"Nothing is wasted on the writer."

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."

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

I used to be an innkeeper.

I used to be a daughter with a living father.

I am neither of these things now.

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

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

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

Which is what I was, and am still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I never stop learning this.

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

recalling the hyphenated life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And long-gone.

procrastination & its creative discontents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"papa-ganda": Maurice & me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotations from Chairman Moe; fierce boilings

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

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

"A writer writes."

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

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

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

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

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

to Crescent Z.
Dragonwagon,

on her 19th birthday -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But who knows what he would have thought or felt?

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

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

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

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

No one escapes such boiling.

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

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

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

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

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