Love As A Found Object

Death: A Festival for the Living

2012-01-27T12:14:00.002-05:00

A good reason to be sorry one doesn't live in London: this weekend's Death Festival, held at Southbank Centre on Belvedere Road, at which, through an assemblage of music, workshops, literature, installations, and talks "with everyone from philosophers to funeral workers," visitors will be given an unusual opportunity to explore death, this "unknowable certainty."

I learned of the event thanks to the happy impulse of a woman I have never met and with whom I have exchanged barely an email: the publicity manager at the publishing house that will issue the U.K. edition of The Grief of Others. I find myself this morning thinking about her, this felicitous stranger, with gratitude and surprise. I find it somewhat extraordinary that she would send me the link, apropos of nothing, without knowing me. I don't mean to overstate the riskiness of her action; my book does have "grief" in the title, after all. But I am so used to the notion that speaking of death willingly, wonderingly, and at any time other than strictly necessary, is thought by most people to be something very like bad manners. This was evinced all too clearly in conversations about the cover design for the American edition of Grief, in which playing against the heaviness of the subject noun was voiced as a paramount concern if the book was ever to make it off display tables and into anyone's palms, let alone all the way the cash register. (Thus the first cover, which featured lots of pink and yellow and a dress with a sash and a gay blue sky.)

The notion is evinced, too, in the slight furrowings of brow that occur whenever I mention how often I think of death (daily), and how without despair or even glumness these musings are, but rather with something more like penchant, humility and appetite. Not appetite to die, but appetite for wandering along the complex and multifarious passageways of thought and association the subject holds. The subject in our culture is rather like a grand old granite house full of forking stairways and hidden rooms and winding corridors and secret panels, with gardens and fountains and overgrown hedgemazes and neglected orchards out back - a generous, ancient estate that might beg exploration if only it hadn't been boarded up, a heavy chain padlocked across its gate, so that people, having grown used to thinking of the place as morose and vaguely sinister, not only give it wide berth but avert their eyes whenever it appears on the horizon, and discipline even their thoughts to stay away.

How I wish I could attend the festival in London. I would like to go to the puppet show, and to see Chris Larner perform "An Instinct for Kindness," and to pencil in a circle on Birthday, Sam Winston's pop up registry commemorating "the quarter of a million lives that are born and die in the space of 12 hours around the world," and to watch the masked and costumed children dance in "From Blue to Joy," a parade and party inspired by New Orleans funerals and Mexican Day of the Dead rituals.

Instead I will imagine a festival in my head, imagine the revelers sawing through the rusted chain on the gate of that great, foreboding stone house, imagine them throwing open the shutters and sashes, admitting breezes to swoop through the rooms, admitting also sunlight and leaves and blown rain and pollen and soot and the sounds of their own voices and footsteps as they venture along, trying out different passageways and doors.

The Other Mothers

2012-01-10T21:05:00.005-05:00

We made stained glass cookies on a dark afternoon, rolling out with our bare hands small snakes of dough, whose ends we pressed together free-form to make, under the direction of my friend's mother, little windows: lopsided diamonds, divided rectangles, lumpy hoops.

This friend's mother was an artist. She made small boxes - loose vessels or sprung cocoons - out of colored silk and long, trailing lengths of thread. These were displayed, if I recall, in Lucite cases that could be set on a shelf or mounted on a wall. You could look in at them, these constructions, at once elegant and a little wanton, a little blowsy, their saturated hues evocative of yolk and raw tuna and new grass. Although some were impossibly pale, a kind of tissuey pink: they were the color of what it feels like to touch the tip of your tongue to the inside of your cheek.

We laid our finished dough windows on sheets of foil, then filled their centers with crushed hard candy, bits of hammered lollipop. We made sure to sprinkle enough candy so that once baked, and the colored granules had melted and spread, the candy glass would fill the opening, seal it completely - yet we didn't sprinkle it so densely that the light would fail to illuminate fully the colors we had chosen. While we worked, the light outside the real window panes deepened from periwinkle to cobalt, and the distant tree branches framed by the windows grew - we swore! - more gnarled, calling to mind the crooked lace of witches' fingers splayed against the sky.

That past summer, when the seventeen-year cicadas had crawled up through the ground, climbed the trees and molted, littering the streets and sidewalks of our town with their iridescent and faintly monstrous shells, this friend's mother had found art in their discarded skins. She'd gathered dozens of the near-weightless exoskeletons and made a centerpiece of them in a clear glass bowl. My own mother spoke of this with some wonder: a mixture of deep, plaintive admiration and the unspoken question of whether this might be going too far.

Once, this friend's mother gave my mother one of her silk boxes, a flushed, fleshy-blush color whose hue seemed to me for years the very definition of the word beauty. It was given in a kind of barter, an exchange for work rendered, because my mother was an artist too - though she would be quick to dismiss such a designation: no-o-o, she would utter from low in her throat, a little string of crumbs to brush away, and with them any preposterous presumption. Graphic art is the public box my own mother settled into for a stretch of years, a modest box: serviceable, useful. In this capacity she designed, at the silk-and-cicada artist's request, a business card, for which she was paid in silk: a single rosy pouch, its visible seams finely, even sensually stitched. It sat on a wooden shelf in our house for decades, a thing of beauty preserved in its small clear case.

Elsewhere in the house, my mother's art came and went, mostly on tiptoe, mostly mounted with nothing but scotch tape. I loved a pencil drawing of pears, a female nude, and a kind of geometric sculpture made of thin wooden dowels.

The mothers of my friends - the other mothers of my childhood - were by turns generous and mysterious, embracing and foreign. They were kind to me, taught me how to make stained glass cookies, took me to plays and concerts and libraries and teas. They treated me not quite like another daughter, but close enough that I sometimes imagined: what if I were hers? What if I were my friend's mother's daughter? What if she loved me as her own? Who would I be then?

And was it from loyalty that I always recoiled immediately upon risking such thoughts? Or was it from superstition, or a sense of good manners? Or from horror, pure and simple, that I should ever be anyone but my own mother's child?

They were so proximal, so familiar, these women who remain steadily threaded through my memories of growing up, and yet I did not keep in touch with them. They had their own daughters to love, and I my own mother, and such a thing, such a love, is so immense, particular, and puzzling - more: so vexing and venerable and unsolvable and lush - that there was no room really to admit them, these other women, into my girlhood heart. Except that I remember them now with gratitude and curiosity, and in remembering I see that they are there anyway - have been all along - safely tucked there within an ignorant, inner chamber.

On that winter afternoon, after the cookies were baked and cooled, we peeled off the foil backing and held them up to the deepening light, and saw how their centers shone like jewels.

Hair, Deer, Birds

2012-01-02T13:08:00.000-05:00

She has lost her hair again, as she knew she would, having - not without real deliberation this time - agreed to another series of taxol, one of the chemotherapies that inevitably leads to baldness. So we brought the clippers with us when we visited last week, and one mild day when everyone else was out, my mother and I stepped out onto the back porch and I shaved the last wisps at her request. They danced in the breeze like milkweed fluff and stuck to my coat. My mother had asked me, before we went out, if I wanted to put on a different coat, to borrow a raincoat perhaps. I had not. I'd wanted to know I might be plucking stray hairs of hers from my own coat for weeks. She has a lovely head, its shape and proportion appealing and right. But then everything about her body has always struck me as right - even more than beautiful - or rather, as the basis of her beauty: this essential rightness, so that in my aesthetic lexicon, brown eyes are 'right,' and soft hands, and trimmed, unpainted oval fingernails, and the set of her mouth and the set of her shoulders and the darkness and straightness and heaviness of her hair, which, admittedly, whisperedly, remains for me at memory's core a rich, shining sable, short and thick, with a narrow sliver of almost silvery white marking the part.

Behind my parent's house is a small creek, and beyond this is a wooded incline, and half-hidden, half-nestled at the base of one of the trees across the creek a deer lay dead. My father had spotted it several days earlier, and I'd seen it closer-up when I'd gone with the dog through the modest swath of woods the day before, and on the day I shaved my mother's head, we began to see the vultures mass, three and four and seven and nine of them, coming to perch on branches in various nearby trees. They were very patient, those waiting in the trees, still and heavy as stone carvings, mutely watching as though keeping vigil or sitting shiva. But of course they had a different purpose, and in the days to come, we - various members of my family - would periodically gather by the big windows, keeping watch on their watch, and we - congregating with peaceable interest, much like the family of birds - noticed how one at a time would dine on the deer, standing literally on the deer's body as it unhurriedly and deftly pried up pieces of meat. The whole thing took place at near stately pace: the birds' almost languid return day after day to the spot, the humans' observation through the wall of glass across the creek; the passage of the deer's body, the metamorphosing of it from one thing into many.

The People's Obit

2011-12-23T15:35:00.000-05:00

Above is a single image from close to 300 that appear on The New York Times page The Lives They Loved.
The man pictured is Jay "Bronzo" Bronzini. Here is what his friend, Zac Stanley, writes about him:

This is my best friend Jay. He lost his battle with depression a mere 10 days ago. This photo is like a doorway into him at the time it was taken. A person with an absolute passion for music and songwriting, someone with a dark side his closest friends and family only knew about. Great clothes and hair, a smile that made women swoon. You are forever missed, junior, my brother.

Once you click on one of the images, it's hard to stop. So much beauty, so many stories. Such plentiful, splendid company.

We are not strangers.

In fact, I know you well.

- Liz Swados

To Scale

2011-11-30T17:45:00.004-05:00

My mother sends an email:

Subject: moon calendar.

Message: Shall we let it go this year?

What to say to this? We have been sending each other lunar phase calendars every year for many years. They hang on the walls of both our houses, one long column for every month, the moon waxing and waning down the line. I forget which one of us started it.

Shall we let it go this year?

I like letting things go. I like standing over the trash can and dropping things in, severing earthly ties, relinquishing things to the curb, to the ash pile, to memory's rippled black stream. I am good at it, practiced. In fact, is it the actual letting go or is it the practice that I like, the discipline, the refusal to cling, the soundless thrill of the instant of abstention, of well-rehearsed, well-performed frugality? The solace of diminution, of attenuation. Smallness.

I have always wanted to be small. And am. This, too, a rehearsal of sorts.

I have just come back from walking the dog. Without my glasses, the holiday lights strewn across bushes and porch railings looked just like cake sprinkles - like gold and silver dragees and like the tinier beads of multicolored sugar confetti - and the bushes were little dark cakes, or model train bushes, and the trees and houses like model train trees and houses, and the lawns and streets and shops all the same, so that it was like walking in a model village, everything properly small under the sky. And in the sky, even the moon was to scale, pinched and pale up there in the fibrous, endless, ragged purple landscape: it was a matte white curve, a bitten-off bit of fingernail, it was so little, the moon.

Against Indifference

2011-11-22T10:40:00.005-05:00

Like all great questions, he said, it has no answer.
This was Elie Wiesel, last night, at Boston University. A lecture titled, "Reflections on Good and Evil."
He began his talk not by greeting the audience, nor by thanking the rabbi who introduced him, nor with any sort of preamble at all, but in direct, not to say startling, fashion, with a two-pronged crowbar of a question: Is what is moral always good? Is what is immoral always evil?
In other words he opened by cracking us open a little. Readying us for his talk with a necessary, not unkindly bit of trepanning. Or as Emily Dickinson would have it, with a kind of poem. ("If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off," she wrote, "I know that is poetry.")

All conversations about morality ought to begin on a tilt-a-whirl. The only sound starting point from which to venture forth being one that admits no absolute, no true north, no fundamental gravitational ground zero. Rather: a multitude of orientation points, an ever shifting, revolving world, and a floor that drops out when you least expect it.
How difficult and beautiful. How beautiful because difficult; because the feeling of one's skull lifting off always includes a kind of brilliant, bracing cold; because growing is never not painful, not shivery and fearsome and sublime.
I meant to write about what he said, and I find myself instead setting down words about feeling. I am talking about his talk and yet the language I am using mostly fails to address its content, describing instead the sensations it delivered.

It is the morning after. Already I and my friend who invited me to go have been consulting with each other, trying to salvage the words, the phrases, the bits and pieces we remember searingly but imperfectly. We have been alternately texting and calling each other up: What did he say about the blind person's conception of God? What was that word he used, before he said, "Then I am the problem," was it "alien?" Was it, "If I see the other as unalterably alien, then I am the problem"?
We remember how we feel more precisely than we remember the words themselves.
We learn that on this coming Sunday night the talk will be broadcast on the radio; there will be a podcast, maybe even a transcript; in time we will be able to revisit the words, copy them down, study them in black and white.
For now what we have is the feeling of the tops of our heads taken off.
We have the feeling.
We have feeling.

Elie Wiesel's great struggle is against indifference. He has said:

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it's indifference.

Feeling is the tool that fights indifference. All literature - all stories, all language, all words - are useful - are moral - only in the proportion that they engender feeling.
How full, how fat I am this morning with feeling. I give thanks for that.

To Dwell in Abundance

2011-11-14T11:47:00.001-05:00

This morning I am indulging in a rare impulse to feel just happy for myself. Two nice things:

I stumbled across a review of my novel in something called Obit Mag (who knew?). It's one of the nicest reviews I've ever received, and I am feeling unabashed, improbable joy over this line in particular: "Cohen pulls off the most pitch-perfect drunk speech since J. P. Donleavy."

And then my editor just wrote to say that "Grief" has been named one of Kirkus's top 25 fiction books of 2011. I can hardly believe it.

(Oh! Isn't it funny that seven days ago I posted about feeling happy for other people's good news?)

The Last Soft Shoe

2011-11-12T08:55:00.000-05:00

Why Joan Didion is like Savion Glover: a review of Blue Nights in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

The Happiness of Others

2011-11-07T09:40:00.004-05:00

The Pilgrimage, Jean-Michel Basquiat

What higher joy than that which we take in another's good fortune? Here are four pieces of news that are giving me pleasure these days:

1. Patrick Wang, the young actor-writer-director I've mentioned before in this space, has just received a glorious New York Times review for his first feature film (which was rejected by 30 festivals before premiering at the Hawaii International Film Festival last month). The Times critic Paul Brunick writes: "Mr. Wang’s slow-reveal psychological drama isn’t just a showcase for his excellent ensemble cast. Beautifully modulated and stylistically sui generis, “In the Family” is also one of the most accomplished and undersold directorial debuts this year...This is a career to keep an eye on."

2. Andrew Krivak, a friend whose first novel, The Sojourn, was similarly turned down by a long list of publishers before at last finding a home with the tiny Bellevue Literary Press, and who saw the book's arrival in the world last June greeted rather quietly and then seem to slip - as is the way with most literary fiction - into oblivion, received a tremendous piece of news last month when it was named one of five fiction finalists for the National Book Award.

3. Pam Ward is someone I've never met, but her recording the audiobook of The Grief of Others led to a brief, friendly email exchange. Then, just recently, I heard from her again:

Dear Leah - We won a very important award...an 'Earphone' from Audiofile Magazine. I feel a bit like an Oscar nominee - I'm being showered with congratulatory emails from all corners of my small universe. But before I respond to any of them I have to talk with you. This is my first 'Earphone' and I cannot adequately express my gratitude that it's for Grief. My deepest concern since finishing the narration has been that my work was worthy of the the gift you gave me in the manuscript. I'm sitting here with tears running down my face because it looks like it was! This award is for both the original material and the narration, so congratulations my friend. We did good.

(Isn't she generous, with her "we"?)

4. Finally, my friend Tina, an Episcopal priest who works with a homeless congregation through Ecclesia Ministries, the Boston Common street church, has just completed a four-day, fifty mile pilgrimage with members of the congregation, walking from St. Paul's Cathedral in Boston to a monastery in West Newbury. Yvonne Abraham, a Boston Globe columnist, tells the story movingly here.
Meanwhile, upon returning home, Tina herself wrote, "We're all back...with hearts full of god-love, and joy, and knowledge of the power of community, and - most of all - with great living streams of gratitude." And on the phone just now she added, "We had everything we could need. How often can you say that? To dwell in abundance..."

To dwell in abundance, indeed. Thank you, dear people, for the brave work you do, giving so much of yourselves to create good things, and for the ambient happiness it spreads.

Poem for the Day of the Dead

2011-10-30T11:28:00.000-05:00

Soneto de la Noche

When I die, I want your hands upon my eyes;
I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands
to pass their freshness over me one more time:
I want to feel the gentleness that changed my destiny.

I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep,
I want your ears to still hear the wind,
I want you to smell the scent of the sea we both loved,
and to continue walking on the sand we walked on.

I want all that I love to keep on living,
and you whom I loved and sang above all things
to keep flowering into full bloom.

So that you can touch all that my love provides you,
so that my shadow may pass over your hair,
so that all may know the reason for my song.

- Pablo Neruda

What would you wish upon your end, and for whom would you wish it?

A Short Interview with Echoes & Visions:

2011-10-17T17:51:00.001-05:00

From The Elements of Style. Illustration by Maira Kalman, naturally.

Click here for a few brief musings on knowing, bullying, softness and tragedy.

Also on Strunk and Barthelme.

Enlarging the Field, Enlarging the Heart

2011-10-15T11:06:00.002-05:00

Edmund W. Gordon

A few days ago I received an email from someone I did not know. The writer said that she had been reading my new novel, was "really enjoying it," and therefore felt profoundly disappointed to come across the word "retard" in the text. She wrote in measured, intelligent language of the derogatory and damaging nature of the epithet, and expressed her view that even when the word is used to express the point of view of a character, its appearance in print is still harmful.

I wrote her back, thanking her for her thoughtfulness and care in communicating about this issue. I told her of my own view that in fiction, when one hopes to represent a complex world, full of goodness and sorrows, and full of human beings - themselves complicated mixtures of valor, weakness, compassion and limitation - every word may have its place.

Ten years ago I might have left it at that.

But I went on to add that I heard her disappointment over my choice, and was grateful to her for her impulse to connect. I told her I'd like to think more deeply about what she said, and to consider whether the use of such a word, even given my explanation about why I chose it, might best be avoided.

My first boss was a man named Edmund W. Gordon, professor emeritus of education and psychology at both Yale and Columbia, and Director of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education at Teachers College. I worked for him back in the late eighties, while he was acting director of Yale's African American Studies Program, and my job consisted of various duties ranging from office support to editing his articles to chauffeuring him to some of his meetings and speaking engagements. Among the many wise gifts I received from Ed was a particular locution he would use. Whenever, during the often thorny conversations that would arise in his field - that is, conversations concerning historical and ongoing inequities and anti-bias work - people seemed to reach an impasse, a place where entrenched beliefs on either side prevented forward movement, Ed would say, "Under what conditions might it be possible to envision [whatever was at stake]?"

With this modest formulation, he invited people into a space where, without having to abandon any convictions they felt the need to clutch tight, they could proceed further in conversation with others, and further in conversation with themselves, expanding the boundaries, perhaps, of their own imaginations.

This phrase informed my whole family. It became part of our regular parlance and way of thinking. Another phrase, similar at core in its movement toward keeping alive difficult dialogue, both between parties and within the individual speaker, is one I associate with my father: "I'd like to think about that." How often he has used this simple utterance as a way of granting dignity and validity to the opposing position, without relinquishing or invalidating his own perspective. And note how it isn't a flat submission or commitment: "I will think about that." It's, "I'd like to." As in, I welcome it. As in, I believe it will benefit me to entertain a different viewpoint. To lend my imagination to walking around in your shoes. To enlarge my mental field, my field of consideration and empathy.

"I'd like to think about that," I told the reader who shared her concerns earlier this week, and I meant it - not simply that I will think about it, but that I'd like to. Meanwhile, she shared with me a link, sponsored by the Special Olympics, that I will share here: Spread the Word to End the Word.

Walking & Reading

2011-10-07T14:49:00.000-05:00

We used to read on the walk home from school, remembering, usually, to pause at the corners and look for cars before stepping off the curb. Sometimes a car would slow and a driver lean out the window, "Look where you're going," or a grownup would pass on the sidewalk and chide, "Aren't you afraid you'll trip?"
We never did. We walked down sidewalks lined with honeysuckle thick with bees, heads bent close to the pages, inhaling book and honey on a single breath.

Last summer I was doing it again, walking and reading, I had a half hour to spare and nowhere to be until then, and was tired of sitting, tired of indoors, so went walking with my nose in a book and got just lost enough, thank you, on some of Cambridge's nicely eccentric roads, the little ones that curve and reel about without logic, or with the logic, I should say, of cows - because weren't they once cow paths, isn't that why they don't follow a grid? And I was remembering walking and reading as a kid, the feeling of living in my head and in my body at once, living in the world and simultaneously not in the world, or living in two worlds, I should say - because isn't it more a doubling than a halving? Although in this case it was three: the world of the book, the world of the curving streets, and the world of memory: of being a schoolchild with a knapsack on my back and a Nancy Drew in both hands before my face.

While all this was going on a car pulled up and a man leaned out the window, a bearded man with a thin t-shirt and a thick gut, and he cried - it was a rattletrap kind of car, absolutely spilling bumperstickers off its rear end right and left, and listing a little under a load of luggage bungeed to the roof - "Hey! You're a walking exemplar! I just heard on the radio that Cambridge has the most readers per capita of any city. How about that!"

So without stopping I grinned at him and at the bees which happened, I noticed, to be still buzzing in the honeysuckle lining the sidewalk, and then it was four.

A Greek Island, Low and Away

2011-10-05T09:55:00.000-05:00

This book put its spell on me fourteen years ago.
I wrote about it for All Things Considered today.
(Why oh why, though, did they swap out the splendid design of the hardcover, above, for the image on the paperback?)

The Glassblower's Breath

2011-10-01T10:31:00.000-05:00

On a day like today (a bluestone sky, the air charged with muted light and a kind of enervating, promising pressure), back when I was a kid, I'd feel the desire to make words come out of my pen. As always at that time, I'd have no story on the boil, nothing that particularly needed telling. Only the unappeasable desire to write.

I might try to force a tale, something derivative or hollow or stale, or try my hand at a poem, which might flow or pogo out a little more willingly, but even back then it was story I longed for, it was fiction, prose, and in the absence of a more satisfying inspiration, what I often turned to were character studies. Or character sketches, really, tiny, nutshell things, always starting with a name. The names might be quietly pedestrian, something I imagined contained the small, satisfying grit of veracity: Ruthie. Stan. Uncle Vinnie. Mrs. Wheeling. The names might be fanciful, more like riffs on sounds: Bilsby, Frock, Sarsa, Elison. Or they might be unabashedly orchestrated to evoke concrete association: Wickerdell Candlesmoke, Violet Moonblock. I give them voices and traits, props and homes. Sometimes, up in my room, with the clouds heavy and gray above, and the river heavy and gray below, I'd sit under my desk lamp and make pen-and-ink sketches to go with these emergent beings, trying to learn from the scritchings I produced, the way their noses and chins and eyebrows came out on the paper, who they were. Who? Who?

Not for years would I encounter the poems of Rumi, the thirteenth century Persian Muslim and Sufi mystic whose major theme was tawhid: union with his beloved, his source, from which he has been severed and with which he longs to be made one. In his poems, he writes about this desire with as much earthly passion as any lover, and much of his lines' heat springs from its duality, the way the language of human and sensual longing is unapologetically interwoven into stanzas of spiritual seeking.

I wonder now whether my childhood drive to reach out toward invisible characters, blindly, determinedly try to grasp and feel their outlines and also their insides, wrap my hands and tongue around their shapes and cores, express their essences in line drawings and lines of middle-grade script - whether this sprung from the same urgent, ineffable desire: a longing to be restored to a oneness I only dimly and insensibly recalled having belonged to, ages past?

Here's the new rule: Break the wineglass,

and fall toward the glassblower's breath.

- Rumi, from The New Rule

Now, Butterfly

2011-09-28T14:54:00.000-05:00

"At Thursday night's rehearsal Patrick smiles for the first time, and it's as though someone has taken the kaleidoscope and given the knob a mighty twist, and everyone laughs, delighted, because his smile is so delighted and lovely, and all the colors for a moment are orange and yellow and rose. He is still on the quiet side in general tonight, and dressed, as usual, in gently formal attire - light gray trousers, belted, and a blue-gray plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up - but his manner overall seems lighter, both between scenes and during, as he has begin to inhabit Song somewhat more openly and playfully. When everyone else's laughter makes him throw back his own head and laugh, he looks suddenly fourteen years old. Or eight. He looks as if he should still have baby teeth, his laugh is so sweetly gleeful and unchecked."

~ The Stuff of Dreams

The above passage comes from my 2001 nonfiction book about American community theater, in which I followed one group's production of the David Henry Hwang play M. Butterfly from start to finish. The title role was played by a young, preternaturally poised M.I.T. graduate who spoke seven languages and sang German lieder. This was Patrick Wang, born and raised in Houston by traditional Taiwanese parents, and now, some ten years after I wrote about him, living in New York and working in theater and film.

His first feature film is debuting this fall, playing in Hawaii and San Diego before opening in New York on November 4. The San Diego Asian Film Festival has written these beautiful program notes, which conclude, "IN THE FAMILY pulls no dramatic shortcuts and makes no compromises. Out of respect to the reality of struggle, this is a civil rights drama with no miracles. The only miracle perhaps is that the film’s director, writer, producer, and lead actor is one man, Patrick Wang, who pulls off an unforgettable feat of unflinching filmmaking."

Please click here to visit the film's website and facebook page.

Writers Recommend

2011-09-23T12:56:00.000-05:00

From Poets & Writers:
"In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process."

See what lots of writers (most recently, me) say inspires them: click.

Newtonville Books Questionnaire, With Apologies to Sarah Silverman

2011-09-19T18:14:00.001-05:00

(administered by the impossibly glamorous and redoubtable Mary Cotton and Jaime Clark, proprietors extraordinaire of Newtonville Books, where I will be reading this Thursday, September 22, at 7 p.m.)

--Name a childhood hero.

Woody Guthrie

--Name a work you wish you’d written.

The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, by Iona and Peter Opie

--If you had to order your work by how successfully you tend to complete what you set out to accomplish, what would that list look like?

I don’t actually place value in accomplishing what I set out to accomplish. I like it when the work surprises me by turning out to be something different than what I’d supposed.

--Name a writer in history of whom you would like to have been a contemporary of and why.

Marcel Proust. Odd duck though he undoubtedly was. I feel a deep (and frankly embarrassing) affinity for the obsessive, exhaustive involutions of his mind, his need to come as close as he possibly could to expressing with language the way life revealed itself to him.

--Name a work of yours whose reception you’ve been surprised about and why.

I never thought “Train Go Sorry” would prove so enduring.

--Correct a misperception about you as a writer in fifty words or fewer.

That’s so funny that you say “fifty words or fewer” – is this the one question people seem to go on and on about? Some reviews have called my work “precious,” and while the criticism may be fair, I truly, truly never mean to be precious.

--Name a trait you deplore in other writers.

Certainty. “Deplore” is a strong word, but I’d say I tend not to care for books that seem to be the product of certainties the writer had at the outset. When a writer allows her ideas to be altered by the writing process, I think this generally shows in the complexity and integrity of the work.

--Name your five desert island films.

The Sting

Big Night

Days of Heaven

To Have and Have Not

Five Corners

--Name a book not your own that you wish everyone would read.

It feels too presumptuous to wish a single book on every individual. I wish we all could come by experiences that deepen our understanding of humanity, but one person’s “Middlemarch” might be another’s “A Long and Happy Life” might be another’s collected works of Wislawa Szymborska might be…

--Name a book you suspect most people claim to have read, but haven’t.

I think most people nowadays feel no such pressure – for better and for ill. I was on the phone recently with my sister, who said, “I’ve got to go. I have book club tonight.”

“Nice,” I said. “What are you reading?”

“Oh, we don’t read books anymore – we just get together for the brownies and wine.”

--If you could choose one of your works to rewrite, which would it be and why.

I’d go back to the beginning and rewrite each one, with fewer words.

--Share the greatest literary secret/gossip you know.

I’m fucking Matt Damon.

--Name a book you read over and over for inspiration.

“Dime-Store Alchemy,” by Charles Simic

--Name the writing habit you rely on to get you through a first draft.

I read my own words aloud under my breath constantly, which I didn’t even realize until someone pointed it out.

--Name a regret, literary or otherwise.

I can’t.

--Name your greatest struggle as a writer.

To stop apologizing.

--Name a question you get about writing to which there really is no good answer.

Why don’t you try writing a bestseller?

--Name a question you wish you had been asked.

Do you see your writing as being useful?

Pratfall

2011-09-16T07:30:00.002-05:00

I receive the following query: might I like to tape an interview with Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, for their weekly podcast?

Instant lightheadedness followed by simple reply: yes, please.

Surely I am not alone among writers in regarding this as an invitation to the very grandest ball. As the day of the interview approached, I fought to steady increasingly wobbly nerves.

The time came, the phone rang, the technician got a reading on my voice level, the interview got underway. He was lovely, I imbecilic. I mean really imbecilic. I mean upon hanging up, I wanted to throw up. It was as if I'd been told, "Look, really this is an audition for Saturday Night Live. We're going to get a guy to do Sam Tanenhaus, and we want you to do an excruciatingly vapid author. Okay? Go."

That night I told my boyfriend about it. He listened sympathetically, then took me in his arms and suggested ways it could have been worse. "At least you didn't say, 'I hate black people.' At least you didn't say, 'The Holocaust was a hoax.'"

I told my beloved old friend in publishing. She was bolstering. "There's no shame in trying to be shameless," she declared, then advised me to go eat a cheese sandwich and some fritos.

I told my mother. She said she doubted it had been as bad as I thought. I supplied further details. A moment's thoughtful silence passed. "Well," she ventured brightly, "maybe it'll touch off speculation about who actually writes your books."

Isn't she droll?

I haven't heard the podcast. If you hear it and I wind up sounding remotely like a person who might be capable of tying her own shoelaces, it'll be a testament to the genius of the Times's sound editor. Meanwhile, to everyone who helped me laugh at myself this week: I love you I love you I love you.

Bright for Stars

2011-09-12T13:40:00.000-05:00

Last night I went to walk the dog. My oldest said wait, he'd come along - he wanted to get some pictures of the stars. He'd been reading up on how to photograph starlight. Fifteen years old.

We stepped off the porch, me holding the leash, him holding his camera and the tripod my mother gave him. I was insanely happy. It was the rarity of the thing; I felt privileged. Felt, too, the tenuousness of the gift, and dared not call attention to my pleasure.

We walked past the street where the dog got sprayed by a skunk last week when my son was out walking him. He claimed the dog hadn't simply surprised the skunk by getting too close but had actually bitten the creature.

- How do you know? I asked. Did you hear it squeak or growl or something?
- I saw it. I saw it in his mouth.
- Oh. Gee... Do you think it was okay?
- No, he said, and in that syllable managed to pack a certitude of bloody finality at which I had not previously guessed.
- Oh, I said.

I thought about this: his carrying the image of a violent death inflicted by the dog he loved, carrying this scene all by himself since last Wednesday. I might never have learned of it if I hadn't asked outright, if we hadn't taken this walk, hadn't had this rare and unexpected opportunity. I wanted to tell him I was sorry, but I've been trying to do less of that, and in any case he wouldn't have welcomed the implication - neither that of his tender fragility nor that I, his mother, ought protect him from sadness or hurt. As he is right not to.

We went to the middle school field, where I walked the dog around the dark, bushy perimeter, and he set up the tripod in the clear center of the grass, which was this night lit silver by the moon. Too bright for good stars. Still, he decided to try all different exposures, and maybe get some pictures of the moon, and maybe the lights of houses on the surrounding streets, which looked glittery as stars through the shifting black branches of trees in the wind.

The dog sat for a while, and then he wanted to move on, and so we did, the dog and I, and it felt both wrong and right to leave the boy alone with his lens on the field, which seemed, as fields do, so much vaster at night, its moonlit blackness sheering up to meet the similarly dark and brilliant sky.

Mayn Rue Platz

2011-09-05T13:52:00.003-05:00

Happy Labor Day.

Mayn Rue Platz is a poem written in 1911 by the sweatshop poet Morris Rosenfeld after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. This recording is by Vocolot, who sung it last March on that tragedy's centennial.

Mayn Rue Platz
Don’t look for me where myrtles are green.
You will not find me there, my beloved.
Where lives wither at the machines,
There is my resting place.

Don’t look for me where birds sing.
You will not find me there, my beloved.
I am a slave where chains ring,
There is my resting place.

Don’t look for me where fountains spray.
You will not find me there, my beloved.
Where tears flow and teeth gnash,
There is my resting place.

And if you love me with true love,
So come to me, my good beloved,
And cheer my gloomy heart
And make sweet my resting place.

- Morris Rosenfeld, 1862 - 1923

In Mourning and In Fortune

2011-09-02T10:44:00.003-05:00

On the phone yesterday with my mother, I came to the realization that I am in mourning and have been, for months if not years, without having quite realized the fact. It came as a relief to put the correct language to the state - the phrase itself like a cold lake in which to dive, a bracing immersion.

What I mourn is the loss of my children, all three of whom are alive and well but have grown so old, so devastatingly old, that I can hardly stand it: two full-fledged adolescents and one on the cusp.

So real, so palpable and particular is the experience of loss, that I can hardly believe Hallmark hasn't come up with a separate line of greeting cards to commemorate the occasion and soften its blows:

I hear no one in your family

likes to be read to anymore.

Deepest sympathies.

No more diapers

No more footie pajamas

No more Legos

Our thoughts are with you.

Condolences on your babies

being taller than you.

You will get through this.

We spoke of the specific pleasures of caring for small children, but eventually we spoke, too, of the broader gift of which that is but one iteration - I mean the broader gift of being useful, of being able to offer nurturance to someone - whether young or old, stranger or kin, man or beast - or something - whether a bean plant, a plot of earth, an idea, a principle. Whether nurturing others or nurturing oneself.

And isn't this in a way the primary task, the first responsibility we all incur and the last we relinquish before we die?

Who - or what - is it your fortune to be nurturing these days?

Sex: A Diversion for the Dog Days

2011-08-29T11:07:00.002-05:00

Having come to the conclusion, a few weeks shy of publication of my new novel, that my attempt to spend the months leading up to publication blogging about the experience of awaiting publication is not only the sort of thing that interests me least (thus boring me silly), but also seems fairly unwholesome and even morally suspect (thus leaving me queasy), I herewith leave off.

For a palate cleanser, I naturally draw your attention to Michael Kitchen.

Can any actor working today be sexier than Michael Kitchen? I first became aware of him in 1992's Enchanted April, an unusually piquant bit of fluff, in which he played a small role, that of George Briggs, the owner of a "small mediaeval Italian castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be let furnished for the month of April." We see him with an oboe reed held, apparently forgotten, between his lips; disheveled and squinting (his character has poor vision), he speaks little and with an almost eccentrically abstracted air. And yet within that fog of abstraction burns a fine, rare ember.

More recently I've been binging on recorded episodes of Foyle's War, the British television drama set during and after World War II in Hastings, England, in which Kitchen plays Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle. The show itself is good without being great - it's a somewhat formulaic police procedural, loaded with stock characters and offering lots of cozy, Miss Marpleish touches. But Michael Kitchen is quietly extraordinary. His Foyle is more given to silence than speech, which affords us ample opportunity to watch him think. This may sound on par with watching a pot of water heat, but Kitchen makes the act subtly scintillating. His intelligence works on many levels at once: we can see him parsing clues at the same time as he makes psychological assessments and registers how unfolding events keep company with age-old patterns of human nature and human folly. His Foyle is low-key without being recessive, slow to anger without being a patsy, heavily burdened without being bitter, and modest without being self-effacing (despite his lofty and lengthy job title, he regularly introduces himself as simply "a police officer"). His Foyle is an expert, attentive observer. He is clear-sighted about his own limitations. He is often a bit tetchy. He seems to lack self-regard but possess self-knowledge. He appears, crucially and without complaint, lonely.

But what makes Michael Kitchen ultimately so sexy may be simply his timing: the myriad, slightly syncopated pauses as he speaks, the subtle hesitations, alterations and reconsiderations in the movement of his face and body as he reflects, questions, listens, watches. This is a man uncommonly alive to every moment in its particularity. This is the basis both of moral strength and, for me, of sex appeal. Graying and craggy though Kitchen may be, slight of stature and soft of voice, these traits serve less to camouflage than to highlight the thrilling contradiction of his crackling vitality.

If you find yourself, in these waning days of summer, in need of a lift - or in need of a diversion from anxieties professional or otherwise - I recommend treating yourself to a few hours of Foyle's War. Or leave a comment: what are your own fondest proclivities?

The Porridge Bowl: A Self-Evaluation

2011-08-17T13:53:00.000-05:00

Just over two months ago, on June 9th, I started a new little series within this blog, in which I proposed to write posts explicitly dealing with the process and experiences leading up to the September 15th publication of my new book: call it a log of the third trimester, if you will. I promised to be honest, to give "a backstage glimpse" of what it's like to be awaiting your book's release into the world.

So how have I done? In a word: horribly. I haven't been dishonest, but neither have I provided the glimpse I intended. I see now that I've managed to equivocate by writing in the abstract about things like commerce and art, criticism and praise, and leaving out what are surely the juicy details: the bits of news trickling in regarding who has committed to reviewing the book, which magazines have announced they'll be running a mention, the audio sale, the new book sale, the actual arrival of the first book in its padded mailer...and surely even juicier: updates on my own embarrassing moments of doubt and shame about cluttering up the world with another unnecessary batch of made-up drivel, worries about letting down my publisher and agent, moments when I scan the pages of my own freshly produced book searching desperately to see if I actually like any of the sentences.

Oh well. I'm not sorry I haven't been divulging all of this in more gory detail, whether the self-congratulation or the self-flagellation. I can appreciate the appeal of the juice - I like reading the covers of tabloids as much as the next guy on the checkout line - but I guess I'm not much good at providing it.

What I am good at: when I feel myself beginning to wallow in fear - or, for that matter, when I feel myself inflating like a helium balloon at some bit of promising news - I am very, very good at going out and taking the dog for a walk. Or putting in a load of wash. Or folding a load of wash. Or starting supper. Or better yet: doing the dishes.

There's that lovely, oh so beautiful story about the monk, the novice monk who's just arrived at the monastery and can't wait to embark on his training. It's his very first morning, he's just finished breakfast: a wooden bowl of porridge, and he goes to the head monk or whatever and says, just bursting with joyful anticipation of the spiritual journey that awaits him, "I'm ready to start! Tell me how I should begin." And the head monk gives him a very small, very kind smile, and says, "Go and wash your bowl."

On Criticism and Praise, Part II

2011-08-12T16:45:00.000-05:00

My mother used to tell how, as a little girl, whenever she found herself beset by a particular kind of isolating dread - a mood of not-quite-articulable worry, of gnawing emptiness or doubt - she would take matters into her own hands by approaching her mother or father, whichever was nearer or seemed at that moment more inclined toward sympathy, placing herself squarely before the adult in question, and beseeching, "Praise me!" in tones of plummy, self-aware melodrama perfectly calculated to elicit first laughter and then, inevitably, an act of compliance: a pat on the head, a tongue-clucking, chin-chucking, "There's a good girl."

The story is stunning for its layers, laid like so many sheets of multicolored tissue one over the other until they seem of a single, if complicated, hue. But lift them apart and see what they are: the girl's youthful recognition of real, nameless dismay; the terrible necessity of finding a way to assuage the resulting worry without letting on about the severity of the feeling or urgency of the need; the girl's heartbreaking resourcefulness at communicating in a manner sufficiently palatable - even charming - that it effectively woos the adults into delivering what she seeks; and then the fact that what they do deliver matches in archness, in artifice, the tenor of her request: both of them play-acted. Two nods in the direction of underlying expression. One gesture exchanged for another.

How often, I wonder, do we ask for what we desire in code? How often is the resulting response then similarly removed from the thing itself? And why do we refrain from stating our wishes more plainly? Is it, as I suspect it was for my mother in childhood, from fear of rejection - the idea that our wishes, baldly stated, might be found unpalatable, might render us, once spoken, finally, irredeemably alone? Is it ever from fear of the opposite: that our wishes, thus bared, might be fully and precisely granted?

On Criticism and Praise, Part I

2011-08-05T10:24:00.000-05:00

An anonymous reader asks for my thoughts on criticism and praise.

I have long been fond of a particular Rilke line about criticism and love, one I have quoted in this space before, in which the poet decries criticism's ability to "grasp and hold and fairly judge" works of art. Then just last year, speaking before a group of honors students, I shared this quote only to have a colleague respond, "But criticism is love," and I thought that was rather wonderful, and in certain cases the truth. Of course, he was speaking within - we were both at that moment serving - an educational context. So yes: as a teacher, I offer criticism only and ever because I care about being useful to my students' growth. How much easier it would be simply to praise - and how much less useful to them.

But what about in contexts other than school? What about criticism within the larger world of art and culture? For the past few years, very much to my surprise and despite assumptions I thought I held dear, I have played the role of literary critic as a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review. How have I managed to reconcile my aversion to sitting in judgment with the demands of the task? And, perhaps more curious, why have I? These are questions I address at some length in an essay to be published in Post Road this fall, so I will let them dangle here for now...suffice to say I do think it has something to do with education, the sort of learning we all engage in on a daily basis as we move along - whether by cakewalk, shuffle or plod - in the great quotidian conversation that is life.

What about you? When do you find yourself critiquing, and in what manner, and to what end? Or are you careful to withhold criticism, and if so, why, and is such withholding necessarily a kindness?

Next time: On Praise

Dear Enhatted:

2011-08-01T09:48:00.000-05:00

I find contests in general rather mean-spirited. When the criteria for winning is supposed to involve merit, the impossibility of fair evaluation rears its ugly head, and when the criteria involves (as in this case) random selection - picking names from a hat or numbered balls from a lottery machine - the whole thing, if statistically fair, is somehow even more repellent.
I am referring, if you are just joining us now, to the "Dear Reader" book giveaway contest my publisher arranged for me to participate in. This past week, hundreds of readers entered for a chance to win a signed copy of my new book, The Grief of Others, when it comes out next month. I notified the five winners this morning, but find myself now hugely preoccupied with thoughts of those whose names remain, as it were, in hat.

So:

Dear Enhatted,
Thank you for expressing an interest in reading the book.
So many of you wrote thoughtful personal notes. I am thinking, in no particular order, of:

the fourteen year old who wrote and said she often wonders about other people's grief;
the several people who explained that if they won, they would donate their copy to their public library, so many of which are suffering budget cuts;
the reader who mentioned how appalled she has been by negative comments regarding the death of Amy Winehouse;
the many readers who shared personal stories of loss - of their spouses, parents, friends, and one beloved dog;
the reader who wanted to know if Biscuit is a dog;
those of you who shared your own perspectives on the Plato quote, and the woman who told me she's taped it next to her computer;
the readers who told me about their book clubs, reading groups, and book blogs;
the reader who works for the IRS, the one who works for the U.S. Treasury, the one who works for the U.S. Probation Office, and the several in healthcare who told me about helping their patients in grief;
the reader called Clogwoman and the reader called Gasstationgirl;
the readers from Israel, Canada, nearly every state in the country, and the one who lives on Campground Road;
the several librarians (yay for librarians), especially the one who said she has for years been "pushing your books upon unsuspecting readers";
the reader whose own grief feels like a "200-pound block of wet cement."

I have been touched by your words and your impulse to connect. I wish we could send a book to each one of you.

With sincere thanks,
Leah

Step Right Up, Step Right Up

2011-07-24T14:39:00.000-05:00

I'm told a link has just gone live: click here for a chance to win one of five signed copies of my new book, "The Grief of Others." The contest lasts till the end of the week. Anyone can enter by responding to a short letter from me.

Here's my thing: I could never run one of those carnival games. Or I could, but I'd get fired after my first night on the job for giving away the cheap and garish plush toys to everyone who buys a ticket, not just those who knock all the bottles down. Yet for this contest, I'm supposed to choose the winners myself. So I'm making an appeal for suggestions: What criteria should I use? Shall I just close my eyes and pick a name from a hat? Make it first-come, first-serve? Or shall I seek out a particular kind of response? What would you do?

To Be a Man or Woman 'For Others'

2011-07-18T09:30:00.000-05:00

A student writes and tells me she has decided to apply to an MFA program in creative writing after graduating from college next spring. But she is plagued by doubt. Not about whether this is something she really wants to do, but about whether it's okay to let herself do it. She writes that she feels guilty. "I wonder: is writing a selfish act?"

Her letter takes on the cadences of a confession. She "admits" that sometimes she ignores her friends' texts and declines their invitations to go out in order to stay in her room and write. She "admits" that she spends hours going over sentences, searching for just the right words, sometimes even talking to herself as she weighs choices of diction and action for her fictional characters. She "admits" that sometimes even when she is physically present with friends, she'll sit on the sidelines of their conversation, wondering what her characters are up to.

She worries that her pursuit is self-indulgent, that it does no service to others. "Who do I think I am?" she asks. "How does a writer cope with the guilt that can come with her desired solitude?"

I know what I replied. What words would you offer this young woman?

Work's the Thing

2011-07-12T08:33:00.001-05:00

This past spring I was on a panel.
(That sounds weird. I am generally not on panels. This is the second post in a week in which I've mentioned one, too. I don't want to give the false impression that I go around populating panels or attending them on purpose. Just the word makes me want to start acting very silly, like blowing bubbles in my milk or showing you a mouthful of chewed-up food.)
That said, it was kind of fun. It was at my old school, Columbia Journalism, and the other people on the panel were really smart and interesting, and it was moderated by the great Sam Freedman, my old professor, who is responsible for getting me writing books in the first place.
People lined up at aisle microphones to ask questions, and one man asked this: His first book was coming out in five months - what should he be doing now?
Clearly he was asking about publicity. What kinds of contacts should he making with bloggers, bookstore owners? Should he blog? Should he be planning to organize a reading tour? How many cities? Should he have postcards printed up and mailed out? Should he be thinking of trying to place op-eds on the topic of his book around the time of publication? If his publisher didn't have a budget to do any p.r., should he hire his own publicist?
All astute questions, all indicative of a grasp of the present state of publishing.
I felt like clutching in anguish at my hair.
"Get started on a new writing project," I suggested. "Immerse yourself in work. Fall in love with your next book."
Healthy or naive? Sound or stupid? How do you approach the pre-publication period in a way that's not dismissive of the book that's about to come, while also taking good care of your heart?

Friends in Disguise

2011-07-09T17:43:00.005-05:00

A few weeks back, a reader asked what I think about the relationship between mothering and writing. I've pondered the question - all its many possible interpretations - and tried to guess which particular interpretation she might have had in mind - and I am a little abashed to report that I find myself, after all that deep musing, resorting to the idiom of Disney.

When I think of the challenges involved in balancing mothering with writing - and let me acknowledge straight off that it frequently poses challenges - I think about the wonderful moments when those challenges not only become part of the work, but reveal themselves as being part of what enables the work.

Here comes the Disney metaphor. There's a scene in the movie Mulan where a camp full of soldiers-in-training are challenged to scale a towering pole. They scoff: Easy. But not so fast. It turns out they have to do it while wearing a pair of weights attached to their arms. One by one, they try to shinny up the pole - the strongest, the fastest, the most lithe - but in every case the weights make the task impossible, dragging each man back to earth after he has attained no more than several feet. At last it is Mulan, a girl-in-disguise, who realizes what must be done: the goal can be reached only when the climber does not try to climb in spite of the weights, but manages to see them as the very thing that will make her journey possible.

Every writer has challenges that may serve as impediments to the work, whether these challenges are child-shaped or not. It is perhaps not difficult to imagine how mothering, for all its challenges, might benefit a writer - by acquainting her that much more intimately with human nature, with individuality, with the fullness of her own emotional range, with the mysteries inherent in the quotidian, and with the humble excellence of the quotidian itself. More difficult, I think, must be the trick of perceiving how other sorts of challenges might also be gifts. What about illness? Heartbreak? Exhaustion? Poverty? Cultural proscriptions? Fear of exposure? Fear of desire? Lack of peace? Lack of hopefulness? Lack of inspiration?

What if, rather than strive to rid ourselves of that which we regard as an impediment to work, we learned how to regard it instead as a friend-in-disguise? What's your impediment? How do you manage to turn it into your friend?

A Meta Post

2011-07-07T09:58:00.001-05:00

A few housekeeping items [DO NOT READ THIS POST IF THAT SOUNDS BORING TO YOU; YOU WILL IN FACT PROBABLY BE BORED]:
1. I confess to being somewhat inept at navigating comments. I don't seem to be able to find a way to respond to them directly, and my inner Miss Manners writhes in sorrow over appearing to ignore any. When I try to reply directly to the writer, I cannot get through to a message-leaving place. I could reply by leaving a public comment of my own (as I did to the question about finding information on the current state of deaf culture and deaf education), or by devoting to the answer a separate post (as with Glimmer and The Sell), but many of my responses amount to simple expressions of gratitude, and it seems silly to clutter up the comments thus. Several weeks ago, a reader named Anonymous Jenny (isn't that wonderful? doesn't it sound just like a Kurt Weill song?) left two nice comments, to which I did not reply directly, and now I see they have been removed - not, I hope, in disgust or disappointment over my failure to acknowledge.
2. I am slow. I am a slow reader and a slow thinker and a slow writer, and entirely unapologetic about this, as they are my three favorite things to do. Think of your very favorite kind of chocolate from a box of assorted candy - cream-filled or nut-clustered or perhaps (yuck, but I do not judge) some kind of nougaty-caramel thing - and now think how slowly you might eat it, if you were loving it and wanted to love it fully and long. That's how it is for me with reading, thinking and writing. So just because I haven't responded overtly to a comment does not mean I am not savoring it, or at any rate musing over it, privately, as with a chocolate.
3. A few people have asked how to leave comments. May I say first of all, if you have not been able to figure this out for yourself, we must be kin. Brother! Sister! I kiss you electronically on both cheeks. Second, and sadly, I believe you have to "register" in some away to be afforded the privilege of leaving a comment. If you click the right thing, you do not have to go public before the whole world with your information, but it seems you do have to reveal a piece of yourself (your email address, I think) to the entity known as Google.

I daresay the very fact of this post shows I am going about blogging all wrong. For an antidote, check out Betsy Lerner's blog, The Forest for the Trees. Disclosure: she was my first and extremely beloved editor, and has since turned agent. She's also a poet, memoirist and screenwriter, and her blog on writing and publishing is scathingly funny and absolutely scary.
There's a scene in the old movie The Witches of Eastwick in which Susan Sarandon's character, a once-mousey music teacher, has tapped into her inner demon-cum-divinity and conducts an orchestra of school children with fiery, feral verve: everyone's dancing with their instruments, the music is raw and cacophonous, steam or smoke seems to be filling the air, and Susan's hair is crackling red and wild. The fuddy-duddy school principal, a middle-aged white man who was born to toe the line, peeks into the rehearsal room and is so frightened by what he sees that he turns and first walks, then speed-walks, and ultimately breaks into a full run in the opposite direction. Sometimes, catching up with Betsy's blog, I think of her as the Susan Sarandon character, waving her baton with wild abandon, and me as the fuddy-duddy white guy running as fast as I can down the hall.

Plenty

2011-07-05T11:42:00.003-05:00

Coming off Lesley's week-long residency (translation: the twice-yearly gathering, in which I participate, of graduate creative writing students and faculty on a pretty Cambridge campus, a week jam-packed with workshops and seminars and readings and study conferences and sweaty hopes and fervid dreams), I feel more troubled than ever by the co-mingling of storytelling and commerce.

For me the week was capped by a handful of students lamenting that they'd just spent hour after hour for days on end attending closely, heartfully to matters of craft - only to receive as parting blow a handful of befuddling panels on publishing: finding an agent, writing a query, creating an internet presence, surviving in the material world. The focus of these discussions seemed not even to be money, earning a living - which might be, I think, somehow cleaner - so much as fame, acclaim, ego: the ur-peace-of-mind (or is it un-peace-of-mind) that might come if only one were to "make it." I lost count of the number of times a panelist or audience member invoked "the cover of the New York Times Book Review" as the chimerical end to which everyone in the room was assumed to aspire, the one impossible prize which might make everything all right. Meanwhile, the ultimate message each guest expert had to relay, in one form or another, was this: the state of publishing is gravely ill; everyone is scared; no one knows what will happen next.

The pain on the faces of some of these students - anticipatory pain, the frantic fretfulness of dream-running, when the promise of arriving seems to slip further away the harder you lunge forward - was difficult to witness. And in their midst I sat quite still, bemused and a little embarrassed by the gauche-seeming secret I harbored: that I have as much now as I ever hoped for. That I am already grateful beyond my wildest dreams.

Glimmer

2011-06-30T08:58:00.000-05:00

A reader writes:
It would be interesting to me to hear about the genesis and transformation(s) of a project as big as a novel. I'm wondering how you settle on a theme or problem--and how you manage to contain it.

It's funny because lately I've been reading short stories (Lorrie Moore, William Trevor, Maile Meloy, a debut collection by a friend that will be released next year, the Alice Munro in last week's New Yorker), and thinking how difficult it must be to write something as short as that and feel satisfied, feel able to walk away from the characters and their lives. That said, I did, and still do, find the commitment a novel requires daunting. But once its particulars have grasped hold of me, I am compelled - almost always pleasurably so - to follow them to the ends of the earth, or at least to the end of the narrative.

Genesis remains mysterious to me. I am unable to will an idea for a novel into being. I remember, as a kid, being "in the mood to write," and begging my mother for an idea: "What can I write about?" The play with language came relatively easily; finding a subject was elusive.

As an adult, this is how it works for me: something will start to glimmer at the very edge of my field of vision. In the beginning, if I turn to look at it head on, it will vanish. But if I go about my business, obliquely attending to the glimmer but respectful of its initial shyness, it will start to burn brighter and gather a bit of solidity. At last I am able to regard it head-on, and this is when I start to interact with the idea, the characters, the events - experimenting with interpreting them, ready to retreat if my interpretations feel off, ready to course forward if they feel right. In this way, writing narrative is not so different from the work I did twenty years ago, before my first book, when I briefly supported myself as a sign language interpreter.

Interpreting is something we all do - daily, even - no? We cotton on to the inarticulate thoughts and meanings flickering at the periphery of our awareness, and sometimes we try to give them form. How many times today will you find yourself engaging in the act?

A Compulsion

2011-06-26T09:20:00.000-05:00

A still from Wings of Desire. The man on the left is Homer, the aged poet; the man on the right is the angel Cassiel. They are in the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin's vast public library.

In today's New York Times Book Review, I review Ursula Hegi's new novel, Children and Fire. This is the fourth book in which she writes about the fictional German town of Burgdorf during the Third Reich. It is more than the fourth book in which she contemplates the question of how ordinary, "good" people can come both to allow and commit monstrous acts against their neighbors - and by implicit association, the question of how we can prevent this from happening: how we can cure ourselves.

This question is unanswerable. I am moved by Hegi's evident compulsion to keep studying it nevertheless. It is like Zeno's paradox: the more one dedicates oneself to the pursuit of a solution, the more apparent it becomes that such a solution will never come.

Instead, we arrive at a different kind of understanding, one that holds no less value: we learn to see humanity more specifically, in increasing variety and particularity. We learn to see more clearly both the flaws and the fineness inherent in it, and, flipping over the fabric, to see how they have been woven from the same threads.

The Sell

2011-06-24T07:43:00.000-05:00

A reader asks what I think of the famous Samuel Johnson dictum: No man but a fool ever wrote except for money.

I think it's rubbish. I think it's not substantively different from saying no one but a fool ever had sex without getting paid. No one but a fool ever sang a song, drew a picture, told a joke, did a dance, baked a cake...you get the idea.

For me, the far more vexing problem is whether it's moral to accept money for writing. Or - not moral, perhaps, but spiritually wholesome. When I was 23, a few months into journalism school, I had a revelation: I would never write for money. I loved it too much: the story-gathering, the story-telling, the fiddling about with words - both the sensual mudpie pleasure of playing with sounds and rhythms, and the sharper cognitive pleasure of making meaning and constructing form. Something else, I avowed, would have to be my bread-and-butter. I'd keep the thing I loved separate and safe from the sway of practical needs and desires.

A few months later I was offered my first book contract, which proved far too dazzling an opportunity for me to cast aside. Now, twenty years later, I've cobbled a living, more or less, from writing for money. I don't stand around castigating myself: I've got mouths to feed, after all. But I still don't know whether I believe in it.

Anonymity, Shmanonymity

2011-06-22T15:46:00.003-05:00

Having grown up in a family that had a distinctly casual attitude toward privacy ("Lele, you can't throw this out!" my mother would cry, unabashedly approaching me with a crumpled sheet of paper she'd salvaged from my trash: the discarded beginning of a story or poem), I'm not quite sure what I think about anonymous comments left on blog posts. Mostly, I suppose they're fine: I respect the various reasons a person might have for wanting to remain unnamed (shyness? privacy-on-principle? fear of stalkers or identity theft? embarrassment about misspelling?). Certainly, we all have less and less privacy these days (see yesterday's front page NYT); perhaps the choice reflects a kind of generalized, inarticulate hunger for the relief of veils.

A few people have asked why I'm allowing anonymous comments this time around, in light of what happened two years ago, when comments by a certain Anonymous (or Anonymouses) led to a kind of degeneration of civil discourse and I turned comments off.

Perhaps it's related to the fact that presently authors are being asked to participate in marketing themselves and their books to an unprecedented degree. Given the current state of publishing (in a word, from all reports: dismal), this is entirely understandable. It has, nevertheless, given rise to a lot of slick-and-smarmy self-promotion, a proliferation of internet content reeking of desperation, and a general expenditure of energy on activities that don't simply distract from writing but are antithetical to the source of creative work. I include myself - more fully now than ever - among the guilty.

So I find myself in the funny position of defending the commenters who wish to remain anonymous. I am sympathetic to the challenges of striking a balance between public and private selves, between asking for attention and owning humility. Between flash and quiet, jazz hands and the vanishing point.

What do you think of claiming anonymity? Is it honorable or weak? When do you choose to be anonymous? When do you choose to go by name?

An Antipathy Toward Sales

2011-06-20T07:54:00.003-05:00

No man but a fool ever wrote except for money.

- Samuel Johnson

Not long ago a colleague and I were talking about the world of publishing. He is a Keats scholar, a professor of British Romantic Literature, kinetically, contagiously in thrall to his vocation. He is also, incidentally or not, a great aficionado of Lady Gaga and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He was asking me about my attitude toward writing books and the whole notion of "growing an audience" and "being successful."

I don't recall precisely what I said that led him to this, but at some point he asked, in a tone of mingled epiphany and bemusement, "Do you actually have an antipathy toward sales?"

I paused only a fraction of a moment before replying, with the particular kind of relief that comes with discernment: "Yes. Yes, I guess I do."

Only later, after we had parted and more slivers of the conversation came back to me, did I realize I must have left him with a mistaken impression. We had been talking about Franzen and Oprah, among other things, and in retrospect I saw that contained in his question must have been the surmise that any such antipathy on my part would have had to do with a reluctance to appeal to the rabble, the masses. That I aspired to a kind of highbrow, rarefied art form whose success would be indicated in part by the very scant number of people able to appreciate it.

But no! This wasn't it at all. It was more like my fierce old socialism, especially in the matter of art; and my wish not to take up more space, claim more rewards, than my due; and my worry that I already have.

The Photographer

2011-06-16T10:46:00.001-05:00

Coming up with a cover for the new novel was, for some reason, proving a terrible challenge. We missed the deadline for getting it into the catalog that goes out to book buyers in early spring. We missed the deadline for having it in time for the sales and marketing meeting a month or so later. By May, when we'd hoped to have galleys ready, we still had no cover.

That's when the photographer Jordan Matter became involved.

He tells it best, here: "How I Shot My First Book Cover in 15 Minutes."

The above photo is from his Dancers Among Us series.

Nothing Might Happen

2011-06-09T09:01:00.007-05:00

Last summer, when the final edits on my new novel were done, but it would still be a year before books or even galleys were ready, I gave my mother the completed manuscript. She has long been my most important reader. She was my first reader. Once upon a time she was my amanuensis; before I could write I would dictate stories and she would take them down in a little book, in her lovely, clear, open hand. Young children love their mother's eyes, and teeth, and noses, in part because of their great familiarity: these are the landscapes we grew up gazing at, the proportions by which we learned to perceive and gauge the rest of the world, from our earliest hours in arms. My mother's handwriting is almost as dear to me, almost as elemental a template as her face: her lines and loops on the page look like home.

She had stated her desire to wait to read this latest novel when it was finished, rather than in bits and pieces as I wrote. But she didn't want to take a chance on waiting until publication. Just in case.

So last summer I gave her the manuscript of "The Grief of Others," and then we didn't talk about it for a while, except every so often she'd say, "I want you to know I realize I haven't said anything about the book. I haven't forgotten, I'm just waiting for a period when my mind is clearer." Other times she'd say, "I started reading, but I put it down because I realized I wasn't taking it in." She was trying to match the reading to her chemo schedule, trying to time it to her most lucid and energetic days. It made me think of jump rope, like when you're jumping in. The rope is already swinging, and you have to catch the timing just right so as not to get smacked by it coming down.

After several weeks, or maybe months, there came a day when she told me she was about three-quarters of the way through, and that she was loving it, and that she couldn't wait to see what was going to happen. And then quickly she corrected herself: "I mean - knowing you - I realize nothing might happen!" At which I burst out laughing. She meant her amendment kindly, intending to honor the kinds of stories I write or have written in the past - which is to say, ones with sorely little plot or action - but as soon as it came out, she realized it might sound like a knock, a condemnation, and so she tried to acknowledge all that and at the same time I was trying to reassure her I knew exactly what she meant and found it quite funny and apt. And this was on the telephone and we kept dipping in and out with our voices and our assurances and our explanations, and of course we kept stepping on each other's words and laughing, and yet the work was getting done - we were explaining, we were understanding, and this too, was like the motion of turning the ends of a jump rope in rhythm and jumping in and skipping along, all without getting our feet too tangled.

Reader, in three months I have a new book coming out. You can see an image of the cover in the upper right hand corner of this page. For the next stretch of time, I'm going to commit myself to writing posts about the process and experiences leading up to, and perhaps just past, publication. It's the kind of blogging I have been most loathe to engage in - that is, the solipsistic author's blog, in which the posts are all about the author's "career." And yet I understand how a backstage glimpse at this process might be of interest to some readers (certainly when I was starting out, I would have been ravenous for a peek at what goes on). So I will try to balance my distaste for self-referential pandering with an experiment in subverting the form. My aim is to be honest, both with myself and with you. To that end I am - gulp - reopening comments on this blog, after having removed that feature some time ago in the wake of what seemed to me a baffling tone of bickering that had broken out among various of the commenters. If you have specific questions about the pregnant period of pre-publication (a friend of mine refers to this time as being with "with book," as in "with child"), feel free to ask them here and maybe I'll make them the basis of a future post.

Meanwhile, a question for you: what are your thoughts about blogging -- blogging-for-attention, blogging-for-sales, blogging-for-truth, blogging-for-love?

Eloquence of the Twelfth Month of Persistently Rising CA-125

2011-06-03T12:08:00.000-05:00

La clairvoyance by René Magritte

My mother writes the following after her most recent chemo appointment:

[N.B. 53^rd St. is where she goes for treatments. Decadron is one of her medications. CA-125 is an antigen that can indicates the presence or growth of ovarian cancer. Each time she goes in for chemo, a blood draw reveals whether the amount of CA-125 in her blood has gone up or down.]

A packed up-elevator this morning at 53^rd St. The usual suspects as well as two middle-aged male techie types in deep conversation. All I can catch is:

First Guy (indistinct mumble-mumble): …lucidity module.

Second Guy (repeating): Lucidity module.

First Guy (confirming): Lucidity module.

Lucidity module?

It sets my flyspecked mind awobble, my dented gyroscope of a brain marinating in decadron: Where does one get a lucidity module? Should I have one? Do I want one? Does it require a password? Casting on stitches? Maintenance? A prescription? Would I still like what's on my Netflix list if I had one? Does it have a "less lucid" option? Which is better? Would I still not want to trade my life for any other?

This is the last posting in the Eloquence Project. Next time look for something new.

Eloquence of a Forster-Loving Tradesman:

2011-05-30T13:45:00.002-05:00

Eloquence of the Dove-tailed World

2011-05-16T08:59:00.000-05:00

1.
The dog presses his nose to the damp May earth and every particle of his being is gathered there, in that lively, quivering black knob. He stands concentrated over his spot, unmoving, ardent, heedful. Then a snort and he lifts the instrument of his nose and replaces it some inches away, again pushing it deeply and soberly against the fragrant soil. He is like a doctor with his stethoscope.

2.
The lilacs, block after block, smell like bread and honey.

3.
I am slicing fennel for the salad, as thin as I can, and listening to songs from Two Gentlemen of Verona as I work. The song called "Pearls" comes on, a man crooning in a dopey voice about how he bends down to kiss someone but her pearls keep getting in his mouth, until at last he takes off the pearls and puts them in the ashtray. The final verse goes:

You just said you loved me

and the pearls came out of your mouth

the pearls came out of your mouth

and made a necklace fit

for the Emperor of Milan.

I remember being small, listening to that song in the kitchen while my mother cooked, asking her what it meant when he says pearls come out of her mouth.
"Her words," explained my mother, "are like pearls to him."

4.

Words like pearls dog noses like stethoscopes lilacs like bread and honey.

Dogs are ardent with their studious smelling and pigs also sniff, nosing the ground for truffles, and pearls are cast before swine and make an necklace for an emperor and the queen is in the parlour eating bread and honey and a stethoscope is a kind of necklace that tells you things, transmitting pearls of knowledge from inside the body.

5.
From a 2004 New Yorker article by Adam Kirsch on the poet Richard Wilbur:

The condition of metaphor is the capacity of things to be likened to one another; and for Wilbur this very capacity suggests that all things share the same essential nature. “I think that all poets are sending religious messages,” he once declared, “because poetry is, in such great part, the comparison of one thing to another; or the saying, as in metaphor, that one thing is another. And to insist, as all poets do, that all things are related to each other, comparable to each other, is to go toward making an assertion of the unity of all things.” This faith in what he calls, in a late poem, “the dove-tailed world” is clearly inspired by Emerson, who wrote in “The Poet,” “Things admit of being used as symbols because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part.”

...And the happiest of Wilbur’s many happy gifts is his confidence that we do, indeed, see ourselves in nature, that the human being is profoundly at home in this world.

The painting at the top is The Queen Was in the Parlour Eating Bread and Honey by Valentine Cameron Prinsep, 1860.

Eloquence of Smoke

2011-03-25T09:31:00.000-05:00

Sitting with a friend on sun-baked stone steps last week in Mount Auburn Cemetery - a high, rare day of jeweled light and birdsong and the air carrying ribbons of sweetness, as though a handful of sugar had been tossed on the wind, the sort of day that in only a few weeks will not be uncommon but which, on the occasion, felt clearly marked by firstness, not just by us but by everyone we encountered; you could see it in faces and also in postures: shoulders thrown back, and even in gaits: slowed down the better to absorb the fineness of the cusp-riding day - I paused in conversation twice.

Once, briefly, when a thick trail of white smoke began to weave up and through the still-bare branches of trees to the side of the granite chapel a hundred yards from where we sat.

Once again, and with less reparable a break from the subject we'd been bandying about, approximately a minute later when the heavy, concentrated banner of smoke turned darkly gray and visibly particulate. "Oh," I said. "I think they might be cremating someone."

I had neither known about or ever contemplated the possibility that the famously beautiful garden cemetery had a crematory on site. I have walked here scores of times and never before noticed smoke billowing from the back of Bigelow Chapel, where, I later learned, over 900 cremations occur every year, each one lasting approximately three hours and resulting in about six to nine pounds of bone fragments, which are then milled into pieces of uniform size.

My friend and I had bits of body on us, too, surely: the smell was dense in our nostrils, sabulous on our tongues.

We walked toward the pinnacled Gothic revival building. A sign on its front doors read: CHAPEL CLOSED. Around by the side entrance a smaller sign announced a funeral service at 2 p.m. We checked our watches. Half past. Only then did I recall the lone black car rolling slowly down the hill a short time earlier with three elderly women inside, the front passenger leaning her forehead against the glass - I remembered her now because it had seemed curious to me then: a white-haired woman with her mouth slightly agape, staring rather vacantly out of the window against which her brow was pressed.

My friend and I had little to say. We were not unnerved or saddened so much as wondrous, each deeply occupied with the task of absorption. We had been talking only a while ago about death, the subject having arisen naturally and easily in conversation, a result of her inquiries about my mother and my inquiries about her ancient, ailing dog. We began to thread down the path toward the main entrance, looking back from time to time at the continuing smoke and the lacy patterns of overlapping branches getting ready to blossom. Impartial birdsong filled the afternoon.

Eloquence of Brillat-Savarin

2011-03-16T11:52:00.002-05:00

from:

The Physiology

Taste

Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 1825

excerpt from:

Meditation X

The End of the World

[falling inexplicably between the chapters On Drink and On Gourmandism]

"...According to what has been written on the subject, we seem only too eager to surround such a catastrophe with avenging fury, with destructive angels and the sound of trumpets, and other no less horrifying accompaniments.
Alas, we do not need such histrionics to be destroyed; we are not worth such a funereal display, and if God wishes it he can change the whole surface of the globe without such exertion on his part.
Let us suppose, for instance, that one of those wandering stars, whose paths and purposes are unknown to any of us, and whose appearance is always accompanied by a legendary fear, let us suppose, I say, that such a comet flies near enough to the sun to be charged with a terrible excess of heat, and that it comes near enough to us to cause a six-month period of a general temperature of about 170 degrees Fahrenheit (twice as hot as the comet of 1811).
At the end of this murderous period, all animal and vegetable life will have perished, and all sounds have died away; the earth will turn silently until other circumstances have developed other germs of creation on it; and still the cause of our disaster will lie lost in the vast halls of outer space, and we shall have passed no nearer to it than a few million leagues.
This happening is as possible as any other, and it has always been for me a tempting thing to dream upon, and one I have never shunned."

Eloquence of Olfaction

2011-03-04T09:21:00.001-05:00

Drawing of a dog’s olfactory bulb by Italian physician and scientist Camillo Golgi, 1875.

All winter long, from beneath every kind of snow - loose hills of talcum, crystalline fish scale blankets, sodden dough mounds, humps of granulated sugar stuff, and now the skeletal architecture of tatted ice, its blunt forms, all knucklebone and molar - smells have called to him.
Vertically he plunges, a warm-blooded borer, and disappears, all but his feathery, frenzied tail. He digs, unmindful of protecting his nose, his eyes, his snout, his gums. He surfaces with his face coated, like a man reclined in a barber's chair, freshly shaving creamed, awaiting the blade. But this is only momentary; already the smells have reissued their refrain; already he's heeded their song and vanished again beneath the layers of cold.
From the frequency with which, when he emerges at last, he is grasping lightly between his jaws a still-heavily-fruited-core, you'd think the people of this town did nothing last fall but walk around every day eating apples incompletely before tossing them to the ground.
He unearths, or unsnows, every so often, things besides apple cores, the vast majority of them unidentifiable except, one imagines, to him. And his nose. And his palate. But I have glimpsed, among their number, what appear to be chocolate cookies, crusts of bread, corn chips, jelly beans, a piece of chicken, a marshmallow and a dead mouse.

Sometimes the fragrance that croons to him so sweetly lies thoroughly locked in ice, as with a piece of chewing gum this morning, shining rosily - if dimly, beneath the dullness of its heavy encasement - in the cold gold light. He worked at it with his tongue - I could see the breath rise from his warm mouth, hear the licking, steady and rhythmic. He worked patiently, assiduously - one might even call his ministrations devout - until I pulled him on.

Eloquence of the 59th Month After Diagnosis, Part II

2011-02-21T19:42:00.002-05:00

Orange and Yellow, by Rothko

Three days later, my mother emails me:

Date: 2.19.11
Subject: overflowing

Animated orange roundness in Richard's woods: single robin. Great swoops of blackbirds terribly terribly busy. A few hundred snowflakes that can't quite get it together -- maybe they're roused by the feathered explosions.

Woke up with 101.7. My tears are driven too.

Eloquence of the 59th Month After Diagnosis, Part I

2011-02-16T14:42:00.002-05:00

Birdfeeder by Mary Azarian

My mother writes to three college friends:

2.16.11

Dear Beloved People,

Would you like to hear about a typical day? Wake up around 10 or 11. A long druggy transition while I straddle the narcotic-riddled dreams that make Ulysses look like Pat the Bunny and the sounds of the real world: Oscar's busy-ness downstairs, the garbage truck, snow shovels scraping. Once my eyes stay open, I call "Hi Ocky" and he brings me tea and my injection stuff. Often I stay in bed another hour or two: marinating in thoughts of family and friends; crosswords, ken-ken, cryptics. The puzzles require a sort of minute mental operation that feels calming and (in a large stretch of the concept) productive. It's somewhere between meditative and obsessive. Breakfast downstairs early afternoon and get dressed. Usually it's a plain day puttering at home, but sometimes there's an appointment or a visit with a friend. Generally Oscar drives me, though I do still drive when I feel that my mind is clear enough. I'm on round-the-clock pain stuff and sometimes it makes me thick and stupid, so the driving is iffy. I read a little and prefer recorded books (with few characters). Netflix is big in this house. I love late afternoons -- back in bed, this time with the string of colored Christmas lights plugged in. I love the slow darkening outside and the fastness of my nest. Oscar makes us supper which we usually have in the den with Netflix. Oh sweet decadence! In jammies and bed by 8:00. More puzzles and and then lights out listening to Bach on my iPod. I've gotten so I can turn it off without waking up.

Having said all that, here are some things I've done in the last month. Driven to physical therapy (silly old neck), gone to the movies (but I've forgotten what we saw), loaded and unloaded the dishwasher many times, done several 1000-piece jigsaws on the dining room table, gone to a valentine's lunch party at a friend's house, gotten a hair cut (think Judi Dench), done every fiber of laundry, shoveled snow for 5 minutes at a stretch, had dinner in a restaurant, taken some slow walks. Such a resume!

I'm on a new chemo, the tumors having figured out that the old one was a plot against them. It is just plain dreadful. One down, five to go (if I'm lucky enough that it's working).

I am fine. More than fine.

I love hearing from each of you. Thank you thank you thank you.

Love,

Sue

Eloquence of Cold

2011-01-24T14:47:00.005-05:00

Its speech is all too plain, its tongue too froze

to pluck out euphony. Uncultured guest,

it lacks the means to temper what it knows:

that windows hang lopsidedly, unrest

afflicts the yammering boards, the door sill's

warped, the bricks all cracked, and wind will ever

find its way. Along the eaves ice rattles

its blades; below, it births rills deep under

banked snow. Oh give thanks, all thanks for the gift

of plain speech, the cold fact, the unsoft blow.

And hark within the plaster walls the drift

of horsehair as it contracts - an echo

dream of a standing herd, its mingled breath,

some bruised sweet apples, small place before death.

Eloquence of Failure

2011-01-19T20:40:00.002-05:00

Umberto Crenca, the founder of AS220, a non-profit community arts space in downtown Providence, spoke last summer at a forum on Free Culture (the link will take you to a recorded version of the entire program). Below I've transcribed part of Crenca's meandering, sometimes bluff, sometimes funny and ultimately serious response to a question the moderator has asked about how one fosters creativity, or creates a "creative capital," as Providence, Rhode Island has, in the moderator's words, "branded" itself.

First Crenca allows a comic pause, which he ends with a mock-ignorant, borderline insolent disavowal: "I don't know." Then he rambles his rather heavy-footed way into an unexpectedly elegant answer, which ends:

So much of our existence is mediated. We're getting billions of messages every day telling us what we should wear, what we should eat, what we should drive, how we should look, who we should date, you know, whatever, and you come to AS220 and someone starts playing a guitar solo, and they fail.
And they start again.
That's human.
We could all identify with that.
It's amazing.
Okay?
And it's empowering to us to have that experience and make that connection. As opposed to being fed perfection. Something we cannot identify with. That's humbling - not humbling, it's, it's, it's, demoralizing -- you know? Because we can never live up to those expectations. So we keep buying more, to try to achieve these expectations that are false.
So I think [the answer is] creating environments where people feel safe to fail, and other people have the opportunity to experience that.

Eloquence of Elementary Birdsong

2011-01-09T17:24:00.008-05:00

Mrs. Thomas taught us to play it on our recorders in the third grade: A - B, as simple as it gets, so why is the song of the black-capped chickadee, repeated over and over on a winter morning, so stirring? In 1889 Bradford Torrey called the chickadee the "enlivener of our winter woods; who revels in snow and ice, and is never lacking in abundant measures of faith and cheerfulness, enough not only for himself, but for any chance wayfarer."

Hearing this bird just the other morning, its two-note "phoebe" call, while I trudged in my heavy coat, the sun barely buttering the tops of the humped, hardened snow, I couldn't prevent myself from picturing the tune emitted, not from the pincering bill of the round little bird, but from -- of all things -- the pursed lips and puffed cheeks of my grandmother, dead now two years.

Grammy was so decorous and modest and feminine (so un-blowsy in every possible way) that the last thing you expected her to do was whistle, but it happens she was a fine whistler who delighted us grandchildren, whenever telling from memory one of the stories in "The Adventures of Mabel," by Harry Thurston Peck, by reproducing the sound of the Lizard King's magic whistle through her own lips. Perhaps one of the things we loved about it, that short string of notes with which Mabel, once she'd learned how to make the sound herself, could befriend any animal she met, was the unlikeliness of it coming from Grammy. This unlikeliness lent credibility to the whistle's magical status. Too, I could not whistle, not even the "funny little wheeze" Mabel makes when first she tries; in this regard, the whistle lay beyond my reach, making it that much easier to believe it was truly magic.

And on that recent day -- as I went crunching across the crust of the calcified snow, which in the morning light revealed its secret crystal properties, glittering now in spangled waves as I crossed it and the sun struck out a new lode of jewels here, and then a new one here, and then a next -- the birdsong kept on and on.

Two thin notes, nothing more. Yet so plainly, so prettily, a song.

According to "Life Histories of Familiar American Birds" by Arthur Cleveland Bent, "It is a matter for conjecture whether the phoebe note is a true song...Perhaps the deciding point in determining a true song is the manner in which the bird delivers its notes." And here he returns us most satisfyingly to Bradford Torrey, who writes of having risen early one morning in 1885 and spying a chickadee, which had lately made a home in a neighboring apple tree, standing

within a few feet of his apple branch door, throwing back his head in the truest lyrical fashion, calling 'Hear, hear me,' with only a breathing space between the repetitions of the phrase. He was as plainly singing, and as completely absorbed in his work, as any thrasher or hermit thrush could have been. Heretofore I had not realized that these whistled notes were so strictly a song, and as such set apart from all the rest of the chickadee's repertory of sweet sounds; and I was delighted to find my tiny pet recognizing thus unmistakably the difference between prose and poetry.

Eloquence of Laura Marling

2011-01-03T09:26:00.021-05:00

Happy new year.
(Click the vinyl.)

Eloquence of Menotti

2010-12-24T15:13:00.007-05:00

The Adoration

In the kitchen this morning, making a chocolate cream pie and listening to Amahl, I felt a sob rise up from nowhere and break through. It's a fine thing to cry when you are cooking, I think. There is something very full, very welling, about the combination of measuring and whisking and warming and weeping.

The part in the music that brought this on had never moved me thus in the past.

I have loved Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors since I was thirteen and played one of the shepherd children in a local Episcopal church production. I had a good and charismatic friend who went to that church, and for a year or two several of us sang in the choir there with her, even though we did not belong to that church or even to Christianity. At that age, the part I liked best was the shepherds' rousing song as they gather, greeting one another on their way to meet the three journeying kings who have mysteriously stopped in their village:

Emily, Emily,

Michael, Bartholomew,

how are your children

and how are your sheep?

and the place in the music where the two shepherd children dance, in, as Menotti's libretto says, "a joyous frenzy."

Also I loved the thank you song, the mandala-like roundness of the call and response where the shepherds name the gifts they are offering - quinces and chestnuts and figs and cucumbers and honeycombs - and the kings keep repeating their simple message of gratitude:

Thank you, thank you,

thank you kindly.

Thank you, thank you,

thank you kindly, too.

Later, after I had children, the part that touched me most was the mother's song, her plaintive responses within the three kings' singing about the child they are bound to see:

Yes, I know a child

the color of wheat, the color of dawn.

His eyes are mild,

his hands are those of a King,

as King he was born.

The sadness of those beautiful lyrics as she sings them about her own poor, lame child created underground rivers of emotion in my belly and limbs.

Yes, I know a child

the color of earth, the color of thorn.

His eyes are sad,

his hands are those of the poor,

as poor he was born.

But what did it, what felled me this morning was a part I'd never even liked before. It's after the mother is caught (cacophonously) trying to steal the kings' gold, and Amahl, having furiously defended her, collapses sobbing in her arms. And Melchior sings, very slowly and deeply,

Oh, woman, you can keep the gold.

The Child we seek doesn't need our gold.

On love, on love alone

He will build his kingdom.

Why in the past did this bit strike me as boringly platitudinous, and this morning as severely, crushingly beautiful?

One afternoon when I was in my teens -- during a period when I was often overwhelmed by the intensity of my own feelings -- I lay on my parents' bed beside my mother, the light coming in the windows alive with the movement of tree branches and of the river, and listening as she described how for her, feelings hadn't become diminished or more muted as she'd aged, but had somehow become more swallow-able. Easier to live with the company of. If you were to draw them on a graph, she suggested, her adolescent self's feelings might look spikily erratic, with lots of jaggedy skinny peaks and plunges, while her older self's feelings might attain similar highs and lows but undulate more mellowly, and linger in places more thoroughly. Though I only half-understood what she was saying, I was comforted by her saying it, and by the image her finger traced in the air over our heads, and by her voice, and by the quiet feeling of drifting with her on the raft of the platform bed.

It's the varying drift of emotion and experience throughout the long arc of our lives that Menotti has captured for me today, as the CD plays on endless repeat and the music flutters at the periphery of my awareness, like a butterfly circling for hours around the kitchen window.

Eloquence of the Dog's Morning Excretion in Thirty Two Degrees (and Thirty Two Words)

2010-12-08T14:09:00.002-05:00

It steams

on the stiff sedge

as if to tell how

moments earlier

it'd been one

with the dog and now,

transferring its heat

in wisps,
is becoming

one with the ground.

Photo: Bill Schwab

Eloquence of a Bump on the Head

2010-11-22T10:25:00.000-05:00

A crowded bookshop-cafe, a harried white female Cantabrigian of about forty, wearing hipster glasses and a fitted leather jacket. With a clipped, "Excuse me," she doesn't quite push her way past the line of customers, but cuts a vexed path through. Going around the side of the cakes counter, she gathers two metal scooters from where they'd been stowed and maneuvers them awkwardly toward the glass front of the store and out the door.

Not so much seen as impressed on me: a nearby gasp almost at the very instant that a nasty banging registers at the edge of my awareness. Turning, I spot the aftermath: little girl still bent back in recoil, hand to forehead, and an atmospheric sense, more than visual evidence, of a squall soon to release from her little mouth. But no - no squall. Only shock and worse: the feeling of tears held back, tears that any witness recognizes ought to fall, not falling. She is in a pink parka. She is black, about six years old. An older girl - not by much, maybe eight - stands behind her. They look like sisters. They had been, it begins to dawn, waiting outside the heavy glass door for the retrieval of their scooters, the littler one positioned unfortunately smack in the path the door cut when pushed open.

What happens is the mother does not comfort. She yanks rather furiously on the hand of the little one and draws her over to a bench. The larger one hovers in the vicinity. The mother - and I think she is obviously this, rather than a friend or aunt or babysitter, because who but a mother would dare be so publicly angry? - seems to be simultaneously inspecting the forehead and reprimanding the girl for having placed herself in the line of the swinging door. After some moments, the mother rises and herds her girls along, the older one riding her scooter, the younger one walking hers, her face now finally crumpling as she goes, and the mother, perhaps realizing she has drawn the attention of the shoppers and coffee drinkers densely milling or lounging on ironwork chairs outside the store, places a hand on the small girl's magenta shoulder a moment before removing it again.

Behind me on line two white women are, like me, observing the drama unfold through the transparency of the storefront, narrating the events to each other in decorous but aghast murmurs. "She isn't being at all nice," says one, and the other agrees, and I, too, am agreeing silently, wondering why I don't rush out there and provide the comfort so obviously missing from the scene. But whom do I wish to comfort? The little one in pink? Her older sister, in less obvious pain? Their white mother, who radiated anger as she brushed past me minutes ago on her way to scooter-retrieval?

Or is the wish to comfort more personal? Am I thinking of my own most ignominious moments as a mother of young children? Am I thinking of my mother's? Surely I am incapable of seeing a mixed race family without being reminded, even unconsciously, of my own, without certain tintypes involuntarily dislodging from my own memory: my white mother and black brother, and certain sidewalk scuffles or tantrums, on cold days like this one, with runny noses and hard cement sidewalks and breath visible in tight little puffs and stinging through the chapped rims of nostrils on the inhale, and hands miserable, fingers contracted against their own frozenness, even inside their mittens.

The women behind me on line continue their own sotto voce script a few moments more, and then the unhappy little family -- but who is to say? perhaps they are a strong, healthy little family, often happy but with their share of difficult times; and who knows what happened earlier this morning, what kinds of provocation the little one may have unleashed, the mother might have endured, or how much patience the mother had already lavished, stretched far as it could go; and who knows what laughter they might find on the way home, or, more modestly, what fragile but shiny offering of forgiveness, or anyway what cups of milk and slices of buttered toast they might eat together this afternoon in a warm kitchen with a plant on the sill? -- vanishes from sight and all the murmurs in the bookshop-cafe settle back into something more easeful, more in keeping with the holiday music and tinsel.

This morning's very public bump on the head spoke volumes. Undoubtedly it triggered within every one of the many reproachful, horrified or merely sympathetic witnesses an intricately textured, varicolored stratum of memories and associations, richly evocative, brilliantly charged with meaning. The one thing of which it spoke very little was the story of that particular mother and those two particular little girls. In that regard, save for a slight, perhaps unrepresentative playlet, it held its tongue.

Eloquence of the Unintended Pun

2010-11-05T09:12:00.000-05:00

I make the distinction:
a pun-on-purpose being too broad and self-congratulatory to be truly funny,
whereas the unintended pun, the serendipitous doubling one catches only after it has been uttered, only as its tail is disappearing in a blur around the corner, is all about the marvel of coincidence.
The unintended pun needn't be terribly clever to amuse, amaze.

We were children. One girl was telling a story about a collector of doll shoes - someone who'd amassed hundreds and hundreds of tiny plastic footwear items. Another girl commented: "That's quite a feat."
The room air shifted. I am tempted to report there was a minor sound. Perhaps it was more of a small soundless burst, akin to the sensation one gets in the instant after a light bulb's filament burns out. A pocket of heightened emptiness.
Then: "Oh!" we all cried more or less at once, the girl from the aperture of whose lips the pun had sprung looking the most surprised and delighted of all. The delight a product of the surprise.

It was not the pun we loved, but that it had been unloosed by some force not strictly in our command, and the sense it brought of a bountiful doubleness, all manner of linked and layered meaning, there, there, there, existing in fantastic invisible abundance, contained for example in the very alphabet blocks of our humble speech, and if only seldom deigning to arrange themselves into patterns that met the eye, glittering rather marvelously when they did.

Eloquence of Valor

2010-10-19T09:38:00.001-05:00

The It Gets Better Project was created by the columnist Dan Savage in September 2010. Prompted by the September 9 suicide of a 15-year-old boy, one of at least seven children who, in recent months, ended their lives after being bullied about their perceived sexual identity, Savage and his husband began this rapidly growing video archive of messages from lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people and their allies, sharing their own stories of overcoming bullying and finding happiness in an effort to give hope to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered youth.

illustration from Mother Jones

Unlikely Eloquence of the Direct Correlation Between the Filthiness of an Item and the Daintiness With Which the Dog Lifts His Front Right Paw as He Sniffs It

2010-10-12T08:52:00.001-05:00

Just that.

Eloquence of Wilma Mankiller

2010-10-04T10:48:00.003-05:00

Wilma Mankiller, the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation, died early last spring. Shortly after, Fresh Air rebroadcast a 1993 interview she'd given Terry Gross. This portion of the interview, in which Mankiller speaks of her experience nearly dying after a 1979 car accident, has been replaying in my mind ever since.

...it's a special gift, I think. Having been so close to death - which, by the way, was the most wonderful feeling I've ever had in my life. It was more profound than childbirth, or better than, you know, the deepest love I've ever had with a man...

...I think [it] helped me understand my own insignificance.

My own insignificance.
Daily I take solace, receive solace from the thought.

Eloquence of a Small Girl's Frock

2010-09-26T19:28:00.003-05:00

In my idiosyncratic lexicon:
A dress slides over the body and drapes it closely, meldingly; it deciphers, spells the figure within.
Frock, a stiffer word, is a thing apart; it hangs free, separate from the body it covers, autonomous, its shape its own.

The girl, then, wore a frock. She was, I'll say, three. Post-diapers, yet still a citizen of that essentially pre-gendered world of the very young. She held the hand of a tall man; together they studied a bakery shop window so that their were backs to me and all I saw of her was hair, bobbed and brown and lollipop round, and a thread of neck, and then the dress - frock - very nearly a perfect triangle of sleeveless blue, suspended from her shoulders but otherwise a thing detached and unobligated, owing and giving nothing more than a declaration of its own rudimentary geometry.

How fine a sight, this girl and her frock: the two entities unrelated, mere - bare - acquaintances - like a pair of subway riders jumbled together by chance, their accidental proximity, even intimacy, serving no greater purpose than to accentuate the irreducible singularity of each. The girl. Her frock. A model couple.

Eloquence of the Dog's Mouth

2010-09-19T18:31:00.001-05:00

1.
Strolling down the sidewalk, he comes across a bruised apple and picks it up. He holds it in his jaws without biting as we continue a hundred, two hundred yards, then sets it down in a new place. It is the moment before he relinquishes it that touches me: the workings of his mind made visible in that pause.

2.
While I am stroking him, he turns his head and closes his teeth on me as gently as if placing a ring upon my finger. If my hand were a soap bubble, it would not burst.

Eloquence of a Medical Abstract

2010-09-12T16:35:00.011-05:00

My mother sends the following abstract of an article.
She says it sums up her feelings quite well.
The bold italics are hers.

Living with suffering as voiced by Thai patients with terminal advanced cancer

Kittikorn Nilmanat, Pachariya Chailungka, Temsak Phungrassami, Chantra Promnoi, Kandawasri Tulathamkit, Prachuap Noo-urai, Sasiwimon Phattaranavig
International Journal of Palliative Nursing 16(8): 393 - 399 (Aug 2010)

Cancer is a leading cause of death in Thailand. Thai cancer patients often seek medical treatment while in advanced stages of the disease. This longitudinal qualitative study aimed to describe the suffering that patients with terminal advanced cancer experience in their everyday life. A series of interviews were conducted and patient observation performed with 15 patients with terminal advanced cancer. Thematic analysis was applied and the overriding theme of the end-of-life experiences was living with suffering. Five inter-related sub-themes regarding the experience of suffering were identified in the informants' accounts, including

physical symptom distress,

feeling of alienation,

sense of worthlessness,

sense of burden to others,

and desire for hastened death.

The findings of this study can be of value for health professionals in cancer care in Thailand. Comprehensive end-of-life care programmes are needed to alleviate suffering in this group of patients.

Postscript prompted by the many kind expressions of worry and concern this posting has elicited:

I do not feel sorry for my mother. That she is a person who sees and does not shy from, but rather lays claim to the truth expressed in this abstract, and, further, that she essays to share it - as a truth about herself - with others - makes her, in my eyes, most shining and even (if strangely) privileged. To own these experiences - think of it! How devotedly and fearlessly she inhabits every speck of her life.

September 15, 2010

Eloquence of the Lost and Found

2010-09-09T20:57:00.005-05:00

This post heralds a new little experiment in this space.

Four years ago I began writing here -- mostly, in the early postings, either directly or indirectly about my mother.
She is in her fifth year of living with advanced ovarian cancer. Two of her friends with the illness died this summer within weeks of each other.
The title of this blog comes from her, not the words themselves but an idea of a way of being in the world that she imparted, continues to impart, to me. After she is dead, I think that will go on being true, right down to the tense -- "continues to impart to me."

But I have grown so tired of my own verbosity. The idea of a blog repulsed and exhausted me even before I began. I managed to find it possible to undertake this project, and keep it going for four years, by making its focus her. Yet I feel increasingly less at liberty to write about her in a public way. I think this feeling, this check on my self-granted allowance, is commensurate with a diminution in her own feeling of self-possession, related to the advancement of the disease and to the effects of having lived with it and with its treatment for a protracted time. She is no less fierce, brave, beautiful and wondrous to me. But I feel a certain call to be quiet.

Or quieter.

The new experiment then: It harks back, in a way, to a posting from January 2008 called Somewhere Between the Monk and the Pear. That one ended, " And more and more I think this is where we are all headed, what we are all meant to learn, and the better I become at my craft, the fewer words I will use, fewer and fewer, until a single word could bring me to my knees, like the man who could not stand to hear spring."

Perhaps this is the season in which I will make good on that promise or wish, the season in which I will head toward fewer and fewer words -- or at any rate, fewer and fewer words of my own.

What if we understood the word "writer" to include a person whose work, rather than being solely the production of her own language-based creations, extended to the recognition and ministration of the words of others, or even simply the expressions of others, verbal and nonverbal alike? What if one possible definition was this: one who sees and salvages the eloquence of the overlooked, of scraps and bits already afloat in the world, aswirl but unread, unmarked, not yet held or home?

Look here in coming weeks to see what I mean. I feel happy about the prospect.

Flight Path

2010-07-25T01:22:00.000-05:00

in memorium B.C.

More than twenty years ago my mother told me a story about a long airplane ride, perhaps across the North American continent, perhaps across the Atlantic Ocean. She was seated near a man who was traveling with three or four children, ranging in age from, say, two to ten. I don't remember the details well or reliably - as will become even clearer - and this is part of the point; or rather, this is a large part of the story's hold on my imagination.

The man, whom she assumed to be the children's father, caught her attention immediately for being so relaxed with the children and with what anyone might agree was likely a harrying, if not harrowing, task, no matter how well behaved the children and how competent the accompanying adult: that is, the task of being the sole person in charge of three or four children so young on a flight so long. Even before the plane taxied down the runway, he somehow signaled a wonderful and unusual sense of ease, which bespoke a combination of both experience and a gently sensible nature. Perhaps she told me that as soon as he'd gotten the little ones seated, he helped them all remove their shoes and put them in a knapsack that he stowed in an overhead compartment. Something like that, something small, not terribly fussy or complicated, but which seemed to communicate a strong sense of peace and caretaking.

I don't remember much else specific about the man and his children (whether he changed any diapers, for instance, or read aloud to them, or passed out sticker books or magnetic toys or held anyone on his lap), except one major detail. This memory - again, imperfect but indelible - concerns a good-sized cardboard box the man took out from under his seat before the in-flight meal service began and from which he produced, at well-spaced intervals throughout the trip, picnic items. A single orange - or possibly two - whose skins he removed and whose sections he separated and passed around to the children. A wet washcloth, rolled in plastic wrap, which got passed around so that sticky fingers could be wiped clean. Cut up celery and carrot sticks. Hard boiled eggs, pre-peeled and glisteningly opaque. Round seeded buns.

Is it obvious? Already I have left the tenuous territory of memory and am making things up, freely fabricating - but fabricating faithfully, being consistent with the original memory of the original telling, and how thoughtfully the food had been chosen, prepared, distributed, consumed. I have a memory too that the man used a pair of chopsticks to extract the items from the box, but this seems farfetched. Perhaps part of the picnic involved sushi? Perhaps I am remembering that my mother described the man and children as looking part Anglo, part Asian? Or perhaps the whole memory, as I have conjured it, simply has an Eastern feel and thus my brain, in a clumsy attempt at helpfulness, has imposed the pair of chopsticks as a kind of atmospheric placemark.

What interests me tonight, on a night I cannot sleep, the night after one of my mother's friends has died in hospice, is that the memory, for all its slimness, has such lasting heft - has been stored, apparently, in a file drawer along with memories of much more obvious importance - when it is not even a memory of mine, per se, but simply the memory of a story my mother told me about people I (and she, for that matter) never met. What accounts for the sticking power of this memory is the way my mother told it: clearly she was conscious of relaying it to me as a gift, but her telling was free of any effort to heighten that gift. She did not widen her eyes or ratchet up her pitch or in any way falsify or embellish the story's 'sweetness' or 'marvelousness.' She did not present it as a story about family harmony, or rare masculine tenderness, or quaintly excessive efficiency. Her telling was as measured and quiet as the manner with which she described the man tending to his children on the long flight. She seemed to be contemplating the story's effect on her, or meaning to her, even as she reconstructed it for me.

This, here: this is what meaning the story holds for me today. It was that she had not made up her mind where the story was going or what it was about. I could feel her getting pleasantly and honorably lost in the telling even as she wove the tale. I could feel the way she was listening to her own recounting, letting herself discover meaning in the story as she spoke, as her mouth and mind created the word-map of this sliver of the world.

In this way she gave me the story - in all its various possible untested, unsolidified meanings - and simultaneously the model for how storytelling works. Which is this: in our humility, our slowness, our blindness, our willingness to wander and get lost as we draw the words toward us, test how they sound, cast some aside for others, set a few in place as stepping stones and venture forward upon them, gathering new ones, holding out our fingers for them and listening to how they click and plink and ring together, we build our pathways even as we go.

The Ask

2010-06-07T09:00:00.004-05:00

A few days ago someone dear to me emailed a topic idea for my next blog posting:
"How about the bittersweet end of school and beginning of summer...just a thought...or maybe you need to write your blogs as you feel them and get inspired."

My first, albeit fleeting response, was, I admit, to feel put-upon.

My second was to feel meltingly charmed. The idea! As if I worked at a piano bar. As if I were a dude in a shiny tie, with a bill-stuffed wine glass and a sleek little mike, into which between numbers I might mellifluously intone, "This next song is going out to Martha from Bill..." or, "By special request from the lovely ladies at the corner booth..." or, "Here's a number I'm sure you all know. Feel free to join in..."

It put me in mind of a recording of a Joni Mitchell concert in which she can be heard tuning her guitar between songs and members of the audience can be heard calling out increasingly forceful requests. After a bit, she gives a little laugh and observes, "That's one thing that's always, like, been a difference between, like, the performing arts, and being a painter, you know. A painter does a painting, and he paints it, and that's it, you know. He has the joy of creating it, it hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, and maybe somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But he never, you know, nobody ever, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, paint A Starry Night again, man!"

It's the same with writers; we don't generally get people calling out requests, either for old or new material. And slowly it began to sink in just how generous and guileless and connective and loving it was, that this person, this dear one, had done so.

The Bread and Puppet Theater has a Cheap Art Manifesto that reads, in part:

PEOPLE have been THINKING too long that
ART is a PRIVILEGE of the MUSEUMS & the
RICH. ART IS NOT BUSINESS!
It does not belong to banks & fancy investors
ART IS FOOD. You cant EAT it BUT it FEEDS
you. ART has to be CHEAP & available to
EVERYBODY. It needs to be EVERYWHERE
because it is the INSIDE of the
WORLD.

This is the stuff for me. This and not the line of thought that goes - as Christopher Hitchens is quoted saying only yesterday in the Sunday Times Magazine - "Dr. Johnson is correct when he says that only a fool writes for anything but money."

If making art for free is foolish, perhaps it's even more foolish to ask for it for free. But that is the flip side of art's being freely available - it must be freely requestable. It's all very well for artists to offer their wares for little or nothing, but the equation's lopsided if consumers of art wait in silence for it to be offered. Asking is a generous act. A creative one, too. Asking awakens. Asking stirs possibility - in the asker as much as in the asked.

And thus I came to my third response: to feel honored, even humbled, by the gift inherent in the ask.

So Dear One: Thank you. This is not the posting you requested, but it was born of your request. You gave me something and it led me here; together, then, we have made this little banner of scraps and wishes, this small flag to stir in the wind.

No More, No Less

2010-05-11T15:12:00.006-05:00

It's noisy as I write this. The day is sharply bright, the sun ricocheting off surfaces like bullets. It looks like it should have a sound effect: ping, ping, but even if it did I wouldn't be able to hear it. The tree guys are out in front of the yellow house next door, with some kind of loud, vibrating machine that knows how to chew a stump right up out of the earth. The window panes are rattling with the force of it.

Two and a half years ago I wrote a posting about these same guys. They'd come then to remove the tree in front of our house. I'd been a little sad about parting with that tree, which had seemed a part of our home, so close did its many leafy arms extend toward our upper-story living room, fairly wrapping us in its unhurried shade. We had often knelt backward on the couch in order to watch the squirrels gambol along its limbs, or snow collect on its bark, or to peer through its greeny slits at the darkening sky.

I might've entertained the illusion - based on another illusion: that of mutual affinity - that this was our tree.

Oh! - now I see clouds of treedust blowing past my window, golden against the yellow of the clapboards, galloping almost, billowing, and dispersing fast in the wind. The guys below mostly stand on the sidewalk while the chewing machine does all the work. One guy seems to be managing the controls. He wears jeans, a safety-orange t-shirt, and a safety-green baseball cap, from underneath which shows a neat crop of thick gray hair. Another guy sits in the flat bed that brought the chewing machine. Behind that, another truck, orange, with levers and a claw. It's slow work. The machine pivots carefully back and forth, chewing the stump like corn on the cob, working its way into the roundness maybe an inch at a time.

Two and a half years ago, when they took our tree, I might've thought of them, the tree guys, as a little imperious, a little officious, the way they came around: the deciders. First they'd deface designated trees with spray paint, then show up a week or two later to saw them away, limb by limb, and then another couple of weeks later finish up the job, disinterring stumps with a kind of grim, heedless efficiency.

It is impossible to think of them that way now. I think of them now as suffering, sorrowful, as I know they must be.

Less than two weeks ago, on a day of high winds, a boy in our town was struck by part of a tree as it split from its rotten trunk and he died. It was the same day that part of this tree here, this one whose blackened, spongy stump is now being dispatched below my window, fell. The same day, for that matter, that yet another tree fell, whose stump still awaits the blade, and which I can also see from my window, in front of the blue house across the street. How many trees fell that day, in those high winds, which I found beautiful?

I know the tree guys were on the scene soon after the boy was struck, because they were shown on the evening news cutting away the fallen wood, clearing the debris. What must they have felt? Among them, whose decision was it, which trees to mark? Who decided the order in which the marked trees would be cut? I met one of the tree guys the day after the accident. The wind had dropped and it was sunny and hot, and the tree guy was leaning up against the mailbox across the street, watching his comrades perform the task preparatory to today's business: felling everything but the stump. The tree guy was pretty taciturn, but he ventured he'd heard the boy was on life support, and the tears swarmed to my head so quickly I could feel myself flushing with the effort to hold them back, and I couldn't tell whether they were for the boy or the taciturn man, whose eyes I could not see behind his mirrored lenses.

The boy, whom I had never met, filled my thoughts during the several days after he was struck and before he died. And even as he filled my thoughts, even as I woke each morning and lay among the sheets looking at the light on the low sloping ceiling and trying to remember why I was worried, why I ached, even then I knew it made no sense that I should think of him especially. Nor, when the news came that he had died, that I should think, "We lost a child in our town." What part of me composed such a line? What "we" did I envision? Yes, he was in the same grade as my youngest; yes, he lived blocks from us. But he was no more ours, no more mine, than the little ones in China attacked that same day, according to the newspaper, by a man who'd broken into their preschool with a hammer. No more ours, no more mine, than the children in Haiti whose buildings tumbled down on them. No more ours, no more mine, than the twenty five thousand children around the world who, the most recent issue of The New Yorker reports, "die of preventable causes every day."

Oh - the machine has stopped. Suddenly: silence. The rest of the tree guys move in now, bright and burly in their safety helmets and vests, coming with their blowers to sculpt the golden, velvety sawdust into a great mound, then coming with their hoovers to hoover it up.

I notice, as I glance over what I have written so far, that not only did I think of this boy as somehow "ours," but that I have rather carelessly referred to "our" tree, and "our" town, and "our" house, all of which are in reality no more ours, no more mine, than the wind. Than the boy. Than the twenty five thousand. No more and no less.

I see them moving operations across the street now, over by the blue house catty corner. In front of the yellow house, all is tidy. The only sign of loss, a patch of freshly shoveled, neatly packed earth. Everything goes: trucks, machines, rakes, shovels, noise, men. They move all of forty yards, to where the next stump is waiting.

(The painting above is Autumn Tree by Egon Schiele.)

Schooled/Fooled

2010-04-01T09:56:00.006-05:00

Last night I went to a meeting for parents of children who will enter high school in the fall. We picked up color-coded packets of information, filed into the cavernous, saggy-seated auditorium, listened to "opening remarks," and watched a Power Point presentation laying out the curriculum and criteria for graduation.

The curtain that hangs along the back wall of the stage was only partially drawn, exposing two large slabs of what at first glance seemed to be more audience - theater in the round? arena seating? - but quickly proved to be merely reflections of us, the parents, appearing, it must be said, whether from boredom or shock, rather ossified.

The evening was boring, but it was shocking, too. At one point "The Class of 2014" shone on the screen, and even before the principle's obligatory, smiling admonition that "the time'll go by before you know it," you could feel the swirling, particulate energy of all the hundreds of mothers and fathers registering this truth. Even our children lately have noticed it, have commented aloud on what we have long known but they have just begun to notice: "Time seems to go faster now than when I was little."

After a while we were split into groups and herded down hallways, stopping in designated rooms for more talks from different department heads, more Power Points and handouts. Much time in each room was devoted to differentiating between the two main tracks, "college prep" and "honors." Honors. As though to confer dishonor on the other? I could feel my indignation rise, like the bristling feathers on an outraged hen - but that probably says more about me than the school, more about my own ghosts, old fears and furies left over from school days past and my intolerance for the rigidity, pomposity and priggishness of certain white men and women in suits. There was that, too, I suppose, in the air: a mild distillation of all our various parental anxieties, projected onto our children's futures but rooted in our own histories.

I don't mean to be ungrateful. Next fall my oldest will go to a high school without metal detectors. I will not fear for his safety as he walks the mile each way. His classmates will all have had access to a healthy breakfast. He will be challenged to work and think. These are no small things.

But knowing this doesn't prevent me from railing internally against that which I find misguided. The one truly ghastly part of the evening, for me, was the handout headed Time Management Activity, a chart on which students are meant to tally the number of hours they will need to allot to class time and homework, as well as estimate the hours they'll allow other activities (the categories provided include "hobbies," "sleep," "family time," "eating," "showering," and "free time" - this last being broken down into "friends, TV, phone, Internet, etc"), then do the math and see whether the total falls within or exceeds the number of hours contained in a week, a figure handily provided in large font. (It's 168, by the way, for those who, like me, think "7x24" and reach for a pencil. I absorbed this information and my heart shrunk a little; I am a sadder person for knowing the precise number of hours a week comprises.)

When I got home last night, said kid was blissfully oblivious to where I had been. He'd been told earlier, but had forgotten it in the intensity of his absorption in a complicated project - not, as it turned out, school-related, but no less cognitively engaging for that. Deep, deep was he into his preparations for April Fool's Day, a holiday toward which his attitude in recent years might best be described by the word devout. Of course, we were not permitted to know the specifics of his endeavors, but long into the night we could hear him pattering about at his labors, rummaging through drawers, opening and closing doors, and also making odder, less clearly identifiable sounds. At one point my boyfriend went down for a glass of water, only to find himself barred from the kitchen. "I wasn't allowed," he reported back with a shrug. And added, not really with alarm but with a kind of heightened degree of contemplation, "He's got the drill out."

We saw the kid once more before going to bed ourselves. He poked his tousled head up at the top of the stairs and, directing his comment toward my boyfriend, who is the first person up each morning, said, in a beguiling tone that managed to sound both sheepish and fervent, "Can you wear a shirt you don't really care about tomorrow?"

In deference to tricksters everywhere, I will not reveal what he rigged, or indeed what happened to us in the morning. But I am ever more firmly convinced of this: that Time Management Activity sheet needs editing.

Honeymoon

2010-03-19T07:41:00.008-05:00

The babysitter's ring had a stone shaped like half a little grape. She said it was an opal, said there were two kinds of opal, fiery, like her ring, and milk-white, like her younger sister's. They were like sisters in a fairy tale, both tall and lean as colts. Also like colts, they were slightly, endearingly awkward-limbed. They had pale, freckled skin. Sometimes the younger sister babysat, too. She liked animals better than children, though, and planned to become a veterinarian. The older planned to become a librarian. We loved them, but it was a love edged by desperation, I think, burdened slightly by gratitude. Those were difficult years for our family, and there was a way in which we clung to those sisters, the babysitters, so fresh and stalwart and blissfully outside the knot of our family. Do all families wind up having a spell like that? A period when, in retrospect, everything seemed to have been rattling, near to coming loose?

The sisters' family had, or had once had, its own share of knottiness - we gleaned this from the stories they told us, the minor, infrequent clues they let slip about their parents and older brothers. But when they came to our house they brought with them the consoling, inviolable air of people who were not our blood, who could not be hurt or even ruffled by us.

The house we lived in during that period was vast and chilly. There were always new cracks appearing in the plaster, water stains spreading their yellow territories ever wider. Footsteps always pounding the stairs like shots. Doors banged hard enough to split moldings. Things got thrown across rooms, or worse: not thrown. Held in with muscle-shaking effort. Our mother forever coming in weary from work, weighted down with grocery bags, the corners of her mouth weighted, too. Our father forever coming in late, later, in darkness coming in like a ghost and drifting to the thermostat to turn down the heat. The house too big and old anyway to hope to heat.

I liked to hold the babysitter's hand in my lap, or in her lap, or on my bedspread if she was tucking me in, and study the ring with its sparking flecks of color. On either side of the opal were tiny garnets - another word she taught me, another stone. Opals and garnets: the words sounded so old, so wonderfully grown up. They were real jewels. Like in a fairy tale.

Those hard years in our family were flecked with happiness. Real happiness. Grilled cheese sandwiches in gray winter, the sharp smell of new grass in still-cold spring. Marching into the house in a festive line, each of us laden with library books. The time a hook and ladder truck drove across our lawn to rescue the cat from one of the towering pines. It made deep ruts that stayed. "The firemen must have been bored out of their minds," our parents said. "They must have been dying for a call." The bridge at night, a glittering rope strung across the river, visible from my bedroom window. The morning glories my mother helped me plant in tiny pots, their bright stems wound finely, particularly, around the pieces of kite string we stretched the length of the same window.

My mother says, "I think the honeymoon is over." This is just a few weeks ago, after her latest scan. The cancer is spreading, as cancer does. By "honeymoon" she means the first four years of living with cancer: a succession of surgeries and chemotherapies, complications, medications and infections. She says it without irony. She means it, I think, in two ways. The more obvious: that it's about to become harder. The chemo cocktails are getting stepped up. Her energy is flagging, the list of untried therapies diminishing. The less obvious: that living with cancer has not been without treasure, even sweetness, real sweetness, brilliant flecks of experience, of living, that she had not known before and might not ever have known without. She has said this.

If we loved the babysitters in part because they were immune to our family's ordinary hardships, because their regular, light tread through various of our afternoons and evenings brought the promise of elsewhere, of other lives, or of reprieve, or simply because it spelled us temporarily, we loved them also for seeing us, for witnessing, in their limited, serene fashion, our rhythms and struggles and messes. And they loved us. We must have looked to them fiery, flecked, sparking off flashes of real life. When I think of those days now, I see that they were all shining hours, all-honeymoon: every wretched moment as well as every tender one.

Tall as the Tasman Sea

2010-02-17T14:11:00.001-05:00

Five years ago I bought a world map for our kitchen. I wanted the children to grow up with an idea of our size and place in the world and, more than that, with some graphic, tangible sense of the rest of the world. I could not find the map I wanted in any shops - none was big and beautiful enough - so I ordered one online. I did not pay particular attention to its advertised dimensions - I get yawny over details like how many inches by how many inches things are. I just clicked on "large" and typed in our address.

It arrived, innocently enough, in a slender (albeit suspiciously long) tube. Unfurled, its proportions proved remarkable. Having done no preparatory measuring, I heaved a sigh of relief when it turned out to fit on the largest kitchen wall. Just.

"Whoa!" said the kids when they got home. They gazed at it from afar, their eyes roaming east and west, north and south. They traveled in closer. The oldest's nose touched Paraguay. The youngest could just trace the lacy rim of Antarctica. "I'm tall as the Tasman Sea," said the middle child.

"Why didn't you get the big one?" said my boyfriend.

For five years now we have taken our meals beneath the map, not infrequently amid discussions of oceans, quizzes on capitals, ruminations on names. But lately its colors and shapes have taken on more layered meanings. I speak not epistemologically, but materially. Someone gave the kids a box of washable markers, and they got the bright idea the map's laminated surface would render it eligible for inscription. After a conducting a test on a remote patch of the Pacific, I gave them the go ahead. For a while, the kids drew on the map in a way I would describe as related. They added islands and new continents, altered coastlines, and invested the landmasses with pyramids and towers, and the waters with sailing ships and humpbacked sea creatures. Then things took a turn.

I'd walk into the kitchen to find the world covered with graffiti, of the "SO-AND-SO IS DA BOMB" variety, or else an array of signatures, the same name over and over in a contemplative variety of penmanship styles.

"That's not what I had in mind," I'd say. "That's not really the spirit of it." I'd try to articulate the difference between what I saw as creative, benevolent markings and vainglorious blemishes. They'd listen with apparent interest, wipe away the offending ink with damp paper towels, and then the next day I'd walk in and there would be a fresh batch of tags. "SO-AND-SO ROCKS," perhaps, and in someone else's hand, a furtive "NOT" inserted in the crucial place.

"This is the world, you guys," I'd say.

"Oh yeah. Sorry. Want me to erase it?"

The latest permutation is algebra. The youngest has just discovered the infinite pleasures of solving for x and, lacking a chalkboard, has adopted the South Pacific as a handy surface on which to work his equations, leaving me to weigh geography against math. Or to consider the advantages of geography-cum-math. Meanwhile, the children's urges remain unstanchable. Even as the mass of numerals and mathematical notation swells in the Southern Hemisphere, new doodles and scrawls encroach across North America, the Atlantic, and are now spreading across Europe and into Asia.

But was it not ever so? Weren't their initial reactions to the map similarly self-referential? "I'm tall as the Tasman Sea," my daughter said. When I was three, we, too, had a wall map. The highest country I could reach was Tunisia, and for a while I felt quite a special affinity for that land, believed in a little link between me and it. Isn't that often the way we learn to care about things beyond the borders of our own skin - by playing along the porous boundaries? We admit to our selves the wider world, then commit ourselves to it.

A Sense of Usefulness

2010-01-29T08:28:00.003-05:00

This just in:

Hi Le,

The nicest bug moved into the upstairs bathroom a few days ago. It's not a roach and it's not a cricket and I don't know what it is. A soft brown color, whimsical-looking, as if William Steig had drawn it. Baroque antennae. It's very centered, never furtive, marches from surface to surface with purposeful bug-steps. I figure it's living off dead skin cells, and I find myself heartened by a sense of usefulness.

love,

Mom

A Trip to the Museum

2010-01-12T14:00:00.006-05:00

Yesterday I served as parent chaperone on a fourth grade field trip - a sentence that strikes me as having a quaint, even archaic ring. Perhaps this is partly because the trip itself was to an old-fashioned museum of natural history. And by old-fashioned I guess I mean old. The exhibit space is cramped, creaky and piquant, not touched in any obvious way by the twenty-first century. So that in addition to preserving artifacts of natural history, the place seems also to work as a preserver of museum history. The staircase harks back to an older time, with its open ironwork sidings; a wooden phone booth still occupies part of the second floor landing, although a sign advises regretfully that the phone no longer works; the roomful of glass flowers feels musty and hushed; many of the taxidermied animals are literally coming apart at the seams (the most fragile leak wood chips and bear wide bandages of tape); and ancient, honey-colored insect skeletons hunch and float fantastically in jars of formaldehyde.

I had volunteered for the position one week earlier at the behest of my own fourth-grader, who, however, informed me the day before the trip that he didn't think he was going to be in my group. He said this so gently I became suspicious. "Did you ask to be put in another group?" With precocious, not to say alarming, social grace, he eased past this question, mentioning simply, and not without a kindly smile, that if there were to be another field trip later in the year, he wouldn't mind if I neglected to volunteer.

So it came to be that yesterday morning, standing in the reception area of the museum amid a boiling sea of some hundred and forty elementary school students, along with a handful of teachers and other parent chaperons, I was handed a photocopied scavenger hunt, a map, a brief itinerary, and a quartet of names, none that of my own child, but rather those of his classmates, all of them previously unknown to me, as was I to them. The children and I eyed each other more or less gamely and set off for the first room: gems and minerals. Here reside case upon case of improbable specimens: rocks that look like plastic bubbles and rocks that look like soap; rocks like eggs cracked open to reveal candy centers and rocks like fur sweaters, frozen fire, speckled tongues.

"So what's on the list?" the kids demanded. "What do we have to find?" I, holder of said list, recited the case number and Latinate name of the first specimen they were meant to locate. They dashed off. They were all about the scavenger hunt, all about finding the right case, and did not pause to look or see or wonder at any strange treasure not on the list.

That's not true. There was one boy who kept turning to me and declaring, "This is amazing! This is incredible!" He was plainly bowled over, and blissfully free of any need to disguise that fact.

The last item they were meant to find in this part of the museum was graphite. When they charged over to me, announcing they'd found it and that we could press on, I gave them pause by asking them what it had looked like. "Can you describe it?"

"Well..." said the tallest girl, frowning a moment, at a loss. Then brightly she realized, "I can show you!" and displayed before my eyes a pink digital camera on which she'd captured the image. It dawned on me then, gazing around the room, that they'd nearly all brought cameras, and were indeed all speeding around with them held up to their faces like gas masks, busily accumulating sights never apprehended with the naked eye. Even the wondering boy was busy with his camera. He struck me as fairly tethered to it, deep in its thrall, and he snapped shots exhaustively until, two hours later in the Hall of Mammals, he pronounced, "Battery's dead," and let it hang idle at last from the cord around his neck. "I got two hundred and nineteen, though," he added, and checked with me: "That's pretty good, right?"

How I wanted to scoop him up, scoop all of them up, this brown-eyed boy and the pink-camera girl, and the others in our group who kept forgetting the rules and running, my own son who'd begged me to come and then plainly wished he hadn't, and all of the children milling about the display cases, still half-wild but not for long; I wanted to cup them loosely in my hands like fireflies, just for a moment watch their lights blink on and off up close and free.

Bounded, Boundless

2009-12-21T10:29:00.006-05:00

Carl Larsson

Last week I met a woman of roughly my mother's generation. She was winsome in a white pageboy haircut and a craypaz-pink sweater. Identifying herself as the oldest of five sisters, she remarked that, after close to a lifetime inhabiting the role of problem solver to her younger siblings, she'd grown weary of it and had decided, now that she was nearing her dotage, to start being part of the problem.

A funny line; it won my appreciative laugh. Later I found myself ruminating. Why, in the case of this woman, did becoming "part of the problem" seem such an invigorating, liberating decision, when it's this very sense, that of becoming more of a problem than a help, that so vexes and oppresses my mother? I suppose the answer hinges on the word "decision." That this woman is able to choose whether or not to position herself thus is very likely what allows her to speak of it so wittily. It's only natural that my mother, along with anyone else whose illness might have robbed her of certain abilities - such essential abilities that the end effect is to rob her of part of her identity too - should mind the change, mourn it as another the loss.

Natural, yes. But inevitable?

Yesterday, late in the day, we took the kids for a walk in the woods. I had envisioned a kind of splendor, a kind of dark awe in the face of such tall trees all clotted and weighted with snow, and the cold and the hush and the encroaching gloom. Yet the kids fought and fussed: this one's snowpants were ripped and letting in the snow; that one was grumpy about missing the Patriots game; the other kicked her brother for shaking snow down on her head. They all wanted to know if they could have Burger King for supper. And the noise of them! You couldn't begin to hear the hush of the woods for all the ruckus of their antics.

And then the snow did begin to work a kind of spell on them. One kept sinking to her knees and stretching her neck forward, mouthing creamy peaks off the bushes and low-hanging branches. "Look at the baby deer," she'd cry, meaning herself, her face glowing red and sparkling with the cold and wet. Another kept toppling face-forward to the ground like a bowling pin and remaining there, oddly still, oddly content, for a good minute each time, his body sunk through so that he lay flush with the top of the powder. "It's comfortable," he commented. The oldest ran forward, fleet and soft, and left the path, camouflaging himself behind the muscled gray-brown backs of fallen trees, both his limbs and the trunks patchily capped in white mounds so that he was hard for us to find when we caught up around the bend. Bunches of frozen red berries dangled low. Around the rim of a meadow, trees thrust their gnarled branches into the leaden sky like forks and knives sticking up out of a silverware basket. Tiny and faintly blue along a skin of snow, we saw the pie crust markings of bird feet.

By the time we stopped walking I'd abandoned my notion of how the walk would go, having acknowledged my utter inability to craft it so, just as the kids had abandoned themselves, given themselves over first to strife and complaint, and then to the bounded, boundless world as they met it all around them.

Breaking Bread

2009-11-11T17:33:00.016-05:00

Last night I took five kids between the ages of 9 and 13 to Old Country Buffet. Old Country Buffet is a restaurant chain that specializes in being inexpensive. You pay according to your age. You eat, as the name of the place indicates, all you want. Last night, the younger kids were each charged eight dollars and change, and the older two were full price, eleven and change, which is a bargain considering what they packed away: macaroni and cheese; pepperoni pizza; big, pale slices of roast beef; tacos; cherry Jello; mashed potatoes, noodles and gravy; soft, pillowy rolls; garlic bread; french fries; roasted potato; ice cream with whipped cream, chocolate chips, crushed cookies, butterscotch sauce, hot fudge and strawberry sauce on top, chocolate cake with chocolate icing; and many cups of peculiar-hued fountain drinks (they'd fill their cups one part cola, one part Hi-C, two parts root beer, one part orange soda, and so on).

I've been to Old Country Buffet, the one right next to the DMV and down from the store that specializes in clothing for the workplace, maybe five times in the past five years, and I marvel at it each time I go.

The kids out and out love it. It's fun to watch them eat, once annually, unhindered by parental or dietary constraints. It reminds me of those daydreams we all used to have: what if the whole world were made of chocolate, and I could just pick up my pencil and chew, take a bite out of my math book, lick the desk. They fill their plates with one set of wonders, then go back and fill a second round of plates with more.

The staff and clientele all seem to have stepped out of a period or foreign film. Last night our clearer - there are no servers, because everything's buffet, but there are clearers who come by and remove the used plates regularly - told us her name was Gussie. She had gray hair but was not particularly old, chronologically. Maybe sixty. And yet she seemed more like the sexagenarians I'd met in my youth, back in the seventies. She had an ineffably archaic aspect about her. I went ahead and asked, because she was friendly, if Gussie was short for Augusta, and she said it was, that Augusta had been her grandmother's name, and it seemed to give her pleasure to say it.

Many of the people who eat at Old Country look like they have left their own old countries behind. You hear people speaking languages of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Eastern Europe, South America. You see women in head scarves and families with toothless babies and toothless grandparents. The white American-born people who eat at Old Country tend to be obese, or very old, or prodigiously tattooed. Last night there was a young white man with a true bowl cut - it really looked as though someone had to have put a bowl upside down on his head and trimmed around it - there with a frail woman he called "Gramma,"who kept fingering the tripod cane she had balanced on the end of the table. There was an Asian woman, neither old nor young, eating all by herself, plate after plate, slowly, deliberately. There was a large family - an intriguing quantity of fathers and mothers and grandparents and children - that sat at two tables pushed together and spoke - I don't know, Turkish? Farsi? Kazakh? There was a middle aged man with the delicate build and high cheekbones of an Ethiopian or Somali with two little children, one girl, one boy. The man was wearing a suit, no tie.

The walls are decorated with more than a dozen framed prints, every one a reproduction of a different Norman Rockwell painting.

I am humbled by this place. I feel a perverse gratitude as I watch the children I have brought here fill themselves with soft starch and glistening grease, with sugar and salt, blithely sating their stomachs, their desires. An embarrassed gratitude - embarrassed not only because the food is unhealthy, and not only because I am aware that none of these children has ever known real scarcity, as, I imagine, most of those around us have, but because I fear we do not belong here, I fear we are interlopers. The children eat away. They rise and come back two or three or four times, grinning over their bounty, unconflicted. They do not register, certainly, the sorrow that I feel here, the slow, terrible melancholy of the place. Yet I feel another kind of gratitude, too, one that is not perverse, one that confuses me, tugs and pulls at my core, carrying a sense of sharp beauty as well as desolation, a quality of small hope.

I am moved by the families and the solo diners, eating with diligence or with pleasure, moved also by the cashier and the manager and the table clearers and kitchen workers. I am moved by the place itself, with its perhaps well-intentioned but somehow insultingly wrong decor: the posters of an Americana that never existed lining the walls. I am moved by the wall-mounted Purell dispenser near the islands of food; by the signs explaining the rules; by the smooth green Formica and the darkly patterned, sensible carpeting; by the effortful but also, I think, genuine aura of optimism, of pride. I would like to think - a shyly formed thought - that we are all countrymen in this room, eating side by side.

Why Are My Characters So 'Nice'?

2009-11-03T09:50:00.006-05:00

I'm not altogether sure my characters are, but the Women's Review of Books invited me to post a little piece about this on their blog. You can read it here:

WOMEN = BOOKS.

This new site ("a blog about women's books, politics, and life") is full of a great, vibrant jumble of voices, ideas, experiences and perspectives.

Rain of Cake

2009-10-13T08:52:00.015-05:00

The Tree, Sandi Rigby

My parents went walking at Pocantico. This was maybe two weeks ago. This is all I know:

There were high winds blowing. There were cows, grazing in a field ringed by trees. My parents heard a great crack, and then the earth shook once under their feet, and then it continued shaking. They turned. Cows were running, pounding across the field. A huge tree had fallen. It lay on the ground, its branches still covered with green leaves.

Then as my parents watched the cows came back. I picture them not ambling but returning at a trot, with purpose, dog-like, their terror forgotten. As though they were at a banquet where a new heaping platter had just been delivered to table: they gathered round, they hastened to eat.

I was immediately jealous when my mother told me the story. I wanted to feel that sweeping wind, to hear the crack, to know the power with which the tree fell to the ground, to feel it in my own legs, to see the cows run and then see them return, see them munch the delicacies newly within reach.

There's a story about me when I was a little girl, riding around in the country in the back of a car with an ice cream cone. Someone must have told me, when handing over the cone, to mind I didn't let any ice cream drip. In the story my mother, up front, says, "Lele, look at the cows," and I say, "I can't. I'm being responsible."

When my mother told me the story, I felt an immediate lurching greed: I wanted to see the hole in the earth where the roots had ripped free, to glimpse proof of that hard-to-grasp truth, that the hidden roots spread themselves just as wide and deep as does the fanning flourish of the crown. I wanted to be there, to feel in my bones how the event was neither happy nor sad. Neither just nor unjust. Not fit, in fact, for any human gloss.

But almost as soon as I was jealous, I was not. I was glad it had been my mother and not me. I thought: I wish it on her, wish it for her, and if all my portion of life's feasts could be put on her plate for the duration, I would have that too. Anyway, she would tell them back to me, so I would have my cake and also I would eat it.

But I realize (just now, writing that): I do so every day. So do we all. There's the thing and there's the story of the thing - and also, I suppose the picture of the thing and the song of the thing and the dance of the thing and the rhyme of the thing and the dream of the thing and the collage of the thing and the sculpture of the thing, and even before we come to the end of one thing, a thousand new ones have rained upon us, and they each are limitless, so long as we pass them (this perhaps our true responsibility) from hand to hand. As limitless as we like.

Sonnet To a Writing Teacher

2009-09-22T17:23:00.007-05:00

Chrysanthemum, Piet Mondrian

Jim. He had a funny grin. A looped light
he shone - sickle slice, moonlike, long of chin -
whenever struck by surpassing delight.
Which was often. We found we wanted in
on it, that freely felt, freely avowed
(what else to call it?) joy. And so we came
with pencils poised, but first he read aloud:
of stolen plums, of wheelbarrows and rain,
of host and guest who spoke no word, of white
chrysanthemum. The wonder was when time
arrived for fledgling flight - for us to write -
we weren't afraid, though green, to start the climb.
Once I tried thanking him. He'd only say,
'Shucks, all I did was get out of the way.'

The references: two by William Carlos Williams: "This is Just to Say;" "The Red Wheelbarrow"
and a haiku by Oshima Ryota (1718-1787)

Prestidigitation

2009-09-17T08:35:00.004-05:00

Even the manner in which he has acquired these new skills seems magical. He comes home one day with the ability to make a card disappear. Just a regular, ordinary playing card, he says. Right? And lets us touch it, test it, waits for our assent.

Then one, two, three, he waves it in the air and it disappears. Vanishes. There is a beauty to this, an airiness and simplicity that I have forgotten, though surely in my life I have seen sleight of hand performed many times. Never before by a child of mine, though. He's good, one has to agree. His poker face punctuated by a dirty-blond mop and a glint of silver braces. One, two, three, the ace of clubs is nowhere.

Then, before we have finished gasping: voila! he taps his head and the card flutters like a paper bird from the nest of his hair.

Where did you learn that? we ask, and he shrugs.
No, really, we press.
I don't know. His new baritone sounds sullen as ever, but he is suppressing something golden: a little well of honest pride. As he turns his shoulder we catch a glimpse of him basking in it. The dark brown eyes glinting with knowledge, the secrets they have spied held close to the vest.

He shows us another. This one requires our surrendering our cell phone. He holds it in one hand, a large pink balloon in the other. Presto. The cell phone has passed into the balloon, is altered, reimagined, encased in pink.

Amazing, we say.
He blinks modestly. The merest of shrugs.

In fact, he's been performing magical acts, metamorphoses, for many months now. It's not only cards and cell phones he manipulates: he has made himself disappear. At least, the old self, the familiar child, has vanished as surely as the ace of clubs. Like the cell phone, it's been swallowed, enveloped by a new material, something masking yet not altogether unpliant, something transforming yet not eradicating. The original remains. The magician gives a slight bow. We in the audience sit open-mouthed, at once disoriented and admiring, maddened and pleasurably confounded. Belatedly, we think to applaud -- but hush: already, he's beginning his next trick.

The Fear

2009-08-19T07:52:00.006-05:00

Last night my youngest came home speaking in tongues.
"Wookie 39," he said. And, "Tie 5." He also said things like, "Spread formation," and, "QB bootleg, pass center to four."
I would have taken his temperature if he hadn't eventually handed me his playbook and said, "Can you quiz me, please?"
It was by then nine o'clock, and still close to ninety degrees in our kitchen. He stood by the table, freshly showered, wearing pajama bottoms and nothing else, eating alternately from a bowl of pretzels and a bowl of strawberries.
I took a look at the playbook. I looked up and said, "How am I going to know if you're doing it right?"
Patiently, kindly, he came around and explained what the different circles and dotted lines and arrows meant, taught me how to parse the diagrams, how to know what the nine-hole was, and the tight end and which symbol meant pivot.
"Okay," I said. "Uh...how about Q11?"
Somehow, his body knew. His feet began to trace on our kitchen floor the exact pattern in the playbook; his torso swiveled in the correct direction; he mimed throwing on a diagonal, sent an invisible football crashing through the window over the kitchen sink.

Imagine you've grown up Muslim and your child comes home asking to be quizzed on his haftorah. Imagine you've grown up Jewish and your child comes home asking to be quizzed on his catechism. Imagine you've grown up going on peace marches and your child comes home in full dress uniform, asking if -- well, he wouldn't ask you anything then, would he? He'd just hold the door for you, break your heart with his cool, impenetrable chivalry.

This is me as a football mom: I am a tiny bit heartbroken, but in truth, mostly just astonished. It's an astonishment no less potent for my realizing its ubiquity, realizing it's a puzzlement all parents, at one point or another, to share: "I produced this person. How could he, how could she, be so different from what I'd imagined? So different from me?"

When I was pregnant with my first, I hoped unreservedly it would be a girl. A boy would be so foreign. What on earth would I do with one? How would I love it, how would it love me? Although I'd grown up practicing the discipline of embracing other, loving other, going toward otherness both within myself and among people I met, what I experienced during that first pregnancy was, I now recognize, nothing other than the most primal, ancient, reptilian-brain fear of otherness, wedded to a profound, frightening doubt about the extent of my own ability to love, to connect, to understand. I had not known I harbored either of these fears. That turned out to be the first gift I received from my firstborn. Even before he was born, even before I met him, he introduced me to fears I hadn't acknowledged and thus, to myself on a deeper level than I'd previously known.

The second gift was instantaneous upon his birth, and it was another astonishment: I loved him immediately and I loved him tidally.

This experience set the pattern, I see now; this is always the undercurrent, the leitmotif, of parenting. In ways small and large, the children introduce me - and reintroduce me and reintroduce me - to my fears. And each time (they are born magicians, it seems) they perform a little trick - I never quite catch the motion - a flick of the wrist? a thing with mirrors? - at any rate, some sleight of hand that at the last minute manages to tilt the image, cast it in a new light, so that nothing is quite as I had pictured it. The world looks different, changed, more full of possibility, even, than it was before.

Last night, little football boy and I ran through all his plays together while simultaneously he polished off all the rest of the pretzels and strawberries. Then he went and sprayed himself all over with the plant spritzer and stood, giggling, dripping, before the fan. He has a great big red canvas bag now, given him by the league, for porting all his copious protective gear, including a girdle with five pads and a plastic cup, a kind of breast plate that (it now strikes me) is reminiscent of the knight costumes he was always fashioning for himself when he was much smaller, and of course the enormous shoulder pads and helmet that are emblematic of the sport ("Hit me," he says, when he has them on and is feeling invincible, "Go ahead. Harder. I couldn't even feel that."). There remains for me an ineffable sadness to all this, but it is a sorrow touched by lightness, or by light. We speak of heartbreak as though it were all sorrow, a thing better avoided, but what if the fissures are necessary, the only means by which new light may shine through?

Chemo

2009-07-22T09:10:00.004-05:00

We leave the house at 8:30 in the teeming rain. The air is therefore slightly festive, as my mother loves the rain. I take an umbrella but my mother demurs, preferring just her raincoat: less encumbering. If she didn't have a battery of medical appointments today, she would likely go for a duck-walk. If she didn't have medical appointments and also if she had more energy.

We go first to Sloan Kettering's main campus. I was here three years ago, when she had her cancer surgery, a procedure called, with a bracing absence of euphemism, debulking. I trail my mother as she wends expertly now through corridors, up and down elevators, in and out of various reception areas, office suites and locker rooms. Registration. X-ray. Waiting room. Examining table. I am overwhelmed by the ease with which she navigates, the ease with which she greets technicians, doctors, nurses, fellows. Inquiring about their families. Joking with them about the weather, the scheduling mishaps, the broken light fixture, their bedside manners. I am a little in awe of her confidence and grace. I think I am getting a taste of what a parent must feel like, visiting her child at college for the first time, getting a tour of the dorms, the classrooms, the quad. A new world that is alien to the parent, utterly familiar to the child. Except she is the parent and I am the child.

We must hurry through these appointments because my mother has chemo scheduled at the 53rd Street clinic at noon. Of course, the phrase "we must hurry" is meaningless, as my mother is not in charge of the pace. She delivers herself to these buildings, these rooms, where she is repeatedly instructed to wait. At last her morning appointments are over and she guides us through a rabbit warren of not-quite public space, basement tunnels populated mostly by people wearing official badges and uniforms or white coats, until we come out on the other side of the building, on First Ave., just in time to catch the jitney, a jolly word. It's parked at the curb, a little gold bus that runs between the main campus, the parking garage, and 53rd Street. Ordinarily my mother would walk to chemo from here, nearly 20 blocks, but today there is the issue of time. We board, sit, look out the window. Outside the rain is still spattering. I can feel her wanting to be in it, wanting to walk, feel the unseasonably cool summer air on her face, feel the drops of rain.

In front of us sit a man and a little boy. I think they may be grandfather and grandson. Who is sick, I wonder? Who have they been visiting? The grandfather says, with interest, "Look out there! See that?" A little white terrier wearing a lime green raincoat.

Two white men in their forties sit side by side, one tall, one short. The short one complains in a loud voice about the pharmacists at Duane Reade. He complains in a loud voice about the rain. In a loud voice, he asks his partner how he feels. Through all of this the partner says nothing. I don't see his face, only the back of his thin neck. The short man leans over and gives the tall man a kind of contorted jitney-embrace. "You're cold," he says in a loud voice. "We'll get you a blanket when we get home."

At 53rd Street, I follow my mother inside, past the waterfall in the lobby, past the basket of fat round hard candies on the reception desk. I have been here once before, with my children, who were terribly impressed by the waterfall, and even more so by the basket of fat round hard candies.

Here again, my mother is some kind of connoisseur, a tour guide in what has become her own country: graceful, swift, smiling, expert. We board the far elevator: less congested. She manages to check in with the receptionist who is the friendliest of them all. In the waiting room, she finds seats by the window, where we can see the rain.

I meet Harriet, her friend, also waiting for chemo. Harriet is beautiful, tall and straight. Her features are delicate and clear and her face seems very focused, in the manner of a lighthouse beam. My mother met her a few years ago, while waiting for one of her first chemo sessions. Harriet has the same kind of cancer as my mother. When my mother received her diagnosis, she learned that half the people with advanced ovarian don't live much more than five years past diagnosis. Harriet's in her eleventh year. It was Harriet who told my mother, the first day they met, that she didn't worry about her health. If there was any evidence, she said, that suggested worrying might help, even a little, she would by all means go ahead and worry.

The greatest worry may be erasure. The slow, steady draining away of presence, of mattering, of selfhood. At home my mother has made a photo gallery - a modest assemblage of a dozen pictures scotch-taped to the door leading to the garage. Photo of socks she has been knitting. Photo of grass she grew in a basket. Photo of a string of origami cranes she made as a graduation present for her oldest granddaughter. Photo of herself, teaching a card game to her youngest granddaughter. Photo of her and my dad. Photo of herself scattering her own mother's ashes in the north woods just last month. Things she has made, things she has done, people in whose lives she figures explicitly, crucially. It's a form of documentation, she says. Evidence that she is still in the world. Evidence that she still is, active verb, in the world.

Late in the day, chemo finishes. Out the window, down below, rush hour traffic has begun. The cleaning crew has wheeled out mops and buckets. In the waiting room, people are still waiting to be called in for treatment. We ride the elevator down, and passing through the lobby overhear the tail end of a conversation. A middle aged black security guard is talking to an elderly white woman in a head scarf. He is saying, "I missed you. Take care of yourself. I love you, darling."

My mother tells me one time she arrived for a chemo appointment and the young man in the reception area keyed her name into his computer only to pronounce, "No record of you."

My mother reenacts how she gasped, how she brought a hand to her chest. "Really?"

"No, just joking."

"That's a terrible joke," she said she told him, but trying to smile through the words, trying to recover her equilibrium even as her heart sped up, even as the great dread continued to flood her veins. She didn't want to burden him with the weight, the understanding of what his words had done.

They May Not Mean To But They Do

2009-06-18T11:11:00.009-05:00

The other night I was working at my desk when the thirteen year old asked for help with an assignment. It's rare nowadays that he asks for anything that doesn't involve a router, remote or, you know, gigabytes, so I was pretty thrilled. Then it turned out he wasn't simply asking for help with an assignment; it was an English assignment. And it wasn't any old English assignment; it was choosing a poem. For declamation.
"Declamation?"
"We have to memorize it and say it out loud."
"Recitation?" I suggested.
"Declamation."
Whatever.
The only requirement was that it be a minimum of fifteen lines. I started pulling books off the shelves.
Robert Louis Stevenson?
Too babyish.
Neruda?
But those we looked at were either too sexy or too long.
e. e. cummings? I showed him the mudluscious one I'd loved as a kid.
Maybe, he said. I think my teacher likes him.
One of Shakespeare's sonnets?
Too short, he reminded me, not even looking. Twelve lines and a rhyming couplet for a total of fourteen.
Oh yeah, I said, impressed.
We looked at Osip Mandelstam, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens. We paged through Wilbur, Simic, Frost, Szymborska.
Okay, I'm lying. It wasn't "we." He'd long since drifted off to watch t.v.
"You don't have to keep doing this, Mom," he called from the other room. "Although it seems like you're having fun."

I miss him, this kid. I feel like a sap, but I do. He can bring me to tears with his woodenness, the way he grunts when I greet him, the way, when I ask how his day was, he looks at me like I've asked him to cut off his hands. "Normal," he grudgingly replies.
"He hates me," I say at the end of some days, curling onto the couch beside my boyfriend.
"He doesn't hate you."
"He never tells me anything anymore."
"I didn't tell my mother anything when I was thirteen."
"He's done with me."
"He's not done with you."
I try to come up with new complaints, fresh ways of looking at it, if only to spare my boyfriend the tedium of my litany, but by late at night my mind is dull, and I usually wrap it up with a simple reprise of, "He hates me."

Of course there's an aspect of humor in it all, an over-the-topness to my moans, most of which qualify as self-pity, a rite every bit as inevitable and trite, I suppose, as is my son's rite of separating from me.
But a piece of it is heartfelt grief over what we have lost, my son and I. Well. I.

So the other night, when I was sitting on the rug with books of poems scattered all about and thought of Philip Larkin's "This Be the Verse," I decided to show it to my son even though it's only three stanzas, four lines each, for a total of twelve:

This Be The Verse


They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

He liked it. He liked it enough that he brought it in to show his teacher. He liked it enough that he somehow convinced her to let him use it for his declamation, never mind that it fell short of the length requirement.
"Maybe it makes up for it in other ways," I said.
"She's making me say 'messed up,' though. 'They mess you up," and 'they were messed up.'"
"Oh." Public school. "I guess she probably has to."
"Yeah."

That was it. We never discussed the poem's content, or its meaning (meanings), or what meaning lay in the fact that I was the one who introduced him to it. I don't worry that the final line might worry him. Or worse, instruct him. I think he's at the age to see the humor in it, and maybe -- I should hope -- the pain, too, without being wed to the words' literal meaning.

The other day he came home and I asked how his day was and he grunted something that, upon questioning, was reported to have been "Fine," except by the time he repeated it intelligibly he was so put out by my requests for him to speak intelligibly that he snarled it. But a little while later he handed me a piece of paper with the grading rubric for the declamation assignment, and on top his teacher had written 98.

Mr. Larkin: bless your contrary heart.

Serendipity

2009-06-08T10:19:00.005-05:00

The Long Black Veil (detail), 2003-2008, 27" x 27"
rose petals, handmade rose beads, synthetic hair, guitar-string ball-ends,
pennies, blue jeans, cotton fabric, rings, bone beads & buttons,
garnets, synthetic pearls, & thread
Copyright © 2008 Donna Sharrett

Early this spring I posted an entry called Authenticity III – What Does it Matter in the End, inspired by “The Library,” an image created by the artist Lori Nix. To my surprise, it generated unusually passionate and abundant reader responses. Some faulted me for reproducing the image and criticized what I had written about it; others found value in my words and expressed gladness at having been introduced to the artist’s work.

By far the most unexpected result of the post, however, was that it led to an invitation to visit the artist’s studio. This came about through the warmth and generosity of another artist, Donna Sharrett, who midwifed the event.

Donna and I began to correspond last fall, when she, having found this blog, wrote and invited me to visit her website. I did, and responded to her and her creative work much as she had responded to me and mine; we recognized in one another a kindred spirit.

When, in March, the small uproar broke out over my Lori Nix posting - just at the moment, actually, when I was seriously contemplating taking down the entire blog - Donna wrote from out of the blue to say that, oddly enough, she knew Lori. She guessed that, far from objecting to my having reproduced and written about her work, Lori would get a kick out of it. In fact, she said, she’d call her up and ask.

One thing led to another, and on a rainy Thursday morning in May, at the Pavel Zoubok GalleryWest 23^rd Street in Manhattan, I met Donna for the first time in person. My mother, who is in so many ways the spirit behind all of this – by which I mean not simply the blog, and not simply my having found my way to writing in the first place, but the fact that I find myself living a life in which unlikely connections often get made – came too. The three of us spent an hour in the gallery, which we’d chosen as a meeting place because it was then exhibiting Donna’s show, Reverb, a series of mixed media pieces comprising, among other things, guitar string ball-ends, rose petals, bone beads, blue jeans, damask linens and hair. The more you look, the more you want to look even closer, and my mother and I took advantage of the luxury of having the artist there beside us: we asked countless questions, practical and not. Eventually we continued the conversation over lunch in a pub on the corner, and then we all rode the subway to Brooklyn.

Lori’s place was in the most literal sense wondrous. A rabbit warren of partially realized dreams. We went shyly around the rooms as she showed us her various workstations, each one overspilling its boundaries, and we drank in everything with eyes - the cliché feels apt - like saucers. Magical objects everywhere. Miniature music stands and folding chairs set up for an outdoor evening concert. An entire wall painted like the sky, in two different kinds of weather. A hand-made escalator. A wall-mounted taxidermied squirrel. A mid-size tree just beginning to turn autumn colors. An anatomical cow. An armchair half-hidden by books and art supplies, and lounging in it a live cat. A boxful of books, dozens and dozens and dozens of them, each roughly the size of a piece of Bazooka gum, each cut from foam and covered and painted to look like it wore a real dust jacket. Here, said the artist, as though extending a bowl of potato chips, Have some. She let us dip our hands in to sift through the texts - all of them blank as sugar cubes, yet somehow full, one guessed, of the most fantastical tales - and remove a few of the tiny volumes to take home. They were - tears came up behind my eyes - the very books she’d used in “The Library,” the work that had led me to her, the one I’d written about in this space.

No Other

2009-05-26T19:18:00.014-05:00

The question comes up, who among us is Other?

The question is not abstract. It has never been abstract. As a fourth grader, I listened while my best friends sang mockingly about another girl, a classmate with an unusual jaw, an atypically flat face. I don't know if her condition had a name; we did not in any case think of it as a condition, but as an Otherness, a reason for some of us to sing a mocking song.

Recently, among colleagues, the question arose in reference to an incarcerated individual. Did the fact of his violent crime render him Other? Some of us thought yes. Some of us thought no. None of us had met him. None of us knew his story beyond the details in a couple of newspaper articles, and then the versions of those details re-reported to one another, amplified by people's prior experiences with violence.

Yesterday, in conversation with a relative, the question arose in reference to all the ordinary citizens who helped the Nazis. Had these people become crazy, had they metamorphosed under extraordinary circumstances into Other? Or were they precisely you and me, were they always only ever you and me?

As a child I dreamed of being a union organizer, an abolitionist, a partisan fighter, a conscientious objector, a member of the Abraham Lincoln brigade, a suffragette, a Freedom Rider, Wonder Woman. I grew up loving parents who made it possible for me to hold such figures in esteem. But I'm no absolutist. If I'd grown up in the antebellum south with parents who owned enslaved people, I think it plausible, even likely, that I would have upheld the institution of slavery as moral. If I'd grown up wealthy, with parents who made their fortune by paying low wages to people working in unsafe conditions, I imagine I might have developed a belief in the legitimacy of differential standards of living based on inherent ability.

It's not simply that I can imagine being a slave owner, an exploitative boss, a Nazi, a Mujahid, a murderer. It's that I can't not imagine it. To fail to imagine these possibilities would be to fail to imagine that we all exist on the same moral and experiential spectrum. It would be, for me, the act of grossest inhumanity, a giving up, a giving in to despair. It would be - I mean this literally - the death of me.

Today I was going into a shop. I was approaching the door, and several paces ahead of me a man and his eleven- or twelve-year-old son were approaching the same door. As I drew closer, the man stopped short. He stopped his son short, too, with a hand at the boy's chest. They looked at me. The man gestured. He even bent his head in a slight bow. "Please, go ahead."

They were black. I am white. I tried to make the best of a sickening situation; that is, I suddenly felt sick. I smiled as humbly as I could manage, murmured my thanks, proceeded to the door, and, pulling it open, stepped back and gestured in turn. "After you," I urged. But when the man demurred, as I'd known he would, I, not wanting to offend or to contradict the lesson he was imparting to his son, did not press. I entered the shop first.

My own children, my three white children, are routinely rude in public. They blow bubbles into their drinks in restaurants. They bicker and cavort in shops. They speed up to go through a door ahead of the meandering elderly. I reprimand them, but lightly. That is our privilege: the world smiles indulgently on these white, blond-haired, badly behaved children, and I never need fear for them, never need fear they will be summarily ill-judged by strangers, teachers, policemen, shopkeepers.

The man who put out his hand and touched his son's chest to keep him from walking was protecting him. He was protecting his son from the false belief that he had as much right to claim a place on the sidewalk as a white lady. He was protecting his son from the still-real consequences, in 2009, of a black boy assuming equal space in the world as a white boy.

I went away sick over our Otherness, that of the father and son and me. This divide, originating so obviously not inside us but outside and then cast upon us like a net, a grid, bars - this is an Otherness I recognize.

To fight Otherness - both the very real Otherness imposed on individuals by systems and institutions, and upheld by individuals invested in those systems and institutions; and also the perceived Otherness that we assign people with whom we fail to connect through the power of empathic imagination - is our great work.

The paradox is that this fight sometimes enlists us in the work of creating divides. When, in fourth grade, in quavering voice, I begged my friends to stop singing, I rendered myself Other. A fissure split the very ground between them and me, and I was flooded with shame for having caused it.

Ways of Passing

2009-05-19T08:12:00.009-05:00

Two weeks ago my parents attended a memorial service for 26 people. My parents did not know the dead, nor any of their friends and family (almost none of whom, in any case, attended). The service took place in an auditorium at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan, and the memorialized were people who had donated their bodies to be cadavers for medical students. Those doing the memorializing were mainly the students themselves, more than a hundred of them: the class of 2012.

The service was coordinated by their instructor, Dr. Estomih Mtui, director of the school’s Program in Anatomy and Body Visualization, and when my mother arrived (she got there early; my father would be meeting her from work), he greeted her and showed her where to sit, in the area reserved for faculty and guests.

She watched a quartet of students who would be performing a choral piece; they were doing a last-minute sound check. Dr. Mtui came over and asked my mother if she would say a few words at the end of the service. She was taken aback, yet she knew she wanted to have the nerve to say yes. She asked whether she could decide at the last moment. Dr. Mtui said that would be fine.

My mother was there as a future donor – the second future donor in the history of the school, she was informed, to attend the annual service.

Bit by bit, the rest of the students and faculty arrived, and also my father, and the family of one of the donors. The service began with remarks by faculty and clergy, and musical offerings by students. Then came the Flower Presentation Ceremony. Twenty-six clusters of students -- a foursome for each cadaver -- came forward one at a time. A designated speaker from each group delivered brief remarks. A few of them chose to read a poem. Each made a statement of gratitude to the individual, whom they called by name (first names only: there were an Agnes and a Mildred, a Harold and a Norman, two Helens, an Esther). The students spoke of the bodies as their teachers. They talked about the individuality of each body, their apprehension of the excellent, inevitable dissimilarities. Each group laid a bouquet for its cadaver on a table. The bouquets, my mother made a point of noticing, were not all the same.

Near the end, my parents were called up on the dais and my mother, too, was presented with flowers. Then Dr. Mtui called her to the microphone. My father speaks publicly quite a lot; my mother rarely does. Actually, I cannot recall a single instance of her speaking in public in my lifetime. This is her best memory of what she said:

I'm in my fourth year of making my way with advanced ovarian cancer. It took me about a year to come to the decision to donate my body. I read about it and mostly just thought about it. I was pretty much decided, but one piece was holding me back: the stories I'd heard about jokes and levity on the students' part regarding the bodies. When I mentioned this to a friend, she laughed and said "Oh what fun." and then everything melted for me and I was fine with it. I simply felt we're all in this together and it's all okay.

I want to tell you what it's been like for me attending this service. I've loved seeing your faces and hearing your voices and seeing the soft side of you. I hope you take good care of it. It's amazing for me to see medicine-as-science sharing space with things of human spirit. I'm very happy whenever I think that my last act in this life will be to become a part of this. Thank you for the opportunity to be here.

Telling me afterward, separately, about how long the people clapped after she finished, both my parents sounded quietly shaken. My mother would later write:

I wanted to march right up to the brink of my physical end and peer down in. I didn’t know what I would find, but I wanted to know it. For a while, sitting there alone in the dimmed light and hushed pre-service murmurs, I felt like I’d stopped being a person and had become chaos, stone and dust and liquid all at once. If I moved or breathed or had a thought, I’d crack open and disappear. Then the service began and the words and meaning tugged at me. I don’t know now what was said, but I realized that the end of my body was no longer about me. It had as large a setting as I chose to allow. It was about the – not my -- life cycle, about the beauty and rightness and excellence of the pattern of life and death. And how splendid that it could actually be useful! I could join the large community of past and future donors. I could join the lives of a roomful of young doctors-in-the-making. And join something else wordless and beyond. I found myself awash in a sense of peace and well-being and certainty and gratitude about being a donor. And this may be crazy, but I somehow think there will be a sort of unobservable, unquantifiable stream of joy pouring out of my dead molecules that semester and circling around the ceiling of the lab up under the fluorescent lights.

Most of the story, however, she told me on the phone, about an hour after the service. She was at chemo then, where, having come directly from the service, she'd arrived with the bouquet from the medical students. She’d given it to the nurses. The blooms would live, while they lived, at the nurses’ station, for their pleasure and also that of the patients and doctors and visitors and custodians, all those who happened to pass.

Notes:
Anyone interested in learning more about donating can contact Mike LeVasseur, the Anatomical gift coordinator at Weill Cornell Medical College. He can be reached at: 212-746-5677, or mil2015@med.cornell.edu.

The painting above, by Karl-Friedrich Schinkel, was a set decoration for Mozart's Magic Flute.

Builds Strong Backs

2009-04-29T09:31:00.018-05:00

About a year ago, we gave the oldest child a wall.

The back stairs wall, to be precise, the one connecting our unit with the cellar. I'm up and down those stairs nearly every day with a load of wash in my arms. In fine weather, the kids are up and down more often than that, taking them two at a time, letting the screen door bang shut as they go searching out stilts and scooters in the damp, crumbling garage, or tracking in mud and grass on their way back to the kitchen for glasses of water.

We gave the child the wall to paint. This came about after a year or two of his sporadic musings-aloud that he'd like to paint the walls of his room. A forest mural, he thought. Or an under-water scene. Or large blue polka dots. The plan kept shifting. Having ample experience of his pattern of embarking on fantastic projects only to find ourselves, at least some of the time, then living with the detritus of his supplies (paper cuttings, bits of tape and wire, snips of pvc tubing, cotton swabs, carefully disemboweled ball point pens, the odd battery attached to a motor removed from some ancient, broken toy) and a half-completed project languishing in a corner of the living room, we offered in the service of his undertaking not, initially, the walls of his room but those of the back stairwell. After registering mild dissatisfaction, he accepted.

For a while he went like gangbusters, and it was beautiful to see him apply that particular brand of intense, problem-solving ingenuity he has. He found images of old cereal box designs online and decided these would make a fine subject for reproduction. He printed them out in miniature, then readied himself to transfer the images, enlarged, onto the wall. He penciled the outlines of boxes, following the sloping line of the wainscoting and using a t-square and algebra to get the proportions and angles just right. My mother bequeathed him an old cookie tin full of little bottles of acrylic paint in dozens of colors. He applied blue painter's tape to the borders, fashioned newspaper tarpaulins, helped himself to a paper plate that would serve as his painter's palette. He painted three cereal boxes and then lost interest.

For something like eleven months, then, we lived with the stalled artifacts of the project cluttering up the stairway. The newspapers, the tape, the jar of brushes, the print-outs of cereal boxes, the tin of paints, the paper plate with its caked-on, festively colorful splotches of paint -- for eleven months I navigated these items every time I passed, clothes-laden, on my way to or from the washing machine. We maneuvered around the supplies every time we used the back door to take out the trash or recycling, every time we went went looking for wiffle balls or jump ropes in the garage.

And every time he declared himself bored, we'd say, "Why don't you paint another cereal box?" and he'd answer, "I'm not really in the mood." Finally one day I asked, "Do you mind if other people paint them?" and he gave -- not so much his blessing as a noncommittal shrug that translated as permission. So I tried to entice the other kids. "No, thanks," they'd always say. I thought about doing it myself, but there was always some chore demanding my time and attention.

Then a couple of weeks ago, my parents came to visit, and my mother and I just sort of looked at each other one morning and picked up and went and stood on the back steps and painted for an hour or two straight. I copied one of the old designs my son had found. It's for Beech Nut Oatmeal, and features, incongruously, a rabbit in overalls pushing a wheelbarrow of enormous carrots. My mother made up her own cereal box. Actually, she made up her own cereal: Snow Flakes. Keep Frozen, her box says. And: Builds Strong Backs.

It's so her. Not only making up her own thing, but that thing being snow. My mother, the snow lover. The lover of shoveling snow. Of making physical demands on her body and rising to those demands. She has always relished her muscles, her limbs, been grateful for the ability to inhabit and exercise with appetite, with zest, the full bounty of her earthly body. It's so much of who she is: the way she embraces manual labor, physical work. For years she had a scrap of paper tacked up on the wall above her bed bearing the Benedictine motto, "To labor is to pray."

The painting itself was physical work, and I began to worry just a bit, about her being on her feet so long, kind of scrunched in the narrow turn in the stairwell. She'd been through two rounds of her new chemo regimen, and although her hair wasn't yet coming out in handfuls again, some bone pain had set in, some energy flagged. I thought I could see, after a while - after I had finished my cereal box and was hanging about, seated on a step, waiting for her to be done - the strain on her face. I suggested she take a break, knowing even as I spoke that she would not heed me. She was, plainly, living at that moment entirely within this one large snowflake she'd painted and was trying to get right. And after that there was the matter of finishing the lettering. And getting the falling snowflakes to look randomly spaced. And then, where was that tube of the blue - not the turquoise-y one, but the dark denim color?

I was torn between the desire to be protective and the desire not to patronize. I made little murmurs about her stopping, sitting down, having something to eat. At last, perhaps twenty minutes after she did confess to feeling light-headed, she agreed to be done. I think we both took some pleasure in her native stubbornness, her refusal to quit when her body first sent signals of being tired.

There's a silly little thing about me and the back stairs, which is that for as long as we've lived here, but especially since my mother became sick, every single time I go up and down to do the wash, I am purposeful about not minding the chore. I am willfully conscious of relishing, instead, the physical labor, of taking pleasure in the workings of my muscles and heart and lungs. My mother doesn't know it, but she is always with me there, on the quiet, yellowish back stairs. Climbing them with an armload of clothes is my version of shoveling snow. My version of prayer, my mother-hymn.

Now when I climb them I not only feel her in the air, in the silent stillness, in my body's labor - I see her, too: her hand, in the snowflakes she painted, in the shovel stuck in a frozen mound, in the lettering of the words. In the words themselves, so carefully chosen. In the not-quite random dabs of falling snow.

The Ombudsman's Reply

2009-04-10T08:28:00.003-05:00

(Ahem. I'm not really the ombudsman, let me just say up front. Regrettably, this operation isn't of sufficient size or stature to employ someone in that position on a regular basis. However, in an effort to address a recently identified need in the area of responding to reader criticism, the regular author of this blog will attempt to take on the role of public editor for a few minutes. I will now apply a neat little mustache with spirit gum to my upper lip in the interest of helping me get into character. Speaking of inauthenticity. All right. Damn, it's crooked. And slipping. Never mind. Who needs this thing. Skip it.)

My mother has just begun a more aggressive round of chemotherapy that has removed her, these past few days, from being as present in the world - well, more to the point, in my world - as she often is. This morning she made mention of this, and expressed rue, especially in light of the fact these past few days have brought a series of unusual challenges, one of them being the strong anonymous rebukes directed at this blog and at me. Then we both spoke of how, in the space of the unusual silence between us, an interesting thing had happened: Other voices had risen up, offering thoughtful questions and possibilities, many of them very much in the same manner as my mother might. Other people had come forward and set steady hands on the clenched, shivering pulse of things. "It's as if all these other people - people who have been there all the time - were gathering up your energy and passing it along," I said.

"But it isn't my energy," she corrected me. "The energy is there. It just is. For anyone to feel and work with and pass along."

This is how I feel about the things I make, including the things I make with words: they're not mine. Oh, they are - in a limited sense. They come through my brain and fingers, and I bear responsibility for them. But I wasn't born with them tied in a velvet sack around my neck. And when I die I'll have no ownership of them in any meaningful, practical way. I'm in relationship with the things I write, but it doesn't feel to me like an owner-object relationship. Anything I make of words (or of paint or yarn or tomato sauce, for that matter) was first given to me; I receive it as a gift first, and only then become able to pass it along. If my writings are mine at all, they're mine to borrow, not keep or control.When I first began this blog, a friend cautioned me never to publish anything for free. I could get no purchase on this notion. It made no sense to me at all. If I could figure out some other way to feed and clothe my children, I guess my preference would be to publish everything for free.

It does feel nice when someone "pays" me a compliment (although I'm not sure such compliments help me grow in my capacity to reach beyond myself and understand others, and in this sense, I don't know that their value is profound). Nicer yet is when a friend tells me he saw a well-thumbed copy of one of my books in the ship's library on a Galapagos cruise - what floods me with pleasure is not thinking that whoever read the book might have attended to the author's name and credited me for the work, but that the work - the story and characters - is enjoying some kind of life beyond me, beyond my ken. This is the gift returned to me.

All that said, I think the person who has posted several comments as 'Anonymous' on this blog is right to fault me for not crediting Lori Nix more clearly for her art. I think he might be right, too, to fault me for not asking Lori Nix's permission first, but I'm a little less clear on that, because the world of the internet, and of art on the internet, seems confusing. I could imagine that once an artist places her work in that big fluid environment, she might be signaling that it is meant to circulate. But it's possible I'm projecting my beliefs about art and ownership onto others, wrongly.

In any case, gratitude to everyone who has taught me more about compassion and about questioning these past few days, including 'Anonymous.'

Authenticity III - What Does It Matter in the End

2009-03-27T08:36:00.012-05:00

"Library," by Lori Nix, from The City series

for L.T.

My friend emails me this picture. She's found it on a site of 'found things' - original provenance unknown.

She knows I love libraries the way young girls are said to love horses: giddily, mystically, reverentially. She knows I'll love this picture, and I do.

The books nestle like birds in a dovecote, a dovecote built high as the sky, and there is the sky - what? - oh - the simplest blue at the tippy-top, where the shell of the building has been split away like the top of a soft-boiled egg tapped with spoon and summarily uplifted - and the sun washes down upon the branches - the what? - the leafy branches of the trees - birch? - which receive it, the golden light, with the speechless wisdom of every book ever written.

Who are those figures up by the crown molding? Rulers? Thinkers? Saints?

Why are those chairs tipped over, those books lying on the ground? Are these signs of the violence of humans or the violence of nature? Or perhaps only the stately violence of time.

What countries appear on that globe? What are their names, where are their boundaries drawn?

And who lights the glass globes mounted by the stacks? And by what means do they illuminate? Bulb, kerosene, whale oil? Firefly.

I call my friend, hot and bothered: Is this real or did someone make it? Did this - happen - or is it staged, a theater set or an art installation? I feel a push to know, to have settled this matter of which.
It's real, she decides. I think, she adds.
(This is very like her. This is the only answer she would ever give; always, always this friend would rather err on the side of believing than doubting. I knew this when I called, when I put the question to her. I knew but asked anyway.)

As soon as she answers, I think I understand it's not real. I look more closely: are those red-and-blue birds perched on two of the branches? Whoever heard of such red-and-blue birds? Whoever heard of a building this damaged, in this state of serious disrepair for at least as long as it takes a tree to grow to towering height, preserving its contents relatively intact: the glass unsmashed, the balconies unsagging, the gold trim still agleam? Wherever existed such strange beauty?

But this line of reasoning does not help, for the answer to the last question is: in life.

Oh gift, oh gratitude. If you know, don't tell me. It isn't that I crave blindness. Only that in a certain light - the light of cast-off ceilings, the light of rain-spattered words - all that is, is. Oh democracy. The real and the made-up: those fine, those stalwart citizens of our waking dreams. Red and blue. Book and tree. Globe and globe. What does it matter in the end.

With mixed feelings, I add this update: the image was found at lorinix.net. I have been illuminated, and go off to mourn, lightly...

Authenticity II - The Remark

2009-03-04T14:18:00.014-05:00

When I was sixteen I fell in love with a married couple, friends of my parents. They were artists and struck me as being full of such wit and glamor as made me giddy to contemplate. They seemed, too, the freest and consequently most powerful people I'd ever met.

Over the next several years I flung myself at them embarrassingly. I tried to materialize, as if casually, whenever they were near, in hopes that one of them would engage me in some thrilling repartee - preferably with a pointed, cleverly laden comment that would obliquely but unmistakably confirm their recognition of me as being, at bottom, like them - and in terror that should this happen, I would be unable to do more than stammer and grin stupidly in response. In private I tried to compose the sparklingly serious conversations we might one day enjoy. When I left for college, I persisted in courting them from afar, sending letters and the occasional poem or story I'd banged out. Every now and then, one of them would dispense a crumb in return: a baffling comment that might or might not be interpreted as flirtatious; a postcard containing a single scrawled sentence in response to my latest creative effort, or, more often, simply advising that said effort was still languishing somewhere near the bottom of a pile of papers they might, in time, sift through.

One day when I was eighteen or nineteen, one of them shared with my mother, privately, the opinion that I was dishonest with myself. I know this because my mother promptly repeated the statement to me. She was indignant. I was stung. We were both perplexed. Whatever was it supposed to mean? In what context had this verdict been formed? Apropos of what? I never learned.

Yet I carried with me ever after a sense of shame; I was persuaded that though I could not locate any evidence of self-deception, it must nevertheless exist. If one of that exalted couple - those keen, discerning artists with their keen, discerning gazes - had seen it - and not only seen it, but seen fit to remark on it - then it must be true. My own failure to understand was nothing but further proof of how little I knew myself truly, how pervasive the extent of my own duplicity.

To believe that others know more about one than the self knows, to endow others with such power, is a potentially self-injurious act not unusual among those poised between childhood and adulthood. What do we know of ourselves then, at the age when we cannot tear ourselves from the mirror, not out of vanity but out of the urgent search to identify, to see, oneself? Up until this time we have been who we are, c'est ça: matter of fact. And someday we will settle again, if less innocently, less righteously, into being squarely ourselves, no more and no less. But there is a time in the middle when we are ciphers to our own minds, when the robust vines of self-consciousness threaten to overwhelm the slighter tendrils of self.

This is when we are prone to spend hour upon hour trying on accents, attitudes, gestures, hats. Colors and moods. Props. We might practice holding wineglasses by the stem; beer bottles by the neck; cigarettes betwixt our fingers; a book in one hand, a hank of our own hair in the other. We try on scowls and sneers, we purse and pout, we analyze our smiles for traces of the beatific. We experiment with unwashed hair, unshaven legs, unmended rips, ungrammatical and ungracious pronouncements. We experiment with posture, with kindness, with the limits of humor and of despair. We do none of it to deceive; rather, we are researching in deadly earnest. We are taking astounded stock of our enormous range. And we are on the lookout all the while for what rings true, for the moments of recognition, for the rare and precious moments we sense home.

Perhaps this is all the artist friend meant by the remark. Perhaps it was merely an observation, offered without judgment, of the stage of development I was then passing through. I should add that I believe it is the case I passed through this stage rather less flamboyantly, indeed more meekly, than the average youth. In any case, and regardless the intent, the remark cut me to the core. It was a blow delivered, intentionally or not, to that weakest place: my wobbly sense of authenticity. When I look back I have to consider that the one true act of self-deception I performed was allowing this statement to suggest to me that I had done something shameful.

Speaking of Loving

2009-02-13T09:13:00.007-05:00

A copy of the following correspondence recently came across my desk:

*

Dear grandmother how do you stand Ocky being a Yankee fan. i wasx wondering how life is thes days.

love,
Jorge

*

Hmmm. A very interesting question. I'm going to ponder it for a while and then answer your question later.

Meanwhile, life is beyond excellent these days.

1. I am up to my eyebrows in making valentines for all my beloveds (your family already got yours).

2. Snow blankets the ground and the pond is frozen.

3. Easter egg time is just around the corner.

And what about you? How is your life these days?

Love, G

*

Dear, grandmother how are you doing you told me WHAT you were doing but not HOW YOU ARE DOING. I vill answer your question now it is that I am doing very well.

*

Dear George,

Jeepers you're picky.

So you say you are wondering how life is these days. And you want to know, specifically HOW I am doing. Well, I'm doing "beyond excellent". I am euphoric [means "happy and feeling a sense of well-being] for some reason. It's as if I were on drugs, but I'm not. I mean not that kind of drug. Here are more specifics:

my hair is a little bit longer
my knee is still a little clunky, but it doesn't really hurt much
I have enough energy to do the things I want to do. I haven't tried hiking yet, but I'd like to try walking a mile or two and see what happens.
I go to the hospital once every 3 weeks to get chemotherapy. It's an IV that stays in for 30 minutes, but I need to be there for about 4 hours each time. I also get a blood test each time. I like those days because I know all the staff so well and it feels like my community. I even have waiting room friends. Plus it's nice to be in the City. On my next chemo day (next week) Ocky and I will go to the Opera at night.
my brain is nice and shiny: I always knew how to do sudoku, but lately I decided I wanted to learn the strategies for doing the hardest ones. So I have books and I'm studying them. They tell about things to look for, like conjugate pair chains, XYZ wings, and swordfish patterns. It's a good mental workout.
I don't worry at all about getting sicker and dying. I mean, of course I will someday, but I just don't worry about it. It doesn't seem like a problem. More like an interesting development somewhere in the future. Something to be curious about.

Have I answered the question?

Now, about how I stand Ocky being a Yankee fan . . . George, when somebody is as perfect as your grandfather, it's a privilege to stand everything about them. Him being a Yankee fan is exactly like you being a Sox fan -- you both love your homeboys. It's not so much about who you love as that you love. You both do a good job of loving.

And speaking of loving, I sure do love you and your questions.

G

*

Authenticity I: Book in Snow

2009-02-04T10:13:00.019-05:00

for B. C.

He was a grown-up of twenty or twenty-one; I a child of seventeen. Not a broad gap, except I really was a child, stuck firmly, even doggedly, in childhood, while he bore a deep intelligence, at once sharp and courteous, that bespoke worldliness and maturity. He was kind, though reserved, and on occasion, palpably sad. He was a good poet, I recall.

This was at N.Y.U., where we both happened to be majoring in drama - although he was graduating and I just beginning, so that even now it feels something like blasphemy to speak of it in equal terms. He'd been born in Dublin and had an Irish name that rolled off the tongue like water. You had to say the first and last names together to get the full effect. He was tall, perhaps a little too lean, with dark hair and a white complexion, less handsome than striking. We had jobs in the same campus office, where the other girls and I were in agreement about the fine unusualness of him - he was, we decided, like Seymour Glass, and we felt proud to know him, and just a shred proprietary about it. We didn't have crushes so much as we simply loved him. Yet at best I knew him slightly.

Not only did we work together, in a building on Second Avenue, we also lived in the same Fifth Avenue dorm. This is how it came to be that we set out across town together one Saturday morning, walking east through driving snow. We'd been called in on the weekend, along with a few other work-study students, to help with a special project (stuffing envelopes, it seems to me as I look back, for some kind of huge mailing; the labor was not glamorous, but we'd been glad for the extra hours). It wasn't by prior arrangement that we walked together; we didn't have that level of camaraderie. Simply, chancing to arrive in the black-and-white tiled lobby of our building at the same time, we fell into step.

How hungry I was that winter. For what, I did not know. For romance, but not sex. For mystery. For knowledge. For transporting excitement. Hungry to leave my skin, to leave gravity, go bounding. To become what I did not know.

This hunger was accompanied by a hope so strong it was almost unbearable -- it made my fingers ache, woke me in the night, kept me conscious of the tireless muscle in my chest -- and by a sporadic, wilting sadness.

That morning, the snow was strong enough to meet my hunger. The two of us bent into it, the swirling flakes spilling from the low gray sky, covering the heavy gray city with their lightness. I do not know how far we'd gone - a block, two? - before each of us realized the other was relishing it. At some point the feeling of fun simply caught on between us. And he did something that made my heart surge.

"We're Russian peasants," he said, casually.

I was quick to agree. When I did, a feather of snow got in my mouth and melted, burning my tongue.

"We're crossing the taiga," he narrated, as we crossed University Place.

"The what?"

"The Russian forest. We're starving."

I clapped my mittens together. "We're going to dig for potatoes," I said. "Under the snow."

At the corner of Broadway and Eighth we stopped for a light. Cars - wolves with glowing yellow eyes - slunk wildly down the avenue before us. "Look," he said, nodding toward the curb. Potatoes? A book lay in a drift, furred by a rapidly thickening coat of white.

I picked it up. It was an ill-used thing, small, black, leather-bound, badly tattered and heavy with damp. Yet it also seemed to possess an air of having been well-loved. I cannot name any feature that lent it this air. I suppose the impression derived simply from our belief. We believed it because it fit the narrative of our pretense.

This was the problem that led me to abandon acting by the end of that year, to go off to another college and study writing instead: I could not seem to tease apart what was authentic and what was made up, in all sorts of interactions and observations, but most troublingly within my own feeling self.

The book was filled with a script neither of us recognized. Cyrillic? Aramaic? Elvish? Runic? Through the film of falling snow, it was hard to guess. Or was it that we wanted the script to be obscure, an undiscovered language, a tear in the fabric?

We crossed the taiga, arriving, finally, in a old building with clanking radiators and the smell of fresh paint. We spent our Saturday stuffing envelopes with other students. I kept the book, promising that I would conduct some research and report back on my findings, but I never did. I didn't have the heart to subject the thing to the indignity of objective scrutiny. Or to subject that fine, gray-lit morning's trek to the altering light of data. For a long time I kept the book, its magic mostly, but not all, drained, among other artifacts of that time and place. I don't know what became of it, only that I have it no more, just as I have had no contact with my brief comrade since the spring of that year.

But he gleams for me still, heroic for the grace with which he (crucially, in my eyes, a grown-up) navigated between reality and fantasy, never missing a beat. The whole world grew softer that morning, more yielding and full of possibility. The hope he ushered in was not the feverish sort; it didn't give me shakes and palpitations and achy fingers. It was like a breath, a long, patient, potentially endless breath - a fermata.

The image is by Tim Graveson, who has taken photographs of books in all sorts of places - click for his site.