"Nothing is wasted on the writer."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's where I went.

__________________________________

I blame, or credit, Carol Gaddy.

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

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

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

“I don’t drive,” I told Carol.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

And reader, I married him.           

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 2: love/ let sleeping cats tell the truth

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

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

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

2002: at home on the aquifer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step, step, step, step.

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

2008: on loan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I do believe in grace, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

somebody to love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Wislawa Syzmborska:

NOTHING'S A GIFT

 

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

 

 

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

 

Part 1: love / dead cat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PART TWO: the political becomes personal (for me)

Well-orchestrated?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then, there they were.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She called me the day after Ned died.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet.

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

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

A grief far larger than personal was afoot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*******

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

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

insomniac lessons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I do say is something like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That simple? That simple.

Easy? No.

Simple, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You Know What You Are, Buddy"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________________________

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

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

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

finally            hit         the wall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

blue-ribbon silliness

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, back to blue ribbon silliness.

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

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

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

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

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

"Why?" I said, "Did I win a ribbon?" 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CODA # 1 to the above:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CARROLL
COUNTY
FAIR AND
LIVESTOCK
SHOW
_______
BERRYVILLE
ARKANSAS

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

CODA # TWO to the above:

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

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

My boyfriend's (almost) back...

It's 10:57 P.M., Wednesday night. I've been expecting the phone to ring and it does: David. His plane has landed at BDL, the Hartford, Connecticut airport. He's just pulling out of the rental car parking lot. In about two hours, he'll be here.

When David was here last weekend, at one point we were fixing something, or maybe doing summerization (the process by which you repossess the parts of the house and property you necessarily, in a cold climate, cede to winter; for example, the porch on which you store firewood in the winter reverts to its warm-weather life as a screened outdoor dining room). He remarked, shaking his head in mock wonderment, "God, you turn your back for three short months and the whole place falls apart!" I found this hilarious. (Was it was when we were vacuuming up the weird winged bugs that hatch over a two-day period each May and come crawling in droves "like something out of Hitchcock," as he said, from one of the old hand-adzed wooden beams in the bedroom, which, during the rest of the year, are such an attractive architectural feature? Or was it when he came back upstairs from the really scary cellar where he'd gone to reconnect the hoses he'd drained in October and found that the dehumidifier was in urgent need of being turned on? Don't remember.) Picture of us the fall before last, taken by his old pal Lynne Barbee.

But, it's true, he hasn't been here since mid-March, and, stretching it some, that is three months. Then again, I was gone all of April myself, on the last go-round of the book tour of The Cornbread Gospels. During which we did meet up for just under a week in Florida, while I was teaching at The Studios at Key West.

And this was followed by a drive up the Florida Keys Highway (a beautiful 125-some mile drive we had both wanted to make, and soon, because with global warming and the road being right at sea level, who knows how long it's even going to be there?). And then we had a couple of days in Miami together at the ridiculously luxurious, tres pretentious  Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables (the publisher was paying) during which I did a gig at one of the country's best independent bookstores, the glorious Books & Books, where, much to my surprise, I ran into my old friend Lauren Wohl, who I knew from her early days as a publicist at what was then Harper & Row. But she is now, somewhat to her surprise, editor at Roaring Brook Press, and it turns out she spends winters in the area because her husband Cliff works at Books & Books, setting up author and reader programs six months a year (but that's another story, too)...

Anyway, after Florida, David and I went our separate ways. I went on touring (New Orleans, where the conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals was holding its annual meeting, and Bill Haymes and I were performing "Until Just Moistened: A One-Woman Show, with Crumbs", (see picture left, taken by David when we were  rehearsing and fooling around),  Baton Rouge, Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee, Oxford, Mississippi, home of Thacker Mountain Radio, which is the South's answer to Prairie Home Companion, and what a feisty answer it is, too, and then to South Pittsburg, Tennessee, home of the National Cornbread Festival, also another story... actually, each of these stops was and is a story).

Meanwhile, David went off to Denver (film work), Ottawa (film work), and Los Angeles (film work, his other home, and the offices of one of his businesses, Organizing Video Productions).

Then I came back here to settle back into spring, the house, writing, and dealing with piles of mail that had accumulated during the tour. Then, last weekend, David came back here, just for the weekend. Then, he went off to two days of film work in Alexandria, Virginia, and now he's returning for a week or so. Then, for him, another three weeks in California, then he's here pretty much all summer and fall other than a few short trips.

Despite the complications and choreography, our later-in-life relationship is simple at its core. We like, love, respect, and enjoy each other, are both smart and verbal, find the same kind of things funny, are both self-employed in fields that blend the artistic with the purposeful, and both feel that, in the other, we got a pretty damn good deal (despite the respective drawbacks that we could each, certainly, list, if so inclined, which most of the time, thankfully, we're not).

Snapshot of life with DK: It's COLD so last winter I crawl into bed wearing my long fuzzy full-length gray sweatshirt. "What's that?" asks David, slightly irritably; he likes us getting skin-to-skin in bed. "Well, I'm just wearing it until I warm up," I say.  "I'll warm you up," he says, "And what is it?"  "It's a nightgown," I say. "It's more like a night-tent," he says. When I warm up and in a few minutes later pull it off: "In diplomatic circles," he says, "this might be called, de-tente..."

As I've said elsewhere, David and I didn't fall in love... we walked, ambled, into love. This has everything to do with later-in-life stuff. To fall, after all, you have to be pretty unsteady on your feet, easily pushed over, toppled. You have to be not just able, but willing to lose your balance. When we're young we enjoy this lack of volition, this turmoil, the agony-ecstasy compulsion of it; when we "fall" it's as if we have no choice (or responsibility). It just happens. "I couldn't help myself," we say.

But if you''re lucky, you actually grow up as you age. Maturity, whatever one's age, is always optional;  not all of us are willing or able to do it. "Live and learn," as my friend Bill points out in his blog, "Or live and don’t learn, your choice."  But if you do so choose, then, thank God, eventually you become steadier on your feet. I think this is developmental: when you're a baby, you move from crawling to toddling: you're unsteady and you fall over a lot. It's not pathology (something wrong); it's developmental (something right; you're learning to walk). Another picture from the series by Lynne Barbee.

And thus it is that I don't think I even could "fall" in love again, leaving aside the question of if I'd want to. I'm not, developmentally, there any more; I'm in a different place: a good one and one I like (despite far fewer songs written being about it). There's a name for this place, though I don't want to jinx it by saying it, but here goes: balanced. (Balanced? Me? Do I dare to say it?) But I am, knock on wood, pretty steady on my feet most days (leaving aside my totally abnormal sleep patterns and the occasional inability to eat anything less than an entire pint of Ben & Jerry's Coffee Heath Bar Crunch at one sitting).

But generally? Love, and most other things, don't push me over the edge or off-course too much. Even writing all night and thinking, as the sky outside my office window lightens and gets streaky with orange and rose and purple,  A) how gorgeous the sunrise is and B) that it would be nice if sometime I could wake up to it, instead of go to sleep to it, even the immoderation with Ben & Jerry's --- in the larger picture? The picture in which, say, America has now legalized forms of torture outlawed under the Geneva Convention? Well, how can I get too bent about my own minor, harmless eccentricities? Call it self-acceptance, which it probably is; call it, in the largest sense, balance, which it may or may not be. But the fact is, these days, again knock wood, I have feelings but, thank God, they (mostly) don't have me.   

(Do you know where "knock wood" came from? From the pre-Christian Druid days, when the Celts believed that every tree contained a spirit or god within it. When you knocked on wood, thus, you were calling on a power greater than yourself, saying in effect "may it be so," or in the contemporary phrase, "from your lips to God's ears.")

For two weeks in March, after David had gone but before I left for the April book tour, I invited my friends Carol and Zoe to stay with me. Zoe is one of my adopted nieces; she's now quite a bit older than pictured here; she's all of five years old now. C & Z were going off to Thailand for two months (also another story). They'd sublet their home, and due to complicated departure choreography needed a place to stay until they left. My place is big enough and we all adore each other, so, perfect.

Carol asked me, "So do you miss David when he's not here?"

I said, "Not exactly."

She said, "But it's different when he's not here."

I said, "Of course."

She said, "But you don't miss him?"

I said, "Not exactly."

She said, "Are you saying it's better when he's not here?"

"No, no," I said, "I like it when he's here, it's good, I like it a lot. But when he's not here I like it too, it's also good."

She said, "Well, isn't one better than the other?"

I said, "Different. Both good. Both interesting."

She said, "But you like having me and Zoe here."

I said, "Of course."

She said, "And you don't miss us when we're gone?"

I said, "Look, I love you two, I think about you, I'm always happy to see you, but I don't exactly miss you when you're not here. " I thought a little more. "I get sad the day before David leaves, and taking him to the airport is usually quite sad, and one of us usually says, 'You know, this just isn't right,' and the other one agrees... But, pretty much, I drop him at BDL and turn around and by the time I get back home, I'm okay, I'm happy and into my life in that non-living-with-David mode. And then, when he's about to get back, I get happy and excited that he's coming... But I can't say either one is better, exactly. Just different. Both good. And that it changes. It's interesting. It's fun. "

(That being said, of course when David and I are apart there are daily phone calls, emails, etc; we don't just drop off into the ether as far as the other is concerned.)

And now life is about to enter the with-David mode again, briefly, and I am happy. We plan, other than when each of us is working, to just hang out, not going anywhere, catch up. (At least theoretically. His film work and my writing work always seem to find a way to worm themselves in even when we have sworn to have protected time). We'll get the garden in together.  I'm switching from my long-time Arkansas bookkeeper to someone local, and David' ll help me get my new system set up.  We'll maybe go on a good long walk or two, and take turns using the binoculars when there's a wild-life sighting (recently this has included nine baby mallard ducklings, and their parents, known to us as Sir Francis, as in Sir Francis Drake, and his partner, Her Ladyship, on the pond). I'll fix him Indian food, his favorite, at least once.

And we'll spend a lot of time in bed. Neither of us sleep nearly as well, or as much, when separated. (Life, waking life, is very interesting, after all. Where's the motivation to go to sleep, go to bed, without someone interesting in that bed? As long as you're not dog-tired and don't have to be anywhere first thing in the morning, my unconscious seems to tell me, stay up! Write! Clean house!  Read! ) But once David gets here, the need for sleep, for skin- and pheromone-contact, make themselves evident. As an oasis is to a camel that's been out on the desert, so, it seems, is being in bed together and sleeping together.

We also spend a lot of time in bed when we're awake, doing other things. Some which I'm sure you can imagine, and some I doubt you can (unless you are really, really lucky and fairly imaginative and of a basic go-for-it temperament sexually).

But there are also plenty of bed activities when David is here that are neither sleep nor sex. Lots of talking and jiving around. At times he is Lord Windymore and I Mollie O'Titum, from below-stairs, and at other times... Well, this one is at least five or six other stories, all of which involve their own language and frames of reference. Let's face it, you don't, or I don't, hang out with someone for five-plus years, even if you're apart some of that time, unless it's highly amusing. (Unless, I suppose, you're in it for the money, enough to tolerate being with someone who bores you or is unkind or otherwise a jerk. This is a place I have never, ever been, or wanted to be, or been able to imagine wanting to be. There've been well-off guys in my past and not so well-off, and while it's very cool if a boyfriend is more monied than not, this is so far down on my list of considerations as to not even make the list. A partner or partners, including me, can always generate more income if that's what they want: but kindness, intelligence, sexual chemistry, sweetness, the ability to talk in funny voices --- they're either there or not. If they're not; dude, sorry, but you're off my list. Of course you'd also be off my list if you couldn't pay your own way; no matter how charming and amusing you might be, I'm not paying your fare, though I guess it might be conceivable if I were way wealthier than I am.)

Anyway, it'll be good to be with David again.

The other piece of all this is that great love of my life was Ned Shank, to whom I was married for 23 years, with whom I walked through life from age 24 to age 46. Then he died. The road forked; he went one way, out of life as we know it, and I went remained here.

Ned and I started out young, and with the big, hot, some-enchanted-evening falling in love sizzle/ unbalance. We cooled down, as per the common experience, to busyness, respect, and friendship, as in  many long-term relationships. Then, during the famed mid-life crisis (a phrase I loathe because it so trivializes the terror and pain of going through it) , we came that close to splitting up. But we didn't. Even more amazing, we wound up loving each other far more, as adults, in a manner reinvented, renewed, reinvigorated, original, and highly sexual, a way that neither of us could have imagined. 

And then he died.

Even on that surreal night, when the emergency room doctor said, "We lost him," I knew down to the marrow of my bones, that I was so, so, so grateful that we had stayed together, worked it out, fought it out, painfully and miraculously broken the shell of baby falling-in-love-love, grown unsteady, stubby, uncertain wings (they didn't look like wings at the time), and then finally leapt --- and found, instead of plummeting down as we had each feared, that we had burst into the exuberant, extravagant flight that is adult love. For-adults-only love. Hot, precious, fully entered into --- walked into, flown into --- by choice.

Once, as very young adults, we had fallen in love. But at midlife, we arrived in love by a different route: we walked, at times crawled on our hands and knees: by choice, with our eyes open to best and worst about ourselves and each other.

This second period of love was ten thousand times stronger than the first, and the first was pretty durned hot, so believe me when I tell you how lucky we were, and how much we both knew it. Many, many people do split up at the point where Ned and I almost did. But, oh, what at least some of them must miss by giving up too soon! The chance to actually grow up, to accept the uncontrollable imperfections of life and love and relationships, and to love each other anyway ---  that is perhaps one of the three or four greatest wonders of my life. 

If we hadn't done that work, how ever would I survived his loss? Why would I have wanted to love again?

When Ned and I became more intimate than ever through that work we'd done, it was not so much as a couple but as individuals. We became more married (real marriage is not something you do once, but daily, in my view, with each act and each choice). Though this is outside the common paradigm, we got where we did by, and through, becoming more individuals, more ourselves... in that sense, more  separate. (The therapist David Schnarch refers to this as "differentiation." )

And in doing this, becoming more differentiated, each of us, separately but side by side, became lovable, not in the usual sense of that word, but love-able. As in, able to love. As in, able to give and receive love, imperfect though we were (and though I still am). No longer bound and oppressed by the myth of two-becoming-one, we were two. The other, the spouse, was the other, different, separate, fascinating... not a narcissistic extension. We each loved the other as the other.

While I wept and grieved and didn't eat, put one foot after the other and resided in limbo in the years after Ned's death, one piece of it was not only his loss but, "So, is that it? I'm never going to be in Relationship School again? I'm never going to get to learn the kinds of growing up I could only do in that petri dish for spiritual growth called committed relationship?"

It's a cliche to call a death like Ned's "tragic." A "tragic" accident. As if there were any other kind.  What fatal accident isn't "tragic", especially when the person who loses his or her life is not only young, but good, decent, smart, handsome, generous and much loved? And Ned was all of those things, and countless more.

And yet. A combination of physical factors met and happened. An accident is by definition a random event, caused by natural or unnatural forces. Some collisions are inevitable, as accident reconstructionists (there is such a profession, one of the many pieces of information I lived without knowing until Ned''s death). An accident is not a matter of volition or choice. What I'm saying is, is "tragic" the word for an act of physical law? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not.

But "tragedy", it seems to me, may be a word that ought to be reserved for circumstances where there is an element of volition. "Tragedy," it seems to me, is in a sense not something accidental. It's when a flawed human being, flawed as all human beings are, is unable to resist a truly devastatingly bad choice. Tragedy is when we choose to close down, close up, be untruthful (perhaps first and most deeply to ourselves), to reach for the drink after 20 years of sobriety, to live within the lie of self-protection and the illusion of safety, and, when partnered, to amputate portions of ourselves "for the good of the relationship", thereby lending up with less relationship and less self. To collude with the less-developed, bratty, even evil parts of ourselves instead of growing towards whatever is best and highest in us.

Tragedy in the sense I mean it here, thus has to do with choice, with moral and ethical decisions. 

Ned's death was a violent, sudden, non-volition subtraction of the person most dear to me on all God's green earth. All the prayer and positive thinking in the universe could not undo it or change it. But what I faced by myself, as a survivor, was volitional. How would I, how could I, live my life without my beloved partner? I didn't even know what to say when people asked me "How are you?" three months, six months, a year after his death. There was, it seemed to me, no honest reply, and it was not a time when I was capable of feigning politeness. (I ended up saying things like, "I'm riding the waves," or "I'm a piece of kelp in the ocean," or "If I knew how to answer that I would probably be better than I am," or "It changes all the time," or just shrugging and saying nothing)

But I had choices, though it did not seem so to me at the time.

Still, now, all these years later, I know that I did. If I had failed to find ways to create meaning from that loss, if I threw over everything I learned with Ned about becoming (slowly), able to love as an adult, if I had chosen to continue on solo, embittered, and in grief... now that would have been tragic. And that is not the choice, or series of choices, I made, even though I had no idea what I was doing as I inched along.

In this context, after first believing I would never love anyone again, and then having a couple of well-intended but basically disastrous false starts, I met darling David, or Davio McTavio as I sometimes call him (for no good reason). And slowly, slowly, we walked into loving each other. (I met David on the Internet, also another story).

Loving David is entirely different from loving and being loved by Ned. But, and what a long road I traveled to be able to say this, how fortunate am I to have loved and been loved by, two entirely different men, at two wholly different times in life, and to continue the joyful, difficult, and ever-intriguing course of study that is Relationship School! And to do it now knowing very consciously that however much I may be in it for the duration with David, it is still only until the unknown fork in the road, the unforeseen moment when the bell goes off and, "Time's up"!

Can it be that loving this time around is all the more precious for this?

"Let's don't go out this week," David said to me over the phone.

I hear his rental car coming up the road.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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