"Nothing is wasted on the writer."

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.

 

 

"fixing to" ... and a message via indigo bunting

The original inventers of twittering have been coming and going from the feeder all day today. Whenever I look out, from the bathroom window upstairs or the french doors in the kitchen downstairs, different visitors are at the cafe. Finches yellow as canaries,  finches as reddish-purple as if they'd bathed in grape juice. Sparrows, in tweedy brown-gray-black-white. Black-caped chicadees. Grosbeaks, with their rosy-red neckerchiefs set off by the chic understated black, gray, and white, the bright slash of their busy yellow beaks. All those dear active feathered bodies, at work, play, feeding, in flight.

And then, twice ---  at midday and then again in the late afternoon --- a rarity at the feeder. An indigo bunting, its turquoise so vivid my breath caught in my throat. (photo, courtesy of Thundafunda)


Which reminded me.

About six years ago, I was fixing to teach my first Fearless Writing in Vermont.

By the use of "fixing to" you can tell, if you didn't already know, that the majority of my life has not been spent in Vermont,  but in Arkansas.

"Fixing to" has elements of "getting ready to" or "about to" , but it's more elastic, less definite. This indefiniteness has to do with time and preparation. One could be fixing to do something in a year or in 15 minutes. And while this could involve doing a particular task in a timely manner (if you're fixing to go a potluck, for instance, you might be making a skillet of cornbread, or cutting up and transferring it to a basket), it --- fixing to --- also, to me, also implies a kind of thoughtfulness, a mental preparation or pre-preparation. You're deciding less what, than how, you'll go about whatever you're fixing to do. You're rolling it over in your mind, meditating on it, cogitating on it, considering it.(Left, one such basket I did take to a potluck, here in Westminster West, Vermont, in 2010; photo by David R. Koff.)

The fixing to I was doing around this particular Fearless Writing had elements of both thought and action.

Not only was it the first Fearless I was going to teach in Vermont, it was going to be in my own home, not a conference center or similar facility. Not only was it going to be in my home, instead of being a quick one-weekend intensive workshop, the way I most often teach it, it was going to be one full-day Sunday every other week for six months; twelve sessions, in other words.

We would go more slowly. The group would get to know each other very well. The seasons would make a half-circle. We would change, individually and together, with and through our writing and our shared time. I knew this, though I had no idea exactly how the particular students would all mesh together with each other and with me, only that they would, in some unforseeable way.

The fixing to was given further depth by the fact that I was still fairly new to my Vermont life. It still felt like a still largely unknown after, filled with question marks --- to the before that had been Arkansas, period.

The Arkansas life: as many readers of these posts know, I'd assumed I'd have for the duration, but had been abruptly exiled from it by the sudden death of my much-loved husband, Ned Shank. His death that unspeakably large domino which knocked over almost all the others constructing my old life.

Ned's before-and-after happened within the space of four hours. BEFORE: a tall, handsome blue-eyed guy in early middle age, with disgracefully long eyelashes; a writer, an artist, an innkeeper, an historic preservationist, an imperfect but loving, affectionate husband, and an all-around sweet, funny guy. Don't know who took this picture of him, laughing with my Aunt Dot on the side porch of what was then Aunt Dot's Vermont home, and is now mine... I believe it was a visit we made here in September, 2000, just a few months before his death. Now both Aunt Dot and Ned are gone from this world; but strangely, he, at age 44, before her, at age 100 + nine months. This picture always twinges me, but i love how it shows the fondness these two had for each other, their good humor in each others' company, and their relative sizes and ages.)

THEN --- which I guess is the "and" in every before-and-after: he, on his finch-yellow bicycle, on his tri-weekly ride, flew through a pick-up's windshield. The impact, on 62 West, just past the Lake Leatherwood turn-off; the ER doctor at St. Mary's in Rogers, Arkansas, wearing black scrubs with an incongruous pattern of bright fruit, coming into the "family room" to say to me, "We lost him."

AFTER.

My own after was not a literal death, of course. Only the death of an old life.

Call it, more accurately, an amputation. One that took place with agonizing slowness and only gradually dawning awareness. Pyschic gangrene just about had to set in before I was willing to say, "Okay, cut it off" and hobble the hell out of Dodge; which is to say, the town that had been my home for 33 years, Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

And move on to the slow, incremental creation, or perhaps revelation, or unfolding, of my new life, begun so tentatively. But one I have now been living, in Vermont, for the past eight years.

It now seems to me that in part I got through all this loss and change because writing itself had taught me a lot about uncertainty.

Showing up, working, walking and writing the same way, one foot after another, without much idea of where I was going. But somehow arriving somewhere that was often surprisingly good: despite unknown, unguaranteed, uncertain outcome, and swimming in the tidal rise and fall of anxiety with its unpredictable, lethal-feeling undertows.

Teaching Fearless Writing (a misnomer, because fear is always part of the process) had deepened my abstract and practical understanding of this. Each time I watched students get it, I got it again, too.

"It" being: that increasing one's ability to tolerate anxiety is the price of admission to writing, creativity, and finally, life itself.

This is something one never stops learning. Like all the big, important stuff, you don't learn it once, but over and over again. And each time it feels both familiar and like a shockingly new revelation.

So. There was a lot of "fixing to" as I approached this first extended Fearless Writing. Given a death, an emotionally unclean and needlessly cruel severing from a non-profit organization I had started back in Arkansas with my late husband, the sale of one house, the purchase of another (that second house being Aunt Dot's former home, bought, as I always say, "...with financing, so creative I should have gotten a Macarthur.) Then, a cross-country move to a part of the country with so different a geographic, political, and civic climate from that in which I had lived for the prior 33 years, that I could as well have moved almost to another planet --- a lot of "fixing to." Right, the day of the great loading of the moving truck, on my then-front porch in Arkansas. I got by with a little help from my friends. Make it a LOT. Here, embracing and being embraced by Cheri Wright, Charlisa Cato, Starr Mitchell, & George West. Ah, the poignant problem of a late-in-life move: you can make new friends --- I have, and I do --- but you can never make old friends. (I believe the South is so much more easily friendly on a personal one-to-one manner than the North, yet remaining unbelievable harsh on a civic level, while the North is the exact reverse. But there are exceptions, and I digress.)

But I had done most of the fixing to by this particular Saturday, before the first Sunday of this extended Vermont Fearless Writing. And I was surprised to be... happy.

It was early May, as it is on the day I write this: miracle greeness after the long cold white winter. The one after which I gave that extended Fearless must've been my second or third in Vermont; now I have been through eight, to my own astonistment.

Non-New Englanders always imagine winter to be the biggest climactic challenge; this is not so. It's Mud Season, which follows winter: incredibly inconvenient, mussy, muddy, mucky, unwalkable, undrivable, sloppy.

But then. Spring.

Now --- both as I write this and the "now" of the day before I taught that first Vermont Fearless --- the white snow and wet brown mud had retreated. Almost everything was green or becoming so, a green pale and yellow-tinged, as if trees and grass, so long covered and sodden, now thirsted for and feasted on sunlight to excess, imitating it, exuding it. A greeness omnipresent, almost palpable, and impossible for human eyes to get enough of.

And me? That day I too was beginning to green-up and grow golden, in a new, double-barreled way. First, I was filled with anticipation about the class, jazzed, psyched. Second, on top of that, just astonished that I had it in me to be happy again.

One does not understand life's own hunger to live, quite apart from individual will, and the resilience it brings, until one has experienced it. While for several years after Ned's death, my own life felt to me like a long prison sentence, a non-negotiable term that is served with grim endurance, because it must be, that resilience was there, as improbably alive beneath the inner snow and cold mud as is spring beneath the outer.

That Saturday, I was cleaning the house. ("Thank God we have people over," Ned used to say, cheerfully, running the vacuum, "Otherwise the house would never get cleaned!"). David, my present and, in so far as I can see, for-the-duration partner, did not yet live here full-time. So that day it was just me and the two brother-and-sister tabby cats, asleep in the room we use for work-outs and DVD-watching.

Like everyone in Vermont, we "zone" the house in wintertime, so as not to heat the whole tresidence, only the parts we're using at any given time. The room where the cats were asleep, and the guest room next to it, have no central heat. Instead, there's my old Ashley Automatic woodstove, which I brought all the way from Arkansas. In the winter, when David and I want to watch a movie of an evening in  that frigid room, we crank the Ashley up, and pretty soon it's cozily tropical in there.

In addition to the Ashley, the house has two fireplaces, one in the living room (where Fearless would be held) and one in the dining room. Counterintuitively, we shut the damper of the fireplaces in winter and do not use them; more heat gets sucked up the chimney than even a blazing fire puts out into the room.

But in spring, when the days are pleasant and somewhere on the medium to warm continuum, but the nights still nippy usually well into May, ah, those fireplaces, and the fires we light in them, are perfect.

As part of my clean-up, I swept the fireplace free of ashes, and began laying a fire. I am a great and devoted fire-builder. It's kind of a Zen thing. The way each fire goes together slightly differently, because the exact pieces of wood vary. It takes being  very particular in stacking, layering kindling, selecting and placing just the right branch or log in just the right order and position. I should be good at this, and I am; wood was our sole source of heat all those years in Arkansas. But beyond all the shoulds, I love building a fire. And then lighting it. And then, watching as it catches, mesmerized --- as humans have been since prehistoric times ---made happy and warm by the flames.

That Saturday, I saw that one particular log was a little short for the fireplace. "Oh," I thought, "I might as well lay a fire in the woodstove too, while I'm at it." The short log would be perfect for the woodstove, and so I carried it in there and lay it on the hearth.

I heard a small unusual thump which I couldn't identify as I came in the room with the woodstove. The cats, utterly sacked out on the orange couch, did not stir. I opened the woodstove and there was another sound, and a small puff of ash floated out. Cautiously, I leaned over and peered into the woodstove.

And there, at the far end of the oval shaped stove, was an indigo bunting cringing among the ashes, its feathers slightly puffed. I heard myself say out loud, "Oh, I know we can do better than that for you, " and I closed the woodstove door.

First I got the cats (drugged with sleep, oblivious to the indigo bunting) out of the room, carting them upstairs and shutting them in the bedroom. Then, I went to the kitchen and got a rag. I even remember the rag: blue flannel, with small white fleur de lis on it. The rag had once been a sheet, in use at the inn my husband and I had owned back in our Arkansas life. When it had gotten too ratty for the inn, we had used it on our own bed. Finally, it became rags. It is strange, what lasts and what doesn't.

With one of those rags, I returned to the woodstove, opened the door and yes, there was the indigo bunting. I imagine it must have been terrified, but what human knows, really, what a bird feels? But it was crouched in that far corner still, its feathers dulled with ash, its head tipping one way and then the other, its eyes still bright, alert, very wary.

I reached in and tossed the rag over the bunting, and, just like that, reached in and carefully picked up the rag from below, the back of my hand in the ashes, the bird inside. I carefully carried the small rag-wrapped bundle out to the lawn on my palm, hoping deeply that the bird inside was in no way injured. But expecting, I think, that it would be a little dazed.

There, in the sunlight, I lifted off the rag. And that tiny bright blue bird was not in the least hurt, or dazed. Instead, liberated from stove, rag, and human hand, it simply and immediately flew away and up.

"Took flight" makes it sound more dramatic than it was; there was no burst of feathers or sudden flapping of wings, as if it was in fear. It was wholly natural. I'm here, I'm gone. Just up and off. I followed its its blue with my eyes, up and to the maple tree by the stone wall. I watched until it flew away again, on whatever errands were on its things-to-do list.

Brilliant indigo bunting, trapped in a dark cavernous place filled with ash; then, liberated, back to air, sun, flight, its own nature.

That day, could my life, my starting-to-be-new life, have felt to me any more like that bird's? And my students, who would come at noon on the following day --- would I be helping them open a door to some cast-iron place, so that some imprisoned part of themselves might flutter out and back into its own nature?

Do we not each have, and need, a dark place? Maybe it's a prison; maybe it's a stove. It can trap us, warm us, burn us; it can, if we are a small blue bird and it's May and we perhaps tried to make a nest in what seemed like a good place but turned out to be the stovepipe of a then unused stove, keep us cold, isolated, and in ash and shadow.

As humans, we need containers in which to create warmth. But we, no more than that indigo bunting, are not meant to live imprisoned, in a woodstove or anywhere else.   

I can still remember the names of every person who attended that long class, which ran from the longest days of the year through the shortening fall and early winter. I can see the faces in my mind, where each person sat, the sunny day we met inside and just outside the opened french doors on the lawn facing the garden. The breaks where we ate, or sometimes ran down to the pond for a quick, chill dip. I can recall some of what everyone wrote, read aloud, said, and how often they surprised themselves and me and the class.

The one who said, at the beginning  "I want to write, but I'm afraid I'll be revealed as a phony." "To whom?" I asked. He blinked in astonishment, as if this was self-evident. "To myself, of course."

The one who said "I wish that every time I start to write, all of these negative thoughts wouldn't rise up in me." "Define 'negative'," I said. "Oh..." she said, pausing. And then, wonderfully, "Introspection gone ballistic." (Something I quote occasionally, with attribution to her, in Fearless workshops to this day.)

The one --- a lef-wing management consultant to non-profits --- who discovered, in some of our practices, that some of what he was writing might be poetry, and that he could write sympathetically as an out-of-his-depth George Bush. Discovered that he could write with transparent brutality about a well-meaning conversation in a restaurant with his young daughter, in which he tried to explain the divorce from her mother.

I looked at that indigo bunting today and remembered all that. It happens to be a challenging time in my life and David's right now. My mother is 95. My brother and I disagree about her care. David, his mother, and his brother mirror, in a fun-house sort of way, that same sibling/eldercare dynamic at play in his family. He has issues with his old life, and property he still owns in it. Time is doing its relentless tick-tick-tick number, asking us both at every moment, "Is this really what you want to be doing with me? I'm infinite only to myself, you know, not to you, you mere mortal." The industry with which I've been connected my whole working life --- publishing --- is undergoing tectonic changes due to various forms of online publication, all of which affect my financial life and future and demand new responses and decisions from me. Risk and uncertainty at every turn. Anxiety's causes are always current, yet it is also, again always, the same-old same-old.

And yet. And yet. Sometimes the door of the dark prison opens, and, with as much seeming randomness as one was got in there, one is suddenly free. Free, if one is an indigo bunting, even of the memory of ash.

And free, if one is a human writer, to remember and recall both entrapment and freedom, to consider them both part of the "riot of opposites" as the Gita puts it, the tidal turning that is life. Free to use the happenings, the mishaps, the happinesses, the mysteries in creating narratives with which we can live. Experience and its utility: the same old ticket to whatever is next, beginning and ending with the creative invention and reinvention of meaning. For nothing is wasted on us, we writers, and in that, we find our greatest luck and purpose.

whimper while you work: life-density, writing, very dark chocolate

First, let me say how humiliated I am that I haven't done a new blog post since (OH my GOD, this is ETERNITY in Blogland!) ... since last July.
 
Actually, I did do one. It was, juicily, about older babes who are still sex-positive in their late 50's and onward, sometimes way onward. I number myself, gladly, among this group, despite being 58 (see left; the 'after', by David Koff). This is an age when, had you told me when I was a teenager (see right, the WAY 'before', by Vernon Tucker), I'd still be desiring, enjoying, and having sex, I would have said 'ewwww'. You may have seen this post, in late March, 2011, but you probably didn't: I had it out there for about 15 minutes before I pulled it. (Here we have the down-side of being able to push a button that says 'publish', instead of working with an editor and having a delay of years, in the case of books, or months, in the case of magazine pieces, to reconsider, rework, and get an outside opinion).

It wasn't inhibition that caused me to pull it; rather, though it was a good post, I decided I hadn't quite said what I wanted to say in the way I wanted to say it. Sigh. If nothing is wasted on the writer, that includes drafts, and the hours of times spent on them, and other pieces --- any length, any genre --- which may or may not finally work out to one's satisfaction. Yet each one increases one's development as a writer. It's that old practice makes practice thing again.

So, I'm reworking the older-babes-in-sexland thing. Consider this reference as a preview of coming (yes, that was intentional) attractions. And, while I would have prefered ending this long near-silence with a bang (yes, intentional too), I am going to start instead with a whimper.

With two whimpers. Followed by a groan of a pleasure and ah-hah, now-I-really-get-it wave of observation. (All of which also pertain, at times, to sexual activities, now that I think of it.)

This first whimper is metaphorical: the subject of this post, chocolate- and writing-related, is seemingly much more minor than the highly-relevent-to-baby-boomers SHOUT of sexual seniority.

The second is a real, actual, literal whimper, one I remember making shortly before indulging in a little strictly legal but serious self-medication. Which, when you hear the circumstances, I think you'll agree was more than justifiiable.

This was was a while back, too: in the, oh gosh, probably late 1980's. If you think this makes both the pained whimper and its palliation memorable, you are right.

So memorable that it all surfaced as I read the following innocent, offhand Twitter post this morning, from @simmertildone:  "I know many writers report that when running or driving or gardening, they're 'writing.' How about 'standing in kitchen eating brownies?' "

Well, yeah. Why would that be any different?

Digression:  I would be remiss if, before telling you more about the whimpers et al which that tweet pulled for me, I didn't introduce @simmertildone, aka Marilyn Naron, a little further. Marilyn (pictured left; from her site) lives in Lawrence, Kansas. She describes herself on Twitter as "Recovering pastry chef. Writer, blogger, dumpling-eater and chief dog-walker."

She also has a blog, also titled Simmer Til Done. I will add that she A) updates her blog somewhat more frequently than I do, B) writes with a nonchalant, charming, hey-we're-just-hangin'-in-the-kitchen together personal voice,  witty and gently self-deprecating, about C) not just food, with lust-wothy recipes that actually work, and musings on same, but stuff like her daughter, Josie, the writer Judy Blume, and the odd non-craft craft. Too, she happens to have a black Labrador named Cleo --- the same name as our family's black standard French poodle when I was growing up.

Something else about her blog: while really good, professional-quality photographs have become almost de rigeur in
food blogs, Marilyn's are over-the-top. You might drool over them; you might gaze at them as longingly as Cleo the dog does here, at some brisket (which almost though not quite looks good to me, and I've been a vegetarian for more than 30 years --- this is Marilyn's photo, obviously).

But she (Marilyn, not Cleo) also does drawings, too. Her Baker's Alphabet, which I think one of these years will develop into a children's book, if there is any justice, is what first led our paths to cross. See her sketch below. But that's another story.

Now you might have been wondering about how a pastry chef could describe herself as "recovering," which is going to slowly lead us back to the point. Marilyn elucidates this statement on the "about" page of her blog: "I’m a pastry chef – but I don’t work in restaurants anymore, so you can just call me giver of dessert happiness." She also gives more details on Lawrence, Kansas, "the coolest college town in America", which she calls affectionately, as perhaps many there do, "Larryville."

As you'll see, I really, really understand the "don't work in restaurants anymore" bit. Which leads us back to whimpering. End of digression.

I have written here before about my former life as a writer-innkeeper (at Dairy Hollow House, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas), and the truly insane (as it appears to me now, from this remove) daily schedule I kept, more or less as follows:

• Somewhere between 6:30 & 9:00 am: get up, breakfast, a little time with Ned.
• 9:30 am to noon: write
• Noon: eat lunch, sometimes with Ned.
• 1:15 to 2:15 pm: nap (very occasionally, not nearly often enough, with Ned).
• 2:15 to 3:15: work out, then shower, dress.
• 3:55 pm-ish: walk to the inn, a few minutes away. As I wrote in that previous post " ...as I approached the inn's door, I'd feel my other, non-writer life, as an innkeeper, kick in."
• 4:00 pm: get into the inn's kitchen, and start cooking dinner for the evening's guests --- anywhere from 15 to 45 people.
• 5:00 pm: Ned would arrive, to maitre d'  (a rare, if blurry, in-action photo of him, right... imagine! Phones still had curly cords, and look at that antique computer! Oh, Ned.) 
• 7:00 pm: dinner at the inn; Ned "front of the house", me "heart of the house", waitstaff the intermediaries
• 8:30-9:00-ish pm: "make the rounds," as Ned used to call it, visiting with guests at the table usually as they were having dessert.
• 9:30-ish pm: staff dinner
• 10:00 pm at the earliest, 1 or 2:00 am latest, leave inn/restaurant/kitchen, Ned arriving usually an hour or so later

Any sane person who says, "I've always wanted to have a restaurant" should read this schedule as a cautionary note.

And I feel sure any person, of any degree of sanity or insanity, who has worked in, or is presently working in, a restaurant, is probably heaving a sigh, relating all too well, and maybe having their feet give a twinge or two in symapthetic recall.

And anyone, period, who didn't understand why Marilyn refers to herself as a "recovering pastry chef" --- well, now maybe you get it.

But: I was productive in those days. As a writer, as well as a cuisinere ('chef' always felt a little high-falutin' for what I was, but 'cook' a little too greasy-spoonish; 'cuisinere', French for 'cook', felt, maybe irrationally, just right).

With so very little time to write then, there was always a heavy-handed external deadline: I had to go cook at the inn, in a very few hours. In memory, I did not waste time. I did not procrastinate much or at all. I did not play computer Hangman or Bedazzled like a person could do if they didn't have to be up at their restaurant by 4:00 (This is theoretical, not confessional, please understand. Just because I have a lot more time to write these days now than then, doesn't mean that I... Oh, okay, it is confessional.) (Left, me in the wonderful writing studio, Moonshine Cottage, where I worked so hard during the inn days. Will I ever have another writing room that suits me as well? Seems unlikely. I still have the sweater I wore in that picture, though, and the mug that's in my hand. Odd what lasts and what doesn't, isn't it?)

Back then, I think the writing time kept me cooking and the cooking kept me writing. 

But of course those solitary mornings of writing rested on uninterrupted time. And that was the great gift Ned, my dear late husband, gave me, on an ongoing basis. (Left, on our wedding day.) For while he appeared at the inn at 5:00 (or at least, was supposed to; he was frquently late, to the ire of our front desk people), he did all, or almost all, of the other stuff before then.

Other stuff like fixing things, doing repairs, maintenance around the property. Paying bills. Stacking the wood. Meeting with purveyors and staff. Occasionally firing or hiring someone. Covering for a dairymaid who had a sick child, or a front desk person on vacation. Doing legwork for the eternal, infernal City Council and Planning Commision and Parks Commission meetings that anyone who did anything in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, was periodically having to go before. Making sure vehicles worked, getting windowshields replaced if a rock dinged the glass. And on and on and on.

The minutiae that is the basal metabolism of life doubles when you are an innkeeper, if you take seriously the safety, needs, and delight of your guests. Ned and I did. Ned also managed to scoop in civic duty and volunteerism; he himself headed up a comission, the Historic District Commission, known to us in-house as "the H-Dick." (Right, just about a month before he died, withe writer Pat Carr, cooking up big plans about the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow --- which is another 'nother story.)

Actually, I don't know how either of us did it.

Where this already tenuously balanced schedule fell apart for me was when or if Ned was out of town. Which brings me to the literal whimper.

One morning he was out of town. It was spring, almost Easter, or Mother's Day --- one of  those Sundays where there's a big-ass brunch crowd was coming up, occasions where  we dropped brunch into the usual go-round of meals we served the general public (as opposed to just inn guests). I think also it was a Friday morning. Since Eureka Springs was and is primarily a town built around a weekend influx of visitors, I knew I'd be cooking late and hard that evening, and Saturday, with that killer turn-around-get-up-early-and-do-a-bang-up-brunch on Sunday.(This picture doesn't exactly match, but I've been wanting to use it for awhile, and it is of a brunch at the inn, held circa 1980 as a fundraiser for the Arkansas Literacy Foundation. You can see me, seated, the strap over my white-shirted shoulder. And you can barely see my mother, Charlotte Zolotow, cattycorner to the right, gray-haired. Sitting at the head of the table? Then-Senator Dale Bumpers. And standing? You guessed it: a very young, impassionaed, articulate Hillary Clinton.)

But back to the day of the whimper, when Ned was out of town. Although he may have been just in Iowa, seeing his parents, if memory serves this was one of his longer trips.
Many years, if we could afford it, he went for two weeks or so to South India, a place where, improbably, he felt wholly at home; a place he so loved that he had wanted his ashes put there (as I did, in fact, in the Pamba River, right, as he had requested).

I have the feeling that this particular Friday was in the middle of such a trip; I do remember he was not available even by phone.

In summary, then, a long, very long, weekend, made longer by whatever would fall to me with Ned being gone. I knew that Friday morning would be my last alone-time/writing time for the next several days. So I was camel-ish... drinking long and deep at the oasis of solitude, because it was going to be awhile.

Except. I was interrupted mid-drink. That morning was one of those where everything that could happen, did happen, most of it typically in Ned's bailiwick. A Dairymaid 
called to say that tehe toilet in Summer Meadows (left) toilet was backed up. Ned could have unblocked it; I called a plumber. Then the front desk called; Becky, Ned's replacement as maitre d', who was going to be in in the late afternoon, had some kind of family emergency; who did I suggest we call to step in as replacement for her? Then the front desk called again; didn't I remember that Rose, the prep cook, had a doctor's appointment and had to leave early, meaning I would have to come in early, to prep for the dinner we'd be serving (and I'd be cooking) that night? Well, no, I hadn't remembered. (Had I been told? If so, I hadn't written it down. Mistake.)

Okay, I remember thinking as I struggled with resentment at having to leave my precious cocoon early; I might as well try to get in a good space about all this, I'm going to have to do it anyway, and I want good vibes in my heart and in the food I cook, yes?  Yes. I thought all this as I opened the French doors from my studio to step out on the porch and walk across the valley to the inn. Or, wait, should I take the car? I'd probably be prettty damned tired by the evening's end...

That's when I saw, on the doormat, a gift from Z-Cat, the then-resident calico: a small dead bloodied snake. Oh-kay. Shake off the doormat, dropping the dead snake into the shrubbery.

And then, I looked down to to the Chevy Blazer, parked below in the driveway: ah yes, of course. Flat tire, passenger's side. Well, I was going to walk to the inn anyway, right?

When I got to the kitchen, David Crough, our erstwhile handyman, popped in to tell me the Eco-lab repairman who was supposed to have come the Monday before and put in a replacement part had not, in fact, come on Monday, and the odds were slim or none that we could get him on the Friday before a holiday weekend which meant the odds were also slim or none that we would have a working commercial dishwasher on this upcoming, particularly busy weekend.

This was the moment I whimpered.

I remember clearly exactly where I was: facing the long, stainless steel table in the kitchen, my back to the little window where guests could look in and I could look out. My feet were on the webby black plastic matting that, at the end of each evening, got run through the now non-working Eco-lab. I remember that it was about 11:00 in the morning.

And suddenly one clear, urgent thought clear appeared as if it had unfurled in 36-point lettering on a screen in my mind above my head. It was this: "I wonder if we have any Double-Density in the walk-in?"

Double-Density was Double-Density Chocolate-Mocha Walnut Torte, one of our two go-to regular chocolate desserts at the inn (the other was Chocolate Bread Pudding Maurice, with Raspberry Sauce). Double-Density was a very adult chocolate dessert; really, you ought to've been over 21 to order it.

It was a very, very bittersweet moist chewy cake with a little inn-made coffee concentrate added to the batter; something like a very rich, extra thick brownie in texture, baked in a round, deeper than usual cake pan. When we reversed it out of its pan, we iced it with a rich-as-sin, velvety-smooth, also very, very bittersweet glaze, shiny-glossy, pretty much just bittersweet chopped melted chocolate (Vahlrona, we used) and sour cream. Fairly liquid when its main ingredients were first whisked together, the warm glaze was poured over the cake. There it firmed nicely; just enough  to set, yet soft enought to stay menltingly voluptuous. And toasted walnuts, hand-chopped, pressed into the glaze around the cake's sides, completed the cake.  (I know you'd like a picture. I don't have one. I am not going to make a D-D now in order to take one. But... the Harvard Square, left, made by famed chocolatier L.A. Burdick, is pretty durned similar in taste and texture, though it's much more refined-looking than our D-Ds were; too, the D-D's were cut in triangular wedges. The L.A. Burdick in North Walpole, New Hampshire, is about a 20-minute drive from us here in Vermont, making Harvard Square or any number of wondrous pastries or confections a dangerously doable local possibility at any time.)

Curiously, my always-active sweet tooth largely abated during the restaurant years. I suspect this was because I did so much baking and dessert-making and plating I got sated by osmosis. My taste, after a long night working the kitchen, ran to the cool, tart, icy sorbets we made in-house (the basil being my particular favorite, followed by the ginger).

But. On the rare night when I really wanted a serious dessert, it was always an after-dinner, late night thing.

And on the really, really rare occasion when I had a yen for a serious sweet midday, it would be after lunch, maybe with a cup of hot tea in the late afternoon. (Still true, to this day.)

For I didn't eat sweet stuff early. Still don't. Not ever. No continental breakfast or danish for me. Have, usually, something proteinaceous, some form of whole grain, and a piece of fruit: typically, a soft-boiled egg or some sauteed tofu, a piece of multi-grain toast, half a fresh grapefruit or a fresh orange or a cup or so of berries. That combo, varied slightly, seems to be just about the perfect fuel for me.

But that particular morning in the way-back, it was 11:00, lunch still a good hour and a half away. Yet stressed beyond endurance, what appeared?

"I wonder if we have any Double-Density in the walk-in?"

Without hesitation I walked across the concrete floor, past the Eco-lab, up the one step to the pantry. Turned left at the bin of onions and the potato bin, past the shelves loaded with jewel-like homemade/inn-made jams and preserves, and to the walk-in, pulling up on its long handle.

And there it was. Two slices left, from the day before yesterday, so it wasn't going to be served tonight anyway.

I carried the pan back to the stainless steel table. I cut a thin slice off one of the two large slices, got out a fork, and put a bite directly in my mouth.

And as immediately as a sedative injected directly into a vein would hit, I instantly felt noticeably, remarkably better. Ahhhh. I mean: as that sugar-chocolate-buttter combination, at the verboten time of day, melted into my tongue, at that milli-second it acted like a drug. Calm and soothe kicked in. I'm sure I closed my eyes for a moment, easing into that sudden Laz-Z-Boy of relaxed feelings and pleasureable sensation. And that was when I let out that soft groan of relief.

But even as I stood there, relieved, drugged with and by chocolate, I was at the same time having the ah-hah moment, with the part of me that stood outside watching and observing.

Being a food-writer (and cuisiniere) I knew cognitively something about chocolate. That its family name is theobroma, which means food of the goods. That in Aztec society  priests, warriors and royalty drank a thick, frothy, bitter beverage called chocolatl/xocolatl. That this was cooked to melt the chocolate but served cool, and was  spiced with chiles, vanilla, and achiote. It was said to be an aphrodisac, a stinulant, an elevator of mood; it was said to strengten one, and banish fatigue. I knew Montezuma (right) supposedly drank 50 small golden cups of it a day; his court as a whole is credited with downing 2000 cups daily. (But, I always wonder when I read figures like this: who was there actually counting? Are we supposed to believe the accounts of conquistadors, as notable for their bragging as their cruelty?)

Anyway, I knew that recent neuroscience had borne most of this out. That chocolate contains a host of phyto-chemicals associated with mood, emotion, addiction: though I couldn't have named all of them offhand, I knew that at least four of them --- phenylethylamine, theobromine, anandamide and tryptophan --- did trigger mood enhancent, via neurotransmitters in the brain's own private pharmacy. Phenylethylamine, for instance, is a brain-manufactured chemical  similar to amphetamine, kicking off feelings of giddiness, attraction, euphoria and excitement, while phenylethylamine open's the brain's apothecary to release pleasureable mesolimbic dopamine ( a substance which, by the way, peaks at the moment of orgasm; there you go). Tryptophan is an amino acid associated with calmness and relaxation, while anandamide triggers a mild version of goofy well-being that some compare to a mild marijuana high. Yet the theobromine, plus a little caffeine (much less in a cup of coffee) balance things out with their wakifying effect. To boot, it has more anti-oxidants than red wine, or green or black tea.

I knew all that about chocolate abstractly. But until that controlled-substance-like first bite, I had never experienced it. I've heard it said that however true something is, if you merely believe it, it's a lie. The truth comes only via experience.

So there it was: the wham of that chocolate kicking in, side by side with epiphany. Oh! Now I know what all that theobromine stuff is about, and what the heck do you know - it's true!

(And although I didn't know it them, chocolate was also going to be discovered to have a prophylactic effect on heart disease, promoting heart health in effect by Roto-Rootering the arteries.)

And yet, did the exact what and why of theobromine at all really matter to me? Not much. Not at that moment. As Emily Dickinson said:

     The pedigree of honey
     Does not concern the bee;
     A clover, any time, to him
     Is aristocracy.

That stressed-out morning, in time, place, and circumstances utterly removed from my present life except by memory, that glorious Double-Density kindly, sensually played clover to my bee, and  made it possibile for me to begin that intense weekend un-freaked-out.

Un-freaked-out, I called the Eco-lab people, threw myself on their mercy, and got them to come out and fix the dishwasher. Meanwhile, David Crough changed the flat tire, and I started cooking.

So. In answer to Marilyn's tweet: yes, while I do mentally 'write' while walking, weeding, driving, I also, as this post proves, do it  'standing in kitchen eating brownies.' Because, when don't I do it?

Even if there is a 25-some year gap between the two, it --- one's whole dense, bittersweet, nut-studded, messy, satisfying wedge of experience --- remains alive and vital somewhere within, waiting to be called forth by the act of putting it into written words.

For nothing is wasted on the writer.

P.S. The recipe, please... this is from Passionate Vegetarian.

DOUBLE-DENSITY CHOCOLATE-WALNUT ESPRESS0 TORTE
Serves 10 to 12
   
Chocolate for grown-ups: no-kidding, we-really-mean-it, bittersweet; an intense chocolate experience, with a faint touch of coffee. Make it with cold-filtered coffee concentrate if you use such a system, or do a quickie version using concentrate from freeze-dried coffee crystals. It's a one-layer, intentionally very heavy cake; please note there's no baking powder or soda. Fairly simple as tortes go, its dense, moist fervently chocolateness put it is right up there. Be sure to pay attention to the notes on pans and baking time. And try the variations, especially the Chocolate Torte Ibarra.

8 ounces best quality unsweetened chocolate
1 cup butter
4 tablespoons boiling water
3 tablespoons freeze-dried coffee or decaffeinated coffee crystals
5 eggs
3 cups sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups unbleached white flour
oil spray
1 recipe Creole Chocolate Icing, below
2 cups walnuts, toasted and chopped

Preheat oven to 375.

Melt unsweetened chocolate and butter together over very low heat in a heavy saucepan, stirring near-constantly. Remove from heat and set aside to cool for a few moments.

Meanwhile, combine boiling water with freeze-dried coffee or decaffeinated coffee crystals to make a thick coffee syrup. Set this aside.

Set up an electric mixer, and add eggs, sugar, vanilla, and salt to the bowl. Beat together, on high speed, at least 8 minutes, or until light, fluffy, and nearly doubled in bulk. (A hand-held mixer takes a little longer than a stand-type mixer).

Add half the coffee concentrate (the remainder goes into the icing), and the somewhat cooled chocolate-butter mixture, and beat until ingredients are combined.

Remove mixing bowl from stand or put away hand-held mixer. Stir in by hand, using a wooden spoon, the unbleached white flour.

Spray a 10-inch round layer cake pan, preferably one with fairly deep sides, very well with oil. Do not substitute a pie tin, or any round pan with curved sides; do not use a glass pan.

Turn batter into prepared pan, and bake about 35 minutes, or until surface is dulled and edges of cake have started to pull away from pan. It will still look a little underdone in the middle; ignore this. Do not overbake this cake; its moistness is an essential part of its charm.

Leave cake in pan for ten minutes after baking. Run knife around edge of pan and reverse onto rack. Let cake cool completely, and ice with Creole Chocolate Icing, pressing toasted walnuts into the top and sides of cake. Serve at room temperature or slightly warm.

Creole Chocolate-Espresso Icing

Makes Enough for 1 Double-Density, with a bit leftover

Though simplicity itself to make, in flavor and texture this is the most sophisticated and divine icing you will ever taste. Astute Dairy Hollow readers will recognize it as a variation of one which appeared in our first cookbook. Very bittersweet --- again, adult chocolate, not kid stuff. Once you discover this you might not make any other chocolate icing, ever.

12-ounces semisweet chocolate (either chips, or diced squares of semisweet)
1 cup sour cream or whole milk plain yogurt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
Leftover coffee concentrate from above recipe ( 1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons)
   
Melt the semisweet chocolate over hot water, stirring often.

When smooth, remove from heat and stir in sour cream or whole milk plain yogurt, vanilla, and coffee concentrate.

Beat by hand until smooth and glossy. Let cool, stirring occasionally, until of spreading consistency, about five minutes.

Pour/ spread over cooled torte.

Variation:
Bittersweet Chocolate Torte Ibarra : Mexico’s favored with-chocolate combinations are brilliant, unique, complex: ground almonds, canela cinnamon, and distinctive Mexican vanilla extract. I developed this excellent, even more rich variation of this cake to take advantage of these complex, multi-layered flavors as my contribution to a South of the Border menu’d dinner benefiting the Arkansas AIDS Foundation, with the flavors, held at Eureka Springs’ Center Street South, now Caribe. It's now neck and neck with the previous as my favorite chocolate torte.
    First, coarsely chop 2 cups whole almonds into chunks in the food processor, and toast them at 350 about 8 minutes or until fragrant and lightly browned. Return them to the processor and pulse again, until they are a ground to a coarse powder. Set aside.
    Now, follow the previous recipe, but omit the walnuts, as well as the coffee in both cake and glaze, and substitute pure Mexican vanilla, available at any Hispanic grocery, for the conventional vanilla extract.  Cut the flour back to 1 cup. Add, with the flour, ½ teaspoon canela cinnamon (available in Hispanic groceries, and sometimes in bags at the spice sections of supermarkets), and ½ cup of the toasted almonds. Bake the cake, and make icing, as directed. Press remaining toasted almond powder into top and sides of frosted torte.

a sound of wings unseen, inadvertent wisdom: a fathering day post

Walking yesterday, up near Frazier's sugar shack here in Vermont, I heard an animal rustle in the underbrush edging the woods by the gravel road. Though I stood stock-still and watched, I couldn't see what it was. Too large for a chipmunk or a squirrel, smaller by far than a deer, I was left only with the sudden sound of its movement.

But  that was enough. It brought back a particular moment to me as vividly as if it had happened an hour earlier. This was a moment with my late father, the writer Maurice Zolotow, who has been dead now almost twenty years.

But, when I heard that unseen animal, he was alive to me again. "No one ever steps in the same river twice," wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, "for it is not the same river and one is not the same person. " I feel that way, too, about memory's river, into which I necessarily step when I think about Maurice.

Another river, the King's, in Northwest Arkansas, is involved in the moment I recalled.

As is a great blue heron.

(The one pictured left is not "ours" , which I'm about to tell you about, but one photographed by Sheila L. Chambers for Birdwatcher's Digest).

As is the inadvertent transmission of wisdom, with which sometimes, if we are fortunate, our parents gift us, almost incidentally.

I've written about Maurice here often, most notably in this post. So I''ll give only a brief back-story. For it was a long way from the circumstances of his birth and later life to the King's River.

Born Morris Zolotoff on November 23, 1913, in Brooklyn, New York, he was a first-generation American who was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Like many of similar background, his idea of sophisticated, upper class America was informed by the movies, and it was towards this world he gravitated, eventually writing magazine articles (for Billboard, Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Look, Life, and, later, Playboy, Reader's Digest, and Los Angeles) and books, mostly about entertainment figures, musical, theatrical, and cinematic.

Sometime between his graduation from New Utrect High School and his entry into the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Morris became Maurice.

He could (and did) legitimately drop names and anecdotes across an astonishing spectrum: Duke Ellington ("The only place we could eat in together in New York  was a Chinese restaurant," he told me many times. But no matter how many times he said it, it was never without a tightening of his mouth, a slight shake of his head, and a tone of outrage. Racism of any type was incomprehensible to him. He recognized its reality, but, to him, it was so despicable it defied belief, let alone acceptance).

He gave Count Basie his first national review (in Billboard), and interviewed most of the sex goddesses of his time: Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe (about whom he would write many articles, and then the first of her countless book-length biographies), Ursula Andress (best known for her role as Honey Ryder, the Bond Girl in Dr. No), and Grace  Kelly (she may have been a princess, but he wrote about her --- making her his subject!).

The now all-but-forgotten outrageous show-business personality/actress Tallulah Bankhead  remained memorable to him: during an interview he did in her apartment, she got up to use the bathroom, and continued talking, leaving the door open, as she urinated. She also had a parrot, which she allowed to fly uncaged, It swooped around her living-room room, to my father's great unease, its droppings cleaned up by a maid who stood on guard. Comedians? He interviewed dozens: Jack Benny, Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen, Dudley Moore, Fred Allen, Allan Sherman, countless others.

For a change of pace (and probably because he needed the money) he even took on John Wayne. In the picture above right, there's the Duke, with Ann-Margret and my father. This was taken on the set of The Train Robbers, released in 1973, a year before my father's biography of Wayne, Shooting Star, was published). 

As I said in the previous post I did about him, at the time of his death he was working on a memoir to be called "Famous People Who Have Known Me." Which about says it all.

Except it doesn't. Not even close.

"I contain multitudes," Walt Whitman may have exulted in Song of Myself, and I think most of us do. But few collections of multitudes can have been so wholly contradictory as those contained by Maurice. I'll touch on just one here: side by side with his enchantment with celebrity, talent, glitz, and being where the action was, was his abiding love of nature and the solacing quietude that comes with immersion in it.

Where did this come from in him? How did it get there? I don't know: I only know that it was always part of him intermittently. And in the last twenty years of his life, it  became one of his transcendent, transforming refuges.


Once, sitting on my porch in Arkansas, he saw a black-and-blue mourning cloak butterfly lit on a snapdragon. Maurice leaned towards it, then stayed perfectly still. The butterfly, likewise, remained on the flower for a long time, its only movement the two wings, fanning like breath. 

I had come out the door, and I too stood still, watching not only the butterfly, but watching my father watch the butterfly. When it flew away, he turned and looked up at me. Normally ebullient and wildly talkative, he was wholly quiet. His usually animated face was  both illuminated and still, silenced by wonder, even awe, and peace. He looked as if he had seen the face of God and creation itself, and was still stunned by it.

Whatever he found in that butterfly had been with him for awhile. He attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he met my mother, the former Charlotte Shapiro, in a class on French Romantic poetry. And one of the ways he courted her was by taking her canoeing on Lake Mendota. Where and how did a wholly nonathletic, overly intellectual, skinny, neurotic, glasses-wearing Brooklyn boy get that?

Later, after they married, Maurice and Charlotte rambled England's Lake District, as famous for its natural beauty as its poets.

Still later, as a couple with children, they resided uneasily in the suburbs of New York City,  Westchester County. My mother would have preferred "real country", my father, Greenwich Village or the Left Bank. Westchester, a compromise, left them both unhappy and resentful. Yet even there, Maurice, Charlotte and I (I don't remember my 7-years-older brother ever coming along) occasionally went on long walks together, often around the less-developed parts of Tibbett's Brook Park.

By then, they were both famous, my mother as a children's book author and editor, my father as a biographer. The Zolotows were, as the above cover, from the September, 1951 Writer's Digest says, a "Big-Time Writing Team. " They were also, increasingly, big-time unhappy. My father's drinking, my mother's martyrdom, and the generally anxious, repressed, and sexist tenor of the times, captured accurately in the television series Mad Men: all these played a part. I've written, too, about both their casual, medically and socially sanctioned drug-taking in this post. They divorced in 1969 (I was sixteen.) A year later, my father moved to Los Angeles. A year after that, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous.


And it was in those last twenty sober years of his life that his love of the natural world took its deepest root in him. He became a member of both the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society and went on Sunday hikes sponsored by both
organizations, often. (Left, a picture of Solstice Canyon, one I believe he hiked, from the Los Angeles Sierra Club's site).  "Isn't it amazing, Cres?" he would ask me rhetorically, bursting with his customary enthusiasm, when I came to visit him in LA. "Here we are, in the middle of a city, but you can smell the night-blooming jasmine and orange blossoms, and do you know, in just 20 minutes --- 20 minutes! --- I can be out on a hike or a bird walk in a canyon!"

It was in this phase, too, that he had that encounter with the mourning cloak butterfly on my porch. He came to visit me at least once a year in Arkansas.


And sometimes we floated the King's River. "Oh, yes," said my father confidently before we put in the first time. "Of course I know how to canoe. I used to take your mother canoeing on Lake Mendota, you know." But that was a lake, 40-some years earlier, and this was a river; albeit a gentle one, there were little rills of white water. My father wasn't kidding anyone. He was scared, but he was psyched. He was up for it.


My friend George West, who organized the whole thing, always remembers that my father showed up wearing a safari jacket. George still says, fondly, "Here it was, the King's, to me a very placid little creek, not at all challenging. I looked at Maurice and it was clear that to him it was like, The African Queen. And I realized, anything could be, with that level of enthusiasm and adventure. Walking to the mailbox could be The African Queen. And that was what Maurice gave me. "

The first float we took together --- that time 'we' being me, George West, my late husband, Ned, and my friend Suzanne, then Suzanne Euler, now Suzanne Tucker, and Maurice --- he was still youngish, maybe 63 or 64. He still had some pretty good vision, was in decent shape, and, with George's help --- George being the most experienced canoeist present ---  Maurice could participate fairly fully. (Left: a family portrait of my friends, the dear Mitchell-West clan, left to right: George West, Starr Mitchell, Logan and Cane West, their sons, to whom I am a Cres-Aunt).

But there were a few Mr. Magoo moments that day on the river: George calling out, "Watch out for that branch, Maurice!", Maurice whispering to me (I was in the bow, he in the stern that trip) sotto vocce, "Cres? Do you see a branch?" two seconds before starting to get lightly smacked in the face by the branch, and then, belatedly, ducking. (Of course everyone present could hear his covert whispers to me.)


These days I live in Vermont, not Arkansas. Ned, my husband, has been dead for almost ten years; Maurice, almost twenty. My present, and for-the-duration partner, David, is older than Maurice would have been on that first float. And I take a lot of walks. 

Rarely is there a day, at this time in my life, when a walk in the green cathedral of the woods does not, at least for a moment, lift me out of myself. Most often it's the light: the way it comes through the trees, dappling the leaf- or pine-needle covered path or sending an almost Biblical ray down to illuminate a single leaf or, as I wrote about here, the ears of a deer. Since the land I walk is honeycombed with water, springs and seeps and little creeks and marshy areas, sometimes it's water, or light on water, or the sound of water, or a combination of all three.


But often it's wildlife: bird, insect, reptile, mammal. Wild, life: both the wildness ---  untamed, unpredictable  --- and the life .  A tiny burnt-orangey-red salamander (an eft, they're called) on the path, can thrill me, as can a bumblebee, droning drowsily as it moves from wild rose to foam flower in the deep woods, if I stand still and just watch it for awhile.

And the other day a plump brownish gray and white chickenish-shaped game bird ran across the old gravel road, the part hardly anyone travels, right in front of me.
It was making first a soft, melodious clucking, which later, as it rustled in the brush & ferns, turned into an almost purring sound. When I came home, I spent a little time trying to ID it on the Internet (as if that would or could have made it more wondrous). I think it was a Spruce Grouse. (Picture, right, from audobon.com, taken by a Glenn Tepke.)

But it was its sound, especially that strange almost-purr that spoke most to me, even more than its shape, beauty, and, for me, rarity.

For sound, like light, water, and greenness, often brings that lifting-out-of-one's-own-small-world, too. The woods and meadows are loud with birds this time of year, in contrast to the near-complete stillness of winter in Vermont.

Which brings me back to the rustle I heard in the woods the other day, and to my father, and to the King's River --- the final float we took together. By then my father's eyesight was very poor, but he still wanted to go.

What did I learn from my father? In that earlier post, I mentioned much of what I imbibed from him about writing and being a writer. But of course, there was - is - more.

Enthusiasm. Joie de vivre. Digging under the surface to find the deeper intricacies of the story, of almost anything and anyone. Reading. Quoting the greats, always with attribution (it is his influence that has brought both Heraclitus and Walt Whitman into this post, for instance.)

Most of all, I think Maurice gave me a sense that a continual falling in love with the world was possible and desirable, despite its --- and one's own --- losses, sorrows, and limitations.

On that final float, we rounded a bend, and George (with Ned in the canoe ahead of Maurice and me). said suddenly, softly, urgently, pointing with his paddle, "Blue heron! One-o'clock!"

My father, the bird-lover, with equal urgency: "Where, where?"

Me (softly, pointing a few feet to the right): "Just there, Maurice."

He turned his head in the direction I was pointing, and said, in a voice wretched with disappointment, "I can't see it." 

Just then the great blue heron took off from the stream in which it had been standing. They are big birds, with a wing-span that ranges between 5 1/2 and 6 1/2 feet. And this one flew right over our heads. Right, directly over the canoe in which Maurice and I sat.



Those huge wings beat the air, bearing the heron up and over us. Slowly. Audibly. A pause between each wingbeat.

Beat.

Beat.

Beat.

My father tipped his chin up. And he said, in a voice that was overwhelmed with a joy, gratitude, and a deep satisfaction even larger than his sorrow of a few seconds before, "I can hear it, though."  


(Picture above, again not "our" heron, but by Jules Frederick. I am so grateful to have found this image!) 

the deer's ears: Mose, me, misery & moments

Today, coming down to the hill towards the pond, beginning my morning walk, two animals --- one large, one small --- standing in the middle of the gravel road. I caught my breath, stood stock-still, blinked and waited, blinking a few times to clear my not-so-good vision so I could identify them.

Ah. A white-tailed deer, and - what was that smaller creature? If a faun, the tiniest one I had ever seen, and low to the ground, and dark. No, surely no, not a faun.I waited on my eyes and brain...

Ah. A cat. A small, peripatetic black cat named Bootsie, belonging to my neighbor Andrew, who lives about a quarter-mile away (across from the graveyard I wrote about last time). Bootsie often wanders over here to play with my two cats --- at least, they play when they are all outside, but hissing and yowling begins if mine are on one side of the screen and Bootsie on the other. (David's portrait of Bootsie, looking spooky, which he's not, and half-wild, which he is, taken the April afternoon David visited the graveyard with me to take pictures.)

The deer (I had a side view, and I believe it was a him, a buck, though too young to have antlers) was facing the right, where the large meadow begins. Only his white tail moved, flickering upright occasionally. Bootsie, with all the delusions of grandeur that only a fearless young half-wild black cat can have, was crouched, in a stalking position. Both, at the sound of my feet, as still (except for that white tail) as the figures on Ode on a Grecian Urn.

Then I began to walk, slowly, towards them. The buck took off for the meadow, Bootsie in pursuit.

That glimpse would have been enough to transform that walk for me, to take my brooding heart from itself back to its true home: wonder. The life-work of seeing and loving the world and what's in it as it is, without being caught on the briers of fear, self-doubt, self- or other-hate, anxiety, all the thousand small things that remove us from the vastness. Yet knowing when and how to move in action, however one can from as it is to as it might be. Or should be.  Yet to stay loving, seeing, eyes --- however imperfect one's vision --- open.

But when I got down to the break in the trees edging the meadow through which the two had disappeared, there stood the young buck, facing me, perhaps a hundred feet away. (No sign of Bootsie; the grass is tall).

All I could see was the buck's head, held nobly erect.

And here is the surpassing wonder of that moment:  with morning sun behind him, the two thin-skinned upright elongated triangles of his ears were illuminated - a bright translucent deep red, each outlined by a two-sided triangular rim of brown fur.

As brilliant, and to me, more uplifting, than the rose windows at Notre-Dame de Paris.

I had never seen deer's ears like this before; I will almost certainly never see them again.

At that moment, the troubles I had begun the walk with dropped. "Such a perfect moment," as Mose Allison, sometimes called "the William Faulkner of jazz," sings, "Nothing you can say / One such perfect moment / Gets you through the day."

David, the resident photographer, is not here now, but in Los Angeles. He'll be there about a month, getting ready to sell a home he owns there. But even if he were here, he rarely goes on walks in the morning, so the only real way for you to picture it is through my description.  Maybe that's enough.

(My friend Traca Savadago, the Seattle-based food maven and blogger said, generously, in a post about our friendship,  "I photograph everything. Crescent photographs nothing. As a skilled observer, I’m convinced she “sees” more. I lean on the image; she expresses it through words.")

However, as I walked on down the hill, and then up, and then to the right, up and up through the woods above the pond, into and through more woods where Frazier has his sugaring operation, along one of the paths he keeps clear for access to his
sugaring lines, I remembered a picture David had taken on another walk. Not of a deer, not of a wild creature at all, but of a domesticated turkey, albeit a 'heritage' variety (you can tell because it's not pure white, and its breast is not so gargantuan that it is falling over).

But the sun was behind that turkey, too, and lit up its red wattle as if it was a blessed and sacred thing, as the deer's ears appeared to me.

As perhaps anything in the world is or would be, if we looked sufficiently closely, with sufficient illumination.Or, perhaps, if we had sufficient distance, to see the whole picture; a God's-eye view.

But who among us has that?

Deer were a problem in Eureka Springs, that sweet and vitriolic, contentious, lovely little Ozark Mountain town in Arkansas where I used to live. No one could agree about what should be done about them. 

The deer there had no natural predators left, and had gotten complacent about the human inhabitants. They bred and bred and bred, and they lived close-up with the people. On the one hand, I could watch a doe nuzzle her two darling dappled fauns just a few feet from my kitchen window. Sometimes they stood; sometimes they knelt, napping. No one could have watched them and not said "Awwwww."

Yet no one in town had had a tulip bloom in years (the deer adored tulip bulbs); and, indeed, it was reaching the point where no one had much of a garden, vegetable or flower, at all, other than one composed of those plants the nurseries labeled "deer-proof."  You had to be careful driving certain stretches of road, those in town but bordered by woods or brush-covered patches, because you were liable to hit a deer.

Certainly you would see the deer, even if you didn't hit them, all the time back in Eureka Springs; you could not avoid them. I still remember fondly a remark made by my first post-Ned boyfriend. We were driving into Dairy Hollow the back way one early evening in late summer; it was still a little light. It must've been a weekend, because he lived in Little Rock and would come up, driving his large loaded brand-new pick-up (he bought a new one every year, an affectation since he had grown up in Westchester, gone to Groton and then Duke, and was, in his business, billing $12K a month. But he lived in Arkansas now, and thiought he should have a pick-up).

A herd of deer, maybe 30 or 40 of them, on either side of the road, were calmly decimating the flora.

He pushed down the window-button, leaned out, and yelled at the deer, "Get a job!"  
"The deer problem" was one of the countless things in Eureka people got exercised over (I used to think it was because we cared, because we weren't apathetic. Now I think maybe that that community just has some kind of magnetic pull to people who enjoy arguing, litigating, and busybodying. Probably there's something to both theories).

Shooting inside the city limits was illegal, besides which many opposed hunting on principle, although just as many engaged in it. Having someone from Game and Fish come and shoot the deer with birth control pellets was even discussed, though perhaps that was just a joke someone made, or one of the wild rumors that boomeranged around that place with such force that they took on the patina of truth.

Meanwhile, the deer multiplied, and went hungry.

Whether the town ever solved the this, I do not know; I moved away in 2002.

Here, though, on 35 acres in Vermont, it's rare to see a deer. Coyotes and weasels,  natural predators, abound. That's what balance looks like.  Things eat each other. That's what life looks like. If you're born (or "take a birth" as I heard said in India) , you eat and, eventually, will be eaten. Basic contract of inhabiting a body.

I stood and watched that deer with its ears like a sign from God, and it watched me, for perhaps 30 seconds, neither of us moving.

Then it stamped one hoof, took a half-step towards me and then turned, gave that strange loud snort they do and bounded away. Those huge leaping effortless bounds! I could see only the top of the deer, its white tail and reddish brown back, at the top of each bound. Then, it was out of sight. I heard one more snort, fainter, as vanished as if the whole episode had never taken place.

I continued my walk through the ferny, now starting-to-be-buggy, woods. There were more shades of green than I have names for troubles. Yet I still walked weighted: there are no good alternatives for my 95-year-old mother. Every option has drawbacks. I don't have answers, let alone good ones, on to how to make her last years on earth as good as they can be. Every time I think it is figured out, things shift. Hundreds of hours have gone into finding a solution. My brother and I try hard, and come in and out of harmony with each other.

But I kept remembering the deer's ears.

When I came home I looked up the lyric's of that Mose Allison song, Perfect Moment. And then, because both sorrow and the illuminated ears of a wild creature are both themselves, and, to a writer, material, I came home and wrote this. Nothing is wasted on the writer. Like Mose, whose words follow, I am still in the game:

Mountain sheen, ocean shine
Miocene valentine
One such perfect moment
Never twice the same
Such a perfect moment
Will keep you in the game.

Part Two, at last! "the rare hare of hope" bounds back in: with guest appearances by Letterman, Aunt Dot, Chou-Chou, Joseph Campbell, Konrad Stanislavski & Sir Francis

I began writing these words on Easter Sunday, as Christians celebrated the triumphant arc of their spiritual year, when Christ rises from death.

But resurrection itself belongs to everyone, regardless of belief, or non-belief.

Here in much of America, Easter-time coincides with the year's resurrection. The alarm clock set by the spin and wobble of this particular planet on which we reside goes off; the natural world wakes again from winter's deep sleep. In Vermont and points north, that sleep is so very quiet, cold and monochromatic it might be mistaken for death; hold a mirror to earth here in January, and if you looked quickly and casually, you would not see see a trace of vapor. It's there, of course; just not easily seen. Left and above: the relevant cover of one of my mother's books for children, The Bunny Who Found Easter, most recently illustrated with great charm by Helen Craig (another illustration, right).

The change, here, is dramatic. The other day, lying in bed to take a nap in the upstairs bedroom, I took off my reading glasses, put down my book, glanced out the  window at the tree-tops and literally started, did a double-take: there, among the gray-brown tree branches and somber black-greens of the conifers, at which I'd been gazing for months, was a sudden swath of riotously bright pale green; the deciduous trees abruptly beginning to leaf out.
To go from the one to the other so swiftly is an annual astonishment, in Cole Porter 's words, "the urge to merge with the splurge of spring."

Perhaps it's rabbits' urge to merge, the fecundity rather than their cuteness, which has linked them, in human eyes, with this time of year. In the book above (another of Craig's illustrations, right),  a bunny seeking company is advised to find Easter. This, he thinks, is a place, located (logically) in the east. The book follows the bunny's brave, persistent, journey through the seasons as he seeks Easter and a mate. You can see from the picture that his search is a lonely one. 

The post previous to this one was written in deep winter, a Part One left dangling without a Part Two until now. A sheepish confession (especially apropos since Part One included a sheep -- Go back and look if you don't believe me): this is, I think, the third Part One I've left orphaned. Why have my well-intended Part Ones sometimes lacked their promised Part Twos? It's not "Shit happens," that supremely who-cares verbal shrug. It's the opposite.

It's: everything happens, and keeps on happening. Daily life is a confoundingly overflowing cornucopia. Events, ideas, insights reproduce more rapidly than rabbits. Not a day goes by when I don't think "Ooooo - that would be good for the blog."  But as all writers and would-be writers know, thinking, writing in one's head, is quick and easy. But   actually writing, on paper or digitally, is time-consuming and hard.

so, why Part Two: a mere 3 1/2 months later?

But. This particular Part Two compels my return. For two reasons. 

First, because the gift the Rare Hare offered me (yes, synchronistically, Part One had not only a sheep but a rabbit, or at least a  half-rabbit, half-antelope, the mythological jackalope) was made fully clear only by subsequent events. It was, it turned out, not exactly a prophetic dream, but something akin. A psychological booster shot, revving up an immunity I already had but would need, soon, to revisit, as daily life's cornucopia grew particularly, challengingly difficult.

And second, not delivering on Part Two was a tease, a broken promise,  poor writing. All these acts I do my best not to commit, but maybe especially the  last.Until I write Part Two, I'm committing the Chekovian sin: In Part One, I showed you, dear reader, a metaphorical gun on the wall --- in fact, a small armory --- but, not one of them has yet gone off.

Having told you about the dream (and mentioned that besides Boundin' it referenced the Holocaust, David Letterman, a New Yorker article --- that's the cover, there ... the December 21-28, 2009, issue, oh the shame! --- called Green Giant, about where the U.S. and China stand, respectively, on developing green technologies, and a transcendent moonlight walk with David --- these would be the firearms) in Part One, I need to tell you the dream itself.

And why those references came up.

So now I'm gonna.

(If you haven't read that previous post, and seen Boundin', please do so now.)

& now the dream: lights, camera, action

        The Cast:

• Me.
• Chou-Chou (described in previous post as "the dear friend who traveled with me through the terrible period following Ned's death and with whom I traveled through some terrible things in her life").
• David Letterman. talk-show host.
  
• An imaginary man, Letterman's guest: an older, erudite Eastern European Jew.
  
  The time: present
  
  The place: a large bedroom at Chou-Chou's house (though not her waking-life real house). The king size bed has a golden-yellow bedspread and is set against a wall, with pillows and bolsters so that one can easily watch the big-screen tv that sits on a bureau across from the foot of it.
  
  We open: Chou-Chou and Crescent are sitting on the bed, sprawled on the bolsters, watching TV.

Ah, beloved Chou-Chou. (That's me and Chou, a few years back, at a riotously fun dinner at her house in Eureka Springs in 2002.) A certain ex-boyfriend and his mother may have been cropped out of the picture --- this sometimes happens, in pictures as in life.  But! What I remember about that evening is Chou and I laughing our heads off, some kind of ridiculous back-and-forth jive between us in pseudo-therapy talk --- We began with the standards --- 'What I hear you saying is that - '  'Un-hunh, and what does that mean to you?' --- and quickly went way, way off the rails. I also recall Chou's excellent spinach enchiladas, and Spanish rice. I believe I brought the salad --- I do a slightly sweet cilantro-lime vinaigrette, of which she is fond, excellent on mesclun and avocado with a little sectioned orange and some scallion. I probably also brought dessert. Most likely flan. )
 
But, David Letterman? If you know me personally --- I don't own a television, rarely watch TV even in hotel rooms, and when I do, never, ever, late night talk shows--- you are no doubt having a WTF moment. You are saying "David Letterman? Of all people!" As I did, when I woke from and thought about the dream. If my unconscious was going to pick "talk show host to participate in meaningful message delivery," wouldn't, say, Oprah have been a better choice? Yes. (After all, she interviewed Elie Wiesel: relevant, as you'll see).

But, nope. My subconscious picked David Letterman.

My subconscious also invented the fourth character. It did not see fit to give him a name, which has hindered and irritated me during the writing of this post; dialogue would've been much easier had he been more than "he" or "the gentleman."  But, I did not succumb to the temptation to make one up for him: I felt funny saying "Let's just call him ________." For who am I to argue with the mind's underground foundations?

This man, then, unnamed, was both old and Old World, and elegant. He spoke English impeccably but with a faint Eastern European or Russian inflection. He exuded warmth, charm, intelligence, sophistication. His slightly old-fashioned dark suit fit him as well as he seemed to fit his own being --- wholly comfortably.

Okay. I just went online to search for someone who looked like him. I did this by Googling images with various phrases --- elegant older man, elegant older Jewish man, older Russian, Russian Jewish actor, handsome older actor Russian --- to see if I could find someone who resembled what my unconscious had conjured up. (Of this process, well, "These are the days of miracle and wonder," as a Paul Simon line has it ). And there, after about fifteen minutes, he was, the gentleman on the left. (In real life, this man was Constantin Stanislavski, 1863-1938, considered the father of modern acting technique, which became known in America as Method Acting. In some ways that's wholly beside the point here; I'm merely using his image as stand-in. But, after reading a bit about him, I feel that Stanislavski would be unreasonably pleased if he knew he were playing a role even after his death.)

And why was he being interviewed by Letterman? Because, in my dream, he was 90-something, the world's foremost voice-over artist, and a Holocaust survivor.

And therein lies the hinge-point of the dream.

a simple plot, not a lot of what you'd call action, and yet...
 
In summation, the dream was simple: Chou-Chou and I, staying put, our backs against the headboard, watching Letterman interview the invented character who looks like Stanislavski. There's no direct dialogue between us, though we exchange a lot of looks as we watch TV and the events of the dream unfold.

In the dream, David Letterman is asking my guy, the Stanislavski-lookalike, about one of his recent voice-over projects: Boundin'.

"But, unlike in your films, you speak with a Russian accent, " says Letterman.

"True," says my man, with a Russian accent. He's smiling.

"And as we're talking here, you sound a little, forgive me, old," says Letterman.

"Also true," he says. Still smiling, he gives a little what-can-you-do shrug.

"Well," says Letterman, "Of course, you are 99."

The studio audience applauds, stamps, cheers, whistles its approval.

"Yet you narrated that film in the voice of a wise, all-American cowboy, sort of a mellow cowboy, middle-aged. Can we see a clip of the film, please?"   

After a bit of Boundin' is shown, Letterman says, "How did you do that?"

There is some discussion between the two of them about voice technique, learning and unlearning accented speech, coaching, travel to Wyoming. How my man lived on a ranch for a few weeks, and eavesdropped on small-town conversations at small-town Western coffee shops.

freedom, and its nightmare opposite

"But," says Letterman, "There's much more to your story than doing voice-over for this film. You are a concentration camp survivor... "

"Yes, " says my character. He is not smiling now. Somber, serious, he sits erect, his  posture dignified. "Auschwitz. Not many lived." (Left, the sign at the main gate to Auschwitz, its famously perverted motto which translates as:  "Work Makes One Free." Of course, the only freedom work at the camp brought to its inmates --- those who were not gassed the same day the cattle cars on which they were transported to the camps arrived, which was the majority --- was death. To which most of those who survived "the selection" were literally worked.)Back to the dream, from this real-life nightmare.

My waking self does not remember the specific dialogue which followed. Letterman asks him about the years in the camp, how he survived... The dream Chou and I, seated on the bed, exchange looks every now and then, shaking our heads, believing but not believing, the common reaction, one I have to this day when I try to truly wrap my mind around the Holocaust, its pure, systemic day-after-day evil. The word itself is from the Greek word "holokauston" , or "sacrifice by fire" , meaning the Nazi's persecution and planned slaughter of people who were Jewish (other groups of 'different' people were also consigned to flame, among them gypsies, the disabled, and homosexuals). How was it possible? How could it have happened?

The Dutch poet and playwright, Abel Herzberg (right, above), who survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and lived to write about it, has said, "There were not six million Jews murdered; there was one murder, six million times." This distinction attempts to individualize the losses, to restore humanity to people systematically dehumanized. A noble attempt. but impossible still. Either way: how can one possibly take in the outrage, the horror, the depth, the scope of the murdering?

As Oprah said, in her introduction to the interview with Wiesel, pictured left: "The story—and especially that number, six million —numbs us: A Jew hater named Adolf Hitler rises to power in Germany, the world goes to war in 1939, and when the showdown is over six years later, the tyrant has slaughtered six million Jews. Inconceivable."

Evil, in my mind, is synonymous with two things: slavery, and (warning: this next link is graphic and horrific; close-up images of Nazi genocide) the Holocaust. Every perversion of good, every oppression, from the sexual exploitation of women and children, to ecocide (intended or otherwise), racism --- every serious lie we tell ourselves or others, seems to me encapsulated and exemplified by these two things. Both express the consequences when human beings have absolute power over powerless beings (human and otherwise), with whom they lack even the slightest empathy.

Both slavery and the Holocaust systematized sociopathology, the deeply shadowed crevasses of the human heart, which we shiver to examine. Yet if we fail to look down into them, we surely imperil ourselves more so. A blind eye to atrocity, simply because it is atrocious, upsetting, surely damns us further.

Yet the man my unconscious created survived this, as only a small percentage of those who went through those gates of hell did (including Elie Wiesel, pictured again below, older, this time with Oprah, at Auschwitz in 2006;  photo, George Burns, Harpo Productions, Inc). My dream man not only survived. Eventually, he thrived. 

what do we do with it?

In a sense, this question, which I ask myself all the time, was the one the dream put to me, and answered.

As symbol and reality, the Holocaust and slavery (the one a historical event; the second, an ongoing institution that's been seemingly part of humankind's shadow self for almost as long as there have been humans) embody what is most unacceptable and impossible to understand about life: that such things can, did, and do happen. That I, or you, or Oprah, may say "unacceptable" is powerfully (or perhaps powerlessly), irrelevant. Evil --- "the banality of evil," as the German political theorist Hannah Arendt famously said at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi said to be "the architect of the Holocaust,"  --- appears intractable, as much part of life as good. (That's Arendt's image, as it appeared on a German postage stamp, issued in 1988 as part of a "Women in German History" series.)

And so, what do we do with this?

This being evil's existence, whether or not we "accept" it. (Not what do we do 'about' it; obviously, good and evil and those who embody each, are in eternal struggle. What we do 'about' evil, assuming we are on the side of the good, is struggle against it; simple, if rarely easy).
 
But what do we do with it, in thought and feeling? (Left, a detail of the two as archetypes in struggle, in Satan Before the Lord by 18th-century Italian artist Corrado Giaquinto.)

And is there any point to even ask "what do we do with this?"

I think so.

Because one cannot embrace life while editing out the evil that takes place in it, any more than one can excise life's inherent sorrows. (Sorrow --- even when unpolluted by  evil intent --- also, of course, inheres in life. Beloved innocents die in accidents, in earthquakes, of disease, by murder --- each a sorrow of vastly different shading, especially to the survivors, but all sorrowful nonetheless). 

The gristle and gravy, the wonder of the Milky Way and of the tornado that lifts one righteous house clear off the ground, killing five, but leaves the home of the child molester next door, untouched, its residents safe. The vernal wild flowers that come up, unbidden and triumphant, each year (like the trillium David photographed last spring, which is now beginning, again, to come up); the 30,000 species that quietly go extinct each year. Bunnies; barbed wire. Those who are quenched and sated; those, in the same world, who are parched and hungry. Love and hate, gifts and losses, an incomprehensible system by which plenty or its absence is meted out.It's what the Vedas, the Hindu holy books, call "the riot of opposites."  Even in Auschwitz, there must have been spring days when the air was warm and fresh and ambrosial, the grass and trees growing green again even as the smoke rose from the crematoria.

Hope and despair, good and evil, cheek by jowl.

Everything happens, keeps on happening.

Life is large enough to contain all this, because it has to be. It is we who are too small.

But I think the act of asking what we do with contradictory realities too large for us, questions which can never be answered --- does, itself,  enlarge us.

And I also believe, of course, that nothing is wasted on the writer.

art & atrocity

I once heard an extraordinary lecture called "Writing Atrocity", given in 2000, during  the summer session at the University of Iowa's non-degree writing program. It was given by Janusz Bardach, the then-elderly author of a memoir called Man is Wolf to Man, about his horrific internment in the Gulag, the Russian equivalent of the concentration camps (he died in 2000, at age 83). Bardach, who had gone on to have a distinguished career in the U.S. as a reconstructive surgeon and a professor, radiated sweetness, unpretentious brilliance, and an Old World gentlemanly quality, much like the man in my dream. 

He spoke, that day, of the inherent conundrum of writing like his: to tell one's story, knowing that any telling will be inadequate, is to risk in some way diminishing it. Or, worse yet, to put it up for the prurient interest of horror's voyeurs and sightseers. But to not write about it; isn't that worse? Doesn't keeping silent collude with the evil-doers, with evil itself? In the end, he seemed to feel, it was the responsibility of the survivor, if he or she had any call to the literary, to try to tell his or her story: for personal psychological integration, yes, but even more so because then a testament was left to the world. (I consider Man is Wolf to Man to be just such a testament.)

And if this testament was accurate enough, clear, truthful, compelling, there was the chance that readers might do whatever they could to prevent it coming again, in another form, in their own lives. (I am thinking about this currently, as I listen to the audio-book The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver's latest; as she describes the "howlers", who grow, in the lifetime of the book's protagonist, to be the House Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC, with its the reverberations backwards - to the Salem witch trials, and forwards, to our own time, when the so-called Tea-Baggers appropriate words like 'freedom' and 'rights' as excuses for the fomenting of violence, racism, name-calling, and that lack of seeing fellow human beings as just that, which, to me, begins the long downward slide. Though fiction, this novel also has the ring of personal testament and powerful warning.)  

It took Wiesel a  decade to find the words for his testament.  But he did, eventually, in Night, called by the New York Times "a slim volume of terrifying power." It was the first volume of a trilogy. the other two books being Dawn and Day. The writer, in life and in writing, made the journey from unspeakable darkness to light.

Imagine, if you can (knowing you cannot, nor can any of us who did not experience such places), Wiesel's unimaginable suffering. Now imagine if he had not been able to make use of it through writing; how much greater would that suffering have been.

Its horror would have then been not only absolute but unadulterated. The Holocaust  can never be justified or explained, nor can art mitigate it. But meaning can be wrung from it. This is what Wiesel did, and in literature as in life, moved from darkness to light.  Night has now been read by millions of people. The Holocaust was not wasted on Elie Wiesel.

But, back to the dream

Eventually Letterman gets to how, after all his guest has survived, he can still believe in resiliency, the 'bound and rebound' theme of the film.

My man says that his experiences confirmed it. That while he never would have made it out of the camp without hope, will, and luck, even more than these things it was ultimately resiliency that saved him. 

For, he says, in his accented speech, that while to survive the camps physically was essential, it "was only a partial saving." The far-longer work was to live a life of meaning, to uncripple oneself from what had been experienced. To not just live but to make a a life: that he says, was the true and final victory.

That, he says to Letterman, "is the most fundamental way war is won, and
imprisonment ended --- not once, but every day. And not just that war I was in, either, or Auschwitz; I am talking about all prisons, all wars. You love, you live and use life fully, despite everything. That is when you win. That is the victory. When you love anyway. "

Then he pauses. Hesitates. His face changes, draws in as if in sudden physical pain. And as begins to topple from his chair on the studio set (Chou and I watch, riveted). And then they cut to a commercial.

Chou and I look at each other questioningly, then back to the TV, leaning forward. 

When the show returns, instead of Letterman and his guests, there are written words on the screen, being typed as we see them, scrolling down. The words are in white against a dark brown background... with deepest regret ... cardiac arrest... doctors... has just been pronounced dead... last words, spoken: 'when you love anyway'... world grieves passing of a great man..." 

Chou and I exchange a long, long glance, wide-eyed. She clicks off the remote. We have nothing to say. We know we have just witnessed an extraordinary occurrence. (And, fortunate us: in waking life we have decades of friendship together, in which we have experienced, side by side, not only each others griefs, but vast and extraordinary joys. Just look at us, right, in 1983, in our bright, bright saris, in India, young and radiant).

So when, in the dream, Chou and I witness the voice-over man's death, we know that even the strange and public manner in which he died was his final gift to the world.

A world towards which, given his experiences, he had no call to be generous. Yet, he won. He loved. He loved anyway.  It was death, but it was a good death.

And that, dear reader, was the dream.

To deliver --- or not --- on what's left on Part One's promises

I mentioned, in Part One, the walk I took with David around 11:00 p.m., on the last
night of 2009. That night was lit up: It was not just a full moon night but a blue moon,  and the ground so blanketed in snow it reflected the moonlight. All was  illuminated, bright enough that we did not need flashlights, so bright, in fact, that David was able to take pictures without a flash. I posted some of them on Part 1. Here are a few more.

Below,  I'm standing on the iced-over pond. I'm bundled up from head to to toe. I said to David, "Please, could you take one of me waving, for the blog?" He did. 

It's amazing how much ambient light there is, sometimes, even at night.

Ask Wiesel, or Bardach, or the dear man being interviewed by Letterman in my dream.

quietude

It is very silent on a windless winter night in Vermont; everything except the sound of one's footsteps is frozen, and still. No birds, no frogs or peepers, nothing to rustle or splash.The snow insulates the ground; one's hat and scarves or balaclava insulate one's ears.

A fictional telling, for children, of winter's quietude, from Charlotte's The Bunny Who Found Easter:

One day it began to snow. Soft white flakes drifted down from the sky, and the air was sharp and cold and still. When he hopped through the white drifts he left little dark footprints in the snow. But no matter which way he hopped, his footprints never crossed other bunny footprints. The little bunny was alone in a world without rabbits.

So when, on that full moon night walk at the end of last year, I heard a sound, I started  slightly (much as I did recently when, a few months later, that pale green stroke of spring caught my eye).

But then I almost immediately recognized what I was hearing --- the rush of water, where the stream which feeds the pond travels under the road and down the hill.

Though the pond was frozen solid on the surface, at one spot, near the dock, it remained liquid, a dark uneven half-circle in the white. This is the location of the overflow for water held in the pond; where it sluices down, beneath the road and out the other side, in a small waterfall . From there, it heads towards the foot of the hill. A busy, noisy year-round brook, it's narrowed by ice in the winter, but is of sufficient force and flow as to remain mostly unfrozen. Its rush was what I heard.

This sound, so unexpected that cold, still night, captured me. Took me out of myself. Instantly stilled the irritating, irritated interior head chitter-chatter (I'm cold. Should have worn the mittens, not the gloves. Where's David? Could he just for once not get so lost in taking photographs that he forgets he's actually out on a walk with someone else and  engage in conversation with me? )

Abruptly, all that stopped, replaced with gorgeous relief: wonder, peace.  Transcendence, unlooked-for, unsought --- grace.

That sound, the water, was the audible breath on the mirror held to winter, and it  vanished, for a few moments,  everything but connection. There was just (just!?) the honeycomb of water over beneath, around, in and above: the small creeks, seeps, brooks, marshy places; the tiny rills and dramatic waterfalls, the water under and above-ground. All flowing downhill. The brook I was hearing  would join Saxtons River, which joins the Connecticut River, the watershed on top of which the area resides. The Connecticut eventually joins the sea; the seas, the blue on our blue and green planet. On a cellular level  --- and that was the way, at that moment, I was feeling it, the cells, after all, being largely water ---it connected all of us. "Us" being the whole world. China and the US. Birds, bees, buffalo. Mosses, mayflies, maple trees. On and on.

My shoulders straightened. I breathed in the cold air. I felt alive, electrified, wonder rushing through me like the water below me, like the red water of my bloodstream. Acute, breathless joy.

That distressing, but hopeful, New Yorker article bubbled up somehow: maybe, I thought, maybe China and the U.S. could wind up working together, cooperating and problem-solving, not demonizing each other. Maybe, for all the opportunities the U.S. had squandered in green fuel technology, it was not too late to save the earth, sweet
planet veined by the water I stood on and carried within me, like every other earthly being. After all, we were all connected.

It was all happening, and would keep on happening.

What a moment, on the last day of the year. Though more was to come.

Because that was the night I had the dream.

And, lightweight as Boundin' had seemed to my conscious mind, it had replayed the most freighted possible themes in my dream. 

Themes, it would turn out in the next few weeks, I needed to hear.

This seems a good time to tell you the real story of Boundin's actual, not dream, voice-over artist, the felicitously named Bud Luckey. Luckey not only did the voice-over for Boundin' --- he wrote and designed it, composed the music and lyrics, sang the song and played the banjo! (as he's doing in the picture, left).  

The film was nominated for a 2003 Academy Award (Best Animated Short) and also won the ASIFA Hollywood Annie Award that same year. Given all that, my endorsement of Boundin' probably means little.

But, should this post come to your attention, Bud Luckey, THANK YOU. I'm sorry for my snotty attitude about animation and "message" (mentioned in Part 1). I'm grateful you got me over it. And bless you, sir, bless you, for your multi-layered gifts, and the way you used them in making this work... so universal that a stranger's unconscious saw fit to appropriate it.)

melting

And now it is spring. Robins, possibly the same ones I gazed at longingly in Hot Springs, Arkansas, hop on our lawn.  A week ago, weeks ago, David took the picture below. Look closely... that thing that looks like a piece of mold on a loaf of bread? It's this winter's last bit of ice remaining on the pond. Look up the hill in that picture, across that expanse of sodden yellow-brown lawn, and you'll see the house. Look closely, and you'll see the house reflected in the pond.

And look at the next picture. It's Sir Francis! The mallard drake who --- we're convinced it's the same duck pair --- has returned for his annual sojourn in our pond. What's a little ice to him and her ladyship? Neither David nor I have seen them, though, since the time of this picture. Which means, as it always does, that they are off somewhere, responding to the splurge of spring by creating a clutch of ducklings.

Charlotte's fictional telling of the bunny version, once, after his long trek, the bunny has found his mate:

...But now his loneliness was gone. Soon they had a whole family of little rabbits, tiny soft sleepy things with long sweet ears and small wet noses. The bunny's heart throbbed with happiness at this wonderful earthsmelling sunlit bunny-filled world. 

Not that one's world is, or can be, always filled with one's own kind, be they bunnies or friends, any more than it can always be spring.

Which brings me to what I mentioned earlier, that while not being precognitive or prophetic, the dream gave me something akin to a psychological booster shot.

dream a little dream of me

January 1, 2010: I wake, having had that dream.

January 13th: I get a call about some leg pain my beloved Aunt Dot, who I have written 
about so often here, is having. Nothing serious, I'm told, at first. But by the next day, I begin to get conflicting stories from the caregivers, the care manager, and from Dot's doctor. I talk to my brother (since Aunt Dot has no children, we are the stand-ins.) We agree that Aunt Dot should be kept out of pain, and out of the hospital.  (Left: two sisters, who share a birthhday, June 25: Dot, in yellow, turns 96; Charlotte turns 90).

January 15th: I take the train to New York to see Aunt Dot. I spend several days. It's clear to me she is getting ready to leave. I do what I can to help the transition... a longer story than belongs here. I grieve. I talk to Chou-Chou and David (by phone), hospice, the funeral home, her caregivers. I talk to Dot, who is not conscious, asleep though not in the usual sense. 

January 19th: I see Aunt Dot again, with a clear sense that this is the last time I will see her in form in this life. I take the train back to Vermont. About two-thirds of the way
home, I begin to resist the knowledge I already have: that I have said goodbye, that I will never see Dot again. When I get off the train, I'm crying and upset. I say to David, "I shouldn't have left." He says, "I'll drive you back down in the morning." I say, "If she lives that long." At 11:30 p.m., the phone rings. Aunt Dot has died, remaining in the state in which I'd left her. She has lived for 100 years and nine months. For 57 of those years, she and I were present in each others lives.

January 20-25: David and I drive back down to New York. With a crew --- old friends of mine,  old friends of my brother, Stephen, with whom I am now on the phone frequently, the doormen of my aunt's New York building--- cleared out the apartment she had lived in for nearly 70 years. Now that too is a story, many stories, in itself, and I will probably tell some of them here. But not on this post, not today. It's perhaps enough to show the before and after of two of the six floor-to-ceiling bookshelves we cleared.

A couple of times, alone in the apartment during those days of dirty, hard, exhausting, emotionally draining work, I lost it (like when I found the aerograme Dot's long-deceased husband had sent her on their 25th anniversary, tucked under a box filled with kid gloves, in her bureau). I will say there were phone calls with Chou-Chou, who knew Dot, and who had been with me the night of Ned's death. Those calls, New York to Arkansas, I will say that at those moments, they held me afloat until I could swim, again, through all the feelings and all the tasks. Tears, laughter, resolution, comfort, strategy ("What do you think I should do with ---?") , more tears.

The days and weeks following are fuller than full: Aunt Dot's stuff, attorneys, boxes 
brought to Vermont. Teaching a Fearless Writing workshop in Rowe, Massachusetts (a student at work, left, at that most warm and welcoming of conference centers, on a cold, cold weekend ). Working with teachers and kids in Hot Springs, Arkansas, at  Gardner Magnet School,  --- and my adventures there, with the kids--- to right, just look at those dear listening faces --- and teachers, remind me of everything I love about Arkansas, and deserve their own post; I hope they'll get it one of these days; (sitting in my car outside of 
Gardner one day I note, longingly, some robins hopping on a lawn outside; I think of my own then-barren white lawn, and the time when there will be robins again in Vermont seems very far away).

Aunt Dot, and her passage, is much with me through all of this. Waves of grief come and go, but it's not at all like when Ned died --- young, unexpectedly, in an accident. This was a death as natural as a leaf.

I think to myself, more than once: Dot budded, she grew, she was pale green, than bright green, then yellow and red, then brown, then she fell from the tree. I think of the e e cummings line: "time is a tree, this life one leaf." Largely, I feel peace, and satisfaction that she was able to leave life from her own home, in her own bed and that I'd been with her almost to the last. 

In late February, the analogous helping-someone-at-the-end-of-life cycle begins again. This time, it's for Chou-Chou. Her father is getting ready to leave. The phone calls fly back and forth again, this time from Dallas, Texas, to Vermont. Tears, laughter, resolution, comfort, ("How do you think I should handle ---?"), more tears. Staying afloat in the waves. On  March 5, Chou-Chou says goodbye to her father, muralist/sculptor Merritt Willitts Yearsley, Jr (pictured left), and, with her brothers, clears his apartment. 

My friend and I, somehow, bound and rebound. In dream; in life. Or, perhaps, that long dream that, when awake, we refer to as life.

I know that one of these years,I will be in this life without my friend Chou, or she will be in this life without me. My heart clenches at the pain of either of these --- not possibilities, but certainties. And that these same certainties are what I signed up for with every single person I love. No matter how much more tightly I hug each of them knowing this, no matter how much kinder we are able to be towards each other as we age and realize this, the pain of knowing the temporariness of our connection is acute.

But connection --- it's a funny thing. It outlasts these fragile vessels known as bodies, so small and inadequate for what they they contain. But, in the sense that pounded through me that winter night by the stream, something remains. We break, and are broken - but something remains unbreakable.

If Dot touched my life, and I touch yours, and you touch someone else's... Dot caresses eternity, though she, and those touched by her, may not know it as such.

Well, life. Life, life, life, there you are.

Jungian philosopher and anthropologist Joseph Campbell, among many others, has proposed that our best human stories tell us, in a symbolic manner, about all or part of our lives' journeys, from birth to death and everywhere in between. Through challenge, loneliness, doubt, confusion, provisional answers. With the help and hindrance of others. Through love and loss, and despite evil, opposition, and pain. He calls this universal story the hero's journey.

It's one the lamb "with the coat of remarkable sheen" in Boundin' makes.

It's the one Aunt Dot made.

And Elie Wiesel, and Janusz Bardach, and yes, all those who left life in the terror and degradation of the camps. It's the one you and I are making, and Oprah, and David --- I'm thinking here of David Koff, my dear partner. But David Letterman, too, is making his. Chou-Chou, my good old loyal friend, is making hers; and her father did.

And my mother, at 94, who has just lost her big sister, and who will be moving to Vermont to live with David and me, next fall, she too is on her journey. We're working on the addition to the house in which she will live her last years now. My mother, who no longer remembers having written books like The Bunny Who Found Easter.

Page by page, day by day, with everything that happens and keeps on happening, we all, heroically, make our journeys.

Including the bunny in Charlotte's book, who, by the end of the story discovers that "Easter was not a place after all, but a time when everything lovely begins once again."

dreaming, as two decades join: "rare hare of hope," part one

My unconscious, in the dreams it chooses to deliver to me, seems to view my conscious mind as a kindergartner. When it gives me the information that it's decided I need, it does so in very simple terms.

Simple, but strange. Like the dream I had two nights ago, just before one decade ended and another began.

And, though simple to me, because spoken fluently in my own private symbolic language, not quickly told to others, who have their own private languages. Just so you know, I won't complete the telling in this post.

But hang in there with me, please.

The seeming centerpiece of the dream was Boundin' , a short animated film for children which I'd recently seen twice.

Understand this: I didn't even like the film much the first time I saw it. I don't as a rule like cartoons or animated films, so it had that to get over. 

And though I agreed with the movie's values, liked its  rhymes and engaged with the story it told --- featuring a lamb and jackalope, a mythical animal that's half-jackrabbit-half antelope --- if you'd asked me did I like it, I'd have said at best that it was "cute", just barely a compliment. 

The problem was, besides my prejudice against animation, I found the film too "message-y."

See, I tend to view anything like a visible "and the moral is" in a film or work of fiction as... well, call it vulgar, or obvious (feel free to call me a snob, too, while you're at it).

Of course most works of art do have a message, or in some way reflect the underlying values of their creator: how could it be otherwise? It's just that by my lights, the message or moral should be invisible as such. When you see a message, it's like the artist's slip is showing. And isn't the idea of a slip that it makes everything fit smoothly,  effortlessly, in no way calling attention to itself? If a slip's hanging down below the hemline, not only is not serving its purpose, it makes both the outfit and the person wearing it look bad.

So, I discounted the film. Or at least I thought I did.

My unconscious had other ideas.

a short film, in a small place

Now, I wouldn't have seen this particular film at all, let alone twice, had David, my partner, not decided to become the impresario of West-West Family Flicks, which takes place monthly at the tiny Westminster West (Vermont) Library. Boundin' was one of the shorts he'd selected to show before the December feature (some of the attentive audience, below).

Where, exactly, is the West-West library located, relative to where you are? Look closely at the signpost (in the picture, by David, at the top of this post), which is thoughtfully placed a few feet south of the library, and you'll get a pretty good idea.

You can also infer, from that signpost, that to those of us who live here, Westminster West is the center of the universe.

And maybe anybody, who lives anywhere, should feel that way about where they live.

welcome to Vermont: a matter of scale

The library is tiny because West-West is tiny: too tiny to even be listed on City-Data.com's "Very Small Towns and Villages" page, which includes only those municipalities with populations under a thousand.

But to give you some idea, Westminster proper has a whopping 275 people, while North Westminster boasts 271. West-West does not even a post office (our mailing address is in Putney) or a phone exchange (ours is Saxtons River).

Living here is not that big a change for me; I lived in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, population 1900, before moving to West-West in 2002-2003. But for David, who followed a year or two later, it was a larger change. He'd lived previously in Los Angeles, which has a population of 3,833,995 people.

Heck, a good-sized demonstration in Los Angeles, like the immigration rights rally in 2006 (pictured left), can draw almost as many people as the whole population (623,908) of the state of Vermont, which, as Vermont's Senator Patrick Leahy remarked at the time, in exactly this context (scale), "makes you think."

But Westminster West, though post officeless,  has a church (above right) which also serves as a community center. It has a graveyard.

And, it has a library.

Libraries are esteemed in Vermont.

And now, thanks to David, librarian Bev Major (left, with some young library patrons), the Board of the Library, and the Vermont Department of Libraries, the Westminster West also has a monthly family movie night.

what dreaming brings

And yes, we are coming to that dream of mine. The one which included Boundin'.

And also, strangely, the Holocaust.

And also the dear friend who traveled with me through the terrible period following Ned's death and with whom I traveled through some terrible things in her life.

And David Letterman.

And then, later, as I thought about this dream and the coming decade, a few other things: a New Yorker article about China, the U.S., and where they stand in relation to each other on the development of green energy technologies.

And a beautiful night-time walk under the almost-full moon on a snowy Vermont night at the very  end of a decade.(The picture below, NO KIDDING, was taken by DK at 11:30PM on December 30, 2009, without a flash...

under the full moon... it's lit by ambient moonlight only!)

Now you see why it might take a bit of time to tell you about both this dream and its aftermath. Decoding is involved, and translation.

Yet dreams, like lives, are an unending series of unlikely juxtapositions. Which may or may not make sense.

When they do seem to make sense, is it because they actually have it, a sense which we  only saw because, finally, we looked?

Or is it because we choose, by an act of willful creation, to give them that sense?

Perhaps in that case what such unlikely juxtapositions (whether in dreams or our waking lives), yield to us isn't sense so much as meaning.

And assistance.

All the things I mentioned above? The Holocaust, Letterman, the film? They were connected, by my unconscious, to do that: to give meaning and help, reassurance.

And that's what I, at least, needed at this moment of endings and beginnings.

It was the end of a decade that had begun (personally) with Ned's death on November 30, 2000 (a picture taken of us at a Valentine's Day benefit a few years before that, left), a loss that would knock over most of my life's other dominoes, ultimately leading to my leaving the community in which I'd spent 33 years of my life, and in which, I had been certain, I would remain for the duration.

At the very moment of Ned's death, on a larger stage an election was being stolen. (He died without knowing George Bush would be president. A small mercy, I think.)

And the following year, the worst attack on American soil in history, 9-11, would take place. 

And the end of that same decade, which concluded with the election of Barack Obama, a narrowly-missed world-wide financial meltdown, and the most horrific, ugliest, frightening, dysfunctional partisanship I've witnessed in my lifetime... who wouldn't want reassuring?


And, but, yet, somehow --- personally --- loving, again, my life, in another home, another community. And sharing that life with another, a second, dear partner and beloved companion. (Above: Janus, the two-faced Roman god, god of doorways, gates, beginnings, endings, looking forward and backward. January is named after him. Grief/joy, old/new. Like a clay pot shattering because the plant it holds has grown too large & vigorous to be contained, I sometimes think our hearts must break to contain so many opposites, gifts & subtractions...)

Maybe you, too, when you hear this dream, or even this bit of it, can find another bit of what Boundin' calls "the rare hare of hope."

Rare, not only meaning "precious", but because while there are always reasons to hope, it often seems as if there are many more reasons to despair.

And yet.

I hope you too go into this new phase with hope. Hope even as we "bound and rebound", as we spin this shiny new decade, and watch it whirl, and wait to see how it lands. Up or down? Heads or tails?

When we move from 2019 to 2020, how will we be characterizing this time we don't yet, can't yet, know? What will the best and worst lists, the compendiums of significant advance, have to say about what we went through?

Who, on a personal level, will we have lost? And who will have entered our lives?  

With decades as with days, it's like genius Shakespeare, in the character of Brutus, said the eve before battle:

Oh, that a man might know
The end of this day’s business ere it come!
But it sufficeth that the day will end,
And then the end is known.

But amidst all the unknowns, there is one end of which I am certain. 

I know it partly because of the deep reassurance that dream (which I'll you about next time) brought to consciousness. And I know it because I know that nothing is wasted on the writer.

I know that however this new decade lands, at the very least, for sure ... it's tales. And, whether we are readers or writers, tellers or listeners of these tales --- with them, we all win.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

cat-shaped pillow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As if there had ever been any doubt.

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

We didn't.

time does not require our noticing it

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

But time passed anyway.

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

What was Aunt Dot was asking, that night?

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

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

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

life in another state altogether; opacity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Redecorate? All this supposing was about redecoration?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Redecorating?

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

How many bridges, I had no idea.

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes, I swear I can still smell the smoke.

Part 2: love/ let sleeping cats tell the truth

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

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

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

2002: at home on the aquifer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step, step, step, step.

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

2008: on loan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I do believe in grace, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

somebody to love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Wislawa Syzmborska:

NOTHING'S A GIFT

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

Late afternoon, Friday, June 27th, 2008.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was an acceptance speech, and more. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pause.

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

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

But it was spirited because we cared so much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Had they even been at the same event we had?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These people are called ... politicians.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the clock is ticking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well-orchestrated?

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

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

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