"Nothing is wasted on the writer."

Redecoration, Part One: Aunt Dot contemplates the living room of the future

"I suppose you'll live here one day?" Aunt Dot said. A statement; a question.

She gave a quick, birdlike glance at me, then looked away. Waiting, I naturally assumed, for an answer. 

But how could I answer when I wasn't sure what the question was?

She was sitting, that night, on the wooden chair with the woven seat, near the oval painted table. We --- she, Ned (my late husband), and I ---were in the living room, at the farm, her summer home in Vermont.   Also present were those other apocryphal living room residents, the elephants being ignored. As is usual in families, the three of us were studiously overlooking them.

The living room was exactly the same as it had been since shortly after Aunt Dot bought the place, in 1957. I, age 5, had come with her when she first looked it over for possible purchase. She was then 48. She was an indulgent if not exactly warm aunt; married, childless, a career woman, a beauty, reasonably well off, a Wellesley grad, accustomed to getting her own way. (I'm guessing the portrait of her, above left,  was taken when she was in her late 30's; just look at the no-nonsense set of her mouth. And that's me, to the right.)

I was the daughter of her younger sister, her only sister.There had always been love, jealousy, and tension between them, as I think the picture below, taken by Ned in about 1985, shows (Dorothy, left; Charlotte, right). In our family, as in all families, there was much more happening than was talked about.

The house, and the acreage on which it sits, had been part of both Dot's life and mine ever since that first visit. By the time of the conversation I'm describing, that had been over 35 years.

Part of the charm of the place, I think to both Aunt Dot and me, was (and to me still is, in some ways) its changelessness.

cat-shaped pillow

Aunt Dot decorated once: when she first bought the place. After that (other than the time in 1961 when it was broken into in the winter, and all the better antiques were stolen, to be replaced by inexpensive reproductions, less-good antiques, and remnants from her apartment in New York including two very uncomfortable Danish modern chairs) it remained as much the same as if it had been trapped in amber, like the tiny insects in Aunt Dot's necklace, which I used to examine as a child, wonderingly.

The wallpaper on three walls of the living room was mustard-yellow with a dark brown scroll, very New England. It, like so much about the farm, had been there for as long as I could remember. It had been lighter but grown incrementally and unnoticeably darker, shabby, in fact, as had the matching cafe curtains. But you could count on that wallpaper and those curtains, just as you could everything about the old house.

You could count on the row of milk-glass chickens on the window sill of the mullioned picture window in the dining room. You could count on the smell of old wood, old paper, when you opened the thick front door. You could count on the sleigh-bells affixed to their long leather strap, hung against the inside of that door, their definitive, distinctive jingle-thunk each time the door was opened or shut. You could count on the balsam-stuffed cat made of calico (from the Vermont Country Store, where we made annual pilgrimages), sitting on the black rocker. You could count on the two hideous imitation Danish modern chairs, one each on either side of the fireplace.Though occasionally Dot would have the upstairs bedrooms papered with new wallpaper, and though she did eventually add an upstairs bathroom, you could count on the downstairs of the house, especially the living room, being the same.

But, it wasn't. More accurately, it changed by such slow increments that it appeared the same.

For instance, the parts of the living room that Aunt Dot had once had picked out in clean, bright white: she'd never had them repainted. By the time she said she supposed I'd live here one day, the white was no longer white. The old wooden mullioned windows, unsteady in their frames (Ned, the preservationist, said they needed "sash conservation"), the wooden mantle and surround of the brick fireplace, the built-in bookshelf with its carved trim, the baseboards, the ceiling and the one unpapered wall --- they had grayed. Time and particulate from the many fires lit in the fireplace left their slow incremental graffiti, dinginess.

The living room, like all of everyone and everything, showed its age.  

Those fires were lit on every chilly spring or fall evening. Their elemental comfort gave rise to numberless conversations, equally comfortable and rarely significant. There was no TV; no charades; maybe a board game or puzzle if there were small fry, but mostly just talk,  punctuated by the occasional pop of the fragrant apple wood logs. My aunt loved to burn apple wood, but hoarded it, adding just one log of it to each evening's fire, the better to induce pleasure as  we (a "we" that changed all the time) sat around talking.

I had been part of these conversations as a child (I had read my Uncle Joe, Dot's husband, the book A Fly Went By in front of that fire one night; he never forgot it). I had been part of them, unwillingly, as a bored teenager (raring to get away from the adults, to get upstairs alone or sometimes with my visiting best friend, Karen, and see if we could pick up Murray the K with the Swinging Soiree, from New York, on the transistor radio).

But by the evening of Aunt Dot's supposing, I was a participating adult, and had been for some years. I had grown to appreciate the gentle inconsequentiality of most of the living room talk, so unfraught compared to most other conversations I seemed to be part of (especially back in contentious Eureka Springs). The Vermont conversations usually included Dot, and her boyfriend (the kind and gentlemanly Jim Cherry, pictured left, the man who succeeded her husband and remained her companion for the last 20 years of his life, until he died at 93). Ned would take part when he was here, as well as other guests: friends of Dot and Jim, friends of mine. Dot loved to have company (in part because everyone who ever visited was simply knocked out by the beauty of the place, and told her so, in one way or another. And a compliment to any part of the farm --- the view, the house, what had been served for dinner --- made her glow.) 

What was the content of those talks by the fire, as the white parts of the room gently faded to gray? How extremely sweet the corn seemed to be that summer. How much better the  current chef at the Grafton Inn was than the previous one. Dot, who had been an editor at Macmillan, might say how aggravating she was finding it to caption the photographs for the three-volume series Strong on Music, on the history of music in New York, which she was editing. But we all knew that despite her complaints, she was engrossed by and immensely proud of this work. Not only was it her last real project, but she was actually completing its writing, not just editing it. The author, her best friend, Vera Brodsky Lawrence, had died before she could finish it, and when it became evident to her that she would, she had extracted a promise that Dorothy would do so. Yet though Dorothy and Vera had met once a week for years in New York, at the farm Dot never talked about her sadness at losing this old friend, only the book and how it was going and what a good job Vera had done.

Knowing how much Dot enjoyed my, or anyone's, enjoyment of the farm, I might comment on how extremely vivid a blue the sky had been that day, and how especially astonishing it was set behind the silver-white birches. "I left them, you know, " Aunt Dot would say, proudly. And she had, back when she had decided to clear an overgrown pasture, to "open up the view." I'd tell her she had foresight, and a good eye.  I'd thank her for leaving them. Aunt Dot would make a tssk sound of self-deprecation, but it pleased her no end that her vision was recognized and appreciated.

Some topics, and what would be said about them, were certain. Every fall, without fail, you could count on Aunt Dot to say, "I don't think the leaves have ever been more beautiful, do you?" And if we happened to have had  dinner earlier that evening at the home of her favorite neighbor,  Dot would unfailingly say, at some point, "Well, the view from Peter's is certainly very nice. But I prefer ours."

As if there had ever been any doubt.

Why, given all these gentle satisfactions, should I, or my aunt, have noticed the white woodwork graying?

We didn't.

time does not require our noticing it

What reigned was comfort and familiarity, not interior design. Just as when we remarked on a particularly bright full moon rising over the forest-edged meadow, or, a few weeks later, the delicacy of a particular crescent moon, and, each fall, the changing of the leaves and the way the dark pond, mirror-like, Escher-like, reflected the orange-red maple that grew beside it while a few bright leaves floated on the surface --- it was beauty we were noting, the loveliness of the place, not the passage of time. 

But time passed anyway.

The cafe curtains in the living room tried, like the wallpaper, to stay sprightly. But 30-plus years is a long time to remain perky. Bitten on the top by vicious-toothed brass rings which circled the brass curtain rods on which they hung, they were taken down every two or three years to be washed, pressed, and starched. Each time, they grew slightly thinner and lighter. Eventually they became fragile, almost translucent, letting more light into the living room. Did we notice? No.

What was Aunt Dot was asking, that night?

Was she saying, do you want me to leave the house to you?

Was she saying, am I correct in thinking you are the one person in the family who loves the farm as much as I do, and might actually reside here?

Was she saying, I am in fact leaving the house to you?

life in another state altogether; opacity

If it was the latter, with what joy and confusion Ned and I would have received the news! We loved the place, and had often talked about living there, but always in a vague, to-be-determined future. For at that present moment, we were utterly involved in our lives in Arkansas. (Ned and I high-fiving, left, in 1998; we had just announced that we were closing our inn, and co-founding a non-profit writer's colony. We had been innkeepers, community activists, passionate preservationists, wholly enmeshed in the politics, culture, and social web of our little town, Eureka Springs).

We also didn't have nearly the financial resources that Aunt Dot did to maintain such place.

But she had said "someday." Is there a word more wide-open then "someday"? 

What would actually happen didn't remotely occur to any of us. That young, handsome, healthy Ned would die before either Dorothy or me, killed when the yellow bicycle he rode with such joy intersected with a pick-up truck on an Arkansas road. That by the time Dorothy might have been ready and willing to leave me the farm, she had outlived her money, in large part due to an embezzling caregiver, and she had nothing left to leave me or anyone else. Thankfully, by that point, she was incapable of knowing, or worrying about, this.

I believe, given all this, that I am also thankful for the opacity of the curtain which divides us from our future. How would we bear what lays ahead for us were that division as fragile as the old curtain fabric which hung at the windows of Aunt Dot's living room?

By the night when Dot "supposed", she was in her late 80's, Jim in his early 90's. Vera was dead; the presence of that had to be in her face every day as she worked on the books. At Aunt Dot's last Wellesley class reunion, only 6 of the "gals" (as she always described them) with whom she had graduated were still alive. How is it possible that we neglected to speak, directly, of these things?  Yet we did: when Dot had told me about the reunion, she'd described it triumphantly, as delighted as a girl. "Everyone else walked, but they loaded us into a Model-T Ford and when we drove down the street it was just lined with young graduates and they cheered us, and cheered us..."

Fall is beautiful, especially in Vermont. Its magnificence, though, marks an ending. Aunt Dot never once saw the farm in the winter; she left long before the last leaf turned from red or gold to brown.

I tried, in the seconds before I answered Dot that night, to suss out what her subtext might be.

I knew there was one, but I couldn't get it.

I knew assumptions are dangerous. Talking about the dispossession of one's property after death is delicate and emotionally fraught, when the death or the property is yours or that of someone you love. There were those ignored elephants in the room. Several of them I can name more clearly now than I could then: aging, money, fear of impending, inevitable change.

Next to me, on the couch, Ned remained silent. But I could feel the quickening of his interest, hope and curiosity and amusement --- how would I answer this? what was Dot actually saying?  --- rising off him like heat.This was, we both assumed, about our future. This was, possibly, big.

"Well, Aunt Dot," I said, fumbling cautiously. "I love the farm, and we've --- well, you know we've always thought we'd like to live here someday..."

But she was no longer looking at me. Her gaze seemed to stretch out, far past the room, to a middle distance.

Then she said, with the utmost mournfulness, "I suppose you'll... redecorate."

Redecorate? All this supposing was about redecoration?

I told that story for a lot of years. I thought it was funny, and I still do. My aunt's wish to control the future, even a future she might not --- would not --- be in. My own utter inability to imagine where she was going with that odd remark, and scrambling to answer appropriately.

But I also think, now, that there was something tragic in the exchange. Not melodramatically so but in a perfectly ordinary, normal way --- that two people who loved each other, who loved and had shared a particular place, who had traveled through so many revolutions of the earth around the sun together, were unable to give voice to their hopes and fears.

Now I think I understand much better what Aunt Dot  was grappling with, but could not articulate. Not to herself; certainly not to us. Wallpaper and the arrangement of furniture had nothing to do with it, though even she may have thought it did.

I still see the funniness. I also see terror, A terror, unexpressed, that lay beneath "redecorating." A terror that is existential, inherent in living a human life, which one knows will end. Especially when that ending (and what, if anything follows that ending) is and must be wholly unknown.

It would take years for me to get that that's what this exchange was about, though.

And although I wish now that we had been able to speak openly that night, neither of us were able to. We each did the best we could.

Redecorating?

I think I probably barked out a an astonished laugh, as I felt Ned, next to me, also shake with laughter. I probably shrugged and said something like, "Aunt Dot, I have no idea, we've got a lot of bridges to cross before we come to that."

How many bridges, I had no idea.

Fifteen, maybe twenty years have passed since that night. I think what Dot most feared --- the twinned loss of control and identity in old age --- has happened.

I think it is less terrifying in actuality than was its anticipation, which she bore alone.

Dot lives in the moment now. Some of these appear to be very happy moments. (Dot, left, on her hundredth birthday).

Dot, now, is the one who lives in another state. And I do live here, on the farm, in Vermont, as she supposed.

But sometimes, especially late at night, I think about those bridges, and how many of them it is necessary to burn in order to simply go on living.

Sometimes, I swear I can still smell the smoke.

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.

gills, guilt, garden... camera, catbox, cauliflower, cosmos

Okay, this isn't the promised Part 3 of my meditations on being in Unity, New Hampshire, with Hillary and Barack back at the end of June, which, God knows, is by now a yuga in the timing of political dialog today... Lord, I may never write part three at this rate, just incorporate the ideas into something else.

At any rate, something lighter, today.

About gills. Bear with me.

It's the day before David goes back to L.A. again, again for a couple of weeks of film work (editing video footage already shot, shooting new film). He leaves grudgingly; he doesn't want to leave the garden and Vermont, both at the height of perfection at this time of year, and we are in one of those phases of thoroughly enjoying each others' company. But once he gets there, since he does social-activist work he loves, he'll be almost completely into that world until he returns. Which I like, by the way. I like that he does work that is meaningful per se, and meaningful to him. And I like that I do the same, in my own way, and that neither of us is mooning around unproductively missing each other.

But here and now, today, it's the garden. The garden we started in the spring. Now it is almost fall and the garden is bursting, overflowing. It's beside itself, and I am beside myself with it. Left, the world's most unflattering picture, taken by my darling neighbor Gaelen. This was a day she came by last May (when David was last in L.A.) to help me tie branches together to rig up bean pole tepees --- note the overall bareness of garden. And below, a picture David took of me this very morning, next to those self-same bean-poles.

How can so much explode, so greenly, so quickly, in such excess? Keeping what's there weeded, putting in a fall garden (a gamble, in Vermont, but worth it --- OH did I have some gorgeous lettuces last year before frost), and harvesting harvesting harvesting, pickling, freezing, eating... a lot to do.

This, plus writing for a living, plus the annual New England children's book writer picnic which is coming up in about a month and will be held here so I'm trying to clean my house in baby steps with my favorite never-fail technique, relentless incrementalism. Plus periodic calls from my mother's caregiver because my mother is very confused these days about where I am (and when I call back she starts out by saying, in a tone of astonished wonder, " But how did you find me?" ). She needs frequent reassurance: that she's there, that I'm here, and where "here" and "there" are, which she then forgets again pretty soon, gets worried, and needs reassurance again.

Given the basal metabolism of life, I sometimes feel I'm a faithless blog-keeper. I'm working on not feeling guilty about this: basically I can feel guilty about anything, since there are so many people and activities I love, writing this blog among them, that I can't possibly give all of them anything like what they deserve. So no matter what I'm doing, there's something I'm not doing. Recipe for guilt, which takes the fun out. And I like fun. So I'm just gonna press delete on blog-guilt. Oh-kay! Much better.

I don't seem to have the knack of writing quick, down, and dirty, supposedly a big part of blogging's laissez-faire nature. Maybe someday.

Back to the garden.

Writing about, and showing pictures of, your garden may be like talking about, and showing pictures of, your grandchildren --- a subject of endless, obsessive fascination to you and your partner, but not of much interest to anyone else.

Nevertheless. 

I'm particularly in love with cauliflower, which I'm growing for the first time in my life. It's a very coy vegetable. Cauliflowers keep themselves to themselves, modestly swathed in curvy gray-green leaves, shyly hiding their efflorescence. Then! All of a sudden! They BURST open --- extravagantly huge white tight almost explosive heads. Ready to go, not there yesterday, here today, come on, let's get a move on, hot to trot, hello, world, here I am, I'm a cauliflower, there's not a second to waste! (Left, a cauliflower on the morning of its first appearance. By evening it will look like a bridal bouquet).

Ever since my friend and neighbor Deborah Krasner (pictured; she's a cookbook writer / kitchen designer / olive oil maven / and creator of "culinary Vermont" and "culinary Italy" travels), introduced me a couple of years back to roasted cauliflower, one of those  couldn't-be-easier to make, unbelievably delicious astonishments that have no right to taste as good as they do, I have been cauliflower-crazed. Have eaten fields-worth of cauliflower.

And David (along with everyone else I've ever fed roasted cauliflower to) is as fond of it as I am. Hence, we grew a lot of cauliflower this year. A whole lot.

Now that the formerly diffident cauliflowers are revealing themselves, we eat a head each night. I don't think cauliflower would freeze particularly well (cabbage family relatives usually don't, in my view, and I'm so spoiled by the perfection of them picked ultra-fresh and then roasted). But I am going to pickle a few heads of cauliflower, solo and in some mixed pickles...

Besides the cauliflower, there are the tomatillos, another first-time growing experience for me. Incredibly sexy visually, I think: just look at that picture: that lit-up, veined green lantern-like ball, hanging, heavy, again encased but in an entirely different wrapping than the shy cauliflower. I mean! If the cauliflower is female (which to my eye it is), the tomatillos are male, exceeded only by figs in their maleness. (Okay, testicularness). Figs --- don't get me started on figs and how much I love eating them.

The hot pimento peppers are further down the same row as the tomatillos. I can't, in this telling, leave out the fecundity of those pimento peppers. Never, ever have I had pepper plants, of any variety, so completely covered with peppers. I held the foliage aside for David this overcast morning, so he could photograph this profligacy.

Actually, David and his camera are what I wanted to write about.

As I said, he's leaving tomorrow. As always before a departure, there's too much to do. Things he wants to do, has to do, thinks he has to do, should do, needs to do, wants to do because he knows I'd like him to do.The bluestone front step which cracked during frost heaves last winter has been waiting to be put back together (a project started in July). The special masonry hooks so I can hang my blue Le Creuset pots against the back of the old chimney in the kitchen instead of them cluttering up the space under the counter (hooks bought three weeks ago).

But flights wait for no man, or woman: there's packing.  Getting in the "A" group on Southwest which requires hovering online at the milisecond of the 24-hour-before-departure mark. And finding the fancy electric toothbrush of his, the one with the 53 heads which he seems to have misplaced, and has torn the house apart looking for, and issued an APB on.  Remembering to remember the cell phone charger. Getting all the invoices from the work he did the last time he was away working submitted and mailed off before he goes off again, because otherwise it'll just get postponed and maybe never again will those receipts resurface...

All this being so, how come David spent maybe an hour taking pictures in the garden this morning?

And how come, when I made breakfast following his horticultural photographic orgy, he started taking pictures of that, too? I'd baked his favorite Irish Soda Bread, left, as a pre-departure treat; plus I'd made an omelet over which I spooned an very odd-looking but delicious cheese sauce, very strangely tinted pink because it had garlicky beet greens and chard plus their magenta potlikker in it.

(Note to my Southern friends: Spell-Check just suggested "parrotlike" as a substitute for potlikker! Note to everyone else: although the link I just gave leads to an essay on collards in which pot-likker is described as the water left over from cooking those particular greens, I've always understood it to be that water --- ambrosial but earthy, with a dense mineral taste, soul-satisfying --- which remains after cooking any variety of greens. Beet greens equaled pink potlikker, and, since I used that liquid in the cheese sauce... Well, take a look, a few photos down).

Anyway, so I'm sitting there at the attractively set table on the screen porch, waiting to eat my breakfast (which is getting cold), get on with my day (which, though less pressed than his, is also full). Both of us aware of all the stuff he has to do and the clock is ticking and ---?

He keeps taking pictures. I make a move towards the bread.

"No --- just one more, please, before you cut it. No, wait!" And, "Everything you make looks so good I just want to document it!" Oh, yeah, good line, David. Flattery will get you nowhere. "But, David, " I harumph, "if I knew you were planning to take pictures of it, I would have sliced that nectarine and fanned it out, not just glumped half of it on each plate. Plus, those soysage patties, they're over-browned... " Unsaid, exasperatedly: actually, David, if I knew you were planning to take pictures for twenty minutes I just would've made some something cold, and brought a book...

I sit. I wait. I shut up.

But what I'm thinking, and what I know he knows I'm thinking, is, given that he has a to-do list the size of a dirigible, is this the best and highest use of David's time?  Couldn't he just take one or two quick snapshots, does it always have to be this prolonged thing?

Now I don't even have to catch myself to know what a stupid and unproductive way of thinking this is: I know it! I know that while it is a typical way partners think about each other, it's also a major reason for the typical mediocrity of so many relationships. I know that when, thanks to therapy, self-confrontation, and a whole lot of development, I first discovered I had made myself into something unpleasant  --- the designated authority on what Ned, my late husband, should do and how he should do it ("May I make a suggestion?" ""What you need to do is ---" ) --- and then quit doing and being this, just deleted this awful know-it-all-ism, well, at that point Ned's and my already-good marriage went so far beyond good that it was just off the charts.

Oh, why do we think we are such experts on what those we claim to love should do! The arrogance underlying this! Shouldn't it be self-evident that the other is an other, and that others do things differently than we (in our great wisdom), do? Why is this so hard to see? Who anointed us judge, jury, and king of another person, another person we supposedly love (and yet, are so often busily trying to improve)? Oh, the oblivious, well-meaning arrogance of the lover, or parent, or friend!

At least I know this for what it is, thanks to all the time Ned and I put into Relationship School.

Even while feeling all this, I'm watching myself feel all this, shaking my head internally, not so much at David as at myself for having those feelings about David. Even as I'm watching him, even as I'm watching my internal self yammering, "He should... what he needs to do is... why isn't he..."  at the same time, with the better part of my over-active brain, I'm thinking, "Come on, Dragon! Get with the program! You didn't spend all these years with Ned to be so dumb! Just stop it!"

And then, one of those sweet unlooked-for small miracles. You, or I, can't "just stop it", no matter how often we see that that that critical "I'm-only-trying-to-be-helpful" yammering is counter-productive at best, and at worst, the cruelest folly, a tragic waste of life's essential moment-to-moment opportunity for sweetness and self-awareness.

But sometimes the yammering stops itself.

As I watch David circling the table, leaning in close, pulling back, I recall times he has stated, or not stated but somehow let me know, in that weird way that couples can do, his disapproval of things I was doing as not being the best and highest use of my time.

Why, with the mortgage looming large and a book deadline even larger, was I spending hours writing and rewriting and editing and linking a blog post for which I was not getting paid, and which not all that many people would read? Or, why was I working on the scrapbook / visual memoir I occasionally give myself over to (so much interesting visual detritus from Ned's and my complex and long shared life, surely it ought to be used, organized, allowed to tell its story, so interesting in fact that when I get into it I just...  I look up, and it's getting dark, and holy shit, I haven't eaten breakfast!)? Or making the mixed media found-object art I sometimes do, which I will never show in a gallery, never sell, never "use", never display, which I just do for myself, which is not particularly "good" --- but then, that is not the point, is it?

No, it isn't. The point is doing it. The point is, all these seemingly non-pressing, non-income-producing activities, zoning out, zoning in, for much longer than is conscionable or rational need doing. By me. I need, at times, to do them.

I can't explain it. I can't defend it. I can't even understand it. Nor do I even want to explain, defend, or understand. I just want to do it. Because it's essential and feeds everything else I do.

And suddenly, watching David, I get it. (This, the getting it, is the small unlooked-for miracle). He just wants to do it. Has to. It's essential for him and feeds everything else he does. Period.   

At times he needs to capture images on film, the same way I have to write, or collage, and for the same kinds of unreasonable reasons. Why should he have to explain this, to me or anyone else?

Inside me, as I sit, there's a sudden, almost audible click of realignment, the psychological and emotional equivalent of a chiropractic adjustment. Instantly I'm relaxed and happy. This acceptance goes way past intellectual understanding. It's so spacious in here! Impatience, exasperation? Gone. Replaced by: loving David. Loving  life. Loving breakfast, and the Irish soda bread, and the pony-tailed sixty-eight year-old guy circling the table, moving objects in and out of the frame. Loving the weird pink cheese sauce, the blooming purple hostas and the bees buzzing them, loving the distant monadnocks of New Hampshire visible across the field, even loving the spare cat-box on the lawn (I'd emptied it last night, when it was raining, and left it out to be rinsed by the pouring rain and then dried by the sun this morning).

You can't edit this stuff, see. It's flowers and mountain and cat-boxes. It's exasperation and then, suddenly, truly apprehending the essence of someone, and feeling, oh, what a privilege, to see them and know them. It's loving. It's love.

Loving the mystery of how we know what we know, and how we discover things that we don't yet know that we know: i.e., the creative process.

Just as I had to mess around with the posts about Hillary and Barack to know what it was I thought, so does David, at certain moments, have to take pictures, and in a certain way, over and over until he gets IT, the mysterious single shot which may or may not realize the ideal he is reaching for.

Like me with writing, David is compelled to do this reaching without knowing what it is he's reaching for until he gets it. The same old home truth of writing / living.

And, basically (though non-aggressively), at such a moment, well, fuck the "A" line at Southwest and breakfast getting cold and needing to pack. Fuck the tyranny of the urgency. This is more important. And important trumps urgent, or should. Not always, but sometimes: much more often than we let it.

When David and I finally sit down to eat our breakfast, I tell him what I've come to. Without thinking it through, these are the words which come out of my mouth: " Taking pictures is the way you breathe in the world."

Breathing in, as a fish, in water, takes in oxygen. Remember I told you to bear with me about gills?  Here we are: gills. We are in the world as fish are in water. How do we take in what we need? How do fish do it? Maybe "how" doesn't matter, only that we do, that we can, that we, like fish, have a way to do this. And must, if we are to live. That we each have our own gills, each of us.  And, while meaning no respect to those miraculous physical human gills known as lungs,  I think we have another, non-physical set of lungs, or gills.  Sure, we can live with just the physical set. But without inhaling and exhaling with this second set, we are not fully alive; we "laugh, but not all of our laughter, and cry, but not all of our tears," in Kahlil Gibran's words.

As we eat, David tells me about his first camera, a German Rolleicord which he received as a Bar Mitzvah present in 1952, or maybe it was when he was confirmed a few years later at Temple Beth Hillel (I didn't even know Jews got "confirmed" ...I thought it was just little Catholic schoolgirls in their white dresses, like I used to see and envy in my mostly Catholic grade school.).

David tells me about taking pictures with the Rolleicord when his family returned to the East Coast from Southern California, where he grew up. Philadelphia, Boston, Washington DC, New York... Though born in Philadelphia, he'd had no memory of it. On that return visit to Philadelphia, he tells me, he was never without his new Rolleicord. He remembers the Liberty Bell, and Faneuil Hall, and the Capitol... all as framed through the camera lens. "And what was there at the very beginning for me still is, " he says. He tells me about how, when he was a graduate student at Berkeley, the San Francisco Parks Department had a free community photographic studio at Duboce Park, with lots of darkroom space. How he used to spend hours there. "Even the chemicals were free!" 

And he talks a little about taking pictures generally. "The composition is there, " he says, "but it's infinite until you find it. Moving the frame is what allows that inherent composition to be revealed.  A lot of people, now, do cropping after taking a picture, but, doing it when you're taking the picture is different. It's like... I remember, exactly, being in Venice, this must have been in 1959 or so, and there was this couple on a bridge overlooking one of the canals. And everything was gray. The sky was gray, the water was gray, the paving was gray, the stone was gray, but it was all different shades of gray... And I knew somehow that by looking through the view-finder I would find a certain frame that would impose, or reveal, a particular reality. And I did. And when I got it I knew. I still do that. It's like, everything else gets pushed to the sidelines. You're, in a sense, cropping reality. And when you've got it, you just know."

Breathing in the world, breathing out. Seeing, cropping. Taking in, releasing.

'Spirare', the Latin root word from which spirit is derived, means, literally, 'breath.' But it has a larger implicit meaning: breath as life, as divine spark. When we expire, we leave the world with our last out breath. When we conspire with others, we breathe with them.

And when we are inspired, we take in something which transforms, elevates, and surprises us. Which, in some way, ennobles us.

And then we let it out.

That, on reflection, is what I think I meant, without fully knowing it at the time, when I heard myself say to David, "Photography is the way you breathe in the world."

The cosmos --- small "c", the flowers, I mean --- have been exceptional this year. I'm growing a variety new to me this year. The flowers have the most extraordinary tubular fringed petals, left. Picking one a couple of months back, I  looked at those pale pink delicate ruffle-edges petals, the shades of yellow making a perfect mandala at the center. And I just sort of fell in. Utter stillness. Maybe just a few seconds, but absolute. Looking at the flower, seeing beauty - the beauty of the cosmos. When I came back to thought, I thought about how, in the Gita, Krishna (an avatar of God in this telling of the universal story) says, "Wherever you see beauty, see Me."

So maybe that was "cosmos" a lower-case c, maybe an upper-case. Who is to say?

Later I saw David gazing at that same flower --- through a camera. Absolutely still, absolutely focused. David, who is anything but a reader of the Gita, the Bible, or any other wisdom text, who is categorically not a meditator, church-goer, thinker about spiritual matters, and so on. But there he was. Click, click, click: he was letting the flower, and the act of seeing (through the lens) take him there.

Or There. Who is to say if that ---That --- destination is lower-case or upper-case?   

And so we breathe in, and breathe out, the world. And when we do, nothing is wasted.

Relationshape-shifting: change, constancy, love, time, and "blace"

From Toni Morrison, in Inventing the Truth: the Art and Craft of Memoir:

"When I hear someone say "truth is stranger than fiction," I think that old chestnut is truer than we know... it doesn't say that truth is truer than fiction; just that it's stranger, meaning that it's odd. It may be excessive, it may be more interesting, but the important thing is that it's random --- and fiction is not random. Therefore the crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because fact can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot."

Did Dorothy, my Aunt Dot, whom I wrote about yesterday, survive, yet again?  To simply say 'Yes' is a fact (a happy one; she survived well and on her own terms). But while true, it's not the truth that Morrison alludes to. And without that, I'm doing a disservice to you, me, and Aunt Dot; a disservice to what I understand about making meaning and telling a story. If someone who aspires to write memoir or fiction or poetry simply states without the fuller engagement of wrestling with understanding and putting into words, than he or she is wasteful; even fraudulent.

Pieces of Dorothy's and my shared life, in and out of time:

1958: Dorothy, age 49; Crescent, age 6:
 Aunt Dot takes me to Los Angeles, where her parents (my grandparents) lived, and to Disneyland.
      
Here's what I remember:
    O    an Alice-in-Wonderland ride at Disneyland, in which the ride-chariots were giant tea-cups in saucers, and, as you hurtle in your tea-cup down into the dark, a very proper, dramatically affected female voice says, "THIS is how ALICE felt when SHE fell down the rabbit hole."

     O     Eating lunch with Aunt Dot and Grandma Ella at a department store tea room and being utterly perplexed but delighted with a bright red sweet dressing that came for a salad. 

      O     Sharing a hotel room with Aunt Dot, each of us folding down the coverlets on our neat, tight white-sheeted twin beds.

      O    Dozens and dozens of tiny raised red insect bites on my legs. We see a doctor, who says (can this be right?) that they are from a kind of biting fly that lives in palm trees. Aunt Dot putting ointment on the bites.

      O     Having dinner together in a rather formal restaurant. It's still light out; the dining room we're  in is almost empty. We're seated next to some tall windows which look out onto a garden. I order vanilla ice cream for dessert. But when it comes, it has lots of tiny little black things in it. I am distressed. Aunt Dot says, "Oh, no, that just means it's extra-good vanilla ice cream. It's made from real vanilla, not extract, those are seeds from a vanilla bean." I eat it trustingly and happily.

Here's what Aunt Dot remembered (back when she had memory).

"Oh, you wanted to go on all these rides! Some of them even scared me! But you were just a little girl and I couldn't let you go by yourself, so I went along too. Even when I didn't want to. I tried to hide that it was something of a strain for me, and I didn't think you had noticed. But that night, when we were getting into bed, you looked over at me and suddenly said, out of the blue, 'Aunt Dot, you're a good sport.' "

2008: Dorothy, age 97, Crescent, age 55. A series of calls on a Friday: Aunt Dot has been taken by ambulance to the NYU Medical Center emergency room by Zorina, her Guyanan-Indian caregiver. Dorothy's belly's distended; she's in pain. "It's probably nothing, but just to be on the safe side..." Then, from ER, a suspected diagnosis: intestinal blockage. But to ascertain it, a scan, one involving dye, is needed, and with that, consent because "there are always risks, especially at her age," said Dr. Blackman, the first of many doctors I would speak to over the next few days. "We need a family member to okay it." (Aunt Dot, left, on her 94th birthday. Paradoxically, she looks younger and prettier now than then).
        Did she have any children? (No). Who was the health care proxy? (Presumably, me and my brother, but perhaps it hadn't been changed since the time when my mother, now in early dementia, was listed first?) Were there DNR orders ? (Yes. I think. I hope. I know my mother has them.) If so, where? (I'll make some calls and find out.) If not, what were the family's wishes?
       I asked questions too: "So if it is an intestinal blockage, what are the options?" ("We entubate her, and we would rather not do it with sedative, because at her age..." ) "And if the entubation doesn't work?" ("Well, we would need to discuss that; surgery, at her age, is not a good option... That's why we need to know the family's wishes.") "If it was your mother or aunt..." ("I'm sorry, I can't answer that.")
         "I'm coming down," I told Dr. Blackman.

1969: Dorothy, age 59; Crescent, age 16: Dorothy tells Crescent, " No, you may not visit the farm with Crispin Dragonwagon unless he shaves his beard. "

2008: Dorothy, age 97; Crescent, age 55. Crescent is visiting Dorothy in the hospital. It's Saturday, and Dorothy looks good, though she is intermittently annoyed by the tube in her nose, which travels down her throat and to her stomach.
     She has not a clue who I am, but she is happy to see me. She admires my earrings. She admires, and touches, the black lace camisole underneath the low-cut drape-y purple t-shirt, reaching out to touch the lace. Sometimes we talk. "What's that noise?" "It's people in the hall, Aunt Dot, you're in the hospital."  She shakes her head at their rudeness. "Can't you ask them to shut up, Mama?" she says.
         We also read and reread the words and numbers written in black marker on the white-board sign at the foot of her bed.   
     "1713," she reads.
     "That's your room number," I say.
     "Saturday," she reads.
    "That's the day of the week, " I say, and count them out on my fingers. "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday."
     "5/18/08," she reads.
     "The five means it's the fifth month of the year. January, February, March, April, May. " I count the months out on my fingers. " And the 18 means it's May 18th. And do you know what the '08 is?"
      "No," she says.
      "It's the year, Aunt Dot! It's 2008! Do you believe it?"
      Aunt Dot moved into her apartment building, the one she still lives in, on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941.
      "No," says Aunt Dot, "2008? No, it can't be! I don't believe it!" She shakes her head, then resumes reading: "R.N. Elaina."
       "That means Registered Nurse, Elaina. Elaina is your Registered Nurse."
         "N.A. Dujan." She pronounces the J.
        "That means, Nurse's Assistant, Dujan." I pronounce it the way Dujan has told us, the "j" sounded as "h."
        "9:00 a.m. to 8:45 p.m."
        "That's the hours Elaina and Dujan will be here, Aunt Dot. Then someone will come and erase it and write down the names of the new Registered Nurse and Nurse's Assistant. "
         About every fifteen minutes we revisit the white-board. Dorothy, one month away from 98, reads the board each time with curiosity, but without glasses.
        "Why does that 4," she asks, "look like a U?"

1973: Dorothy, age 64; Crescent, age 21. Uncle Joe, Aunt Dot's husband of many years, a well-heeled Jewish importer-exporter from McCrory, Arkansas, dies, after many years of illness, through which Dorothy nursed him. Joe, who chain-smoked cigars, was gruff, commanding, and total putty in Aunt Dot's hands. His nickname for her was "Zussie" (sweetness or sugar, in Yiddish). My aunt, having been stretched paper-thin during the years of caring for him, maintained her job at Macmillan; her retirement party was the same week as Joe's funeral.
     My father, Maurice, gives Joe's eulogy: a strange choice in that there was always tension and disapproval between Maurice and Dorothy, Maurice and Joe. But not so strange in that Maurice can give one hell of a speech.
        "We shared what is in many ways the closest bond two men can share," says my father at the funeral, "for we were married to sisters." The out-and-out peculiarness of this statement is not lost on me. Yet I admire my father for finding a way to make a bridge over all the estrangement, misunderstanding, fights about money-versus-art. (Maurice, left, in his early thirties.)
      At this same time, my mother and father have just, after a long separation, finally divorced, but are still utterly enmeshed with each other. There are so many layers of complication and emotion, almost none of which are addressed directly, that when I write my first solo novel, The Year It Rained, I begin with the funeral, and the gathering afterwards, at my mother's house.

2008: Dorothy, age 97; Crescent, age 55.  Every so often Dorothy and I stop talking and just look at each other.  I sit on the bed next to her. Her blue eyes are clear and transparent. Her mouth, which often used to form a straight line of disapproval, is soft.  "Oh, I love you so much, honey, you have no idea,"  she says, looking directly into me. 

  1973: Dorothy, age 64; Crescent, age 21.    
         Because of Joe, Aunt Dot's husband, I have Arkansas propers. Though generally perceived in what was for many years my home town, Eureka Springs, Arkansas, as something like 'the hippie writer who was a New Yorker who moved to Arkansas', I have genuine Arkansas relatives, albeit through marriage.           When I mention this fact to my then-Eureka Springs banker, John Cross, then president of The Bank of Eureka Springs, and that the Arnofs own the Bank of McCrory, he can't even wait until I leave the building before whipping out what is clearly a statewide bank reference book. He looks up the Bank of McCrory, right in front of me. He raises his eyebrows quickly as he looks over the figures. For a moment he is silent, apparently genuinely impressed (his usual facial expression when talking to me combines curiosity and amusement, with a dash of trying-really-hard-to-get-it and another of respect). "Wow," he says. "Good assets."
         At the gathering following my Uncle Joe's funeral, I meet my Arkansas relatives, Neudy Arnof (Joe's brother , who stayed in McCrory), and Ian (pronounced I-yan) Arnof. Ian at that time is in New Orleans , CEO of a large regional bank conglomerate. Neudy and I discuss investments. He favors land ("They're not making any more of it.")  but cautions me against rental properties and cattle ("Never buy anything you have to repair or feed."). 
          This is a very Arkansas kind of conversation, and it astonishes me to be having it in my mother's genteel Hastings-on-Hudson living room.

2008: Dorothy, age 97; Crescent, age 55: At the hospital, Aunt Dot admires my earrings and the camisole again and again. By the end of the day, when she is getting tired, "Black lace", the words she has said at intervals all day, become, "Blace."  She reaches out to touch it and my sternum. "Pretty," she says. "This blace is pretty. Did you make it yourself?"

1976: Dorothy, age 67; Crescent, age 24.    
      Aunt Dot reconnects with Jim Cherry, her boyfriend from when she was in Wellesley and he was at Harvard. They used to drive to football games in his T-Model Ford. He brought her gigantic football mums. They wore raccoon coats.
     Then they each married other people, happily enough. The two couples moved in the same social circles and occasionally saw each other. Jim became a lawyer, working at the same law firm at which Clarence Darrow once worked.
        Around the time that Joseph Arnof, Aunt Dot's husband, died, Jim Cherry's wife's Alzheimer's reached the point where she was put into a home. The story goes, Aunt Dot called Jim sometime in and around  there. "Oh, Jim, I just don't understand all this probate stuff," flutter flutter, "Could you help me with it please? "
     Dorothy and Jim spent the next 20-some years together: spring and fall in New York (in the city, at her apartment; in Chappaqua, in his home); winter in Rancho Mirage and sometimes abroad (once Jim took her to the Bellagio Center; when they were in England he introduced her to a duchess, about which she was very chuffed at the time), and late spring through early fall in Vermont (the farm, left).
        Jim, who played racquetball into his eighties and was still doing legal case work the week he died at age 92, was given to looking at Dorothy and saying admiring things about her (to me, among others) such as "Did you ever see such a vision of pulchritude?"

1995: Dorothy, age 86; Crescent, age 44: Dorothy, Crescent and Ned (Crescent's late husband) are eating dinner together into a tiny French restaurant around the corner from Dorothy's apartment. The waiter, gay in all the classic tropes of gay male waiterhood, comes to take our order.  His jaw drops. Dorothy, blue-eyed and elegant, looks sort of like you might imagine a retired film-star from the silent movies to look. The waiter looks at Ned and Crescent, "But she's beautiful!" he says of Aunt Dot.
     Aunt Dot looks at Ned and Crescent and says, in tones that are scornful and wholly disbelieving, "Is he blind?"

1997: Dorothy, age 88; Crescent, age 45. In late summer, Jim Cherry dies.  I fly up to be with her in New York, and to drive her up to Vermont to close the house up.  Jim and she never married, and there is bad blood between Jim's daughter-in-law, a chic Catholic Parisian, who never approved of their relationship and barely recognizes it, although Jim's daughter, a nun, enjoyed them both, and there was a real bond between Jim's granddaughter, Justine, and Dorothy and Jim; in fact, Justine often used to visit at the farm. Jim's chic daughter-in-law insists on a Catholic funeral for Jim, who would definitely not have wanted one. She speaks at his eulogy of his "joie de vivre."
       Aunt Dot, barely acknowledged by Jim's family, hair askew, desperate with grief, sits at the funeral, lips compressed together; occasionally outrage tangos with the grief across her features. If you didn't know her, you'd say she looks like a crazy old lady, I think, immediately feeling disloyal.
       Staying in Aunt Dot's small apartment, sleeping on the fold-out couch, is difficult. I go through papers with her, and the black plastic garbage sacks into which Jim's daughter-in-law cavalierly tossed all Dorothy's clothes and personal items, the stuff that Dorothy kept at Jim's home in Chappaqua, New York. Jim Cherry's family can't sell the Chappaqua home quickly enough. 
      Every so often, I reach my emotional limits. I walk to the end of the block and sit in the little park facing the East River, a park mostly inhabited by the extremely old, the extremely young, and their immigrant care-givers. The park is a United Nations of caregivers: Caribbeans, Africans, Eastern Europeans. Those cared for are white, mostly in wheeled conveyances: strollers, wheelchairs, tricycles. Those cared-for are clearly well-heeled. But they are all, now, somehow peripheral to the lives of their families, it appears to me.  And what of the immigrants, the stories of desperation and hope that led them from their lands of origin to this park, and their young or old, wealthy charges?
       I always bring Kleenex when I go to the park. What I do is sit on a bench, look out at the river, and cry. It's not that I loved and miss Jim Cherry, though I did and do; it's for Dorothy, for the absolute non-negotiable-ness of her loneliness and what, it looks to me, her life will be now.
     She shared her adult life with two men; Joe Arnof and Jim Cherry; she has lost both of them. Romance and relationship and being coupled were big to her. Her political and cultural focus changed markedly and effortlessly when she got with Jim (liberal, philanthropic in nature, big supporter of the arts) after Joe (self-made rough-and-tumble businessman, conservative politically and fairly uninterested in the arts). 
     I know, for her, that with Jim's death, that's it: there will never be another man in her life.  I cry and cry.
      Mostly I prepare meals for her, and we eat together. Occasionally I have to take a break beyond the park visits, and I'll skip out for a meal at a nearby Asian noodle shop. Once I do this and when I return, forty-five minutes later, Aunt Dot is standing in the kitchen. She has baked herself some Stouffer's frozen stuffed peppers, but in transferring them to the plate, she has dropped them on the floor. The green peppers and their red sauce steam on the white linoleum. The oven door is still open, the flame on and visible. Aunt Dot appears unruffled, unharmed, but slightly bewildered; quizzical, almost.
      The writing on the wall is large and fully legible. It is as red as the sauce on the floor. It is all in caps. It says: LOSS, LOSS, LOSS. CHANGE, CHANGE, CHANGE.
      "Oh, Aunt Dot," I say, as I wipe the sauce from her shoes, walk her to the living room and her favorite blue leather chair, bring her a plate of the take-out I have brought. Then I bend to clean the peppers off the floor.

To be continued... my friend Albert is due here any minute to till the vegetable garden, here in Vermont. Where I now live. In what was Aunt Dot's summer home.

 

night drive with rain, arrows, gingerbread crumbs, too-big numbers, and, as always, questions

"... so perhaps the work is the arrow, flying from the writer towards what she will become..." This may not be the exact quote, but it's more or less what I remember from May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, which I read some thirty-five years ago. It was a book I found self-indulgent even then, but the idea behind the quote above (whatever it was precisely), stayed with me.

What I understood Sarton to mean was that often, for writers, the work is more "advanced" --- matured, richer in wisdom --- than the writer herself may be. 

Friday night my plans for a quiet, car-free weekend --- gardening, spring-cleaning, bringing my home to order, writing --- got up-ended. My Aunt Dorothy, 98 (pictured left, September 2007), went into the hospital. I drove down from Vermont to New York that night, uncertain of what I would find there.

Driving down, I alternated between audio books, my own noisy thoughts, and NPR.  The news was unbearable and incomprehensible. "Official death tolls: 78,000 in Burma, with another 56,000 reported missing. 34,000 confirmed dead in China... An estimated 4.8 million homeless following the quake... aftershocks and mudslides hamper relief efforts..."

Is it possible to remove the "numb" from "number", I wondered (and wonder still, and I suppose will always wonder)?  How do you even think about that much suffering and loss? I know that to those on the ground, it is not "4.8 million", but person, person, person, one, one, one, one... each of whom has or had a life as important to them and those they love and are loved by as mine is to me and those I love and am loved by... as important as my Aunt Dot's life is to me. I grieved for those lost lives unknown to me, I shook my head at the vastness and seemingly random cruelty of it. Yet those lives were as unknown and unknowable to me as "4.8 million".  Where my deeper emotional attention lay, of course, was with Aunt Dot, and as I drove I kept turning over not only what I knew of her current medical  status but the long journey of our side-by-side, sometimes intertwined, lives.  Her life had existed for perhaps 40 years before I entered  it, via her sister, Charlotte; now, it appeared, my life might well go on for who-knows-how-many years, after she exited it.

As I mentioned earlier in these posts, I love to take, as well as teach, writing workshops. In one I took a couple of months ago, taught by the writer Elayne Clift, at the Rockingham Library in nearby Bellows Falls, Vermont, Elayne gave us a three-part writing prompt. It was something like, what I know is true, how I know it's true, and... I've forgotten the third one, because I only got the first two done in the time we had.

The second poem I wrote that day is what had brought the May Sarton idea to mind. It was wholly unlike any other poem I've ever written; in one sense, much less personal.  But it felt dictated to me.  It was  larger, or farther along, than I am at present. It was a gift, in the sense of something literally given. But who gave it? The muse? Spirit? God? Or perhaps, as Sarton implied, a self who is and isn't myself. Who is wiser than I am yet. But I felt the words to be a trail of gingerbread crumbs through the forest. And maybe that forest was the dark one Dante wrote about, in which we "awoke in the middle of our life, where the true way was wholly lost."

A trail of crumbs to lead me to what I will come to understand, maybe, and maybe, eventually, be able to live with?

May Sarton used an arrow analogy; I, the food writer, gingerbread crumbs... no matter. "The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," wrote Shakespeare, speaking as Hamlet, sorrowing over his own dark and unanswerable questions. Yet Shakespeare also wrote, in a much lighter vein, as the word-play loving Costard in Love's Labours Lost,  "Had I but tuppence in the world, thou shouldst have it for gingerbread."  He had room for the tragedies, the comedies, and  "the historical plays."  Oh, and sonnets.  This huge and timeless roominess,  his genius  --- we call it genius, but isn't that an outsider's word? Must he not, too, have emptied out "William Shakespeare" from himself enough to become such a conduit? --- in wording what goes beyond words: this is why humans read him still, and, each time, find something new.

I found my thoughts weaving in and out around Shakespeare and Sarton and the recent poem I had written in Elayne's workshop as I drove down 91 that rainy Friday night, drove down with the news and the audio books and my own loud thoughts: hoping deeply that Aunt Dot would either recover to her usually feisty, hilarious self or leave this earth quickly and painlessly. Ninety-eight years is a good run, by any account, and she had had a terrific life, not without difficultly and sadness (from which no one is exempt) yet interesting and engaged.  A beautiful woman, she was a honeypot; men buzzed arpund her like flies, and she always managed to have some rich, powerful, charming guy around to pick up the tab and grease the skids and take her to Europe or Asia. Yet she was a career woman (an editor of history textbooks at what was then Macmillan). She never had children, and this was by choice (I knew their were several abortions in her past, in the days when abortion was illegal, dirty, sordid, dangerous). She lived in Manhattan but spent much time in Vermont, on the very 35 acres I now live on, staring out rapturously at the same landscape of mountains, meadow, the white vertical punctuation of silver birches in that meadow.

All this was now her past, and forgotten, except in odd and often charming, poetic shards. But she was still my aunt, and she was still, in a non-linear way, having a ball. And no matter their age, we are rarely ready to let those we love go (unless they are suffering intensely), even when we must.

And at the same time as all this was going on inside,  I was praying / thinking about/ realizing that there was no way to think about adequately or helpfully, all those incomprehensibly suffering in Asia.

Of course, given that I was driving a car at night towards Aunt Dot's unknown outcome, it was probably inevitable that I also think about the justly famous statement of E.L. Doctorow: that writing a novel "is like driving a car at night. The headlights don't shine very far, but you can make the whole trip that way."

To hang out with pain, uncertainty, the knowledge of all the terrible natural and human-made disasters in this life and yet to still love life and the world, passionately, on its own unspeakable terms: that is how, mile after mile, I am making the trip these days.

This is the arrow, or gingerbread trail, poem from Elayne's class.

What actually happened

Safety went to work in the 
World Trade Towers one morning. 

Trust believed her husband when he said, “It was only one kiss.”

Faith, with her tiny silver cross, her star of David, her om sign,
served the victims of the plague. “How,”
she asked God,  “could this happen? ”
If God replied, it was inaudibly.

Belief clapped hands for Tinkerbell,
who did not arrive.

Certainty, the bough on which
the cradle rocked, broke.
The baby fell down, down, down
into limitless dark star-free space.

The baby falls still.

The baby will fall forever.

Mystery said: I am big enough to hold you all.

Mystery said: Are you big enough, small human,
to hold me?

A few quick post-Mother's Day P.S.'s, re writing

1. The New Yorker cartoon showing the sullen college-age girl in seated in a window seat, cup of tea on the floor beside her, writing in a notebook balanced on her knees. Caption: "“Dear Mom and Dad: Thanks for the happy childhood. You’ve destroyed any chance I had of becoming a writer.”

2. My late father, Maurice Zolotow, telling me the story (possibly apocryphal) about when Nora Ephron's mother was dying. "And Nora and her sister Delia are sitting around their mother's bed in the hospital, crying, and, you know, very emotional, and Nora and Delia's mama --- she was a writer too, a screenwriter --- opened one eye, looked at them carrying on and said to them sternly, 'Take notes.' "

3. From Carolyn See's feisty charming, insightful book, Making A Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers, which seasons wisdom, practicality, and a little New Age-y-ness with crankiness and many exclamation points. "What if you quickly made a list of the ten most 'important' people in your life?" After throwing out some questions to prime the pump and urging you not to overthink, she says, "Quick! Write the list! That's what I'm going to do. I'm not going to try and get fancy about it..." And she begins, big surprise, thus:

1. My mother. She was beautiful and funny and she never loved me. In fact, she couldn't stand me. Goddammit!

Later, after some delightful hypothesizing and relevant digressions about who (and in the case of Phillip Roth, what... a certain "fleshly appendage") might be on other people's most important list, she makes, almost offhandedly, this remarkable comment, set aside in its own brief paragraph:

As a writer, the importance of people is inside of you. My mother's rejection is the central event of my life. Enough people have said to me, "she was just a secretary," or "She was poor, she didn't know any better," or "What does it matter what she thought anyway?" Or, "She was bi-polar." Or, "She was depressive." Or, "She was mistaken." But it matters to me.

4. My friend and sometimes collaborator, the musician-singer-songwriter Bill Haymes, traveled across three states to see his Alzheimer-suffering mother for one long weekend a month, during the years she was in a nursing home. When she was well enough, he would take her out to eat at a Luby's Cafeteria of which she was fond, and they'd also just drive around. One day, driving, there were passed by a large bakery truck, the brand name of the bread proudly bannered across the side. Bill's mother, Helen, remarked. "That's a big truck." There was a pause. Then she added, "There could be... a lot of pianos in that truck!"
     Billy and I both interpreted that as a gesture of connection, from some non-linear place in her mind. Though able to identify the vehicle as a truck, and cognize it as big, she couldn't read the sign or grasp the picture of the bread. Yet, Bill plays the piano, and she was with Bill, her beloved son (even if she sometimes didn't know who he was) and hence her synapses put it together in the charming and off-the-wall manner.

5. This is a story my mother told me, many many years ago, when she was still totally with it. Patricia MacLachlan, author of Sarah Plain and Tall, was visiting her own mother, who had dementia, in the nursing home.  Her mother  said, "I'm sorry, dear, but remind me, please, who you are?" 
     "I'm your daughter, Mom, your daughter Patty!"
     At this her mother beamed up at Patricia, giving her a huge, bright, delighted smile. "How nice, because I like you very much!"

me & my semi-famous aging mother: navigating love with fierce persistence

"Happy Mother's Day," we say, as if it were that simple. It usually isn't.

Complex, ambivalent,  contradictory, with more layers than a baklava: that begins, barely, to describe the relationship my mother, Charlotte Zolotow, and I have with each other. That it has at last grown simpler and less ambivalent in the last couple of years, as she has entered extreme old age (she's about to be 93) and I middle age, is one of the great reliefs of my life. And, I think, hers, too.

I think we will pull it off yet: when she leaves, we will be at peace with each other. The love between us, which has never been a question, is becoming more and more visible, as the matters that have made it opaque grow thinner and less obscured.(She's pictured, left, in front of the house in which she still lives, now with a full-time care-giver. This photo was taken in about 1996).

(Baklava? Where did that come from? It's layered, sure, but so are many pastries; why did the word baklava travel through my fingers, and presumably brain, to arrive on the screen? In the manner one might analyze a dream, I turn the object over in my mind.  Sweet, almost too sweet. Delicious, but very, very sticky. Have to wash your hands after eating it. And it's filled with --- nuts! How can one not love a discipline, writing, that so surprises its practitioner, by delivering stuff like this? ! )

I could write a book trying to explain this particular mother-daughter relationship; in fact I did, when I was much younger (around 30), a novel called The Year It Rained . (You can buy the paperback British edition here; or track it down used online. I prefer the former, because then I actually make a little money.)When I wrote that book, I think I was still trying to explain what went on between my mother and me to myself, much more than to anyone else. For, to the extent I figure out anything, I usually wind up doing through writing.  Now, in present-time, her and my relationship is clearer to me, as so much is. (And, Lord, I should hope so, 25 years down the line.)

A general, no doubt oversimplified rule: what makes people crazy and drives them to therapists and spirituality and self-understanding / healing / peace (if they're fortunate) , or dope or booze or other forms of attempted or actual self-obliteration (if they're unfortunate)  is the gap, among intimates --- family members, spouses/partners --- the gap between what is said in words and what is said by actions.  The wider the divide, the more crazy-making this is. 

Such gaps are hard to even get, let alone take apart, let alone recover or heal from. I deeply believe it can be done, and that to do so is vastly liberating. But not without effort. We're too close to such gaps to see them, and they're sometimes abysses;  we may not want to see them, being afraid we might fall in and never emerge. And they affect us most at particularly vulnerable periods of our lives: we're young and are pure unadulterated emotion, without comparative experience or analytical skills to back away, or we've just gone through some major life-tragedy. (Picture, left: CZ in a quiet moment, at her 90th birthday party. Photo, David Koff.)

My mother is a wildly talented, well-known writer of children's books; she was an equally talented, incredibly generous and insightful children's book editor at Harper-Collins (then Harper & Row; and before that  Harper & Brothers) for fifty-some years. She was and is much beloved by the many authors she worked with, including Paul Zindel , Francesca Lia Block, and Paul Fleischman. She has always been respectful and supportive of my talent, too. And oh, did she ever have the most gracious manners! And she was beautiful, too, though she never thought so at the time. (To right: a happier moment at that same birthday, which she shares with her sister, my Aunt Dot. Dorothy, in yellow, was turning 95 that year! Photo, David Koff).

(Recently, looking through a scrapbook I made her, she scrutinized a picture of herself and said thoughtfully, and utterly without guile, "I don't remember being that attractive.")

On the other hand: well, for now, let's just say there is another hand. One to give, one to take away. Until recently, but pretty much only within the family, Charlotte poured out major, almost excessive,  generosity... but always, if you bit down on what was offered, there was a hook: bitter, sharp, ready to slice your your tongue or pierce the roof of your mouth.

This is hard for people who revere my mother to hear --- there's an interesting discussion of this re The Year It Rained, the novel I mentioned above, at a post called "The Polarizing Express"  (It's an  excellent, thoughtful blog called Collecting Children's Books , by Peter, a writer, reviewer, collector, and cataloger of same). But as for me, I think love and anger often coexist, as extreme selflessness and extreme selfishness sometimes do. (This picture, taken in 1998, was when I accompanied to Charlotte to the award given in her name, the Charlotte Zolotow Award, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.  I'm at the far left, CZ next to me. This is one group that definitely falls into the "we revere Charlotte" category.)

This  --- public graciousness, undeniable talent, and a lot of private anger, manipulation, love, and controlling behavior ---  is how it looked to me for a long, long time. Until fairly recently, but thankfully, thankfully, not much now. I grew up; she grew old. Things are different now. 

Some poems of mine, then; never intended for publication. This first batch dates from the period around 2002, 2003, 2004; when she was, in old age, starting to lose it. For awhile, all her worst qualities (victimhood, a tendency towards melodrama, rage, manipulation, control) took over. For the first time, this side of her was visible to those outside the family (friends, caregivers - she went through seventeen of them in three years!).

That it was somewhat validating to me to have others finally recognize (with shock) this side of her at last,  was the saddest, most bittersweet victory you can imagine; not victorious at all, just sad. And as it fell to me to "fix things" --- to retrofit her house after she fell and broke her hip three times in one year, for instance, oh, it was difficult. I was still grieving Ned; I felt bereft, beleaguered, adrift. My mother was angry all the time. I was traveling back and forth from Arkansas for some of that period, then from Vermont to Westchester, New York, a four hour drive each way...

One day, back in Vermont after a particularly hard week, I had a latte at L.A. Burdick's (a fabulous cafe and chocolate shop about twenty minutes drive from my home). Pen and notebook in purse, as  almost always. Without conscious forethought, I began to write, and found myself spinning out mother-related haiku after haiku.

What I saw as her point of view:

numberless problems
shall I start counting for you?
my life's very hard

if you understood,
you'd agree, clearly love me.
I'll explain again.

call me when you've got
some real time, an hour, two:
not this pissant call

I love you dearly
surely you could improve things
if you would only try

Grandly creative,
my daughter. Too bad
she won't fix my painful life.

Doesn't fit. You're wrong.
No one is doing their job.
Sure I'm unhappy.

And, imagining how outraged she'd be at my statements about this:

my daughter places
mean words, bitter sentiments
in my mouth. Tragic.

And my own frustration, futility, anger at not being able to make things better, nor to stop caring or get some emotional distance:

I'd gladly give you
what you want. But it's always
changing, never right.

She: perfectionist
busy redefining what
perfect is. Trouble.

I can't get no, no
satisfaction. Is it Mick?
No, just Mom again.

My intentions are
honorable, misguided;
parenthesis (doomed)

I'd like to give you
what I feel: two cats purring,
breakfast, yoga.

And this, perhaps about both of us:

Why want what you don't
have? Human nature? Greediness?
Refusing to see?

But I was wrong on this one:

Contentment won't make
an appearance in Mom's life
not now not ever.

Because, occasionally now, it does. (In the picture below, taken in September of 2007, CZ in such a moment. Photo, David Koff).

About two years after the poems above were written, I found myself writing what follows, in a class with Pat Schneider. (Pat is herself a very fine writer and remarkable teacher, based in Amherst, Massachusetts. She founded Amherst Writers and Artists in 1981; her book about her method of teaching, Writing Alone and with Others, will have every writer underlining and asterisking and, finally, using. She is also a woman who has written extensively, honestly, and beautifully about her own complex issues with her mother, in her memoir Wake Up Laughing: A Spiritual Autobiography. If you live at all close to Amherst, you have the opportunity to study with her once a week on an ongoing basis; an experience which should not be missed.)

The assignment Pat gave us had to do with "what matters." Writing it, I'd say, may have been the beginning of the so-long-in-coming sea change in being with Charlotte.

At last, at last, Relationship School, even in this most fraught of relationships, was teaching me again how to love and be loved:

Calculation

What matters, then? What remains?

Subtract the fact
that there was always "Yes, but – "
to any moment that might, for her,
have threatened complete happiness.

Subtract the flat
of blue-velvet-faced pansies,
cheerful shocking yellow centers.
She taught me how to plant.

Subtract the water
she taught me to pour around each.

Subtract even the soil (or its memory),
turning to mud, and how
each seedling must be settled
down and in a second time,
patted as its element changes:
how, when I gasped
at that pink soft curled moving thing,
she said, “Oh no, it’s a worm, it’s good,
it won’t hurt you.”

Subtract that she has lost
the knack of naming:
Monday, Friday, January, June –
Joan, Jules, Josephine, “You know,
the one who pays my bills…” “…who used to live
next door…” “…that poet…” “You know,
your brother’s friend, who lives in –
what is that city, with the painted houses,
by the water, that’s always colder
than you think it ought to be, and
overcast each morning…”

Subtract the huge unbending joints
on tiny hands;
subtract the rings which, thus,
she gave to me.
Subtract the green eyes
browned by medication,
the ambulettes,  subtract
“They tell you things
about me that just aren’t true;
they lie and you believe them,
no one asks how I feel, what I want.”

Subtract the gauze dress, pink and blue 
she sent one spring, which I wore
to the ribbon-cutting
of a business I no longer own
in a town where I no longer live
when I was a wife
to someone who, being dead,
is now without address.

Subtract the rage.
Subtract the gaps between
what’s said and meant.
Subtract the future and the past,
sciatica and death and birth,
glaucoma, osteo, and Fosamax
exasperation, hopelessness, and repetition 

Subtract the old, old shapes and patterns.

Subtract the body, once my height and weight,
now 75 pounds, though still fond of salmon,
drowning in a twin bed, always cold. 

Subtract duty, money, obligation, and their grip.

What matters is, not because I must,
I love her.

So. And now that so much is falling away, I not only know, as I always have, that she loves me, but sometimes she simply expresses it: no buried fishhook, no agenda, just joy and acceptance. Who would have thought? 

Whether your mother is living or dead, whether your relationship with her is basically resolved and happy, or more ambivalent, or fatally flawed; whether you even know her or not; whether you are a mother or are without children, I hope you celebrate Mother's Day.

No matter what else she was or is, your mother was the imperfect portal through which you entered your own imperfect life, and took temporary residence on this imperfect earth.

If we preface the holiday with "happy", and of course we do, let it be the kind of happiness with breadth and depth, radical acceptance (even if it takes awhile), transparency (at least in one's own understanding), and, perhaps, forgiveness (but not if it has to be forced, not if you do it because you "should").

Such happiness is bittersweet, but then, so is good chocolate. Such happiness embraces it all:  broken dishes, broken promises, passed-down delicate heirloom lusterware tea-pots, scents that may mix Chanel Number Five with Clorox,  cigarette smoke, dilled chicken soup, Jergen's lotion, nail polish remover. (Photo left; holding hands: the knobbly jointed hands belong to my mother, the hands with rings are mine, and the third set of hands are my aunt's).

Such happiness is love and life, imperfect perfection.

And for writers, it's part of work, rich material which should not be forgotten or regretted, but utilized.  It is yours alone (your mother has her own) and far too precious to waste.