Anatomy of a Story

by Jack Lehman 

     How much detail should a writer include, what makes dialogue interesting, should there be a twist at the end of a short story? The answer to these questions is that you need to go deeper than these stylistic matters. Back to the underlying reason this is a story that has to be told.

     “I’m not Bill, I’m Roland, his son.”

     “I’m sorry I didn’t realize how much you’ve grown since I last saw you. I’m John, Bill’s uncle. You look a lot like your dad.”

     “He’s around here someplace, doing something for the wedding.”

     “Good, good. I drove in from Wisconsin for this and…well it’s been a while since I’ve seen any member’s of my brother’s, your grandfather’s, family.”

     “You were my grandpa’s brother?”

     “Yes, still am. I mean he’s no longer alive, but I am. I just haven’t seen anyone for a while, being out of town and all, like I said.”

     And I knew that was the case for Bill as well. He lived in Cleveland where he was a fire fighter. Ironically, his was the last family wedding I had attended. My daughter and I had driven to it from Madison, Wisconsin, and stopped off in Ann Arbor on the way. I had gone to graduate school there and she was considering doing her post graduate work at the University of Michigan as well. Now Bill and his wife had been divorced for many years and his two children lived with their mother.

     That was the curious thing about weddings. We go to them to be inspired, to praise everlasting love between a man and a woman. But what about second marriages like this one of my niece I was now attending in the forest preserve of a Chicago suburb on a late Friday afternoon in June? As I was to look at the front row of chairs set up by the gazebo for our side of the family, I could see that most who were sitting there were divorced, separated or the children of parents no longer together. Fortunately most of them had little tasks to perform: take care of the rings, make sure the place cards on the dinner tables inside were correctly assigned, practice a wedding toast or help the bride get dressed.

     I didn’t see Anne anyplace before the ceremony. I guessed she was preparing for a grand entrance. As to the groom, he was anybody’s guess. There were men in suits gathered at various spots throughout the garden. Any one of them would do.

     OK, what attracts me to this subject? Being uncomfortable about a setting in which everyone seems to know one another and have something to do, except me? That, even more than why people join together and split apart, seems to be the answer. Creating a story gives me control over a situation I didn’t have in real life. But now the characters and scenes are free to lead me beyond. I don’t know where. That is what is exciting to both reader and writer, because in fictionalizing the situation, it is possible some deeper truth may emerge. Curiosity and risk become driving forces.

     I thought about the tall gangling boy who had stood before me, wanting to get free.

He looked like Bill, and Bill (when he came around the corner as we were talking) looked like a younger version of me. My own adult children, as well as my deceased older sister’s sons and daughters, had not been invited, and my second-wife and I had been in the midst of a major disagreement. She’d decided not to come.

     Because I wanted to take pictures, I slipped to the side of the chairs and dutifully, after an interminable wait of electronic keyboard music, captured the big entrance, the rising for prayers led by a friend-of-the-groom’s-family minister, and some quick words by an attractive female judge in requisite full-length robe. Then it was time for the exchanging of vows.

     Anne: “I remember the afternoon at the country club meeting Cliff who’d been playing tennis with some of my friends.”

     This was nice. Personal, real.  But then, behind the pianist, through the bushes, I saw the face of someone who probably had not been invited—Anne’s former husband.

     “I realized, here is the man I had been looking for all my life, the man I was meant to be married to.”

     There was a loud crack. Like a gun. But it wasn’t a gun, it was thunder. The sky covered over and the world turned ominously black. The judge hurriedly wrapped up the proceedings. Within minutes the bridal party, attendant family and guests, robed judge, friend-of-the-groom’s-family minister and I were scurrying through the rain like a gaggle of geese toward “The Grove” bungalow-like reception hall where a beef and chicken buffet would be served. The ghost of the former husband—real or imagined—had disappeared.

      Plot has moved forward. The setting mirrors the suppressed inner conflict of the narrator. So what? What’s in this for me? the reader asks. Or for me, I, as writer, also wonder. Why continue. But discovery in a short story is a vertical rather than horizontal thing. We don’t find something new, but rather how elements of the story that didn’t seem to be connected at first, now start to fit together.  

     It was only when I saw the wife of my brother, Ted, and her sister that I suddenly knew. Rita, the sister, was grey, overweight and bent. Talking too much, I could tell even from a distance. I had known her first when we were both sixteen. She had dark eyes and had had black Italian hair she wore in a Bobbie cut. She’d been popular— active in school and church activities—and I, well I was a rather introverted nerd. But that connection wasn’t what struck me. It was that my brother was not there. Often we invoke those who have passed on, as if they were present in some way. Anne had about her father when I went through the reception line and talked to her. But what really surprised me was when Anne’s sister, Sarah, introduced me to her youngest daughter.

     “This is your grandpa’s brother, my uncle. Uncle John.” And then to me, “Oh, I forget she was born after Dad died. She never knew him.”

     There is a wonderful photograph I remember of Ted, his wife and all of all his young children, striding toward the camera, like the Kennedy’s or something. Then he had died. Ten years earlier than even he had expected.

     Suddenly I was my brother returning. A stranger. And life had moved on. 

THE END

Many miles to go before I sleep.

 

Some give us birth, some give us children, but it’s gypsy women in the night who adorn our male bruises with tattoos. 

Why I’m Telling You This 

I’ve always thought that organizing and re-organizing books is a pretty good metaphor for life itself. Remember the first time you did it—placing the large picture books on one end and the smaller ones, like Beatrix Potter, on the other. As we grow older we keep only those that still hold a piece of ourselves and add others full of mystery (like the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew), adventure (Call of the Wild) and even young romance (and here I have to defer to my wife’s Anne of Green Gables). Words replace pictures as we travel back in time or forward out into space. “Once a reader, always a reader,” proclaims the masthead of a pulp magazine from the ‘20s. 

Then the day comes when we merge our personal collection with that of another. Over the years these books weather moves, suffer damage from mildew in basements or are even lost when we lend some to friends who don’t return them. When that happens we feel it more personally than a missing casserole dish. A book can be replaced, but for sentimental reasons we seldom do it. And perhaps that’s how love is lost, for inevitably the day comes when we must separate what is ours from what is hers (or his), decide what is me and what is, after all, someone else.           

Perhaps you have a book that once belonged to your mother or father. For me it is one called How to Draw Anything. My dad, who was an aspiring painter, prized it and referred to it often. Don’t we secretly hope that someday after we are dead one of our children or one of our friends will hold a book that was part of us and take it home, make it live on in his or her life? But, that’s not why I’m telling you this. There’s more to sharing our stories than books.           

This happened to me twenty years ago. I had been fortunate to have a half- dozen poems published over a period of a year and a half. My nephew who was an adult living in Chicago heard about this and asked me to send him some of my poetry.  I xeroxed a number of poems and sent them off. A month later he wrote that he’d enjoyed them well enough, but that he was very surprised when his mother (my sister) came over one night and spent a couple hours in an easy chair reading them…one in particular. I instantly knew which poem this was.  

When I was about fourteen my sister and her husband were expecting their third child. They had decided to name it “John” if it were a boy.  At that age I took this to mean they were naming the baby after me. The baby was born, right before Christmas. It was a boy. Unfortunately it lived for only a few days, then died.   Everyone gathered at my parents’ home for Christmas Eve. Ordinarily my sister who was sixteen years older than me, would have been in the middle of the celebration, she was very gregarious. That night she didn’t feel like it so she sat in an easy chair in my room as I worked on a model railroad building. I didn’t know what to say. I still wouldn’t; but years later when I wrote a poem called “Autobiography” it was this experience that was one of its central images. And now years later, through writing, my feelings expressed in that poem reached her. No publication in a magazine could possibly compare to that.           

Several years after my nephew’s note, I invited my sister to participate in one of my writing seminars. She had been a journalist and I thought it might get her writing again. When it came to the point where I talk about showing your work to others and trying to get publishing, I thought to myself, Should I include this anecdote I usually told about this autobiographic poem. My sister and I had never discussed her child’s death directly. Well, I decided to go ahead and recount the story.  When I finished all eyes turned to her, they knew she was my sister. She said, “You know, it wasn’t that you didn’t say anything, the trouble was that no one said anything.” I was so happy she had seen that poem. That she knew we did care, even if we couldn’t say it. Later in the year, at another seminar, a woman called out, “My God, I had a baby, named John, who died and no one would talk about it either.”  

We’re all friends,…who just don’t know each other. Sharing our stories is a way in which we do. Thank you for coming tonight and listening to mine. I hope they remind you of some of your own stories that you might otherwise have forgotten. Stories you make your own, that you can tell others. Little scenes with a direction and meaning, at least for you; in which you take risks that test the boundaries of who you are. In some mysterious way stories and poems, yours and mine, help us to understand our world and guide us forward. Perhaps they are, after all, the handouts for a satisfying life that we though we never got.  

Slowly at first, then with gusto 

And remember…

Darkness, then the lights come up on an empty stage. John enters from stage right, bows and waves good-night.   

THE  END

 Encore:

If Poets Did Useful Things 

It’s dark. People need to be places,

yet the Poet Transportation Authority

busses lurch, wild-eyed and empty,

down half-deserted streets, drivers

muttering, “ And miles to go before I

sleep. And miles to go before I sleep.”

Art of Reconciliation

 After my wife left me, and then returned,

I wrote a one-act play about it, which we

performed on a Sunday afternoon at the

local bookstore.  She, as the “repentant

spouse,” me, a “cocky but forgiving god.”

Later that evening, she rammed my car

through the back end of our new garage.

So what’s at stake in a story? Ideally you should be able to express the core plot in a sentence or two, in about the same space and style as program listings in TV Guide. If this sounds original, fine; if not, don’t worry. Nothing is original. It’s in the telling and in readers’ reactions that it becomes unique. There are always new readers and readers who weren’t ready for this when they read something similar to it before. But now for the teller and for the listener there has to be something real. As someone once said, “Go for broke. Don’t do this like an exploratory operation; it is life and death surgery.”

A Brief History of My Tattoo

 It was, say, twenty-three or twenty-four years ago, in my parents’ Upper Peninsula cabin. I had on a tank top and was doing something at the kitchen table with my two young kids. My mother said, “Oh I forgot you had a birthmark on your arm.” This wasn’t very startling, but then she said something that set me wondering for years. “When you were born you had a birthmark on your forehead as well, but we had it removed.” I had never heard this before. Over the next couple of months I looked at my earliest baby pictures and none gave any indication of there being a birthmark on my face. It was one of those surreal moments when you wonder, were babies switched in the hospital? Are these my real parents? I even wrote a poem about it called “The Changeling.” In fairy tales elves exchange one of their young for a more-valued human when no one is watching. The changeling—the elf raised by humans—is always somehow foreign to the environment he grows up in, though he knows no other. I had a niece who, when she was born, had a strawberry birthmark on her brow. It was removed by laser treatment. I have since concluded that my mother in her old age mistakenly attributed this to me.

            Thoughts like these were still in my mind as I entered the tattoo shop in Janesville last year. I had an appointment for a tattoo that would cover the birthmark on my arm.  The parlor itself was a cross between a third world medical clinic and a neon-lit carnival freak show. Dragons, skulls, and snakes (at least drawings of them) lined the walls. This was not a place for the faint of heart, and I was basically a coward. But a coward who was fed up with a large tan birthmark. 

Ever since I was a kid I was razzed with, “What’s that shit on your arm?” I found myself wearing t-shirts when I could have gone shirtless or leaving the towel over my shoulders after showering at the gym. It was a symbol of my difference that in subtle ways caused me to act differently. I was a changeling.  At one point as an adult, I thought I would be like the character, Blind Pig, in The Man with the Golden Arm. Because he couldn’t see he decided he would be a filthy, unkempt mess and contaminate the vision of those who could. I wore tank tops and proudly displayed my birthmark. If I wasn’t perfect, people were going to know that the world they saw wasn’t perfect either. But if at heart I wasn’t an introvert, I certainly wasn’t an extrovert either.  As time passed I realized something had to be done.

*                       *                       *

Did I mention that my mother had disowned me, my wife decided to move out, and that the tattoo artist’s name was Holly. The next day, after her remark about my birthmark, my mother and I got into an argument about religion. She told my wife of the time that I was “no child of hers.”  It didn’t mean anything in reality, but coming so soon after her confusion about which baby had a birthmark it was curious.  And just eight months before getting a tattoo, my second wife, Talia, decided life would be simpler if she lived on her own. In fact that’s why I finally concluded, why not get a tattoo. 

            People ask if it was painful. What, sitting for 3 ½ hours perfectly still on a stool and having vibrating needles stabbing into your skin? It’s like being cut with dozens of razor blades at once, but what is difficult to explain is that you’re so anxious it will be botched that you are too petrified to look, much less feel the pain or think about whether or not getting a tattoo is really a good idea. I had gone in for a visit a week earlier and shown this woman the art nouveau design I’d xeroxed out of a library book. She recognized the style of the drawing and seemed genuinely interested in doing the tattoo. She traced my birthmark very carefully and I went home to enlarge the design to its proper size. Now, this afternoon, she was carefully shaving the spot, rubbing it with cleaning alcohol and studying her “canvas” intently.

            Holly transferred the design to my arm and began the arduous task of using the electric tattooing needles to push the ink under the top layer of skin. I didn’t know if I should talk or not. I needed her to want to do a good job, but I didn’t dare disturb her concentration. It turned out that a little conversation was fine.

            She was a single mother of two young children. They lived in a small apartment above the studio. She’d originally done the bookkeeping for the business and later would clean up drawings people wanted for tattoos.  She had studied art in school. She would stop every two or three minutes and carefully pat the spot she was working on with cotton swabs of alcohol. Long streams of blue-green ink were running down my arm. I was afraid to look but comforted by her gentle touch. How right it seemed that a woman was tenderly paying such attention to this mark that had been the source of such lifelong embarrassment. The healing process had begun.

Holly had no tattoos. Her skin was very white, almost translucent in the glare of the room.  Her eyes, red rimmed. She had a direct gaze and pleasant smile, though I noticed one of her gums was discolored over a front tooth. She was slight in stature and wore brown coveralls and disposable sanitary gloves. Her children came down twice.  The second time her eight-year-old son showed me a cartoon strip that he had drawn because his mother told him I was a publisher. The pictures were funny. At that point the mother cleaned off the tattoo—which was almost done—and the boy and his younger sister in unison said, “Wow!”

            My arm was so numb and red you could no longer see the birthmark through the design of the tattoo. She carefully put some ointment on it and wrapped it with strips of gauze. I paid her $350 with a $20 tip for her kids and stepped out into the now cool night air. I nearly passed out. I drove a mile then pulled over into a restaurant for a hamburger and fries. There was a tremendous sense of relief. I had done something that I dared myself to do. But besides the throbbing pain, the intensity of the last four hours and a fear that this was a mistake that would mark me for the rest of my life made me physically sick and mentally disoriented. And, of course, there was the anxiety over what my wife (now having returned to our marriage) would think. She was working in Madison that evening preparing a new restaurant, where she was a waitress, for their grand opening. I did make it home and into bed. Talia arrived an hour later. The unrolling of the gauze was like a scene in a B-movie in which the hero undergoes plastic surgery and holds a mirror in front of him as the doctor unwraps bandages to reveal his new face. I think she was relieved by what she saw. She knew I was going to get a tattoo but I had not shown her the design. I’m sure she feared it would be a cartoon bunny (my nickname).

            But the climax came two days later at the opening celebration of the Clay Market Café in Madison (this was it’s real name, not “The Quill Driver”). It was crowded and festive. As I’ve said already, Talia was one of the hosts that night. I had told her I would wait until she was done and we could go out somewhere else for a bite of dinner. Eventually the hors d’oeuvres were gone and customers thinned. Then it was only staff and one or two tables of hangers-on. Talia had told the others about my tattoo and one of her friends came over and asked if she could see it. Since it would involve taking off my shirt, I didn’t think it was appropriate and said, “No.” But one of the waiters said to the friend, “I’ll show you my tattoo,” and rolled up his sleeve to reveal a little design. The new maitre d’ said, “Take a look at mine,” unbuttoned his shirt and wiggled out of a sleeve to reveal some small grapes and grape leaves. By then a small circle of the staff had gathered and I said, “Well if everyone is showing their tattoos, I’ll show mine.” Remember, I am the person who for fifty-eight years had done everything possible to avoid showing the top of his arm to anyone. I unbuttoned my black shirt, twisted my left arm free of the sleeve and (there was no longer any gauze bandage) moved directly under the light.

John slowly begins to roll up his sleeve.

            There it was, gleaming under a fresh application of skim cream. The new bluish ink ten times darker than any of the other tattoos. The art nouveau design of a large flowing medieval plant like a knight’s emblem, bold, proud, ornate—yet stunningly simple—positively glowed from my arm.  Was it my imagination or were people staring in awe. And was I mistaken or was that a new glint in my wife’s eye as she silently clapped her hands.

            The transformation was complete. I’m sure people at the gym think I’m vain when they catch me glancing at the tattoo in a mirror. It’s not that. I’m just delightfully amazed. If you look carefully you can still see the birthmark against which the single-color pattern is silhouetted. I like that. There was nothing wrong with having a birthmark; it just needed a proper frame.

Rewriting Chapter One

In the first chapter of my beloved

wife’s semi-fictionalized account

of our lives two characters with

soap opera names, Gray Becket

and Sylvia Caldwell, meet through

a personals ad.  He entices her

with poetry and gifts only a woman

could  think of for a  man to give.

My wife’s friends love it, and me.

However, after my slight flirtation

with a female friend, she rewrites

the chapter. Now the first person

narrator finds her way despite

the insensitive nature of the male

sex. My spouse’s peers cheer

the work’s new  fierceness and

with her pray all women may be

delivered from evil (such as me).

Time passes…and most of that

seems less important somehow.

In the new Chapter One (which I

barely am  allowed  to see) she

turns to God. Men–even women

who are complete strangers soon

agree–are superfluous; without

them life, as well as writing, flows

just so much more (well) easily.

But what about Gray Becket and

Sylvia Caldwell? Like a TV show

that switches from one time slot

to another they take up residence

in my verse. She, eyes lowered,

dreams of unrequited love while

sipping café latte as he, lost in his

own imagined world, churns out

enough poems to last an eternity.

 For a couple winter months my wife and I did something pretty interesting. Each night at six o’clock we would sit down with a couple glasses of wine and write for twenty minutes in our journals. After we were done we took turns reading what we’d produced to each other. I named this “co-journaling.” Here are three of my writings from consecutive nights. I titled them…

My Ideal Woman

 #1

                In the movie, The Heartbreak Kid, the central character marries a folksy twenty-something Jewish woman and they go to Miami for their honeymoon.  She gets a terrible sunburn the first day and while she’s confined to her hotel room for a few days, he is smitten by the young Cybil Shepherd (this was twenty-five or thirty years ago).  She is the ideal white American Protestant male’s dream woman.  He eventually leaves his wife, doggedly pursues Cybil and at the end marries her in a refined ceremony that is in great contrast to the ethnic celebration of his first marriage that began the movie.

            Now I always thought that this premise was wrong. How could someone fall in love with one person and really want just the opposite? But I have wondered about something else. What if a man, for example, fell in love with a woman because she looked a certain way, had a particular manner and there were pleasant dynamics between them and then met another woman who had all the same characteristics but to an even greater degree. There would be a dilemma!  He would love the new person, not because she was different but because she was even more of what he desired. That may seem improbable but I can tell you from my own experience, it is possible. You say, well perhaps someone could be taller, more slender, have a better figure, but her personality would be different or she would be less fun to be with, right?

            Last week at a bookstore-reading a female science fiction writer, Joan Vinge, claimed she had written her latest book because she fell in love with the male character. That got me thinking about Sylvia Caldwell, the character who is my wife in her semi-fictional autobiography (Gray Becket is the man impersonating me). Now he is of little interest to me—I get enough of myself as it is. But Sylvia is another matter. She is like my wife, but perhaps a little taller and more slender; she has all my wife’s personality traits but I only see Sylvia on her good days. And the sex? Well everyone knows that reality can’t compare with fantasy.  There is only one thing that troubles me.  What if these two should find out about each other, or even worse, what if they should meet. Perhaps they will.

 #2

           “And try to make it so there isn’t that ‘glick, glick, glick,’ noise when you shift,” Talia said as we pulled into the downtown area. She had already told me where to exit and where to park and now was back to harping on me about the way I drove.

            “I’ll let you off right in front,” I said, “Then park the car.”  But please shut up, I was thinking, please dear God, a moment of peace and quiet.

            We were going to a grand opening of a new, overpriced Madison restaurant called (give me a break) “The Quill Driver.”  My wife, Talia, was one of the wait staff, but tonight’s event was being catered, so her function was to be hostess–greeting and conversing with invited customers from the restaurant’s old location while I…(and I smiled at this as I left the car down the block and walked to the new establishment), …while I…would sit in a corner, drink champagne and scarf down free hors d’oeuvres.

            As it turned out, though, we were a little late, the skimpy bits of food were already almost all gone.  Wow, I thought, there must have been a mob waiting at the door who waged a major attack on the free d’oeuvres as soon as they opened and it doesn’t look like any reinforcements are on the way.  “Oh well,” I sighed and sat down at a back table after accepting a glass of champagne offered by one of his wife’s colleagues.

            There Talia was, her hand on the arm of the no-chin owner Rodney, talking to one customer while she was smiling at another.  I had to admit, she did look good. There was an animated quality about her that was infectious and appealing, at least from a distance.  I was hunched over my glass of champagne and thought, I should really sit up straight, when I heard a voice like butterfly wings at his ear. “Why John,” the female’s well-modulated tones exclaimed, “what a joy it is to see you here.”

            I turned (while straightening up slightly and pulling in my stomach) to see alone at the table next to me (why hadn’t I noticed her when I sat down) a stunningly attractive woman, about the same age and height as his wife, but with hair…, well hair that looked like the woman’s pictured on a hair coloring box.  My God, I thought, it’s Sylvia Caldwell.

 #3

 “Won’t you join me,” she purred.

            I was sitting next to her, drink in hand, before she finished the sentence.  Good Lord, is she here alone, I thought, quickly searching the restaurant to see exactly where my wife might be.

            As if in answer to my unasked question she sighed, “I came with Gray Beckett, that other white-haired gentleman in a black shirt, talking to Rodney over there.”

            Shit, I thought.  But turning my head I could see the direction in which she was looking. There was Rodney and that pretentious, smug Gray Beckett standing next to him.  Ah, well.  I was envious.  What was the big deal with this guy anyway?  So much for Sylvia Caldwell, I thought, then Rodney, in the midst of pointing something out on the wall across the room, put his hand suggestively on Beckett’s shoulder. “What the hell,” I murmured to myself, as I remembered Beckett was a designer. “Maybe they’re gay!”

            “Haven’t they done a nice job decorating the restaurant?”  Sylvia said.

            “Huh?” I answered, turning back to her.

            “And don’t you just love the name, ‘The Quill Driver.’ It’s an old fashioned slang term for writer.”

            “Why, yes,” I said and turned my head again, this time to make a pretend cough so she wouldn’t notice me rolling my eyes. “Do you like writers?” I managed to ask (hoping that since I was one, the answer would be “yes.”). “I mean, what’s your favorite book?” I continued, trying not to be quite so obvious.

            Now, because there was this striking resemblance to my wife, I braced myself for an answer of The DaVinci Code, Conversations with God or Jaguar Woman.

            “Why,” Sylvia smiled warmly, “it’s your poetry book, Dogs Dream of Running. I can’t tell you how often I’ve read it, John, and each time I find something new and exciting in it.”

            I was melting at her feet; drool was running from my mouth and my privates were playing tom-tom. “Why thank you,” I uttered, “how kind of you to say that.”

            What I wanted to say was that I was madly in love with her. I looked at her face beaming at me and wanted to sweep her into my arms and into my life.  But something held me back… Why? She was perfect. What was the problem? 

            Then it struck me. It was exactly that . . . the fact that she was perfect and I was not. She had everything she wanted in her already perfect world. I saw my wife now, out of the corner of my eye talking to the ugly sister of one of her friends, making her feel welcome and special. I could tell Sylvia of my love but it would mean nothing to her. What I had was a wife who also had needs. Someone whose life I was important to. 

            And here was Talia coming over to our table with a bottle of champagne to refill our glasses. (slowly) Sylvia Caldwell—who, now that I thought about it did seem to resemble a young Cybil Shepherd—was fading into the background.

Old Hippie

Where I’ve Lived

It’s like with that poem, “The Handout” we all believe there is some key to life’s mystery just beyond our grasp. We’d like to believe this truth is universal, applicable to everyone equally, but maybe it isn’t. Perhaps each of us has our own secret theater in our imagination showing films we create especially to fit only us. 

The Movie Version 

In the movie version of my life

everything beneath the surface

makes sense. A porn star plays

my wife, and, oh yes, my black

and white Mustang is fiery red.

And while we might not share the same movies, we do all have a need for them, no matter what form they take. And the sharing of them? Ah, the sharing of them…

At the Poetry Reading

This is a poem I wrote, have written? No wrote

about a time  when my car and I  were stuck in

an automatic  car  wash—the  kind  where you

drive in between rails and a huge upside down

metal  horseshoe  with rotating  shower heads

passes  back and forth  around your car.  Well,

here’s how it  goes.  This is  the start.  Ready?

“My soul felt  grimy  that  dusty  afternoon.” No,

make it “that dusty summer afternoon,”  “grimy

as the  rocker  panels of my  1997  convertible

coupe. I inserted  quarters,  thirty-two  of them

and drove along the designated tracks when…”

Excuse me,  whoever  has a  cell phone  that’s

ringing, I wonder if you’d turn it off? Thank you.

Where was I?…Hmmm?  No, could that be my

cell phone? How embarrassing.  Hold that car-

wash  image  and we’ll  get to  the suds  in just

a minute. …You know, it might be just as quick

to answer this, I can’t seem to turn the thing off.

“Hello?” It’s my wife. “No, listen, I can’t talk now.

I’m  in the middle  of a  poetry  reading.  I’ll call

you back.Yes, I love you too.” OK, where were

we:“rockerpanelsofmy1997convertiblecoupe…”

Again?  What  does  that woman want?  Just a

second please.  Think suds.  Suds, suds, suds.

Com’on,  everybody, “suds,  suds, suds.”  Very

nice.“I am reading a poem  at a poetry reading

Yes  now.”…Ha, ha, can’t  live  with them, can’t

live without them. I mean cell phones, of course,

not women. “Suddenly I was blinded in a vortex

of  cotton  foam,  a blizzard  of white gobs  that

wouldn’t stop…” …Oh, for godsake, I can’t take

this? …“What, what, what?…I’m on stage right

this minute. No, it’s the one about the car wash.

Well, I like the stupid repetition,…it’s…cathartic.

No, I don’t know. Now good-bye.” She’s asking

about a Beatle’s song. …OK…Let’s finish, shall

we?  “Suds, suds, suds.  Suds, suds, suds.  All

you need are  suds,  all you need are suds.  All

you need are suds,suds, suds are all you need.”

Join in with me, OK?: “Suds, suds, suds.  Suds,

suds, suds.All you need are suds. All you need

are  suds.  All you  need  are suds,  suds, suds

are all  you  need. All  you  need  are  suds  (all

together  now).  All you need  are suds  (every-

body). All  you need  are suds, suds,  suds  are

all you need.”

Where I’ve Lived

 On the occasion of my daughter’s moving back to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she was born, I got to thinking about places where I’d lived. I don’t mean physically as much as imaginatively and emotionally. 

            As a small child in Chicago my favorite room, especially on rainy days, was the attic in my parents’ brown-brick bungalow (at 5923 North Hermitage—the word “hermitage” itself, meaning residence). There were low, slanted rafters and, on the floor, planking that reached almost to the sides of the room…but not quite. Amidst the cardboard boxes and makeshift racks for hanging clothes stored in plastic bags, I’d play with my set of wooden blocks. There were actually three sets of various sizes that once belonged to my older brother and sister. I’d build forts and highways or roofless castles with secret rooms. The “soldiers” and toy cars I had were equally unmatched proportionately. A figure might be four inches tall and a “Matchbox” auto less that one inch long—but it didn’t matter. Sometimes in the summer I’d take the cars and soldiers to play outside in the jungle of my mother’s rose garden—she didn’t seem to care.  But the best place was under the dangling light bulb in the attic on a rainy afternoon where no one saw or could disturb my own little world.

            I didn’t have a room of my own until my sister went off to college. Mostly I slept on the other side of the attic—the finished side—with my brother. Years later I took over the TV room downstairs; he had moved to my college-bound sister’s room next door. I didn’t want a bed to mess up the arrangement of my room—which I fancied to be like the library of a world explorer’s club—so I continued to sleep upstairs, but now with my father in my brother’s old bed.  My father slept up in the attic because he didn’t want to disturb my mother. He’d paint pictures in the basement until late at night and turn in after she was asleep. He also liked to listen to the radio before drifting off, leaving it on all night. I don’t think she particularity appreciated that. I know I didn’t.

            Meanwhile, back at the explorer’s club library (I had some cheap prints of old maps on the wall) I nailed up a dartboard I had purchased with my allowance.  It really looked great and my brother, Ed, and I envisioned playing a nightly game of darts whenever he took a break from his law school studies. I’ll never forget how upset I was when a stray dart stuck in the knotty pine wall the first time after missing the target. I thought, “Well maybe I can fill the hole and stain it and no one will know the difference.” About three weeks later there were at least 2,000 holes in the wall, in the upholstered chair under the dartboard, in my dresser next to it, even in the frame of an old mirror I had on top of the dresser. The room was a dart-disaster. 

            But here’s the best part. My brother, at times, could be somewhat mean-spirited in word and deed. He liked to spoil a birthday by telling me beforehand what my parents had bought me as a surprise, or he’d say things like, “Dad loves me, he hates you.” Well one day he made me very angry about something.  I was fuming in my room wildly throwing darts when I noticed that I could unscrew the metal tip from the front of the plastic dart.         

            A few seconds later I burst into his room, slamming the door open against the wall. He was seated in an overstuffed easy chair, smoking a pipe, and had a board balanced across the arms of the chair with all his law books and papers on it. I appeared in the door frame, like Anthony Perkins in Psycho, but instead of a knife I had a handful of darts. 

            “I’ve had it with you!” I screamed and began hurling them one by one at him.  The first one missed but he knocked over his big ashtray trying to duck. Then he lunged up from the chair and board, books and papers filled the air.

A dart bounced off his forehead. He stopped, not comprehending what was going on, so I quickly sent two or three more at the same bull’s-eye. He reached over and picked up a pointless dart and started laughing. I would have too, but I was already halfway out the door.

            Later I took the dartboard down and hung a huge floor-to-ceiling, 45-star American flag over the dart-cratered wall. 

                        *                       *                       *

            Ten years later I found myself in Vietnam. Not that I didn’t live in apartments, dorms and barracks between my childhood and being in the war.  But the truth is, I didn’t really.  Oh, my body was there, but I myself lived in the books I read and the books I imagined writing.

            The First Medical Battalion Headquarters and I had arrived in Vietnam in full battle gear on military planes leaving Fort Riley, Kansas in the middle of the night. After being stationed about twenty miles north of Saigon for five months, three of us who were tired of living in tents that were hot, smelly and blew over in the rain decided to pool our money, buy lumber and build a house. We thought that if we were going to do this we needed to have it finished before the monsoon season began. None of us knew anything about building, but remember I had my experience with blocks as a child up in the attic. I drew up a rough plan, we borrowed an Army truck and driver and after a half hour of searching through nearby small villages, bought a bunch of lumber. It cost us about 120 bucks each.

            We’ve all heard stories of barn raisings. You get food and beer, invite the neighbors and, after a half-day or so of good-natured work, there is your completed structure.  We bought a keg of beer from the officer’s mess, bribed the cooks to prepare a feast of pizza and deep-fried cheese, passed the word, and, sure enough, everyone came.  I should explain in fairness to those attending that day that Bill Ross was a big talker and Martin Sweeney, my other partner, a big drinker. Everyone came. Everyone ate and drank and had a good time sitting on the lumber. Then everyone left. We rested up for three weeks after that fiasco until I couldn’t stand hearing Ross’s stories over and over again so I decided to start building myself. I don’t know if we bought bad lumber or if it got harder sitting on the ground, but it was like rock. I had to use a chainsaw to cut it and a baby sledgehammer to drive nails through it.

            This was an unlikely design for the jungle—about 12 feet wide and 30 feet long. The roof was like an “A” frame except there were five-foot high side walls over which the roof hung about 3 feet. The tops of these walls were two-foot high screen the full length of the building. Though you couldn’t see out because of the overhang, the rain wouldn’t blow in. The front third was our lounge area and the back two-thirds, where we had our three cots. 

           After a week, I, with a little help from Sweeney and a little less from Ross, had the frame completed.  We were just in the process of starting to nail corrugated aluminum sheets over the roof structure when we got the news. The battalion commander wanted the construction stopped because (remember we were in the middle of a w.a.r.) it might be “unsafe.”

            The Corps of Engineers were called in and it was decided that it was, not only safe, but over-built and would “withstand just about anything.” So we completed the building and moved in. I had finally realized my childhood dream of living in a house, which I had designed and built myself.

            Sweeney was a psychologist.  After a few beers he often would say with a smirk in his quasi-professional tone, “There are only two kinds of people, the `livers’ and the `non-livers.’” By this I suppose he meant there are those who enjoy themselves and make the best of a situation—like building a house in the jungle—and the “non-livers”—people who go through life following orders like zombies and living in tents. But we were a medical unit in the middle of Vietnam. Everyday people were literally “non-livers.” They were the wounded and dying or those who came to us already dead to be sent home. No, there were only “the living” and “the dead” and as I stood in the doorway of our metal covered framed house and watched torrential rains sweeps across the fields, I thanked God I was still among the living.

SECRET THEATER

Settled things make for explanations not for good stories. Instead, these are more often situations or people or memories that are troubling, things we want to work out and understand for ourselves and invite others along for the ride. It’s kind of a game we play with ourselves. This piece is based on an exercise from a book in college psychology.

                                    The Game of Without Within

John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman.

Sit down in the middle of  a quiet place,

one with  little  furnishings  is preferred.

Spend a few  minutes in silence, know-

ing that you’re both going to speak and 

to hear. Listen for the slightest  sounds.

Prepare for your  peacefulness  to end.

Say your own name out loud. Articulate

it distinctly and then repeat it insistently

as if  hailing another who’s away in the

distance  who can’t  see you, on a boat 

or in a foggy field. You’re calling some-

one who’s  remote in a mysterious way.

Lengthen  vowels  and  stress syllables,

exaggerate.Continue the calling of your

name, twenty, thirty times until you start

to get the feeling that you, yourself, are

being  called.  Keep calling.  Yes, this is

your voice but it is also something more. 

It’s you who are  calling, you don’t know

for whom.  It’s you who are being called,

but you don’t know from where.The one

who’s calling  is the  same,  and yet not

the same as the one who is called. Feel

the strangeness of this so familiar name.

Only other  people  call you this.  Go on

do it  more.  The goal  is to produce the

slight,  but  not  necessarily  unpleasant,

sense of  unease,  when  self  becomes

unstuck from self.  To escape and close

the breach,  simply say,  “Here I come!”

John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman, John Lehman. (pause) Here I come.

John goes to the desk, sits and turns on the gooseneck lamp. He types a few words on the old typewriter then pulls out the sheet to check what he apparently has been working on. He reads the title and the piece:

The Girl Who Washed Her Hands

Let me see, it was a few years after college. I got a teaching certificate and found myself with a position as an English teacher in a poor high school in Michigan. Most of the kids had no interest in classes, but I did have one student who was not only cute but very bright. My ex-wife and I even got to know her parents. They were old-fashioned radicals from the forties, and this was a very conservative, fundamentalist area.

            Mary also had an older sister, Jeannie. She was smart too, but psychologically troubled even at that young age. These were happy times for me. My wife and I had our first house, a little bungalow a block or so from the lake. The first years of teaching were demanding, but summers were free. Then it was back to full days of classes, and evenings and weekends correcting papers.

            Anyhow, one day this student’s mother stopped at the school late in the afternoon. (slow) She was a small woman with very short, cropped brown hair—a head like a coconut. She asked to come into my classroom and she shut the door behind her. I had no idea what this was about, but I pulled a couple of student desks around so they faced each other and motioned for her to sit down. Without further introduction, she said, (John leans forward in a whisper) “I have a terrible, family secret to tell you.”

            And what was her secret?

            I don’t know. She bent forward in the desk toward me, speaking in hushed tones. So much so that I couldn’t understand what she was saying. You’ve done that, haven’t you? In order to be polite, pretend to hear or be interested in something inaudible someone says to you?

Later, I thought, perhaps, she’d said she was suicidal or that she had been molested by her father.  But at the time my first reaction was that this didn’t have anything to do with the girls. My next one was, why is this woman telling this secret to me?”

            Jeannie had a weird boyfriend but she received good grades and graduated to go on to college.  Mary blossomed, too.  She was a straight `A’ student, a top vocalist, had poems published in literary magazines–and remember she was only a high school student—starred in school plays, was an active environmental organizer, etc., etc.  But no boyfriends!  Even though she had naturally blonde hair and a wonderful smile. A wonderful, seductive smile. Boys were intimidated by her because she was so far beyond anyone else her age in accomplishments. And I’ll admit, to me she was more like an interesting peer than a student. But at that time I didn’t allow myself to think if it was anything other than that.

            Senior year, Mary suddenly gave up everything for religion. Some kind of charismatic Christianity. She was living like a Bible-story virgin who’d delivered herself over entirely to God. She got a full scholarship to the University of Chicago to study theology and that was the last I saw of her until three years ago. She was eighteen when I was her teacher and now many years later, she was thirty-six.  Of course I was old enough to be her father, but when she telephoned I was still trying to come to terms with my separation, and to hear this warm, familiar voice…well, I was very pleased.

I forgot to say that I’d heard she had had a nervous breakdown that first year at the University. A student who was a photographer for the yearbook—I was the advisor—had a brother who worked in a mental institution. Mary was taken there after the breakdown. (slower) The brother said she couldn’t stop washing her hands. Two hundred, three hundred times a day she would wash her hands. The other thing I learned, and I don’t remember how, was that Frank was not really the girls’ father. He had married the mother when she’d already had the two young children.

            Can we re-create ourselves like motivational books and tapes lead us to believe?  Or is it fate? Are we doomed to always repeat the past in some superficially different form?

            Whether the past is a treasure worth reclaiming or some kind of stigma that marks us and turns ordinary things we do into penance, it’s always there, isn’t it? And sometimes it surfaces as unexpectedly as a phone call. A phone call in the middle of the night from Chicago.

            Mary called out of nowhere late one night. She had found my name through an Internet search. I’d just come home and hadn’t even had time to turn on the lights and there, over the receiver, was her voice in the dark, coming out of the past.

I pictured those thin white arms and animated hands, her full mouth and wavy blonde hair. I could almost smell Lake Michigan and feel the trudge of walking barefoot in the sand of the lakeshore dunes. It had been almost twenty years since my first wife and I’d packed up the kids and left Michigan for a new life in Wisconsin. A life of frustration and financial hardship that had ultimately driven us apart. But now, in the sound of Mary’s voice, there was promise bubbling up like an underground spring.

            Mary and I talked for an hour and a half. Her parents, Elsie and Frank, had died five years earlier within months of each other. Her sister, Jeannie, had not married her boyfriend but a rather conservative businessman. She’d been on medication for depression, but last summer decided not to take her drugs anymore. Like Virginia Wolfe, one night she walked out into Duck Lake until she drowned. Now Mary Briggs—`Briggs’ was her married name—was alone except for her husband of a year. He too had left her but then he’d come back, she said, providing she agreed to “certain conditions.”

            Anyway, she wanted to see me…had to see me. She wondered if that would be possible. As it turned out, I needed to schedule a business trip to Chicago within the next two weeks. I told her I would call the following day after I’d pinned down a date.

            But something was strange right from the start.

            When I called her the following night, she said, “Hello.” I gave my name, but then as I started to talk about what day I’d be in Chicago, without saying a further word, she hung up.

            I called again thinking that I might have dialed the wrong number, but the same thing happened a second time.

            She phoned the next morning with absolutely no explanation for what had occurred the night before, telling me that she’d be overjoyed to meet with me. We set up a time and place, though when I hung up the phone, I had a vaguely unsettled feeling.

            I arrived in the Old Town section of Chicago—where we had arranged to meet—about an hour early. I thought I’d have trouble finding parking, but as it turned out there was a spot just behind the restaurant. It was a warm late- afternoon in June and I sat at a table outside.

            I have to admit I did have a few beers while I waited. I’d grown up in Chicago and the afternoon was awash with memories. As a kid I’d taken the el to this part of town and explored its shops and coffee houses. During my college breaks I’d hit one or more of the clubs to catch folk music acts and sometimes get a little intoxicated. And now, here I was again, at this new stage in my life.

            The meeting lasted less than a minute. What I remember most is mumbling some excuse, then walking, almost at a run, through the restaurant, past the kitchen and out the door to my car parked in back.

I was sitting at that outdoor table looking down the street when I heard a voice. It came from the sidewalk behind my back. It said, “Mr. Lehman?”

            I turned slowly not knowing what to expect. It had been many years since I’d last seen Mary but I still half thought she’d look the same. She stood in front of the setting sun and I was blinded by it at first. I could only make out the shape of her body and her golden hair. The blonde around her head glowed like a rim of sun around the moon in a solar eclipse.

When Mary came forward—as she bent down toward me out of that halo of sun—I saw that it was not the sweet face I’d remembered, but the shriveled face of her mother’s coconut head…

…and from its pressed lips came a whisper. It said, “…I want my secret back.”

With this last sentence John turns off the table light again leaving the room in complete darkness.

Pause.

Another reason we hesitate to share stories is that they may seem too personal for listeners to become involved with it? Had I identified Mary’s secret in this story, it might the ending might have been less interesting. It’s like with that poem, “The Handout” we all believe there is some key to life’s mystery just beyond our grasp. We’d like to believe this truth is universal, applicable to everyone equally, but maybe it isn’t. Perhaps each of us has our own secret theater in our imagination showing films we create especially to fit only us.

Today I’m beginning a new presentation. I originally gave this in Milwuakee three years ago. I think it still says a lot about writing and story telling. I hope you enjoy it. Let me know if you do. – John

A Brief History of My Tattoo

Thirteen Things I Never Told Anyone Before

The Handout

Each of you should have received a handout.

There were some problems and there are more

people here than expected, so if you don’t have

a handout, please look on with your neighbor.

The handout lists the twelve things you must

know in order to achieve success. Without these

I’m afraid you’ll have pretty rough going, and

ultimately will fail. But here are the simple rules,

a list of resources and the practical timeline you

need, all clearly spelled out for you to succeed.

If neither you nor your neighbor has the handout,

ordinarily I’d say raise your hand and I would

give you one. But, I’m sorry, I just don’t have any

additional handouts—that’s what I’ve been trying

to explain. I know that may not seem fair, but

this is something addressed at great length in point

seven of the handout. In fact all your questions

are answered by the handout. Success would be

yours if you had a handout. Life would be easy

if you had a handout. If only you had a handout,

happiness would be guaranteed.

The Perfect Crime

I’d always thought it would be my son and I doing things together, but it is my daughter and I who are alike. Sometimes too much alike. After she graduated from NYU in theater she got a job as an understudy for an off-Broadway play, “The Perfect Crime.” She did this for two years. Unfortunately, the lead female—the only woman in the production and the one who had written the play—prided herself on seldom missing a performance. My daughter rarely got to go on before a live audience. Eventually Pam quit and then suffered the usual problem of actors in New York: trying to get roles. So she decided to come back home to the Midwest and attend graduate school in education. After being accepted to the University of Wisconsin she didn’t much attend classes. Instead she formed her own theater company with the intent of putting on an original play—if Wisconsin couldn’t go to New York, then she’d bring New York to Wisconsin.

“Pop,” she said, “you have to audition for this play. There’s a part in it that would be perfect for you.”

I’m not much of an actor but agreed to try out. I thought it would support her effort and give us a chance, as adults, to work on something together. I did the audition and she turned me down.

I admit I had chosen an unusual vehicle to show off my talent, or lack of talent. My monologue was of a soul leaving a recently deceased body. The words were those of Martin Luther King, Jr. but given a different, dramatic emphasis:

“Free at Last”—relief. “Free at last!”—glee. “Thank God Almighty…” —uncertainty“…I’m free at last—dread.

Perhaps she thought I was making fun of her audition process. Part of the try-out was for her to work with the actor, giving direction to get more out of the person’s chosen lines. How much direction can you give a disembodied soul? And no matter what she said all I was capable of was a sort of silent screen version of relief, glee, uncertainty and dread.

I wanted the production to be successful, and it was, but there was always this small part of me—a teeny part—that resented being excluded, especially when she confided in me about problems she was having with the actors she picked—not learning their lines, being late for rehearsals, etc. I would never have done that, I told myself, as I listened with sympathy— “sympathy.”

 Then the last performance of the last week of the show, something strange happened. One of the actors, a young college girl, left the stage after her early scene and went out the back door of the theater. She left the play and the theater in the middle of the show—the one unforgivable theatrical crime. The other actors improvised as best they could around this void, and when the final curtain came down people applauded as other audiences had.

But I sometimes think about this girl.

She had had all the direction and stress she could take. So she just packed up and left. And, somehow I felt…

Well I could picture her walking down the dark alley to her car, and perhaps saying to herself,  “Free at last. Free at last! Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.”

Thanks for being here this evening. I have subtitled this performance, “Thirteen Things I’ve Never Told Anyone Before.” And you might ask, “Why hasn’t he told them?” Well, one reason is, in the case of this last episode it was my story to tell. But in a way I made it my own by asking my daughter to direct my telling of it at the Cornerstone Theater in Milwaukee where this first was performed. How’s that for irony. But I wanted to see what would happen. For in reality most story ideas won’t be things that we already know and have settled. Settled things make for explanations not for good stories. Instead, these are more often situations or people or memories that are troubling, things we want to work out and understand for ourselves and invite others along for the ride. It’s kind of a game we play with ourselves.

Promises to keep...

He died on January 28^th, 1963, near midnight, losing consciousness soon after a blood clot reached his lungs. A great and long life had come quietly to an end. America had lost a poet of astounding grace and wisdom. He was not a monster or malcontent as some biographers have tried to depict him. While hardly a saint, Frost was a passionate, headstrong man who believed deeply that, despite a life of personal tragedy, poetry never let him down. And poetry can mean the same to us.

Poetry is a way of living, not just a way to communicate the experiences we have had. Frost believed that for our own survival we need to throw ourselves into it with energy, abandon and trust. We will be rewarded accordingly. That, more than any particular Frost poem, as great as it may be, is the richness of his gift to us.

(John, with passion.)

Birches

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay

As ice storms do. Often you must have seen them

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning

After a rain. They click upon themselves

As the breeze rises, and turn many colored

As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells

Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust—

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away

You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed

So low for long, they never right themselves;

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in

With all her matter of fact about the ice storm,

I should prefer to have some boy bend them

As he went out and in to fetch the cows—

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,

Whose only play was what he found himself,

Summer or winter, and could play alone.

One by one he subdued his father’s trees

By riding them down over and over again

Until he took the stiffness out of them,

And not one but hung limp, not one was left

For him to conquer. He learned all there was

To learn about not launching out too soon

And so not carrying the tree away

Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise

To the top branches, climbing carefully

With the same pains you use to fill a cup

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

As so I dream of going back to be.

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig’s having lashed across it open.

I’d like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

(The lights slowly fade to black.)

(John stands, takes off his coat.)

I never met Robert Frost, but I did meet John Updike once and discussed with him this account he wrote for the New Yorker of seeing the poet perform in Sanders Theater at Harvard

(John pulls a New Yorker off the table and reads.)

Robert Frost was relentless in the number of public readings he gave. In Allen Ginsberg’s words, “He created an audience for poetry readings… He was the first voyager, a kind of pioneer, the original entrepreneur of poetry.“

I remember Frost shambled about on the stage as if he had been prodded from a sound winter’s sleep; he “said”—as he put it—his poems rather rapidly, minimizing their music in his haste to get on with his spoken commentary on whatever came to his mind. In the front rows sat the flower of the English faculty, most conspicuously Archibald MacLeish, the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Compared to these exemplars of civilized letters, Frost was an untamed beast, a man who had wriggled or quarreled his way out of every academic post he had had, though his appetite for instructing others was powerful. As a literary artist, he was, we all knew, the real thing, the one man in the hall—and, for that matter, in all of safe, sane Cambridge—who had staked his whole soul on poetry and had gained the ultimate prize.”

Shortly after his trip to Russia, Frost was admitted to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Cambridge on December 3, 1962. An examination showed that his prostrate was abnormally large and his bladder was infected. The surgery that took place a week later revealed even worse problems. He recovered but was obviously in bad shape. On top of everything, his heart had been damaged.

There was one bright spot in his older age however.  After the death of his wife, Frost became strongly attracted to Kathleen (Kay) Morrison, married to Theodore Morrison. Frost employed her from 1938 as his secretary and adviser, but over time also became his lover. Frost bought a small, wood-frame farmhouse on 150 acres at Bread Loaf—a writing conference Ted Morrison ran at which Frost was a regular presenter. A few minutes’ walk uphill, on the edge of the woods, was a self-contained cabin with a stone fireplace and pleasant screened-in porch offering a dramatic view across a meadow. The Morrisons occupied the farmhouse. Kay would phone Frost and he would come down for meals which the three of them would eat together. Every morning she would go up to the cabin and work with him on his letters and arrangements. Kay was beautiful, charming and sophisticated in a way Frost had rarely seen in a woman. He liked her independence and she…provided order and grace to his later years.

Out through the fields and the woods

     And over the walls I have wended;

I have climbed the hills of view

     And looked at the world, and descended:

I have come by the highway home,

     And lo, it is ended.

Frost wrote these lines in his poem “Reluctance” which ends prophetically,

            Ah, when to the heart of man

                 Was it ever less than a treason

            To go with the drift of things,

                 To yield with a grace to reason,

            And bow and accept the end

                 Of a love or a season?