"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.

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 ONE / the winning ways of a presumptive loser: Hillary's remarkable acceptance speech

Late afternoon, Friday, June 27th, 2008.

My partner and I were driving back to Vermont from Unity, New Hampshire. We were sunburned: we'd been outdoors from about ten to two, and neither of us had worn a hat or enough sunblock. We were damp: towards the end of that time, the skies had opened up, bursting very pregnant clouds into a complete drenching downpour.

And we were happy, more or less stunned with happiness and possibility. We turned on NPR to listen to the coverage of the event we'd just been at: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in their first joint appearance since he became the Democratic presidential nominee.

But more accurately, as I've come to think about it, what we'd really heard was Hillary giving her acceptance speech. Now, I doubt she or anyone else thought of it that way. But it was. And yes, this is ironic, poignant, and contradictory. But also triumphant. And, though political, to my ear and heart, its triumph transcended politics.

The context of that speech (the year-and-a-half struggle for the candidacy, the historic nature of the two who were competing for that candidacy, the known-from-the-get-go fact that one of these brilliant, gifted contestants would lose, and that, finally, she was the one who lost) went to the core choice which being human asks of us: when faced with difficulty, heartache, and loss, will we fall or will we rise?

Will we act and live from the best and strongest in ourselves, or from the worst and weakest?

What I call Hillary's acceptance speech, then, given to about 6,000 people in a woods-edged field outside a small New Hampshire high school, was in a sense far larger than anything she might have given in Denver or for that matter Washington.

It was an acceptance speech, and more. 

First, the "acceptance" that day: it was of loss, the loss of her chance to be the Commander-in-Chief of the United States. It was loss acknowledged and moved on from.

The "and more" was the extraordinary force by which she did the moving-on. She took this loss, and her acceptance of it, and transformed it. She made meaning from it, took purpose and found direction from it, rose from the ashes and flew, phoenix-like. And in doing this, she lifted up herself, Obama, and all of us in the process.

Transformation, the refusal to be embittered or victimized when things do not turn out in the way you thought you wanted, is uplifting and powerful. Inherently. And because every human life has its tragedies, difficulties, and setbacks, this kind of transformation is a skill that every human being urgently needs.

Just as Hillary had modeled not taking the candidacy for granted (at the time when she was the media's anointed one) nor giving up the fight (at the time Obama was the media's anointed one), she now modeled how one works with defeat in a manner that is positive, honest, and powerful. It was strong stuff, watching her take her very public defeat, and transmute it into the ultimate win: a win that showed her wisdom, strength and courage transparently, but that also demonstrated her respect for her opponent.
Hillary spoke first, followed by Barack Obama, who thanked and praised her effusively, citing, among much else, "... her unyielding desire to improve the lives of ordinary Americans."  When an audience member shouted "She rocks!" he added, "Yeah, she rocks... she rocks. That's the point I'm trying to make!  I know how much we need Bill and Hillary Clinton, as a party and as a country..." Photo, David Koff.

Most of all, her deep concern about the state of our country and its people shone from her like a beacon. Though her words were powerful, her delivery was transcendent: radiant, glowing, confident, strong.  Lots of eye contact with the audience. Determination on her face and in her body language, careful pauses, gravitas (this balanced, nicely, Barack's slightly less formal style, which followed).

But let's don't forget the touches of self-deprecating (never, for an instant, self-pitying) humor here and there:

I was honored to be in this race with Barack, and I am proud that we had ... a spirited dialog.

Pause.

That was the nicest way I could think of phrasing it.

Pause. Waiting until the laughter, whooping, hollering, clapping subsided.

But it was spirited because we cared so much.

And one had no doubt that she, and Barack, did care.

(The quote above gave me powerful deja vu. It's almost exactly how I used to respond when people from other parts of my then-home state, Arkansas, asked me, as they frequently did, why on earth the population of tiny (1200), prickly Eureka Springs was always getting riled up and litigious about something absolutely without consequence to the rest of the world: fighting like cats in a sack about, say, if a street a single block in length should be made one-way part of the year, or whether a particular business should be grandfathered in or given a conditional use permit, or were tour buses a heaven-sent economic boon to the community or spawn of the devil? I used to say precisely what Hillary did: that we fought because we cared, and because we actually believed we could make a difference. "It's the opposite of apathy," I used to say.)

As I said, in the car on the way back from Unity, David and I turned on NPR, to listen to the coverage.

And we heard it described in one throwaway sentence as "well-orchestrated."

An unspoken hunh??? , a glance of mutual disbelief, passed between David and me.

That was the best they could come up with? NPR? "Well-orchestrated?"

Had they even been at the same event we had?

*********************

You probably heard about this particular Barack-Hillary appearance, although, in the ephemeral way of politics, this probably seems long ago by now. But when we saw them that morning in Unity, we felt we were witnessing a miracle: unbelievably long in coming, yet wholly natural: a black man and a white woman, both intelligent and articulate, both of whom had, until recently, been rivals for the presidency.

To most accounts, bitter rivals. But that was not the sense I'd had when I listened to the debates (unlike, seemingly, every single other public pundit and pontificator in the universe, on- or off-line.)

I campaigned with and against (Senator Obama) for lots of months. I have stood, or sat, on a stage with him for, I've lost count, but I think 22 debates. So I've had a front row seat to his candidacy. And I've seen his strength and determination, grit and grace.

Hillary spoke first. Strangely, or perhaps not so, it was really her day, not his. When he did speak, he, like her, did so with passion, graciousness, clear and easy camaraderie, generosity, and a stunning lack of bitterness.

Stunning, that is, if you had believed those accounts. I hadn't, as I've said. I felt, and feel, it is pretty easy to sit at the side-lines, critiquing and second-guessing relatively simple problems and fights (popularity, strategy, who-said-what-about-whom-and-what-they-meant, salivating over presumed interpersonal nastiness, thus enlarging it, while at the same time self-righteously decrying it). Easier, by far, than to engage in the real, and unanswerable questions of our day.

Such as, almost everything in the American economy and way of life is made with, made of, or transported by fossil fuels. Almost everything in our economy and way of life is predicated on the cheap, easy availability of those fuels. Cheap, easily available fuels are over. The way of life we purchased with them, with stunning profligacy and entitlement, is also almost certainly over. It was an anomaly, a one-shot deal. What now?

Now that's a hard question: evidently too hard. 

So let's discuss internecine fighting, which, in one way or another, we've all been discussing since high school, and are thus well-practiced in doing. Let's not look much at the actual issues that distinguished one candidate from another, but let's see how outrageously we can conflate each candidate's alleged personal animosity and attacks on the other. It's the People Magazine, National Enquirer, scandal-and-celebrity driven model of journalism.

And naturally, at the Unity event, both Hillary and Barack had to deal with this avoidance-of-the-important-questions, largely media-created created ruckus.

I don't think it's ... at all unknown that this was a hard-fought primary campaign.

But almost immediately, she --- and we, those of us privileged enough to be present --- moved from this one-phrase allusion ("hard-fought") to what really mattered about the campaign; that it was about differentiating the positions of the two candidates.

We have traversed America, making our case... we have gone toe to toe in this.

And, from there, to the still more important question, essential in Unity, and towards unity: what now?

But today and every day going forward, we stand shoulder to shoulder. For the ideals we share, the values we cherish, and the country we love...

(Barack and I) may have  started on different paths, but today our paths have merged. Today our hearts are set on the same destination for America...

We are one party, one America, and we are not going to rest until we put our country back on the path to peace, prosperity, and progress in the 21st century.

Both of them, but especially Hillary, had an almost crystalline clarity about the corrosive interconnected choices we've followed that, regrettably, have led us to the crossroad that is our time:

... the damage that has been done: environmentally, to the economy, civil rights, education, foreign policy, the Supreme Court...

Now this wasn't, and isn't, new: how many time have you both made and listened to such a laundry list  (or a much longer version) with friends, colleagues and an astonishing percentage of fellow citizens? But this has almost always been on a personal level, leaving us shaking our heads and sorrowing, feeling helpless, outraged, and frustrated as we've watched the most arrogant, obtuse, corrupt and absolutely opaque administration in American  history drag us to what looks ever more like our collective doom. ("Who would have thought," said David, not too long ago, "that we'd ever say, 'Ah, Nixon, the good old days?' " )

But here, in an overtly political context, these issues were being articulated clearly, simply, and urgently. And by people who were in a position to do something about them; to, perhaps, provide the leadership whereby we could wrest our future back from its collision course with doom.

These people are called ... politicians.

Politicians: a profession we often use as an epithet, an insult, shorthand for untrustworthiness ("He's just a politician."). Our derision, distaste and disdain for politicians says, "We know what you're up to, you power-hungry con artists, we know how you talk about us behind our backs, we know your contempt for us and it is mutual: we know how much you've had to have sold out to get to where you are."

At some deep level (and perhaps understandably, especially since the Watergate era), politics, to us, is synonymous with manipulation, with measuring one's words, opinion poll-driven, for effect. With dirty back-room deals and being beholden to special interests.

But how about this: what if such perceptions actually bring about or strengthen this side of political reality?

If we see the seeking of public office as filthy enough, who in their right mind will take it on?  Our views become self-fulfilling: we seem to believe that anyone who does take it on is not in their right mind; must be inherently flawed. We (in the guise of our media, often) seek those flaws with a salacious vigor that leaves objectivity behind, with arm's-length scorn and cynicism... as if we had no stake in the outcome of who is in office.

We don't look to the good, the --- at the risk of sounding naive --- pure, in the motivations of those who run for office; we look for, and expect, and discuss, the smarmy.

And we fail utterly to take responsibility for the part this belief-set plays in creating government that is indeed, often corrupt, only looking after its own.

But that day in Unity, Hillary, and then Barack, articulated a different kind of "own."

We do not want to see our country continue on a path where people feel that their government doesn't work, and their President doesn't care.

We want to make sure that once again every American is seen. That there are no invisible Americans.

What issues define our time? Let me ask this differently: what is our time, and what time is it? In my view, it's a time that may be 11 hours and fifty-nine minutes before the damage is finally irreversible. The damage done to each other, in and on our joint home, the planet from which we have taken so unthinkingly for so long and to which we have failed so utterly to give back (with an arrogance and greed so blind to its consequences that it's no wonder we got ourselves the uber-blind-to-the-consequences George W. Bush as president).

And the clock is ticking.

"...when we think about the lost opportunities and the damage that has been done during the last 7 1/2 years..."

Yet there were Hillary and Barack, at what may literally be the last minute. Their humanity, and sense of urgency, finally made the issue of skin color or sex immaterial; they were daring to exhibit "the audacity of hope," to quote the title of one of Barack's books. Never has so much been so dangerously awry on a global scale; because of this,  never has hope been quite so audacious. 

That the two of them called the issues by their correct names mattered. That they  had not given up mattered. That they could still hope, with and for all of us and our shared country and world, mattered. 

In short speeches (hers was about 20 minutes, his 10) of course what they said was not nuanced, not detailed. It was broad, painted in bold unvarnished strokes, designed to inspire, not explain policy. Well, of course, obviously.

But to hear politicians speak thus, in a tone of reconciliation and clear ease with each other, despite and after all those allegedly terribly personal attacks, that also mattered.

Because those who aspire to this office aspire to lead us, and we deeply, deeply need reconciliation. We need to create a world in which our differences dwell side by side with our commonalities, a rich and functional social bio-diversity rooted in a

... deep equality, where we reach beyond the boundaries of color and creed, gender and geography, to embrace all our people.

In the campaign, fought hard and passionately, it was necessary for the candidates to elucidate their differences (not that most heard them; the media was too busy picking apart inconsequential personal details). But now, just as clearly, it was time for them to elucidate their far greater similarities.

As they came together publicly for the first time since the race, they were gracious, mutually respectful, cogent. And they were convincing. What Barack and Hillary, what all of us, have at stake is so much larger than whatever the disagreements between them may have been or are. They knew it; they showed it; they said it.   

Just as, mostly, whatever we hold in common in our time is far more important than what divides us.   

And to anyone who voted for me and is now considering not voting,  or voting for Senator McCain, I strongly urge you to reconsider. I strongly urge you to remember who we are standing for in this election... all of those who lost jobs and health care and can't afford gasoline or groceries, who felt invisible to this president.

David and I knew history being made when we saw it.

Well-orchestrated?

*********************

Part 2 of this series will be published on Saturday, July 26.

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

identity gumbo

What does it matter if we know, or tell, our personal stories?

I wrote, on June 9 post, about buying a lungwort plant at the annual plant sale for the Putney Library, and the extra pleasure that small bit of history gives me each year when it blooms.

I love getting plants in such ways, rather than from a nursery. And getting starts or divisions or cuttings from friends is even better.

I hadn't thought about this phenomenon --- of how one's thoughts almost automatically go to the people and stories associated with a particular plant as one weeds, divides, admires, or harvests from it ---  until I started that post. But now that I do think about it, well, it's clear to me that gardening and narrative are inextricable.

Too, we all participate in both daily, whether we know it consciously or not. Run into an acquaintance you haven't seen in awhile; ask  "So what are you up to these days?" In listening to the response, you're hearing narrative, which, to a greater or lesser extent, becomes part of your narrative as well.  Bite into a bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich (vegetarians, feel free to substitute smoked tempeh for the bacon) and you participate in gardening, albeit often someone else's . (Picture: just an excuse to add some graphics and show off some of last year's abundant garden... me at one of our pole-bean teepees, taken in the fall, by David Koff).

Gardening and narrative connect us: to our home on the earth, and to each other. In different ways, they tell us who tell us who, what and where we are; and they always tell us, whether we're paying attention or not.

The economist Eliot Janeway was an ardent amateur gardener; he and his wife, the feminist and writer Elizabeth Janeway (pictured) were both friends of my parents. I vividly remember a visit to their large country home and estate-like garden. I was still pretty young, maybe 12; young enough to still be willing, occasionally, to go places with my folks (I'd always bring a book, and would wonder off to read if things got boring). On this particular day, Eliot had just finished dividing the astilbe, one of the few reliable flowering perennial plants for shady gardens. At the end of our visit, he gave my mother, writer-editor Charlotte Zolotow , also a devoted gardener, some divisions for her much smaller back-yard garden. She took them home and planted them.

The astilbe Eliot Janeway gave her eventually became overreaching in Charlotte's garden; after a few years, she was dividing it herself. By my twenties, I was also gardening, and would often work with my mother in her garden when I visited. On one such occasion, my mother was dividing the Janeway astilbe again, and she gave me some of the divisions to bring home. By this time Eliot was long dead. I was maybe 25 or 26 by then, and I hand-carried the astilbe home back to Arkansas, where I then lived,  on the plane, the plant's roots wrapped in a damp paper towel and a sheet of plastic wrap. Just as I now think of the Putney Library's unknown friend who unwittingly added the pulmonaria to my garden when it blooms each spring, so I used to think of the Janeways whenever I weeded the Arkansas garden into which I transplanted that astilbe.

That was was the garden at our inn, Dairy Hollow House, R.I.P. (1979-1998), the same garden in which my late father's ashes now reside. How many years did I anticipate the astilbe's flowering, its fluffy, feathery plumes of pale pink and white, which I'd use in the arrangements I'd make for each room's incoming guests? (This astilbe variety looks similar to one of the two Eliot Janeway gave the Zolotow-Dragonwagon clan). Presumably, that astilbe still blooms in that garden, another little piece of literary history connected with that property, unknown by anyone except me (despite the place the surrounds that garden's current use as a refuge for writers), until my mentioning it here. As is that larger piece I just mentioned: that my late father, Maurice Zolotow, also a writer, wanted his ashes put in that same garden. And so they were, and are. According to the promise he and my mother made each other when he was still alive, and she was still cogent, her ashes will eventually join his, a promise I will keep. (It's also a hilarious story, especially the agreed-upon marker to be, but will have to wait for another time to be told: I'm on a different track now, and am trying to resist my old friend, digression.)

What does it matter if we know, or tell, our personal stories?

Because our stories connect us to others, in ways we may never know, but which may have meaning to them, just as the stories of others sometimes have meaning to us.  And meaning is a life-shaper. 

This is true for all of us: we never know who we touch, and how, by our stories. We just never know.  But maybe it's especially true for writers who are fortunate enough to have their work published and read widely or even semi-widely. We just never know. (Or almost never. When I get an e-mail from a stranger who's been making one of my recipes for years and tells me about how it's now become a Christmas morning family tradition, or who from a teenager who read one of my YA novels and tells me it helped her feel less alone, I am always reminded of this. Or when I get such mail about my mother's work, how, say, her title Big Sister and Little Sister helped the writer of the e-mail when she herself was a little girl growing up with a bossy big sister, and then, as a mother, she read it to her own two girls, and now she's looking forward to reading it to her two granddaughters, who are now ages 1 and 3,  and she just wanted to let Charlotte know how much the book has meant to her... I am even more reminded of this). (Picture, taken by David in September 2007, the big sister, Dorothy, in blue, and the little sister, Charlotte, in cream, now both very old ladies... the sisters that inspired Charlotte's writing of this book.).

As I said in the subtitle to this blog, I think we're all part of the narrative life tells itself about itself.

Someday, will someone connected with the non-profit institution, which I co-founded, and that now occupies the physical terrain Ned and I and my whole family put so much into, ever want to know about such things as Eliot Janeway's astilbe and my father's ashes, things that to my mind and heart are so connected with the narrative DNA of that place, and, I believe, add to and strengthen it?

Maybe, maybe not. As my late father himself used to say, "God sees the truth, but waits." So, who knows? It will happen, or it won't; the artifact of the astilbe itself, and the ashes, and perhaps something of the vibe, will remain there, at least.

And here, at least, I have told that story.

What does it matter if we know, or tell, our personal stories?

Because, paradoxically, our personal stories are ultimately not a matter of personalities, but of something that transcends personality:  collective identity,  an ever-developing gumbo of history, truth, perspective, prejudice, and, again, narrative.

Identity: Who we are. Do we identify ourselves as the member of a particular family, community, church, organization, survivor (of Katrina, a bad divorce, two tours of duty in Iraq)? Do we see ourselves as triumphant or victimized, active or passive, clear or confused, a Yankee, a Southerner, a Sunni, a Shiite, a Pakistani, a British citizen of Pakistani descent, wealthy, just getting by, successful, a failure? A parent, a child, a student?  Usually, identity is a mix of countless such factors (some contradictory). But most of us tend to pick to or three or four as our major themes. This becomes how we tell, and understand, our story; this becomes what we think our life is.

As we age, we tend to get more affixed to our story and our identity. On the plus side, this is stabilizing; on the minus, getting rigid limits further growth and understanding. But occasionally, if we not only age but ripen and mature (which is a matter of conscious choice: as the saying goes, "You can't stay young forever, but you can always remain immature") , we sometimes wise up enough to let the story to which we are so attached, be undermined. We reconsider. We may have, not just "Aha!" moments, but "Oh, shit," moments, as we look at what we've done and what that makes us.

But with a little luck and persistence and heart, with the courage to confront ourselves both ruthlessly and with forgiveness, with what Tara Brach calls "radical acceptance" (a concept I've mentioned before here) we can end up with several version of "our" story.

And not just that, something larger:  "the" story.

"The" story is always both individual and collective. "The" story is dynamic, ever-changing, always altering as time, distance, wisdom, experience, scholarship, a changing cast of characters, and research bring new facts and perspectives to light. "The" story may make us look better or worse, more or less significant than we look in our own version. But ultimately, and naturally, "the" story is much bigger than we are. For example, the book 1491: New revelations Before Columbus completely and dramatically retells the story of America's first inhabitants (such as this chief painted by British watercolorist John White in 1585.  The early Europeans, it turns out, though in some ways appalled by the Indians, were amazed by their physical health and beauty;  the Native Americans, of course, had never had small-pox, ate incredibly healthfully and lived with much physical activity; naturally they were far taller and handsomer than the puny British).

I love this book, by the way. Charles C. Mann, who wrote it, is brilliant but wholly unshow-offy, and, that rarity, a historian whose writing is compelling, funny, thoughtful, and all-around delightful.  "In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archeology," trumpets the jacket copy of the book, truthfully, I'll add, " Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492."

Exactly. Stories, especially those that rethink "the" story, radically alter us.

The word "radical" is based on the prefix rad, or root. By having access to the stories that happened before us yet affect us, the stronger and deeper, more radical, are our roots and rootlets. And, I think, the greater our chances for wisdom and dimensionality. We grow spacious enough to embrace contradiction and paradox; to accept that we all, individually, have a metaphorical 1491.... something about ourselves and our culture we take as a given in one way yet to to which we're blind, because we're too close to see it. I think this is true whether the "we" is an individual, an organization, a community, a town, an institution, a nation.

What allows "the" story to unfold? Deep inner and outer inquiry, new information, time. And radical altering, liberating and astonishing though it is, doesn't happen for everyone; certainly it is possible in many cases to accept our own prejudices and versions as reality, not simply one story out of many.

But to be so wedded to our blind spots that we insist that we what we are seeing and saying is the whole truth, is to move through life as tourists, on the surface.

When we dare to ask the sometimes impertinent or threatening questions, of ourselves and others, when we seek a story, "the" story, then we move through our lives as travelers.

“For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him or her, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of actuality and the flexibility of a dream. Be receptive and careless of failure. ”

             --- William Stafford (poet)

The difference between no story/false or partial story and provisionally true story is the difference between the kind of "following" Stafford speaks of or wandering aimlessly. It's the difference between superficiality and depth; between, basically, wasting (or "killing") time on earth, versus using time, reveling in it, finding meaning and mystery in it.

And then passing that meaning on.

All without knowing how the story comes out, or if our meaning means anything to anyone else.

Gardening (as well as cooking, preparing the foods that come from our gardens or someone else's),  and narrative --- they both ground us. Gardening literally, stories metaphorically. How else do we contend with the huge mystery of knowing our home is in these fragile and temporary vessels called our bodies; of residing on and nourishing ourselves from the earth, from which we know we will be exiled?

Humankind has always needed to feed its twin hungers.

Thus, we garden, and tell our stories.

insomniac lessons

There's no doubt that my life would be more in sync with the way the world generally runs, if I had what are usually viewed as normal sleep patterns.

However, it is possible, even probable, that my seemingly abnormal sleep patterns are normal for me.

I teach a workshop called Fearless Writing, subtitled "You can't drive with the emergency brake on." Bearing in mind, and I always do (I tell my students, somewhere near the beginning of sessions,  something psychologist Richard Price once said:  "You always teach what you most need to learn; you are your own worst student. "), the first perceptual shift I work with others and myself around is this: that fear, hesitation, doubt, uncertainty, a sense of foolishness or futility, and anxiety are all part of the creative process. That is true especially initially, but periodically and cyclically throughout. That one must consider fear a partner in creation.

And sooner or later I usually talk about "insomnia lessons."

Truthfully, these days I even dislike the word "insomnia"; it's a disease-word, a word that makes something outside-the-norm, and, yes, admittedly, sometimes difficult, not just difficult but wrong. An illness. To a greater or lesser degree, unacceptable. Something that should be treated, or fixed. In short, it pathologizes it.

I just sleep differently from (supposedly) most people.(I question the very idea of "most people" too, or, as the poet e e cummings puts it "mostpeople" : but that's another rant. )

Acceptance of my unusual sleep patterns as usual for me has been a long time coming. 

Sometimes I tell my students how, according to family lore, even when I was an infant and had been in bed for hours, when my parents would come in before they went to bed, just to check, here's what they would find, night after night: me, wide awake. Not crying. Not unhappy. Just - awake. When I was old enough to stand up, they told me, I'd often be standing in the crib, holding on to the bars, just gazing out into the dark. Presumably thinking or just taking it all in. "Pondering," as an old Eureka Springs-ian named Lyle Pinkley used to say,"the imponderables." (Does the picture, left, probably taken by my father, back this up, or what? Hey! Nighttime! Party-down!)

I sometimes tell my students that my parents were concerned about this. And that the first pathologizing of my sleep patterns took place early on, when my parents took me to the pediatrician, whose name was Dr. Billo.(he resembled the singer Burl Ives... when I was five or six I always halfway expected him to burst out into "Ghost Riders in the Sky."). And for little baby Ellen (me, for these were pre-Crescent days), Dr. Billo prescribed phenobarbital.

I don't usually go into this next part too much in Fearless class, but here I'll say a little more. Phenobarbital is a pretty serious drug. But bear in mind it was the 50's, the post-Hiroshima age of anxiety and prosperity, when we began to enshrine the idea that stability and conformity and pleasantness were normal and to be expected. In order to maintain this illusion, especially in the face of  the nuclear bomb, pretty much everyone in certain sets smoked, drank, and took drugs without thinking anything much about it. Drugs certainly weren't considered recreational as such, nor was there any sense that they might be dangerous; it was almost in the category of brushing your teeth and taking your vitamins and eating out of the five basic food groups.

My parents took benzedrine as a matter of course with their morning coffee and orange juice (freshly squeezed by my father, who also ground the coffee beans fresh daily, with a hand-cranked coffee mill). It was the era of the two-martini lunch. And in the late afternoon, Miltown was served with the post-work cocktails (again martinis, extra dry with a twist of lemon peel, the way, according to my father, a true martini must be made, and which I must have heard him order with great edgy precision a million times. God help the waiter who brought one with an olive instead of a twist!). Cheese (Camembert, usually) and crackers (Ry-Krisps, Triscuits) were always served; the Miltown was almost in that category. (It's a drug you don't hear about much any more, but for awhile in there, it was really popular. Till I was ten or eleven, I thought it was something like aspirin. In fact I remember once an adult friend of my parents, visiting, complained of a headache. I offered --- helpfully and politely (for I was taught by my Southern-bred mother to be helpful and polite, to offer guests whatever might be needed), "Would you like a Miltown?" I was offended and perplexed when the grown-ups burst out laughing: what was so funny?)

At their bedtimes, my parents had their own barbituates:  Seconals (which my father, many years later, in recovery, would sometimes call by their street name, Red Devils). These accompanied their nightcaps; Johnny Walker Red for my father, Wild Turkey for my mother. This was no doubt part of the reason their morning uppers were required. (Later, as a teenager, I used to regularly swipe a few of their morning uppers and evening downers --- but not the Miltown --- and sell them to my high-school mates for walking-around money; but that's another story... and this part I definitely skip when teaching Fearless).

What I do say is something like this:

"So there's the insomnia itself. I've always had it, now I'm an adult and I still have it. So a lot of times, I'm lying in bed, I'm wide awake and I know I have to get up and give a talk the next morning. And there's the big honkin' digital clock casting its red or green light and it says , '3:14 a.m.' And I start counting off on my fingers: 'Okay, 3:14, 4:14, 5:14, 6:14... if I go to sleep RIGHT NOW I could still get FOUR HOURS OF SLEEP, and...' This is the way I think when I'm on the road. At home, if I don't have to be somewhere early, it changes slightly: "You know, if I was a GOOD person, a SPIRITUAL person, a DISCIPLINED person, a NON-NEUROTIC person, I wouldn't have this problem! I could go to sleep every night by 11:45 at the latest, and get up at 6:00, and do yoga, and meditate, and eat a healthy breakfast, and I'd be writing by 9:00 and ...'

"But after awhile, we're talking years here, we're talking about finally starting to grow up, I begin to get that there are actually two things going on. One is the insomnia, the other is, freaking out over the insomnia. And then I slowly, slowly get: hey, the insomnia is really the minor problem here.

"And things slowly start to shift. The first thing is, when I'm at a hotel, I turn the clock to the wall. This is a revelation! This is a marvel! It takes the freak-out intensity way down. So I start making other physical adjustments. A lot of times, there are these annoying cracks where the curtains don't quite close and these big razors of light come in, a good reason to be wakeful. So I start to pack big diaper-pin size safety pins, and I start pinning the curtain gaps shut. Or if there's light coming through the bottom of the door, I roll up a towel and put it down and block the light. Easy! And there's often ambient noise, so I start bringing ear-plugs. I begin, to the extent possible, to alter the environment and my physical self so things are a little more sleep-friendly. I get one of those eye-masks. In fact, I get two: the seed-bag kind which is great as long as you stay on your back, and the elastic band kind, which works even when you roll over.

"But even though the freaking element is less, I still have unusual sleep patterns. Most of the time, I begin gradually turning down the volume on 'I suck because I don't sleep like everyone else.' And on a practical level, when I'm at home, I work at getting that it's cool, I'm not lazy or a bad person, I'm actually self-employed and highly productive, just at my own hours. But it remains troublesome when dealing with the so-called real world. Where the plumber wants to come at 7:30, or I have to give a talk at 10:00 a.m. at a college that's two hours drive away, or I want to get to the 8:00 a.m. yoga class.

"So I gradually begin this little routine, talking to myself in bed. Calming myself down. It goes something like, 'Okay, I'm not sleeping, and I have to get up in the morning and give a talk. I've given plenty of talks on two hours sleep and, yeah, I felt wiped out but going into it I did just fine! I can probably get a nap in afterwards, before I have to leave for the airport; if not I can sleep on the plane. It's not a big deal. So I'm just going to lie here and relax, whether I go to sleep or not. Just relax. And if I'm not sleepy after awhile, I'll get up in half an hour and read, or work.  But right now I'm going to stretch and feel how good it is to not be moving, to just relax. If I want I can just lie here rest, without necessarily sleeping,  or get up, and either way, it's okay.'

"And you know what? Sometimes I get some actual sleep, sometimes I don't... Sometimes I lie there and relax and just think, maybe the way I did when I was a little girl, who knows... but sometimes I do get up, and read, or work on the computer. And either way, it is okay!"

I tell my Fearless students all this because fear is part of the process. and insomnia is part of what taught me this. It's not the thing that's problem. The problem is freaking out over the thing. Thinking that because the thing is difficult or unpleasant or hard to go through, it's abnormal. Where we really go crazy isn't the thing, it's trying to outrun the thing. The thing being whatever it is that we name our anxiety of the moment.

And that thing would be what, exactly, in writing? Well, here's some of what Fearless students have articulated in class over the years (there aren't that many things, just infinite variations):

I'm afraid that everything important to say has already been said by someone much more qualified or better at saying it than me.

When I write it down it comes out so trite and stilted compared to what's in my head.

If I write it down, everyone will know what a phony I am.

If I write it down, I will know what a phony I am.

I can write passably for my job, which is technical writing, but then it's, who do I think I am, trying to be a poet?

If I say what I really want to say, no one in my family will ever speak to me again.

I make a good start, but then I can never finish.

I say I don't have time, and I really don't have time, but then there's this little niggling voice saying, that's just an excuse, you're never going to do it, you're a fuck-up.

I never get to the second sentence/paragraph/chapter because I keep messing around trying to get the first sentence/paragraph/chapter perfect.

What's the use? I'll never finish it / publish it / start it anyway.

One of my favorites was from a student who said that whenever she tried to write, "My negative thoughts run away with me." I asked her, "Could you define negative thoughts, please?" She paused and said, "Introspection gone ballistic."

Here's the thing, with writing, as with life: we want some kind of a guarantee that what we write will be good before we write it. (I don't know quite where we get this idea, frankly, since life consistently contradicts it: maybe it's wishful thinking gone ballistic. )

Berryman is a poem the poet W.S. Merwin wrote about the experience of studying with his own writing  teacher/mentor, the poet John Berryman. Merwin says:

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all

and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write

When you make fear your partner, you give up having to be sure. In my view, that's the same thing you have to do when you finally begin to grow up. 

When we start to write, fear and uncertainty are more often there than not, like my unusual sleep patterns are when I get into bed. Trying to drown out these things just makes them louder: as the New Age truism goes, "What you resist, persists." But recognition, as opposed to resistance, transforms things into a source of strength. Here's another truism, which many people have said in many ways, but probably no one quite as beautifully as Shakespeare ("Sweet is the use of adversity,") or as clearly as Mark Twain: "Courage is not the absence of fear but the mastery of fear." (I noticed Ariana Huffington used that Twain quote recently on her post, but unattributed. Bad Ariana.)

Mastery of fear, not its absence: that means, inferring from Twain, that fear is present; it's a given. That "Them's is the conditions what prevails," as the late, great Jimmy Durante said, and as my late, great father Maurice used repeat (I probably heard him quote that even more times than I heard him order an extra dry martini with a twist of lemon peel, because I knew him when as a sober guy more years than as a drunk).

(And reading this post over, and seeing how many, many people I have quoted, from so wide a range of times, places, and excellencies, I realize the knack and habit of quoting is another thing I picked up from my father, who was a walking Bartlett's... but he always gave attribution. Listen up, Ariana!)

You're afraid, but but so what? You go on anyway.

That simple? That simple.

Easy? No.

Simple, yes.

When you do this, anxiety is no longer pathologized. It's not something you have to fix any more. Instead, it takes its own true shape, an unpleasant-feeling but ultimately fantastic developmental gift. Each fear offers you the chance to take whatever is the next step in growing up, as a writer and as a person. (I say 'step', because God knows, or at least, I know, for certain, you never reach a point where you can rinse your hands, dry off , and say, "Okay, I'm done!") It's step, step, step; fear, fear, fear, resist, get over the resistance, resist, get over the resistance ... work with one fear, another'll pop up. Endless opportunities! This might sound depressing, but there are few highs greater than doing something that irrationally scares the hell out of you, and getting through it.

The outcome, in worldly terms, might or might not be what you hoped. But the outcome in creating that work which is yourself is always beneficial. (This, by the way, is in part the basic story of the Bhagavad Gita: mastering fear. When Krishna says, "In this yoga, even the abortive effort is not wasted," well, how clear is that?)

And each time, as you see how it works, you fear less; you fear the fear itself less. That's what I mean by "fearless writing": not without fear but because, in understanding it, you fear less.

This is true for almost every writer; indeed, at times, for all writers, and for all people. Gradually, the fears yield, to those willing to contend with them, their strange, wondrous offerings.

And especially so for writers. For, when you give up having to be sure and the myth of perfection and the myth that other people can be made to believe that you're perfect, you bring the whole, imperfect, neurotic, egotistical, lazy, angry, messy, doubt-filled you to the chair in front of your desk. The whole is stronger than the partial. You write better because you bring your whole self, including the parts of your self you've wasted a lot of time trying to ignore, avoid, or vaporize.

This is an act of what Tara Berch calls radical acceptance. In a different way, something Thomas Hardy said also pertains:

“The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.”

My friend, the poet Red Hawk, who teaches English at the University of Arkansas Monticello, really gets this: listen to this poem of his (by which I mean, maybe even read it aloud), from his book The Way of Power, Hohm Press, 1991:

"You Know What You Are, Buddy"

As I am pulling into the gas station
a woman roars out from behind a pump
and cuts right in front of me.
I slam on the brakes, lay on my horn

and she stops just long enough to
lean out her window and scream at me,
You know what you are, buddy.
Yeah.     I do.

I am a sorry little loser who
doesn't know his ass from a gas pump;
I am an arrogant educated skreed who
will show you everything I know for a dollar;

I am a scared tense lonely humbug
willing to sell myself to the first woman
who shows me a grain of kindness;
I am a dazed and hopeless idiot

wondering how I got here and what
I am going to do next; I am a third-rate poet,
a broken and ruined lover of God,
a spiritual derelict hooked on Dharma,

a bum for truth, a pimp
for the teachings of Masters, but
what I want to know is,
how could she tell?

Now there is someone who gets that writing to make yourself look good --- to you or to anyone else ---  Is not where the juice is.  Quite the contrary. The weaknesses, the things that you thought were holding you back, turn out to be shape-shifters, propelling you forward. In the process of bringing your whole self to the page or screen, inevitably (especially and indeed only if you keep writing, pretty much daily, no matter what), ironically you wind up losing yourself in the best possible way. The writing itself becomes fuller, more humanized, stronger, more transparent. It takes its own shape. You become the conduit for it, a conduit that can run far more power without shorting-out because it's not busily blocking itself up saying "Oh, I'm such a lousy, unworthy, incompetent conduit." (Or for that matter, "Oh, what a good conduit I am, congratulations to wonderful me, queen of all conduits.")

So if I don't know what I'm going to write, or if it holds together, or or or ... what's the big deal?

So I'm awake. What's the big deal?

Now, knowing my take on this whole process, and the part sleep has played in it, you will perhaps appreciate the following.

I come into yoga class one morning here in Vermont (actually, right across the Connecticut River, in New Hampshire). It's Sandy Curry's Powerseed class, which is a pretty heavy-duty 1 3/4 hour anusura (vinyasa) class. I love going to it, but, given my sleep stuff, it's really hard sometimes to be there, because I have to leave the house at 8:10, which means getting up at 7:00, and... well, you know the drill. (I love this picture of Vermont, taken by David, along the road to Putney last winter... it really has nothing to do with the paragraph above, except there aren't many pictures in this post and I did mention Vermont, so...)

So I manage to get to class this particular day and it's great, like it always is. I am so tired that at times I'm just almost hanging in the poses as if in a dream state, the fatigue is so huge it's like my mind as shut down and I'm just moving.

I do great in Corpse Pose, the last asana, I can tell you that.

After class, I'm leaving, I hug darling Sandy and we talk a little and I yawn... She says, "Late night?" I  say "Yeah. I think, 2:30, 3:00 a.m. I finally got to bed." Sandy, who is one of those people who (besides being slim as a reed, flexible as a willow, gorgeous, in her mid-sixties, reverent and irreverent in all the right ways, smart, funny and really nice) has the NERVE to get sleepy in the evening automatically and wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning --- Sandy kind of shakes her head. It's not a judgmental shake, mind you, at least, not much; if I had to guess it's more like wonderment , amusement, maybe a touch of sympathy... in words, something like, "What a gift are all these strange people bringing their stuff to class, and Crescent is just... too much."

Robert, fellow student, a friend of both of ours, comes up and joins the conversation, just as I yawn again.

Sandy says to him, by way of explanation, with a slight but fond rolling of the eyes towards me, "She was up until three last night."

Robert says, wagging a finger at me, "Why, you bad girl! Shame on you!"

I say, "Why shame on me?" (My tone is mild, and curious... I've been working on this one awhile and am now wholly undefended about my sleep non-habits).

He says, mock-scoldingly but with a teeny edge, "Staying up so late at night, tch-tch-tch! You know better than that! That's why shame on you! "

I say, "Nope, Robert, no shame. I just... sleep a little differently than a lot of people." 

And I smiled at him, and at Sandy. And I meant both the smile and every word I'd just said.

__________________________

CODA ON WRITING THIS POST: (I feel, since this blog is generally about writing, that I ought to be clear about a little of the process):

I started this a couple of nights ago, and it was one of those no-sleep nights, big time. I planned to say, "I could start at the beginning, with" and tell you about my baby-life, as I more or less did in the draft you finally read.

But I was going to then say, "Or, I could start at the end," and talk about being awake that particular night... all the things I had done, the general buzz of mental and physical activity, writing, having a piece of toast in the middle of the night, watching part of a pretty good movie called "Dopamine", how I was still awake when the sun came up and how unspeakably gorgeous it was, with layers of orange-pink flame-colored streaky clouds licking at  white edged dark clouds, and how I was STILL so awake that I went outside and gardened for an hour, then came back in and worked on the precursor of what you're reading, and then

finally            hit         the wall

showered and went to bed. By then it was maybe 7:30 am: I got up at 11:00, had breakfast, meeped around, was so tired I was just not functional, went back to bed, got up again at 3:00 in the afternoon, worked, swam, ate dinner, watched the rest of the movie, then actually went to bed that night at what's generally considered a reasonable hour. (This is what I mean by "unusual.")

But, I wound up trashing that part of the essay. (I tell you all this, because aspiring writers often don't realize that because something they read sounds natural and effortless, that writing it wasn't necessarily effortless. One of my favorite pieces of my own writing is the second part of the introduction to Passionate Vegetarian,the part about Ned's and my life together. I think it reads conversationally and easily. It's funny, and sad, it's respectful and precise. But it took me eighteen drafts!) (Cover of that book, left. As I always say, "It's amazing what twenty pounds of make-up and a professional photographer can do!" As I rarely say, but often think, 'A cover girl at age 50? WTF?" and "Ohhhh... why couldn't Ned have been alive and gotten to to see this?")

So. I let what I'd written in the middle of the no-sleep night rest a day or two without looking at it. (I had, among other things, income-generating writing work to do). Then, today, after doing some income-producing writing work and coping with a major example of  "the r-word"  (subject for a post in the near-future), I revisited this essay. Cut, changed, did lapidary work. It's now 9:34 PM, on Thursday; I think this go-round I've given it maybe two, three hours, which has passed in a flash (I was astonished when I just now looked at the time). I still need to go back in and stick in all the links and I'll probably edit it a time or two more. I haven't eaten dinner, I haven't worked out (except for 5 token sun salutes when I got up). I'm tempted to just link it all on in right now and be done, but then that could add to another wholly cockamamie night of sleep.

But you know what? That's what I'm going to do.

Not only because I want the satisfaction of completing it, but because I'm a writer with unusual sleep patterns. And because, as my daddy taught me, nothing is wasted on the writer.

(Post-adding the links in. Now 11:05 p.m.)

Goodnight. In whatever form it takes for both of us! 

 

narrative flowers, garden blues (Houseman, Hopkins, on harmony)

The moment: Saturday afternoon, May 7, 2008, 2:11 pm.

The place: a house on the top of a hill, not far from the small town of Saxtons River, Vermont.

The view: a southeast facing window in which a vividly green meadow, exclamation-marked with a stand of tall silver-white birches, is framed first by woods, then sinuous curve after curve of ranged mountains stretching twenty miles away into New Hampshire.  (Yesterday, a day of pleasant, slightly cool drizzle and mist, the meadow was blanketed in white; I could not see even as far as the birches. The view changes with the moment. The picture shows this same view, as taken by David Koff, last fall).

Close up, below me, is the garden in which I have just spent an hour working, sun-hatted and SPF 55'd to a fare-thee-well. I rarely even go outside in full sun 10:30 am and 4:00  pm if I can avoid it, let alone garden at high noon. I'm protective of my skin, probably to the point of fanaticism. But at this time of year, the black flies, no-see'ums and mosquitoes come out ravenous at the hours before dusk, the time I prefer gardening, and they are bloodthirsty. DEET only seems to piss them off, and I think they view the organic stuff, with citronella, cedar, and oil of geranium, as a condiment. So, because the pole beans and swiss chard needed to get in without delay, just for today I conceded defeat to the insects, braving the UV rays instead.(Pictured: a basket of vegetables from my last year's garden, prepared for a friend last fall; this is one reason why gardening is so worth it. The basket, by the way, is one of the old split-oak baskets I brought with me from Arkansas; it transported breakfast to many a Dairy Hollow House guest. Photo, David Koff. )  

Though I went to work in the vegetable garden, the flower beds also called me. As I weeded them, I thought of one of the slow yearly parades I was witnessing: that of the blue flowers.

The first had been the woods-violets I'd transplanted in here and there into the beds, and simultaneous with them, the pulmonaria, lungwort, its blossoms a pale but vivid blue. Both had their moment, their small short bloomings, and have gone now. The foliage remains; the heart shaped violet leaves, the lung-shaped leaves of the pulmonaria, an almost kelly green dotted with tiny specks of white, as if someone had shaken over them a paint-brush dipped in a pale tempera. "Glory be to God for dappled things," wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in the poem "Pied Beauty"; though Hopkin's version of God is not mine, I revel with him in the glory of "all things counter, original, spare, strange; whatever is fickle, freckled..."

Lungworts are small-scaled and give the impression of delicacy, but here at least, they are healthy and vigorous, and mark the precise corner of the house where sun turns to shade. This plant is one I was unfamiliar with in Arkansas, though it may well grow there. ( A quick Internet check and I've learned that it does; in fact, according to the University of Arkansas Agricultural Extension Service, it's even "deer-resistant", something that is a non-issue here but was huge back there, where there were no coyotes or other predators to keep the deer population in check. I had a friend whom, whenever we were out driving back where I used to live, and we'd pass a herd of 15 or 20 deer, grazing fearlessly by the road, would roll down the window and holler at them, "Get a job!")

Anyway, to me, pulmonaria is associated with living in Vermont. This is especially true because I bought this particular plant two years ago, at the annual Putney Public Library perennial sale. Every time I admire or weed around that plant, part what goes through my mind is the unknown book-lover who dug up that particularly vibrant specimen, and brought it to the library parking lot on the allocated day. And there I bought it, probably for slightly above-market price, but gladly so: enriching my garden and the library which has, after all, as its motto says, been "opening minds since 1793!" (exclamation mark theirs).

So: blue flowers. The pulmonaria, come and gone... so too the deep, midnight blue-black of the emerging wild blue cohosh. They're not flowers, true (their flowers are yellow, and come later, long after their foliage has lightened to green), but their initial up-shooting curled, finely cut leaves in the early spring woods are almost otherworldly, as you might expect from a plant with such a fine pedigree as an healing herb. Now the cohosh is larger, and green.

I said goodbye to the last few lilac sprays by the front door today, too, not without sadness. This is not only because I love lilacs, but because who is to say whether I will have the privilege of witnessing them again?  As A.E. Houseman said,

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

I doubtless have far less than fifty springs ahead of me (though maybe not, considering Aunt Dot's longevity). Then, too, this is the lilac bush which had only a few sprays of blossom when I moved here. Three years ago, not really knowing what I was doing, I asked around, read, took the advice I got on faith, took a deep breath, and pruned that poor lilac bush within an inch of its life. It finally rewarded me this year for such brutal treatment with lush, thick, fragrant cascades of bloom on almost every branch. This lilac bush and I have a relationship. And while I don't know anything about feng shui, it has to be superb feng shui to have a gorgeous, fragrant, flower-covered shrub right by the step as you enter the house, even if it's only fragrant and flower-covered two weeks out of the year.

(Thought: perhaps we all need brutal pruning now and then for our ultimate growth. This would explain a lot, wouldn't it?) 

As the lilac blossoms depart, the irises are coming into bloom. I have the tall, old-fashioned ones Aunt Dot left here. They're royal purple, with soft in-curved white throats and those fuzzy, showy, yellow caterpillar-looking things known as  "beards". The iris scent isn't as wholly seductive and enveloping, almost excessively sweet, as that of the lilacs. It's more complex, and subtler. When I inhale an open iris --- you have to get your nose right into it to do this --- the distinctive fragrance is powerfully calming, at least to me. It's also intriguing, because, what is it? How would you describe it? It's familiar and yet not. I'd say the scent is something like a combination of grape soda, lemon and talcum powder, but much more delicious than that sounds. David's nostrils read it as nutmeg.

But there they are, and, being irises, there they very much are: sword-like foliage, soldier-straight stems, those blossoms, larger than my fist and so bold, yet at the same time, in their openness and the tender frill of their petals, so achingly vulnerable. And then, the unopened iris buds, deep purple furled tightly onto themselves, tips boldly, eagerly peering up from their protective green wrapping. Ready, as youth is, to burst.

While the iris blooms display their glorious selves, what may be the most intense, prettiest blue of all is just about to arrive: that of the bachelor buttons (cornflowers). I did buy this perennial plant at a local nursery, so it has less narrative mojo to me than the pulmonaria. But, I first admired it at the Ozark garden of my friend, the herbalist Jim Long of Long Creek Herbs, so I do have some story-connection with it, which (as you no doubt know by now), in my view strengthens any plant's own inherent beauty or utility. The sturdy pot of bachelor buttons I bought did so well that I've divided them two years in a row, and this year, the divisions are coming on like gangbusters. (Picture: me, Jim Long, and a biiiiiig honking poster of The Cornbread Gospels. This was taken in early 2007, probably by David, at the Unitarian Church in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. )

Or more accurately --- what is a "gangbuster" anyway? --- like small cobalt blue fireworks, spread throughout the three different flowerbeds that border the house on the side facing the meadow. I love their color, and that as long as you cut them back, they'll pretty much bloom all summer. I love them in arrangements and bouquets,too. But bachelor buttons have one major drawback: no fragrance.

I was rinsing out the emptied compost bucket with water from the hose when --- but wait! The hose! I have to say something about the hose! It's back in service!  After having been disconnected and drained and lain dormant all winter in the basement!  The very hose itself says Spring! Summer! Change! I am so happy to be using it again! All this is part appreciating the extremity of Vermont's yearly cycle ... Anyway, somewhere in there, I began picturing a bouquet of all the blue flowers: the lilacs and irises, the lungwort, the bachelor buttons, the hydrangeas still to come, the curling blue-black foliage of the blue cohosh. How well they would all look together! I'd put them in the white pitcher with the ribbed sides...

And yet, it's an impossible bouquet, except imaginatively; these blue flowers are simply not in season at the same time.

Their individual transitory natures, their rootedness in a particular moment, makes them more precious, as rarity often does. As we age our appreciation of experiences like brief lilacs, grows greater and more bittersweet: they must go, we know it; therefore, what poignant joy that they have arrived.

(The alternative to this poignant coming and going is something like what we've done to the strawberry. That's a fruit which is extraordinary, simply unbelievable: when eaten in its own time and place, a strawberry is as fresh, local, full of its own essence and juice and flesh and fragrance as anything one puts in one's mouth could possibly be. But it's brief, this perfection. In our greed for experiencing the strawberry beyond its brief natural appearance, what do we do? We buy strawberries grown 1500 miles away. Though red outside, they are white, fibrous and flavorless at the core, because they're usually of varieties selected for their ability to withstand the rigors of travel. They're picked under-ripe, travel thousands of miles in their small individual small plastic suitcases.  Add up the costs: the fertilizers, the underpaid migrant pickers exposed to pesticides, the fossil-fueled tractors and transport, the plastic... all this for the shadow of the ghost of a fruit that bears little resemblance to a true, succulent, wet, red-to-its-heart strawberry. Wouldn't it be better just to wait? To revel in true strawberries intensely and even excessively, but at what is actual strawberry time? ). Picture: my Vermont pals Albert and Phyllis, and Albert's favorite dessert, made on his birthday: fresh strawberry shortcake with Vermont strawberries. A shortcake, to him, belongs on yellow cake, not biscuit. This was taken last summer on the screened porch, by David. I've mentioned Albert here before; he kindly tills my garden for me each year (and not so kindly critiques it and much else, that old smart-ass!).

My bouquet of blue flowers exists only in my mind, as does the impossible dinner that Louis and Elsie Freund attend, along with my father, and Ned, and David, and Chou-Chou, and Shelley, and Aunt Dot and Jim Cherry, and Gaelen and Rich, and Jan Brown and Bill Haymes, Hattie Mae, Tori Taff (pictured... just because I wanted an excuse to see her again and smile; taken by David last December in Nashville Tennesee), KJ and Clary and KJ's new girlfriend... the living and the dead, the loved, each of whom were here or are here for their brief season, seasons which are not simultaneous and can never be, friends and loved ones who, even when living simultaneously, are scattered.

Those most consistently present in our minds and hearts, our beloveds, at least those who still reside at an earthly address, generally come together simultaneously only twice: once when we marry, once at our death. Ideally, we have one wedding and one funeral apiece. One of which we (presumably) aren't exactly present for.

The moment is now 4:14 pm. (Later note, in the interest of full disclosure: it was 4:14 pm when I wrote the first draft of this post... But I came back and messed with and edited it it later, several times; I did not write, link, add photos et al, in a mere two hours and wouldn't want you to think I had.) Though the place and the view are much the same, it is time for me to get a move on. I'm driving South to hear the brilliant James Howard Kunstler, whose writing and thinking I've long admired, speak at Marlboro College's Graduate Center in Brattleboro. He wrote The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century   which I have not yet read, as well as Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's  Man-Made Landscape, which I have, years ago. I loved, loved, loved that book, though it was troubling, as all Kunstler's work is. It kept me going, "Ah-HAH! Now I get it! Oh, yes, of course!" about all kinds of things that had bothered me but which I'd never fully understood in context. And it brought together my own long-term interest in environment and ecology with Ned's work as an historic preservationist with a strong background in urban design and American Studies.

Now, it is not lost on me that it will be a 42-mile round trip, by car, to hear a talk given by someone who understands the automobile, and the creation of the suburbs that went with it, to be more or less spawn of the devil and seed of the eventual downfall of our lifestyle as we know it.

But you know (this might surprise, even shock, you) --- this is not the first inconsistency I've come across in myself and my actions.

That ever happen to you?

blue-ribbon silliness

I'm still going through business cards gathered at April's International Association of Culinary Professionals conference, catching up with what I scribbled on the back of each, reminders of promises made (probably foolishly, but with the best of intentions). If you look at the May 1 post, you'll see that April was a whole month of bebopping above and beyond IACP...which means, a whole lot of cards / promises-to-keep, and the word "Please excuse my taking so long to get back to you" written, in various ways, many times.

One of the emails I finally did tonight was to a woman who arranges judging and special promotions for state fairs around the country. She had wanted to discuss my possible involvement or services (cornbread judge? spokesperson?  I've done/been both. The spokespersonship was for the California Almond Board, back in 1992. More than a few friends saw fit to remind me, "Your first product endorsement is ... a nut!?" One, the herbalist Jim Long, even gave me a homemade certificate to the effect that, appearances to the contrary, "Crescent Dragonwagon A.I.N.T. N.U.T.S."  Jim, by the way, does a weekly blog, Jim Long's Garden Talk. Few are more qualified to so do, for many reasons, including the fact that he's been "gardening since age 3, " as he says, and there's an adorable photo on his blog to prove it).

Sorry. I never met a digression I didn't like.

Anyway, midway through following up with the state fair lady, I suddenly remembered something. One of those memories which flash up, fleshy, funny, full-blown, almost as amusing in the reliving as it was actually living it. 

Back in my former life, I lived in Arkansas. I was an innkeeper, I was married to Ned (now deceased, 7 1/2 years) and I was and did, oh, many other things. It all seems, at times, almost dreamlike to me.

But not entirely dreamlike, mostly thanks to friends, and , strangely, former inn guests. When I was on the recent tour for The Cornbread Gospels, at virtually every stop someone would come up to me and say, "You may not remember me, but my husband and I stayed at Dairy Hollow House with you many, many times, and we always just loved it." And I get emails from former guests periodically: "Brett, the son we conceived at Dairy Hollow House, just turned 21. We live in Montana now, but just had to write you. When we looked for you on the Internet, we discovered that Dairy Hollow House had closed, and were shocked to learn that Ned had lost his life. Even though we haven't seen you for more than 15 years and he passed away years ago, we were so saddened, and send our deepest condolences. Some of the best moments of our lives took place at Dairy Hollow, with you two." Such communications amaze and touch me, because, as I say, otherwise that past is so wholly vanished except in memory. When I hear someone's Dairy Hollow House story, as I listen something like the following goes on my own internal narrative: "See? You weren't making it up, it really was as good as you remember!" Above top, at a December 2007 book-signing, Barnes and Noble, Tulsa, Oklahoma, the audience was full of former DHH guests, among them Norma Banks (light blue blazer) with her husband, Dick. They stayed with us many times. Dick brought me a ziplock of hand-shelled and picked pecans --- shelled that day, so ultra-fresh --- and yes, there were some tears as we hugged and exchanged necessarily brief catch-ups. In the second photo, from the same event, I'm holding up a copy of the original, hard-cover Dairy Hollow House Cookbook, published in 1986: a former guest bought it, an "I was there" souvenir. You can buy it online, in hardcover, used, for fairly big bucks, or in paperback, for $14.95 + S & H, through link above. Pictures were taking by David Koff, the filmmaker who is very much a part of my present-day life.

But, back to blue ribbon silliness.

Well, in my innkeeper days I always meant to enter some of my jams and jellies in the Carroll County Fair. But somehow every year I would get too busy. Getting over to Berryville would just slip past me. Bizarrely, Berryville is one of two county seats in Carroll County --- the other is Eureka Springs --- but Berryville is the one with the fairground.

Finally, one year --- if I had to guess I'd say '89, '90? ---  I remembered at the appropriate time. Darling Hattie Mae, who worked for us then, was going over to Berryville, to Wal-Mart, and offered to drop the jams off at the fair and do the entry forms on my behalf.

Now, in my view, Hattie Mae, a hilariously funny and irreverent woman with quite a few years on me, is an angel of tolerance, intelligence, and organization, disguised in a Southern Baptist polyester package. She was one of the great gifts of my time in Arkansas (she moved there from Jackson, Mississippi). Hattie Mae showed me indelibly the utter folly of typecasting people by appearance and most other common markers. She was and is one of my favorite people. I visited her in Tennessee last fall when I was there on book-tour. We spent a drizzly afternoon walking around the Cheekwood Gardens in Nashville on a chilly, overcast day, sitting on various benches and walking through, touching, and examining various large installation sculptures, mostly just talking. But you know what? Despite the chill, we were warm.  She and David got to meet each other, too. It's always a relief when people you love, people from different phases of your life, turn out to like each other, and they did.  Two pictures from that lovely gray afternoon: Hattie Mae and me, above, and one of one of Cheekwood's more formal areas, a reflecting pool at a somber time of year. Both taken by David.

Anyway, back in the blue ribbon year, Hattie Mae got the jams and jellies entered, and then the weekend rolled around and the fair started in earnest. I hadn't still had a chance to get over there yet and see how my jams had done, but Hattie Mae was in Berryville again and checked.

"You better get over there," she told me.

"Why?" I said, "Did I win a ribbon?" 

She said, "I don't want to give away the surprise, you just get over there."

I was in the kitchen of the restaurant when she told me this, as I remember. I looked up at her, a neat gray-haired lady, in her trademark polyester. We were on opposite sides of the stainless steel serving counter, a restaurant-pan of 24 roast cornish game hens (I remember because 24 hens was what those pans held) between us. Their drumsticks were neatly tied (Ned once referred to them as a chorus line of "can't-can't girls"), and they were attractively glazed with one of those same jams Hattie had entered on my behalf. It was a typically insane Saturday night. I'm sure I was dripping with sweat and my chef's jacket no doubt had smears of chocolate and plum and blood (yes, though I'm a vegetarian, I cooked meat for many years) and other culinary detritus on it.

We looked at each other over the hens. We twinkled, because that's what Hattie Mae and I always did, and do.

"Come on, Hattie, what if I don't make it over there? Just tell me. Please? "   

"All right," she said,  making her mouth pretend-stern. "But you really do need to go for yourself." She paused. "Crescent, every one of your jams won a blue ribbon! Every one!"

Oh BOY I was one and surprised happy girl that night! And Sunday morning, after we got breakfasts out to the inn guests, Ned and I finally found time to go off to Berryville and check it out for ourselves.

Now, unbeknownst to me, there was some ridiculous county-wide political snafu concerning the new fairground and where it was going to be built. I don't remember the particulars, if I ever knew them. But, the Carroll County Fair, that particular year, was not being held at the old fairgrounds. And the new fairgrounds had not yet been constructed.

So, that year's Carroll County  Fair was held way out on someone's farm, out in a pasture.

As Ned and I drove to Berryville, then north, then further north, almost to the Missouri border, then took a left on a dirt road that turned into a cow path and finally slowly bumped our way across cattle-guards and through little dried-up wet-weather washes, I grew more and more dubious. But Hattie Mae had given us the directions. And finally, sure enough, the tents of the temporary fair ground, and the ferris wheel and other midway rides, came into view.

There weren't a whole whole lot of people there.  We found our way to the home ec tent, and sure enough, there were my jams, each with a blue ribbon around its neck. I ought to have been pleased as punch, and I was. Sort of. But... yet... presumably because of the mix-up with the fairgrounds ... not only weren't there a whole whole lot of people there, there weren't all that many entries.

Like, there were maybe only 3 or 4 other entries for each of the kinds of jam I had made and won a blue ribbon for.

As Ned and I walked away from the tent and out into the pasture I said to him, "You know, there being so few entries kinda takes some of the thrill out of winning."

"Well," said Ned thoughtfully, in a helpful tone, "You could say you came in first in a very large field."

(I probably don't need to add, but will anyway, that smart-ass remarks like this are part of what made me love Ned so much and so long, and make me love him still.)

CODA # 1 to the above:

I was talking with an old friend tonight, Michael Avenoso, a fellow part Yankee-part Arkansawyer who is now to all intents and purposes house-bound with advanced Lyme Disease, with which he lives in courage, pissed-off-ness, and wisdom... in short, grace. As well as with an extremely wonderful wife, my friend Jae, a brilliant artist in several media (fabric, acrylic, watercolor) who didn't fully 'own' her gift until later in life, an ardent gardener, an active Unitarian, a terrific cook,  home canner, organizer and... Anyway, even were he not on the long arduous road of illness, Michael has reached the stage in life where he and Jae are getting rid of and selling lots of stuff: a woodstove,  he told me, and twenty acres of woods he used to ramble when he was younger and healthier, and a lot more, things both large and small. We talked about all that some.

Michael said at first it was hard getting rid of stuff and letting go. 

"But then I realized, " he told me, "that there was the stuff, and then there were my stories about the stuff. And that I could give away or sell the stuff, but still keep the stories. The stories were mine whether or not I kept the stuff. That was a big revelation to me."

Perhaps it is correct to say not just that nothing is wasted on the writer, but nothing is wasted on the person who takes note of, and keeps, his or her stories and life-narrative. That these stories, not the  artifacts, are what contain the value. Moreover, as you tell yourself stories about your life and what it means, the stories change, unlike artifacts, because they are alive and dynamic. As you grow you develop new perspectives on what happened and the place it holds in making us who we are now. The stories, not the stuff, contain the value. It's not quite what Jesus meant (as far as I, or any of us, can presume to know what Jesus meant) when he said, "Lay not up your treasures where moth and rust doth corrupt." But it's related. Stuff is just stuff, matter.

(Although: a woodstove? A woodstove's value is clear, not metaphorical, or symbolic, or show-offy: it keeps you warm. Can't get yourself toasty sitting around a narrative, no matter how good, and that's a fact. Though, I guess in a sense you can. Maybe the best for warmth would be a stoked-up woodstove, sitting around it with friends, everyone telling their stories, everyone listening.)

I held the Mother of All Yard Sales when I left Arkansas, in particular the small town in Arkansas I'd lived in for so long (how small was it? 1200 people, none of whom agreed with each other on anything for more than a few minutes at a time). My friend KJ graciously let me hold it in a room at her restaurant, Caribe  (pictured: a corner of gorgeous Caribe, now sadly --- but not sadly for KJ, she's liberated! --- no more; this picture is from when I was there on book tour, in December 2007, and the restaurant was still extant, and David was wholly enchanted with its colors and art work and playfulness). The Mother of All Yard Sales was creepy in a way, like coming to the estate sale of your goods, except you were still alive. I had been part of that town for 33 years and somehow, that day it became evident to me, mostly through what other people said and the feeding frenzy over the possessions I was selling (some of which, I must admit, were pretty cool), that my leaving was  viewed by many as "the end of an era."  Tears were shed: some by me, some by others; some, in both cases, were part of grieving Ned's loss and the changes it had necessitated. Those members of the community who were presumably happy to see me go, and there were a few, stayed away.

How much did I sell at the Mother of All Yard Sales? $6000 worth of stuff in one day.  (Much needed by me at that point, I'll add). And I miss only a few of the things I released: a couple of teapots, a square of patchwork I used to keep on my bureau.

But here's a fact. I did save those blue ribbons. They hang in the closet in what's now my writing room (which was my bedroom when I was a teenager visiting Aunt Dot here; I once got in BIG trouble with my aunt for writing, in this very same closet, in large letters,  in green paint, "The Beatles 4-Ever!" when I was about 14; long since painted over.)  Some of the ribbons have faded to purple, a few maintain their original blue. They have a pinked bottom edge, a folded-over triangular top in which the hang-tag is inserted in a little brass eye. Next comes a round gold something-or-other with visuals that are utterly illegible, but claims itself, in gold, as  "THE SEAL OF THE STATE OF ARKANSAS." It's followed, all in caps, traveling down the ribbon, with these words:

CARROLL
COUNTY
FAIR AND
LIVESTOCK
SHOW
_______
BERRYVILLE
ARKANSAS

Where I once came in first in a very large field.

CODA # TWO to the above:

And here, in Vermont, today, I planted an asparagus bed, in my own very large field, during a light intermittent rain.

I thought about investment, time, money, friendship, of course asparagus... but all that's material for another post.

Playing Scrabble with the dead, feasting at the Brattleboro Farmers Market (with the very much alive)

The other day, Saturday, I'm driving down the unpaved road which leads from from my home at the top of the down to Westminster West Road. I'm with Traca Savadago, my "pan pal" and all-around buddy. She's a friend in the meet and instantly feel you've known each other a long time category, though we've actually only known each other since 2006. Traca lives in from Seattle, where I've visited her the past two springs; now she's come to visit in me here in Vermont. Today we're off to the Brattleboro farmer's market. The market takes place every Saturday, May through October; its atmosphere is like a festival or a fair, as perhaps you'd expect after our long, long winters. 

As we travel down the shady curving canopied tunnel, so green this time of year, we start talking about carbon footprints and "relentless incrementalism." The latter is one of my favorite concepts, one I return to in thought over and over: that small steps, taken incrementally, make a difference in aggregate and over time, individually and collectively. These days, living as far out in the country as I do, I am religious in trying to limit driving. Traca talks about wishing she'd kept her Metro instead of upgrading, as she saw it at the time, to an Accord and "driving around with the trunk full all the time because I now have a trunk." I say, in passing, "Well, of course given how much air travel I've done between now and when The Cornbread Gospels came out, I could not drive the whole rest of the year and I'd still have a carbon footprint the size of a yeti."

And then I pause, having quickly gone somewhere else in thought. I tell her the following story, because. since I trust narrative, I also trust digression, and my friends, fortunately, accept this:

"Ned and I used to play cutthroat Scrabble religiously. We actually kept a running tally in the Official Scrabble Dictionary --- we tracked the scores of individual games, our lifetime wins and losses (at the time he died he came out exactly equal), the bingos we had in individual games... Once I won on the very last turn with a bingo, the word towhee, which is a kind of bird. For weeks afterwards, out of nowhere, Ned would suddenly turn to me with a look of disgust and say 'Towhee!' and shake his head...

"Well, once I played the word 'yeti.' He challenged it, and of course he lost, because it's a real word. So he forfeits a turn, and he's bummed, or mock-bummed. And then, either in the same game or the one following, I had that same combination of letters, so I once more put down Y-E-T-I. And Ned looked at me mournfully and said, 'Yeti again.' "

Traca and I traveled conversationally as we drove the West-West Road through Putney, down 91 and into Brattleboro and to the Farmer's Market. This would be my first visit this year. I always forget how much I love the experience of this particular farmer's market. It's in a tree-covered, park-like area, not a parking lot, and as Traca pointed out, it's both inviting and inclusive. "There are actually places to sit," she says, waving one hand.
"Look, if you buy something to eat there are tables, it's not just, fine, you sit on the curb. And it's so kid-friendly...That sandbox? You would never see that in Seattle." Traca always, and I mean always, has her camera at hand.

She started with the sandbox (left, above), and soon she was finding, and taking, pictures everywhere. Two little girls sitting together on a tree trunk, giggling, wrapped in a a shared sweatshirt. Flats of basil plants, arugula, snapdragons. Farmers, customers, musicians, close-ups of plates of food and bags of homemade granola.

I'd skipped breakfast and Traca had only had a couple of blueberry corn muffins leftover from breakfast yesterday, so we started out by sharing a corn-and-black bean tamale. (As at any market, if you shop while hungry you wind up buying twice as much food). As we sat, picking apart the tamale (a little underdone, but what a wonderful smoky sauce), I caught sight of Andy Reichsman, who sometimes does camera work with my filmmaker boyfriend, David. Andy's also the brother of my friend Judith Reichsman, who teaches Interplay, an improvisation, movement, and storytelling melange I go to most Thursdays. I introduced Traca to Andy, and then we meandered a bit, separately. (Pictured left, dinner at our home about a year ago. Left to right; Andy, his wife, film-editor Kate Purdie on his lap, Kamoji, an old friend of David's, Lisa Merton, a Vermont-based filmmaker, David, with the silver beard, me in the green sweater with Cattywhompus on my lap, and Alan Dater, Lisa's husband. Alan, Lisa, Kamoji, and David have a long and lovely two-degrees-of-separation relationship, involving Taking Root, Alan and Lisa's most recent film, about Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan Nobel-prize-winning environmentalist, and David's 1973 film, White Man's Country).

But back to the Brattleboro Farmer's Market. Though I had intended to purchase vegetables (David was coming in later that night, from L.A., I wanted glorious ingredients on hand), I wound up spending most of my cash, and a little of Traca's besides, on starts for the garden instead. The tomato varieties alone were intoxicating in their names: Mr. Stripey, Brandywine, Rubygold, Aunt Ruby, Boxcar Willie , San Marzano. But I got peppers, too: cayenne, jalapeño, red bell, Thai. And lots of lettuce, five different varieties. And cauliflower, broccoli, and eggplant seedlings (two varieties) as well. Growing lettuces and cabbage family members is a revelation to me, because in Arkansas it was always way too hot; just seeing the small familiar leaf shapes of the tiny cauliflowers-to-be made me happy. Another summer in Vermont, where we don't need air-conditioning! I'm here! And I was: present at the farmer's market, anticipating this year's garden, looking back to last year's. Thinking about how these tiny optimistic seedlings would, presumably, become like the broccoli I kept running out to cut from August through frost last year, and the strange, extraterrestrial-looking Brussels sprouts which got sweeter and sweeter the colder it got until there was a hard freeze (Check the link to see just how odd a stalk of Brussels sprouts is in its manner of growing... but I couldn't resist this picture, taken by David, of Wislawa, the sister of Cattywhompus, above, in last year's garden, in the late fall. She's crouched beneath the leaves of one of the Brussels sprout plants).

As much as I love living in Vermont, there is this major drawback: it is almost too cold here to grow okra. I say 'almost' because know it can be done. My favorite farmstand, Walker's, does sell okra each fall, but they sell it as "an ornamental curiosity." And for 50 cents a pod! I'm an okra girl from way back, and I am determined to grow it here, though you probably have to start the seeds indoors, which I didn't get done this year, so I may not succeed until 2009. And it probably will never thrive as it did in my Arkansas garden, with its spectacular circus-yellow hibiscus-flowers and its pods pointing straight up, little dicks with enthusiastic erections. 50 cents a pod? A curiosity? Puh-lease! Horrifying, if not downright insulting, to me. I may have one foot in the North and one in the South, but I am a founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, after all, and proud of it.

I heard someone call my name, loudly, and looked up from these meditations and general seedling-selection samadhi to see Ami, my friend whom I somehow haven't seen for several months, wearing an orange velvet jacket, her young grandson clinging to one of her ankles. Our hug is long. We have so much to say that we actually say, in words, very little.

I continue buying seedlings greedily from a couple of different farmers (John and Tessa, the folks from Dutton's) who are kind enough to let me leave the flats with them while I go off in search of Traca and more lunch. Traca has fallen into a deep and soulful conversation with an older German artist, whose beautiful silver hair and bangs caught the sunlight. She was wearing what looked like a hand-knit shrug-wrap of a deep rose pink, and carrying a basket of posies, their green leaves silvery as her hair, their flowers as pink as her sweater.  Traca (who took a picture of her basket, left) was getting her story: how she'd come to the U.S. many years ago as a student, married an American she'd met just a few days after she'd arrived in New York. They were still married, 40-some years down the line, twenty of which had been lived in Vermont...  (Traca has the gift of connection big-time; if she was in Tibet and yetis did exist, she would have one telling her his favorite restaurant; she would be asking if he had tasted the yak butter sorbet in that little place in Lhasa; it would turn out the yeti's brother-in-law had worked in the kitchen there.)

Since Traca was still grooving with her new friend, I stood in line for both of us at the Thai foodstall I prefer (there are two at the Brattleboro FM) while she finished up. The one I like is owned by Tuk, the chef at Cafe Lotus. Besides the food at the booth being excellent, Tuk, Pawntip and the third woman usually with them have extraordinary smiles: not just sweet and cheerful like most smiles, but radiant.

As I stood there waiting, the sunlight dappled down through the trees. U felt the heat play on my face,  sometimes shading, sometimes warming it. Ahead of me on line were three girls in their twenties, also deep in conversation. One had long, henna'd hair, a shiny blue-red from which the sun glinted, more colorfully, though no less beautifully, than off that of Traca's silver-haired friend. Another of the three friends had a darling sleepy-eyed baby, quiet, dozing, cradled in a sling made out of a huge fringed orange-and-yellow scarf around her neck.

All around me: people, all ages, all stages. A band with two women vocalists, two guitarists, a banjo player, several  a small self-assured little boy with a toy guitar(Traca later took his picture). "And I'm not gonna let 'em catch me, no, not gonna let 'em catch the midnight rider..." sang the women, a cheerful and harmonic version of the old mournful Allman Brothers song. A slim, lovely woman with dark hair in a self-propelled wheel-chair, buying a Thai chicken skewer and sharing it with her daughter, the child nestling her small head in the mother's lap. The smells: herbs from the farmstands, crepes and curry and African stews (brought by a mother and son from Mali), wood-fired pizzas, all mingling. The sounds: occasionally faint sizzles barely audible against the waves of conversations and greetings. Neighbors hailing each other and hugging. Music, children at play calling to each other, their parents calling to them.

It was life, life, life, its own sweet unfolding self.

Quiet for a moment in the midst of all this, I felt for the wonder and strangeness of being here. This version of life is still new to me, utterly different from what I imagined it would be seven years earlier, when Ned was alive. The twinge and ache of his loss, which so often comes up for me still, was there, of course. But by now it is a mild sadness, an inchoate longing, not the overwhelming grief that was my near-constant companion for so long. These days, certainly that day at the Brattleboro Farmer's Market, sadness resides side by side with joy. (Perhaps having my heart cracked open with his sudden death has, in fact, enlarged it, so that opposites can now both inhabit that beating muscle, clenching and unclenching, peaceably?)

And Ned was in a sense with me --- not in the "he's looking down on you" way at all (I have never felt that) but that he was present in me, because who I am is inseparable from who he was and who I became in those 23 years with him. That I was still amused, all those years later, at the very thought and recall of his expression as he said "Towhee!" back when we played Scrabble. (Pictured above left: Me, Ned, and Z-Cat --- Z-Cat is also deceased, now --- taken in 2000, a couple of days before Ned's death, on the front porch of my old home in Eureka Springs, Arkansas... another life for me. Photo, George West.)

Who are we, then? Future ghosts, enjoying the temporary and uncertain privilege of being embodied? And how is it that on that beautiful day, in the midst of all that presence and abundance, plants and food and people and spring, I could feel loss and longing, yet not be saddened by them... feel, instead, deep joy, amazement, appreciation, wonder?  Contradiction is rich, the discovery I make continually; again and yeti again. Each time, it feels new.

"Now", we're told, is all we have. Undoubtedly true. Yet once we reach the age of experience, memory, and forethought, our "now" is informed by "then" and the knowledge of the brevity of our sojourn here.  Curiously, this feels neither morbid nor depressing; rather, "now" becomes all the more luminous for its transience. As I said in an earlier post about transparency, more light shines in and out.

Traca joined me on the Thai line, and we eventually received two gorgeous plates of Thai food, mine  vegetarian, hers non-v. We were both very happy with the fresh, spicy, herbal, hot flavors that make Thai cuisine absolutely sui generis. (I especially loved an ugly but hauntingly good "tofu salad", crumbly white and brown.) And there was the delectable presence of the no-way-is-it-local coconut in some of the dishes. Though of course it was local, in one sense, because there it was, after all, in Brattleboro, Vermont, cooked and served by Tuk and Pawntip who had somehow --- I don't know now, but am sure  the particulars are fascinating and fraught, as are the stories of all immigrants and exiles --- made their way from Thailand. To right there, right then.

As I had. As Traca had. As David was doing, at that moment, aboard a Southwest Airlines flight from Los Angeles, California, to Hartford, Connecticut. 

As all of have traveled, uniquely and universally, from somewhere to somewhere else.

In the town I used to live in, occasionally I'd see a self-righteous bumper-sticker that infuriated me with its ignorant mean-spiritedness. "All of us here are NOT tourists!" it proclaimed. Well, duh: talk about patently obvious. And so hostile! And ignorant of Economics 101: how come Eureka Springs remained relatively pristine, without a chicken processing-plant and a 24-hour-a-day Wal-Mart SuperCenter like nearby Berryville? Because the appreciation of visitors, i.e., tourism, protected it!

But most of all, that bumper-sticker was dumb. We're human beings. We're here so briefly. We're all tourists, or at best, travelers.

My friend, the musician Bill Haymes, introduced me to a Leonard Cohen song called "Passing Through." 

"Passing through; passing through;
sometimes happy, sometimes blue,
glad that I ran into you.
Tell the people
that you saw me
passing through."

Bill, who is now passing through Paris. If Traca is a relatively new friend, Bill is... well, we've been pals since 1975.  Friends of the finish-each-others-sentences variety. Friends of the sometimes-we-don't-even-need-to-finish, or for-that-matter-even-begin some of those sentences variety. ( Here's a picture of him, taken by David in my kitchen here in Vermont, a few months back. Note the typical quizzical, smart-ass, slightly skeptical expression.) God, I love my friends. Go check out Bill's blog, Your Man in Paris.   

David would arrive safe and sound around 1:00 am that night (technically, the morning of the next day, but it's not morning to me until I get up). Traca was asleep by then and I dozing, but I woke up enough to greet him and be delighted that he was back, fix him a plate of homemade split-pea dahl and some Fair Trade Thai rice of a wild purple color. A dab of yogurt and one of some homemade chutney. And we caught up, and for once left the dishes (a radical break in my household protocol)  and then went upstairs to bed... I had put clean sheets on, the crisp cotton summer linens, as opposed to the warmly napped winter flannels...

That was Saturday. Sunday David gardened, I cooked and did battle with a huge stand of rhubarb, Traca helped with the rhubarb, cooking, compost-taking-out, plus ran out to Saxtons River for sugar and Pam spray. At twilight, the three of us went to a potluck to which I brought the rhubarb crisp and buttermilk ice cream Traca and I had prepared. The buttermilk ice cream, in particular, was very well-received.

"Do you know most of these people?" Traca asked me, gesturing around the gathering. "Nope," I told her, thinking about how in Eureka Springs I would have known every single one of them, and their kids, and their dogs, and their dogs' astrological signs. The fact that you only pass from youth to maturity once, if you're lucky in one place with one person (as I did with Ned, in Eureka Springs) is certainly bittersweet. I am in one way less rooted here. In another, I'm liberated from the corral of expectations, of those who, because they think they know about you, may not in fact know you. (Picture, left, taken by David during the cornbread tour at an event when I was visiting my former home town last December, held at the Old Stone Church , aka the Gavioli Chapel... me with two old friends in Eureka who DO know me; Barbara Kellogg, aka Farletta Farquardt, and darling Debbie Dye, who may know me too well. You can see we're not having much fun.)

Today, Monday, they left for the airport in Hartford, Traca to return to Seattle, David to work in Alexandria, Virginia where he'll be filming until Wednesday, when he'll return to Vermont. (More yeti-sized carbon footprints. But hey, even in An Inconvenient Truth, what was Al Gore doing but going airport to airport with his rollaway bag, poignant, spreading the message? You do the best you can, and something is always better than nothing.)

I sent them off with a breakfast of eggs scrambled with fiddleheads (a basket full of fiddleheads, left, from the farmer's market, snapped by Traca on Saturday), and Parmesan cheese. Since I was inexplicably out of fresh bread, I made a sort of improvised hashed-brown/stove-top stuffing to go with it:  sauteed onion, a fresh tomato this early from Micheal Collin's miraculous Vermont garden (how that guy extends the season is beyond me) with some chunks of some excellent wholegrain-y artisanal bread I had toasted dry and stashed in the freezer).

After they'd left for the airport, I ate the leftovers fiddlehead scrambled and hashed brown-style bread, sitting out on the screen porch (the screen porch is pictured left, but with Very Lemony Cornmeal Poundcake from The Cornbread Gospels, and hot tea, and cosmos from the garden last summer, and blue lustreware inherited from my old, long-deceased Arkansas friend, Virginia Carey, may she rest in peace and feistiness, as she lived. Again, presence and absence, side by side, inextricable. David took this picture). The view from the screen porch spreads out, on a clear day like today, twenty-some miles, clear into New Hampshire. And on days like this morning, so extremely fresh and clear, the air fragranced with the lilac in full bloom, Edna St. Vincent Millay's line echoes in my head: "Inebriate of air am I."

Then, after breakfast, I went out into the bright, now much quieter, morning. I had intended to go back to sleep but the garden and the seedlings were calling. I put eighteen of the assorted lettuce starts I had bought at the farmer's market into the ground, plus seven eggplants. Albert had tilled that garden earlier in the week; David, the day before, had laid out rows and made furrows. And of course Aunt Dot (as taken by David, last fall) --- still in the hospital, but, after a scary downturn, was finally on a liquid diet and tentatively scheduled to return home later this week --- she had had the foresight to buy the farm in the first place.

And I thought then, and think now, that we are always and never alone as we make our way on this spinning green earth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

today is the first day of the rest of my blog: settling in after a month of cornbread travels

It was during the first event of last month's great April book tour boogie (thirteen events! nine cities! One of those cities three times! Renting and a returning a car six times from various airports! Getting off and on an airplane 22 times!) that I realized: hey! I really no-kidding have got to start a blog! The book I was traveling with and about was my latest cookbook, The Cornbread Gospels, which was published on Thanksgiving Day, 2007, by Workman Publishing.

Now, this first event was something of a home-coming, for it brought me back to Little Rock, where I used to live, and where I met my darling late husband, Ned (with whom I spent 23 years; a picture of us taken in August of 2000, three months before he died in a bicycling accident). I  still have many dear friends, some of whom share decades of joint history, in Little Rock; returning is always, like chocolate, rich, dark, sweet, bitter and irresistible. Most of these friends, knew Ned, and knew us as a couple.

A tornado arrived in Little Rock the night after I did. My friend Starr Mitchell hypothesized a connection (harumph). I met Ned in Starr's former home; I was staying in her present home, shared with her husband, George West, when the tornado sirens went off. The three of us, and their younger son, Cane, who is on hiatus from college, alternated between watching the reports of the storm on television, watching it from the upstairs loft, and going out on the porch to watch. The Mitchell-Wests dug out the large closet in Cane's room, the architecturally most secure spot in the house, in case we should need to scurry into it for shelter. Fortunately, we didn't have to, as Scratch, the family cat, had peed in one of its far corners, with lasting results, in the olfactory sense.   

But meteorological events and friendships notwithstanding, what I was really there for the Arkansas Literary Festival, the main fund-raiser for the Arkansas Literacy Council. This was one of the causes close to my heart when I lived back in Arkansas, and for that matter, still (literacy, anywhere, anyhow, always will be).The opening event was a ticketed meet-the-authors thing, buy books, snack, drink, gossip, get books signed, cocktail party-ish. The horribly unflattering picture to the left was taken that night; it's of me and another old friend, Louise Terzia, who works with the aforementioned Starr, at the Historic Arkansas Museum. I'm the red-headed one, but trust me, said photo does neither of us justice. Anyway, the featured drink of the night was a pomegranatini, which I stayed away from (I get looped on two sips of wine, so I never drink at all if I have to be remotely on; besides which, I could just imagine my late father, at times fanatically devoted to "an extra dry martini with a twist of lemon peel", who viewed the addition of an olive, with its noxious brine, as a travesty, going into a horrified rant at the very idea of any kind of a fruit-ini ... if you want to know how serious he was about liquor, until he gave up drinking in late middle age, check his article on absinthe). As to the food, I was delighted to find excellent guacamole, and what was for me a first on a cocktail party buffet: really good from-scratch mashed potatoes, with grated cheese and oddments to sprinkle on them. Of course there was also all the usual meatballs, artichoke-crabmeat dip, etc. But as a vegetarian - hey, those mashed potatoes made me happy. (Speaking of which, here's a very happy mashed potato recipe, which I developed for Relish Magazine some years back; it has marscapone and celery root).

At most such events writers wind up talking quite a bit with other writers. I plunked myself (and my cocktail-sized plate of mashed potatoes) right down next to Suzette Haden Elgin (in Blog-Land she goes by Ozarque). We hadn't visited in some time and we got right to everything important: writing, health, relationships, gossip about mutual friends and not-friends. Because I had been angsting about whether or not to blog, I asked her if she did. At which she lit up, smiled a great big smile, and said yes, and she was finding it amazing and thoroughly enjoyable though a hell of a lot of work. I quizzed her ruthlessly. In essence, she said: "It's time consuming, it's good, you can do it in your pajamas and you don't have to go anywhere, you won't believe how many people read your work, it's fun, your book sales go up, I actually got paid decently for a poem I posted there, it's a constant surprise."  She also told me, "Don't write about religion!" (Which it turns out I manage to have done, in this very first post... Sort of. A bit. Later  on. But.)  Suzette writes sci-fi, and non-fiction (the latter primarily in the field of linguistics --- her Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense is a classic). Neither of these are my genres. But we are both poets as well, and feel comfortable with each other, and are both Arkansas, and Ozark, authors --- though I'm an Arkansas/Ozark author who now lives in Vermont, or perhaps a Vermont author who used to live in Arkansas (the first feels more accurate to me, though).

Anyway, I am back home, in my new-old home, Vermont, after 30 days crammed with traveling (exhausting) and cornbread adventures (energizing). (The house in Vermont is pictured. Unlike the picture of me and Louise, this one is incredibly flattering; it was taken when my aunt, who was more moneyed than I am, owned the place as a summer home, and she really kept it up. It's a bit funkier now, though still an amazing piece of property.) A tsunami of stuff has accumulated in my absence, and it would like some attention. Yet Suzatte's enthusiasm stays with me, as does that of another writer I also queried on the pros and cons of blogging last month: Judy Blume. And so, here I am, commencing to blog. How did this become front-and-center on my To-Do list? (Well, when a list has assort receipts, catch up with emails, pay bills, do laundry, make dentist's appointment - the stuff every human being contends with, and which Starr, many years ago, once referred to in a piece of writing as LPTs, Little Piddling Things - starting a blog looks much more compelling. I realize that "the stuff every human being contends with" presumes that you, dear reader, are in fact a human being, despite the New Yorker cartoon of two dogs hunched over a computer, one gleefully telling the other "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog.").

This last month's goofy narrative will continue over the next few weeks, up to and including the grand finale, The National Cornbread Festival, in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, last weekend (It's always the last full weekend in April, FYI; [icture, left, one of the many food vendors at the Festival. This particular shot taken in 2003, by David Koff: note the blue sky and green mountains).

All told, April was one interesting, story-rich month for me: revisiting these experiences in writing, instead of merely thinking about them, will be pleasurable, a putting things away as important, in its fashion, as unpacking. (Someone, I think W.H. Auden, said famously, "How can I know what I think till I see what I say?").

But, of course, why stop with last month? I've had, and still do, an... interesting life. I vividly remember a telephone conversation with my father, the writer Maurice Zolotow, who I already mentioned vis martinis, and who was, among other things Marilyn Monroe's first biographer. I can still picture the kitchen where I was standing as we talked, me on a wall phone with a curly black cord. I was facing out across a laminate counter, bright orange, looking out through the window behind the counter into our small Atlanta backyard garden, dominated by a larger wisteria. Maurice, in LA, would have been in his small office, one room of his West Hollywood apartment, cluttered with paper and open books and the detritus of a working writer's working life. What I can't remember is what my father asked me that sparked whatever story, also vanished, I told him in response. But I can still hear him saying admiringly, with great relish, his customary over-the-top enthusiasm, and maybe even a little envy, though his own life was far, far from dull:  "By God, Cres! You could live the rest of your life in a nunnery and you'd still have plenty of material to write about!"

I was 29 then. I'm 55 now. So you can imagine.

But we have miles to go before we sleep. I do, anyway.

Which brings to mind the following: when my husband, Ned, was alive, late one night we somehow got into a long, long passionate discussion about how those who follow various religions so often commit atrocities in their name, despite the fact that the doctrines of most such religions at least in part support peace and brotherly/sisterly love. Bear in mind this must have been in, oh, 1990 or 92, way before 9/11. Ned and I discussed Christians. We moved on to Jews. We had just reached Sri Lanka  and the long and terrible civil war essentially between Hindus and Buddhists... I glanced at the clock. "Good Lord, Ned!" I said, startled,  "Do you realize it's way past 2:00 a.m.?" He gazed at me balefully, raised his eyebrows, and sighed. "And Muslims to go before we sleep," he said. (Another picture of Ned, this one when he was very young, before I knew him: as a teenager, throwing pottery. What a sweet, funny, smart good guy he was. )

I guess that story is a long way from cornbread, from being back home in Vermont on  May Day, 2008 ... But you know? Everything's connected, which may be why I chose to put up that picture of beans and cornbread, which are certainly connected on plates around the world. Or maybe I chose it because it was taken by my boyfriend, David Koff. Because though I miss Ned greatly and still, I am living proof that life and love go on in altered form, and that human beings are incredibly resilient. And perhaps, because I do talk about Ned a lot, I didn't want you, unknown reader, to put me into the "grieving widow" file, though there were certainly years when that's exactly where I was.

But not now.

As I was saying: Everything's connected, and nothing is wasted on the writer. I trust digression. I go with it.

Now, thank you: for going with me.