"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.

"50 year old shoulder"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I really do. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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.

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?

why every life should have a pugilistic 98-year old in it

Aunt Dot beats the odds again.

Aunt Dot (Dorothy Arnof to the rest of the world except my brother, Stephen) is out of the hospital and back in her apartment on East 57th Street. (If this doesn't sound like stop-the-presses news to you, please go back and read the posts for May 21 and May 19).

Aunt Dot's 98th birthday falls this June 26. She shares it with her slightly younger sister, my mother, Charlotte Zolotow ( according to family lore, when Dorothy, age five, was told she had a new baby sister for her birthday, she said, "But I wanted a bicycle!"). The two sisters, left, in in the 1980's, taken by Ned Shank, my late husband. To my eye, they both look beautiful and tense. I believe this was taken at Lyndhurst, a National Trust property in Westchester, not far from where my mother lives and where my aunt's late boyfriend lived. Aunt Dot and Ned shared interests in history and historic architecture.

But it's not just that Aunt Dot is alive and well and back home, despite her age and a prognosis that looked pretty poor for awhile. It's that, like Frank Sinatra, when she seemingly faced her final curtain, she did it her way.

See, there was the tube.

The emergency room docs at NYU Medical Center had put it through her nose, down her throat and into her stomach for the first few days. It probably saved her life, breaking up an intestinal blockage which had kinked her bowels. But she really didn't like it. The first time around, they had to sedate her, which at her age is high risk, to even get it down.

But, a couple of days later, the minute no one was looking and she was feeling better, she ripped it out.

Over the next few days, four different doctors, each with their own nurses, tried to reinsert the tube. I was there for part of one of these attempts, the one done by Dr. O, an Austrian. At least, I was there until he asked me to leave.

On the one hand, it was awful. Two big young strong strangers on either side of her bed, trying, for reasons she didn't understand, to shove this foreign object down and into her. This would have been uncomfortable and strange for anyone, but no doubt her aged passages were especially small and fragile. They couldn't risk sedating her this time, so they tried to do it by force. There were splatters of blood, and it had to have hurt like hell besides being just overtly unpleasant and scary.

But the thing is: Aunt Dot wasn't afraid. She was pissed, and she was pugilistic. (You can see what a determined person she was --- as well as beautiful ---  even when she was young, like in this picture taken circa 1945, when she was 35 and a textbook editor at Macmillan.)

I watched her fight off Dr. O and his nurse, Michelle. She made fists of her little arthritic hands and struck out at the two giants forcefully, and she called out to me, "Make them stop it, Mama!" (That was when the doctor told me to leave). But in the end she won. The four sets of doctors and her whole "gastro-intestinal medical team" finally decided not to reinsert the tube. So, with "watchful waiting" (and I think a few enemas),  she slowly but surely got better. On her own terms. And was released Friday.

I am proud to have DNA like that.

Aunt Dot's current state of mind is called dementia. This is another thing that I think is pathologized (something is wrong) rather than being viewed as developmental (a normal part of aging, at least for most of us).  Who's to say that our so-called rational view of the world, our linear version of time, is correct, after all? I think of where Aunt Dot is as more of an altered state, one many people actually strive for. It's called "living in the now," and it's the upside to the loss of short-term memory you never see mentioned (at least I never have).

Thus, while she was a thousand percent enraged at Dr. O and Michelle, the minute, no, the second, they gave up trying to force the tube down, Aunt Dot calmed down. Her brow unfurrowed. "Well, that's all right then," she said. She immediately began reading the doctor's name tag, "M-A-R... oh, you're Martin. A-U-S-T... Austria! What are you doing in the United States, Martin?"

But, still, seeing Aunt Dot fight them off... it's as I once remarked to my mother, "No one can accuse you of going gentle in that good night!"

And now Dot is back home. Yay, Dot!

And my home, in Vermont, the farmhouse I live in now and am slowly, slowly purchasing, the place that Aunt Dot summered in for so many years? Here it is. And, below, a photograph taken by David on July 31, 2007, from the front step: a summer view of the vista the house faces, which I'm facing right now from my office. Except the view, splendid as it is, doesn't always have the rainbow...

And where is this home located? The state named the road for her... it's "Arnof Way."

Her way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What actually happened

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

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

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

Belief clapped hands for Tinkerbell,
who did not arrive.

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

The baby falls still.

The baby will fall forever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I saw as her point of view:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She: perfectionist
busy redefining what
perfect is. Trouble.

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

My intentions are
honorable, misguided;
parenthesis (doomed)

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

And this, perhaps about both of us:

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

But I was wrong on this one:

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

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

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

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

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

Calculation

What matters, then? What remains?

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

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

Subtract the water
she taught me to pour around each.

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

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

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

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

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

Subtract the old, old shapes and patterns.

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

Subtract duty, money, obligation, and their grip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such happiness is love and life, imperfect perfection.

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