"Nothing is wasted on the writer."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

cat-shaped pillow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As if there had ever been any doubt.

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

We didn't.

time does not require our noticing it

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

But time passed anyway.

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

What was Aunt Dot was asking, that night?

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

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

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

life in another state altogether; opacity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Redecorate? All this supposing was about redecoration?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Redecorating?

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

How many bridges, I had no idea.

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes, I swear I can still smell the smoke.

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

I used to be an innkeeper.

I used to be a daughter with a living father.

I am neither of these things now.

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

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

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

Which is what I was, and am still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I never stop learning this.

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

recalling the hyphenated life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And long-gone.

procrastination & its creative discontents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"papa-ganda": Maurice & me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotations from Chairman Moe; fierce boilings

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

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

"A writer writes."

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

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

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

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

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

to Crescent Z.
Dragonwagon,

on her 19th birthday -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But who knows what he would have thought or felt?

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

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

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

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

No one escapes such boiling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's where I went.

__________________________________

I blame, or credit, Carol Gaddy.

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

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

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

“I don’t drive,” I told Carol.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

And reader, I married him.           

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 1: love / dead cat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

buffalo girl: adventures in children's book writing & publishing/non-publishing, screwing up, & being inspired by one very fearless child

It's not quite a month now since I came back from Little Rock, Arkansas, where, among other things, I met the Buffalo Girl. I will probably never know her name, but I'll remember her for a long, long time.

I went to Little Rock, this time, for several reasons. As y'all who read this blog regularly know, I now reside in Vermont, but I lived in Arkansas, mostly in the off-the-wall little town of Eureka Springs, for 33 years. But at this point, whether I leave Vermont and arrive in Arkansas, or leave Arkansas to return to Vermont, it feels like home on both ends of the journey.

So what brought me back to Arkansas? First off, I was to address the Arkansas branch of the Young President's Organization. Secondly, I'd lead a Fearless Writing workshop. And third, I'd give two presentations at Historic Arkansas Museum, one to those who work in and with area museums, and one to a group of 80 third-graders, from e-Stem Charter School.

First, just to set the background scene: of this trip: I was three weeks out of arthroscopic shoulder surgery (the necessity for which had become apparent long after I had already made my speaking and teaching commitments, which I was not about to break, being a the-show-must-go-on girl down to the nuclei of my cells). So there I was, wearing a sling, still needing painkillers to sleep partway through the night, but basically boogeying along in game fashion. And why not? Darling David (boyfriend; filmmaker) came with me --- I still couldn't drive, plus he and my agent had conspired and decided I really needed to have some of my talks on film, and DK was going to film them. All this was good enough, but we were ALSO staying at the home of two of my dear, dear long time friends, George West and Starr Mitchell. (Also present in their home was Scratch, George and Starr's very mellow old gray cat, who did everything he could to make us comfortable. Picture: here I am in George and Starr's  guest bedroom, just woken up, snapped by David, slung in the sling, with Scratch cozying up.)

I cannot tell you how much I prefer staying with friends to staying in a hotel. And when those good friends live in a welcoming comfortable home, complete with amiable cat, and when one has the chance for the odd late or early bit of easy, natural, catch-up conversation with either or both of said people, so much the better. In this case, so very much the better: these are two interesting, funny, kind people who are intellectually vibrant, loving, and deeply committed to justice and understanding (to get a sense of this, check this article, which touches heavily on George's work with Central High students and bringing the institution's difficult, meaningful history alive and into a very different present). That they are my loyal long-term friends is my great good fortune. That they loved my late husband, Ned, yet have welcomed David, as well and as compatibly, is almost miraculous.

How, under these benign circumstances, could things not be basically good, even with a shoulder that hurt like hell?

But back to Buffalo Girl, and my talks in Little Rock.

Now, any time I give a talk, anywhere, there's one question that I can be almost certain someone in the audience will ask me, whether that audience consists of YPO members, third graders, museum keepers. Well, actually there are two usual questions: "Is that your real name?" and "What are you working on now?"

A freelance writer's life being inherently unstable and unpredictable, this last can sometimes be a painful one to answer. But this time, thankfully and  happily, after a somewhat difficult and dry spell, I had a nice, gratifying three-fold response. Because, to my own joy and wonderment (for reasons that will become clear) I was working on, and actually under contract for, three new books.

The first of these is a cookbook, The Bean Book (actually a wholly rewritten version of a book I first wrote in 1972). It will be published by Workman later this year or early next year. (Left, you can see some of my hands-on work for The Bean Book.  This is what we had for dinner the night before last; a close-up of a plate of feijoada completa: Brazilian-style black beans over rice, with sliced oranges, cooked greens, and farofa, toasted tapioca flour --- that's the white powder which looks a little like Parmesan, sprinkled on the beans. Molho de vinagrete, a sort of chunky, non-spicy vinaigrette salsa, rounds out the plate. Not pictured: the tiny, beautiful piri-piri --- very red, fiercely hot little peppers on the side). I will just mention here in passing, that, quirkily enough, Little Rock has an extraordinarily good Brazilian restaurant, Cafe Bossa Nova, which had spiked my interest in that particular cuisine. If you happen to be in Little Rock, eat there. But I digress. 

The second book I'm at work on is a new genre for me: how-to/inspirational. It's Fearless Writing, about the writing process as I understand and teach it ... how I infect  (in the positive sense), others with it. This book will be published by Ten Speed Press in 2011. As I mentioned, I was also teaching a workshop on it, while in Little Rock. (Pictured right: most of our wondrous, energetic recent Fearless group in Little Rock, at the end of our time together).

The third book I'm working on is a children's book.

Now it happens that when I was answering the "what are you working on" question at "Ordinary Miraculous", the talk I was giving to the museum folks, I screwed up big-time in the part of my response where I was talking about this children's book, which will be published by Little, Brown (I don't know when yet; they have to decide on an illustrator, and publication date will depend on the illustrator's scheule). 

And of course, because David was getting tape, it's on camera. In that remarkable way the Internet makes possible, I'm going to include a link to a You-Tube clip of this actual hilarious, and completely unintentional, screw-up ... my story, inspirational and nominally informative at the start, eventually going very, very wrong. Watch, please, before we continue, or what happens next will not entirely make sense.

(Have not yet figured out how to "embed" a video here, though I've diligently tried... sorry.)

Okay, by now, hopefully, you have finished laughing at, and with me. 

And now let us fast-forward --- through the YPO talk, Fearless, and "Ordinary Miraculous." Let us come to the morning when I talked to the 80 third-graders from e-Stem (unfortunately, this was the only one of my presentations David did not tape, because by then he was understandably jonesing to be back online and working at his real work, which is not taping his girlfriend giving talks). So while I was with the kids, he was back at George and Starr's, with Scratch, working on his laptop while I did this final talk. It was on a Friday morning; that Friday, in the late afternoon, we'd fly back to Vermont. (Although I wasn't there, obviously, the scene may well have looked like this one George had photographer earlier in the week, with Scratch supervising David at work).

So, back at Historic Arkansas Museum with the e-Stem students, a morning not documented in pictures... so from here on my description will have to suffice.

When the third-graders asked me what I was working on now, I skipped over the cookbook and Fearless Writing and spared them the whole story about the long ten years of non-children's book publication. I just told them that I had just finished writing a children's book.  

     "What's it about?"

I told them, much as in the taped clip above, that a parent was trying to get a wide-awake child to go to sleep. I quoted the same bit of verse, and the same two animals, Antelope and Baby Bison. 

     "What's a bison?"

I started to explain what a bison was, but then asked  "Well, does anyone here know what a bison is?"

A hand waved wildly in the middle of the room. "It's like a buffalo!" said a young man, excited to know.  "Exactly so," I agreed.

     "Does it look like a buffalo? "

There was a large flip chart at the front of the room. Though I am not a visual artist, I might have made a stab at trying to draw one had not my right arm been in a sling.

Now it happened that my friend Mary Springer had driven down from Eureka Springs, the little town in which I'd lived so long, with three other dear pals for dinner the night before (at Cafe Bossa Nova, naturally). They'd stayed over, and we'd spent time that morning, and they were sitting in the back row of the auditorium behind the 80 third-graders.

Mary (pictured left), who is an artist, is also, like me, pretty much always up for anything.

"Mary, " I called to her, "Could you come down and draw a bison for us, please?"

Mary called back, holding one arm up, "Remember I told you last night I had carpal tunnel surgery? I still can't draw either!"

So I looked at the 80 e-Stem third-graders and said, "Can anyone here draw a bison or a buffalo?"

Many hands were waving.

But there was one little girl, right in the center of the front row of the auditorium, who caught my eye. She wasn't waving her hand; she had just shot it up and held it still; she seemed to almost be pulsing with confidence and conviction.  "Come on up,"I said to her.

With great self-possession she rose from her seat, walked right over to the giant flip pad, and picked up a green Sharpie.

And she turned to me, and looked up at me, and, in front of everyone, said --- earnestly,  sincerely, neither whispering nor especially loudly, but in a let's-get-down-to-business tone ---  "Now, what does it look like?"

I was, for a second, speechless. She waited, gazing up expectantly at me, clear-eyed and with complete trust. She demonstrably believed that we were, at this moment, partners. Her belief was numinous: her belief that I had the ability to describe, in words, so accurately what this animal she had never seen looked like that she would easily be able to render it on paper. Her faith in all this seemed absolute and complete. It was faith in both of us, and in our ability to instantly and perfectly collaborate. Faith that moves mountains is one thing; but faith that can draw a bison, never having seen one?

Calm, purposeful, utter fearless, she looked up at me, waiting.

"Well..." I said, "I guess its shape is a little bit like a bull..."

She uncapped the green Sharpie and began to draw. Not perfectly --- this is not a story about her being wildly gifted with natural drawing talent --- but te shape she made was definitely bullish, and drawn swiftly and confidently.

Mary, by way of help, called from the back of the room, "It has a hump."

Immediately the little girl put humps on the bull, two, like a camel.

"Just one hump," I added.

"Oh, now I got it," she said, nodding. Deftly she changed the double green humps into a single hump.

And she did get it, sort of. The four-legged horned green humped barrel-chested bullish-buffalo-bison looked amazingly like what it was supposed to be. It had pretty much the shape of a bison.

She completed the outline, capped the Sharpie, put it down, and turned to go back to her seat.

"Thank you," I said, and everyone, including me, applauded.  

Later Mary said to me, "She really did very well."

"Unbelievably well, "I said, and repeated to Mary what she had said to me. "Now, what does it look like? "

I shook my head in wonder, as I have several times, writing about this interaction, which took place in far less time than it takes to tell it.

As I said at the beginning of this post, it's not quite a month since I've been back from Little Rock. But I remain dazzled by that little girl and what she embodied.

She didn't know better than to suppose she couldn't do it. Or, more truly, she didn't know worse, the worse most of us carry around, the usual fictional parade of bad possibilities, what if this, what if that,  that goes on and on inside our overheated, overactive, fearful brains. That child was heedless of failure. That she might do it wrong in front of a large group, maybe be made fun of, never even crossed her open, fearless small mind.  

"We shall not cease from exploration, " wrote that most unchildlike poet, the cerebral T.S. Eliot, " and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time."

I think that arrival, which is both the beginning and the end, probably looks a lot like the gaze ---  bright eyed, certain, open, ready --- of that little girl.

The Arc of the Moral Universe: Bush, Barack, & the Bend Towards Justice

January 20, 2009: the swearing in of America's 44th president, Barack Obama.

I watched it quietly here in Vermont  ---the first state in the union to declare for Obama back on that glorious election night in November, as most Vermonters will tell you with modest pride. (Quietly, that is, except when singing. Above, standing for The Star-Spangled Banner, facing the television in a small inn. Read on.)

The tone of the day couldn't have been more unlike the deep depression that followed the last two inaugurals for me (in 2004 I actually wore a black armband for several days after the election). And for me personally it couldn't have been more different from the inauguration sixteen years ago (if you want a hint as to why, see Vanity Fair's online "Catching Up with the Clinton Crowd"  a kind of 'where are they now?' update on Friends of Bill... your dragon's on page 13 of the slide show).

Because David and I don't have a TV, we drove to Saxtons River, population 541. We don't actually live in Saxtons River, but our phone number has a Saxtons River exchange, and, at three miles from our hilltop, it's the closest place to go when we run out of milk or need to drop a Netflix at the P.O.

It was also the nearest place to find a TV and a group we could be sure would be congenial. Though we're not habitues, rumor had it that innkeeper Tim Clark of the Inn at Saxtons River was an extremely nice man, said to be most welcoming towards the community. The blackboard set on the downstairs porch backed this up : Join us! it said, WATCH INAUGURATION HERE!

The bar (pictured right), where the TV is, isn't large. By 11:15 the room was full. There, with neighbors I mostly didn't know yet, and my partner of the last seven years, David Koff, I watched. As millions of others watched from their corners of the world, or crowded next to each other in the bone-chilling cold in Washington DC (where I had stood on a far warmer inauguration day in 1993, watching Bill Clinton get sworn in). 

And I had the sense that those great creaking cogs on which this world's better ways rest,  wheels and gears which had rusted and ground to a terrible halt and then slowly reversed over the last eight years, were moving forward again. Moment by moment, word by word, the inauguration lubricated the machinery, and the corrosion fell away. Like many, I wept in wonder.

I wept when Aretha, in her goofy, wonderful hat (which actually has its own fan club on Facebook!), sang.

I wept when the quartet with Yo-Yo Ma  and Itzhak Perlman played. (If you haven't seen In the Fiddler's House, the documentary in which Perlman travels to Poland in search of the roots of klezmer music, please see it now --- it is tragic, triumphant, funny and just so worth seeing).

I wept when Elizabeth Alexander  read her Inaugural Poem, Praise Song for the Day (a lot of mean-spirited criticism is surfacing on the Net about it. People, people! It's almost impossible to write a truly great poem for such an occasion, since as anyone who's actually written poetry knows how much it resists appearing on demand or request for particular occasions; it's a form that is more comfortable germinating itself. What Alexander did with this imperfect source for poetry seems to me remarkable:  uplifting, accessible, appropriate. A fine and cogent post by Sharani, a librarian, and Shri Chinmoy devotee, about the poem and Alexander's other work, is here ). And of course,  I wept, and laughed at the same time, delightedly, through Reverend Lowery's benediction --- "When the red man, can get ahead, man," is just my kind of rhyme.

But most of all, I wept as our now-President Obama spoke. Above, as we saw him on the screen.

"The arc of the moral universe is long ," Martin Luther King, Jr told us just four days before his death in 1968, "but it bends toward justice." Obama, then senator, quoted those prescient words last April, on the 40th anniversary of King's assassination.

On January 20, nine months later, a watching, listening world witnessed that long arc's bend.

King used this phrase many times, including in what would turn out to be the last speech of his life. But during his lifetime, many were not ready or able to hear his words. Even those who did couldn't have imagined the future we glimpsed today. Nor could anyone have imagined how far we still had to go, or the strange twists the road would take, for us to get here. Here being the inauguration of Barack Obama.

This election, more than any other in my lifetime, seems to me to have renewed our contract with hope. It also renews our connection with what President --- yes, President!  --- Obama   called "our better history."

So rich, rounded, resonant and far-reaching was President Obama's speech, one could write an essay on every sentence. I'm sure it will be parsed for meaning, reference, and rhetoric for decades to come. What I want to talk about here is this idea of "better history."

America's history, our history, does contain a better and a worse. We have always lived at the extremes of both.

All of us, individually and as nations, have a best and worst self from which we can, and do, choose to act, in small matters and large. Maybe this is especially true in America, not only because of our position of power, but because we are one of the most deliberately created nations in the world. We can't afford to ignore either our better or worse: we're made up of both, and must learn from both.

But we must choose, ultimately, to emphasize and live by the lights of one or the other.  

By choosing our better history, we chose not the mindless arrogance that allowed colonizers to build America on land already inhabited by its native people. Instead, we chose the thoughtful, idealistic America that existed in direct contradiction to this theft by the Europeans. We chose the America that in its primal document articulated that we "held self-evident" the radical proposition that all are "created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and Happiness."

By choosing our better history, we chose not the America which could articulate such visionary words at the very time it prospered on the commerce, ownership, exploitation and oppression of enslaved human beings, men, women and children kidnapped from their native land and schooled against insurrection by the whip, the brand, and the chain. Instead, we chose the America which later went to war with itself over this fatally flawed inconsistency, paying the most terrible price but thereby bringing itself into alignment with its own ideals and winning freedom --- not only the enslaved but for the enslavers, too. 

By choosing our better history, we chose not the America which ran internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. We chose not the America which ran Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and legitimized torture there and elsewhere. Instead, we chose the America which, with its allies, liberated Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau and Buchenwald. 

By choosing our better history, we made possible this present: where we chose Barack Obama. 

I wept, as perhaps you did, in both joyful and sorrowing disbelief. The joy: amazement,  thankfulness, relief, nascent hope. The sorrow: all it taken to get Barack Obama where he is, and, even more so, to get us, as a country, to where we could put him where he is. 

There are many heroes and heroines, going back as far as this country's memory can hold, whom we might rightfully credit with taking us, step by incremental step, to this day.

But strangely, strangely, I believe, and I want to credit, the one person (save, perhaps, Barack Obama himself) who, though certainly not heroic, did more than anything to get him in office: George W. Bush.

From the moment George W. Bush stole the first election (and we let him! I don't know what we could have done differently, but, still,  we let him!), he presided over the step-by-step dismantling of everything that is good about America, virtually all that belongs on the "best" side of history's ledger. He's left us a disastrous legacy on every front : we're poorer, less free, and more imperiled in a world approaching environmental meltdown, peopled by nations who had begun to hate and feel contempt for us, and rightfully so. 

Yet Bush (albeit with as much ignorance about the consequences of his actions as he has always shown) propelled us forcefully towards where we are today.

See, I think most of us stick to the known, however bad it is, rather than risk change. Everyone likes the outcome of positive change. But that outcome, and that it will be positive, is never certain on the front end. And almost no one likes the process of changing: not only is outcome not a sure thing, but at least temporary destabilization is almost certain. Change asks us to risk chaos and maybe hardship, for an unknown outcome. Better the devil that you know, as the saying goes. Who, for example, would choose the huge disruption of leaving their homes and possessions to become a refugee unless they were quite sure they were about to be slaughtered or flooded? 'Pretty sure' isn't usually enough: as witness those who, rather than disrupt their lives by moving, lose them by murder or drowning. 

Looked at this way, it becomes easier to see why change, even when its the potential pay-off is vast, frightens the wits out of most of us.  Yeah, sure it could be better, we human beings seem to say reflexively, until we are completely backed into a corner --- but it could also be worse. Couldn't it? Much worse? 

Well, George Bush backed us into one hell of a corner. It's hard to imagine anyone who could have done so more impeccably. Consider his perfect storm of characteristics: arrogance, ignorance, carelessness, a heedless and unthinking disregard for any point of view but his own, xenophobia, incompetence, being just plain not-very-bright, and a fatal blindness to the consequences of his actions, for starters. There are plenty of people who have these characteristics, true. But can you think of anyone else who, despite being wholly lacking in any credentials or experience which might befit the nation's highest office was also A) wealthy, B) willing and C) dynastically positioned to become president?

Who else but George Bush could have caused so much suffering, could have tipped the scales so forcefully that even change  ---- chaos, unknown outcome and all --- looked much, much better than status quo? Who else could have caused us to lose so much that we feared that if we did not change course drastically, we might lose everything?

We will be reckoning the cost of George Bush's legacy for a long time. Some of us have already paid with our lives, or the lives of those we loved. Some have paid with their homes, or their once-secure retirements. Our nation's level of debt is a toxic, Katrina-high flood, and only the richest of the rich remain truly dry. Because of the last eight years, our world is less safe --- for Americans or anyone else --- and our water and air more imperiled than in decades.

Yet only a series of crises as deep and prolonged as those George Bush wrought while in office could have forced the nationwide self-confrontation it took to bring us to today. Could anything less have made us grow, and grow up, so profoundly? To overcome such ancient distrust and hatreds that would almost certainly have barred Barack Obama from winning an American presidential election at any other time? 

Because George Bush broke so grossly with our "better history" , instead embracing our worst --- by making us, for instance, a covertly governed nation condoning wire-tapping and torture, mocking science and rationality in the name of God, unloosing witch-hunts or firings of those who disagreed publicly with his and Cheney's regime's decisions, feeding fear, quashing hope,  inflicting blow after blow of profound unfreedom --- by turning his back on our better history so unwaveringly, George Bush finally helped us, at last, to return to it.

With Obama's inauguration,  America finally yanked up hard on the racism that's poisoned our country's roots since its inception. Of course, hatred and racism are not weeded out so with a single yank, no matter how dramatic. Yet, wonder of wonders, when it came down to it, we elected the most qualified person for the job: despite the fact that he happened to be a black man --- more truthfully, a mixed-race man. (Surely most of us over at least 50  are still murmuring to ourselves and each other in wonder, "Did you ever think you'd live to see the day when --- ?" )

When it came down to it, we overcame a campaign of perception, slander, innuendo, and over untruth  to vote as we did. For this most qualified person could easily have been defeated, in less desperate times, simply by having a foreign-sounding last name that is one letter away from being the first name of America's most widely known, hated and feared enemy.

When it came down to it, we also overcame, in our vote, our longtime national suspicion of intelligent, complex thinkers as over-educated, impractical, whiny, politically correct eggheads (remember how recently John Kerry's  "nuanced thinking" was derided?). Instead, when we chose Barack Obama, we chose someone genuinely well-educated, deeply thoughtful, unwilling to pander to us by speaking simplistically or playing to the old prejudices and their false verities.

We chose someone evidently personally developed enough to know that the old them-and-us ways of looking at the world no longer suffice. Someone articulate, smart, and both impassioned and cool headed enough to raise a clarion call to another, radically different way of seeing and living in the world.

I wrote the first draft of this post on the evening of the Inauguration. I noted  "it's late now, though the parties in Washington are still going on. I could go on, too, now  --- there's much more I'd like to say about today. About all it called up for me personally (at Bill Clinton's first presidential inauguration, 16 years ago, I did my share of dancing until my feet hurt at inaugural balls  --- but that's another story). About, also, teaching in Little Rock last week and the wild-ass gorgeous fearless courage of the little girl who offered to draw a bison --- but, that too is another story. I could certainly make all these improbable skeins all wrap together with the inaugural and my thoughts about it (something I love doing as a writer, and have already done in my mind).

"But. It is late, I have a cold and one arm in a sling and a very sore shoulder, plus I'm trying to learn how to write shorter posts."

Now it's the next night. Everything above is still true. Once again my shoulder is screaming in pain at its overuse, and I have let it, again, get shockingly late.  

So I will leave you with this: as I sat in the bar at the inn and watched on the television screen the image of that Army green helicopter holding George and Laura Bush rise above Washington and leave for Andrews Air Force Base, as I breathed out in relief, as millions surely did, also probably shaking their heads as I did mine, at the senseless damage inflicted, the waste, waste, waste... as I did all this, I also found myself thinking, to my own vast surprise, "Thank you.

"You may not know you did it, Mr. Bush. And you certainly didn't intend to do it. You have much, much to be ashamed of and to answer for, and perhaps you'll never do either, or if you'll ever even understand the damage you did, the evil you set loose in the world and why you leave the office disgraced. And no, I do not believe, as you say you do, that history will absolve you.

"But you left us Barack Obama. Thank you. Thank you for this gift."

"50 year old shoulder"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I really do. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

fearless French toast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About softening: bear with me for a second here.

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

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

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

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

And I mean ripping.

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

And here's what Micheal would say.   

"Soften. Soften to my fingers. Soften."

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

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

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

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

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

I say to myself, "Soften."

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it turned out there was a solution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And discovered that my first Fearless student had registered.

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

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

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.