"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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's where I went.

__________________________________

I blame, or credit, Carol Gaddy.

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

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

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

“I don’t drive,” I told Carol.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

And reader, I married him.           

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 2: love/ let sleeping cats tell the truth

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

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

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

2002: at home on the aquifer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step, step, step, step.

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

2008: on loan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I do believe in grace, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

somebody to love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Wislawa Syzmborska:

NOTHING'S A GIFT

 

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

 

 

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

 

"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. 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moraines and morays and morasses and mussels!

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

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

All the crickets and thickets and creepers and creeks!

The beeches and leeches alone could take weeks.

Chinchillas, gorillas, and sarsaparillas ---

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

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

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

Isn't sunset a little too much for two eyes

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

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

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

(translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczack and Clare Cavanagh) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

All right then, this particular fall, 2008.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so peace, of a fashion, is made.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because nothing is wasted on the writer.

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

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

At any rate, something lighter, today.

About gills. Bear with me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the garden.

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

Nevertheless. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I sit. I wait. I shut up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But sometimes the yammering stops itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then we let it out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

PART TWO: the political becomes personal (for me)

Well-orchestrated?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then, there they were.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She called me the day after Ned died.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet.

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

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

A grief far larger than personal was afoot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*******

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

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

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

Late afternoon, Friday, June 27th, 2008.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was an acceptance speech, and more. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pause.

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

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

But it was spirited because we cared so much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Had they even been at the same event we had?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These people are called ... politicians.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the clock is ticking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well-orchestrated?

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

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

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

insomniac lessons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I do say is something like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That simple? That simple.

Easy? No.

Simple, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You Know What You Are, Buddy"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________________________

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

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

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

finally            hit         the wall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That ever happen to you?