Why it’s been quiet in these parts …

“Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Sometimes you just need time to think, to take it all in, to sort it out, before you can let it back out of you.

More thoughts on the dreams that break your heart coming soon …

On giving more

“I was demanding of myself a deeper and greater honesty, more and more revelation in my work in order to give it back to the people, where it goes into their lives and nourishes them, changes their direction and makes light bulbs go off in their heads and makes them feel.  [Where] it isn’t vague.  It strikes against the very nerves of their life.  And in order to do that you have to strike against the very nerves of your own.”

-Joni Mitchell

If you call yourself an artist, make art.

Tennessee Williams - working.

Outside the bar it was winter, and a woman in a grand fur coat that fluffed to her ears walked past the window.  They were sitting in the corner, away from the others, passing bits of who they were back and forth in a conversation that had, beneath it, a pulse of their growing attraction, a kind of warmth, like the cooing of something newly born.  Behind them, the traffic was thick and the sidewalks were busy.

“I want to make something lasting,” he said. “But I lose steam after the initial inspiration. I have a lot of first drafts, but no second drafts.”

“That’s because you don’t like to be alone,” she said. “You don’t like to lock yourself away from other people and work.”

“I feel like being out among people feeds the work. One is necessary for the other.”

She told him he might be right, but at this point he had only one and not the other; he was only out among his friends, meeting new people, spending his stories and ideas over cocktails so that even if he sat down and forced himself to write, he had nothing left for the page.

The waiter came over with the bottle of red and offered it to them like a question.  They nodded, then he refilled their glasses.  There were tea lights on the tables and the waiter’s hand elongated in shadow across the wood surface, then drew back when his hand drew back.

“This is the problem with people who have the urge to create but don’t,” she said. “You focus only on art as inspired fancy, and never think of it as the work it is. I’ve been writing my whole life,” she said, “and I just started to get good. I can’t possibly tell you how much I’ve written and revised throughout the years. How much I’ve thrown out. It’s a craft and you have to learn it. The only way you learn it is by doing it.”

“When I’m ready to sit down and write it, I will,” he said. “When the time’s right.”

“But then it won’t be any good,” she said, “because you haven’t apprenticed. You haven’t put in the work for it to be any good.”

She wasn’t sure if he was listening because what she said resonated, or because he wanted to touch her, later on, after the bar.  But then he paused, the glass before his lips, the wine giving a little swirl against the glass, threatening, for a moment, to spill out.  Then he nodded, a slow nod of consideration.  She thought he was  listening because it was an angle he hadn’t heard before, because many people thought of art as primarily a vacation from the normal, a deviation from their parents’ boring lives, say, and they had decided they did not want such lives, but they did not see it as work, as a trade.  They wanted above all to not be conventional, and so they had decided somewhere along the way that they were creative types, even if they never actually created.  As if creativity was accoutrement to a persona, and not an action, the result of which is a gift to the world, a gift against the world, with its brutality and its carelessness, a push back against that, a little love wrought in the darkness, a little beauty spit in the eye of the great ugly beast.

“Would you pick up a hammer and a box of nails and say, ‘I’m going to go build a house’?” she said. “When you’ve never learned how to build a house?”

“No,” he said, smiling, “I wouldn’t.”

“But because you have a sheet of paper and a pencil and you know how to spell you think you can build a book, something lasting, a story, whatever, whenever you want, just like that,” and she snapped her fingers.

He lowered his wine, smiling, and leaned back against the chair, like a chess player who’s been outmaneuvered.  He either understood or thought her moxie impressive, she couldn’t quite tell just yet.  She couldn’t tell if she was wounding him, which was something she did not want to do.  She was charmed by him and for a moment thought maybe it was his lack of this drive that would eventually make her no longer charmed by him, and so she wanted to be clear on this point.  She admired his gregariousness,  found it endearing, actually, she just could not abide others co-opting what she had given so much for – and so much to – without earning it.

“I can’t talk about writing with people who don’t want to put in the work,” she said, “it aggravates me. Call yourself something else,” she said, “but don’t call yourself a writer.”

The bourgeois desires of the bohemian

You have always wanted to be free to create.  You have the instinct of a romantic: When you felt your work was not so good, you yearned to have had polio as a child, like Frida Kahlo or Joni Mitchell, women whose periods of fever had created lifetimes of fever.  A fiery touch from God forging the exceptional, the visionary.

You wonder often if you have failed.  If everything you’ve decided you’ve decided wrongly.  Where you were tight, maybe you should have been loose, where you were free, maybe you should have been caged.  You hadn’t the constitution to be a true bohemian.  You think of Kahlo, say, setting her broken body back together by trading paintings to pay doctors’ bills, living with both her husband and her lovers in the blue house in Coyoacán, and the idea both attracts and repels you.  It is too much risk, perhaps, to live and die that way, unable to pay for chemotherapy if you need it, or a new set of teeth if you need them, and so on.  And what would others think of such sexual veracity?  Kahlo was a cripple and she behaved like a vigorous man.  She didn’t give a damn.  Sex made her feel alive.  The arms of her lovers healed her.  She apologized to no one for it.  She painted it.  She took it all onto her brush and she painted it.  Patti Smith once cleared an oven in a Lower East Side apartment of syringes before baking bread in it.  She pissed in old jars in a loft she lived in because there wasn’t any bathroom.  She fell in love with junkies and she moved like an eel, smoothly and darkly, through the waters of her youth.  All this both excited and unnerved you.  You knew you could never be that low to the ground, that grimy, that perilous.

Once you had gone to Memphis with your lover.  The motel you stayed in was low down to its core.   You wouldn’t even get underneath the bed sheets.  The room smelled like a suitcase packed with wet socks and old cigarettes.  There were stains on the ceilings and stains on the curtains and after you took a shower in that bathroom, you felt dirty just for having bathed in it.  Moss grew in the abandoned pool.  Men drinking 40s loitered along the balcony.  You slept on top of your lover that night.  His body touched the bed and your body touched his, you laid yourself across him like a plank so you wouldn’t have to touch any part of that room.

It has only been by failure — not by choice — that you have not attained all the comforts you want.  Even though you’ve listened to artist after artist say that those things would ruin you.  That money and safety and comfort make you fat.  You stop struggling in your soul and it is hard to create something that says anything worth hearing.  You have only been willing to risk so much life with your life, to risk only so much ostracizing from you family, to be only so strange, to be only so unconventionally beautiful before you reign it all in, pull it back: You make it safe.

You are always making things safe again.

When you run away you always run back again.

When you are wild for a period you are always tame, then, for a period,

as if there is a penance to pay for your freedom,

as if you owe the universe a balancing of the scales.

But still you’ve been wild, you’ve run, risked, been ostracized, strange, and disappointed the people you love.  They wanted you on a different path.  Something they could understand and define.  You went like a rag doll, this way and that, tugged here and there, pulled where you wanted and tugged back where they wanted.  You wanted to please them.  But you admired the people who sought to please no one.  Those who had been defiant from the start, setting out to make themselves in another image, a truer image than the one the world they had been born into allowed.  You admire these people, but you could never really allow yourself to be one of them.  At least not fully.  You love your hometown too much.  You love the very idea of a hometown.  When you plant bulbs in the spring you stare at the roots as if they are tarot cards or tealeaves.  You believe they have something to tell you, to teach you.  You respect your family too much.  You have never seen its members as idiots but as heroes.  They are heroic to you, made of stronger stuff and bolder.  They had come from the dregs and sought to be bourgeois.  You would have to relinquish that bourgeois to seek the dregs, and it seems so silly, to go backward, to throw away all they had worked for, all the mortar and brick and nails they had fought with, for some creative fancy.  So here you are, some hybrid creature — one half traditional, one half heretical.

You had another lover once, and he had disliked his family immensely; he disagreed with every bit of the way they saw the world.  You were not like that.  You did not understand that.  Bruce Springsteen never left the place he came from, but he went so far.  He made a name for himself and created a breathing, illuminating narrative arc, and still he felt obligated to something more than himself; he wrote, “… I paid the big cost, inside I felt like I was carrying the broken sprits of all the other ones who lost,” and you understand that.  You understand what it is like to feel like a vessel, carrying all the people who have come before you, carrying all their struggles, all they have done and sacrificed to create you.  You can’t take that for granted.  You can’t dismiss it.  You know people who do dismiss it.  They say, “That’s not me, that’s my family,” and this is a concept foreign to you.  It is like a baby telling his mother that is not his milk, but her breast.  It is unnatural, bizarre.

You have felt too old fashioned for the wild, too wild for the old fashioned.

But you love them both equally.

You are both of them equally.

This division is the chisel that shapes your life.

Out of this your art is forged.

Regarding your day job

“You know, it may be a rotten thing to lick a man’s boots,

but it’s a lot worse to be the man whose boots have to be licked.”

- “Playhouse 90,” Rod Serling

Why we want what we want

(or “Johnny and Josie,” Part 2)

 

Her legs to him were as tall as the buildings in the black and white photographs she kept in her dresser drawer; the buildings rose from the ground and went up up up into the sky.  In one of the pictures, the top of the building pokes into a cloud.  That always amazed him, and he could easily imagine his mother in those buildings, he could see that she belonged there, once upon a time, in a city like that.

He was only as tall as her thighs.  When his father wasn’t home, she’d wiggle into her old cigarette girl uniform – the black satin short skirt, the glittering gold bow tie, the silky white bodice that showed the start of her cleavage, and the tiny black hat pinned to her upswept hair.  Cigarettes? Candy? Matches? she would say, parading around their teeny living room, holding at her waist a flimsy tray she’d gotten at Woolworth’s as if it was the old carrier she used when she worked the cabaret clubs in New York City.  Cigarettes? she’d ask, leaning down to him, lifting a balled up pair of his dirty socks from the tray, Cigarettes young man?  And he’d nod yes, and pretend to pull a tuft of bills out of his pocket to pay for the cigarettes.  She’d hand him the socks.  She’d pour him a bit of apple juice and tell him it was champagne.  Drink and be merry, she’d say, for tomorrow we die.  He didn’t know, because to him she was still beautiful, that the uniform no longer fit her as it once did and that once she had been beautiful.

Then they’d hear his father’s boots, pounding like hammers against the corridor stairs as he drew closer to the front door.  Both of them would stiffen.  They’d pause like deer caught in approaching headlights.  He never knew what he should do first, if he should drink the pretend champagne to get rid of it, or remind his mama she had heavy lipstick on and to remove it, or to take the tray, or hide the socks, or her hat.  Then his steps would be so close their paralysis would break as adrenaline flashed through their veins.  His mother would rush him into the pantry and shut the door and tell him to stay, to sit and be quiet and wait.  It was so cold in the pantry.  He’d huddle in the dark beneath the shelves of canned beans and flour sacs, only a slim line of light sliding in beneath the door.  There were different kinds of entrances and that’s how Johnny knew how long he would be in there, either a few minutes or a few hours, depending on the type of entrance.  Depending on if the front door slammed hard or closed softly, depending on if his daddy said nothing or said hello.

If the door slammed and his father said nothing he knew it would be hours in the pantry.  His mother would try not to scream, so there would only be her grunts, little cries like a wounded puppy as his father smacked her around the tenement flat.  Johnny, knees pulled to his body and tucked under his chin, arms wrapped around his legs, shuddered at each whack he heard his father deliver.  Furniture would break.  Glasses and dinner dishes fell to the ground and shattered into a hundred pieces.

Then it would be quiet.  Then Johnny would hear the squeak of the mattress springs, and different kinds of grunts, different kinds of little cries, and when his mother finally came for him and opened the door she would be smiling, smoking a cigarette, her Japanese silk robe hanging loosely around her body, her cheeks pink, with the light behind her fanning like a peacock’s tail around her outline.  Oh there’s my little boy, she’d say, come on out now, she’d say, you must be hungry.  She’d lay two slices of bread with cheese between them into a pan and, stepping around the shards of broken glass, hand Johnny a glass of chocolate milk.  His father would enter the room, buttoning up his pants, his rough face red and blotchy and his black hair matted.

Then one night, several years later, he did not stay in the pantry as he was told to.  When he heard his mother’s moans, what he thought was her head smacking against the sofa arm, he leapt up from the place where he had always sat and threw open the door and lunged onto his father like a cougar onto its prey.  It was an act that shifted things.  After that nothing was the same.  That night his mother slept in the bed alone and his father on the sofa, his body too large for the slim piece of furniture so that his left arm threshed off the couch, knuckles touching the floor.  Johnny never sat in the pantry again.  He was always thereafter in the middle of his mother and his father, taking the blows for her, and because of that the blows lessened; his father understood that while he was growing older, Johnny was growing stronger. Sometimes he thought maybe his mother resented his interference, as if his parents were dancing a waltz and Johnny had now taken away the music.  But the thought was so twisted that Johnny would push it out of his mind; he would choose to not see it.   He would see what he needed to see in his mother, and all the rest he tossed aside.

His father was a bricklayer and he wanted Johnny to learn the trade.  Johnny wanted to be nothing that his father was.  He took a job at the sheet metal factory where some of his cousins worked and it was a fine enough job, and he intended to keep it all his life, collecting a pension he had earned when it was time to retire.  He wanted a good life.  A good woman.  Not a broken woman, a good woman.  He wanted a family.  A clean house and a steady paycheck and little things that called him Daddy and Papa and a wife that loved him.  It was so simple, what Johnny wanted, so simple that when he met Josie he felt he had found the piece to complete the puzzle.  He met Josie and he snapped her into the picture, and, to him, the picture was complete.  He saw the parts of her he needed, and the rest he tossed aside, not out of malice, but out of necessity – he needed her to be what he needed her to be.

Now, 10 years into their lives together, when he tried to kiss her he could feel her body stiffen.  She went rigid as a slab of beef at the slaughter house.  He thought of his days as a boy, and how he and his mother would stiffen at the sound of his father’s approach, and it killed Johnny inside.  It stabbed him like needles in the heart to know he made Josie stiffen as his father had made his mother stiffen.  The reasons behind it were different, of course, but he didn’t understand how he had become the same kind of man whose wife turns rigid in anticipation of his hands upon her.  He had loved her and given her a home and what he thought she wanted.  He didn’t know that some day, the parts of her he had tossed aside would return, like evidence washing ashore, to accuse him.

The roads we choose

(or “Johnny and Josie,” Part 1)

“Every day it just gets harder to live

This dream I’m believing in …”

 Bruce, “The Promise”

Before Johnny came along, Josie sang with the band.  There had been other men before him.  She was like a sailor with a lover in every port, but she was a good girl, a good Catholic girl and so all she let them do was buy her a drink, or a t-bone at the local steak house, or a record, maybe, or a pack of cigarettes, and they would dance until the orchestra packed up, or the piano player pulled the lid down over the keys and the barroom lights were turned up.

There were a whole lot of nights on the road, in this city and that, in this forgettable town and that one.  The money was steady but it wasn’t good.  She believed in herself because little sparks kept her going, little happenings that worked like injections, fortifying her and giving her strength to go on: Once, in Los Angeles, the Times had written up a little blurb about her performance, calling her the love child of Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee; once, in Memphis, she had been asked to sing live on a local radio station, and her rendition of “Unchained Melody” brought the men working the controls to tears.  These things, they were injections, and they gave her the hope and the force to move on to the next city, as if her big break was just around the bend, just a few more miles, a few more lines to travel on the Rand McNally, and there it would be.

It was night after night like this, until it was week after week, months, and then a few years had passed of a life that, when she looked at it, seemed made of nothing that would last.  It was like this when she met Johnny.  And there was, she had suddenly realized, all this space, as if her life was just a framed-out house, and she hadn’t been able to fill it, to give it walls and a roof and floors.  Josie had never felt love before Johnny, and he made, in comparison, all those other guys fall away.  So she sat on the boardwalk, because he had taken her down the shore to ask her, and she thought about it long and hard as she watched the hot rods and the muscle cars riding the circuit in front of her.  They were like wild beasts upon the summer streets.  Their engines throbbed.  The rev of their transmissions was a terrible cry, something like the thunder of horses on the plains.  There was something inside her that kept telling her to hold on, to not give up, to keep on with it.  It was as precious and small as a lightning bug, and when it flashed its yellow light she seemed to fill with it, to understand that she should hold on, keep on, not give up.  People always gave up too soon.  They cashed in their chips when their best hand was in the next deal of cards.  When the going got tough they split.  When push came to shove they fell to the floor and stayed there.  You had to push through the pain.  You had to give yourself a good fighting chance.

But then the yellow light dimmed.  There was doubt.  The darkness drew more darkness to it and expanded inside of her.  She could see herself down the road, alone, alone, alone because of some lousy dream she didn’t have the chops to pull off, the talent to actualize, and it horrified her.  And by then, she wouldn’t even be pretty enough anymore to have the lovers in every port.  Just herself and broken dreams.  Then what would she do?  What would she do?  And she stared at it long enough so that the yellow light could not compete with the darkness.  She turned her back on the cars.  The sound of the ocean’s steady, relentless slap against the shore filled her ears, drowning out the rev and roar of the engines.  She told Johnny yes, she would be his bride.

Then it was Johnny and the baby and Josie singing only lullabies, happy birthdays, or along with the radio with her hands deep in dishwater.  In the beginning she was fine with it all; at first she was fat on this new life, this sweet, warm, honey-bear life she had with Johnny and the baby, all three of them snug in the one-room apartment, the radiator hissing heat in the winter and the windows thrown open in the summer so that the curtains billowed softly.  It was a strange feeling, though, when it did come, like the way your stomach flips before you vomit.  She had been listening to the radio.  After the first time it happened more and more, as if, now that it had caught up with her, it wouldn’t let her out of its sight; she’d listen to the DJ play the newest single by Brenda Lee, or The Shirelles, or the latest girl singer or group to break through to the top of the Top 40, and she’d realize she’d been scrubbing the same spot on the pan for the last three minutes and twenty-four seconds, or however long it took for the record to play.  Then it was in her throat, like something buoyed up from the waters where she had tried to sink it.

And now, 10 years down that road, she couldn’t help but to pin it all on Johnny, even though she knew it was a shit thing to do, she couldn’t help but do it, even though she knew if it hadn’t been Johnny it could have been anything – the promise of a straight, steady job, a chicken in the pot, the promise of a split level home in some town so safe nobody even thought about it, let alone caused trouble in it – anything, almost anything, could have lured her away with its promise of safety and security.  But it had been Johnny, and now there was a lot of forgiveness needing to go around, and so little of it to spare.

On the art of the physical

“I am fascinated with athletics and physical prowess because it is the only place that I can get a kind of truth that I can get nowhere else in the world. I can’t get it from my government, I can’t get it from institutionalized religion, I can’t get it even from my best friends half the time, but let me tell you what I mean by that.

If you tell me you’ve got four-four speed in a 4o, well we got some watches budd, we’ll go measure 40 yards and see what kind of speed you got, and you either got it or you don’t have it. You say you can bench press 500 pounds? We got a bon-pro bench press, we’ll load up a bar and we’ll see, and you can either do it or you cannot do it … I know that that sort of truth, perhaps, put against philosophical truth, or truth concerning faith or the lack of it, nobility or the lack of it, compassion or the lack of it, is pretty weak stuff, I realize that, but at least it’s the truth …

And I want to here say that courage is not a joke; that perseverance and tenacity are not jokes; that deprivation and denial toward some goal is not a joke, and last of all, the ancient Greeks believing that self-competition was the highest form of competition is not a joke. And all of those things are at work when anybody, whether he’s a competitive bodybuilder or just works out in a weight gymnasium, all of those things are at work when he steps through the door.”

- Harry Crews

An excerpt from the memoir in progress …

In a dusty box in the basement, I find a VHS tape labeled, “Christmas 1979.”

Everyone in the house is asleep, including my father, who is curled up on the living room carpet behind me, a pillow tucked under his cheek.  In September, I will enter junior high, and already things are beginning to churn inside of me; already childhood is a glacier breaking apart, seismic pieces disturbing life as I have known it.  The television set is framed by cabinet doors and, in the dark room, the light flashes silver and blue across my face as I sit in front of the screen, cross-legged, sliding the tape into the VCR.

A time capsule cracks open, and here comes my family, circa December of the year I was born.  It takes my breath away.  My shoulders start to cave forward and my back hunches as I see myself, stuffed into a pair of fuzzy, yellow feety pajamas, crawling around the base of the Christmas tree.  The film was transferred to video from 8 mm, so there is no sound.  My mother’s mouth moves as she laughs and talks to my Uncle Ralph.  Uncle Ralph has a microphone in his hand, a little voice box recorder in the other, and he starts to sing into it.  Behind him, Uncle Mario smiles, a Marlboro Red between his fingers, as all my cousins scamper around the room, crazy with Christmas energy.  My big brothers are there, and they are children; my sister, who is the age I am now, waves, all silly, to whoever it is that is filming.  My father, lean and bright-eyed and young, wraps his arm around his sister and says something to tease her; her face goes purple as jam as she laughs and laughs, her big body jiggling.

We flicker across the screen like ghosts, holographic images that do not exist anymore.  Something fractures.  Molecules scatter like pool balls through my body, as though someone has just broken the news of a tragedy to me, and I’m slipping into panic:  I suddenly understand that those people do not exist anymore.  I feel what you feel when you hear a car screech to a stop, followed by the shatter of collision.  Tears puddle in my eyes and then stream down my cheeks.  I am holding back my sobs, because my daddy is still passed out behind me, a long day of work in the sun having taken from him even the energy to climb the stairs or to remove his work boots.  I don’t want him to hear, because if he hears he will ask me, “Why you cry?” and I’ll have to tell him, “I don’t know.”

By this time, I have already written my first short stories.  One is about an adopted child, who, unbeknownst to the adopting parents, has AIDS; it’s the 1980s, and the AIDS epidemic is all over the news.  President Ronald Reagan has come on television to talk about it and, unconsciously, I was doing what I would do for the rest of my life — what I am doing right now — trying to make order out of chaos, to make sense of what is happening, or has happened, or will happen.  Another story is about a star high school football player whose leg is amputated in a car accident.  He loses the very thing that defined him, the very thing he loved; no more football, no more cheerleaders cheering him on at the 30-yard line.  It was already inside me, although I could not have described it, this sense that life is not a straight line but a swirling mass that would take what I did not want to give, and give what I did not want to take.  Wired into me was some unnameable grief, a prescience for loss.

Watching the Christmas video, tears barreling down my cheeks, I have found my proof.  I have evidence, here, on the screen:

Once I had been an infant, a decade had passed without my realizing it was passing, vanishing, never to be again.  I had changed.  I was already broken, and there was no returning to that pure little bundle in the feety pajamas crawling across the carpet.  Even the carpet was gone.  My father was older (he would grow older still, I suddenly realized) and my mother was not the skinny, fire-eyed woman I saw on the screen (and she would grow older still, my God, it crashed over me.)  I will never catch up, I think to myself.  It will all keep slipping away.

I bring my hands to my face.  My fingers and palms are wet.  The light of the television prisms over me.  I feel like a failure, a mortal sinner because I did not realize this sooner, because I did nothing to appreciate — to preserve — what is now gone.  What I’m trying to say is this: I became an artist because I felt this way.  I was an artist and so I felt this way.  My body bends in half, face toward the floor, like a mule whose load suddenly causes him to buckle; without art, without a way to shape the unmanageable into something ordered, I will not survive this life.

When I wrote a poem, a few years earlier, the beginning of which goes, “She sits and watches the world go by, contemplating everything, wondering why,” I don’t think I knew what I was saying, but it was true.  I grabbed the broom and made my cousin sit on the back porch as I recited it again and again.  My cousin thought the poem genius.  I agreed.  It came as a revelation to me when I finally learned that writers are real; that Emily Dickinson, say, had been an actual young woman, holed up in her father’s house the way I was holed up in my father’s house; that Whitman had been an actual man, not a mythical creature, wiping the mouths of dying soldiers.  Then I learn somehow that writers are not, like dinosaurs, extinct.  It’s untrue that the people in blown-out sepia pictures, like Dickinson and Whitman, have already written all the books and, as I thought, filled the library shelves once and for all.  Writers still lived.  They were alive among me, where I did not know, but they wrote and tried to make money from what they wrote, and it was their job, the way my daddy had a job planting flowers and chopping down trees, I could shake their hands if I ever met them, and maybe, someday, I could be one of them.

The tape statics to a finish.  Black and white dots flutter across the television screen.  Something that had been inside of me all along has broken through the surface, shot through like a dolphin reaching for air.  I will spend a lot of time alone in the next couple of years, trying to define a way to grasp what is slipping away.  I have lost what is gone.  Now I know it will happen again.  And continue to happen, and I need to stop it.  For some reason, I feel it is my responsibility, my reason for being, to capture life, especially the life of my family.  This is what writers do: like dark and disconsolate magicians, they try to defy the rules of natural law, and stop time — drawing life, white dove after white dove, from the black hat of death.