"Nothing is wasted on the writer."

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

Crescent Dragonwagon — 2009-10-12T18:39:35-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

cat-shaped pillow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As if there had ever been any doubt.

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

We didn't.

time does not require our noticing it

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

But time passed anyway.

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

What was Aunt Dot was asking, that night?

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

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

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

life in another state altogether; opacity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Redecorate? All this supposing was about redecoration?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Redecorating?

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

How many bridges, I had no idea.

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes, I swear I can still smell the smoke.

Maurice Zolotow & Roman Polanski (with a side of absinthe)

Crescent Dragonwagon — 2009-09-28T19:16:43-04:00

Re: my father, Maurice Zolotow, and Roman Polanski...

Y'all know I am given to writing long, thoughtful, wrestling-with-big-questions blog posts --- what my friend and fellow cookbook writer / memoirist Ronni Lundy called "blongs" (as in "blog" plus "long"). But you can teach an old dragon new tricks. This is a quickie.

Every time I hear the coverage about Polanski's extradition on a 30 year-old charge (which, I just learned on NPR, even the then-13 girl, now 45-year-old woman, has asked be dropped, saying she long since gotten over it) I remember the incident I'm about to tell and start laughing.

I figure since most of the readers of "nothing is wasted on the writer" already know a little about Maurice from this last post, I could pass it on, a P.S. on that irrepressible man, whose DNA and craziness I am proud to carry...

(Though he was primarily a show-business biographer, Maurice did occasionally write on food, travel, wine, and spirits. An article her wrote for Playboy, on absinthe, has just been posted: it was written in 1971 and was the last piece he wrote on alcohol before he sobered up. He kept the original of the accompanying illustration to the article, which I've reproduced below, in his L.A. living room: a bottle with a skull inside, behind bars).

But, to MZ & Roman P.

"So I'm at this Hollywood party," says Maurice, this would have been some time in the late 70's. "And suddenly this guy cuts across the room and strides over to me, very purposefully. And I see it's Roman Polanski. And he sticks out his hand, and gives a little half-bow, and says, 'I am Polanski.' I figure he had to have me confused with someone else."

"What did you say?" I asked.

"What could I say?" said Maurice, with one of his exaggerated shrugs. "I stuck out my hand, and shook his, and said, 'I am Zolotow.' "

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

Crescent Dragonwagon — 2009-07-24T16:12:34-04:00

I used to be an innkeeper.

I used to be a daughter with a living father.

I am neither of these things now.

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

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

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

Which is what I was, and am still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I never stop learning this.

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

recalling the hyphenated life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And long-gone.

procrastination & its creative discontents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"papa-ganda": Maurice & me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotations from Chairman Moe; fierce boilings

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

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

"A writer writes."

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

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

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

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

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

to Crescent Z.
Dragonwagon,

on her 19th birthday -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But who knows what he would have thought or felt?

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

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

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

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

No one escapes such boiling.

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

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

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

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

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

Estimated Final Date of Frost: time's winged chariot, with lilacs & the fish

Crescent Dragonwagon — 2009-06-18T10:57:16-04:00

It's almost Summer Solstice. Here in Vermont, the days are extraordinarily long, because we are so far north. I often don't get out to the garden until as late as 6:00 p.m., yet there are still hours of light in which to work. I often don't come in until I'm ravenous and it's almost dark and it's dinnertime. Which, this time of year, may well be 9:00 or 9:30. Almost dark: but still a little light. Though it may not officially be summer yet, it's definitely past spring. The lilacs, for instance, have already come and gone. (Right, there they are, or were, the lilacs in full bloom, earlier this year, mid-May. Photograph, like all those here, by David. We're going to go on a little photographic lilac journey throughout this post).

David, my partner, has more than once described these days as "deceptive" --- meaning, I think, that because it's light so long you think you can get much more done than you actually can. No matter how many hours of the day are light, there are still only 24 of them.

Since May, every other Tuesday morning we've been going to an "eco-agriculture" gardening class with Tatiana Schrieber of Sowing Peace Farm in nearby Westminster West (here's a piece she wrote on celeriac). Tatiana has a Ph.D in Environmental Studies; her focus was and is environmental anthropology; that is, the way people and environment interact. She blends hard science and long garden experience with her personal pull towards social justice: so, the workshop might be summed up as organic gardening plus-plus-plus.

Yesterday, in one of the less-esoteric class discussions, Tatiana brought up succession planting (what you plant in the garden in the place that, say, the early crop lettuces and peas, now harvested, have vacated) as well as planning for the fall garden.

And she said that it was time to start seeds, especially the brassicas --- broccoli, kale, the cabbage family --- for our fall gardens. Our fall gardens? It's June! It's not even officially summer yet! How can this possibly be? (Left and above: we interrupt the lilac series to bring you this beaut of a picture David took, I believe autumn before last: a maple leaf on a still-productive broccoli plant, in that year's fall garden.)

It's natural to think about time. Natural in a garden class, surely, for time and nature are inseparable.

But natural,too, as one experiences time. As one ages, and is humbled by it. As one's parents and partner and children and friends age. As the ones who cared for and protected you becomes the ones you care for and protect. As those who came before you die, and you find you must step to the front of the line. Right, the lilac bush outside our front door in early spring... if you enlarge it you can see that trees in the background are still bare and skeletal, but it knew --- in whatever way a lilac bush knows --- that spring was on the way, and that it would eventually flower into what you saw at the top of this post).

And natural at time's interstices, solstices and equinoxes, when the year inaugurates the next quadrant of its great turning wheel. There is so much I would like to say about these linchpins of time on earth.

How I got married for the first time, at age 16 (back when I was in "pre-Ned school", as I sometimes say) on the spring equinox.

How, almost 40 years later, I would have a friend named Ami and her 21-year-old daughter would die of a heroin overdose on that same day.

How I no longer celebrate Christmas (18 years of decorating 8 different Christmas trees at the inn got all that washed right out of me, permanently) but I do celebrate the solstice; sometimes by going to a party I'll describe later, but always, since I've come to Vermont, by going on a night-time horse-drawn sleigh ride at Fair Winds Farm.

How my beloved adopted parents, Louis and Elsie Freund, about whom I'll write a post one of these days and who lived with verve and luminosity until their nineties. managed the following: he died on the winter solstice. She died, a year and a half later, on the summer solstice.

And how on David's and my first extended trip together, a long several day drive up the California Coast, he arranged for us to spend a few hours in the middle of the night --- from 1:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. the only time non-resident guests are allowed! --- in the then-newly restored salt-water hot tubs set high into cliffs above the sea, at Esalen, at Big Sur. It happened to be Winter Solstice, and a full moon rose over the sea below.

When I met David six years ago on an internet dating site --- before we took that up-the-coast trip --- I used Andrew Marvell's phrase, "time's winged chariot" in an early email (I can't remember the context). This slightly astonished him, in that way that things do when you're starting to consider the possibility of love or friendship with someone --- wow, you do that too? You like that, too? Every commonality signifies, or appears to, though perhaps, finally, it's what you don't have in common that keeps things interesting. The poem in which the Marvell phrase is used, To His Coy Mistress, was one of his favorites; in fact, he'd memorized it, along with several Pablo Neruda sonnets. (I got to hear him recite the Neruda, in Spanish, then in English, on the coast trip. He had the moves!). (Left and above, the lilac bush, a little further along... note the tree in the background, just starting to green.)

There's no way of knowing whether Andrew Marvell 's unnamed mistress did indeed give up her virginity when she read that poem, in which he tried to persuade her to do so. But almost 400 years later, long after her quaint honor and his lust are long since ashes, and even with our far-longer lifespans today than in his time, that chariot still hovers precipitously, ominously just over our heads. It always has and always will. Time rubs our face in our mortality daily, since, especially as we age, we discover every day is so full of beauties we will clearly miss or barely have time to see (like the lilac again, this time its buds, all green, in close-up) and it's just choice, choice, choice and the minute you say yes to one thing, you're saying no to something else, perhaps equally marvelous. The passage of time at the center of Marvell's poem is at the center of life... at the center of life itself and our individual lives.

At least, our worldly lives, life as embodied beings, temporarily in residence on this beautiful, perplexing globe, with its endless seductions. (The spiritual life being the only place where we transcend time... except, conundrum-like, of course at that moment we aren't "we" any more, just That. Which takes it beyond the realm of discussion. Doesn't it?)

Time is certainly much on my mind these days. It's a rhythm steady as a pulse, a heartbeat. My mother, the writer Charlotte Zolotow, is about to turn 94; my aunt, Dorothy Arnof, a former editor, is about to turn 100. My boyfriend, unspeakably... except I'm okay with speaking it... will turn 70 this fall. (70? Can I even call him my boyfriend? Would this mean I'm dating, like, my grandfather? But wait, I'm 56...) Left: the Charlotte, me and Aunt Dot on Charlotte's front porch, in September 2007.

(Digression: when my mother and David --- pictured below that same day on the porch, jiving around with Charlotte's beloved decorative sheep, Baaa --- first met, she was 88 and he was 63. She was in the hospital at the time, an old lady tiny even in a twin bed, wearing a bright blue nightgown. Now understand that even before she was elderly, my mother used to mix up words in a manner everyone who knew her found charming and hilarious. For instance, in Charlotte-speak a sangria became a "shangri la" and the city of Manila was located in "the Philistines." The other piece of back-story is that David, in his youth and still, has always been active in social justice movements, including racial equality. As a student in Stanford, he traveled with six African students on a "fact-finding tour of the South", during which they met, among other, Martin Luther King and Orville Faubus. So, anyway, Charlotte and David meet each other. Things go swimmingly. Evidently David makes the grade, for Charlotte starts bragging about to friends. Immediately! No sooner are we back home than the phone rings. It's one of Charlotte's pals, apoplectic with laughter. "As soon as you left the hospital Charlotte called me," says CZ's friend. "She said, 'I've met Crescent's new young man.'" Funny enough in itself since he was then 63. CZ's friend continued, "And then she said, 'He was very active in the Civil Wars, you know.'")

(Meaning, just in case you didn't get it, Civil Rights movement.)

(This is why I have very mixed feelings about Facebook and Twitter, though I use them: you just can't tell a real story. It's like the one-line poem written by the late poet, William Matthews, which appeared in an early '70's chapbook called "An Oar in the Old Water." The title of the poem: "Premature Ejaculation." The sum, complete total of the poem: "I'm sorry this poem's already finished." )

But back to time and the lilacs. (Another close-up bud, below, starting to take on to color).

I think it's especially natural to think about and be aware of time in Vermont, where the seasons are radically different from one another. With the dramatic seasonal extremity and summer's brevity, consideration of time is unavoidable. If you don't get your wood in before winter... or your garden in in early spring, it'll be too late. (I have yet to really succeed with growing okra. a hot weather-loving crop, in chilly Vermont. Last year I got beautiful okra plants, with their sensuous, velvety saucer-sized blossoms, but only about three or four actual pods. I'll try again this year. Photo: the okra seedlings. Prosper and grow, little okras! As a Southerner who has only recently become a Yankee, I found it shocking that my favorite area farm-stand, Walker Farm, sold okra for 50 cents a pod... and hilarious that they labeled the okra basket "curiosity." !!! But now, having tried, and failed, to make crop of okra, I almost see their point.Though given how much I love okra, I might say "tragedy" rather than "curiosity.")

Sometime in late March or early April, Vermont begins its slow, gradual shift from winter to summer with what locals call Mud Season. My Southern friends often say to me, in a tone of concerned urgency, of the shift from Arkansas to Vermont, "But what about the winters?" To which I sometimes reply, "Aw, you just suffer from from claustro-snowbia," and at other times quote what my friend, neighbor, and fellow cookbook Deborah Krasner says on the subject: "It keeps the riff-raff out."

But in fact, winters are actually not nearly as difficult as Mud Season, when all the snow melts. This year, 2009, all the old-timers were saying "Worst Mud Season I've seen in 40 years." We got pulled out by Triple-A twice, and often just plain forwent driving rather than risk the mud. I had a Scarlett O'Hara moment in early April... "As God is my witness, I will not spend another Mud Season in Vermont!" I didn't fall to my knees, as Vivian Leigh does in the famous radish-eating scene, because the ground was... mud, and I might never have gotten back up and out. (P.S. So far, I'm doing very well, thank you, in setting up gigs in points considerably South in late March/ early April 2010.) What could be so hard about Mud Season? See picture, above right. That's my car, right in front of our house. It just... sank.

But how swiftly we went from that mess to full-throated spring! DK and I just couldn't stop marveling at it. "Two weeks ago the trees were bare! And now ---!" Do we marvel this much every year? Spring is, after all, a perpetual renewal and I think everyone whp experiences gets amazed all over again each year. But perhaps because this particular Mud Season was so extremely dreary, protracted and difficult, we were even more spring-struck than usual.

(Above, our house in early May. That bush to the left of the door? The lilac. And maybe a foot further back from where this picture was taken is the road... the exact spot of the sinking car above, only a month earlier! And below? Another close-up of a lilac bud. Enlarge the picture, look closely, and I bet you'll marvel, too).

One night recently, DK and I were talking over dinner, again, with wonder about the rapidity with which mud had changed to greenness. I said, "You know what? I think this has something to do with what you talked about in the car, when we were coming home from that party at Leslea and Matthew's, that first time we went."

That party had the celebrated the winter equinox two or three years earlier. It's held annually (though 2007 was our first time), at the home of two doctors, Leslea Goldman and Matthew Pearce. Only Leslea is a practicing physician now ... several years ago, Matthew left medicine to pursue a second vocation which had always called him: painting. (That painting, "Bearing Fruit," is one of his, left. Look at how luminous the skin is! I think one can see the healer still, in the artist).

After the party, in the warm quiet car, traveling the few miles home alone the snowy road, in that coupled intimacy, checking in with each other, once again a dyad after a larger group event, we were talking.

(This after-the-event checking-in was one of the recurring experiences in which I missed Ned most achingly after I was widowed, in the years before David and I fully connected. To leave, or --- if you were the one entertaining --- be left alone after everyone leaves, and not to be able to check your reactions, explore your thoughts and perceptions, with a beloved partner! It was a silence so noisy, one's mind and heart became an internal emotional Times Square. I know a period is likely to come when I am again unpartnered, given the difference in my age and David's. Will I be able, by then, to experience that quiet in peaceful solitude instead of longing? I don't know. I do know that I treasure it all the more now, having done without it. I do know that never do I do a post-party deconstruct / decompress with David without being aware that to do so is both privileged and temporary.)

Anyway, as we made our way home in the dark, snow so high on either side of the road that at times it was almost like traveling in a tunnel of white, after that solstice gathering, David said, "You know, I was looking around the room, and I thought to myself, 'you would never, ever see a room full of people like this at a party in Los Angeles'."

I thought back through the evening. Finding the house; the sudden bustle in the quiet night: many cars, figures visible inside in silhouette, almost palpable warmth on the longest night of the year. Coming in, shedding our various layers of coats, hats, scarves, boots. (Vermont has its own winter-time etiquette: bring slippers or house shoes with you when you go visiting; take your boots off and change at the door). Entering into the warm people-filled kitchen, every flat surface and stove burner covered with baking dishes and bowls and jars with spoons sticking out of them and crumbled foil spoons --- the detritus of an almost demolished potluck. An equally people-filled living room and study adjacent the kitchen. Lights low; lots of candles, a wood-stove cranking out the heat. David and I separated, to eat and explore. There were many conversations , in and out of which we, like every one else, eddied. It was neighbors greeting neighbors, not fancy. Jeans, sweaters (the distinctive smell of damp wood and woodsmoke when you hugged someone, a scent I also remember so fondly from my Ozark days), lots of town vests and Polartek. The photo above has nothing to do with the party--- it's just in case you think I'm making this up: our mailbox, midwinter, in snow.

We were still relative newcomers, and didn't know many people there besides Leslea and Matthew. I did talk with my own doctor, Gary (with whom I play Scrabble occasionally, and have hiked and swum with a time or two). I had my then-typical twinge: if I was back in Eureka Springs I would know every single person here, and my then-typical self-soothing internal talk: relax into your new life, CD, open, soften. Isn't it nice to meet people without having to dance through what they've heard about you? I remember I talked, that night, with a woman who raised sheep, a potter, a teacher, and a couple who replace automotive glass. And I had faith that with every year, I would grow more deeply rooted in the community, and come to know more people, and that some few of them would grow to be close friends. As has happened.

Faith. That's what moving to a new place and starting over takes, even if it's shaky at times. And that's what a Vermont winter takes. Left, a picture taken at Aubuchon Hardware in March: garden supplies, piled high with snow.

"What do you mean by 'people like this''?" I'd asked David in the car. "You mean, no make up, no dress-up clothes?"

"That too," he said, "But what I was thinking of was, everyone looked their age."

"Ah," I said.

And, two years later, this spring, I continued (he immediately referenced the earlier conversation). "You know, in L.A. maybe it's not just the youth-and-movies thing. Maybe it's the climate. You have pretty much the same weather every day: that Southern Californian mild, sunny thing. Nothing to say 'Time's passing.' It's lotus-land. What seasonal changes that are, are very mild and subtle, compared to here. Here, because of the climate you can't duck the passage of time. It's in your face. Maybe that's part of why people wear their faces here, they don't attempt to alter them."

As if such alteration worked. Even when it works visually --- the person looks good, instead of surgically altered --- it doesn't work. (Left: oh so many lines around those alteration-free eyes...) You can't outsmart time, as Andrew Marvell knew. And countless others --- among them, Shakespeare ("Summer's lease hath too short a date.").

Contemporary gardeners can approximate that date; you look up where you reside to find the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone. From there, you get the estimated frost dates. After the final date of frost, you can, theoretically, plant in the spring. And, as Tatiana told us, you look at the estimated first frost date and count backwards, to figure out what you can plant that is likely to reach maturity before a killing freeze sets in.

One of my own poems is about that date. It creeps me out that it was written two years before Ned died:

Estimated Final Date of Frost

Estimated final date of frost, Zone 6: May 5.
You put your tender plants out two weeks later.
Climatically, the odds are good; it probably
won’t freeze, and they’ll survive. The ground
is warm, and your Big Boys and jalapenos,
impatiens ‘Little Twinkle’, holy basil
will be protected from inclemency, and harm.

Yet I remember 18 inches on May 9
And hail, two Aprils in a row, left us all peachless.
Fronts met and clashed above.
Five minutes made the orchards into holocausts
of beaten useless blossom-covered ground below,
odd white balls still melting calmly on the sodden ruin.
This has some relevance to love.

There are some calculations best avoided
by those who say, “Ah well, it’s for the best.”
They had to ship in fruit from California, twice,
to Clarksville, where they hold Peach Fest.

Protection’s not available
to those who raise a pig or grow a fruit.
We bite July’s Red Havens, sweet and acid:
juice, which trails our chins,
explodes in yellow, red, and pink,
the fleshy meat of summertime
within our mouths, and
fiber between teeth. We don’t suspect
the work and the travail,
and all it took to give us what we eat.
In this, a farmer or an orchardman’s like us.
A day that ought to be pure spring may freeze.

you tend while knowing,
unprepared to be reminded,
there are no guarantees.

As always and with everything, Ned's sudden death in 2000--- for which, despite my own prescient words, I was wholly unprepared to be reminded --- figures into my considerations of time. Ned is now, forever, in one way, a beautiful and vibrant 44-year-old. (In another way, of course; he isn't; he isn't period. He doesn't exist, is vanished: it' was hard for me to not be angry when well-meaning people said "Of course he's always with you, " or "He's always watching over you." No, he wasn't. He was and is gone; what I remember about him is precious to me, but it is no more or less than memory. Memories of Ned are not Ned.)

One strange gift of his death, an event I would never ever have chosen yet which is not without gifts, is this ever-present sense that there are deadlines. Some deadlines you know about, and to some extent they are negotiable: you can file for an extension with the IRS, you can ask your publisher for another couple of weeks or months. But some deadlines --- the big ones --- you have not a clue about. As W.S. Merwin writes in "On the Anniversary of my Death", "Every year without knowing it / I have passed the day..."

We all work and live under both kinds of deadlines. What message do I take from all this? Don't waste time. Or, as I sometimes say, "Listen to the fish!" The fish being a carp, as in "carpe diem."

This year springtime brought something unusual: I was invited to teach at Rancho la Puerta in Tecate, Mexico. This is a place about which I'd always had intense curiosity and to which I had always longed to go: click the link and you'll see why. (The experience there, which exceeded my expectations, is a subject for another post). The invitation was the good news. The bad news was, it could only be scheduled for mid-May --- right at the start of the time to get the garden in, in our part of the world where, as you know by now, every day counts.

Too, it looked like we would miss the actual blooming of the long-awaited lilacs, that sublime color and fragrance I love to bury my face into (which David has, several years in a row, taken a picture of me doing; you saw one earlier and there's one, a bit more natural, still to come).

But I wasn't going to say no to Rancho la Puerta. I was listening to the fish! (FYI, I've been invited back for 2010 --- but will be teaching next in March and December, not garden prime-time).

So, I determined I was going to plant all I could (potatoes, hearty greens and yes, brassicas, carrots, beets) before we went to Mexico. And, I was going to mulch it down so the weeds couldn't get a jump on me. Left, the garden post-early planting, pre-mulch. Looks pretty unprepossessing, right?

Only problem was, Mercury was retrograde and despite my best efforts, the mulch didn't get delivered until the Thursday before the Friday we'd be getting on the plane for San Diego.

Reader, I woke up at 5:00 a.m. without an alarm and got my ass out to the garden and mulched the whole thing that damp, overcast Friday morning.

David said to me several times that morning, "I'm impressed. I'm impressed."

He also said, eying my head-to-foot straw-covered, mud-covered clothes and shoes, "You might want to get undressed outside."

Which is what I did when I came in at 8:00. After that I showered and we ate breakfast. Then we made our flight with time to spare, arrived in San Diego that night, ate great Thai food, and went off the next morning to a fitness adventure and beautiful flower-filled terrain wholly unlike what we had left. In Mexico --- my first trip to that country.

Above right, the garden as it looks today.

But, back to the morning of the mega-mulch.

I had exited out the side door to go to the garden, but I headed around to the front to come in, stripping off as I came. I piled the hay-covered clothes on the steps. And there I saw --- how marvelous, unexpected, kind, generous! --- that David could take his annual photograph after all.

For the lilac, just in time, was in full bloom.

letting an invitation become personally seismic: how I began to grow up

Crescent Dragonwagon — 2009-04-30T16:21:42-04:00

Greetings, dear blog-readers! May 1, 2009, is the one-year anniversary of "nothing is wasted on the writer", and I thank you, thank you for your generous responses. I'm working on an anniversary post: it also happens to be the one-year anniversary of when I stopped using credit cards, as well as the general time of year I begin getting in this year's garden .. all fecund material for any writer who believes that nothing is wasted on her. (Speaking of fecundity: on the left is a lilac, still tightly budded in mid-April, but day by day getting more and more ready for its annual shower of ecstatic fragrance and color, every time we come in or out the front door. David, already in plant-nirvana, took this.)

But posts always take me longer to write, link, get illustrated and tinker around with than I expect, so I'm putting something else up here for anniversary day.

A couple of months back, I was kindly invited by the magazine Little Rock Soiree to write a piece on "A Day in Little Rock. " My contribution is in the current issue of the magazine; if you live in the Little Rock area you'll be able to pick it up. In case you don't, here it is.

It's not a "here-are-my-favorite-places-to-eat-and-things-to-do-in-this-city," article. That's what I initially thought the magazine would want when Amanda Morgan, the editor, contacted me. And I dreaded doing it, and planned to turn her down: I find writing that kind of story not too interesting --- though as a reader, of course, I find the idiom useful and sometimes interesting.

But it turned out Little Rock Soiree wanted something much more expansive and fun to write. It turned out that the piece would be part of a wide-open literary series the magazine runs, all written by Arkansas-rooted writer-writers. Amanda sent me several samples. It was the piece by the brilliant novelist/ memoirist/journalist/art professor Donald Harington that won me over. (I'm certainly not saying Don is "brilliant", by the way, just because a most flatteringly described children's book writer named "Half-Moon Berryfairy," who lives in Eureka Springs, happens to have a walk-in appearance in his novel Ekaterina. The protagonist of which is a Russian mycologist with a pleasantly twisted erotic bent... but I digress).

But Donald's essay, and the fact that the magazine published it, made it clear that "A Day in Little Rock" would or could be just my kind of thing. The writers are free to go wherever that idea --- a day, a place --- takes them. As far, or far out, as they wanted.

Here's where I went.

__________________________________

I blame, or credit, Carol Gaddy.

She heard me reading poetry between sets of a bluegrass band at a now-defunct nightclub in Eureka Springs, where, if one sentence wasn’t smacking your audience upside the head, you lost ‘em.

Carol came up to me and said, “I’m with the Arkansas Arts Council. Would you like to be part of Arkansas Artists-in-Schools?”

I was 22. I said, “Oh, you wouldn’t want me, I’m a high school drop out.” “Doesn’t matter,” she said. She told me about Artists-in-Schools. How professional writers, musicians, painters, actors, sculptors signed on for a school year, and for one week out of each month, they visited schools, doing what they did with children and teenagers. Four small classes a day. Regular income. Different schools, all over the state. (Left, me, a few years later, with one of my students at the Alexander Girls Training School).

“I don’t drive,” I told Carol.

"Now that,” she said, “could be a problem.”

But way down underneath I must have had some idea that I might be able to become the kind of teacher I’d never had, who might have reached the kind of indifferent, restless student I had been. For I stopped talking myself it of it. I let Carol Gaddy’s invitation be personally seismic. Over the next few months I learned to drive, bought a car, got a watch, had a telephone installed. Shifted from identification with the so-called counter-culture to participating in that ecosystem of education, geography, history, art, and social interaction which we simply sum up as culture, period.

Driving down the Pig Trail to my first A-I-S gig, I had a serious discussion with myself. “How,” I asked myself, downshifting into the curves, “are you going to do what you do and be comprehensible and palatable to Arkansas school administrators?” “Well, Crescent, are you going to speak the truth to them?” “Sure.” “And isn’t truth truth? Recognizable, universal --- or it wouldn’t be truth, right?” “Yes, but ---” “Well, then most people will recognize it if you say it clearly in language they understand. Speak truthfully in easily-understood language. Stay away from jargon, hippie and otherwise. Stay clear. Simple.”

Thus do we talk ourselves into growing up.

Here’s how it turned out. I fell in love with doing Artists-in-Schools. I fell in love with the whole state, not just tiny off-the-wall Eureka Springs. Then I fell in love, period.

The next school year, I rented a studio apartment in the Quapaw Quarter of Little Rock.

Little Rock was dab in the middle of the state instead of way to hell and gone like Eureka Springs, which is tucked into the northwest corner of the state and not convenient to anywhere. Whether I was going to Crossett or Jonesboro, Walnut Ridge or DeQueen, whether I was working with the children of sharecroppers in the Delta or of attorneys and real estate brokers in Maumelle, living in Little Rock put me closer.

The house in which I rented the apartment was the Garland Mitchell House at 1404 Scott Street, a two-story steamboat Gothic on a lawn punctuated with Tuscarora crepe myrtles. My landlady was a Mitchell --- Starr Mitchell, who was gorgeous and about my own age. She lived in the larger, usually messier apartment across the hall. I loved watching as each day she emerged from it butterfly-like: slim, shiny dark hair, immaculately dressed, the picture of order from chaos.

Starr had a weekly potluck dinner. (Picture below, Starr and me in 2009, a full 33 years --- how can it be? --- after these events I've been describing took place. We're still laughing, still friends, still crazy after all these years. Taken by David at Cafe Bossa Nova, Little Rock). One Tuesday she waltzed in to 1404 Scott and said to me, “I get the prize for inviting the best-looking man in Little Rock to potluck, you just wait and see.”

And, that evening, setting down a hot apple crisp, I did.

And reader, I married him.

Not long after that potluck dinner, before we married but after Ned and I had fallen in love, stepping into the shower one day, I thought, “I could die now, I know how it all comes out. This is the man I marry and live out my days with. “ This was not quite accurate.

On an unseasonably warm fall day, about 23 years after I set down that steaming apple crisp on a trivet of Starr’s table and looked up and into the extraordinarily large blue eyes of that handsome man, Ned went out for the bicycle ride he habitually took, twelve miles out to the Conoco where they rented canoes, which he called “Canoe-Co.” On the way back, he and a small pick-up collided, about a quarter mile west of the Lake Leatherwood turn-off on Highway 62. (Map, strangely, courtesy of the Ozarks Offroad Cyclists Association).

The large events which shape one’s life do not appear large at the time. They appear typical. Ned had no idea that particular bike ride, out of thousands he’d taken, led to eternity. I had no idea that particular apple crisp, out of the thousands I’ve made (always with fresh apples, always with cinnamon and a tiny bit of black pepper in the topping but never spices on the apples themselves) would lead to Ned.

And what if I hadn’t read poetry between bluegrass sets at the bar, that particular night?

That is why I blame, or credit, Carol Gaddy.

Otherwise, I would be forced to say, “Life is mysterious. It is as sweet and fragrant as an apple crisp straight from the oven. As round as a spinning bicycle wheel. As twisted as the Pig Trail. And at any time, it can change utterly and forever, as it did for me on a day in Little Rock.”

Part 2: love/ let sleeping cats tell the truth

Crescent Dragonwagon — 2009-04-01T16:55:09-04:00

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

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

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

2002: at home on the aquifer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step, step, step, step.

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

2008: on loan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I do believe in grace, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

somebody to love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Wislawa Syzmborska:

NOTHING'S A GIFT

Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan.
I'm drowning in debts up to my ears.
I'll have to pay for myself
with my self,
give up my life for my life.

Here's how it's arranged:
The heart can be repossessed,
the liver, too,
and each single finger and toe.

Too late to tear up the terms,
my debts will be repaid,
and I'll be fleeced,
or, more precisely, flayed.

I move about the planet
in a crush of other debtors.
some are saddled with the burden
of paying off their wings.
Others must, willy-nilly,
account for every leaf.

Every tissue in us lies
on the debit side.
Not a tentacle or tendril
is for keeps.

The inventory, infinitely detailed,
implies we'll be left
not just empty-handed
but handless too.

I can't remember
where, when, and why
I let someone open
this account in my name.

We call the protest against this
the soul.
And it's the only item
not included on the list.

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

Part 1: love / dead cat

Crescent Dragonwagon — 2009-03-23T17:56:19-04:00

I sometimes tell my writing students "Start out with a clear purpose, but be willing for that to change in the course of writing. "

Well, case in point. In this post, sparked by an e e cummings quote, I set out to explore the idea of how one becomes lovable... and wound up writing, mostly, about a dead cat. (Disclaimer: not the "lovable" that's the usual saccharine, adorable puppies-and-kittens-pansies-and-plump-faced-babies; a much grittier one --- becoming able, finally, to give and receive love.)

The course-correction probably began this morning. I was halfway thinking about the post, having started it last night, but not yet being at all satisfied. I was also making breakfast.

I cracked two eggs into a small stainless steel bowl for an omelet. I began to beat them with a fork. This, of course, makes a certain sound, a light, distinctive rhythmic metal-on-metal clang. And as I heard the fork strike the bowl, I also heard myself calling, "Beanblossom! Bean-Bean-Bean-Bean-Bean!"

Now Beanblossom, my first cat, has been dead more than twenty years now. It's not that I've forgotten this. But I habitually call the name of that small dear calico when I beat eggs in this way. It's as automatic for me as unscrewing the caps of the small brown extract bottles and raising them to my nose and inhaling the vanilla or lemon or orange or anise, another habitual gesture. Whether it's sniffing the vanilla or calling the name of a dead cat, in my view, you take pleasure and joy where you find it, and never miss an opportunity to do so. Eventually, some of these opportunities become habits.

For Bean is, and isn't, dead. Yes, she's buried (in the back of my old house in Arkansas, under the mimosa tree; the daffodils Ned planted when he buried her are probably already blooming). But in memory as in dreams, where time and embodiment have little or no sway, Beanblossom is alive whenever I think of her. She is as quick and immediate as was her spry scamper to get to the egg bowl. Licking the little bit of raw egg inevitably left in it was one of her great delights. Even as I would call her name, the clang of the fork in that stainless steel bowl would already have brought her running, however deep her sleep, from whatever part of the house she was hiding herself in. One favorite haunt was the top of the armoire, from where she could look down on us, blinking in surprise, as if to say "Oh? Who are you again? And what are you doing here?" Another much-loved Beanblossom place, in winter, was wedged into the small space between the end of the wood-stove and the brick chimney into which it vented. If you touched her hot tricolored fur while she laid there, you wondered why she didn't simply combust --- and indeed, one December she did actually singe slightly, sizzling the edges of her whiskers so that they curled comically into great rococo curls. (I love that picture above left, taken one winter morning by our friend George West. Two great early lasting loves of my life, neither with me in form any more: Ned and Beanblossom. The picture was taken outside the little cottage that was my home for years, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.)

Although I've called Beanblossom's name when I beat eggs for years, it's always been automatic; I only really thought about it today. I guess that by calling her name in the same way I did when she was alive, I call all this --- the curled mustache, the quick feet --- up in memory. And there, quickly, I can revisit our adventures during the years we were both alive in the physical sense simultaneously, and in connection with each other --- in whatever mysterious way a cat and a human being are in connection.

As I've said, Beanblossom was my first cat. She lived to be 18 ... a period that paralleled, in my life, the years from age 18 to 36. No one else on the planet knew me so intimately in a daily way that long, that closely, over that period of time. Though life is one change after another (why do we continue to cling to the illusion that someday it's going to settle down?) I think we can agree that for most of us, in young adulthood, the rapidity of change is stepped up.

Though I have had cats since her death --- first another calico, and then two tabbies from the same litter (the current feline residents) --- Beanblossom was, and I think always will be, the cat of my heart.

One night, alone (as far as human company goes), lonely in my bed in the little funky cabin Beanblossom and I shared, I fell asleep with a backache, my last conscious thought, "Oooh, I wish I had someone to rub my back." This would have been, oh, 1973, 1974, which would make me about 21, 22. The next morning, I woke up on my stomach. And Beanblossom was walking up and down my back, kneading my spine with her four small paws, and purring loudly.

Beanblossom used to go on hikes with me; not on a leash, but following or leading, a few steps ahead or behind. She also went camping out with me, both when it was just the two of us and at times when I went with friends. On one latter occasion, several of us were skinny-dipping in an Ozark creek, and someone called out to me, "Crescent! Look at your cat!"

I looked up to the shore and there, standing on a rock, was Beanblossom. You might not think that a cat's face would be capable of expressing distinct feelings of distaste and resolve, but that's what I saw on hers. She stood there a few seconds longer, looking towards me, gazing at the water, sizing things up, possibly screwing up her determination. Then it was: "Well, if I have to, I have to."

And she jumped into the creek and cat-paddled to me.

Her dear resoluteness. The way she elongated her neck above the water. Her head canted up and back, her nose tipped up, as if she couldn't bear even the smell of the disgusting substance in which she found herself.

And yet, and still, she kept paddling to me.

When she reached me, of course I swam back to shore with her. When we got out, I tried not to laugh as I toweled her cat body, ridiculously tiny with its flat wet fur, especially silly because poking out of that almost rat-like wet body was her dry, normal-sized head, with the v of caramel-colored fur that slanted down to her nose.

For how could you laugh at a creature, so loyal and willing and brave and peculiar as that?

I remember these things; and that when I fell in love with Ned, Beanblossom did too. Though a generally friendly cat, she took to him truly exceptionally. So much so that when Ned... Well, Ned then worked for the Arkansas State Historic Preservation Office. He was hired to write a how-to book for use in the Quapaw Quarter district of Little Rock, and he did. It was called Fixing Up Your Old House, and it was published, as he never failed to say, by the Arkansas prison system.

He threw himself a publication party for it, and everyone from his office was invited, including Wendy, a woman he had dated a few times, not seriously, before meeting me.

We were then living in Little Rock in a rental apartment. I can still picture that living room and the dining room next to it, that night: filled with gaiety, people, food, friendly noise, laughter, the requisite old beige uncomfortable given-away couch, with which young people just-out-of-college (as Ned was, and as I would have been had I gone to college) invariably furnish their first living rooms. Now that I think of it, he proposed to me on that scratchy old couch. Beanblossom gloated in all the activity, more or less making herself the center of attention: making the rounds: lap to lap, person to person, socializing and being petted by all. All, that is, but Wendy, who arrived about an hour late.

And this is what happened: Wendy walked in, Beanblossom jumped down from whatever lap she was perched on, faced Wendy squarely, gave a single gigantic, dramatic hiss, and fled the room. There was a moment of awkward silence, and then the party went on.

Later that evening after everyone had left I came into the bedroom and there was Beanblossom curled up with Ned. He was stroking her between the ears and sweet-talking her, sotto vocce. "Noooo, Bean, it wasn't like we were even serious. Nooooo. You could have been a nice hospitable kitty, yes you could have been, yes yes yes, you could..."(Scroll back up and look at the picture above, of the two of them nuzzling each other. When I look at this one, what is so clear to me is a tenderness that was part of Essential Beanblossom and Essential Ned).

To think that all this story, it turned out, lay in the beating of some eggs this morning! I could have made and served omelets for a dozen people in the time it's taken me to recount this.

And as I say, I didn't even set out to write about Beanblossom.

Or Z-Cat, another calico (equally feisty but much less sweet-tempered) who eventually followed Beanblossom. Here's Z, pictured on a couch cushion in a 2003 picture taken by David Koff.

Or Cattywhompus (a neutered male tabby, who embodies an almost dog-like mischief and playfulness), who eventually, with his sister, followed Z-Cat into my life. See his portrait below, also taken by David. I must add that the Whomp and his sister made short work, alas, of the couch on which Z is pictured.

Though Cattywhompus and Z do figure into the story I want to tell.The story I planned, and plan, to tell. About becoming lovable.

But I should have known that such a vast and audacious topic, deserves, at the very least, a couple of posts. Even if you're not writing abstractly, but specifically, as, in my view, you must, if you want to write well, about love or anything else.

As the Native American writer N. Scott Momoday once said, "The events of one's life take place, take place." It is this second emphatic place, which in my understanding is not just geographical, but personal, sensual, historical, and spiritual, not just accurate and contextual, but above all truthful, which gives writing about any topic life.

This is why nothing is wasted on the writer: let the world in, be porous to it, and then, so long as you actually write, as opposed to think about writing, everything becomes the specific material of the place Momoday describes. There is no waste, all utility. (Cattywhompus, current resident, left).

I promise you Part 2, the post I thought this one was going to be, will be up no later than April Fool's Day.

For you can't hurry love, as Diana Ross told us, any more than you can the true disclosure of place.

And for me, it turns out that becoming able to love insists on beginning with a calico cat who had a v of caramel fur that tipped to her nose.

buffalo girl: adventures in children's book writing & publishing/non-publishing, screwing up, & being inspired by one very fearless child

Crescent Dragonwagon — 2009-02-10T01:12:59-05:00

It's not quite a month now since I came back from Little Rock, Arkansas, where, among other things, I met the Buffalo Girl. I will probably never know her name, but I'll remember her for a long, long time.

I went to Little Rock, this time, for several reasons. As y'all who read this blog regularly know, I now reside in Vermont, but I lived in Arkansas, mostly in the off-the-wall little town of Eureka Springs, for 33 years. But at this point, whether I leave Vermont and arrive in Arkansas, or leave Arkansas to return to Vermont, it feels like home on both ends of the journey.

So what brought me back to Arkansas? First off, I was to address the Arkansas branch of the Young President's Organization. Secondly, I'd lead a Fearless Writing workshop. And third, I'd give two presentations at Historic Arkansas Museum, one to those who work in and with area museums, and one to a group of 80 third-graders, from e-Stem Charter School.

First, just to set the background scene: of this trip: I was three weeks out of arthroscopic shoulder surgery (the necessity for which had become apparent long after I had already made my speaking and teaching commitments, which I was not about to break, being a the-show-must-go-on girl down to the nuclei of my cells). So there I was, wearing a sling, still needing painkillers to sleep partway through the night, but basically boogeying along in game fashion. And why not? Darling David (boyfriend; filmmaker) came with me --- I still couldn't drive, plus he and my agent had conspired and decided I really needed to have some of my talks on film, and DK was going to film them. All this was good enough, but we were ALSO staying at the home of two of my dear, dear long time friends, George West and Starr Mitchell. (Also present in their home was Scratch, George and Starr's very mellow old gray cat, who did everything he could to make us comfortable. Picture: here I am in George and Starr's guest bedroom, just woken up, snapped by David, slung in the sling, with Scratch cozying up.)

I cannot tell you how much I prefer staying with friends to staying in a hotel. And when those good friends live in a welcoming comfortable home, complete with amiable cat, and when one has the chance for the odd late or early bit of easy, natural, catch-up conversation with either or both of said people, so much the better. In this case, so very much the better: these are two interesting, funny, kind people who are intellectually vibrant, loving, and deeply committed to justice and understanding (to get a sense of this, check this article, which touches heavily on George's work with Central High students and bringing the institution's difficult, meaningful history alive and into a very different present). That they are my loyal long-term friends is my great good fortune. That they loved my late husband, Ned, yet have welcomed David, as well and as compatibly, is almost miraculous.

How, under these benign circumstances, could things not be basically good, even with a shoulder that hurt like hell?

But back to Buffalo Girl, and my talks in Little Rock.

Now, any time I give a talk, anywhere, there's one question that I can be almost certain someone in the audience will ask me, whether that audience consists of YPO members, third graders, museum keepers. Well, actually there are two usual questions: "Is that your real name?" and "What are you working on now?"

A freelance writer's life being inherently unstable and unpredictable, this last can sometimes be a painful one to answer. But this time, thankfully and happily, after a somewhat difficult and dry spell, I had a nice, gratifying three-fold response. Because, to my own joy and wonderment (for reasons that will become clear) I was working on, and actually under contract for, three new books.

The first of these is a cookbook, The Bean Book (actually a wholly rewritten version of a book I first wrote in 1972). It will be published by Workman later this year or early next year. (Left, you can see some of my hands-on work for The Bean Book. This is what we had for dinner the night before last; a close-up of a plate of feijoada completa: Brazilian-style black beans over rice, with sliced oranges, cooked greens, and farofa, toasted tapioca flour --- that's the white powder which looks a little like Parmesan, sprinkled on the beans. Molho de vinagrete, a sort of chunky, non-spicy vinaigrette salsa, rounds out the plate. Not pictured: the tiny, beautiful piri-piri --- very red, fiercely hot little peppers on the side). I will just mention here in passing, that, quirkily enough, Little Rock has an extraordinarily good Brazilian restaurant, Cafe Bossa Nova, which had spiked my interest in that particular cuisine. If you happen to be in Little Rock, eat there. But I digress.

The second book I'm at work on is a new genre for me: how-to/inspirational. It's Fearless Writing, about the writing process as I understand and teach it ... how I infect (in the positive sense), others with it. This book will be published by Ten Speed Press in 2011. As I mentioned, I was also teaching a workshop on it, while in Little Rock. (Pictured right: most of our wondrous, energetic recent Fearless group in Little Rock, at the end of our time together).

The third book I'm working on is a children's book.

Now it happens that when I was answering the "what are you working on" question at "Ordinary Miraculous", the talk I was giving to the museum folks, I screwed up big-time in the part of my response where I was talking about this children's book, which will be published by Little, Brown (I don't know when yet; they have to decide on an illustrator, and publication date will depend on the illustrator's scheule).

And of course, because David was getting tape, it's on camera. In that remarkable way the Internet makes possible, I'm going to include a link to a You-Tube clip of this actual hilarious, and completely unintentional, screw-up ... my story, inspirational and nominally informative at the start, eventually going very, very wrong. Watch, please, before we continue, or what happens next will not entirely make sense.

(Have not yet figured out how to "embed" a video here, though I've diligently tried... sorry.)

Okay, by now, hopefully, you have finished laughing at, and with me.

And now let us fast-forward --- through the YPO talk, Fearless, and "Ordinary Miraculous." Let us come to the morning when I talked to the 80 third-graders from e-Stem (unfortunately, this was the only one of my presentations David did not tape, because by then he was understandably jonesing to be back online and working at his real work, which is not taping his girlfriend giving talks). So while I was with the kids, he was back at George and Starr's, with Scratch, working on his laptop while I did this final talk. It was on a Friday morning; that Friday, in the late afternoon, we'd fly back to Vermont. (Although I wasn't there, obviously, the scene may well have looked like this one George had photographer earlier in the week, with Scratch supervising David at work).

So, back at Historic Arkansas Museum with the e-Stem students, a morning not documented in pictures... so from here on my description will have to suffice.

When the third-graders asked me what I was working on now, I skipped over the cookbook and Fearless Writing and spared them the whole story about the long ten years of non-children's book publication. I just told them that I had just finished writing a children's book.

"What's it about?"

I told them, much as in the taped clip above, that a parent was trying to get a wide-awake child to go to sleep. I quoted the same bit of verse, and the same two animals, Antelope and Baby Bison.

"What's a bison?"

I started to explain what a bison was, but then asked "Well, does anyone here know what a bison is?"

A hand waved wildly in the middle of the room. "It's like a buffalo!" said a young man, excited to know. "Exactly so," I agreed.

"Does it look like a buffalo? "

There was a large flip chart at the front of the room. Though I am not a visual artist, I might have made a stab at trying to draw one had not my right arm been in a sling.

Now it happened that my friend Mary Springer had driven down from Eureka Springs, the little town in which I'd lived so long, with three other dear pals for dinner the night before (at Cafe Bossa Nova, naturally). They'd stayed over, and we'd spent time that morning, and they were sitting in the back row of the auditorium behind the 80 third-graders.

Mary (pictured left), who is an artist, is also, like me, pretty much always up for anything.

"Mary, " I called to her, "Could you come down and draw a bison for us, please?"

Mary called back, holding one arm up, "Remember I told you last night I had carpal tunnel surgery? I still can't draw either!"

So I looked at the 80 e-Stem third-graders and said, "Can anyone here draw a bison or a buffalo?"

Many hands were waving.

But there was one little girl, right in the center of the front row of the auditorium, who caught my eye. She wasn't waving her hand; she had just shot it up and held it still; she seemed to almost be pulsing with confidence and conviction. "Come on up,"I said to her.

With great self-possession she rose from her seat, walked right over to the giant flip pad, and picked up a green Sharpie.

And she turned to me, and looked up at me, and, in front of everyone, said --- earnestly, sincerely, neither whispering nor especially loudly, but in a let's-get-down-to-business tone --- "Now, what does it look like?"

I was, for a second, speechless. She waited, gazing up expectantly at me, clear-eyed and with complete trust. She demonstrably believed that we were, at this moment, partners. Her belief was numinous: her belief that I had the ability to describe, in words, so accurately what this animal she had never seen looked like that she would easily be able to render it on paper. Her faith in all this seemed absolute and complete. It was faith in both of us, and in our ability to instantly and perfectly collaborate. Faith that moves mountains is one thing; but faith that can draw a bison, never having seen one?

Calm, purposeful, utter fearless, she looked up at me, waiting.

"Well..." I said, "I guess its shape is a little bit like a bull..."

She uncapped the green Sharpie and began to draw. Not perfectly --- this is not a story about her being wildly gifted with natural drawing talent --- but te shape she made was definitely bullish, and drawn swiftly and confidently.

Mary, by way of help, called from the back of the room, "It has a hump."

Immediately the little girl put humps on the bull, two, like a camel.

"Just one hump," I added.

"Oh, now I got it," she said, nodding. Deftly she changed the double green humps into a single hump.

And she did get it, sort of. The four-legged horned green humped barrel-chested bullish-buffalo-bison looked amazingly like what it was supposed to be. It had pretty much the shape of a bison.

She completed the outline, capped the Sharpie, put it down, and turned to go back to her seat.

"Thank you," I said, and everyone, including me, applauded.

Later Mary said to me, "She really did very well."

"Unbelievably well, "I said, and repeated to Mary what she had said to me. "Now, what does it look like? "

I shook my head in wonder, as I have several times, writing about this interaction, which took place in far less time than it takes to tell it.

As I said at the beginning of this post, it's not quite a month since I've been back from Little Rock. But I remain dazzled by that little girl and what she embodied.

She didn't know better than to suppose she couldn't do it. Or, more truly, she didn't know worse, the worse most of us carry around, the usual fictional parade of bad possibilities, what if this, what if that, that goes on and on inside our overheated, overactive, fearful brains. That child was heedless of failure. That she might do it wrong in front of a large group, maybe be made fun of, never even crossed her open, fearless small mind.

"We shall not cease from exploration, " wrote that most unchildlike poet, the cerebral T.S. Eliot, " and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time."

I think that arrival, which is both the beginning and the end, probably looks a lot like the gaze --- bright eyed, certain, open, ready --- of that little girl.

The Arc of the Moral Universe: Bush, Barack, & the Bend Towards Justice

Crescent Dragonwagon — 2009-01-22T04:48:03-05:00

January 20, 2009: the swearing in of America's 44th president, Barack Obama.

I watched it quietly here in Vermont ---the first state in the union to declare for Obama back on that glorious election night in November, as most Vermonters will tell you with modest pride. (Quietly, that is, except when singing. Above, standing for The Star-Spangled Banner, facing the television in a small inn. Read on.)

The tone of the day couldn't have been more unlike the deep depression that followed the last two inaugurals for me (in 2004 I actually wore a black armband for several days after the election). And for me personally it couldn't have been more different from the inauguration sixteen years ago (if you want a hint as to why, see Vanity Fair's online "Catching Up with the Clinton Crowd" a kind of 'where are they now?' update on Friends of Bill... your dragon's on page 13 of the slide show).

Because David and I don't have a TV, we drove to Saxtons River, population 541. We don't actually live in Saxtons River, but our phone number has a Saxtons River exchange, and, at three miles from our hilltop, it's the closest place to go when we run out of milk or need to drop a Netflix at the P.O.

It was also the nearest place to find a TV and a group we could be sure would be congenial. Though we're not habitues, rumor had it that innkeeper Tim Clark of the Inn at Saxtons River was an extremely nice man, said to be most welcoming towards the community. The blackboard set on the downstairs porch backed this up : Join us! it said, WATCH INAUGURATION HERE!

The bar (pictured right), where the TV is, isn't large. By 11:15 the room was full. There, with neighbors I mostly didn't know yet, and my partner of the last seven years, David Koff, I watched. As millions of others watched from their corners of the world, or crowded next to each other in the bone-chilling cold in Washington DC (where I had stood on a far warmer inauguration day in 1993, watching Bill Clinton get sworn in).

And I had the sense that those great creaking cogs on which this world's better ways rest, wheels and gears which had rusted and ground to a terrible halt and then slowly reversed over the last eight years, were moving forward again. Moment by moment, word by word, the inauguration lubricated the machinery, and the corrosion fell away. Like many, I wept in wonder.

I wept when Aretha, in her goofy, wonderful hat (which actually has its own fan club on Facebook!), sang.

I wept when the quartet with Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman played. (If you haven't seen In the Fiddler's House, the documentary in which Perlman travels to Poland in search of the roots of klezmer music, please see it now --- it is tragic, triumphant, funny and just so worth seeing).

I wept when Elizabeth Alexander read her Inaugural Poem, Praise Song for the Day (a lot of mean-spirited criticism is surfacing on the Net about it. People, people! It's almost impossible to write a truly great poem for such an occasion, since as anyone who's actually written poetry knows how much it resists appearing on demand or request for particular occasions; it's a form that is more comfortable germinating itself. What Alexander did with this imperfect source for poetry seems to me remarkable: uplifting, accessible, appropriate. A fine and cogent post by Sharani, a librarian, and Shri Chinmoy devotee, about the poem and Alexander's other work, is here ). And of course, I wept, and laughed at the same time, delightedly, through Reverend Lowery's benediction --- "When the red man, can get ahead, man," is just my kind of rhyme.

But most of all, I wept as our now-President Obama spoke. Above, as we saw him on the screen.

"The arc of the moral universe is long ," Martin Luther King, Jr told us just four days before his death in 1968, "but it bends toward justice." Obama, then senator, quoted those prescient words last April, on the 40th anniversary of King's assassination.

On January 20, nine months later, a watching, listening world witnessed that long arc's bend.

King used this phrase many times, including in what would turn out to be the last speech of his life. But during his lifetime, many were not ready or able to hear his words. Even those who did couldn't have imagined the future we glimpsed today. Nor could anyone have imagined how far we still had to go, or the strange twists the road would take, for us to get here. Here being the inauguration of Barack Obama.

This election, more than any other in my lifetime, seems to me to have renewed our contract with hope. It also renews our connection with what President --- yes, President! --- Obama called "our better history."

So rich, rounded, resonant and far-reaching was President Obama's speech, one could write an essay on every sentence. I'm sure it will be parsed for meaning, reference, and rhetoric for decades to come. What I want to talk about here is this idea of "better history."

America's history, our history, does contain a better and a worse. We have always lived at the extremes of both.

All of us, individually and as nations, have a best and worst self from which we can, and do, choose to act, in small matters and large. Maybe this is especially true in America, not only because of our position of power, but because we are one of the most deliberately created nations in the world. We can't afford to ignore either our better or worse: we're made up of both, and must learn from both.

But we must choose, ultimately, to emphasize and live by the lights of one or the other.

By choosing our better history, we chose not the mindless arrogance that allowed colonizers to build America on land already inhabited by its native people. Instead, we chose the thoughtful, idealistic America that existed in direct contradiction to this theft by the Europeans. We chose the America that in its primal document articulated that we "held self-evident" the radical proposition that all are "created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and Happiness."

By choosing our better history, we chose not the America which could articulate such visionary words at the very time it prospered on the commerce, ownership, exploitation and oppression of enslaved human beings, men, women and children kidnapped from their native land and schooled against insurrection by the whip, the brand, and the chain. Instead, we chose the America which later went to war with itself over this fatally flawed inconsistency, paying the most terrible price but thereby bringing itself into alignment with its own ideals and winning freedom --- not only the enslaved but for the enslavers, too.

By choosing our better history, we chose not the America which ran internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. We chose not the America which ran Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and legitimized torture there and elsewhere. Instead, we chose the America which, with its allies, liberated Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau and Buchenwald.

By choosing our better history, we made possible this present: where we chose Barack Obama.

I wept, as perhaps you did, in both joyful and sorrowing disbelief. The joy: amazement, thankfulness, relief, nascent hope. The sorrow: all it taken to get Barack Obama where he is, and, even more so, to get us, as a country, to where we could put him where he is.

There are many heroes and heroines, going back as far as this country's memory can hold, whom we might rightfully credit with taking us, step by incremental step, to this day.

But strangely, strangely, I believe, and I want to credit, the one person (save, perhaps, Barack Obama himself) who, though certainly not heroic, did more than anything to get him in office: George W. Bush.

From the moment George W. Bush stole the first election (and we let him! I don't know what we could have done differently, but, still, we let him!), he presided over the step-by-step dismantling of everything that is good about America, virtually all that belongs on the "best" side of history's ledger. He's left us a disastrous legacy on every front : we're poorer, less free, and more imperiled in a world approaching environmental meltdown, peopled by nations who had begun to hate and feel contempt for us, and rightfully so.

Yet Bush (albeit with as much ignorance about the consequences of his actions as he has always shown) propelled us forcefully towards where we are today.

See, I think most of us stick to the known, however bad it is, rather than risk change. Everyone likes the outcome of positive change. But that outcome, and that it will be positive, is never certain on the front end. And almost no one likes the process of changing: not only is outcome not a sure thing, but at least temporary destabilization is almost certain. Change asks us to risk chaos and maybe hardship, for an unknown outcome. Better the devil that you know, as the saying goes. Who, for example, would choose the huge disruption of leaving their homes and possessions to become a refugee unless they were quite sure they were about to be slaughtered or flooded? 'Pretty sure' isn't usually enough: as witness those who, rather than disrupt their lives by moving, lose them by murder or drowning.

Looked at this way, it becomes easier to see why change, even when its the potential pay-off is vast, frightens the wits out of most of us. Yeah, sure it could be better, we human beings seem to say reflexively, until we are completely backed into a corner --- but it could also be worse. Couldn't it? Much worse?

Well, George Bush backed us into one hell of a corner. It's hard to imagine anyone who could have done so more impeccably. Consider his perfect storm of characteristics: arrogance, ignorance, carelessness, a heedless and unthinking disregard for any point of view but his own, xenophobia, incompetence, being just plain not-very-bright, and a fatal blindness to the consequences of his actions, for starters. There are plenty of people who have these characteristics, true. But can you think of anyone else who, despite being wholly lacking in any credentials or experience which might befit the nation's highest office was also A) wealthy, B) willing and C) dynastically positioned to become president?

Who else but George Bush could have caused so much suffering, could have tipped the scales so forcefully that even change ---- chaos, unknown outcome and all --- looked much, much better than status quo? Who else could have caused us to lose so much that we feared that if we did not change course drastically, we might lose everything?

We will be reckoning the cost of George Bush's legacy for a long time. Some of us have already paid with our lives, or the lives of those we loved. Some have paid with their homes, or their once-secure retirements. Our nation's level of debt is a toxic, Katrina-high flood, and only the richest of the rich remain truly dry. Because of the last eight years, our world is less safe --- for Americans or anyone else --- and our water and air more imperiled than in decades.

Yet only a series of crises as deep and prolonged as those George Bush wrought while in office could have forced the nationwide self-confrontation it took to bring us to today. Could anything less have made us grow, and grow up, so profoundly? To overcome such ancient distrust and hatreds that would almost certainly have barred Barack Obama from winning an American presidential election at any other time?

Because George Bush broke so grossly with our "better history" , instead embracing our worst --- by making us, for instance, a covertly governed nation condoning wire-tapping and torture, mocking science and rationality in the name of God, unloosing witch-hunts or firings of those who disagreed publicly with his and Cheney's regime's decisions, feeding fear, quashing hope, inflicting blow after blow of profound unfreedom --- by turning his back on our better history so unwaveringly, George Bush finally helped us, at last, to return to it.

With Obama's inauguration, America finally yanked up hard on the racism that's poisoned our country's roots since its inception. Of course, hatred and racism are not weeded out so with a single yank, no matter how dramatic. Yet, wonder of wonders, when it came down to it, we elected the most qualified person for the job: despite the fact that he happened to be a black man --- more truthfully, a mixed-race man. (Surely most of us over at least 50 are still murmuring to ourselves and each other in wonder, "Did you ever think you'd live to see the day when --- ?" )

When it came down to it, we overcame a campaign of perception, slander, innuendo, and over untruth to vote as we did. For this most qualified person could easily have been defeated, in less desperate times, simply by having a foreign-sounding last name that is one letter away from being the first name of America's most widely known, hated and feared enemy.

When it came down to it, we also overcame, in our vote, our longtime national suspicion of intelligent, complex thinkers as over-educated, impractical, whiny, politically correct eggheads (remember how recently John Kerry's "nuanced thinking" was derided?). Instead, when we chose Barack Obama, we chose someone genuinely well-educated, deeply thoughtful, unwilling to pander to us by speaking simplistically or playing to the old prejudices and their false verities.

We chose someone evidently personally developed enough to know that the old them-and-us ways of looking at the world no longer suffice. Someone articulate, smart, and both impassioned and cool headed enough to raise a clarion call to another, radically different way of seeing and living in the world.

I wrote the first draft of this post on the evening of the Inauguration. I noted "it's late now, though the parties in Washington are still going on. I could go on, too, now --- there's much more I'd like to say about today. About all it called up for me personally (at Bill Clinton's first presidential inauguration, 16 years ago, I did my share of dancing until my feet hurt at inaugural balls --- but that's another story). About, also, teaching in Little Rock last week and the wild-ass gorgeous fearless courage of the little girl who offered to draw a bison --- but, that too is another story. I could certainly make all these improbable skeins all wrap together with the inaugural and my thoughts about it (something I love doing as a writer, and have already done in my mind).

"But. It is late, I have a cold and one arm in a sling and a very sore shoulder, plus I'm trying to learn how to write shorter posts."

Now it's the next night. Everything above is still true. Once again my shoulder is screaming in pain at its overuse, and I have let it, again, get shockingly late.

So I will leave you with this: as I sat in the bar at the inn and watched on the television screen the image of that Army green helicopter holding George and Laura Bush rise above Washington and leave for Andrews Air Force Base, as I breathed out in relief, as millions surely did, also probably shaking their heads as I did mine, at the senseless damage inflicted, the waste, waste, waste... as I did all this, I also found myself thinking, to my own vast surprise, "Thank you.

"You may not know you did it, Mr. Bush. And you certainly didn't intend to do it. You have much, much to be ashamed of and to answer for, and perhaps you'll never do either, or if you'll ever even understand the damage you did, the evil you set loose in the world and why you leave the office disgraced. And no, I do not believe, as you say you do, that history will absolve you.

"But you left us Barack Obama. Thank you. Thank you for this gift."

"50 year old shoulder"

Crescent Dragonwagon — 2008-12-19T06:10:32-05:00

If I want to eat anything else, I have 15 minutes in which to do it. No solid food after midnight.

When I hurt my left shoulder about a decade ago, some now-forgotten person said to me, "Rotator cuff, probably. Rotator cuffs just wear out. You know what they call it in Chinese medicine? 'Fifty year-old shoulder.'"

Since I was only 45 or so at the time, I found this offensive. And it turned out not to be the rotator cuff anyway. Not then.

But now it is (only partially torn, however). Some other stuff going on in this 56-year-old shoulder, too.

Here's what the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center "What to Expect After Shoulder Surgery" sheet says: "Whether your shoulder surgery is done arthroscopically or through a regular incision, you should still consider your procedure a major surgery. You'll be living life with only one useful arm for awhile..."

Here's what Gail, Dr. John-Erik Bell's orthopedic nurse, whose hobby is --- get this --- racing motorcycles --- says: "Look, it's a big deal. It is. Time, money, pain. Not being able to use your dominant arm is a biiiig hassle, I won't lie to you. But you need to think of it as an investment. Shoulder surgery is an investment. And it is so, so worth it."

She also says, "Stay ahead of the pain. Take the painkiller before you think you need it. We have good drugs. Use them."

I like her. I like Caroline, the scheduler, and Jessica, who was the first person in the department I spoke with. I like John-Erik Bell, too. Each of whom, though no doubt busy up the wazoo and no doubt sick of answering the same questions countless times, all gave me and David the impression that they had as much time and information as we might need in order to reach whatever the best decision for us might be. I don't think this was just "impression" either, for it's not possible to fake caring or thoughtful listening for longer than a few minutes before a glance at the watch, a set of the shoulders, a micro-grimace, gets across the too-busy-time's-a-wasting-can't-you-see-I've-got-a-job-to-do message. Those DHMC folks, at least all I've met so far, don't have jobs as much as they do callings: their attention and intention is aligned with being called to do do their particular work. It's not only not just a job, it's not even just work; it's work with meaning: meaning for them and meaning for those they serve. Meaning is what makes work a calling.

A couple of times a day for the past week, I've been listening to the pre-op portion of a recording called "Stress Free Surgery: a self-relaxation program to help you prepare for and recover from surgery." Here's (in part --- it's 44 minutes long) is what it says:

"Breathe in ... re... breathe out... lax. That's right. In ... re... out... lax.
"You're at the top of a staircase of comfort. Each step down takes you twice as relaxed as the step above it. " (Don't get irritated at the grammar, Crescent.)
"Ten... Relax... Nine...relax.
"The doctors and the nurses will take such good care of you..."
"You'll feel the blood pressure cuff inflate, like a gentle hug..."
"Any sounds you may hear, unless said directly to you, recede into the background, and become a quiet... peaceful... lull, like waves on the ocean..."

For the first fifteen or twenty minutes of listening to this, I also listen to my mind, which chitters, ridicules, jeers, disparages, critiques the language use, wonders if the whole experience would be better if I had remembered to put the eye mask on and maybe I should get up and find it and put it on my eyes because it's really bright in here, and then I could relax. Things I haven't gotten done yet and really need to do before I am one-armed also run in and out, one after another putting in an appearance.

But eventually the part of me watching all this sighs, and says "Give it a rest, Dragon, chill."

And I really do.

Here's what my mother's friend, the retired children's book editor Susan Hirschman, told her some years ago. "Oh, Charlotte, let's not waste time talking about our health. At our age, it's just one organ recital after another!"

Here's what Gaelen, my down-the-hill neighbor, sweet pal, vernal wild-flower aficionado, and nurse says, "Do NOT take opioids without taking Colase and senna with them. " I demur, point out that I've soaked prunes and apricots, and David can make me fruit compote using them... I don't like discussions about intimate scatalogical matters. Gaelen repeats "Do NOT take opiods without taking Colase and senna with them.Get David to pick them up when he has the painkiller prescriptions filled."

Undergoing voluntary pain and temporary disability --- it's anxious-making, no matter how good you are with anxiety, no matter how good the eventual pay-off from the investment.

Now it's 12:01 a.m. I've missed chance for eating the other half of that perfectly ripe d'Anjou pear I was eating at 11:28 p.m.

Here's what I say: how we tell our stories matters. I know this much is true, to quote the title of the Wally Lamb novel which is in turn based on a song originally recorded by Spandau Ballet and made popular by the 80's rock-pop group, whose music I never particularly liked, Tears for Fears.

Here is what I say when I tell the story about this upcoming surgery to myself:

I'm glad I live in a time and place where people routinely live long enough to have 50-year-old shoulder, and that there is a medical intervention to fix it actually exists. As well as drugs to put you to sleep while it's being performed.

And that my doctor is a Johns-Hopkins graduate who did a residency at Columbia-Presbyterian just in shoulders, and shoulders are mostly what he does now.

And that the surgery is taking place at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, where they did such good work on David's spine two summers ago, and where, from the moment you walk in to that light, non-hospital-smelling atrium space and see the arch that says, "We, the employees of Dartmouth-Hitchcock, welcome you", and see the grand piano that a volunteer plays at noon each day, you know this is an astonishingly kind as well as well-practiced facility. (Left, DHMC's photograph of the info desk that centers the atrium --- a mandala out of which the life of the Center spreads)

And that David, the loving partner with whom I am privileged to walk through time during this phase of our respective lives, will take care of me in the weeks to come. No doubt with a mixture of compassion, impatience, thoughtfulness, aggravation, and tenderness --- much as I did when he had his spine surgery.

And that I made an extra lasagna, and extra black bean soup, and other stuff I fixed in the past few weeks, and froze it. Plus I taught David how to make a smoothie the way I like it, and that pasta dish with the garlic and chiles and loads of kale or swiss chard or broccoli and chick peas and lemon juice and Parmesan...

Here's something else I say to myself: it's elective surgery. You are choosing to do this. To that extent, it's within your control. You weren't in an accident. You got to pick.

Here's something else I say to myself: you fortunate girl you!

And sometimes, something else, something my old, one-time Eureka Springs compadre, Vernon Tucker, once said to me: "All this positive thinking is driving me to despair!"

I hear David coming up the stairs. Time to get offline --- for a month, six weeks? Time to get in the hot bath and let David scrub my shoulder with the presurgical Hibiclens.

Time to say, goodbye for now, dear friends, readers, and colleagues.

Time to see what new insights this series of experiences turns out to have yielded.

For here is what I also say to myself --- and if, again, I know this much is true, then it's the hugest and most comforting much there is, that of utility, usefulness --- I tell myself, nothing is wasted on the writer.