"Nothing is wasted on the writer."

before you push the envelope, you have to be willing to open it

I was innocently standing at the foot of my hill by the mailbox, flipping through the envelopes, about eight years ago. And there, smack in the middle of the mail, was one from Bank of America, with the word 'statement.' I glared at it.

And heard myself say aloud, snarlingly,  "Goddammit! I thought I was done with you!"

I took the Bank of America envelope home and put it on the marble-topped credenza in the living room. I continued to glare at it each time I passed by.

I didn't open it for at least ten days.




life and debt

Here's why I was so freaked out.

Five years before that envelope arrived (that is, some thirteen years ago as I write this), I bit one of the great American bullets: I got out of credit card debt, including some with Bank of America. With the help of Consumer Credit Counseling Services (CCCS) I paid off $32,000 worth of unsecured debt in five years. 

So. I thought I was done and then --- that envelope. 

Now here's the interesting thing. My reaction to the envelope was not rational. I had paid off my debts. CCCS had confirmed it by phone, mail and email. The B of A card had long since been cut up; I had not used it in years.

But did it dawn on me, as it should have logically, that this envelope could not possibly contain anything scary? Or that Bank of America might have made a mistake?

No. It did not dawn on me.

Here's where I went instead: why on earth is Bank of America harassing me?  (Victimhood.)

Did I do something wrong? (Guilt).

Uh-oh...this could be really bad.  (Fear).

What have I overlooked? (Disgust at my own incompetence).

Do I owe some secret amount of money of which I am unaware and which is about to fall on me and ruin my life? (More fear).

How come I can never get this piece right, when so many other people can, and when I have it together in many other ways? (Bewilderment).

If all those people who look up to me for the ways I do have it together knew about this, they wouldn't be looking up to me... Heck, I don't look up to me." (Shame).

Will I never be free of this? (Hopelessness.)

CCCS is a terrific organization; I recommend them highly. If you have the kind of credit card debt that comes with stomach-roiling wake-up-terrified-at-3:00 a.m. panic, contact your local branch immediately. CCCS's counseling is practical, objective, quantifiable, and effective: CCCS negotiates, strategizes and works with large financial institutions,  mediating on behalf of individuals like me.

But, as the previous litany of screwed-up illogical mental and emotional processes make clear, even when debt is paid, individuals like me still have work to do. And it's not work that CCCS can do.

I kept on not opening that freaking envelope. With every day that passed, I gave it greater power. It sat there on the credenza, giving me a jolt of adrenaline and cortisol whenever I passed.

Because I am a writer and a self-improvement junkie, part of me observed these unpleasant contortions, which also fueled my determination to make an inner and outer life where this would no longer happen.

That's what this story is about: story itself, and money-fear, money-anxiety, money-terror, money-shame, and refusing to open the envelope.

Until you do.

the envelope please

I'm talking, of course, about not only the literal envelope, but the metaphorical one. The one which contains whatever we refuse to look at until not looking becomes more unbearable than looking.

Although one could extrapolate this to countless other areas of life in which we carry envelopes we refuse to open, my main one is of course, finances, and numbers themselves (I was finally officially diagnosed, at age 56, with a learning disability called dyscalculia; my math comprehension stops halfway through fourth-grade level).

Until one is willing to open a metaphorical envelope and examine its contents, there's no shot at understanding, let alone changing, that contents. It's a variation of the New Age truisms: "If you can't feel it, you can't heal it," or "What we resist persists." Put differently, the unopened envelope relates to Jung's  "shadow."

But if one is willing (not ready, please note, just willing; one often begins this work without feeling in the least ready) and one does open the envelope, one starts walking the road to fundamental alteration. It's the legendary single step, the one which begins the journey of a thousand miles. (And it may turn out, when you do actually open the envelope, that it wasn't a thousand miles after all, only ten).

This journey is from where one is (typically fear; actual or perceived insecurity, loss, shame, chaos, in my case around fiscal matters) to outer stability and inner equipoise and peace: slowly, tentatively, finding ways to behave differently. And concomitantly, to feel differently. And: to actually be different. In realms both outer/transactional, and interior/private.

In my case, the outer, transactional realm means understanding and living in traditional fiscal responsibility, harmoniously "meeting obligations", "living within my means"...it meant, for example, the work I did with CCCS. It means opening every literal envelope that pertains to finances. In the interior, private realms, it means gaining insight, looking at what's going on, opening the metaphorical envelope. Why? Because this, combined with the outer actions of the first, will create emotional, psychological, and spiritual clarity and freedom for me around fiscal matters,  as I have done, methodically, with many other areas in my life.

This is my journey.

Now. I must emphasize here that this is not a triumphant before-and-after story. This is a before-and-during story. And it is probably one I will tell in several non-consecutive posts over time because I am still mid-process.

Let me tell you, then, what I learned when I did finally open that Bank of America envelope.

I had a zero balance.

I owed them nothing.

All of that fear and craziness --- that was not out there. It was a story I made up. It was in here (she said, tapping her head.)

the eggs - or lack thereof - in the freelancer's basket

I revisited this recently because, to be frank, I am currently going through a rough time financially. Though I have almost no unsecured debt, my cash flow is undergoing a drought equivalent to California's.

And two envelopes, one from American Express and one from Green Mountain Power, a utility company, lay on my desk unopened for two days. I did not have full-bore craziness as with the Bank of America letter, but there was a frisson. I took note.

Being a full-time freelance writer is challenging even at times of personal as well as general socioeconomic stability, and I did pretty well during those times. But these have not been stable times --- in general terms, not since 2008; in personal terms, well, I'm coming to that.

I sometimes liken freelancing to being a parent bird with a nest full of eggs.

A few of the eggs in a successful freelancer's nest have already hatched, so periodically s/he leaves the nest, locates some worms, and flies back to feed the baby birds (for me, already-published books, which I "feed" by reminding readers they are there, continuing to generate sales).

Most eggs in the nest, however, have not yet hatched. Each egg is vital, yet at a different stage of maturation. Some are lively, wobbling with what is about to happen --- a chick-to-be in there! Though exactly when that chick is going to peck its way out is unknown, and until it's out of the shell, it could always die (in this category would be, say, a completed manuscript that my agent likes but is just starting to submit).

On some of these unhatched eggs there's a vigorous tapping from within the shell, even a hairline fracture, though they're still egg, not baby bird (the contract for the book or magazine article is signed, but the check is not here yet and the company's bookkeeper is on vacation; 17 people have signed up for the workshop but the online seminar booking agency does not send out checks until the 15th).

And then there are eggs which do not yet exhibit so much as a tremble, yet which must be kept warm out of the freelancer's faith, belief, pigheadedness, dogged persistence...all without knowing whether or not they will ever hatch (the manuscript you are working on; the long-shot application for a gig you know thousands others are also applying for).

In case you were thinking of freelancing, in case it's not obvious: you've got to have dedication as well as a mighty big feather-covered ass, to cover that many eggs.

And that's leaving out the all-important eggs you haven't laid yet. Those eggs called 'ideas.'

All this requires being able to switch from right brain (writing) to left (keeping track of cash flow, deadlines, submissions). Thinking in multiple dimensions time- and schedule-wise. Being realistic, yet optimistic; being big-picture, yet compulsively detailed, not just day-to-day but hour to hour. Breaking big projects into daily increments, while staying fluid. Focusing (there may be many eggs, but you pay attention to them one at a time).

You have to be able to have a lot more going on, many more potential maybes, than will pan out.

The last time I figured out the ratio, decades ago, it was something like seven projects in play for each one that actually reached fruition.

You have to find a way to be okay with that.  To calm yourself down enough in the face of the inherent insecurity and unknowability of freelancing, so that you can both create, and keep all those eggs warm.

Do all this, and, if what you're actually offering is good, and you get just a little bit of luck, you can be a successful freelancer. 

It's insanely time-consuming and complex. It's edgy for income-generation (fortunate is the freelancer with family money or a well-off supportive spouse). As my late father, Maurice Zolotow, also a freelance writer, used to say of our profession, "It's a hard way to make an easy living." (And he lived and worked in the golden age of  magazine article writing, in the 1940's and '50's, when he could spend a couple of months on an article and get paid five or six thousand dollars for it --- stories writers now routinely give away as online "content").

I used to say, "Yeah, I get to choose which 70 hours of the week I want to work... But I love what I do, so there isn't that much of a line between work and play for me."

This is what writer Dave Micho calls a two-handed truth: I'm always and never working.

Or at least, that's how it used to be, back before a series of situational wallops took from me two essence-y underlying pieces of successful freelancing --- time and focus --- and blew them all to hell.

welcome to chaos; we hope you'll stay awhile

My mother, the writer Charlotte Zolotow, made the journey from old, to elderly, to very, very old, to death. I accompanied her up to that final border, spending an increasing amount of time with her, from 2010 through 2013.

The week she died, a pipe burst in my home in Vermont, shooting a geyser of hot water for about a week, and destroying a third of my house. Insurance did not begin to cover the cost of repairs.

Three months later, my partner of the previous decade, filmmaker David Koff, who had been battling with depression since 2011, hung himself.

I tell you categorically: no human being can contend with all this and simultaneously be in business as a successful freelance writer.

As I write these words, it is now fifteen months since the last of these three events, David's death, took place. In all, it's been five years since I was able to be fully engaged in my profession. 

To which I am now returning. 

I've had a year of assorting and readjusting (thanks to the life insurance David left me, on which I lived, and for which I am profoundly grateful, sorrowing ever at the circumstances under which he gave it to me; thanks also to the help of friends, my extraordinary family of choice).

The thought of re-entering my professional life fully, reinventing, re-imagining, writing, working, planning, repopulating the nest with eggs, fills me with joy. And terror. I am thrilled and I am panicked.

I am also nearly broke. Do I feel humiliation about this? You bet; though not nearly as much as I did when I tottered into the CCCS office thirteen years ago. For one thing, I am debt-free. Still, in addition to the urgent need for immediate strategic decision-making, there is shame. I'm 62! I should have it together by this time! And of course, fear: you're running on fumes, CD! You can count on part of one hand the money you have for mortgage payments.

Oh, yeah. That again.

As you might expect, given that three tectonic plates shifted, I am a different person than I was back when I was last a freelancer, with different interior terrain.

What you might not expect is that the exterior terrain is also different. I can't just go back to doing what I did, because the environment in which I did it is no more.

The publishing business I grew up in is gone. What remains is in the throes of reinvention; it's the Wild West, full of possibility, potential, somewhat lawless. The Internet, self-publishing, e-readers and amazon are just four of the factors that changed publishing, forever.

Ditto, the other world in which I swim professionally: education, personal development, workshop leading, public speaking. The seismic shifts there are not only Internet-related, but reflect the general economic climate. Budget cuts, income inequality. (When I spoke at a certain educational association twenty years ago, I got $4,000. Last year, I was offered the "opportunity" to speak, to that same group, "for the exposure," for free. Eventually, $250 was offered.)

As JFK pointed out, in Chinese, the word 'crisis' is made up of two characters, one showing danger, the other opportunity. I, and every other writer over the age of, say, 50 (with the exception of the Stephen Kings) must deal with that, or bow out. In Bob Dylan's startlingly prescient words:

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

enveloped again

The other day, as I was working on a piece of the challenging, thrilling business of re-engaging with what I do and how I am going to do it, I had a moment of deja vu with the two envelopes on my desk, not yet opened. I figured the American Express was a please-pay-your-overdue-balance now note (though I was only a couple of days late, so this was puzzling). I figured the other was a plain old bill.

The minute I felt that frisson, you better believe I ripped into those two envelopes.

And here is what I found.

Green Mountain Power informed me I should not pay them this month; I had overpaid them last month.

And American Express informed me that, due to an error in their billing practices on their automatic travel insurance products, I might be eligible for a refund if I cared to request it.

Once again I had told myself an untrue story.

I shook my head. I laughed out loud. I don't exactly believe in "messages from the universe", but there are times when you almost have to. This was one of them.

Here is what I think: there's hope for me yet.

Here is what I think: the need to hear and tell stories is inherent in human beings, and there will always be a place for those of us who can do both, though the means and form by which we do this will change continuously, as they always have.

Here's what I think: fear, and overcoming it, are always part of the process. Of writing. Of loving. Of living. Of any endeavor worth undertaking.

Here's what I think: letters from financial institutions that say 'statement' are simply that. Statements. Neutral information.

Here's what I think: the growth edge is uncomfortable, but energetic, filled with creative tension and possibility, danger inseparable from opportunity. I am willing to reinvent what I do so that it is perfectly in tenor with the times and with those who want and need it. Willing to be a dark-horse candidate for later-life financial success and stability.

Despite, maybe because of, all the things that militate against it.

Here's what I think: I may be close to broke at this moment, but I am not broken. If the loss of my mother, my house, and my partner couldn't do it, well, hah! This is minor!

Here's what I think. I'm willing --- not ready, but willing --- to push every envelope of fear and limitation I've got.

And to do that, I've gotta open them.

Motherless Mother's Days

At the memorial service for the poet Miller Williams, a service held a month ago at the Fayetteville, Arkansas public library, I met his daughter, singer/songwriter/musician Lucinda Williams. It turned out she knew of one of my more obscure and long ago cookbooks, and she began telling me the dishes she made from it… “And those vegetable fritters? I must've made them 100 times." Embarrassingly, I could barely remember those vegetable fritters.

This was after the memorial proper. We were upstairs by then, in a large sunny room, at the sort of improvised reception that is part of these occasions often. We were standing by a table of very nice hors d’oeuvres, catered by Bordolino’s, and we continued talking. Lucinda said to me, “You know what’s strange? You know when I cried? I cried the day my father told me he was through writing poetry, that he could no longer do it. So far I haven’t cried at all since his actual death, but I cried that day.”

I said, “Doesn’t seem strange to me. The day my mother’s caregivers told me she could no longer eat solid food, that they had to purée everything, I went upstairs and cried on and off for hours. Mind you, she didn’t have a problem with it! She didn’t even know she wasn’t getting solid food anymore, she liked the purées, and they were easier for her to swallow. But, all those meals we’d eaten together…”

Lucinda nodded. I took a piece of broccolini, she spread some goat cheese on a cracker. Who knew how long we would be able to write songs, or poems, or eat broccolini? Neither of us, certainly. But that there would be an end point, well, that was clear.

Loss. What are we going to do with it? Because, we’re going to have it, so we might as well think about it. Because the nature of life is, you get given things --- not just objects but people, and not just people but feelings for them, such as love and ambivalence --- you get given things, but only on a temporary basis.

These are not gifts, then, but loans, as another poet, Wislawa Szymborska, writes in one of my favorite of her works.

Our own lives, and the lives of everyone and everything we love: loans, not permanent endowments. No telling when those loans’ll be called in, either, or how.

I can tell you this: I've lost some people I love suddenly – to accident, to suicide, to unlooked-for out-of-the-blue cardiac arrest.

And I've lost other people I love gradually: to old age and decline, a predictable cessation (though never predictable as to the precise timing).

As the one left behind (for now, so far, at least), I can tell you this: gradual is easier for the person left behind, or has been for me. The tears are spread out over a longer time. The process feels natural and more comprehensible. You have some time to get used to it, sort of. The grief is anticipatory, a flowing brook which sometimes swells to a river, but is never, as with sudden death, a tsunami on an ordinary day at the beach, sweeping away within minutes first beach umbrellas, then cabanas, sunbathers, toddlers with pails and shovels --- then everything familiar gone. Oh, I’ll take gradual letting go to sudden desolation every time. Though, as everyone will tell you, “It’s never easy.”

And I can tell you this. Everyone who doesn't die young will someday have a motherless Mother’s Day.

Mothering ... Days

If, that is, you take “mother” to mean your literal embodied mother, the physical being who raised you and who probably (unless you were adopted, or raised by a stepmother) grew you in her own body. That mother, like all of us, arrives, is here for awhile, and leaves.

This is my second motherless Mother’s Day, in this literal sense, and I am off to spend it with a friend whose mother died only last week, making it her first motherless Mothers Day, and, that death being so recent, an especially difficult one.

But I am not a literalist.

What I loved about my mother, the writer Charlotte Zolotow, remains with me forever. In this sense, not the looking-down-from-heaven sense, she is always with me. And what I did not love about her, what was difficult for many of the years of our relationship, though not at the end, is not only forgiven but more than forgiven. It is used, utilized, it has become an inextricable part of what and who I am, and I now view the once-tough parts of our loving with as much gratitude as the tender portions.

Even when my mother was alive, I had problems with Mother’s Day. It seemed to me excessively sentimental and excessively biological. What, after all (unless you have fertility problems) is easier than breeding? Reptiles breed. Cats have kittens. Squirrels have baby squirrels. I can’t enshrine an act of biology in itself as having meaning and love, because only some of those --- by no means all --- who have babies actually love those babies and do right by them.

Some mothers are simply not very interested in their children. Some couldn't care less. Some are interested only in how their offspring reflect on them. Some mothers will always celebrate the mean-spirited son who is an attorney more than the son who is a gentle house-painter, or the son who is a mean-spirited house-painter more than the gentle attorney.

I think meaning and love come, if they do, not with the act of giving birth, but with  the acts, plural and endless of mothering. Of nurturing and nourishing, protecting, encouraging, growing, loving, introducing, educating, listening, “being there” as long and in as many dimensions as possible, and also knowing when to let go and leave alone. Of loving that small, then larger, then eventually adult person who came through your portals as the individual he or she is, separate from your dreams for him or her. Part of a parent's job description, I believe, must be to plan for that job's obsolescence.

And this kind of mothering does not have much to do with biology, a process which goes on more or less on its own (squiggly viable sperm, fertile egg, good timing, contact, bang: the species is reproduced again).

Of course biology gives most parents an attachment to their offspring, but this is not true mothering. This kind of mothering requires choice, an endless series of choices, active participation, judgment calls and compassion without end.

And, in my view, there are three important points about mothering:

1. Everyone and everything needs it, and

2. You don’t have to have given birth to do it. Heck, you don’t even have to be female! And,

3. When it comes to this expanded view, why limit recognition to one day? This is the same aggravation I have about Earth Day: what, do we live on Jupiter the other 364 days of the year? Surely the vastness of what mothering brings deserves more than brunch and a bouquet of flowers, which, however well meant and well-received, is just kind of... perfunctory.

Perhaps one reason I feel this so keenly, one reason sentimental Mother’s Day stuff makes me break out in a rash, is because I cannot participate in the other side of the equation. I did not have children; I was biologically unable (thank you, Dalkon Shield).

Yet: I worked as a visiting writer in the schools for decades; I still do, occasionally. I wrote children’s books; I still do. I am a generous, eccentric, sort of Auntie Mame-ish “Cres-Aunt” to many of my friends’ children. When I was sixteen and living on my own, I took in a street kid named Donald, the young child of feckless hippies --- a perfect example of my view that breeding-is-not-mothering --- and lived with him for eight or nine months (a story told in my novel To Take a Dare).

And in the last decade of my mother’s life (which ended on November 19, 2013, when she was 98 years old and I 60) I spent increasingly large amounts of time with her, and, I believe, mothered her (an extraordinary journey, stories of which I have written both here and on Facebook).

Then there is my work as a small scale environmentalist, my wholly inadequate but persistent attempts to act in a manner which protects and nurtures our planet, so often called Mother Earth (though, if one is going to be parental and anthropomorphic about it, I think Mother-Father Earth would be more accurate --- which dittos my view on God: if He exists as such, surely He is She as much as He; but I digress).

I look at all this and I sometimes, not often, think, reprising Sojourner Truth, “And ain’t I a mother?”

Then I think of the childless women who shaped my life and indulged me in various acts of mothering.

My Aunt Dot, glamorous, generous, proper in an eccentric fashion (I used to say she was the white sheep of the family) who not only took me to the requisite Disneyland, but to plays, the ballet, and the Greek Games at Hunter College.

Miss Kay, the neighbor (a retired teacher) who taught me how to cook and instilled a love of baking that lasts to this day and who was the first person I knew who raised a garden from which you could actually eat (corn on the cob! fresh raspberries!), and with whom I lived when my parents went off to Europe for a month.

Virginia Carey, 76 years old to my 18, my mentor in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, with whom I drank tea in impossibly delicate Japanese china cups (“We’re going to be ladies if it kills us,” she announced to me the first time she put such a cup in front of me, no doubt reading on my face my horror that I might break said cup.)

Elsie Freund, another Eureka Springs mentor, a painter and jewelry designed and peace activist, who taught me, among other things, to, “Stay fluid!” as she once directed me in no uncertain terms, when she saw me crying about her and her husband, the painter and WPA artist Louis Freund, leaving Eureka to move into assisted living.

men, mothering

For that matter, I think of Louis, and my late father, Maurice Zolotow, and my friend George West, and my late extraordinarily sweet husband Ned Shank.

I think of Miller Williams, whose generosity as a person, a writing mentor, and a poet, blessed my life in these three ways, and continues to even though he has vacated the earth. Here is another poem of his, one read aloud at his memorial by another poet, Billy Collins.

When I Am Dead, My Dearest

Sing what you want to sing. Theologize.
Let anyone who wants to lie tell lies.
What will I care, back in the past tense
with no ambition and not a gram of sense,
back where I was before a fear and a wish
joined to form a sort of finless fish
that learned to walk and have lips and smile?
I will go there to wait an endless while,
and neither think that wrong nor wish it right,
more than a rock in darkness hopes for light.
You will say my name, but less with years,
the children less than you and more than theirs.
It's mostly our names, as they fray and thin,
blown on the breaths of aging friends and kin,
that in some tugging moments we may seem
to sleep on a little past the dream.

I think of the present beloved alpha male in my life, who shows astounding patience, gentleness and compassion not only to me but to his four children (two of whom are adults, the other two almost, all of whom adore him) as well as the woman with whom he has shared much of his time, who is losing her life by degrees to a physically and cognitively degenerative disease. He cares for her with the utmost tenderness.

I think most especially and profoundly of my spiritual mentor, who would not care to have his name mentioned (He told me once, though, when I asked how I could go through life and not acknowledge what had so fundamentally been given me, “You may say that there is ... someone.”)

All of these human beings, biologically male, have poured acts of profound nurturing on me. They have, in fact, each in their own way, mothered me.

Cruelty, and its reversal

Mother’s Day, in its insistence on biology and sentiment, leaves out many. It can be a cruel holiday.

Cruel to those who were lucky enough to have mothers who were both biological and nurturing, but who are now dead.

Cruel to those whose mothers were not remotely cut out for the job, and live with this consequences of this. (Like my friend CJ whose mother used CJ when she was a young girl, as bait for her, the mother’s, pedophile boyfriends… Her mother apologized, just once but explicitly, for doing this to CJ. She did this just before her death. Well, at least she did it. But that still leaves CJ with a lot to deal with, as how could it not?).

Cruel to every woman who wants to, but is not able to, have children.

Cruel to those of us who spend much of our lives and energies in what can be called mothering, but are not mothers.

Yet by thinking of and acting on mothering in this largest sense, we can ourselves nurture and heal.

To those whose mothers are no longer in this world, we can say, “I’m sorry,” and “Remember her with me, tell me what you loved about her, and what drove you crazy.” Allow dimension in that remembering; it trumps sentiment (so one-sided, so reductive) every single time.

To those whose mothers were not remotely cut out for the job, and live with the consequences of this, we can also say, “I’m sorry,” and “Remember her with me. Recount the crime, I will not flinch. Tell me what you longed for. Tell me in what ways, if any, you were able to love each other. Tell me what you do with this pain.”

To those whose mothers are not remotely cut out for the job, in present time, we can step up. Can offer what seems to us to need offering: sandwich, camping trip, listening ear, open heart, fold-out couch, lesson in baking or horseback riding. Perhaps --- and I say this with trepidation and ambivalence, but with certainty that sometimes it must be done --- a call to the authorities.

To every woman who wants to, but is not able to, have children, an “I’m sorry.” And, “I’m listening.” No “Have you considered adoption?” (Duh.) No “Well, then God must not have meant for you to have children.” (And how would you know that? Did God text you that information?)

To those of us who spend much of our lives and energies in what can be called mothering, but are not mothers, acknowledgement, perhaps.

I say, nix Mother’s Day. Nix the mother part, and nix the day part.

Love, and live that love, transcending biology.

Nurture, and be nurtured, every day, exchanging the diurnal for the eternal.

Compost, and nurture the earth. Listen to, and feed, not only your children and your friends, but strangers, like the tech support guy in Bangalore helping you with the installation of something or other on your laptop , to whom your kind word, acknowledging him as a fellow human being, may change if not his life than a few hours of it.

Mothering, and being mothered, in this largest sense, assures that not only will we “… in some tugging moments seem / to sleep on a little past the dream” but that, during this brief waking dream called life, we will be more fully awake.

This is the way it works: reminder from a turkey buzzard

This is the way it works.

You return to a town where you used to live.

You go on a short walk, on a street you have walked many times.

You are only stretching your back and legs and getting a few more steps in so your Fitbit will be happy at the end of the day.

You are only walking because it is such a pretty little town. Whenever you return here, you remember why it charmed you, for so many years.



This --- Fitbit, stretch --- is why you are out walking on this unseasonably cold November day.  Yes?

No. While this is true as far as it goes, it does not go all the way. You are walking because you are discombobulated, also. As you walk, you bear down on what this discombobulation is.

You find you are sad. You hang out with this. It's a newish practice for you, to just stay, quietly, with less-than-comfortable emotions. Neither repressing nor indulging these emotions, merely naming, then feeling, watching.

This, you believe, is what adults do. So. You are sad.

It is, after all, November. A month that begins with "No." A month that has your name on it.

A month of short days, and long memory.

The month in which your husband died, fourteen years ago.

The month in which your mother died, one year ago.

The month of your birth. Of your late father’s birth.

The month of Thanksgiving, laden holiday, groaning board of food and recall.

But. Though laden at present, though sad, you are not stopped. No.

Look at this second, for instance. You got up, after all. You decided to move your body through space. You are doing so. On this brief walk. Along this exceptionally interesting, quiet, charming street, once much-loved, still much-loved (though, in your case, with ambivalence).

You stop to admire the Grotto Spring. There has been a cold snap. The two enormous ferns guarding the grotto have turned from bright green to frost-hit gray overnight.



Is this a speeded-up version of what has happened to you?

No. You are not a frost-nipped fern.There is no need to anthropomorphize everything you see. Just because you are watching yourself in a moment where the emotional weather is sadness.

But, like the fern, you are a living creature. You wear corporeal form. As such, you, like the fern, like everything with wings, fronds, feet, scales, fur, claws, skin, like everything ansd everyone made of tissue, of molecules, like every human friend, every enemy, every relative, you have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

So in that sense, yes.

You turn away from Grotto Spring to look in the other direction. This means you are gazing out and across a small wooded valley. Again, this is terrain you once knew well.

Though you no longer live here, you can still be said to know it.

In this part of the world, valleys are called “hollows.” (An 1995-ish era computer store in the area was called "Silicon Hollow.")

The valley you are now looking at is called Dairy Hollow. The last remaining family dairy in this small town was still extant when you moved here as an 18-year-old, in 1971. There, in a small neat farmhouse just up the hill from you, lived a feisty blue-eyed widow named Ethel Rhiel, who milked eight jersey cows by hand twice each day. You loved her, and she was fond of you."I never was what you could call religious," she told you once. "One day when I was a little girl, I told my mother, after we'd heard some fire-and-brimstone preacher, 'I don't believe in hell, because rocks don't burn!' "

It shocks you to realize that Ethel has been gone from Dairy Hollow for at least forty years now.

You have written two books which both used "Dairy Hollow" in their titles. The first (published in 1986) is still going, the second (published in 1992) is long out of print.



You can see that tiny farm, once Ethel's, across the road, down one side of the hollow and up the other, nestled in maybe a mile away by foot (less as the crow flies), in the midst of the late fall colors. Colors that are still present but only barely; now the deciduous trees are mostly brown, against the dark greens of the conifers.

Just down from the old Rhiel place is the small house in which you lived for many years, six of them by yourself, 15 or 20 of them with your late husband.  That house is now owned and lived in, after being renovated extensively and with charm, by an old, dear friend. This is a surprising turn of events, but it is one that leaves you feeling grateful.



So, and you hear yourself think this, much to your surprise. So. You have not lost everything. 

Ah. Now we are getting somewhere. Closer to what underlies this sadness.

You turn over past and present as you look across the hollow. Clearly, it’s not all memory. The physical evidence is irrefutable. Your present-time life and connections still exist, as surely as that little house in which you and Ned once lived and in which Chou-Chou resides now. The steep but not too high mountains, among the oldest ranges on the continent, still exist. This all exists as itself, present time, as does your past association with it, as does love and potentiality, and the future.

All side by side with each other. Along with this heavy sadness, which will not last anything like as long as the mountains.

You wish you could lay the sadness down. But too much experience with grief has taught you that the ability to do this is not within your conscious control.

You edge up to it, and what this sadness is, is grief.

But grief muted. The volume's turned down. Like Arkansas fall foliage in mid-November, this grief's colors are brown and dark gold, more subtle than the compulsive red, orange, yellow of earlier phases.

Still. Grief, in all phases, cannot be laid down or unfelt. Its essence is, it demands you feel it when and in the manner it wants to be felt.

But experience has also taught you that sometimes it --- grief, sadness --- falls away of its own accord.

Usually this falling away, when and if it occurs, happens in a startling moment. You are, unpredictably, taken out of yourself. You are, as C.S. Lewis famously wrote, "surprised by joy." As when obscuring heavy clouds roll away, and the sun, there all along, is suddenly revealed again.

On your way back, walking the familiar street, you glance out again over Dairy Hollow, and you discover that exactly this has happened.

Though it's only perhaps half an hour later, you are struck by how vast and blue the sky is now. Despite the muted trees; despite your gray mood, despite the earlier cloud cover.

And then you see a raptor, riding the thermals. It almost hangs there in the air.

And it happens. You are lifted from your sorrow by this sight, this one sight, the large black bird (probably, unpoetically, a turkey buzzard) against that bluest sky.



In the old days (why do we call those past days "old" when we were young then?), you would simply have stood there, as you are now, mouth half-open, watching and watching, allowing yourself to exult in the way the sun illuminates every pinion feather, the curves of each outstretched wing distinct. Allowing yourself to exult in your heart being lifted despite itself. Knowing life at this moment is granting you reprieve. Re-engaging you. Hooking you back into loving its sweet, complex, terrible, beautiful self.

As you would have known even when young, you have been given a gift.

But it is 2014. You are 61, almost 62 now, not 18. The world has changed; you have changed. You experiencing bird against sky purely, yet also have an I-Phone in your pocket.

You pull off your gloves and hand-warmers, bulky, awkward, warm clothing loaned to you by the friend who now lives in the small white house which used to be yours, and which you can see from where you stand.

In the old/young days, you weren't a picture-taker. What you were, among other things, was stubborn, and you stubbornly believed that to take a photograph took you out of the moment. That it was a trade-off: documentation for transcendenxce. You, smart arrogant pigheaded girl, believed you would and should always choose transcendence.

(That is why there are few pictures of you in your late teens and early twenties, and almost none of your many trips to India, perhaps the most lastingly signifigant journeys of your life. But here is one of the few; you, young you, with your then-young friend Chou-Chou, in 1983; the same woman who now, in 2014, lives across the hollow in the house in which you once lived).



But time, and technology --- the I-Phone itself with its no-tech, no light-meters, uncomplicated necessary adjustments --- has altered that.

As has twelve years of living with and learning from a documentary filmmaker --- the one who committed suicide seven months ago. He was a brilliant photographer, and changed the way you view taking pictures. For him, it was an artistic and meditative act, one of the few practices, for awhile at least, that could lift the depression that afflicted the last four years of his life. That could take him out of his tortured self.

Until it no longer could, and finally nothing else could except the slip-knotted loop of white plastic clothesline rope he choose.

You take the I-Phone out and grasp it with your chilly fingers. You point it towards the sky, being carefully to frame the shot with a fringe of the mountain, and to wait until you think the raptor is in frame. Then you press the white circle on the screen which indicates that you have taken a picture by making a clicking sound.

You take several. You can’t see whether or not you have captured the bird, because the camera makes things much smaller, of course. Also, you don’t have your reading glasses. (You were just going on a walk, for fitness and to lift your blues; why would you have your reading glasses? You weren’t counting on this moment. You weren’t counting on taking any pictures. You weren't counting on the raptor.)

But you figure if you’ve captured it, even as a speck, perhaps you can edit the picture, another task that is now so technologically effortless and unintimidating even non-technological you can do it with ease.

Picture taken, you shove the I-Phone back in your pocket, struggle your very cold fingers back into the thick gloves, walk the short distance back.

But. How different is your mood now!

You marvel at the shift, the rapidity with which it took place. You contemplate this gift.

You think --- being someone who is in constant conversation with herself,  someone who could perhaps be said to be over-analytical philosophically --- “Yeah, but it’s not really a gift.”

This is not an original thought, but one you first heard articulated by your favorite poet, Wislawa Szymborska, in a poem which begins, "Noithing's a gift, it's all on loan."

You thought, when you first read this, and you think now, yes. And you walk back to where you are staying.

Back at your suite, you shrug off layers and feel, atop the mood lift, the animal pleasure of moving from cold to warm, your skin on your cheeks still lively, pinked with cold. You put on water for tea. As you wait for it to boil, you look at and edit the pictures you just took. You are still happy, still amazed to find yourself so.

In one picture, the raptor is visible.

When the tea is brewed, you sit.

You are active on Facebook, which a friend recently described to you with startling acuity as “a cocktail party for introverts.” You take that picture and post it, with the following words.

On a cold cold day, against a blue blue sky, a raptor wheels, high and far away, sunlight catching its wings as it caught the air currents.

And I, on Spring Street, just across from the Grotto Spring, looking up at the sky and out into the valley that is Dairy Hollow, caught it, as my own breath caught.

Winter is eating the last of fall. The colors, though there's still a little warm to them, are giving way as each thing – each season, each bird, each life, each day – gives way to the next which follows. So much beauty catches us, but we don't get to keep it. Ever.

But what a loan it is.

Later that night, you see that more than 50 people have “liked” this post and picture, and some have left generous comments.

You reread the post.

You think, “This is almost a poem.”

And, though you have surely written thousands of Facebook posts, you do something you have never done before: you copy this Facebook post and paste it into Word, and begin to reconfigure it into something more intentional and less offhand: a poem.

You are not at all sure this poem is any good --- perhaps the original post was better? --- but experience has taught you that this doesn’t matter.

And the absorption in doing this work again gives you lift-off, a second time, by taking you out of yourself. In a wholly different manner than that conferred on you by the grace of the glimpsed turkey buzzard itself. But the freedom of absorption in something beyond thought --- that is the skein of breathing room and spaciousness that both the turkey vulture and writring the poem conferred on you.

Later, on another walk --- this time up through the woods to the elegant old stone pile of a hotel that, by coincidence, bears the same name as you do --- you think about the all this.



The purity of the original sighting.

Documenting it with the camera on the phone, which, unlike your early presuppositions, did not take you out of the moment but became part of it, perhaps even extending that transcendent sense. You contemplate the ease of a phone-camera today, decide that all the futzing around with F-stops and light-meters spinning dials and having to stay still and numerical decision-making that would, indeed, have taken you out of the moment. 

You contemplate that great phonemenon, hated by many but unmitigatedly loved by you, of Facebook, a modality of communication, to you in effect the contemporary version of sitting around the campfire or water-hole, which would have been utterly incomprehensible a few years back.

You think about how Facebook has altered your life, allowing you, the world’s most outgoing introvert, to connect in a fundamental, substantive way with many actual friends, as well as people who have become friends, not just “Facebook friends.”  And to interact, in a way that is comfortable and natural to you, that allows for two needs that had often, previously been in conflict in your life --- the need for solitude, and the need for vibrant, substantive connection.

Facebook fills you with wonder.

The whole turn-around of the day fills you with wonder.

You ask yourself: so, did technology --- the ease of the I-Phone camera, Facebook --- alter the process?

You decide: I will write a blog post about this.

Because nothing, no piece of this, “this”, finally, being life itself, is wasted on the writer.

On a cold cold day,
in a blue blue sky,
a raptor wheels,
way up and high

sunlight caught its wings
each pinion glowing gold
it rode freeways, warm air:
I don’t know how it knows
yet recognize this thermal
knowledge to be old

a hanging check of movement, black
and still, held with purpose
and such strength,: yet ease and glide
effortless effort, a silhouette of will
I’m breathless at its ride

It’s almost dusk,
and winter’s eating fall
what color’s left to trees, though burnished still
is muted, almost bare.

Night follows day,
each now proceeds a next
each season, bird and life give way;
and if you say, “Not fair, I want to keep,”
you have misread the text.

It catches us, but we cannot catch it
we’re part; but on our own
The arrogance, to think all this a gift; it isn’t
But oh dear fellow earthbound friend,
how generous a loan.

 

 

My father, the stripper's press agent

After the Los Angeles funeral of my late father, Maurice Zolotow, a well-dressed, chic, trim woman came up to me and extended her hand. She had excellent posture, and her hair --- a jet-black that looked neither harsh nor unnatural --- was well-styled in a short, flattering, expensive cut. Her age was hard to guess (I figured out later that she was 78 at the time). 

"I'm Margie Ferraro, I used to be Margie Hart," she said. "Your father used to... represent me."

I shook her hand. I thanked her for coming.

I didn't take it, or her, in fully. So many people I didn't know were introducing themselves to me, and I was dazed. My father's death, though he was 77, had been sudden. I missed him fiercely. I was focused on giving him a good send-off. All of this converged, making the whole surreal to me, as memorials often feel to mourners closest to the deceased.

And at that point I hadn't seen the video yet... the one I found going through his apartment. 

It was of a talk he gave at Mills College, in Oakland, California, around 1990, titled "The Agony & Ecstacy of Being a Freelance Writer." In it, essentially, he riffs, free-form, no notes, on his life in writing professionally over a fifty year period. He does this for about 30 highly entertaining minutes.

He starts in fourth grade: "Our teacher told us to write about a pet. We didn't have a pet, so I made up a dog. I was dipping my pen in... only people who are very, very old, will remember dippping the pen in the ink to write. And the class stops, and I'm still writing... And my teacher picks up my pages and looks at them... I thought I was going to get in trouble for lying. She says, 'You wrote this.' I nod. She says, 'You're a writer.' " In the video Maurice gives an exaggerated shrug. "That's it. My destiny! I never had to see a guidance counselor... my vocation was just thrust upon me."

In his talk, he gets to an early job, being a press agent. "And every time I got a few dollars together I'd quit to be a writer... And I had one client, the stripper, Margie Hart, the famous ecdysiast, now she's married to Councilman Ferraro in Los Angeles. And she said, 'Look, why don't you give up your other clients and just work for me? I'll pay you what the agency's paying you, and you can have more time to write...' " Maurice, in the video, raises his eyebrows suggestively here, and says, "I think she may have had other designs, but..."

I never saw Margie Hart Ferraro again, only that one time, at the memorial. I looked her up on Wikipedia just now, and discovered she died in 2000.

Now, it is January, 2014. I am going through the papers of my late mother, the writer Charlotte Zolotow. She died on November 19, 2013, at 98. I did this going-through-papers, in a more cursory fashion, with Maurice's, 23 years ago.

By then, Maurice and Charlotte had been divorced 22 years, about 2/3 of the length of their 33-year marriage. So most of his papers were in Los Angeles, where he'd moved to after she'd initiated the break-up in 1969. Yet, they had remained in contact, eventually amicable, and never going long without him proposing remarriage to her, often, throughout those 22 post-divorce years. 

So it's probably not surprising that among Charlotte's papers, now, there turn out to be several boxes of his, from the very earliest days of their marriage.  

Sooner or later, most adult children go through the objects left behind by their deceased parents. Few find it easy. Most find it sad. Almost all run into unanswerable questions, both immediate: should I save this or throw it out, and elegiac: why didn't I ask her/him about..." Most make discoveries, sometimes delightful, some discomfitting.

In this, I am no different from any adult child who undertakes this task. But because my parents were, in their way, each connective tissue in a larger cultural story --- writing, publishing, in what many consider the respective Golden Ages of both children's books and magazines in America, and acted and moved in concert with many well-known and not so well-known public figures --- my decison-making has another element.

What, of the letters, scrapbooks, photographs, manucripts, contracts, should be kept? (Almost everything). Where should it eventually be housed? (Don't know yet.) How should it be organized? (Also don't know yet).

But every so often I find something that makes me whoop with surprise.


Like finally finding --- through an article Maurice wrote (clipping only; no date, and no title of magazine; maybe Collier's, maybe the Saturday Evening Post, maybe the early '30's?)  --- the young Margie Hart, the "stripteuse, " as he described her, "generally agreed to be one of the best undressed women in the United States, or for that matter, anywhere else. "

Our parents, the first people we come to know, who shape us when we are the tenderest of clay --- can we ever, figuratively, undress them? Say truly what lies beneath them, what motivated them, what they meant, what happened?

We cannot, as death never fails to remind us. Being a child of, just like being a parent of, even being a husband or wife of, is to know that you can never fully know or be known by another human being. That we are all, finally, mysterious and "other" to others, even, perhaps especially, to those who love us best, and whom we love. Even the most transparent and truthful among us is filled with secrets. Even when we open one secret, we find another.

Is it sad, the immutable solo act that is each human being, no matter how well-integrated within him- or herself, is at the same time compartmentalized?

Yes, perhaps.

Is it interesting?

Oh yes. And, I think --- at this moment, at least --- that perhaps this interestingness is even larger than the sadness. Perhaps it leads us to never take the "other", whoever he or she is, for granted, as a known quantity.


As I, a writer, wander through the mysterious, fascinating, faceted lives of my parents as documented in all these thousands of pieces of paper, and as I live (and write) my own life, I again think, feel, believe --- even though, as with all I look through, I have an infinity of unanswered questions  --- nothing is wasted.

Glad to have met you again today, Margie.

Click to see that video of Maurice...

Charlotte Zolotow's Fierce Truthtelling: 'always' is continguous to 'never'

It's been snowing all day. The house at 29 Elm Place, where I grew up, will be sold in a month or two. It's the house in which my mother, the writer Charlotte Zolotow, quietly died 24 days ago. I am here going through her papers. This is a job which could, and in some ways will, take me the rest of my life. But I'm working hard to make a solid start in six focused weeks.

It is very quiet here.



My friend Susan Whelan, who lived (with Rick and the kids) just across the street from Charlotte for many years, wrote me on Facebook tonight: "So I was just thinking, as it snows, about you and how your first experience of snow happened just where you are right now. Have yourself a magic moment. We know your poet mother showed you that first snow."



Tonight I am recalling a snow moment with my "poet mother." (Above, a portrait of her taken about five years before I was born, for the author's bio flap of But Not Billy, Charlotte's second published book, brought out in 1947).

I don't think this snow moment was the  "the first." But it's vivid. It's remained with me almost 55 years. "It", the memory, has remained; my mother, of course, has not.  Her death is recent enough so I keep saying the words, edging up, then away, then back, to "never again" and "over" and "final." ( Yet, in all these papers I am going through, which span 93 of her 98 years on earth yet exist simultaenously, I am discovering that  'always' is contiguous to 'never.')

Like everyone of a certain age, I get it. This is how it goes.

Like everyone who grieves, I resist it.

It is wholly indifferent to my resistence. It has its work to do. I have mine.

Which, now, is to recall, in words, a time almost before I had words:

I have the chicken pox. It is snowing. We are downstairs. It is dark. It is late. My brother and father are asleep, upstairs. The house is quiet.

I am awake, exhausted, small, stunned with illness. I am seated in Charlotte's lap; she is seated in the wooden rocking chair, one of those vaguely early American stenciled black rockers. I am nestled miserably and helplessly into her. We are in the living room, by the window which faces the driveway and looks out onto the street. If she is rocking, her movement is so small that, when I recall this moment later, I will not find anything but stillness. The ridged white radiator below the windowsill is next to us. Some heat exudes from it. It clanks occasionally. 



We are watching the snow. It falls, hard and thick, its dizzying steady movement illuminated by the bright cone-shaped light cast by the tall street lamp just outside, in front of 27 Elm Place, the Finkelstein's house. I would like to whimper, but am too sick to make a sound. I am completely still, on her lap, encircled by her arms. We are silent.



It is snowing hard. On the short looped wire fence marking the border between our driveway and the Finkelstein's, a mounded white cupcake of snow tops each round metal fence post. There are no lights on in our house, nor in any other house on Elm Place. The street, snow-blanketed, is perfectly still and dark, except for the streetlight, and the movement of the snowflakes, silently accumulating.

That room remained the living room for decades, until 2001. That's when I retrofitted the house after Charlotte broke her hip for the second time, making it into her bedroom, downstairs. For which she was furious.

"I am going to do physical therapy, I'll be bounding back up the stairs like a mountain goat in a couple of months!" she told me. 

"Then we can move your bedroom back upstairs," I said.

"But you ruined it! You destroyed it!" she said.

"It's all still up there," I said. "If you start bounding like a mountain goat, it can be your bedroom again."

"Well that's good to know, at least," she conceded, then paused, not yet ready to be mollified. Angry again, she said, "But it was my house!"

"Charlotte, it still is. You didn't want to stay at the nursing home. I don't blame you. But they weren't going to let you out until there was an accesible place for you to live." 

"But why didn't you ask me?"

"Because you would have told me no."

"For good reason!"

"But I had to make a decision, and line people up to do the work, and you were telling me, 'Get me out of this hell-hole.' They weren't going to release you unless I had an accessible place for you to go to. I had to get it done. And there wasn't a lot of time."

Two and a half months. I pleaded with the carpenter, plumber, painter, to rearrange their schedules so it could be completed by the time she finished her physical therapy and could return home, if home could be made ready for her.

That we pulled it off, I still count as miraculous, and kind (Thank you, Auggie; now and again, always; I think every time I walk past your and Fern's house, just down the street from Charlotte's). I was on the job site too, every day, picking out the step-in jacuzzi tub, finding tiles that were on sale but still handsome, occasionally assisting in things like the carrying of sheetrock, covering objects with sheets to protect them from sheetrock dust. Auggie and I worked out pocket doors, so Charlotte could have privacy even though her new room would be in formerly open, shared space; I found lace curtains for their windows; they'd let in light but still be private. (Of course, all this meant I wans't doing my own writing work, or generating income). The last step  before Charlotte was to come back to Elm, I arranged the delivery of a hospital bed.

However, I don't say any of this. Charlotte, angry, miserable as a wet cat,  continues to glare at me. 

"Look, Charlotte, I had to say to myself, 'Well, maybe she'll be bounding up the stairs like a mountain goat, and maybe she'll be in a wheelchair.' I have to make it so either will be okay." 

To say this to my angry, fiercely independent mother felt like the most dangerous of transgressions ("The important thing/  is the obvious thing /  that no one is saying," wrote the poet Charles Bukowski; I was saying it). The word "wheelchair" caught in my throat, tearing soft tissue like a fishbone. When it came out, it changed the atmosphere into something thin, strange and new.

In a few months, Charlotte was in a wheelchair. She was never able to climb up those stairs again.


In 2001, the same year that I retrofitted the living room, another writer, the children's author-illustrator Grace Lin, married an architect named Robert Mercer.

On their wedding day, she wrote in the foreword to the book Robert's Snowflakes, "... it poured a river of rain, but it couldn't dampen our happiness. So when Robert's aunts told me that rain on a wedding day meant good luck, I believed them." (Robert and Grace, pictured below.)


Until, later that same year, in the middle of the winter, Robert was diagnosed with bone cancer. "The treatment was grueling, and Robert was left listless and weak..." she wrote. "One night, I began to tell Robert a children's story about a mouse that wasn't allowed in the snow, just like him. Surprisingly, it became out pet project. I titled it Robert's Snow, and as it grew, so did our hopes for the future. "

Nine months later, Robert was pronounced cancer-free, and the book they had worked on was accepted for publication.


I had 61 years of knowing my mother, if any child can be said to know her mother. "All children have a narrow angle on who their parents are," writes Fern Schumer Chapman in her memoir Motherland. " After all, they come to us with a life half lived."

I knew her, of course, as my mother (a relationship always intimate, but concomitantly excruciatingly difficult, until the last eight or so years of her life; before that, though we doted on each other, we could not have been constructed with more different and oppositional temperaments).


I knew her as a wife to my father (supportive and loyal to a fault on the one hand; undermining and self-martyring on the other).


I knew her as friend to many women and quite a few men who came and went from our lives, most of whom adored her. Again, she was supportive, generous, and loyal on the one hand; always ready to listen, to offer a glass of wine or a scotch, some brie cheese on a plate, accompanied by green grapes and the little grape shears, golden and shaped like a bird, the scissors its beak. Yet, on the other: she was easily, but almost always privately, enraged by those friends she thought were making foolish decisions, and harsh in her judgment about them.

As a child, I did not know what to make if this; was it polite or fake? As a teenager, I wondered: why was their admiration of her so important to her if she didn't approve of them, and why did she tell me about it? As an adult, I sorrowed: what made her so conflict-averse that she could not just have a good fight with a friend when needed and trust that they could get it over with, and move on? 



I knew her, too as an adult younger sibling to her six-year's older sister, my Aunt Dorothy (who she loved and was maddened by, adored and was jealous of).


Perhaps most vividly, because her work affected the life of the family on a day-to-day basis, I knew her as a professional --- driven, self-disciplined, conflicted, revered, hard-working, a mentor to many writers, in her role as an editor at Harper and Row, later HarperCollins. When she was at home and when she wasn't; what her mood was; who she was angry with and who she was excited by; this was the stuff, ever-present, of "the office."  (Below: at her retirement party from HarperCollins, held at the New York Public Library.)



Yet most truly of all, and encompassing all the other people she was and roles she played, I knew her as a writer. 

Her professionalism and seriousness in this was evident. I saw her discipline in submitting work, typing a dozen labels to a dozen different publishers, and preparing the manilla envelopes in advance, each time, each book (Going through her papers, I found file cards by the dozens, detailing who was looking at what; here are just two. One is on The Storm Book and Three Funny Friends, both ultimately published; one a memoir of herself as a young mother, never published, called The Shaded Porch).


She was utterly unfazed by rejections; into the ready envelope went the turned-down piece to be looked at by someone else. She was by then at work on something new and that, the active in-process writing (not the piece she had already submitted), was what truly engaged her.

But far more formative was seeing how the creative, rather than the business side of her life as a writer. Seeing how observation, memory, and emotion overlaid  contemporary experiences, each setting off and layering each other, and how this was expressed in her writing, writing sometimes became books. By osmosis, I took in the way she picked up, examined and merged these elements; how, in writing about them, she made from the chaos of life a personal and artistic whole.

Nothing and no one was off-limits, yet the initial elements transmogrified in her writing, through the acuity of her child's heart, sharp adult mind, and vast writing gift. In countless interviews, she called this overlay "an emotional deja vu" or "a double or triple exposure."

Her own love-hate relationships with her sister and her friends, for example, became Big Sister Little Sister, Do You Know What I'll Do, The Quarreling Book, The Unfriendly Book, My Friend John, The Hating Book, The New Friend, and It's Not Fair. 


Her grief as the end of her marriage to my father (though she initiated the divorce) became Janey, in which a young girl's best friend is suddenly... gone.

          "I didn’t want you to move away.
          You didn’t want to either.
          Janey
          maybe some day
          we’ll grow up
          and live near each other
          again.          

          I wish you hadn’t moved away."

Though my mother and I were opposites in temperament, we always connected profoundly in this one way: as writers. When people say, of my writing, "It must be in your genes," I demure (How, then, did my brother become a professional poker player? And what about my own hard work? My submissions, rejections, revisions, self-discipline, writing when I don't want to or am filled with self-doubt; that is not DNA, that is effort, choice, and earned, word by word and action by action). 

Yet, though I think I would have been a writer regardless of the family I was born into, there is no doubt that I absorbed Charlotte's primary lived truth --- observe what happens, feel it, write truthfully, and thereby make meaning, and literature, from whatever the material of your life is.


Until the last 7 or 8 years of her life, Charlotte and I knew and loved each other best not as mother and daughter, but as colleagues --- as writers, fellow travelers creatively. Even in the fraught years that preceded these last blessed final ones, talking about our respective writing, each others' writings, and what we were reading, brought us equilibrium.

She told me, in my 30's or 40's, that she would like to make me her literary executor, "If you want it. It's a lot of work." I said I would be glad to do it.

We were sitting in the living room that would later become her bedroom. She said, with a wave of one hand and an air of vagueness, "And you know, there's a lot of work there that I never finished that's, really, pretty good. If you should care to finish some of it after I'm gone, I think you should."  I said, casually but carefully, knowing as ever how easily she was displeased, and seeking clarity, "If I did do that, and it were published, would you want it to be in my name, your name or both of our names?" "Oh..." she said; thoughtfully, but again airily, "In both of our names, I think."

Here is how the night of the chicken pox, and the snow, appeared, reinvented, in my book Your Owl Friend (1977, illustrations by Ruth Bornstein).



The story is told from the owl's point of view, about his or her friendship with a young boy:

"In the winter, we can stand on the corner watching
the snow fall in the cone of yellow light from the streetlamp.
Standing in the snow, how warm each feels to the other!
Couldn't it always be dark,
and me on your shoulder, watching the snow?"

"No, no, my friend, no, no. That's not how it is."


Did that same moment find its way, transformed, into Charlotte's work? In her book, Hold My Hand (1972) two little girls, best friends, go on a walk one winter afternoon.

"The wind stops.
Everything is still.
There is only the cold
cold cold cold
Oh hold my hand.
I look at you
and suddenly the air is full of snow."



But earlier, Charlotte's 1957 Over and Over (stunningly illustrated by Garth Williams), written when I was five, references not the chicken pox moment, but a still-living artifact: perhaps the "first"  which Susan Whelan mentioned. Which, otherwise, I would have no way of knowing.

"...one morning when she woke up and looked out the window she was very excited.
     'See! Come! See what has happened!" she called.
     The garden was white!
     'That's snow,' her mother said.
     The little girl stared..."


Charlotte, for a year or two after she moved into the rehabbed house, continued to express her resentment, in the passive aggressive one-two punch that had always driven me crazy. "Jean George was over here yesterday," she'd say. "She thinks what you did to the house is absolutely stunning. She couldn't stop exclaiming over what a beautiful job you'd done.  Really, everyone says it is so beautiful and what a lovely job you did." Pause, beat. Then, "Of course, it's not my house any more, but..."

A year or two after that, she said --- just once, but it was enough --- about the downstairs bedroom, "Thank you. I was wrong. I'm glad you did it after all."

Not long after that, the idea of the upstairs bedroom drifted away. She was finally no longer aware of where her bedroom was, only that it was in her home, and somewhere warm, safe, and cozy, from which people who loved her came and went, me among them (one week to ten days a month, for five years). She knew she was well-taken care of, and thanked her caregivers often, and loved them, as they genuinely did her.



She knew her black-and-white cat, Tumbleweed, often slept curled on her feet or at her hip ("I'm very... fond of that cat," she said to me one day about six weeks before she died. She hadn't been speaking much at all, for those last several weeks, and I thought those might be the last words I'd ever hear her speak. I was wrong, however.)



In 2004, Charlotte was 89. Her vision and mental acuity were declining, but she had not yet broken through to the peace and moment-to-moment joy that would characterize her last years. She was often angry. She was still, as she always had (in private, except perhaps with the authors she edited, in whom she encouraged freedom) trying to control the uncontrollable, while any semblance of being able to do so was slipping through her hands.

By this point I was also acting as, in effect, her literary executive secretary, answering her fan mail, sorting permissions requests and forwarding them to her agent. She also pulled me in as a kind of second editor, asking my opinoin when marked-up proofs of forthcoming books arrived, such as Seasons, a book of short poems that HarperCollins brought out in 2002.

The mail included, one day, a letter from Grace Lin. She wanted Charlotte to submit a poem, a haiku about snow, to an anthology she was creating.

"In March 2004, " writes Lin in the foreword to the book Robert's Snowflakes, "Robert's cancer returned. We were devastated. Our doctor told us that Robert's best chance for survival was a breakthrough in cancer research. So we decided to help the doctors the best we could... we decided to use Robert's Snow as an inspiration for a fundraiser, " an auction of wooden snowflakes painted by various children's book illustrators. Eventually the project became a book. It was a contribution to this book --- 100% of its royalties would go to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute --- which Grace was soliciting from Charlotte. 

"I want to," Charlotte told me. "But I can't. Not now."

"Would you like to talk about snow together? " I asked carefully,  again feeling the ground shift, though not so much as when I had said 'wheelchair.' "And then I can write something, and you can see if you like it , or change anything that doesn't work?"

"Yes," she said thoughtfully. "Yes, I think that would be good."

"Charlotte, " I said, "Do you remember that night when I had the chicken-pox, and we sat in the living room, watching the snow?"

"Oh, yes," she said, without hesitation.

I did three haikus; as it turned out, Grave and Robert wanted only one per contributor, and they made their choice. I can't find the other two now. But, "I love of them," said Charlotte, of all three. "Send them, please."

"Under both our names?"

"Yes."

Here is the one they selected, a slight thing, as haikus are.


The poem appears in Robert's Snowflakes (2005).

It was the only such writing collaboration we did while she was alive.

Now she is dead, and I begin the work of going through her papers, her letters, her manuscripts, discovering and knowing her in ways I never did or could when she was alive. With this, a strange new form of collaboration begins. I can already feel the regrets and joys, the questions and surprises, forming. Sometimes my throat thickens, and tears, insistent on doing their job, prickle at my eyes. At other times, I laugh out loud. At still others, I want to tell someone of a discovery I've made --- a letter baby Charlotte wrote to her daddy, illustrated with a drawing of a pen...


Or another, tragic, which she wrote to God, on Christmas Day (though the family was Jewish) in 1926.


Charlotte adored her father, Louis Shapiro (pictured below with his wife Ella, and their daughter Dorothy, my Aunt Dot. Behind Dot, the family Weimaraner. In the carriage? Me). 

Louis must have been the one to wrote to her as God, referenced above. (I remember his lovely, faithful letters to me, sent each week, with two one-dollar bills paperclipped to the top of each).

Surely he was the one who saved these letters of Charlotte's, too, that I am just now discovering.



Yet, as I consider Charlotte's own later adamant insistence on writing for children as a truthteller, I wonder: how, as an adult, did she feel about her father's tenderness in writing that original letter, referenced here, as God, and yet, his betrayal, the lie of his so doing? How did it make her feel, as a child, about a God with whom she was on such personal terms --- when that God, "Dearest Of All Spirits",  could not and did not answer her prayers?

How much did this, and other, similar events that I don't and can't know about,  shape her fierce sense that to speak with authenticity, even about painful matters, was the greatest gift she could offer her young readers?    

Yet the person I want to ask these questions of is gone.



Yet she is here.

Gone. Here. Gone. Here. Love. Loss. Love. Loss. Love. Breathe in, breathe out.

Call the medical supplies place. Have the hospital bed picked up. Note the unbearable blank space, under the painting Marcel Marceau gave her.



Fill the space, somehow.


Here is the heartbeat of life, including its absence.

Here is literature, which lasts because it is out of time, like the infinitesimal timeless time between breaths, or heartbeats, or thoughts.

Writing this post, I Googled "Grace Lin". And learned that her beloved Robert had died, far too young, in 2007.


I may have mixed up which questions which reporters asked me on the day Charlotte died, November 19, 2013, and the days which followed.

I think it was the reporter from the local Westchester paper, the Rivertowns Enterprise, who asked me, "When did you know you would follow in your mother's footsteps?"

I said, without hesitation, "I'm not following in her footsteps. Her footsteps were unique. No one could follow in them. "

Then I thought of all the writers who had told me how Charlotte helped them find their own voices, how, as an editor, she quieted her own writing sensibility in service to theirs. And I added, "Nor would she want me to. I think she wanted everyone to create their own path. I think she believed we all have to."

And when the Los Angeles Times reporter (I think) called me, he said, "How long was she confined to her bed?" And I said, "You couldn't really called her 'confined.' "

What, after all, can you say of someone who finally was able to say "I love you," without appending a "but" to it, as she had, to her daughter, for 60 years; an "I love you," or "You're wonderful," or "I adore you" or, when I said I love you to her, "Me also" --- all said with the ease and inevitability of snow falling?

Or of this exchange, maybe a year before she died: 

Me: Charlotte, if you could have any wish in the whole world, what would it be?

Her (teasingly): I would like a big truck to come, and everyone gets into it, and they all drive away!

Me: Are you in the truck with everybody, or are you standing on the porch waving goodbye?

Her (suddenly serious, thoughtful, and intense): I just want everyone to be free.

Or, this, one night about six months before her death, late at night: 

Her (apropos of nothing in particular): Since I've... had all the days --- and they were wonderful! --- I want you to do the same.

Me: Charlotte, did you just say ---- (and I repeated it back to her).

Her: Yes.

Me: Hang on, I'm going to write that down.

(I go get a piece of paper; it happens to be a bookplate sticker from Little Brown, because in the other room I am signing hundreds of bookplates, which they've asked me to do for a special order of my picture book All the Awake Animals).

Again, I repeat it back to her, slowly, as I write it on the bookplate. "Since... I've ... had... all... the..." I finish. "Charlotte, did I get that right?"

"Yes."

"And, " I ask her, "What will be the result if I do, if I take your advice?"

Charlotte said, "Wiser." 


Writing this post, throughout a snowy day and a snowy night, I went downstairs, back to the living room turned bedroom, late one night. Soon, as I say, the house will be sold. But for now I am here. So is the radiator, the window, the street lamp. I watched the snow fall; recycled water, ultimately the same snow Charlotte and I watched some 55 years ago. Yet utterly new. Each snowflake is unique. Each snowflake is made of water. Different, same, different, same. Presence, absence. Loss, love.

Some things never change. Some things always do.

Sometimes, they're the same thing.



The Charlotte Zolotow Fellowship remembers and continues Charlotte's work as a nurturer of others' talent. It is an annual one-month residency-fellowship for writers of children's books or young adult fiction, at the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow, a 501 (c) 3 which Charlotte helped support during her lifetime. Checks may be made to WCDH, noting 'CZ Fellowship' , and mailed to 515 Spring Street, Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

Keeping the “dead” in “deadline”

“He cannot be dead,” said Paul, my father’s editor at Playboy. “It is Friday. I am sitting here looking at a pitch letter he sent me on Monday.”

Things you don’t realize will be part of your job description: returning voicemail messages left for your father, who has suddenly died.

“Well, Paul,” I said, “Maurice always said he wanted to be found dead slumped over the typewriter, a blank sheet of paper rolled into the platen.”



“This could be the last time,” sang a very young Mick Jagger with the Stones, back in 1965: warning of impending break-up/heartbreak --- that compelling story we love to live and replay in our youth, but which turns out to be a minor dress rehearsal for the infinitely larger narratives of love and loss which will come, over time, to pervade our lives. (Heart images throughout: paintings by Jim Dine).

But any time could be “the last time.”

Here’s an unalterable reality: anything can happen to anyone at any time. No exceptions, exclusions. No security in the usual sense. Why did it happen to me, wails the dancer who gives birth to a dwarf, the fiddle-playing carpenter who loses 3 fingers in a table saw accident, the sudden widower whose wife died from complications following surgical removal of a benign growth between the first and second toes on her left foot.

I get steamed when I go to a workshop and right at the beginning the leader says (as many workshop leaders do), in a calm, reassuring voice, “Now we are going to create a safe space here this weekend…”

I know what is meant, and how well-intended this meaning is. But I also know, with that one sentence, that they are still green to life’s bittersweet, gorgeous, implacable nature. They think life can be safe! They think they have some realistic say-so in the matter! I think, "How can they possibly believe this?"

But I know how they can and do: They have not yet ripened.



Lately I have been thinking a lot about time, the unknowable “last time”, deadlines, as well as those realities of life that are at essence unalterable --- what the Buddhist-Jungian David Richo calls “the givens.”

How could I not? I outlived my father, as most adult children in modern societies do. My mother is 98; the most pressing thing that she has outlived, at the moment, is her money. I am myself 60, thirteen years past the before-and-after moment when I became a 48 year-old widow, and began the long process of outliving my four-years-younger husband.

And, I am a writer, who also works with writers and would-be writers. And one of the things writers (including me) say all the time is, “I don’t have enough time.”

Like asking “Why did this happen to me?”, saying, “I don’t have enough time,” is the not-yet-cracked code which initiates you: which means welcome to the club,  human being. You, like every other human being or creature (“a crush of other debtors,” in the words of the poet Wislawa Syzmborska, whose poem “Nothing’s a gift” starts with the premise “It’s all on loan”) , inhabit a body in which you will move through a series of events, some lovely, some terrifying, some boring or aggravating or divine, most unpredictable.

This movement is called “your life”, or, perhaps more accurately, “your life time.” And there is never enough of it. Or so it appears.

Would-be writers often tell me they want to write but have no time. They ask me sincerely where I “find time” or how I “make time.” Between calls from my mother’s caregivers, between appointments to get my teeth cleaned, between out-of-the-blue e-mails that offer terrific opportunities but only if I stop what I am doing right now and answer, between remembering that it is Tuesday and therefore the trash must taken down to the bottom of the hill --- between all this I am forced to say: No one “finds time.” No one “makes time.” We all just allocate time.

If you want to write, you have time to write, though almost never as much as you want or feel you need. Yet there it is: the same 24 hours a day belong to you as to every other creature on this beleaguered, perplexing, lovable planet, temporary home from which we will at some unknown time be permanently exiled.

You can choose to use part of the 24 hours to write (or do anything else, of course). Or not. Simple: it’s choice. Writer Neil Gaiman says, “This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy and that hard.”

Professional writers under contract work under two deadlines. One is the known deadline: the date that the article or manuscript is due to the publisher. The other is the unknown deadline: the moment when time’s up; when they no longer have that 24 hours a day for an unknown, but presumably somewhat indefinite period of time.

The moment when this second, unknown and mostly unknowable deadline becomes clear is the moment the writer realizes the car, on the black ice-covered road, is not in his or her control and will hit the telephone pole. The moment when the doctor says, “I’m sorry. It’s inoperable.” The moment the heart explodes in the chest, breaking out of the cage of the sternum.

There’s a reason why the word “dead” is in deadline. And don’t you forget it.



Writers who are not under contract --- and for that matter everyone else --- still work under a deadline: this second one. David Richo, who I mentioned earlier, believes “the givens” of life have two contradictory meanings. He asks us to hold one in each hand. The first, in essence, is the one I have already described: a given is a non-negotiable reality, often appearing harsh, which you, being merely a puny mortal human like the rest of us, cannot alter or control. But the second meaning of “given” is… a gift. A gift: something given.

I can speak to this clearly. Being seasoned with a full and conscious knowledge of mortality and loss is a gift, though one that usually comes wrapped in horrific wrapping paper.

I was given it for the first time when I was a month past my eighteenth birthday, when I was raped at gunpoint. At one point, trying to escape the abductors, I tried to slip out the car window, and I screamed “HELP” so loudly my throat remained raw for several hours.

One of the rapists looked at me and shook his head wonderingly. “Baby,” he said, “You just signed your own death certificate.”

In the next five or six hours before the two men let me go --- a letting go that, until they did it, I was mostly sure would not happen --- one of the leit-motifs that ran through my mind and heart over and over was all I had not done.

Some you would expect; did the people I love know how much I loved them? But some, you might not (unless you, too, are a writer): those poems in the bottom drawer of the dresser; why had I never finished them? And the first three chapters of that dystopian novel that I got discouraged by and stopped…

I do not recommend being raped at gunpoint and thinking you will not survive it as a motivational or time-management tool. I do not defend the actions of those who violated me, or rape in general, in any way. I could just as easily not have survived. (Anything can happen to anyone at any time.)

But the fact is, I did survive, and the terrifying knowledge of unsafety and death’s proximity was both a theft and a gift. The latter became more generous, over time, than the former. The latter, in fact, has never stopped giving.

For six months or so after the rape, if even the most gentle and affectionate of lovers stroked me, even if a friend or parent so much as placed a hand on my arm, the skin they touched would rise in a long, strange welt, a line of white framed in  red, itching, dramatically visible. This gradually ceased, and has never recurred.


But the knowledge of what Andrew Marvel called “time’s winged chariot” has never faded. In some strange way, I owe the fact that I have fifty published books out, and countless magazine articles, to say nothing of innumerable unpublished pieces, to the visceral grasp of mortality I had when one of the rapists showed me the pearl-handled revolver, showed me its six cylinders, showed me that two contained bullets and four did not, held it to my head, spun, and clicked.

Nothing happened. But I still write, and live, as if it might have.

And as, in one sense, it will.


Still, I have never reached the point where I can view the death of my husband, Ned, as a gift. To even imagine seeing it thus feels obscene. It feels like pure subtraction, still. 

Thank God I no longer dwell in that bewildered terrain, steep, barren, rocky, split by chasms and moraines, that is grief. After the sudden death of someone you not only loved but counted on as unthinkingly, their presence as certain and unquestioned as, say, waking up with the same number of arms and legs as you went to bed with: after this, the grief in which you reside, in which you carry on, has a sound track inaudible to everyone with whom you converse (“How are you?”).

You shop for ever smaller amounts of food; you are cooking only, and barely, for one, or you are by yourself, refilling the birdfeeder, running a bath, stroking the cat, looking out as the tree-tops dip on a windy day, in that long long silence that is the remainder of your life.

But the soundtrack, audible only to you, continues without cease: it is one long unending unremitting inner howl.

No. I do not live there now. Yes, I see much good, much that is a gift, about my life as it is now, a life that would not have unfolded as it did had Ned lived. But I cannot see his death as having purchased for me where I live now, the twenty mile view to New Hampshire, the heated political discussions and middle-of-the-night word-play with my present, dear partner, a filmmaker. I cannot see it as having bought me singing, painting, drawing and collage, participating in improv, none of which I did when Ned was alive because they sort of encroached on ‘his’ areas, though neither of us would have seen it that way at the time.

And though in one sense I suppose that is what his death did do: bought, by creating such endless empty space, room to be filled. But "gift"? No.

As Richo says  (and I have quoted this before, in a post called Famous Peaches, Dripping Juice, which is on my other food-centric blog, Deep Feast), “Some feelings, for example, those associated with grief about a heavy loss, may never lead to full resolution. There is a note of inconsolability in some grief no matter how much we cry or how mirrored we may be by those who care about us. We can say yes to the given that some experiences remain unresolved and unfinished. There are some aches which never fully abate. This is not because we are inadequate but because reality is sometimes just that stubborn --- another part of the mystery of life.”

One of those mysteries, for me, remains the fact that a few years before his death, Ned and I came close to breaking up, due to an extended and secret affair he had.  But we did not. Instead we pick-and-shoveled through our individual choices and decisions, spading up youth and breaking up the soil to reach maturation, digging in and accommodating the experiences --- including painful and difficult ones.

That this enriched us individually and as a couple is an understatement. Not only did we have a period of pure and unadulterated delight in ourselves and each other, so new had we become, but, as it turned out, we created a fertile, black, healthy soil from which we both kept growing and growing.

It is because this ground was so rich that I was, eventually, after his death, able to do that most sacred and frightening of tasks: begin again.

Because those experiences with Ned, following the affair, had to do with maturation and ripeness, they --- as his death would later underline for me, and as being raped, six years before I met him, had also presaged --- stated clearly that life is brief and not in our control.

That we must use what we have while we have it: use it to love, and use it, if we are writers, to write.

Here is a poem I wrote, maybe a year after Ned and I had rediscovered ourselves and each other, reinvented our marriage and sexuality… all as a result of the affair; or rather, what the two of us chose to do with the affair. I am no more defending his doing that, or excusing his affair partner, than I am the rapists their actions. But their behavior, it turned out, did not excuse the growing up I needed to do; and that Ned, too, brave soul, chose to do, with vigor and courage.

Why did we "need" to go through that to wake up? I don't know. But sometimes, as Richo noted, “reality is that stubborn.” I seemingly needed to be hit over the head with a two-by-four to get it.

"It" being the reprieve that life gave me, twice: after the rape, and after the affair: this is your life, your love, don't waste it.

Please note: this poem was written after the affair but while Ned was still wholly alive. His actual death, about a year and a half after I wrote this, was of course hidden from both of us by the opaque curtain that is always drawn between present and future.

No matter how healthy you and those you love are, or how much money you have invested, that curtain hides what’s ahead for you. That is why I believe one must keep the "dead" in "deadline."

Live with it. You have no choice.

Reprieve

The phone at 3:00 a.m., (or doorbell), news
you thought you’d never get (but always, somewhere, feared):
the ending. Finished. Disappeared.
The X-ray spot. The bruise that will not heal.
This is the clinic. We are sorry to inform you.
We regret. He never knew what hit him.

Some messages will cleave your life,
before from after. No leniency or warning, time to kill
or to outwait. No call from any governor known to man
commutes or lessens or dilutes, or can, the usual sentence:
too late. How many second chances are there? Precious few.
What’s done is usually done, done to.
How many first “I love yous” are finally said
by hard old broads or bastards, in death-beds?

You’ll overlook your water (being human)
until the storied well runs dry.
You’re going to miss the always-leaving boat.
Your choice, to flag it down or never even try
to catch it. Rash and stupid, take for granted,
simply take. Glue eyelids shut and then complain
that it’s too dark to see. Or else, accept
the commonplace believing: glittering
towards the new, alluring counterfeit, you plan
to fake out history, bury grieving.
But zombie grief will rise, like loss, undead.
I use the pronoun ‘you’ , but may mean ‘me’ instead.

How many second chances are there? Precious.
Few. I wonder at the fearful stun of joy: at
knowing all we do, and all our parts, and what
was nearly lost. Of what remaining life would be
I cannot dare to reckon up the cost, without
your skin to mine, or face, or laughter; cannot begin
to name the ways we daily learn to conjugate our hearts.

I’m glad we had it in us to be tough.
Death will tenderize us soon enough.

“That the paper be blank was important to him, “ I told Paul, Maurice’s Playboy editor. “You know… it meant that he could have been about to do anything, and we, the people still alive who found him, would never know. It was the mystery of it. “

“Well, I get it.” said Paul, and I could almost hear him shaking his head over the phone. His tone, though, was not grim, was respectful, admiring, even a little amused. “I mean, Crescent. That pitch was sent on Monday. It’s Friday. He and that piece of blank sheet of paper he wanted … he damn near made it.”

getting good at it: the three secrets of writing (and pretty much everything else)

Quick, think of your favorite musician. Doesn't matter which one.

Bonnie Raitt? Yo-Yo Ma? John Coltrane? Lady Gaga? Eric Clapton? Youssou N'Dour? Dolly Parton, Mirian McPartland, Wynston Marsalis, Howlin' Wolf, Luciano Pavarotti, Biggie Smalls?

Doesn't matter. She, or he, does, or did, three things.

Practice. Rehearse. Perform.

Practicing

Practice is just playing around. "Just!" It's getting familiar, comfortable with your instrument, whether it's your voice or the dobro. It's having fun, even if on a particular day it's not all that much fun. It's experimenting. And it doesn't have an intended specific outcome. It's just how a muscian says to his or her instrument --- or, if you like, to his or her muse --- "You matter to me. I want to hang out with you. And I want to do that just because. Just because I love you. Because I like you. Because you interest me deeply. Because every time I do, even and especially when I think I don't want to, you never, ever fail to show me something."

Rehearsing

Rehearsing? It's almost the same as practice, but with two gigantic differences. The first is, rehearsal has a specific intended outcome. Yeah, there's an element of fooling around, experimentation, and learning, always, but hey --- we're here to decide which songs are going to be in the second set or the next recording. And once we do, we're here to do them over and over again, in different ways. Until we decide on the way that sounds best to us. Thus the second difference: rehearsal is always, at a certain point, repetitive. When we decide on the direction we're going, on what sounds best, we're gonna do the songs that way over and over again, until it's as perfect as we can get it. All while knowing that perfect is an illusion.

Performing

And performance? That's where we show the world what we've done. Everyone won't like it, of course, but we know we've given it our best shot. And those who do like it will really, really like it. And the odds are good that the back-story of our efforts --- the practice, the rehearsals --- won't show a bit. It'll look effortless. (If the effort shows, the musician didn't practice and/or rehearse enough).

And --- here's the most amazing part --- all that work and effort and anxiety will fall away at the moment of performance. Because the performer, too, will be absent. Because he, or she, as an individual, as that person who worked, got bored, got anxious, got tired, didn't know if it would work out, questioned whether it was worth it --- that person is gone. There is just the music. Both the musician and the audience leave the concert hall or stadium transported, intoxicated. "That," we say, when we finally have words again, "was a great show."

Writing practice

I practice writing every day. Yes, absolutely pointlessly. I can show you the cupboard of notebooks kept on and off since I was sixteen (I'm 60 now, and these days there is no "off"; practice is always on, every single day).

Sometimes I "freewrite." Sometimes I do an acrostic (never with just a single word per line, however). Sometimes I make lists (views I remember from various windows; interactions with birds; things I have lost; beliefs I used to have). Sometimes I write haiku. Sometimes I do my practice at home; sometimes I take my notebook and little bag of pens to a cafe and work/play there. Sometimes I use a lot of jazzy colors, or doodle and sketch or Zentangle along with or in and out of the words. And I almost never read over what I've done. It's not for that. It's for the doing. It's the way I prostrate, daily, resting my head on the sacred feet of creation, taking refuge in something much bigger than I can understand but in which I trust, perhaps more completely than any other force in the world. 

Writing rehearsal

Most days I also "rehearse." I consider a first draft of anything I intend or hope to publish "rehearsal". Ditto, second draft. And third. And fourth. And more.

And then, there are all the drafts in response to others' responses to the prior rehearsals. I usually don't show what I'm working on until I've been over it quite a few times myself, and when I do show, especially at the beginning, I am very selective about whom I show it to. I want to know where whatever it is works and where it doesn't, but I'm aware that it, and I, may still be pretty tender. If I and the piece I am writing were a garden of enthusiastic seedlings, I don't want to be stomped on, I want to be thinned, weeded, maybe, and fertilized.

The writer's cast of producer/directors

Usually my partner is the first to hear or read what I've been rehearsing. In the old days, I used to often show these tender, just barely rehearsed starts to my mother, the writer/editor Charlotte Zolotow (at 97, she is far, far past this role).

Sometimes, it's the Second Saturday works-in-progress writing group I facilitate. ("Facilitate" as a verb sets my teeth on edge, but I don't have a better one. So far.). 

Somewhere in here, my beloved agent takes a look. Though she is tough --- I have to be sure the work I show her, and my relationship to it, is sturdy enough to bounce back should it get a stomp or two from her. But she, my agent, is good. I don't always like what she says, but I usually wind up agreeing with it, and I never doubt that she wants what's best for the piece of writing. 

Rehearsal for publication

If and when a particular piece of writing has been accepted for publication, a whole new round of rehearsal begins. This is the kind of writing called "revisions."

Some writers love this part. Some hate it. Me, at times, both.

Revisions-as-rehearsals are not as scary as those private first draft rehearsals, where one is usually making stuff up out of the most vaguely felt and pieced-together mash-up of ideas, hopes, experiences, and imagined stuff.  Not as scary, but not as exhilarating.

The quality of revisions-as-rehearsals depends greatly on the editor.

A good editor pulls from you that which you have not quite said. She or he finds the soft punky spots, where the reader's foot would go right through the floor: where the writer has written inaccurately, or lazily, or without specificity, or untruthfully.

A good editor may make you wince, but his or her comments will also make you think. Spade over what you've done. Aerate your ideas. You read the editor's comments, he or she takes you out to lunch, and suddenly you get excited again. You  say, "Yeah, unh-hunh, now I get it. I think. Sort of. Maybe! Let me get in there and see..." A good editor gets you wanting to go back to work. Your same-old piece, that you've been hanging out with so long, is suddenly fresh and eager, and calling to you, yelling to you, standing by the door stamping its feet, saying, "Let's go, let's go!" 

A bad editor? A bad editor is a necessary evil: necessary only because every book gets assigned an editor, and she or he is the gatekeeper to publication. and if you want to get published, you have an editor, sometimes a bad editor.

Some bad editors are just plain dumb. They make you do extra work that does not make sense to you; that is unreasonable, that doesn't serve the book, that goes against what you are trying to say. And some bad editors are on an ego trip. It's power, it's I-know-better-than-you-the-writer (and oh how tempting, and foolish, it is to respond on the same level).

Whether benignly dumb or on an ego trip, here's what interactions with bad editors are not, and what they should be, and are with a good editor: how can these two diverse minds and sensibilities, those of the writer and those of the editor, work together, with discernment and respect, to co-create the best possible book/performance? 

If you got saddled with a bad editor and you want to get published, you go along with as much as you can stomach. You try to do the absolute best you can with his or her less-dumb comments. You try not to sink to their level. You pick your battles; some things, you realize, you cannot "go along to get along" on. And if you don't do it too often, sometimes you, the writer, can just say, "No," to the editor (and oh how you wish they had been the kind of editor to whom a "Yes!" could have been uttered truthfully and with enthusiasm). 

And you can also say the largest "No" and buy back your contract, and look for and hopefully find another publisher, with an editor who, though she or he may make you work your ass off, makes every rehearsal of the book, every rewrite, count. For a hard editor is not a bad editor. Unless she, or he, is.

I've had a few superb editors, a lot of so-so, somewhat competent ones (they improved the books in some ways, but in others did not, and wasted a lot of my time).  And I've had a couple who sucked. And I've bought back contracts a couple of times. And/or, when it came time for the next book,  "divorced" publishers who saddled me with bad editors.

Writing well, like playing music well, is a lot of work. Why do we --- writers, musicians --- do it, then?

Performance... and practice

Because sometimes a reader closes a book and sighs with pleasure. Says, in effect, "That was a really great show."

But you know what? I can't, in my heart of hearts, say I write to cause this reaction. I love having this reaction as a reader... but if I set out consciously to try to create it as a writer, if I wrote because I wanted to astonish readers, I would freak myself right out of writing a word.

That words which I've written do, sometimes, give something big to my readers: that's extra. That's gravy. I'm delighted. I'm humbled. I'm pleased. And in my heart's core, each and every time I get this reaction, even as I may be saying politely and truthfully, "Thank you so much," I swear to you that inside myself I am prostrating, resting my forehead on the sweet, beloved feet of creation itself, mysterious,  strange and compelling.

Unlike a musician's transcendent "great show" moment, we writers have our instances where we are emptied out (in the best possible way), transported, intoxicated in the act of writing itself, not performing as such. Not every day, not every time. But sometimes while practicing and sometimes while rehearsing, it comes.

And so I return to practice. I say to my writing,  "You matter to me. I want to hang out with you. Because I love you. Because I like you. Because you interest me deeply. Because every time I do spend time with you, even and especially when I think I don't want to, you never, ever fail to show me something."

Because nothing is wasted on the writer.

Crescent Dragonwagon's next Fearless Writing workshop, a weekend-long retreat, will be held in New York, on February 1,2, and 3, 2013. Find out more at the link above, and register now.

speaking the unspeakable; accepting the unacceptable

Why are some saved and some lost?

Once a month most months,I make the roundtrip drive from Westminster West,Vermont to Hastings-on-Hudson, New York (where I spend a week with my 97-year-old mother, Charlotte Zolotow). Leave Vermont, cross Massachusetts, cross Connecticut, reach New York. And then reverse it. Exit after exit, I read the names of the towns and have my semi-mindless associations with them. Chappaqua, New York; Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have a home there; Pleasantville, New York, my late Aunt Dot's late long-time companion, Jim, who had a home there; Elmsford, New York; that Persian restaurant I like.

Last Thursday, December 13, 2012, I was coming up 84 to Hartford, had almost reached the point in the tangle of lanes where I knew I needed to get to the right to pick up 91 North. Had passed the Connecticut exits with their associations: Waterbury, where I once got fuel, drove off without removing my wallet from where it was resting on the car, and, miraculously, someone turned it in to the local police and I was able to pick it up intact from them. Newtown; I once stopped at an "easy-on easy-off" diner there late at night and had some really not-good lemon meringue pie. Meriden; that's where Ken, who I dated briefly, used to live. 

Usually I drive our late model Subaru Forester, but occasionally I drive the crap car: a 2001 Dodge Neon, so low-end that it actually has roll-up (with a crank) windows. I was driving the crap car on Thursday.

It was almost rush-hour as I approached Hartford, a time/place continuum I try hard to avoid on this commute. There was more traffic than I prefer, but I'd still be on the other side of Hartford before it hit full spate. I changed lanes to position myself for the split to 91 North, braking slightly.

And
suddenly
I had
no
brakes
at all.

I considered for maybe 3 seconds trying to pull off on the nearest ramp and get to a service station. Then in far less time than it takes to write this account, I ran through the impossible odds of being able to end up at a service station without hitting anyone or anything, off an unknown exit, near rush hour, in downtown Hartford. I realized, "NO."

I was in the right lane. I pulled off onto the shoulder --- narrow, but wide enough --- and glided to a stop. Safely.

I put on the flashers. I called David. I called AAA. I got right through to Roadside Assistance; they took my position seriously. "We're putting you on the top of the list."I called another friend. I sat in my car and waited for the tow-truck. I was not yet shaking at my close call, though the car shook with each 18-wheeler that passed. I was relatively still, against the loud white noise of the non-stop traffic stream. I simply couldn't believe I was fine. Alive, unhurt, had not hurt anyone else, had not even dented the crap car. And I was overwhelmed by gratitude and amazement. 

The rest of the story --- how I got home, the nice guys at Cameron's Auto Service, David picking up the repaired crap car --- does not really matter.

What matters is, there I was, swimming --- that day and the next --- in astonished gratitude that my life had been spared in Hartford, Connecticut, when I heard the news of the massacre in Newtown. Many other lives, twenty of them the lives of six- and seven-year-olds, had not been spared. 

I can make no sense of any of this, on any level. While Rilke advises us to "be patient towards all that is unanswered in your heart, and learn to love the questions themselves," there are some questions, the most profound and fundamental "why" questions, which are simply not lovable and towards which we cannot and perhaps should not and must not be patient.

On one level, the "why" in the case of this slaughter must be addressed. Guns, and the culture of violence so prevalent and glorified in America. Guns and their licensing, or lack of same: I just don't GET why you have to take a test (not only written but in an actual vehicle, with a policeman no less), to get a drivers license; then document, tag and title, at each and every point of sale for a car, which is a transportation machine (though it can certainly kill you) but not for a gun, which is a killing machine (though it cannot transport you anywhere, except, possibly, to the next world). Mental health care, and access to it. Causal factors in mental health, including funding cuts not only to clinics and veteran's hospitals, but to programs like Head Start; nutrition and the prevalence of fast food and its effects on mental and emotional state, violence and abuse in the home, and education.

Lord knows these "whys" are complex enough, and faceted, and interrelated. That's the great lesson of ecology: everything affects everything else. As conservationist John Muir famously said, "Pull any thread in nature and the whole unravels." Humans are part of nature. Pull the thread of a human action, sacred or profane, horrific or heroic, and our understanding begins to unravel, deepen, and grow forever more unanswerably perplexing... and "there but for fortune go I."

But even if we could address these sorts of "whys" in the case of this massacre, even if we could alter the legislative and behavioral factors that led to Newtown --- which will now forever bear the crosses of the murdered innocents, which will now forever twist the hearts of even those who casually pass the green and white sign announcing its exit off 84 --- the bigger why remains.

Why are some saved and some lost?
  

And this is the one that can never, ever even provisionally be answered. (Unless you are Mike Huckabee, who has explained that what happened in Sandy Hook is due to prayer having been 'removed' from our schools.) Wipe out school violence tomorrow, and you are still left with the families who lost their children, who must live forever in an 'after' they had no idea was coming when they got up that morning, made French toast, bundled small arms into sweaters, lifted small back-packs onto small, dear shoulders. The waves of grief spread out and out forever. The circles of grief never stop widening.

I just don't get how our wonderful, gorgeous, one and only world can be so chockablock with hate, evil, ignorance, violence. But, how can anyone get it? It is ungettable.

That being so, what do we do with such events?

I think the trick --- one I so have not come anything close to mastering --- is to stay permeable to the world in all its agony and beauty.

Permeable, responsive on a practical level whenever and however we can... and yet "immunized emotionally" to the extent that we don't wholly lose our equipoise no matter what.

And when we lose it, as we will, as we must, as we should, in response to things like the deaths at Sandy Hook... Well, I used to have a yoga teacher who would say, on the tricky balance poses as half the class was falling over, "Let your coming and out of the pose be part of the pose."

I think it has to be like that. When we inevitably, and often properly, lose our equipoise, we let that --- that sorrow, that lack of balance --- "be part of the pose." And return to the reaching for balance. Not achieving it; just reaching for it.

Not blocking out the world; yet neither so losing ourselves in its infinite painful and horrific 24/7 news cycle, the endless stories, both new and repeated, that we are flattened and incapacitated.

Not easy. But the alternatives (being flattened by pain or hardening one's heart to it, becoming impermeable) are worse.

My own brush with mortality the day before filled me with gratitude; the news of the innocents' deaths, so nearby, the following day, with heaviness, despair. Yet in one sense both tell the same story: that our lives are on loan to us, and may be recalled at any time. That the veil between life and death may be opaque, but is paper-thin. That, in the end, we must make our lives worthy of the privilege of having been given this precious loan. That we must stay permeable and balanced, the better to do whatever work has our name on it. That this work should be generous --- as generous as the giver of that mysterious gift of our individual loaned lives as been to us. 

And the 'what does one do with such events' question takes on another dimension if we are writers. We must write about this, however imperfectly and inadequately. We must try to speak the unspeakble.

It is the tiniest of ways we can not let those small bright lives have been wasted.

This poem comes from Wislawa Syzmborska's book View With a Grain of Sand, translated Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1996)

It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Nearer. Farther off.
It happened, but not to you. You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. The left.
Because it was raining. Because of the shade.
Because the day was sunny. You were in luck -- there was a forest.
You were in luck -- there were no trees.
You were in luck -- a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake,
A jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant . . . So you're here? Still dizzy from
another dodge, close shave, reprieve?
One hole in the net and you slipped through?
I couldn't be more shocked or
speechless.
Listen,
how your heart pounds inside me.

Have I missed anything?

I had no idea Nate was an undercover cop in the Narcotics Division of the Chicago police department the first time I slept with him. I will skip the whole long, weird tale of his and my relationship, which only lasted  5 or 6 months, and took place when I was around 23 years old, other than to mention that my not knowing this essential fact was due both to the general social-and-mating practices of the period (early 1970's) and the circumstances under which we met (picked each other up at a now long-defunct bar called The Quiet Night, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where I then resided and to which he had come on vacation).

Fast-forward to maybe 3 or 4 months into our relationship, which was a major crush, and of course, very exotic to both of us. No email then, but we managed daily or near-daily phone-calls, notes by mail, and his not infrequent visits to Eureka Springs. I think I'd visited him in Chicago maybe twice before I got the call. I remember my hand flew to my mouth and I literally dropped the phone, and had to pick it back up again from the floor onto which it had clattered, for after I had replied in the affirmative to "Is this Crescent Dragonwagon? " what I heard was "I'm a friend of Nate's. Now, it wasn't fatal, but Nate was stabbed in the middle of the night last night."

I got myself up to Chicago as soon as I could to be with Nate, who was already somewhat up and around by the time I arrived 2 days later. Fortunately, if you can even use 'fortunately' and 'stabbed' in the same sentence, he was stabbed in the spleen. Evidently, if you're going to be stabbed in the viscera, the spleen is a good place for it. Evidently, they got him to the hospital quickly. An inch up, down, sideways, or deeper, it would have been a different story. But this one was mostly, "Don't make me laugh, it hurts," and my going on short walks with him, cooking for him, rubbing his feet, and resuming sexual activity as soon as was possible, which was surprisingly soon (we were motivated).

But though this post has to do with mortality, it is not about Nate's being stabbed. All this is to explain my being present at the party Nate's buddies on the force threw for him to celebrate his survival, and welcome him back to active duty, a mere two or three weeks after the stabbing.

Now, picture this, though I know it stretches credulity (even mine, and I lived it, however cluelessly). Imagine a 23-year-old New York-Arkansan woman whose lifestyle has been, to put it mildly, alternative and boho from the get-go... a life that has included dropping out of high school, back-to-the-land era communal living, the taking pf psychedelics a few times, along with the straighter things: publication of a few of her books, semi-famous parents. Picture that young woman (I'm tempted, now, to say, 'girl', but such a designation would have outraged me at the time), in a large meeting room in Chicago, at police headquarters. Also present are maybe 20 or 30 Chicago cops, most in the Narcotics Division.

To say that Nate's pals were curious about me is an understatement on the level of "A stegosaurus is larger than a dog," not that I fully understood this at the time. I do not remember any other females present, though there must have been some. I do not remember if there was any food served (this is unusual; I always remember food), but there must have been some. I seem to remember beer. And I do know there was some punch, pink (improbably) and almost surely non-alcoholic.

I remember the punch because I was standing next to it, ladling some up for myself, when the conversation I am about to recount took place. I believe it was almost surely non-alcoholic, because, despite the early dabble in psychedelics, I don't drink and never have (other than a few sips of wine from a friend's glass, very occasionally). And it was there, at the punchbowl, that a burly, dark-haired guy, one of Nate's colleagues, introduced humself to me. He had a build one might perceive as threatening in some situations one could imagine a Chicago cop being in. But then and there, towards me, he emitted a sweet vibe.

Burly (friendly, dese-dem-dose accented): So. You're Nate's girlfriend.

Me (demurely): Yes. Yes, I am.

Burly: The one from Arkansas.

Me (agreeably): Yes.

Burly: The one who's a writer.

Me (cheerfully but with a slight manic edge; where is this going?): Yes, that's me!

Burly (musing, a little dreamily): Jeez, a writer. You know, I always thought, a writer, that's gotta be a great thing to be. You see your name on the paper, right there... (he pauses, thoughtfully) ... Jeez, you know, you achieve immorality when you're a writer.

Me (instantly recognizing that I would remember this moment forever and that I must not, in any way, indicate this hilarious slip to this sweet guy, let alone what its nature was, because not only would that be incredibly boorish on my part, it would've embarrassed him down to his follicles... so, replying in a modest tone, lowering my eyes, I said): Well, I do my best.

And I do. Though rarely does it seem all that good to me. Hardly immortal. But not immoral, either.

***

Like anyone about to turn 60, my thoughts turn towards mortality. Even more so because I am not only a writer, but both a literary executor (of my late father, Maurice Zolotow, a show business biographer) and a literary-executor-to-be ( of my 97-as-of-this-writing mother, Charlotte Zolotow, a children's book writer).

And I am an Authors Guild member. Twice a year I read the Guild's Bulletin. Rarely do I get to the boxed-in listing titled "In Memoriam", and the one-paragraph-long obits of the better known writers on that list, which follow later, listed under "Deaths", without feeling that deep, unsettling, resonant twinge, occasionally with a sharp, sudden dart of grief. Sometimes I see the name of someone I actually knew, or knew of, or whose work I loved. The work lives; the person who wrote it does not. Of course I think about mortality. Far more than immortality. (Immorality is another question, one we will not take up here, so don't get your hopes up.) 

***

My mother, as I mentioned, is 97. About two months ago, we celebrated her birthday. "We" was me, my partner, David, most of our team of Jamaican and African caregivers and some of their partners and/or adult children, maybe 10 or 15 neighbors from the block on which Charlotte lives, in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and a couple of her old friends from the publishing world. The party was held on her front porch, and there was quite a spread of food (of which, she said modestly, the jerk tofu I made was the hands-down favorite). It was a relaxed, come-and-go affair.

Charlotte was in her recliner, which had had to be moved from inside the house, and to which she had had to take a longer than usual wheelchair ride, so she sort of half-listened half-dozed throughout the early part of the party; eyes closed but smiling. I had the sense that she was rocking along in the sounds of conversation, people enjoying themselves, lids being flipped off bottles with church-key openers, laughing, greetings.

People sometimes say to me, "Is she still with-it?" Or "Does she have dementia?" Or they mention Alzheimers, or short-term memory loss... While Alzheimer's is out-and-out inaccurate in her case, I don't really like any of these other summations of her state, for they seem to pathologize (label as illness, or abnormality) the altered working of the mind in the very old, which is as unique, from what I can tell, as the working of a young child's mind... but normal within its paradigm. (Of course, I'm not talking about real illness, where there is a sudden and disordered change of mental state which causes distress, like Alzheimer's).

Charlotte sometimes is clear and coherent, sometimes off the wall. Sometimes she makes jokes. Sometimes she struggles for a word or words, or doesn't complete a phrase, especially if she's sleepy. (Like "L...l...l" for "love", let's say). Sometimes she truly is in altered state, perhaps finishing up unfinished matters from her early life (one evening she stayed up all night long, laughing and talking with her sister Dorothy, who died many years ago, and her young daughter Ellen, who was me before I became Crescent at 16 and thus in a sense also died many years ago; several nights, she's stayed up worrying about "the office" and if "everything is organized." The office was HarperCollins, where she worked as an editor for many years, and always did worry about).

Late in the afternoon of her birthday, Charlotte opened her eyes suddenly and looked at me. "What, " she asked slowly but clearly, "did I... miss?" 

I thought a moment before I answered. Because maybe she meant that afternoon, while she was half-dozing, but maybe she meant something else, something bigger... so I tried to vibe it out. And I always, in such moments, try to orient her a little bit.

"Well, Charlotte, you're at 29 Elm , in Hastings, and we're having your birthday party today. You're 97 years old and ... I don't think you missed much. Let's see... You were married, you had two children, you wrote an incredible number of books, you helped a lot of people write their books when you were an editor. You traveled all over America and through a lot of Europe. You had a lot of friends, you had a lover, you had a garden, you read hundreds and hundreds of books. You ate Indian food and Chinese food and French and Italian and Mexican food and now you're often having African and Jamaican food--- really, I don't think there was anything big that you missed!"

Charlotte, who began laughing during this recitation, said, when I finished, wholeheartedly, "GOOD!"

But, does Charlotte remember writing 100+ children's books? No.

Her readers certainly do. And I (so strangely) am the gatekeeper of the bridge between them and her. The actual bridge is, of course, her work itself, which lasts, even as she does not and cannot, any more than the rest of us.

As this gatekeeper, her literary-executor-to-be, I am sort of Charlotte's executive secretary and the guardian of what I think she would have wanted me to say and do when she was in her middle-aged (as opposed to "right", another pejorative, dismissive word) mind. I answer emails that come in to her, and there are a lot. While some are seeking permission to reprint a poem of hers in an anthology, for instance, many more are just plain fan letters. Except, not just plain. Charlotte's readers, young and older, write about what her books mean to them. Often they reference having read them when they were children, and now reading them aloud to their own children, or even grandchildren.

Here is one email I received, and answered, yesterday.

"Hello! My name is Felicia ... I am 20 years old. I'm writing to you today because I was recently going through some of my old books and I stumbled upon one of my favorite childhood books, I Like To Be Little.

"I researched the author and came across your website and email address. From what I understand, Mrs. Charlotte Zolotow is 97 years old! Wow! I'm happy to see that she has lived such a long and happy life.

"Mrs. Zolotow's book was a staple in my childhood. I remember buying the book from a little shop in our local library where they sold used library books. My family couldn't afford things like video games to buy me so instead they bought books. Whether they were second-hand or brand new, I cherished them all.

"I Like To Be Little taught me how to embrace my youth and not to be in a rush to grow up. This has become such an important lesson to me and now I am able to pass this book on to my 6-year-old niece. This story will always be relevant and I just wanted to thank Mrs. Zolotow for teaching me such a simple yet important life lesson. I hope to also pass this on to my future children so Mrs. Zolotow's work can live on.

"I hope this email reaches you. Thank you, Felicia "

My response to her:

"Thank you, Felicia... I am Crescent, Charlotte's daughter. My mother is indeed 97 years old now (and does not really remember writing her books). But she would have loved your letter. And I love it now! Thank you so much... I am very moved and grateful.

Crescent Dragonwagon"

This response was truthful, yet less than complete. To state the whole truth, I'd have had to describe the poignancy of being in this role and relationship, to someone who created works like my mother did... and who is where and what she is now. And, though I am trying to do that here, I can't describe it, or explain, adequately.

Sometimes --- always, actually --- life just is too big for me. We are such tiny intricate pieces of an infinitely more intricate whole. We do the best we can, but really, with very little understanding of the part we play in the larger spiritual ecology.

Here in Vermont, in summer --- yet, because we are past the solstice and the days are already shortening, moving towards fall and winter --- the huge bullfrogs in our pond give their nightly throaty resonant calls, which always make me laugh. They sound from different sides of the pond, and, if I sit on the dock and listen, I can hear the distinct and unique tones of each different frog who is part of the choir. The depth of the one on the right, toward the sugar house, versus the one on the upper left in the cattails, a little higher in pitch, and the one in the near left, just past the dock, who is a bit softer. Slightly, subtly one of a kind. But all, to me, just delightfully humorous. (David, my partner, can imitate them flawlessly. And does, sometimes out of the blue, when he feels like making me laugh).

The frogs, like me, like Charlotte, are playing their parts, and presumably don't obsess about not having understanding about what those parts are, about "meaning", as much as I and most human beings do, and as Charlotte did.

And I hope I do as well at my work as the frogs do. And as my mother, who also didn't understand, did. She did so without understanding any more than I do (as I know from many conversations with her in the past and even, sort of, in the present, and from her work itself).

Ah, Mr. Burly Guy, back in Chicago more than 40 years ago, a writer doesn't and can't achieve immortality (though immorality, sure; much easier). If we are fortunate, and diligent enough at our practice of writing to get good at it; if we are able to empty out through and after practice enough for something greater than our small petty confused selves to flow through us, using us a conduit; if, if, and if, than just maybe our work may outlive us. And it may even connect us with others , across space and time and circumstance, in mysterious ways. Most of which, like my mother and Felicia, we will have absolutely no idea about.

Nor would it neccesarily be such a great thing for us if we did. The bullfrogs couldn't make their calls one bit better if they knew there were delighting me. If a writer meditates on immortality, or pleasing his or her readers, or writing something astonishing and earth-shaking, he or she is not working and the earth will not give the slightest shrug of astonishment. As William Faulkner said, "Not 'Be a writer.' Be writing." Well, yes, exactly.

And, as my mother unknowingly reminds me daily, even the chance to "be writing" is time-limited. Even if her mind worked in the fashion it once did --- linear yet poetic, able to put thoughts and feelings into words, and find those words, and craft them into sentences that speak to readers --- her arthritis-crunched fingers could not begin to hold a pen or tap a keyboard.

A woman in her late 20's with the same last name as Nate, my old cop boyfriend, contacted me on Facebook, saying she knew I'd once been friends with her dad. She'd found a copy of one of my books in the attic, inscribed by me to him. She made a friend request; I accepted. She and I have never had much Facebook interaction, but, through her page, I now know the slightest bit about how Nate's story came out. That he married. That he had children. What he looks like now (I cannot recognize, in the picture of her and her dad, the bright-eyed slim young man, the brave cop who survived a stab wound, and lived a fascinating almost actorly life when he was his 'underground' self on the job, with whom I was so briefly deeply and intoxicatingly infatutated, when I was myself younger than she is now). 

Are my words or memories made "immortal" just because they are written down? I don't think so, but I don't think it matters, nor is that what I am trying for in my work. What matters is very mortal indeed, to me: life fascinates, seduces, crushes, and mystifies. I keep trying to figure it out, and realizing that  I never will have any more than the most provisional understanding.

But one thing I also have come to realize is that, as I said in the subtitle of this blog, the human desire to tell and hear, read and write stories, is part of the process of life figuring itself out.  What subtractions! What gifts! All that happens --- love and loss, a stabbing to the spleen, the lovely funny self-important croaking of the bullfrogs, a pink punch, a misspoken word, a laugh, a platter of jerk tofu, a book finding its way into the life of a little girl whose parents couldn't afford video games, an old old lady on a front porch, wondering, one June day, if she has missed anything  --- it happens, all of it, in any event.

But if we write about it, for us at least, it goes unwasted. We won't be here long, any of us. But we were here. By writing, we bear witness. And, we bear life.

And, too, in the act of writing, if we are fortunate enough to hit "flow" (as inevitably happens at least sometimes, if one shows up on a daily basis) we don't think about any of that. We are, briefly, exempt from time altogether. We forget where we are, who we are, that time is passing. We look up, and realize that though we sat down after breakfast, it is already starting to get dark. We have a moment, sometimes a few hours, when, regardless of the quality of the writing produced, and whether anyone likes it or not, we have been exempt from time.

It has nothing to do, Burly, with seeing your name on a page. But it's as close as one can get to immortality... for a moment or two.

just so you know I haven't been totally slacking in the blog department...

Look, I realize that in Blog World having your last post dated December 12 when it's now the following mid-April looks bad. Really bad.

I've had my reasons. New book (Bean by Bean). Book tour. Elder care. Not home much. Blah, blah, blah.

But, I do walk the talk writing-wise, pretty much. I do writing practice, daily or near-daily. And I do a lot of semi-thoughtful quick writing; a paragraph or two on the issue or experience or thought or or insight du jour --- on  Facebook. These quick paragraphs are more like the majority of blogs, or micro-blogs, out there. (If you click that link you'll see it takes you a 'fan page'; which I just started. Facebook made me, refusing to allow any more 'friends' to my 'personal' page. Since I consider the cult of celebrity part of the DNA of the spawn of the devil, I am not happy about this. Anyway, that's why you're not seeing many of my paragraphs/'micro-blogs' there. Yet. And maybe one day all the language around 'social media' won't seem so distasteful to me that I have to keep putting it in quotes. Maybe. ) 

Thing is, as you know if you read me here regularly (or irregularly. That being my fault, not yours) what I do here are not that.

They're what my wise and funny friend Ronni Lundy calls 'blongs': 'blog' + 'long' equals 'blong.' They're what used to be called essays. And to "essay', of course, means, to try.

And these just take awhile, mostly. This kind of writing takes uninterrupted, open-space, free-range thought-and-writing time. Time to get it wrong. Time to get it right. Time to figure out what it is you're trying to get. Just time.

Exactly what you don't get on a book tour where, paradoxically, you are talking about your writing, or at least the subject of your writing, all the time. (It is the writer's need for uninterrupted time that led me, in the course of my life, to periodic stays at writers' colonies, and eventually to co-found one, the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Another story)

But. Even blog-, or blong-wise, I haven't been a total slacker.

In addition to Nothing is Wasted on the Writer, I have another blog, which I keep up with even more sporadically. It's called Deep Feast: Writing the World through Food, and it focuses on culinary writing and the larger questions eating, cooking, and writing about them bring up. It too, like this blog, is usually in the 'creative non-fiction' (was there ever a more pretentious-sounding term?), or personal history, line.

And there, at Deep Feast, I wrote a blong only last month (which makes it practically current events for me, though for no one else in the online world). It's seemingly about my discovery of goongoo peas.

But it's really about why there's no such thing as a definitive cookbook. Or for that matter, a definitive book of any kind.

As such, it's also germane to Nothing is Wasted. So I'm sending y'all over there while I finish up the book tour and related stuff, as well as write the next post for her. And the rest of my life. Unpacking. Laundry. You know. 

Not to give anything away, but I think the next post for here is going to be about the myth of getting caught up, and how it hog-ties us. A blong story, if there ever was one.


P.S. If you're interested in some of what the book tour bebopping included, here are some of the high points that've made it online. In February, I was on NPR's On Point with Tom Ashbrook, a stellar interview, who really, really takes the time to be well-informed on the subject and asks erudite and thoughtful questions. And, in late March, Sheryl Julian, food editor of the Boston Globe, wangled an invitation for lunch, and wrote about it here. It should be said that the wangling was not very difficult. I would frankly prefer to be talked to in my native habitat, over food. And Sheryl's an  excellent, thorough, old-school, dig-deep journalist; she actually talked to people who knew me (and got a few hilarious quotes).