"Nothing is wasted on the writer."

My father, the stripper's press agent

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

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

I shook her hand. I thanked her for coming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Yes, perhaps.

Is it interesting?

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


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

Glad to have met you again today, Margie.

Click to see that video of Maurice...

Keeping the “dead” in “deadline”

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

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

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



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

But any time could be “the last time.”

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

And as, in one sense, it will.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Live with it. You have no choice.

Reprieve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Practice. Rehearse. Perform.

Practicing

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

Rehearsing

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

Performing

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

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

Writing practice

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

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

Writing rehearsal

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

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

The writer's cast of producer/directors

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

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

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

Rehearsal for publication

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performance... and practice

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

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

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

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

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

Because nothing is wasted on the writer.

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

Are you a real writer? The sure way to find out...

It's 9:24 a.m.

I have to leave at 10:00 to drive a deeply depressed friend to her therapy appointment. I am in the middle of writing one of my long, thoughtful, typical essay-type posts, which my friend Ronni Lundy calls "blongs." I left it, and began writing this instead.

I have a bowl of Irish oatmeal beside me, cooked with diced apples, which melt to creaminess as the oats cook, studded with pieces of medjool dates, which also soften to caramel-like bits, added in the last few minutes. The bowl, brown and grey pottery, with visible finger-rings, was thrown by my late husband. If I lifted it up I'd see, on its bottom, his scratched-in signature: Ned Shank, 1971. Stirred into the finished Irish oatmeal is a heaping teaspoon of almond butter, and a drizzle of maple syrup, from the trees tapped by my nearest neighbor, here in Vermont.

I am going to see if I can write an actual short blog post, and get it done before I hop into the car to do my mission of mercy, which I both want, deeply, to do, and am slightly irritated at having to do (I have been hanging in there with my depressed friend for many months now. It's getting old. But I am ridiculously loyal, to my friend, and stubborn;  insistent, internally, that I know this is part of her life process, and mine, and that she and I will get through it, and that it will someday have meaning).

I am trying to finish this because nothing in the universe, that I have found, makes me feel as "God's in heaven and all's right with the world," as writing, particularly when I finish a piece. (I accidentally wrote, and just found and corrected, "all's write with the world.")

I have 50 published books out: all with name, traditional publishers: HarperCollins (Harper & Row when they published me), Simon and Schuster, Macmillan (now also part of Simon and Schuster), Charles Scribners (now defunct), Workman. And I have one coming out with Little, Brown (leading at times to peculiar, hilarious, but truthful statements like, "I'm going in to have lunch with the Little Brown people tomorrow.") 

But I don't believe, in my heart of hearts, that I am a real writer until I have written that day. That day, being each day. Being today.

It's the holidays. Should I go to a party that is large enough so that I don't know everyone and strike up conversation with a stranger, it is likely at some point he or she will say, "So, what do you do?"

And I will say, "I'm a writer."

"Oh," he or she will say. And then that subtle shift in tone. "Published?"

Meaning, are you a real writer or an amateur, just futzing around. Meaning, where do I put you on the one-up one-down scale. Should I be impressed (are you famous? have I heard of you?), interested and slightly respectful (oh, you write a column for the Brattleboro Reformer which I may have read) or merely polite (how interesting, excuse me while I get another deviled egg).

I say yes when so asked, because I am a published writer, after all. Yes. True. But if I haven't written that day, I feel, in my heart of hearts, like a hypocrite.

The outside world, in the form of real and imaginary people at cocktail parties, teachers, parents, and siblings, will tell you, directly and indirectly, that a real writer equals a published writer.

Except every writer was at some point an unpublished writer. And even every published writer returns periodically to being unpublished, during the time they are writing.

This is so obvious. Except, evidently, it isn't.

Twitter is a medium I use (I'm @cdragonwagon) and simultaneously like and loathe, in part because the same limitation of characters that forces you to be succinct and pithy also forces you to write "U" for "you" at times.

Here's the one sentence version of this post, as I put it on Twitter a few days back:  "Act of writing makes U 'real' writer. O,U thought it was publication? In his lifetime,Van Gogh sold O paintings; was he a 'real' artist?"

I said above, vis a vis the location where I feel like a phony if I haven't written on the day --- any day --- when I'm asked about being a writer if I haven't written that day, "in my heart of hearts."

By which I mean, in that interior True North by which one steers; to which, if one is true, one feels in alignment, living life with purpose and integrity.

Veer a few degrees from that compass point, and one becomes a hypocrite in one's own eyes, whether or not the world notices (and it usually won't, until the degrees are so many that the degree of offness is blindingly evident).

At least I feel that way if I deviate by even a couple of degrees.

But not today.

For now it is 9:50 a.m. And though I have not finished my oatmeal, I have written.

Like one of the ads for one of the airlines used to say, "We earn our wings each day."

Today I earned my wings: I wrote. Therefore, I am a real writer.

It's a relief.

9:55 a.m.

All I have to do is hit "publish" and I will both a real and a published writer.

Again. Until tomorrow.

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."

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.

me & my semi-famous aging mother: navigating love with fierce persistence

"Happy Mother's Day," we say, as if it were that simple. It usually isn't.

Complex, ambivalent,  contradictory, with more layers than a baklava: that begins, barely, to describe the relationship my mother, Charlotte Zolotow, and I have with each other. That it has at last grown simpler and less ambivalent in the last couple of years, as she has entered extreme old age (she's about to be 93) and I middle age, is one of the great reliefs of my life. And, I think, hers, too.

I think we will pull it off yet: when she leaves, we will be at peace with each other. The love between us, which has never been a question, is becoming more and more visible, as the matters that have made it opaque grow thinner and less obscured.(She's pictured, left, in front of the house in which she still lives, now with a full-time care-giver. This photo was taken in about 1996).

(Baklava? Where did that come from? It's layered, sure, but so are many pastries; why did the word baklava travel through my fingers, and presumably brain, to arrive on the screen? In the manner one might analyze a dream, I turn the object over in my mind.  Sweet, almost too sweet. Delicious, but very, very sticky. Have to wash your hands after eating it. And it's filled with --- nuts! How can one not love a discipline, writing, that so surprises its practitioner, by delivering stuff like this? ! )

I could write a book trying to explain this particular mother-daughter relationship; in fact I did, when I was much younger (around 30), a novel called The Year It Rained . (You can buy the paperback British edition here; or track it down used online. I prefer the former, because then I actually make a little money.)When I wrote that book, I think I was still trying to explain what went on between my mother and me to myself, much more than to anyone else. For, to the extent I figure out anything, I usually wind up doing through writing.  Now, in present-time, her and my relationship is clearer to me, as so much is. (And, Lord, I should hope so, 25 years down the line.)

A general, no doubt oversimplified rule: what makes people crazy and drives them to therapists and spirituality and self-understanding / healing / peace (if they're fortunate) , or dope or booze or other forms of attempted or actual self-obliteration (if they're unfortunate)  is the gap, among intimates --- family members, spouses/partners --- the gap between what is said in words and what is said by actions.  The wider the divide, the more crazy-making this is. 

Such gaps are hard to even get, let alone take apart, let alone recover or heal from. I deeply believe it can be done, and that to do so is vastly liberating. But not without effort. We're too close to such gaps to see them, and they're sometimes abysses;  we may not want to see them, being afraid we might fall in and never emerge. And they affect us most at particularly vulnerable periods of our lives: we're young and are pure unadulterated emotion, without comparative experience or analytical skills to back away, or we've just gone through some major life-tragedy. (Picture, left: CZ in a quiet moment, at her 90th birthday party. Photo, David Koff.)

My mother is a wildly talented, well-known writer of children's books; she was an equally talented, incredibly generous and insightful children's book editor at Harper-Collins (then Harper & Row; and before that  Harper & Brothers) for fifty-some years. She was and is much beloved by the many authors she worked with, including Paul Zindel , Francesca Lia Block, and Paul Fleischman. She has always been respectful and supportive of my talent, too. And oh, did she ever have the most gracious manners! And she was beautiful, too, though she never thought so at the time. (To right: a happier moment at that same birthday, which she shares with her sister, my Aunt Dot. Dorothy, in yellow, was turning 95 that year! Photo, David Koff).

(Recently, looking through a scrapbook I made her, she scrutinized a picture of herself and said thoughtfully, and utterly without guile, "I don't remember being that attractive.")

On the other hand: well, for now, let's just say there is another hand. One to give, one to take away. Until recently, but pretty much only within the family, Charlotte poured out major, almost excessive,  generosity... but always, if you bit down on what was offered, there was a hook: bitter, sharp, ready to slice your your tongue or pierce the roof of your mouth.

This is hard for people who revere my mother to hear --- there's an interesting discussion of this re The Year It Rained, the novel I mentioned above, at a post called "The Polarizing Express"  (It's an  excellent, thoughtful blog called Collecting Children's Books , by Peter, a writer, reviewer, collector, and cataloger of same). But as for me, I think love and anger often coexist, as extreme selflessness and extreme selfishness sometimes do. (This picture, taken in 1998, was when I accompanied to Charlotte to the award given in her name, the Charlotte Zolotow Award, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.  I'm at the far left, CZ next to me. This is one group that definitely falls into the "we revere Charlotte" category.)

This  --- public graciousness, undeniable talent, and a lot of private anger, manipulation, love, and controlling behavior ---  is how it looked to me for a long, long time. Until fairly recently, but thankfully, thankfully, not much now. I grew up; she grew old. Things are different now. 

Some poems of mine, then; never intended for publication. This first batch dates from the period around 2002, 2003, 2004; when she was, in old age, starting to lose it. For awhile, all her worst qualities (victimhood, a tendency towards melodrama, rage, manipulation, control) took over. For the first time, this side of her was visible to those outside the family (friends, caregivers - she went through seventeen of them in three years!).

That it was somewhat validating to me to have others finally recognize (with shock) this side of her at last,  was the saddest, most bittersweet victory you can imagine; not victorious at all, just sad. And as it fell to me to "fix things" --- to retrofit her house after she fell and broke her hip three times in one year, for instance, oh, it was difficult. I was still grieving Ned; I felt bereft, beleaguered, adrift. My mother was angry all the time. I was traveling back and forth from Arkansas for some of that period, then from Vermont to Westchester, New York, a four hour drive each way...

One day, back in Vermont after a particularly hard week, I had a latte at L.A. Burdick's (a fabulous cafe and chocolate shop about twenty minutes drive from my home). Pen and notebook in purse, as  almost always. Without conscious forethought, I began to write, and found myself spinning out mother-related haiku after haiku.

What I saw as her point of view:

numberless problems
shall I start counting for you?
my life's very hard

if you understood,
you'd agree, clearly love me.
I'll explain again.

call me when you've got
some real time, an hour, two:
not this pissant call

I love you dearly
surely you could improve things
if you would only try

Grandly creative,
my daughter. Too bad
she won't fix my painful life.

Doesn't fit. You're wrong.
No one is doing their job.
Sure I'm unhappy.

And, imagining how outraged she'd be at my statements about this:

my daughter places
mean words, bitter sentiments
in my mouth. Tragic.

And my own frustration, futility, anger at not being able to make things better, nor to stop caring or get some emotional distance:

I'd gladly give you
what you want. But it's always
changing, never right.

She: perfectionist
busy redefining what
perfect is. Trouble.

I can't get no, no
satisfaction. Is it Mick?
No, just Mom again.

My intentions are
honorable, misguided;
parenthesis (doomed)

I'd like to give you
what I feel: two cats purring,
breakfast, yoga.

And this, perhaps about both of us:

Why want what you don't
have? Human nature? Greediness?
Refusing to see?

But I was wrong on this one:

Contentment won't make
an appearance in Mom's life
not now not ever.

Because, occasionally now, it does. (In the picture below, taken in September of 2007, CZ in such a moment. Photo, David Koff).

About two years after the poems above were written, I found myself writing what follows, in a class with Pat Schneider. (Pat is herself a very fine writer and remarkable teacher, based in Amherst, Massachusetts. She founded Amherst Writers and Artists in 1981; her book about her method of teaching, Writing Alone and with Others, will have every writer underlining and asterisking and, finally, using. She is also a woman who has written extensively, honestly, and beautifully about her own complex issues with her mother, in her memoir Wake Up Laughing: A Spiritual Autobiography. If you live at all close to Amherst, you have the opportunity to study with her once a week on an ongoing basis; an experience which should not be missed.)

The assignment Pat gave us had to do with "what matters." Writing it, I'd say, may have been the beginning of the so-long-in-coming sea change in being with Charlotte.

At last, at last, Relationship School, even in this most fraught of relationships, was teaching me again how to love and be loved:

Calculation

What matters, then? What remains?

Subtract the fact
that there was always "Yes, but – "
to any moment that might, for her,
have threatened complete happiness.

Subtract the flat
of blue-velvet-faced pansies,
cheerful shocking yellow centers.
She taught me how to plant.

Subtract the water
she taught me to pour around each.

Subtract even the soil (or its memory),
turning to mud, and how
each seedling must be settled
down and in a second time,
patted as its element changes:
how, when I gasped
at that pink soft curled moving thing,
she said, “Oh no, it’s a worm, it’s good,
it won’t hurt you.”

Subtract that she has lost
the knack of naming:
Monday, Friday, January, June –
Joan, Jules, Josephine, “You know,
the one who pays my bills…” “…who used to live
next door…” “…that poet…” “You know,
your brother’s friend, who lives in –
what is that city, with the painted houses,
by the water, that’s always colder
than you think it ought to be, and
overcast each morning…”

Subtract the huge unbending joints
on tiny hands;
subtract the rings which, thus,
she gave to me.
Subtract the green eyes
browned by medication,
the ambulettes,  subtract
“They tell you things
about me that just aren’t true;
they lie and you believe them,
no one asks how I feel, what I want.”

Subtract the gauze dress, pink and blue 
she sent one spring, which I wore
to the ribbon-cutting
of a business I no longer own
in a town where I no longer live
when I was a wife
to someone who, being dead,
is now without address.

Subtract the rage.
Subtract the gaps between
what’s said and meant.
Subtract the future and the past,
sciatica and death and birth,
glaucoma, osteo, and Fosamax
exasperation, hopelessness, and repetition 

Subtract the old, old shapes and patterns.

Subtract the body, once my height and weight,
now 75 pounds, though still fond of salmon,
drowning in a twin bed, always cold. 

Subtract duty, money, obligation, and their grip.

What matters is, not because I must,
I love her.

So. And now that so much is falling away, I not only know, as I always have, that she loves me, but sometimes she simply expresses it: no buried fishhook, no agenda, just joy and acceptance. Who would have thought? 

Whether your mother is living or dead, whether your relationship with her is basically resolved and happy, or more ambivalent, or fatally flawed; whether you even know her or not; whether you are a mother or are without children, I hope you celebrate Mother's Day.

No matter what else she was or is, your mother was the imperfect portal through which you entered your own imperfect life, and took temporary residence on this imperfect earth.

If we preface the holiday with "happy", and of course we do, let it be the kind of happiness with breadth and depth, radical acceptance (even if it takes awhile), transparency (at least in one's own understanding), and, perhaps, forgiveness (but not if it has to be forced, not if you do it because you "should").

Such happiness is bittersweet, but then, so is good chocolate. Such happiness embraces it all:  broken dishes, broken promises, passed-down delicate heirloom lusterware tea-pots, scents that may mix Chanel Number Five with Clorox,  cigarette smoke, dilled chicken soup, Jergen's lotion, nail polish remover. (Photo left; holding hands: the knobbly jointed hands belong to my mother, the hands with rings are mine, and the third set of hands are my aunt's).

Such happiness is love and life, imperfect perfection.

And for writers, it's part of work, rich material which should not be forgotten or regretted, but utilized.  It is yours alone (your mother has her own) and far too precious to waste.

today is the first day of the rest of my blog: settling in after a month of cornbread travels

It was during the first event of last month's great April book tour boogie (thirteen events! nine cities! One of those cities three times! Renting and a returning a car six times from various airports! Getting off and on an airplane 22 times!) that I realized: hey! I really no-kidding have got to start a blog! The book I was traveling with and about was my latest cookbook, The Cornbread Gospels, which was published on Thanksgiving Day, 2007, by Workman Publishing.

Now, this first event was something of a home-coming, for it brought me back to Little Rock, where I used to live, and where I met my darling late husband, Ned (with whom I spent 23 years; a picture of us taken in August of 2000, three months before he died in a bicycling accident). I  still have many dear friends, some of whom share decades of joint history, in Little Rock; returning is always, like chocolate, rich, dark, sweet, bitter and irresistible. Most of these friends, knew Ned, and knew us as a couple.

A tornado arrived in Little Rock the night after I did. My friend Starr Mitchell hypothesized a connection (harumph). I met Ned in Starr's former home; I was staying in her present home, shared with her husband, George West, when the tornado sirens went off. The three of us, and their younger son, Cane, who is on hiatus from college, alternated between watching the reports of the storm on television, watching it from the upstairs loft, and going out on the porch to watch. The Mitchell-Wests dug out the large closet in Cane's room, the architecturally most secure spot in the house, in case we should need to scurry into it for shelter. Fortunately, we didn't have to, as Scratch, the family cat, had peed in one of its far corners, with lasting results, in the olfactory sense.   

But meteorological events and friendships notwithstanding, what I was really there for the Arkansas Literary Festival, the main fund-raiser for the Arkansas Literacy Council. This was one of the causes close to my heart when I lived back in Arkansas, and for that matter, still (literacy, anywhere, anyhow, always will be).The opening event was a ticketed meet-the-authors thing, buy books, snack, drink, gossip, get books signed, cocktail party-ish. The horribly unflattering picture to the left was taken that night; it's of me and another old friend, Louise Terzia, who works with the aforementioned Starr, at the Historic Arkansas Museum. I'm the red-headed one, but trust me, said photo does neither of us justice. Anyway, the featured drink of the night was a pomegranatini, which I stayed away from (I get looped on two sips of wine, so I never drink at all if I have to be remotely on; besides which, I could just imagine my late father, at times fanatically devoted to "an extra dry martini with a twist of lemon peel", who viewed the addition of an olive, with its noxious brine, as a travesty, going into a horrified rant at the very idea of any kind of a fruit-ini ... if you want to know how serious he was about liquor, until he gave up drinking in late middle age, check his article on absinthe). As to the food, I was delighted to find excellent guacamole, and what was for me a first on a cocktail party buffet: really good from-scratch mashed potatoes, with grated cheese and oddments to sprinkle on them. Of course there was also all the usual meatballs, artichoke-crabmeat dip, etc. But as a vegetarian - hey, those mashed potatoes made me happy. (Speaking of which, here's a very happy mashed potato recipe, which I developed for Relish Magazine some years back; it has marscapone and celery root).

At most such events writers wind up talking quite a bit with other writers. I plunked myself (and my cocktail-sized plate of mashed potatoes) right down next to Suzette Haden Elgin (in Blog-Land she goes by Ozarque). We hadn't visited in some time and we got right to everything important: writing, health, relationships, gossip about mutual friends and not-friends. Because I had been angsting about whether or not to blog, I asked her if she did. At which she lit up, smiled a great big smile, and said yes, and she was finding it amazing and thoroughly enjoyable though a hell of a lot of work. I quizzed her ruthlessly. In essence, she said: "It's time consuming, it's good, you can do it in your pajamas and you don't have to go anywhere, you won't believe how many people read your work, it's fun, your book sales go up, I actually got paid decently for a poem I posted there, it's a constant surprise."  She also told me, "Don't write about religion!" (Which it turns out I manage to have done, in this very first post... Sort of. A bit. Later  on. But.)  Suzette writes sci-fi, and non-fiction (the latter primarily in the field of linguistics --- her Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense is a classic). Neither of these are my genres. But we are both poets as well, and feel comfortable with each other, and are both Arkansas, and Ozark, authors --- though I'm an Arkansas/Ozark author who now lives in Vermont, or perhaps a Vermont author who used to live in Arkansas (the first feels more accurate to me, though).

Anyway, I am back home, in my new-old home, Vermont, after 30 days crammed with traveling (exhausting) and cornbread adventures (energizing). (The house in Vermont is pictured. Unlike the picture of me and Louise, this one is incredibly flattering; it was taken when my aunt, who was more moneyed than I am, owned the place as a summer home, and she really kept it up. It's a bit funkier now, though still an amazing piece of property.) A tsunami of stuff has accumulated in my absence, and it would like some attention. Yet Suzatte's enthusiasm stays with me, as does that of another writer I also queried on the pros and cons of blogging last month: Judy Blume. And so, here I am, commencing to blog. How did this become front-and-center on my To-Do list? (Well, when a list has assort receipts, catch up with emails, pay bills, do laundry, make dentist's appointment - the stuff every human being contends with, and which Starr, many years ago, once referred to in a piece of writing as LPTs, Little Piddling Things - starting a blog looks much more compelling. I realize that "the stuff every human being contends with" presumes that you, dear reader, are in fact a human being, despite the New Yorker cartoon of two dogs hunched over a computer, one gleefully telling the other "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog.").

This last month's goofy narrative will continue over the next few weeks, up to and including the grand finale, The National Cornbread Festival, in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, last weekend (It's always the last full weekend in April, FYI; [icture, left, one of the many food vendors at the Festival. This particular shot taken in 2003, by David Koff: note the blue sky and green mountains).

All told, April was one interesting, story-rich month for me: revisiting these experiences in writing, instead of merely thinking about them, will be pleasurable, a putting things away as important, in its fashion, as unpacking. (Someone, I think W.H. Auden, said famously, "How can I know what I think till I see what I say?").

But, of course, why stop with last month? I've had, and still do, an... interesting life. I vividly remember a telephone conversation with my father, the writer Maurice Zolotow, who I already mentioned vis martinis, and who was, among other things Marilyn Monroe's first biographer. I can still picture the kitchen where I was standing as we talked, me on a wall phone with a curly black cord. I was facing out across a laminate counter, bright orange, looking out through the window behind the counter into our small Atlanta backyard garden, dominated by a larger wisteria. Maurice, in LA, would have been in his small office, one room of his West Hollywood apartment, cluttered with paper and open books and the detritus of a working writer's working life. What I can't remember is what my father asked me that sparked whatever story, also vanished, I told him in response. But I can still hear him saying admiringly, with great relish, his customary over-the-top enthusiasm, and maybe even a little envy, though his own life was far, far from dull:  "By God, Cres! You could live the rest of your life in a nunnery and you'd still have plenty of material to write about!"

I was 29 then. I'm 55 now. So you can imagine.

But we have miles to go before we sleep. I do, anyway.

Which brings to mind the following: when my husband, Ned, was alive, late one night we somehow got into a long, long passionate discussion about how those who follow various religions so often commit atrocities in their name, despite the fact that the doctrines of most such religions at least in part support peace and brotherly/sisterly love. Bear in mind this must have been in, oh, 1990 or 92, way before 9/11. Ned and I discussed Christians. We moved on to Jews. We had just reached Sri Lanka  and the long and terrible civil war essentially between Hindus and Buddhists... I glanced at the clock. "Good Lord, Ned!" I said, startled,  "Do you realize it's way past 2:00 a.m.?" He gazed at me balefully, raised his eyebrows, and sighed. "And Muslims to go before we sleep," he said. (Another picture of Ned, this one when he was very young, before I knew him: as a teenager, throwing pottery. What a sweet, funny, smart good guy he was. )

I guess that story is a long way from cornbread, from being back home in Vermont on  May Day, 2008 ... But you know? Everything's connected, which may be why I chose to put up that picture of beans and cornbread, which are certainly connected on plates around the world. Or maybe I chose it because it was taken by my boyfriend, David Koff. Because though I miss Ned greatly and still, I am living proof that life and love go on in altered form, and that human beings are incredibly resilient. And perhaps, because I do talk about Ned a lot, I didn't want you, unknown reader, to put me into the "grieving widow" file, though there were certainly years when that's exactly where I was.

But not now.

As I was saying: Everything's connected, and nothing is wasted on the writer. I trust digression. I go with it.

Now, thank you: for going with me.