, now also deceased, went around the table from woman to woman and kissed each goodbye on the cheek, with great ceremony, for no particular reason than it struck him as a good idea at the time. I also recalled the later, larger party that evening, to which Jerry Stamps, a Eureka Springs pharmacist / herbalist who is now also deceased, brought the wedding cake. A many-tiered very dense carrot cake (not my favorite, but structurally necessary), it was elaborately iced, topped by a small bride and groom who were in a wagon he'd had someone weld out of thin brass tubes --- a wagon being pulled, needless to say, by a dragon.  (The little brass wagon and its dragon are downstairs, on the high kitchen windowsill, things outlasting people as they do).

(Honestly, all these people I loved. Dead dead dead, deceased, departed, known, loved, gone. Sometimes I feel I move through a world that is thick with ghosts, as if moving through a room filled with the kind of cobwebs you don't see until you walk into them. And I'm youngish, and still have many friends alive! How must it be for Geri, David's mother, who has outlived all, every one, of her contemporary friends? And yet there she is, cheerfully, on her second day at the Grand Oaks in this picture David took. She's with her younger friend and sometimes-caregiver, Pattie, and looking forward, David says --- for real, he insists, not just putting a good face on it ---  to making new friends and acquaintances among this new group of people including many who are her own age. The flowers behind her were a housewarming gift sent by  my mother and me. The card: "Dear Geri, Welcome to the next chapter in your life. May there be lots of adventures and surprises... but only the GOOD kind! Love, CD & CZ." Only the good kind... for isn't that what we wish for those we love, our parents, our children, our spouses, though God knows, as do you and I, that we can't guarantee it?  )

In the middle of the Good Think, I found myself recalling Ned himself and some of his sui generis particulars, in great detail, with fondness and sadness. Of the way he would occasionally, when putting away the groceries, create a sort of installation on the kitchen counter: a tall construct of cans of beans and tomatoes, boxes of cereal, carefully balanced pieces of fruit at the top. Of his thick, thick long eyelashes, and the way they lay across his cheek when he slept, almost as furry and dark as caterpillars, and the delicate petal-like lavender shading of his closed lids. Everyone who knew Ned noticed those large blue eyes of his; many remarked on them, to him and to me. But maybe I am the only one who also noticed their beauty when he closed then.

And, I also recalled, in detail, his penis. 

This is a part of widowhood no one tells you about: that you might miss, remember, long for, your husband's dick. His was, in my view (and I have to say, based on a certain amount of clinical research prior to marriage) one of the great ones. In size. In its... obligingness. In a way, it was like one of my current cats (there he is, the cat in question, rolling in the October leaves; click on that picture, taken by David, to see him fully). You have only to lay your hand on Cattywompus's head, sometimes even just say his name, and he immediately,  happily bursts into enthusiastic purrs. Ned's penis, similarly, was demonstrably happy to have attention paid it. And up for anything, as playful, in its own dear and graifying way, as is Cattywompus.

Now, of course part of it is that this particular dick was attached to someone I adored who adored me. But still. In a poem dedicated to Anne Gregory, Yeats said  "only God alone, my dear, could love you for yourself alone, and not your yellow hair." I think I truly loved Ned for himself alone... but it's also true that, like Anne Gregory's hair, his penis was part of the package.

All this, again probably inevitably, also led me, in my Think, to walk through the three times he and I had sex the week before he died, each time different and distinctive. One was a fun, quick, utilitarian romp. The second was on my birthday, and had a long slow start (he brought a massage table over, and that is how it began). And the third time... the third was the best. I mean not just of the three times that week.

I mean in my whole life. I mean ever, including the times when we were young, hot, madly in love, couldn't keep our hands or anything else off each other. There were certainly many memorable encounters in that phase (and I do remember many of them, being blessed or cursed with a memory that more than one person in my life has called "scary-good.").

But they didn't come close to this time I am, inadequately, describing. (The Bob Dylan lyrics from Blood on the Tracks are coming to mind as I write this: "But there's no way I can compare/ all them scenes to this affair / you're gonna make me lonesome when you go.") That time, there was not one centimeter of me, inside or out, that Ned was not touching, that he didn't know, and, I believe the same was true for him. That lovemaking, that day, stopped on every floor of the tall, tall building created of our 23 years of loving each other.

But it wasn't that kind but lukewarm sex you often hear described by or said of the long-married:  "Well, of course it's not as passionate any more, but it's better, deeper; you're more friends and companions." That sex was passionate, desirous, heated --- we were friends and companions and lovers/beloveds: it was sex and more than sex, but the "more" was shot through with sex. (In my view statements like the former are apologia: more or less excuses for not daring to want, sexually, the person you have grown to need so much over time and who knows you all too well --- much easier to be sexual and show your wild sexual self to someone who doesn't know you well, with whom you don't share taking out the trash and saving for the kids' college educations. This is a point of view I share with David Schnarch, one of my mentors, and the author of Passionate Marriage , a book everyone who is, or is planning to be, long-married, should read).

In retrospect, in its quality of culmination and completeness, I wonder was it perhaps inevitable that that lovemaking turned out to be the final time? Perfection doesn't occur often in worldly life. That was and we both knew it. What we didn't and couldn't know was that it would be the last time.

I still don't know how to think about the gift and the subtraction of this experience in that larger context, his death and my life without him. 

(And speaking of gifts, here is the great gift of writing: it has just occurred to me is, having started this essay with October, that that ecstatic final lovemaking had the quality of fall itself: the extraordinary color and beauty and perfection that indicates an ending. Not something I thought of consciously when I began writing this, or ever, until the moment the paragraph above began to take shape.) 

Remembering that lovemaking during my Good Think the other morning, I cried. This wasn't the racking uncontrollable grief sobs that rend one after sudden loss. It was quiet; thoughtful tears if such a thing is possible. They flowed sideways out of my eyes, into my ears, onto the green flannel-covered pillow as I lay on my back, facing the very tall cathedral ceiling with its one long dangling ominous-looking cobweb I must figure out how to remove. They flowed as I remembered something else: how, maybe three months after his death, I tried to masturbate and had to stop; just bursting into that other kind of crying, bitter, stunned and stymied with grief, comparing the act of so-called self-gratification to that incredible last time we had and thinking, "Is this what I have been reduced to? After that?"   

How on earth did I get through that? How do any of us who lose those we so love? I still don't know; I just know I did and we do, despite ourselves. As I've heard said, "we make the path by walking."

It's not uncommon that others, either well-meaningly or because they can't handle it or because they haven't experienced, try to rush one through grief. The day after Ned died, the day after, not one but several people said to me, "You were lucky to have him." (My editor, who just lost her mother to cancer, had someone say something similar to her --- we wondered, together, over the phone, how on earth it is possible that people can be so tone-deaf emotionally as to come out with such statements). I can hardly imagine more incomprehensibly cruel, stupid, foolish words to say at that time.

But that's not to say that such statements are false. They're true. They're just not true then, not in the important way, and they ask the grieving person not to feel what he or she feels. It's just that it is for the bereaved, and only the bereaved, to articulate when they they reach the point where it is true, experientially. Diana Ross said "You can't hurry love;" even more so, you can't hurry grief. You can't skip over the pick-and-shovel work to get to the awareness part, you can't fast-forward through the pain --- oh, how you wish you could! --- and the parts that make other people uncomfortable --- oh, how they wish you could! --- to get to the insight and gratitude. So, yes of course I was lucky to have Ned (Not that, as I have already said, anyone actually ever "has" anyone) and of course I knew that even then.

But knowing that spring will come does not and cannot exempt you from winter. You have to wear your coat, you mittens. At that moment? "Lucky" , in the blizzard of loss? That the person I had loved for decades had just pedaled off into eternity? That I would never, ever, ever see him again?  The day after the night I had seen his broken body, wrapped in sheets, lying on a stainless steel table in the emergency room? Lucky?

But, on the morning of my recent Good Think, almost seven years after Ned's death, as I lay there in bed the same day David would be helping his mother move in the Grand Oaks, across the country, I thought, yes, now I can say what I knew even then but only partially --- that I am lucky, lucky, fortunate beyond belief, that Ned's life intersected with mine for all those years. Lucky that we didn't give up on ourselves and each other when we hit the wall (and we did, at one point, hit that wall so hard we were both stunned and bleeding). Lucky I loved Ned and laughed with him, and also fought with him and came out the other side. Lucky I had that gorgeous and intense sex. Lucky I knew, caressed, and admired that pleasing dick of his (We used to joke about organ donation. Thankfully, I did not remember this on the night of his death when, in that complete and surreal state of shock, those people arrived --- angels to some, necessary ghouls to others --- to ask "Was he an organ donor?" I only recalled our dick-related riff on that some weeks later. And then, oh Lord, then I was beset for some time with those terrible tears, that rip the skin from your sternum and you see your heart, flopping and gasping like a caught fish, thrashing in your rib cage).

I know I will never again have sex in the way Ned and I did that time. It would be impossible, because it was built on every single way we knew each other and co-created a life in which we grew from youth to middle age. And this is a journey you make only once. Even if David and I get to have twenty-three years together, the journey that we will make is from middle age to old, and that is a very different journey, in every way: developmentally, physiologically, emotionally, spiritually.  And I am very deeply fortunate, to have not only had my past journey but now, to be embarked on this second one, in a different way, with a different human being. Not a day goes by in which I am unaware of this. Despite --- no, because of --- how wholly altered this traveling through time with David is from the trip Ned and I took until that fork in the road where we diverged forever, I am incredible grateful that DK and I are in each other's complex, middle-aged, interesting lives now.

The dear and wise therapist with whom I worked with after Ned's death, Bill Symes, told me that when I began dating and having sex again I would probably have "loyalty issues." I didn't --- until David. Why? David is 69 and Ned was, when he died, 45: David and I have sex in a wholly different range of styles than Ned and I did. Now, because there is no way to tell this story without being explicit, and because for me as a writer, transparency trumps embarrassment or privacy, I will take a deep breath here: with David I have gotten to experience, over and over, something I didn't used to believe in and never had with Ned, but now know to be absolutely for-real --- g-spot climaxes. My loyalty issue was something like, "How can it BE that there's this whole cool new thing I didn't even know my body was capable of, that Ned and I didn't get to experience with each other even once, when he would have loved it so much, and here I am having it and having it, with David?"

(A P.S. dropped in here a day after I published this. David  --- he's on his way home now, and called me from the Las Vegas airport between changing planes --- said to me, laughing,"You know, when I was reading your blog I came to the part where I you said 'David is 69', and I thought 'Holy shit!' That's old'! I mean it's one thing to know it but it's another thing to read it! I thought, the people that read her blog are going to think, what's that young chick doing with that old man!" I said, "Well, you just prove 'em wrong, then." He then went on to tell me about a twenty-minute call he'd had, from the airport, to a 71-year-old guy in Weston, Pennsylvania; he's phone-banking as part of "Seniors for Obama." Then I told him about a story on This American Life about making calls for Obama in Pennsylvania, and how he just had to hear it --- then the flight attendant arrived and told him to turn off his cell phone. Life, unfolding as it does when two people who share lives, or a portion of them, find each other's thoughts and adventures deeply interesting. )   

Back to loyalty issues and g-spot orgasms: here's what my unconscious did with this one.

Maybe three years ago, I dreamed that Ned turned up here in Vermont, just walking in the house through the front door pictured left. We greeted each other with great cheer, very happily and excitedly, as if we were picking up a conversation that we had, as if we'd just been away from each other for a little while. As we're catching up with each other in the dream, I say to him, "And guess what? I learned this whole new way to come!" And Ned, in the dream, says, enthusiastically, "Really? Let's try it!" And then, in the dream, I pause. I look at him. In the dream I am perplexed, and I have to stop and think about it, hard. And I finally look at him --- I can't see myself, but I feel my dream-brow knit together --- and say, "Well, it's complicated. See, it's a real relationship."

And so peace, of a fashion, is made.

On the morning of the long Good Think, I thought, there is a fulcrum in the grieving process, where the balance shifts. I am always going to miss Ned, but now I'm on the side of the fulcrum that those idiots actually thought I should be on the day after he died: I am lucky, I know it, and I am filled with gratitude for it.   

And then I stopped thinking and got up: to make the bed, to shower, to meditate, to call David, to have a breakfast of grilled wholewheat tortilla and egg and Vermont "seriously sharp" cheddar cheese, with sauteed onions,  peppers and potatoes and broccoli, pictured, with an autumn leaf on the plant, from the garden he and I had created (a shared joy particular to David-and-Crescent, because Ned was colorblind and found gardening frustrating and impossible... green and brown were the same color to him), and to work on The Bean Book , one of my current projects, some more... and to eventually go out for a long walk in the extraordinary woods surrounding our property.

Where I continued to muse about presence and absence, love and loss, best and worst. And where, suddenly and wholly unexpectedly, I was moved from the cogitations by finding, to my huge delight, the largest single cache of puffball mushrooms (image from here, and this is exactly what they looked like) and then of oyster mushrooms, that I had ever found. I wasn't looking for them, but there they were. Well, I just LOVE finding edible wild foods. It makes me feel connected with nature in the most delighted way --- as if nature had nothing better to do than to scatter edible surprises here and there all over her (or his) big generous self and wait for people and animals to come along and be surprised and nourished. Coming on a wild ripe persimmon tree, just laden down with fruit, around this time of year back when I lived in Arkansas, used to leave me similarly overjoyed.

So, that day I gathered up the blue cotton pull-over I was wearing, into a sort of apron and eventually walked home,  slowly and carefully so as not to spill a single puffball. My fungal treasures were so many that, had you seen me (thankfully no one did) I would have looked peculiarly, bumpily pregnant.  I wished, yet again, that David was here --- I wanted him to take a picture, not of me but of those mushrooms.

For I knew I would write about them, and him, and Ned, and the Good Think, and Obama and McCain, here.

Because, although you bet I opted out of the damn credit card, I did not, do not, will not, cannot, and would not opt out of anything life offers me by way of growth and self-understanding. And material.

Because nothing is wasted on the writer.