"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.

creative discontent: lasting father-wit, & a writer/innkeeper's ex-files

I used to be an innkeeper.

I used to be a daughter with a living father.

I am neither of these things now.

Yet both reside within me. Both come into my present life at unexpected times. They did today, a moist, misty day, one in which I felt slightly out-of-sorts.

Perhaps this very out-of-sortness is what brought to the surface these past lives (daughter, innkeeper). Yet, one more time, they yielded some truth to me. One more time, as I weeded the garden in the late afternoon in Vermont today, and then began to write about it here. 

One more time, this all led me to understand that feeling out-of-sorts is in a larger sense always very much in sorts, for a writer.

Which is what I was, and am still.

As was my late father, the Hollywood biographer Maurice Zolotow. (There he is below, in this 1972 photograph with John Wayne and Ann-Margret. Wayne was the subject of one of my father's biographies, Shooting Star. Photo, David Sutton.)

Thinking about Maurice isn't unusual for me. He's there almost always when I think about writing, which I do daily. 

More surprising was thinking so deeply, and in such detail, about the innkeeping period of my life. Despite the fact that I spent eighteen years of my life at it, it's not that often in my thoughts.

Possibly part of the reason for its coming to mind today is because I recently have finished putting together the next Fearless Writing workshop. This is less a workshop than "the whole enchilada" (as I've actually called it on the event's website, as well as captioned photo album). It's going to be held up here in Vermont, in part at my home (left), over Labor Day weekend, and has involved organizing lodging, glorious meals and activities, as well as the core program, Fearless.

All this has called on more of innkeeping's organizational skills --- being fiendishly, compulsively detail-oriented about "stuff" while being wholly easygoing and go-with-the-flow about people --- than I've used in years. 

So. There you have the ingredients of this post. My father, innkeeping, writing, gardening. Feeling a little off. Recognizing this, finally, one more time, as an unavoidable part of the ultimate on.

Though the vigor of my weeding equaled the vigor with which I was, seemingly, putting off writing, it turns out --- ever-new discovery! ever-powerful, and humbling, marvel! --- that nothing is wasted on the writer.

I never stop learning this.

(Last year's garden, on a misty day in June, by David Koff). 

recalling the hyphenated life

In retrospect my innkeeper phase, those eighteen years when I was not "just" a writer, but a writer-hyphen-innkeeper (and for six of those years, writer-hyphen-innkeeper-hyphen-chef), seem to me now to border on insane in terms of overwork. The inn, co-founded with my late husband, Ned, was  Dairy Hollow House (here we are, high-fiving in front of the inn's sign); the town, hard in the Ozark Mountains, was Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

Though insane, those years were not without moments of joy. And they were formative. And they gave me much I couldn't have learned elsewhere.

And it was a period when I was fond of saying "I don't have writer's block... I don't have time for writer's block." 

At least in memory this was more or less my schedule, for years: I'd wake up anywhere between 6:30  and 9:00 am, and, after breakfast with Ned (if he got up at the same time), I'd go to work, writing, fueled by copious cups of hot, very caffeinated tea.  9:30 am to noon, daily or almost, I was at it, solitary,improbably hermit-like given what the later part of my day would be.

Around noon, I'd eat lunch, occasionally with Ned, but more often on my own.Then I'd nap, wake up, and work out, starting still too sleepy to talk myself out of it: clicking a tough video (the early Firm  series was my favorite, but I also liked Step Reebok) into the VCR, and dragging out my array of exercise equipment from the corner and the front porch. There were dumbbells, ascending pairs, 2 pounds (wrist curls) up by increments to 20 (for lat rows and pec flyes only). There was a sturdy plastic Step, and its risers, too, just like you see at gyms. (I still have, and use, this equipment. But the work-out DVDs I use --- VHS? What's VHS? --- these days are not nearly so hardcore. At 56, I use one riser, or none, on the Step, where I used to use two. It's hard for me not to feel like a wuss, but it's work out at lower intensity or don't work out, and the latter would make me feel like even more of a wuss, and so...)

Back in the inn days, after a post-work-out shower, if there was time, I'd walk to the inn, a few minutes away. If there wasn't time, or if I suspected it would be a late night, I'd drive: returning on foot, in the dark, through the woods, after a long night's work, would not, I knew, have much appeal at 1:00 am. But whether I'd walked from my little writing studio, or just from my car in Harmon Park,  as I approached the inn's door, I'd feel my other, non-writer life, as an innkeeper, kick in.

By then, it would be about 4:00. I'd greet Becky or Paula at the front desk, check to see how many reservations we had that evening, and walk to the back. I'd usually be alone in the kitchen then. I'd start cooking, often with Miles Davis's Kind of Blue as a soundtrack: its slow, mellow start and crescendo-ing glide into high gear were perfect for slipping calmly into hard, soon-to-be frenetic work. I'd check the task-list I'd left for the morning cook, and I'd start preparing dinner.

We did one seating most nights, at seven, so those three hours between arrival and dinner service were carefully choreographed. I knew exactly when to put the game hens in to roast, when to glaze them with whatever fresh fruit was in season --- plums, peaches, blueberries I'd transformed into chutney. I knew when the roasty-toasty carrots, onions and potatoes would have their turn in the oven, and when to start the cornbread, skillet after skillet of it, golden suns framed in their black cast-iron pans.(I'd later devote several years of my life to writing a book called The Cornbread Gospels). I knew when to start warming the plates, when to put the gratin of vegetables du jour in, mince the soup garnish, start the dessert (the homier fruit desserts: apple crisps, rich biscuits for strawberry shortcakes, would be baked as the main courses were being served) . By 6:00 pm, with an hour to go, I turned the music off.

The restaurant sat 40 people; I could solo up to half that; with numbers any higher, I'd call in an assistant, who'd arrive around 6:00 usually, followed by the waitstaff. Ned was due in for front desk at 5:00, relieving whoever'd been there during the day; he perennially ran late and was slightly frantic, and, for him, grouchy. I learned to ignore him at that moment, to try not to take it personally, to call myself lucky if he even managed to stick his head in the kitchen, blow me a kiss until midway through dinner service. That's when he became friendly again, but at that moment beforehand --- running to catch up before show-time, he was often (uncharacteristically) downright unpleasant.

There was a the moment when, all at once, guests were arriving and dinner was beginning. The choreography of waiters, tables and food began and it all began clicking, a beautiful synchrony. Sometimes, gazing out at the well-dressed people arriving in every expectation of a lovely evening, I would have a moment of being moved to my core: what a privilege, to feed trusting strangers good food, often grown not five miles from the room they were entering, guided to their table by Ned, who himself radiated such a welcoming glow! At that moment, the kitchen was the only universe I knew, and it was a good one, as absolute in its way as writing had been.

The evening progressed, the waiters --- John, Carolyn --- communicating the rhythm of each particular night to me. The dining room and its service was an elaborate and connected dance, invisible to the guests, who were serenely enjoying what I was told --- often --- was "The best meal of my life." This couple, I would learn, was lingering, wasn't ready for salads; but that four-top, the one that had all chosen the asparagus soup, was already through it and two baskets of bread and wanted their entrees now. Could I divide an entree in half? ( See if you can divide a roast Cornish game hen neatly and attractively; doing this was what our waiter, John Mitchell, wittily and accurately called "a splitting headache.").

I kept the music off, remaining focused in that manner recognizable to anyone who's worked in a good restaurant, where the world becomes, briefly, the particular beef tenderloin being seared, the  side-plate of half a dozen vegetables being arranged, the shower of mixed minced herbs on the edge of that particular pink-rimmed plate.

After dessert went out, it was time for what Ned called "making the rounds."' I always started out resistant. It required another layer of energy, and a psychic switch: to move from the solitary focus writing or cooking, each, in their way, required. With a clean chef's jacket; always, I put on my socializing, getting-to-know-people self, removing the self-contained self. Ned was by this point usually also relaxed and happy, which made it easier. Once I actually got out to our pretty dining room, candles glowing, the twig lattice on the walls, flowers (often I'd done them myself), on each table, happy people replete with a good meal, I enjoyed this phase, too. But, consistently, I always resisted it beforehand. 

As I relaxed into this phase, the waiters and Ned boogied in earnest: getting checks, making change, bringing coffee or decaf or teas, wrapping extras for people to take home. Behind the scenes, dishwasher Roy slammed trays in and out of the Ecolab, billowing clouds of steam. Very nice things were often said to me by guests, some surprising ("I have never once liked broccoli until tonight!") ; I was always so pleased to have been part of giving people a memorable evening. But I knew my work wasn't completed. As the last few guests said their goodbyes in the front desk area, it was back to the kitchen to complete the fixing of staff dinner.

All of us --- the waitstaff, me, Ned, Roy, whoever was assisting on nights I had someone with me --- we were all tired. And it was too late, really, to eat. But we needed to, anyway. And to decompress. Catch up on how the night had gone. Feel the shared sense of a job well done, a we-pulled-it-off-again joy. It was solid esprit de corps, time for catching up, general how-are-you check-ins, eternally fascinating Eureka Springs gossip. And somehow it was at that point that Ned and I managed to reconnect as a couple, too, instead of just tag-teaming co-workers.

Vigorously tossing tufts of grass into the weed bucket in the garden today, I found myself thinking about those staff dinners in great detail.

Audrey, then in her sixties, who assisted me some nights when we were busy enough. When we all finally sat down together at staff dinner, she invariably said, at some point, with a long sigh "My dogs are talkin' to me." Meaning her feet hurt --- to which everyone who has ever worked in a restaurant can relate.

And Carolyn telling us about the Native American-style funeral of her late, estranged husband, the father of her sons, and how her young son, Shaman, participated (I believe he took part in the ritual placement of sacred objects in the coffin; tobacco was one, I think dried meat another).

And happy, goofy times. If there was a birthday, I'd have made a cake; Steve Colvin, a long time friend who used to call himself both the world's only gay red-neck, and the world's only fat AIDS patient, and who sometimes acted maitre d' on nights when Ned stepped in as a waiter, had a favorite: banana cake, with a peanut butter filling, if memory serves. (But did he prefer chocolate icing, or cream cheese? I can't remember, and it bothers me. R.I.P., Colvain, as I used to affectionately call him. It was to Colvin, when he was ill, that I dedicated Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread: "For Steve Colvin, with whom I hope to share the bread of life for a long, long time.")

I also remember that often as we were eating we'd hear the pleasant, slow, old-fashioned music of horse's hooves: the clip-clopping (there is no other accurate verb) of the horses, no doubt as weary as we were, as they turned off Spring Street and down Dairy Hollow Road, after their evening of drawing tourists around the historic loop, heading home to their stable on the other end of the Hollow.

As I picked at staff dinner (I wouldn't be actually hungry until some time after I'd arrived home, where  of course there was very little food; I can see the restaurateurs among my blog-readers nodding ruefully), in and around the conversation, I'd update the detailed list I always left for prep cooks. It had to be ultra-complete and accurate: it was what would allow me, if I did it thoroughly enough, uninterrupted time the next morning so I could again become, briefly, a writer: otherwise, there were calls like "How much of the green part of the scallion do you want me to cut up?"

On a non-holiday week night, I might be able to leave by ten; weekends, festivals, would see me there till 11:00, midnight, or sometimes 1:00 (if a dishwasher didn't show, Ned and I would stay, doing the work ourselves. One Jazz Festival the dishwasher told us, at midnight, "This job is interfering with my social life," took off his apron, and walked. Ned and I did the dishes. I believe every plate, glass, cup, bowl, saucer, implement, utensil, pot and pan were dirty. When we left, it was after 4:00 am).

Once home, I'd bathe in our wonderful antique clawfoot tub, so long I could actually submerge my aching five-foot-four body in it. I scrubbed under my nails, rinsed my head: begone, garlic, roasting chicken, seared beef. Ned came to the house later, because after dinner service he "cashed out" the register .  At home, bathed, I'd wait for him to to arrive, so we could have a little time together, however tired we were. It wasn't much, though. 

Midnight, 1:00 am ish: bed. Ned would fall asleep instantly; me, not so. Often I was too tired to sleep. Tired-and-wired, dog-tired, horse-tired, but lacking that sweet sleepiness that presages rest. Often I lay beside Ned, reading.

It exhausts me now, just thinking about that life. Of course, I was between age 30 and 40 at the time: I'm just past the middle of my fifties now. Still, it's amazing how vivid those memories are to me when I turn my thoughts to them, and how much I miss and do not miss (more of the latter) about that overfull time. And there were often extras I have not mentioned. If we had any guests who were leaving too early in the morning for our full breakfast, I needed to provide for them.

"Our bountiful breakfast in a basket," Ned used to describe our usual morning repast on our answering machine, his voice radiating satisfaction, pride and pleasure. His enthusiasm was genuine: he loved breakfast in general and he loved our breakfasts. And they were good, truly, and bountiful, fuller than full --- "delivered to your door at nine each morning!"as he also said.

But for those leaving early, I'd fix, towards the end of those long restaurant nights, a "Go-Basket." Sometimes those Go-Baskets would frankly send me over the edge, though I kept it to myself. These were smaller baskets, some components of which the guests would stash in their in-room fridges: typically, homemade granola and "Would you prefer yogurt or milk?" assorted fresh fruit, our own in-house blend of freshly squeezed citrus juices and various organic bottled juices. There'd also be slices of a sweet bread, and a ramekin full of a homemade spread of butter, cream cheese, and honey, flavored and colored with a few pureed strawberries pr blueberries, maybe with a touch of grated orange or lemon rind.  The rooms each had their own coffee machines and electric tea-kettles with of course terrifically good assortments of teas and New Orleans Community Coffee... whatever else we did, we truly took good care of our guests. I still hear from many of them, all these years later. (Left: breakfast, on the front porch of the farmhouse, the smaller and more isolated of the two homes that made up Dairy Hollow House).

(I remember once jiving with a mid-sixties-ish couple from Baton Rouge or Shreveport, at the inn for the weekend. The husband was mock-curmudgeonly in the way older men, especially Southerners, sometimes are with younger women, which I always find quite fun to spar with. It was mid-afternoon,  a Saturday. They were hanging out by the front-desk, visiting with Ned, who was very visitable, and they explained they'd be leaving early Sunday to get a jump on the long drive back. I said, "Now why do you want to do that? You were just telling me how much you liked breakfast this morning. Just stay an extra hour and a half and you get the whole thing!" He said to me, in mock-outrage, "Well, we would, if it wadn't for all your damn Arkansas two-lane roads!" I said --- ah, when the rejoinder comes right to you when you need it --- "Yeah, but Louisiana's the state that named a university after 'em!" Laughter, all around. Yes, those were sweet days. Difficult, arduous, but sweet).

And long-gone.

procrastination & its creative discontents

Just as when I set out to write about one event / insight concerning love and loss and found myself, instead, writing about my beloved cat Beanblossom, a few posts ago, I have wandered afield from my original intent. "Start out knowing what you want to write about, " I tell my students, as I've mentioned here before. "But expect, and allow, that to change. The story has a life of its own. "

Here was my original intent in this post: to write about the uncomfortable, loose-end-y feeling that one has, almost invariably, in the middle of a longer piece of writing. A feeling I in which I spent most of today. Where it's happening but not quite. Or, as today, sometimes it comes when one big phase of a piece has come to completion (yesterday, I finished the introduction to the non-fiction book I'm working on, which frames the whole thing and marks the beginning of the end of writing that book) --- but there are still large blocks to go. I find, and evidently I am so not alone, that one needs to go into neutral for a bit at that point. But this is usually in conflict with one's conscious intention and heartfelt desire to press onward. 

Today, instead of moving on to the next phase of the book I'm at work on as I felt I should have been, I've been sort of meeping around. Not that it hasn't been productive. It was overcast this morning. Good time for transplanting! I had three or four meep-around sessions, to the garden's benefit if to my writing's deficit.

I transplanted several dozen beautiful little Winter Density lettuces, from Seeds of Change (good lord did those seeds germinate --- that picture shows one corner of three beds worth of transplanted seedlings).  That was meep session one, ended only because I was driven indoors by the mosquitoes, which seemed to view both the DEET and the organic stuff as a condiment.

Later in the day I returned to the garden, this time transplanting some sweet little bulls-blood beet seedlings. The next meep session, it was the Chantennay carrots. Somewhere in there I napped (part of the time, I am happy to report, with David). There was another meep-session in there somewhere, too.

And then the last, late-afternoon meep-session, which, after I'd checked on how all the seedlings were doing (fine),  was devoted to weeding.

Which, I could not but help be aware, meant I was into major, serious, writing-postponement.

"papa-ganda": Maurice & me

Out in the garden, particularly in the weeding phase, I found myself thinking of my late father, Maurice. (Here's another picture of him, interviewing the director Billy Wilder for the book below).

It is common (and, I think, rarely true) for adult children who had or have a good relationship with their parents to say, "He" (or she) "is" (or was) "my best friend." Maurice and I adored each other and almost unfailingly, once I grew up and he sobered up (I turned 16 the year he joined AA). But we were  not "best friends." We were a lot of other things, though. And one of them was colleagues. Writing colleagues. I think we  shared and understood what the nature of writing was for each other with a perfection I have never, and probably will never, have with another soul. And this went both ways. We never read or critiqued each other's work pre-publication. To both of us, I think, that would have felt over-intimate, intrusive, and disrespectful of the writing process.

It's a process, we both knew, that has moments of pure consummation, and those moments are not in  publication and the questionable glory that sometimes come with it, but in the writing itself. "Sometimes I get deeply depressed, " Maurice says, rather matter-of-factly, even cheerfully, in a videotape of a talk he gave at Mills College in the late 80's. In a tone of wonder he adds, "And just putting my fingers on the keyboard is enough to bring me out of it!"

At those moments of consummation, we both knew, the writer is not even there; the writing is just taking place. Come out of an hour or two of that --- of what I once heard Maurice describe, in one of his AA talks, "that transcendent vocation" and you long above all else to return to that state. It's unparalleled freedom. It's being released from your own petty life, body-surfing the perfect wave of story with no effort.

The effort comes in the meepy times, in just getting through them. Times when you feel restless, discontented, a little uneasy. When. It's. Just. Not. Happening. No matter how often you've been through this out-of-phase phase, no matter that you may recognize it as part of that process, and know it as the coin through which, mysteriously, you are able to purchase the transcendent aspect, it is still uncomfortable.

This uncomfortableness brought me, first in thought and now here on screen and keyboard, to recalling the inn days. Partly because to some extent I outsmarted the uncomfortable aspect by leaving myself so very, very little protected time for writing that my unconscious just leapt into what was available, knowing how limited it was (at least, this is my best guess).

The uncomfortableness also led me to thinking about Maurice, dear colleague as well as father, as well as brilliant, insane sui generis goofball, and one man museum of contradictions.

Maurice was a compulsive reader of poetry (he especially loved T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, and was able to, and frequently did, recite both) and fiction (he so loved James Joyce that he named his son, my brother Stephen --- now, improbably, a poker champion, pictured left)  --- after Stephen Dedalus, a character in Ulysses). Maurice read Latin; he was fluent in French, yet his personal patois include slang from the beatnik and hippie era: he could travel from "Let us go then, you and I/while the evening is spread out against the sky" to "Groovy, baby!" in five seconds.). He was in love with popular culture.

He was obsessed with magic; one of his two published novels, The Great Balsamo, was based on Harry Houdini (who he'd seen perform on Coney Island as a boy); he was friends with with Ricky Jay. He adored jazz, and gave Duke Ellington his first national review, in Billboard, in the early '40's. He is the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question: "Who is Marilyn Monroe's first biographer?" (His eponymous biography of her would be published in six languages, and reissued with a new introduction some 25 years after her death. Right, the cover of the British edition; left, the paperback French edition).

Though Maurice imagined, early on, that first he would be a foreign correspondent, like Ernest Hemingway, and then go on to life as a novelist (probably living on the Left Bank), for most of his professional writing career was as a  show-business biographer (at the time of his death, in 1991, he was working on a memoir to be titled "Famous People Who Have Known Me").

During the hyphenated years, I had a phone number that was unlisted, for emergencies only. No one, and I mean, NO one, was supposed to call me on it for anything short of a major inn or personal disaster during writing hours; that is; until 1:30 or 2:00 in the afternoon. The front desk had the number, but they knew never to give it out, and they knew, as well, how to deflect the typical writing-work interrupting calls ("Yes, she does give talks / do keynotes / donate books to charitable auctions / do school visits. If you'll mail your request in writing with all the details, she'll get back to you...")

And they knew never to give the number to my parents, whom I was trying to break of the all-access-all-the-time-habit (my mother, particularly, was not at all respectful of boundaries in those days). I would have preferred to not have a telephone at that point, but even I couldn't go that far. Besides, I sometimes needed to call out, and I did also include conversations with my agent and editors as acceptable, sometimes, during writing hours.

Well, one day --- I don't know who did it, none of our front desk staff would ever confess --- and I don't know how, Maurice wheedled the secret number out of someone.  This was before caller ID, and I think even before digital phones; the phone was still connected to its base by that curly pig-tail of plastic-covered cord.

I was mid-writing, and the phone rang. I answered, in my snappy, serious, no-nonsense, this-better-be-important, businesslike (as I then thought of it) manner, "Dragonwagon."

There was a pause. Then Maurice's unmistakable voice: "Yes, ah, is this the, ah, the writer's suicide prevention hotline?"

I gazed out into the treetops from my desk. Maurice knew very well he wasn't supposed to call, that he wasn't supposed to even have that number, and that (though he would have denied it) he was irresistible.

"Maurice!" I said, "What is it?"

He said, "I've been working on this goddamn piece for five days now. I can't get anywhere with it, Cres. It's 60 pages, it needs to be twelve. It's shapeless. It's flabby. I've transcribed the interviews --- there are 37 pages of them --- but it won't cohere. It won't take shape, I'm completely disgusted, I..."

I interrupted him. "Maurice! " I said. Did a little quick addition in my head. "Maurice, in approximately ... 48 years of professional freelance writing ---" I started laughing " ---has this ever happened to you before?"

Another pause. Then Maurice said, "Yes. Yes! Thank you, Cres! I get it, I get it! Thank you! Thank you, Cres! Goodbye!" And he hung up --- bang. I don't know that he ever replaced a receiver gently in its cradle. It was always - bang! Decisive. Maurice was there, with you; then, he wasn't.

I shook my head, as I am remembering this --- I'm smiling, too, as I did then. I looked out at the trees, and went back to work.

Quotations from Chairman Moe; fierce boilings

This kind of advice-giving and cheerleading was never one way, as I have said. Maurice went by the name Broadway Moe for a few years (during his go-to-the-racetrack-with-Walter-Matthau phase, which resulted in the book shown left, one of his few non-show-business books... and no, that is not him on the cover). He would often take the role I played the particular day of the Writer's Suicide Prevention Hotline call.

And his advice was always solid. There were some Quotations from Chairman Moe, as I came to call them, that he returned to over and over again.

"A writer writes."

"Write your way out of it." (Said when I was confused or depressed.)

"Laborare est orare." (Latin for "to work is to pray.")

"The editors come and go, but the writer remains!" (Said whenever there was fuckwittage with an editor, with the last phrase exultant.)

Maurice was a dedicated sender of clippings in those pre-Internet days. Sometimes they'd be from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker,  Nation, New Republic,  American Spectator. Sometimes, they were political (Maurice had been a communist in his youth, a "middle of the road anarchist" for much of his life, and a free-market Republican late in life --- and was obsessed with politics for all of his years... as if magic, the classics, and pop culture were not enough). More often, though, they were profiles of writers, pieces about writing, or simply  essays that he thought particularly well-written. He scrawled a quick message across the top of all of them, usually just a single word, in red Flair pen --- "Papa-ganda" --- then a dash. a line of xxoo's, and his initials or first name. 

He gave me a used copy of "The Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to his Family and Friends", inscribed thus:

to Crescent Z.
Dragonwagon,

on her 19th birthday -

May you find in these
pages, darling, a
spirit, kindred to your
own, beyond the differences
of time and culture and politics ---
with the deepest love
your father Maurice
Nov. 17, 1971.

Astonishing though it may be to consider a father who thought his daughter a kindred spirit to Dostoevsky, it's more astonishing when you know that this gift was given in the same year I had sold, to Cosmopolitan, a profile of a rock groupie named Sweet Connie (immortalized in the Grand Funk Railroad song"We're an American Band" in the following lines: "On the road for forty days / last night in Little Rock left me in a haze. / Sweet, sweet Connie was doing her act. / She had the whole show, and that's a natural fact.")

Maurice read the story --- in the magazine, of course, as I've said we never read each other's stuff pre-publication. As I've said, profiles were his beat; this was the first of mine he'd read.

He said to me, collegially, "So how many interviews did it take for you to get this, Cres?" (Only, and I mean only,  Maurice could get away with calling me Cres.) "One," I said.

He gave me a long, long look. Maurice's face was incapable of dissembling. I watched a parade of emotions cross it; the first, to my surprise, was jealousy. I watched jealousy duke it out with curiosity, appraisal, admiration, thoughtfulness, and finally the winner: fatherly pride.

"You know what, Cres?" he said. "Give up the children's books. Stop messing around with cookbooks. Write profiles."

And yet, somehow,  though I had just written a profile of a rock groupie, I was Dostoeyevskyian to him.

When I was about 26, my book The Year It Rained was published. It's an autobiographical novel in which the father character does not come across particularly well (the book dealt with the years when he was still a practicing alcoholic, and he and my mother were getting a truly riproaring divorce, one higlight of which was his getting shock-treatments, from which I was supposed to, and did, pick him up afterwards). Desoite this, when he read it, he loved it.

And he said, "You know what, Cres? Give up the children's books and cookbooks. Don't mess around with magazine work. You were born to be a novelist. "

Given how dedicated he was to the belief that I should focus on just one genre of writing (I have worked, almost since the first, actively in children's books, cookbooks, magazine articles, poetry, and fiction) you can just imagine how opposed he was to my hypenated life.

 "Innkeeping! " he'd snort. "Innkeeping! For God's sake, Cres, you're a writer, why are you wasting your time with innkeeping?" 

But he eventually he made his peace with it... helped along, no doubt, by the fact that he could come to visit in Arkansas, and stay at the inn for a week or two twice a year (The Iris Room, right, was his favorite. He liked the shades of blue, and the fact that it was quiet, looked into the garden, and was directly across the way from Ned's and my little house).

He also loved eating at our restaurant (gratis, of course). He adored the food. I remember once, him looking up from a plate of chocolate bread pudding with raspberry sauce. He said to me, "Wow." He was then speechless --- a rarity, as you may have gathered --- for a few moments. Then he took another bite and shook his head. "Cres," he said, gazing up at me with his large blue eyes (he was seated at a table in the inn's dining room, I was standing, I'm sure in a chef's jacket.) "On a scale of one to ten, I give this five thousand."

After he died, we renamed that dessert "Chocolate Bread Pudding Maurice." I wrote his initials, M.Z. , in script, using raspberry sauce in a squeeze bottle, hundreds of times, covering about 2/3 of a dinner plate, before spooning the bread pudding in one corner, dolloping it with whipped cream, adding a fresh raspberry or strawberry, and a mint leaf. It pleased me, though in some moods it occasionally made me cry, when John or Carolyn, the waitpersons, would buzz from the dining room on a busy night, land at the station in the kitchen, and call out, "Three Maurices!" or "Are my two Maurices ready?" But we all knew --- the inn staff, too, for they had all met Maurice and come under his incorrigible, irascible spell, that there was really only one Maurice.

Besides learning to enjoy the benefits of the inn, there was another way Maurice made peace with his hyphenated daughter. "Look, I was wrong. You should do the inn! You should! Probably you must! You're one of those writers where for some reason something else feeds your writing! I couldn't do it, but you can. Clearly! Lots of writers are like you --- they have to do something else. Chekov --- he was a doctor! And William Carlos Williams! Wallace Stevens, one of our great poets --- he was an insurance executive, lived in Hartford, Connecticut!"

I think, though, that Maurice would probably be relieved that these days I am "just" a writer. I think that he would find David --- an intellectual, with a love of and encylopedic knowedge about the movies, a Los Angeles background (MZ lived the last twenty years of his life in LA), and the political obsession they both share --- a much more easy-to-relate to mate than he did the somewhat otherworldly Ned. I think that he would have wept endlessly, though, at Ned's death, both for Ned and for me, and that he would be proud that I was resilient enough to come through, write again, love again.

(Ned, me, Maurice, photograph by George West, circa 1985. This is on the porch of the innkeeper's house. The windows you can barely make out, in the little house across the way, look into Maurice's favorite Iris Room.) I think he would be surprised and pleased that I ended up living in Vermont, on the farm (which he knew, because, though it belonged to my Aunt Dot, we spent part of each summer here when I was a kid). But I think he'd be horrified by the very idea of my spending a snowy, icy Vermont winter here. 

But who knows what he would have thought or felt?

For it is a strange rebellion, and a delusional one, when we say with such authority, "He would have..."

These are only our guesses, our suppositions. Questions sent out to a universe that does not and cannot answer, any more than the vanished one can.

We fill in the side of those who are no longer able to keep up their end of conversations, otherwise the dialogues that were once so important to us are, unbearably, monologues. We do it, in part, by saying, "He would have..."

In the poem "Chickpea to Cook" by Rumi, a poet to my knowledge Maurice never read, the chickpea protests its torturous simmering. The wise cook reminds the chickpea that he, too, has simmered. "I was once like you, fresh from the ground. Then I boiled in time, and in the body, two fierce boilings."

No one escapes such boiling.

Today, at the well-known to me but still uncomfortable place of sixes-and-sevens with writing, as I pulled up the cinquefoil and wild sorrel vigorously, I thought about that time Maurice called me on my secret number.

I thought about that conversation with Maurice, and many others which preceded and followed it.

I was in just the kind of mood, and it was just the kind of day, when I would have called Maurice, were he still among the living.

Instead, I heard the Maurice who now, despite all boiling, resides in me.

So I came inside, and, instead,  wrote my way out of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's where I went.

__________________________________

I blame, or credit, Carol Gaddy.

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

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

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

“I don’t drive,” I told Carol.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

And reader, I married him.           

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 2: love/ let sleeping cats tell the truth

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

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

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

2002: at home on the aquifer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step, step, step, step.

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

2008: on loan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I do believe in grace, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

somebody to love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Wislawa Syzmborska:

NOTHING'S A GIFT

 

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

 

 

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

 

Part 1: love / dead cat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"50 year old shoulder"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I really do. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

fearless French toast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About softening: bear with me for a second here.

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

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

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

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

And I mean ripping.

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

And here's what Micheal would say.   

"Soften. Soften to my fingers. Soften."

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

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

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

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

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

I say to myself, "Soften."

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it turned out there was a solution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And discovered that my first Fearless student had registered.

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

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

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.

PART TWO: the political becomes personal (for me)

Well-orchestrated?

That's the word with which I concluded Part One of this series: the word NPR used to sum up, in a manner I considered cursory and condescending, the June 27 Clinton/Obama rally in Unity, New Hampshire, which David, my partner, and I attended.

My take on that event is continued here: up close, very personal.

To see and hear the full Unity speeches, both Hillary's and Barack's, click here. 

*******
Now, well-planned is one thing, and that event was. It had to be. Unity, New Hampshire, population 1500, is not exactly near anywhere and has little parking. The Hillary-Barack event (free) was announced on a Wednesday night before the Friday it was to take place. The deal was, you signed up online, printed out your "invitation", and showed up at one of two locations, on either side of Unity. We were closer to the site just outside the old mill town Claremont, New Hampshire, a forty-minute drive from us. It couldn't have been more unpretentious: a funky little racetrack called Twin State Speedway.

As we pulled in that Friday morning, around 10:00 am, the planning was already in evidence: cheerful, orange safety-vested volunteers, most with Obama buttons, directed us to one of several large fields for parking, after checking in with walkie-talkies ("Yeah, okay, we still got room for three more down there? Good." ). We found one of the three remaining spots in the field we were directed to, pulled in between a Lexus and Geo, and began walking, then walking a little faster:  magnetic pull towards where people were gathering.

Back across the field we went, joining a long line of folks waiting to board the school buses which would  shuttle us to Unity. David was already roaming, taking pictures and film footage. I stayed put on line, talking to the two women ahead of me. They'd driven up from Boston, three hours away.  Both had worked for Hillary. "Every state I worked the phones in, Hillary won!" said the shorter one, gray-haired, 65-ish, bright pink t-shirt and white jeans. Half-joking, half-rueful, she added, " Maybe if I had been on the campaign on the national level... "

But she too was wearing an Obama button now. And though her slight sadness echoed that of many other former Hillarians, there was an almost palpable air of buoyant exhilaration.

It was hot for New England, maybe 85, a little muggy; volunteers traveled the line, offering free bottled water, escorting the disabled and elderly to accessible buses. A few people were selling Obama sweatshirts, buttons, t-shirts, bumper stickers and sun-hats from card-tables or out of the backs of their cars. Business was brisk, and so was the progress of the line. The chatter was loud and happy. "I started out for Hillary, then changed to Obama, then back to Hillary, and now, of course, I'm back with Obama."   "... anybody but McCain." "If we don't win this time, then there's no hope for the Democratic party."  "I'm counting the seconds till we get rid of Bush."

Live conversations between people were punctuated by inevitable cell phone calls. "Actually, I'm not in the office today. No, I'm at the Twin State Speedway. Yes, you heard me right. Unh-hunh. Yes, the Twin State Speedway in New Hampshire. New Hampshire! Yes. Yes! Well, because I'm getting ready to board a bus to go see Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama."

(Why do people on cell phones always have the need to start out by stating their location? Though, given, at that moment, it was a pretty exciting place to be, worth bragging about).

We reached the bus, clambered on, took off. The bus, funky, same poor shock-absorbers all public school buses seem to have, took about another 30 minutes to reach Unity. The passengers looked like --- well, if you created a mental picture of "average Americans", they would have been it. Young, old, many a little overweight. Almost all were white (naturally, given New Hampshire's demographics) but there were a few Latinos and several Asian-Americans sprinkled in (under a dozen black people, outside of Secret Service, at the rally itself). The route was curvy, two-lane. The bus made its serpentine way, audibly gear-shifting up and down through wooded areas, then areas of small, mostly lower-middle class residences. An extraordinary number of these appeared to have just had their lawns mowed --- the word had clearly gotten out that company was about to arrive. Unity, it turned out, was, like the Arlo Guthrie lyric in Alice's Restaurant, "Off the side of the side of the side road."

If Unity had a downtown, I didn't see it. As we pulled up outside Unity High School, media truck after media truck were already parked. "NBC News!" said a pigtailed girl of maybe 10, in a white eyelet sun-dress, sitting on the bus in the seat in front of me. She read the words on the truck out loud. Her eyes were wide, her voice tinged with awe.

Past the tented tables where the Kiwanis were selling soft drinks, burgers, hot dogs, through the smoky grill-scented air of every outdoor fair you've ever been to, milled hundreds and hundreds of people. Some were waiting on line for the refreshments, but most were hurrying, to whatever extent was possible, towards the football field, jostling their way to the bleachers and the crowded standing-room-only spaces nearest the small  flag-draped platform. 

That, clearly, was where the two, until recently portrayed as such enemies, were to speak. Signs and bunting everywhere: "Unite for Change" , "Change we can believe in", "Yes we can" and hand-made signs too. A Boston-based band called Pop Gun Seven (we learned this later, when first Hillary and then Barack thanked them) was playing. Eventually the music switched to recordings: mostly the unsurprising, uplifting hopeful songs you would expect at such an occasion (Mavis Staples, I'll Take You There) , but, surprisingly, some tinged with righteous anger (Neil Young, Rocking in a Free World). The latter, with its urgent, rough edges, is not what you would expect at a rally, but was appropriate... to anyone, that is, who is not in denial about just how seriously in it we are: how much hangs in the balance at this moment in time.

As I said in Part One, in my view, it's 11:59 and the clock is ticking.

David and I immediately lost each other in the crowd at the rally. I scrootched in as close as I could to the left of the makeshift stage. This was a packed, standing-room-only area; it was necessary to immediately grow roots in the spot I'd claimed (the old protest song, "We shall not be moved" comes to mind). David meanwhile circled like a restless shark, taking pictures and video footage. He was in his natural element, both as a photographer/filmmaker and a lifelong political junkie.

There were inevitable warm-ups by the local and statewide politicians. The day was hot. Shading my face ineffectually with the spiral notebook I'd brought, I felt the back of my neck and cleavage start to burn. Shifting on my feet, arm aching from holding up the notebook, wiping sweat from my face, aware of but caring little about these discomforts: they were shared with everyone else present (six thousand, the reports later said), along with the palpable anticipation.

The preludes were high-energy as these things go, but everyone hungered for the main event. Still, Democrat Jean Shaheen, New Hampshire's former governor, now running for Senate, a tall woman wearing a raspberry pants suit, reflected the general mood: ebullient. "Dontcha think there was some... " She paused. " ... divine intervention that had Barack and Hillary split the vote equally in a town called Unity?" (I had the internal relief, when she said this, of being in the North. In the South, when and if I heard a politician or anyone else standing in front of a group using the words "divine intervention", I always felt instant uneasiness: I knew what road we were headed down, and it was not one with a lane for non-Christians).

Shaheen spoke of her "incredible pride" in the two candidates, how she had chosen to concentrate on her own campaign (by implication, to endorse neither), but was "glued" to her TV Tuesday nights, watching the returns. She spoke for me, and I hope, countless others when she described the struggle as "inspiring, uplifting, and dramatic."

Yes, yes, yes, Jean, me too. How I had longed, impotently, to swat all those "Hillary should just drop out" pundits dive-buzzing our ear canals in the weeks before she ceded.

Where is it written that anyone gets the nomination handed to them? Or that they should? Wouldn't rising to the challenge of a long and arduous campaign, dodging alleged insinuations, trying to differentiate yourself from your opponent yet not split your party, help to prepare whichever candidate won for the slings, arrows, the unceasing hits that are inherent to the American presidency today? And, oh my God, dealing with the eternal, infernal media and its frequent, shameful insistence on asking the wrongest of wrong questions --- flag pins, while the world is burning? That's like the waiter on the Titanic is taking your drink order: "And will you have red or white with that?" as the boat tilts... that's how I viewed the flag-pin type questions.

And what about the watching children, the girls especially? In the Olympics, some get the gold, the silver, the bronze, and some come home with no medal, except that of their own mettle. No one suggests that those who aspire towards winning should shrug and walk away when it appears they won't reach their original dream. The nobility of their struggle, the inevitable and inherent losses of some to others, is part of what elevates the practice of competition, whether in sports or politics.

(But, as Truman Capote said, "Honey, don't let me commence.")

The crowd was restive by the time Governor John Lynch spoke, asking a series of call-and-response questions which all began "Do we want a president - " ... (beat) ..."who  - " (beat) and then a laundry list of the things that most of us, do in fact want... "will end partisan bickering ?" ...  "cares about the quality of education in our country..."  and on through jobs, health care, energy policy, stature in the  world...  But soon all he had to do was say, "Do we want a president --- ?" and the sweaty audience, reaching let's-get-on-with-the-show saturation, began cutting him off with a good-natured but to-the-point "YES!"  Lynch laughed, picked up the pace, and got the hell out of Dodge.

And then, there they were.

Hillary spoke first, standing at the podium while Barack sat. And from the moment she began, as I've said, the day was hers.

I think I would have felt this in any event for the reasons I've described in Part One. And it wasn't just me: that was the buzz I heard later, standing on line for the reverse bus trip later, back to the racetrack. Even David, till then a dyed-in-the-wool Obama supporter who raised several thousand dollars for Obama and did some precinct-walking, finally got what I 'd described when I talked about Hillary. Later, back in the car, he told me, 'Until I heard her and saw her today, what you said about her just didn't align with what I saw in the debates." He shook his head. "I think her campaign managers have a lot to answer for. Why didn't we ever see the Hillary I heard at Unity today?"

But whether I would have felt this had I been an objective stranger, I cannot judge for certain.

Because, old Arkansawyer that I am, old acquaintance of Hillary's that I am, well, I'm also an old ... friend, if it is not presumptuous to name a warm but casual acquaintance thus.

And to my own surprise I found myself weeping  when I saw her: blond, tough, tender, articulate, middle-aged, funny and dear to me.

******
The first time I saw Hillary was in 1979, at Bill's first gubernatorial ball, called Diamonds and Denim. Her hair was mouse-brown, long and swept back. Her glasses made her look intelligent, earnest, and totally dorky (much like this picture, taken around this time. I found it on the net; don't know who took it. The other woman is the Clintons' old friend, now deceased, Diane Blair... Bill's eulogy for her here. Later, coincidentally, Diane and I would  be co-guests one night for dinner with the Clintons at the White House, see picture a few paragraphs down). But dorky or not, Hillary looked very happy that night at Diamonds and Denim. And so did Bill. I remember how beautifully she and Bill danced together. She was wearing a long gown; ice blue, I think. It was made by my friend, designer Connie Fails, about whom I once wrote for the Arkansas Times. Connie no longer designs, now working her creative genius at the museum gift shop of the Clinton Presidential Library, in Little Rock ("Somewhere," as she said parenthetically to me a few months back, as one self-employed-for-many-years-person to another, "where there's health benefits.") .

Arkansas was, and is, a small state. Just how natural, complex, and intertwined the connections are is hard for outsiders to grasp. Connie had made my wedding gown, two years before she made the long dress in which Hillary danced that night (that wedding dress is now at the Eureka Springs Historical Museum; I gave it to them when I left Eureka Springs). And later, in 1993, on the eve of Bill's first presidential inauguration, Connie and I were photographed together by Annie Leibovitz for the January issue of Vanity Fair, for a pictorial on "real friends of Bill." (Here's one of Leibovitz's portraits of me, solo, from that same session. Pamela Harriman --- quite old by then but still alluring, who swept in wearing a dramatic black cape as befitting her lifelong socialite / political demi-mondaine thing --- was photographed just after me and Connie, and Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's economic adviser, who would eventually become Secretary of Labor in the his administration,  preceded us.  In the picture, I'm wearing what passes for my one and only evening dress, a black silk chiffon sari.)

That Hillary and I, like Bill and I, kept crossing paths time and time again as the years unfolded, was almost inevitable given Arkansas's size.

I will skip over, therefore, the middle range of my years of acquaintance with Hillary and Bill, watching as they grew and ripened into their public selves (and, in her case, growing ever more attractive physically as well). The events we met and chatted at; the occasional note exchanged; the projects we worked together on; the brunch (travel down to the fourth paragraph on that link) I served to 1200 people at Bill's first presidential inauguration, in the National Trust's Decatur House, in Washington DC. (Ned was alive then, and very much part of that event. "De Catering House," he called the location, adding helpfully, "Two blocks from de White House.") 

I will travel, as I did that day in Unity, to the last time I saw and talked with Hillary face to face. That was at an informal "family dinner" (her phrase, at the time), in the White House, in 1995, during Bill's first term. This is the dinner I alluded to a few paragraphs back (and it's pictured left. That's Diane Blair on the top right. Further down on the right is Bill, Hillary across from him, then me.) Always smart, always dedicated, Hillary didn't have the natural social ease Bill did... that, she was already growing to, as she has continued to). There were only eight of us at that dinner, as you can see. Bill wearing a golf shirt, I was in jeans... the picture still hangs on the wall in my home. I look a little dazed.

That was the last time I saw her, up until Unity. But the last time I spoke to Hillary was at least part of what kept rocking me.

She called me the day after Ned died.

Unpredictably, standing in the crowd, I re-felt that surreal day not quite a decade earlier. Certainly I had not remotely expected this. But it was as if the very cells of my body were reliving, at the sound of her voice, the moment when I'd last heard it, on the other end of the phone, that day.

The house, I remember, was filled with the people, the coming and going of strangers and friends. As Emily Dickinson put it:

The bustle in a house
The morning after death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon earth---

The sweeping up the heart,
And putting love away
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity.

The bustle.  Pain mitigated only by sheer disorientation. It is late afternoon: why am I still in my shaggy old turquoise blue chenille bathrobe? Who are these people the house is filled with? I know them, but why are they here? Saying, "Ned is... No, was..." "We are... We were. I mean, we were, I am..." For several months after a death, especially a sudden death, innocent pronouns draw blood.

The phone rang and rang. Mostly others took the calls; occasionally, I picked one up. And I picked up that particular one (no, no caller ID).

"Crescent, this is Hillary. I just heard and I had to call you." 

Ned died on November 30, 2000. So this was on December 1. Hillary had only just become Senator of New York. "But how on earth did you hear?" I asked incredulously. She said, and I remember her short, grim laugh; as I think about it I imagine her at that moment: in a new office, papers stacked up on a new desk, surrounded by unpacked boxes.  That unfunny laugh, which said and the hits just keep on coming, don't they? I picture her shaking her head in that messy office.

"To tell you the truth, I don't even know. It's chaotic here. An aide came in and put a piece of paper in front of me saying what happened, and with your phone number. And I had to call."

I can't recall our whole conversation any more than I can that day. Only snatches, like moments of surfacing for air before sinking back down into and under dark water. Ned still alive to me, his death past belief. But I had seen his torn body the night before, on a stainless steel table in the hospital emergency room in Springdale, Arkansas. I had kissed his forehead, lain my hands on his sternum, as nurses, still busy, mopped up his blood. But how could any of this be? Let alone at the very moment when, in our 23 years together, each day, I was waking up amazed, as he was, at the renewed joy we  were experiencing, having gotten through the most difficult period of those 23 years (more on that in Part Three) and stuck it out... how could he be, suddenly, dead?

I suspected the difficulty Ned and I had experienced, and the happiness that followed, would have been something Hillary and Bill understood (in fact we, Ned and I, occasionally speculated about this). I talked to her about our parallel hard marital journeys, how our troubles seemed to microcosm what they experienced in macrocosm. I switched back and forth between the present tense and past, as if Ned were still alive, then remembering he wasn't (and do you say "we" when one of you is gone? Pronouns and possessives again:  agony, perplexing). The images of his broken body, his mangled teeth, sharp unreal sobs that kept escaping at intervals, but since it was impossible and unreal, and here was Hillary, of all people, whom I hadn't spoken with in years, on the phone, and, in the surreality of it all, I'd grow composed and conversational again.  Just two old friends catching up.  I was quite literally crazed with grief.

I remember I told her about David Schnarch, the therapist whose theories about differentiation in marriage had been such a clarifying beacon, shining light on the dark places Ned and I had (relatively recently, about two years before his death)  traveled through, at the start without comprehension.

I remember she said, "Spell his name," and I said "S-C-H-N-A-R-C-H." In all I think we talked about half an hour.

All great kindnesses that come when one is bereft are memorable. Much else blurs into the general agony in which you sink and rise, sink and rise: he is gone he is never coming back, the unreality of that, the well-intentioned paper-cuts of many people who sincerely want to be helpful but don't know what to do or say and often say exactly the wrong thing: "Well, you were lucky to have him."  "I know just how you're feeling. When my dog died, I ..."  "Well, if it helps any, I'm divorced, and that was like a little death."  "I guess God needed him worse than you did."

But those other people. The person who says not just "Call me if you need anything," but "I wake up easily and I go to sleep easily, so you can call me any hour of the day or night to talk --- I mean it," as my friend Bill Haymes did (left, me and Bill in happier times, seven years after Ned's death, in Nashville) ... My friend Chou-Chou, who labeled the medication and made an elaborate schedule, so someone was around at all times and they knew if I had eaten and taken pills. People who instead of saying "What can I do?" see that refrigerator needs cleaning out, the bird feeder refilling, and they just do it, without asking because you are so far past remembering or caring. Later, much later, you do remember --- those deeds, those people.

Perhaps most of all,  you remember those who are able to be present with you, who hang out with you in the disorienting pain and do not try to alter it.

Simply for Hillary to call, at that moment in her life (so public) and in mine (so stricken by sudden, private loss), was a gift of this kind.

That day we last spoke was brutal. (As remembering it here has been, in trying to deconstruct what happened in Unity for me: that's why writing this has taken so long). What objectivity do I have? 

And yet.

This most personal of events, looked back on involuntarily, intersected for me with the larger events of that day in Unity. It's hard to articulate, even to myself, but that's what happened. And for all that shook me from my own past, something beyond revisiting of Ned's death happened.

I saw Hillary mount the stage. She spoke. I wept.

A grief far larger than personal was afoot.

Part of it was this: a deep sense of all we must lose as human beings to get to where we must get in this life.

All Hillary had had to endure to reach where she was. All I had. All, for that matter, everyone does, each in his or her own way. We each suffer, uniquely and universally. And then, we rise, despite it all (as I talked about in Part One, the "acceptance speech"). Or we sink.

That day Hillary spoke about both. The sinking: the hopeless, helpless invisibility that so many felt during the Bush years. The rising: a different ethos that might replace it ---

... that the trials and troubles that fall to each of us during a lifetime are recognized and shared, and that a helping hand is there when it is needed.

This has been my life's work, and it was the purpose of my campaign.

********
And in Unity, she assigned that purpose to Barack's campaign, as I have said. 

Most of us, if we go to political rallies like the one I'm describing, do so because we don't know the candidates face to face, nor are we likely to. Thus, we want to get as much of a personal read on them as possible. Do they seem genuine? Are they articulate, charismatic, relaxed? Do we get a sense of personal warmth? Do they connect with us, not only in their values but in their personae?

Of the six thousand people present that humid day in Unity (not counting her and Barack's immediate entourage), I am certain that I'm the only one who can attest not just to how truthful her words were,
but as to how Hillary Clinton lived and lives them.This is above and beyond the good I saw her do, especially for women and children, in Arkansas. I am talking again, rather, about that personal good: that wholly unexpected call. She didn't have to do it. No one, including me, would have thought less of her. It wouldn't have occurred to me that she should or would call. There was no reason, no usefulness (from her side, in the political sense) in calling me: I am not influential or well-known, and if I am a friend, I am not a close one. 

But trials and troubles had fallen to me. She was informed, recognized this and responded,  instinctually.    

Hillary's place in American and world politics as the remaining decades unfold is unknown. That she will have one seems beyond doubt: we need her too much. And in her, I believe, the urge to help burns too deeply to be extinguished. Despite all she herself has been through (perhaps most egregiously, the complete and cynical misunderstanding of her motivations), despite being dazzlingly intelligent, analytical, savvy and informed in ways that most of us are not, never will be, and would not want to be, she persists in seeing. Seeing not just through the mind's eye, but that of the heart. 

One can be blind to suffering (example: Bush's fly-over of post-Katrina New Orleans, days after the devastation). One can see suffering, but be overwhelmed by it (example: most of us, who, at a certain point, turn off the TV, throw the envelope from Amnesty International in the trash, shake our heads in genuine despair at all the awfulness in the world and our inability - we think - to affect it). 

But to see and act, with mind and heart: that is the vision which Hillary, and presumably Barack, possess. That is what I believe she meant by the use of the word "recognizing." That is what I know she will continue to do, though in what role none of us (probably including her) yet know. And that is what I believe, I hope, I pray, Barack Obama will do.

The world, and America in it, twists in its countless large and small griefs, perils, and agonies. The clock ticks. All of us, no matter how actively we may be working to alleviate these griefs, wait, too. We wait to be heard, seen, and recognized by our leadership.

I think, in retrospect that I wept, that day, because at last, at last, we may have a leader, who, unasked, picks up the phone and calls.

*******

To see and hear the full Unity speeches, both Hillary's and Barack's, click here.

Part Three will be the next post here. Look for it in the next week or so. 

in pursuit of purslane; political prayer

I know, I know... CD gets all gung-ho on blogging and then drops off the face of the earth. Why? A September book deadline, a July article deadline, and, with David, working on the most ambitious, satisfying, beautiful vegetable garden I have ever grown, but ...

Unity, New Hampshire & the writing process

But that's not why I've been so long between posts.The reason for the hiatus is an entry about the first joint appearance of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama since his becoming the Democratic nominee for president, which took place in Unity, New Hampshire, about an hour's drive from us. It took place three weeks ago, and David and I were there.  I've been working on writing about it since the evening of June 27th, following the rally. And three weeks is, of course, an ice age, in political reportage. But I'm not a political reporter, and the essay turned out to have its own agenda, different from what I anticipated when I started it. There turned out to be many skeins to follow. In part this was because of the peculiarities of this particular presidential race. In part because of our deep disaffection with "politics" and "politicians" now. And in part, because of my relationship to Hillary, a personal one. Every time I worked with my partially formed ideas, in thought and on computer, more presented itself for exploration. 

Dawning personal clarity is one of the privileges of practicing the craft of writing. Sometimes it happens rapidly; often slowly. (If you're an essayist, novelist or memoirist, that is. For most political reporters, there isn't time for digestion).  Lines of thought that seemed promising peter out. At the beginning you know only that you don't have it yet, though you can feel it out there, just beyond reach. Tension, frustration, and uneasiness are inherent at this point (which is when many beginning writers, not recognizing this and understandably disliking these uncomfortable feelings, throw up their hands). Left, immediately after the rally, in the sudden burst of rain which followed, a journalist files his report from the field ... under a poncho. Perhaps the speed with which we require news is partly to blame for its often-spotty quality. This journalist, for sure, was literally in the dark.

But those seeming false starts, though they may not appear in a finished draft, are the beginning. They're the way the elusive, slippery shape of what wants to be said emerges. (This is another way of understanding why nothing is wasted on the writer).  The craft of writing teaches patience, persistence,  tolerating of unpleasant feelings instead of being deterred by them, and faith. For as as long as the follower of that craft is willing to just keep showing up, and writing, where is the waste? --- for one continues to be taught by writing.   

I did eventually finish my piece on the Unity event. It's long. I've divided it into three parts. I'm going to post Part One on Monday, July 21, Part Two on Thursday, July 24, and Part Three on Sunday, July 27. Meanwhile...

the happiness of weed-yanking

This morning, going into the active bliss I enter when I garden, I thought again about Hillary and Barack: how they, like anyone in the more elevated levels of government and public service, would never, ever get the time to experience that particular pleasure I was having at that moment, as I tucked mulch in around one of the thriving heirloom tomato plants, the one named, improbably,"Japanese Black Trifele" (picture, above left, what they'll look like when ripe, courtesy of Johnny's Seeds)--- now more than four feet high, covered with green, lumpy, egg-shaped tomatoes (Ours, taken the day of this post, below.) . And I had a thought that was sort of a thank you, sort of a God-bless-them, and sort of a prayer, for all those who hold office and are actually trying to make things better for those they serve (as opposed to serving their own interests) ... and I thought, with sympathy, of all that such people give up to do that. Like gardening. Like any hope of a quiet life. Like having a single day where you go uncriticized.

And, I thought, possibly with even more sympathy,  "And they have to go to all those meetings." I hate meetings.

Growing season in Vermont is short. Full-on, timely attention is required to plant, raise and harvest before frost. Despite my weird sleep habits (see Insomniac Lessons), I've been getting up early every morning (6:00 a.m. today), working in the garden with David (aka Farmer Brown) . I (Farmer Green) usually intend to work just a half-hour, but often wind up spending more like an hour, hour and a half, two hours, before it gets too hot (on the days, thankfully not too often, when it does get hot).

A lot of what we (Farmer Brown and Farmer Green) do at this point is weed.

I love weeding. Yes, I do. I would rather weed than attend a meeting any day. I get a big kick out of weeding. In fact, two kicks.

Kick # One: it improves things. Pulling up weeds neatens the garden demonstrably and immediately. It allows what you want to grow, to grow, without interruption or competition for soil nutrients. It leaves clear visual evidence of your effort and progress. So little in life is tidy-able, let alone with a single satisfying vigorous yank, and then: into the weed bucket, to be turned into compost.

I would love, for instance, to clean up my very messy office this way. But nothing in here can be just yanked up. I'm pretty good about throwing out what needs to be thrown out, but that means that every single piece of paper that is here, is here for a reason. Business cards from people I met at conferences who asked to be put on my email list, or to whom I promised to send something (guilt!). Fan letters from kids, sometimes whole classes worth, who read and liked my books (guilt!). Articles I wrote that really ought to be filed (guilt! But only because Ned, my late husband, was a meticulous archivist and would be distressed at the state I've let things get to). Research material for current writing projects (scribbled spiral notebooks, notes taken on the back of fliers or paper place-mats, stacks of Post-It noted books, torn-out magazine articles with underlined sections). Bills, because my writing office is not separate from my bill-paying office (yet, she said hopefully). Bills (guilt! What am I doing blogging, I've got income that needs generating!). 

To my right, on the desk, at this moment, is an opened copy of The Moon is Always Female, a book of poetry by Marge Piercy. It' s been here at least a month. Only two small triangular pieces of pages are visible. One says "64", the page number of the poem I was looking for, when I brought the book up from the poetry shelf downstairs because I'd intended to quote a few lines from "Attack of the Squash People" here. But there the book lies, still, now largely buried: a half-page of address stickers, a note from Charles Schwab about my barely-there-anymore IRA, a CD of pictures David took at the Unity rally, a pair of orange-handled scissors, a blue see-through plastic envelope into which I place bills that have been paid, and a few bills that have, in fact, been paid but have not yet been put in the blue envelope. Nothing in this pile can simply be yanked like a weed. Every single piece of paper requires more complex action. This is why I come into my office and feel, often, guilt.

As opposed to coming into the garden. and feeling joy, satisfaction, and surprise. In a garden, things change! For the better! On their own! (Provided, of course, you do the basics; stay on top of weeding, water if hasn't rained). The sun-gold tomatoes, greenish yesterday, are now bright yellow, ready to eat on the spot! That fat bud on the Grand Commander lily has opened! The Kentucky Wonder beans have shot up the pole another six inches! Look at the way the morning light is catching the red leaves of the beet seedlings, they've turned into rubies! Left, David captured the latter, only this morning.

Kick # Two: it's an edible treasure hunt. Some weeds aren't weeds: they're edible wild plants which arrived in the garden on their own. So while I'm yanking and flinging bindweed and johnson grass into the weed-bucket, I'm also, more gently, looking for, finding, and placing lamb's-quarter (Chenopodium album) and purslane (Portulaca oleracea) in the bright yellow colander, to be brought to the kitchen, washed, sometimes steamed, and eaten, raw or cooked. Click on the picture, left, and you'll see, under one of our squash plants, the enthusiastic reddish-stemmed succulent purslane growing at its base. Below this, said colander: purslane (round leaves) and lamb's quarter (jagged-edged, arrow-shaped leaves in the left foreground and behind it two spectacular lettuces, the next-to- last of spring's crop) This morning our post-gardening breakfast was an omelet filled with just-picked steamed purslane and lamb's-quarter, a little Parmesan, some cut-up potatoes leftover from last night's parsley-buttered potatoes. Grainy sourdough wholegrain toast with that.

Eating this breakfast on the screen porch, gazing out across the view to New Hampshire, one of those moments of perfect contentment, where you think, "I must have done something right, to be right here right now."

Ah.

Now purslane is, according to a recent blog article in the New York Times, one of the vegetables recommended by nutritionist Jonny Bowden in his book The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth. It's also, evidently, a high status, trendy food in the city: a current foodie's food. Though purslane was considered too hard to find to make the Times's list of "11 Best Foods You Aren't Eating," the newspaper recently referred back to its own report of research dating back two decades:

Dr. Artemis Simopoulos, a Washington, D.C., nutrition researcher, has found that purslane, a wild green sold in farmers markets and easily grown as a house plant, contains large amounts of omega-3. Purslane has long been used in folk medicine to treat inflammation, Dr. Simopoulos points out, adding that the low rates of cancer and heart disease in her native Greece may be partly due to the liberal use of purslane in soups and salads. ( New York Times, April 17, 1988)

But there's the purslane, growing away of its own accord, out in my garden.

Yo-Anka, you wild-woman, R.I.P.

I recognize the plant thanks to Yo-Anka Light. As I mentioned in Identity Gumbo, astilbe connects me to the economist Eliot Janeway. But purslane, and flower-arranging, connect me to Yo-Anka Light, a Eureka Springs (Arkansas) Character-with-a-capital-C.

Yo-Anka died at age 66, in 2002 (here is a letter she wrote to the editor of the local paper, the Lovely County Citizen, touching on her childhood in Europe during World War II; she wrote it shortly after 9-11). I knew her as an eccentric organic gardener who used to bring vegetables and flower bouquets around to Dairy Hollow House, the inn I once owned with Ned back when in Arkansas. Yo-Anka  had, long ago, been a prostitute in Amsterdam. Or was it Copenhagen? I'm not sure how she got from there to being a farmer in the Ozarks, but somehow, she did. She sold her gorgeous produce, beautifully displayed, from the back of a small closed pick-up. She'd open the back gate of the truck with great drama, revealing a gorgeous array of produce, a display somewhere between a boutique florist's and a high-end specialty produce market (no farmers market, where her vegetables and flowers might get lost in the crowd, for her).

She dressed with equal drama, always in stop-you-in-your-tracks costumes: fortune-teller style ensembles that were layered, vintage combinations of her own creation. There were often with full skirts, and mixes of solids and prints chosen so the same three or four bright colors of the day would be repeated artistically head to toe --- fuchsia, orange, yellow, green and black, say. And the rows of bangles which climbed her lean arms, and the multiple necklaces, and the dangly earrings, would echo the day's color scheme. She often jingled. She was her own canvas, on which she painted daily. It was impossible not to notice, and admire, her and her presentations.

You never knew when Yo-Anka might show up:  she stopped by (with her much-younger boyfriend, who had survived being struck by lightning; no kidding, literally!) whenever the spirit, and garden, moved her. "Yo-Anka's here!" someone from the front desk would call, and we'd all come from the kitchen to admire the splendid, outrageously overpriced array of vegetables and bouquets (each tied with jute twine and stuck in a mason-jar of water, a mix of garden- and wildflowers). Her face, very tan, was heavily lined: sun damage, plus, in direct contradiction to her gardening practices and macrobiotic diet, she smoked like a chimney (she also always, invariably, helped herself to a cup or two of Dairy Hollow coffee, which she drank, black, rapidly). She was from the Netherlands, and spoke with a heavy accent and unusual syntax: whenever I use collards (which, for those of you who don't know, are a green that's pronounced KAH-lerds), I hear Yo-Anka's smoky, accented voice saying, "I have today some very nice co-LARDS, ya?"

Yo-Anka introduced me to purslane. She sold it, touting its healthfulness and rarity. She turned out to be right on its healthfulness: it's not only high in omega-3s, it's even supposed to be a cure for depression. But she was (knowingly) mistaken on its rarity. As befitted its wonders, she charged astronomically, never for a moment letting on that it was a ubiquitous, incredibly easy-to-gather shallow-rooted weed. I was thus surprised, and delighted, to find it growing vigorously all on its own, its plump red-green stems and juicy, slightly tart leaves amiably covering the ground, in my Vermont garden (no doubt it did, as well, in Arkansas). I belly-laughed the first time I thought about all this, and sent a thank you of admiration to Yo-Anka, that sui generis marketer. You knew you were being hustled by her, but you couldn't help going along for the ride. Thank you, Yo-Anka, wherever you are.

Perhaps this --- thinking about the strange rich presence of people in our lives, and how, even in their absence, they stay with us, even those who didn't seem all that significant at the moment  --- is a good time to finally employ that quote from Marge Piercy's "Attack of the Squash People."

The poem is about zucchini, at the height of its fecundity: ways to use it, trying to give it away when all your friends and neighbors already have too much of it in their own gardens. All true, as anyone who has ever grown it knows. (Last year on the bench outside of L.A. Burdicks, I actually saw a box heaped with zukes, a plea in black felt-tip marker on one of the cardboard flaps. "FREE. Please take. PLEASE.") Perhaps Piercy's words make sense of the compulsiveness of gardening in a place where the growing season is brief and extreme, as the winter is long, and extreme. Here are the concluding lines from the last verse of the poem, in which Piercy addresses the zucchini directly:

... You give and give
too much, like summer days
limp with heat, thunderstorms
bursting their bags on our heads,
as we salt and freeze and pickle
for the too little to come.

Ah.

And now, I will take the book back downstairs and my desk will be, incrementally, neater.

Watch for the Unity posts.