MORGAN, Fall, 1962 - February, 1963

I thought I was writing a poem. I wrote a lot of them back then. The Beat Generation had sent me an invite, and I'd RSVP'd. It was nineteen fifty eight. Maybe late fifty seven. Three things colluded to trigger my need to write. First of all, Miles Davis', "Kind of Blue", which I listened to for the first time sitting cross legged in a rundown building on the cold floor in winter of an unheated apartment that contained only a record player and a huge painting named, "Bleeding Eyeball Tree". Very cool. Very hip. Like, man. Dig it, y'dig? Second of all, Jack Kerouac's, "On The Road", was a personal invitation to pick a place and Jack would meet me there. The third factor was heart break, my first. I wanted to die. No one ever suffered so much.The Checkmate, a coffee shop, the first and only, was a quick skip down the street. Baltimore's Bohemia. It was where I read my first poem wearing a brand new black turtleneck. I was seventeen. 

I can't remember whether it was romantic poetry or Shakespeare, but the class was being taught by Dr.Holmes, a soft spoken,very kindly man with large,doe-like eyes.It was Friday, last class. There were half a dozen of us. I sat in the last row as I always did scribbling away in my notebook, this time a poem set in eternity featuring an elderly man arguing with a young man, two people, back and forth, very meaningful stuff, worse yet,in verse, worse yet, they were wearing togas. After class Dr. Holmes stopped me and asked what I'd been doing back there?

    "Let's see," he said. 

He held his hand out and wiggled his fingers. Then he wiggled them some more. I handed him my notebook. He took a look and said,"See you Monday."

I can't remember if it was Keats or Coleridge,Lear or Ophelia,but it was Monday. I was back in Dr. Holmes' classroom. Not a word about my notebook until after class when he handed it back and told me to finish it.    

    

I blew off the rest of my day in the library writing until it closed. Long hand. A ballpoint pen and lined loose leaf paper.The IBM Selectric, that totem of the successful screenwriter, was not even a glint. I gave it to Dr. Holmes Tuesday morning. The next day, Wednesday, he'd given it to Dr.Waters Turpin to read. Dr. Turpin was the head of the drama department and wanted to see me on Thursday. On Thursday, he told me I'd written a play, and he intended to produce it. By Friday, one week after Dr. Holmes asked to see what I thought was a poem I was a playwright. The planets aligned. Life and Morgan had brought me to this place. 

Go figure.

An elderly tracker once told me, "Just because you lose the trail don't mean it's the end of the trail." He'd led search and rescue missions on horseback into the wilderness for a lifetime. I'd been bushwhacking for years until Morgan helped me find my way. I wrote a play, it was produced, ergo, I was a playwright. The fact that I had no idea what I was doing probably had everything to do with it. Instinct is all. I had begun to think of myself as a Byronic poet on the faculty of a fine liberal arts college some where in the woods publishing chapbooks seven people might read if I stuffed them in their Christmas stockings. I also thought about going into the tire business, my father's, retreading, a facet of the industry, even at that time dying out of existence. Shows you where I was in those days.

Dr.Turpin produced and directed the play at Morgan. A five hundred seat house was filled, both with faculty and students, friends and family, but also local personalities, politicians, and dignitaries. Newspapers, too, and all three local television stations.

It was February, 1963, two months before my father died.I'd had my troubles, to say the least. Half the time he didn't know what to make of me. That made two of us. Half the time I didn't know what to make of me, either. It got very confusing never knowing which half didn't know what. However, he came back stage after opening night, looking natty in a light gray Chesterfield overcoat with a black,velvet collar, put his arm around me, smiled, and said, "I guess you're not gonna be a bum after all." He was joking, of course. Wasn't he? I mean, eyewitnesses thought so. What?

Somehow, Dr. Turpin wrangled an off-Broadway production on stage at the Columbia Teacher's College in NYC. A sweet bite of the Big Apple.This was followed next year by a second play written as an Honors project and directed by Dr.Turpin at Center Stage Theater, Baltimore, Maryland, with a mesmerizing performance by the first actress I'd ever worked with, Carolyn Dotson now Wainwright, still a friend after all these years.

Not long after the production at Morgan, our local television station, WJZ, Westinghouse Network, approached Dr. Turpin about creating a documentary on the history of the American Negro. I researched and wrote it. My fellow students acted in it, WJZ aired it - The Unknown American. The first of its kind. So many Black people in so many fields doing so much for their country, our country, yet our country didn't know anything about them. And Black people,an entire campus full, for no reason other than they were good human beings seeking  the very same things I was, helped me find where I belonged. In today's world I might well be accused of cultural appropriation, but this world was not that world. I see things now that I didn't see then, but I saw things then that needed to be done and tried to help do them. Morgan brought something into the world that hadn't been there before. It won a national broadcasting award as well. We'd done a good thing. We believed we lived in a time when facts mattered and faith was a staple of the heart, except, of course, they didn't and, ultimately, faith, well, I don't know what to say about that. 

I left a trunk filled with memorabilia - early poems, letters from a dear uncle, yearbooks, a varsity wrestling letter - at the apartment of a woman I'd been dating. I liked her very much but didn't love her, though she loved me. It wasn't that she wasn't wonderful. She was. It's just that the needle went so far and budged no farther. I was in California when I told her I wasn't coming back.The transition from east coast to west had been underway for some time.I'd been dragging that footlocker around for years. She dragged it to the curb and left it on the street. New York City. Upper West Side. 110th and Riverside. My only copy of the play was in that trunk. 

The following excerpt - young man arguing with older man - is all I remember. Dr. Turpin's notes claimed it took place in the "womb-tomb of time and space". No set to speak of, ramps and levels and lighting. Music: Satie

This I know and only this

that I am given a life

a gift that only once I will receive

to do with as I choose

and I choose to wring it dry of all it's pleasures

so that when I am wombed in death's certain eternity

I cannot reflect in anguish that 

I have had but birth and death and 

nothing more. 

I was twenty-one.

 

Eden - corrected version

 He’s over there asleep on the sofa in front of a dancing fire. It’s brutally cold outside but not in here, not with last spring’s firewood blazing in the fireplace. The “He” I’m talking about being my2 ½ year old grandson, Dorian Alexander. What a little pistol he is! If cuteness were firepower, Little Man would wipe out the room. My own children, Sevi and Madden, have been the wonders of my life - breathtaking , sometimes difficult, but still  life blood throughout my entire being. As an old cowboy in Montana once told me about his children,”Wouldn’t give ya a nickel for ‘em, wouldn’t take a million”. Now, I’ve got Little Man asleep three feet away. How does a person keep from exploding when a body overloaded with feelings sends you flying through air like a loose balloon? My experience is no different from millions of grand parents, but I’ve taken to wondering why, really why? You may disagree but here’s what I’ve come up with. I’m not certain these thoughts are original, but, y’know, lock ‘n’ load. No guts, no glory.

 I passed the sofa where he was sleeping to bring in more firewood. He was asleep on his back. That face, unblemished, free of wrinkles and blotches, stopped me cold. “Let the damn fire go out. You don’t want to miss this.” I looked at his closed eyes to see if there was movement. I wondered if he were dreaming and about what? His sweet breathing was sometimes interrupted by a purring sound, like that of a kitten. An unmarked face completely at peace. A face that was peace. I was mesmerized, unable to look away. I even forgot to breathe. I remember when my son, about the same age, asleep in his crib in the dark of night, I walked into his room, stood by his crib, overwhelmed by feelings foreign to me until this little creature kidnapped my life. I reached down and touched his head. Instantly, a flash, a jolt, a powerful charge of some kind of unleashed energy that bound us one to the other for life. This connection between my son and me (unleashed again two years later when Madden Rose became our daughter), a connection as powerful as anything I’d felt before caught me by such surprise that it felt as if I were being hurled by a tornado, free of the earth, no fear, free from everything on earth except my son. It beggars the question:

Why?

Lots of reasons but I’m looking for “The Reason”.

He is innocent, as yet unburdened by the minefield ahead. When last I checked, the Garden of Eden was the first and last place of pure, unvarnished innocence: cradled, cared for, no worries, no enemies, no concept of good or sin or evil, loved as you will never be loved again. Nothing to line his face or turn his hair gray. Not yet. It’s a perfect world. He is so innocent. Now. But, he won’t be for very long. He’ll be entering a foreign world. I watch his unbounded joy and discovery, “That was me!”, and that epiphany sends me back to Eden before the gates were thrown open, and the only two innocent beings in creation were told to take a walk. They were issued consciences as a parting gift. After that, they would never again have that sense of peace and innocence except that brief sliver of time at the very beginning. I delight in his innocence and, for that split instant, his innocence is my innocence, too.

New Year's Eve - December 31, 2020

"In with the new, out with the old" sounds like the proverbial new year's toast, but not for my mother. Upon meeting Jamie for the first time, introductions were barely over when these very words came out of her mouth, only in reference to how I played women like lottery tickets. "He leaves 'em all sick. Out with the old. In with the new."" she said and quickly segued into "The only reason Jewish boys like gentile girls is for the sex." Jamie replied with a straight-face, "I know that's important to Stephen, Elizabeth."  Right then and there I knew I had a winner. Why am I thinking about this now? I don't know why I'm thinking about this now. No clue. It came into my mind as I sat down. It is New Years'Eve after all. And that's the way it works, anyway. 

I've been an octogenarian for a week now, and I'm down, we be cool, I got stuff to do. It must be said that these days have been just about my best so far. I don't feel any worse than I did at seventy-nine, and, except for a few aches & pains, I felt pretty good then. Mostly, I'm anxious for the holidays to be over so I can get back to a regular work schedule. I've had no plans to write another novel (Three's enough and who needs the hassle?), but New Year's eve, without forethought or planning, out came eight pages. I was just sitting there staring into the fire thinking how different this was from all the other NY's Eves we've celebrated. How quiet. No earth-shaking thoughts. No epiphanies. Just mulling things over when, all of a sudden, my computer jumped into my lap and began giving me instructions. My fingers hopped around the keyboard on their own like Mexican jumping beans. Eight pages later I fell asleep. 

Back in 1968 I made my living as a stage manager. I remember looking around my first year at Yale wondering how all the playwrights who graduated were making a living. Mostly, I discovered, they weren't. Now, I'd had no theater experience whatsoever except that I'd had this play produced. My room-mate at the time was a director who was about to turn down an assistant stage manager gig at the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis. As I ran down the stairs I yelled, "Hey, Rog, tell 'em I'll take it." He did. They called me. I went to NYC for an interview. Had I acted? Of course. What? Howard in Picnic, Greek chorus. Directed? Of course. What? The Sandbox. No Exit. However, really, of course, I'd done nothing at all. I lied. Apparently, they didn't see through me because I was hired. Two weeks into the season I was nearly fired because I didn't know what the hell I was doing, so I dug in and learned, and, by season's end, I had my equity card and a way to make a living. Cut. Dissolve. A couple of years later I was Edward Albee's stage manager for the premiere of a new play at the the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, directed by Alan Schneider.. Pretty nifty gig. For a month I was around GianCarlo Menotti, Stephen Spender, Buckminster Fuller, Michael Cacoyannis, John Cazale, Irene Pappas doing an imitation of Danny Kaye begging her to have sex with him, Edward Albee, Israel Horowitz, a young Al Pacino...Others I can't remember, but I do remember the famous sculptors, Henry Moore and Isamu Noguchi. All this glamour and fame, but what they wanted most was to go home and back to work in their studios. They wanted out of there. I heard them say it. Back to work. I sort of understood it then, but I really understand it now, especially now, since, no matter how optimistic a guy is, time is limited, and I have another book to write. Jim Harrison, a favorite of mine, died with his pencil in his hand and a sheet of paper on his desk with an incomplete sentence. Sounds just about right.

December 23, 1940 - December 23, 2020

An unavoidable cliche for the year at hand - “How the hell did I get here?” Young and foolish seems like yesterday. Suddenly, it’s old and foolish. Wha’d’ya gonna do? As that wonderful song by Sondheim fearlessly puts it out there, “I’m still here”. And glad of it. Nu? Where would I rather be?

A Jewish merchant was traveling from Pinsk to Minsk. Another Jewish merchant was travelling from Minsk to Pinsk. Of course, they run into each other on the road. They know each other. They greet. So, one merchant asks the other,”How’s by you?” The other shrugs and answers, “Nu? How should I be?”

My reward? As in "Go to my"? Pass. Where am I going? My reward is already here - a tolerant, forgiving miracle of a partner of 42 years, our two children, one boy, one girl, our two and a half year old rambunctious hunk of championship grandson, two dogs, a beloved mutt and a big, black, sixty pound doodle, all right now under one roof - my roof, our roof. Brother and sister still spry and healthy. Best friends on the way. Oh yeah, let’s not forget the two goats and four horses out back. My Goddaughter and her mate bought the place only a few yards away across the creek. We're the ones with the goats. They’re the ones with the horses. Setting up shop in the Catskills, the irony being that we all once lived a quick block away from each other in Hancock Park. Very posh. BTW: “port out starboard home” - POSH. I love to do detective work on words - how they evolved, what they’ve come to mean. I was accepted by the University of Chicago as a PhD candidate in Linguistics. When I learned that linguistics was more concerned with how the tongue works rather than where the words came from, and that I had to take Latin, I bailed. Yale came next; Morgan State before that. The point of all this is that I refuse to “go to my reward”. Kickin’ and screamin’ be my middle name. Why go anywhere else? Joy! Joy! Joy! Gimme all y'got.

What I find hardest to believe is that I’ve had the life I’ve had. I wanted to be a writer, and I'm a writer. It's been a life often propelled by happenstance, but mostly by choice, not always good ones, but good enough to have made it worthwhile. There were crossroads, and I was fortunate to have found them. Sometimes they were guarded by the Black Knight from Monty Python. Other times were genuine shit shows. The punch that knocks you out is the punch you don't see. Sometimes you're out on your feet, stumbling around, with people asking you if you're all right, only you can't figure out why they're asking you such a stupid question. 

It hasn’t always been easy but it's never been boring - so many interesting people, so many challenges, so many books and boxing matches, some heartaches, more than I bargained for, some delicious happenings, more than I bargained for. My curiosity took me places I always wanted to go and places I didn't know were there. My intellect helped me make sense of it all, at least, sometimes, it did. There were times I could have been killed, once by a charging sperm whale, once by knife on the streets of New York. The whale was not serious. The knife was. Survival experiences. Aesthetic experiences. Intellectual experiences. Dumb experiences. Experiences where I was an asshole. See what I mean? Interesting. 

I've been fortunate. I can talk to anybody and have, and that includes a desert prospector, a sitting president (smack dab in the White House, no less), an Alaskan trapper, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Captain Tschirgi, USMC, Robert Lowell, Freddie Brown, Jane Fonda, a homeless lady with no teeth and a retired playmate with breasts the eighth and ninth wonders of the world. I don't feel superior or entitled or inferior or undeserving, just pleased to be doing what I do  - listening. Maybe this is why I've always loved books more than movies. A beloved Uncle Milton once gave me this advice,"If you want other people to find you interesting, get them to talk about themselves". Really. What could be more fascinating than you? I enjoy listening to the adventures of other people, their accents, their quirks, prejudices which are not mine, poses, desires. I can spin a yarn with the best of 'em and will with a wink and a nod, but I'd much prefer you show me yours.

I was three, maybe four when I had my first true writing experience. I was raised in a brick semi-detached house with lots of trees around. 3814 W. Rogers Ave., Baltimore 15, Maryland, Mohawk 2729. I remember it well, details like jumping up and down on a sofa in the club basement to the tune of "Cement Mixer, Putty, Putty" on the radio, and a breakfast nook where I sat across  from Uncle Milton when he visited from New York. We had our midnight snacks  - slugs of Hebrew National salami and and talks from places of love so good and pure, so never felt before, gone dormant until a father and his son brought them back to life, and a grandson who is life itself.

 My first writing experience, ca, 1944. My three year old self somehow came up with the idea that if he kneeled on the seat and "wrote" in the air above the nook, scribbles and lines and circles and wavy stuff, up, down, back, forth, every morning of the year, on Xmas morning the "letters" would appear in many colors right there in the air. My parents, being Jewish, did not celebrate Christmas, so upbringing had nothing to do with this. It was my secret.  I remember rushing down stairs to the nook that morning, all excited, only to be disappointed to see that nothing was there. Not one squiggle. Blank space. Nothing. My writer's life may have begun right then and there - write the stuff, send it out, wait for an answer, get an answer, get over it.  However, there are times when the proper answer does come, and, along with it, comes the goodness of the feeling I had when writing those letters in the first place, decades and decades and decades ago when I was barely here.

                                                                end

PS 

You can stop here or...

What follows is completely off the subject, or maybe it isn't. My old friend, Paul, used to refer to this type of construction as "a graceless segue". Your call.

Jamie is Catholic, and so, we have a Christmas tree. It took me awhile to get past my discomfort with having one in my own home, but, know what? Get over it. She's your wife.

The other day, my grandson, daughter, wife, self, and Joe, the black doodle, trudged up the mountain in deep snow to cut a tree Jamie had targeted this past summer. We'd been watching it grow, a young spruce, fresh and perky, just the other side of a stone wall above the creek. Dorian, two and a half, bodacious as could be, was a trooper, fearless, determined, oblivious to the twenty degree cold, endlessly curious. Madden cut the tree down and we headed back. True to the shlemiel I seem to have become, I lost my balance crossing the wall and went down. Fortunately, I was able to grab a nearby sapling to break the fall. No problem, except figuring out how to get up again. Just then, this thirty month old little person turned around, saw me, said, "Poppa, help?", and held out his hand to help me up. "Poppa, help?"

So, you tell me: is this completely off the subject? 

(NOTE: Yiddish lexicon - the shlemiel spills the soup on the shlemazel.)

Death Of A Computer

 It’s been three weeks, three weeks without my computer, the headquarters of my brain where a good two thirds of my life is stored. How did I get to such a dependency on a machine and a  machine without a soul no less? Certainly, there are folks who would dispute that, but, of course, they are wrong. Just because it talks does not mean it has anything to say. Now, some forty years after losing my virginity to an archaic, fifty pound desktop with a screen the size of a credit card, it’s become an appendage. Remember that fifties movie, “Donovan’s Brain”? A man’s brain outside his body dictating what he can and cannot do? No academy awards there, but a glimpse of something frightening and imminent. And then the internet was conjured into existence. My world became more complex at the stroke of a key. 

It wasn't always like this. Way back in the fifties when I fancied myself a Beat poet, a ballpoint pen, even a pencil stub, and the closest scrap of paper was just dandy. This method evolved to yellow legal pads and felt tip pens of many colors, then typing it up on a portable Olivetti or another brand I can no longer remember which I took to Italy where I wrote my first screenplay. Why Italy? Why not? I was Edward Albee’s stage manager at the Festival of Two Worlds, Spoleto, and so I thought, what the hell? Florence was just a ways north. Stick around. This screenplay led to my first IBM, the purchase of which was one of the single most exciting times of my life, way better than my first sexual experience which wasn't very good at all. But that first IBM? Whoa, what a ride! What a high! Mazel tov. I was a success. Then along came computers. My first one was not unlike my first whirl at serious sex - ignorannce redux - awkward, confusing, frusttrating, serially unsatisfying. It was years before I worked out the sex thng, but the computer had to be mastered right away, one computer after another, until I finally got it, well, sort of got it, enough for me to pound out a manuscript anyone else could read. No more cut and paste. No more trying to read my own handwriting. No more White-Out. No more carbon paper and yellow copy pages. Revisions infinitely easier. Writing has never become a breeze, but losing the grunt work was a saving grace.

So, what have the past three weeks wrought? A huge hole where my words used to be, and devolution - scraps of paper I promptly lost, dried out felt tips, cheap ballpoint pens from local political campaigns stuck in the backs of drawers, ideas left hanging, “precious” thoughts dissipating like cigar smoke. What was the good in all of this? For starters, I wasn’t seduced by internet ads into parting with my hard earned dollars for stuff I never thought I needed. For another, I read books.

Now that I’ve got my computer back, is my world once again a delightful place to be? My little world may almost be that, but my bigger world still has Trump and his traitors in it, and will have them in it most likely the rest of my days. Anyway, I’m back now and don’t feel like kvetching , although I could at length but won’t, not this week, anyhow. Stay tuned.

When Somone You Loved Long Ago Dies

People die. I know a lot of them. Knew. Relatives. Friends. Others. No secret. It happens as one grows older. What about those who were alive to you all your life and then you discover they aren’t, discover they died years ago, all that time you assumed they were still alive. Somehow that’s even more of a shock than a sudden death. 

My father’s death was sudden, although for years his ailments forecast it,  so it really wasn’t sudden at all. One day he was here. The next day he wasn’t. But, this wasn’t really sudden, was it? It just seemed like it.

Sometimes, when my mind wanders, I wonder about those from my past with whom I was once close. Are they well? Have they had good lives? It’d be nice to check in after all the years. A surprise. A call from the blue. Someone answers. You know that voice.  “Who? My God, how in the world have you been?” That’s the way it often is. Really nice. Really fun, only once, it wasn’t.

It’s been fifty-six years. I was a social worker in the city of Baltimore. So was she. A very, very smart woman. Strawberry blonde hair. A lithe body kept trim by swimming. A lovely, warm smile. Some freckles. An easy laugh, more like a chuckle or a chortle. Sweet. She thought I was funny. And, again, very, very smart.

I was Jewish, a graduate of Morgan State College, an HBCU, where I was the only white guy matriculating at the time. She was Episcopalian, a University of Maryland graduate whose great great great aunt was an honest to God Revolutionary War heroine.You’d know her name. Her family didn’t want me anywhere near. I’d hear feet running from the living room up the steps to the second floor when I was at the front door. We dated for months, yet I never met one of them. But, she was tough, certain of her own mind, so, while it bothered her, we only spoke of it once. I’m sure she was the first Daughter of the American Revolution to work as a social worker. She did not brook inequality.

We talked a lot and laughed a lot, but I was heading to graduate school at Yale, and she was heading to law school at University of Maryland. I don’t remember how, but we drifted, and then we weren’t there anymore. I thought of her from time to time - still do - and I wondered if she ever thought of me?

It wasn’t that long ago when I took it into my head to see what had become of her. I did the research and discovered she had become a highly regarded equal rights lawyer, especially women’s legal rights.There was a newspaper photo showing her standing at her desk, older, but still, but still...I thought she looked just great. More years went by until I took it into my head to call her. I did the research, found her firm’s phone number, found she was dead. Whoa. Dead? Dead. She had died years before. It was a shock because she had just died to me.

I wanted her to be alive. I wanted to swap tales of our lives. To laugh. Instead, it was a shock to the midsection, a shock to the heart kind of grief I hadn’t yet known. I was no longer in love with her - that passed half a century ago - it was more an uncommon sadness, a befuddlement. She was just here. Where had she gone? I wasn’t looking at an empty chair or a hollow place at the table. I wasn’t looking at anything, but I could see her clearly as she had been. It made me want to share the tales of our lives. Fifty-six years ago we talked about what we wanted to become. Now, I had become what we had talked about, and I wanted her to know it. I wanted her to know how it felt to hold my grandson’s hand. I wanted her to know of my marriage of forty years and to whom I  was married. She’d have laughed and clapped her hands. I wanted her to know I became the writer I wanted to be. I wanted her to know that I’ve held onto those principles which brought me to social work in the first place. T’ain’t easy, MgGee, and there were times I wavered but recovered and tried to do my best. I wanted to email her pictures of my son and daughter, and tell the tale that brought them to us. I wanted to tell her tales of Hollywood, and I wanted to tell her I worked in the White House with George H. W.  Wrote a documentary on the american wilderness for him. I wanted to tell her that, unlike actors, the President didn’t change a word. 

There wouldn't have been time in a phone call to tell her all this, but some of it, and it would have been fun. Yet, there would have been no more phone calls had she been alive because this would be the one. It’s not that I miss her. Really, I don’t, but she’s tucked into a good place in my life at a good time in my life, and, like my garden, I tend my memories. I roam through my mental rolodex (that dates me, doesn’t it?), pluck out the good ones, give them a brisk watering. I try to hear voices, words said, even peculiar expressions. There is no sadness to this, no yearning, mostly huge smiles that hurt my face. Those times were, but these times are, and that’s where I am and will be for the next chunk of time, checkin’ out my world to see what’s comin’ ‘round my mountain next.

 

Just Like Being in a Corral

 When we lived in Montana we became friendly with two much older couples. Kenny and Verna Trowbridge lived a few miles south in the little town of Darby. Carl and Billie Hopkins lived there as well. Kenny broke horses for the army in WW1. He taught me how to hand load. Billie, as a bride, came to Jenny Lake in the Tetons, one of the first white settlers in the area. Billie gave Jamie her famous recipe for corn pudding which has become Jamie's famous recipe for corn pudding. 

One day Kenny and I were in a corral, leaning on the top rail, looking out over the wide Bitterroot Valley - a stupendous sight. "Beautiful, isn't it?" I said to Kenny. He hesitated then replied, "Seems just like bein' in a corral to me." One night, when the six of us were together, Billie described what it was like being a new bride in the Wyoming wilderness. After she got over her fear of a horse drawn sled falling through the ice, she grew to love the place. Imagine the Tetons and the lake. Imagine you are there by yourself. Alone, alone and filled with the delicious happiness of  solitude. "Has she ever been back?" we asked. "Once," she said, "but no more." "Why not?" "I can't recognize the place anymore. Too many roads. I get lost." A woman who could find her way through the hills and dales of the Teton wilderness when there were no roads, now gets lost and confused by them.

When we moved to the Catskills going on forty years ago, our road was a quiet country road. If three vehicles came by in an hour we'd call it gridlock, and we could often tell which neighbor it was by the sound of their engine. It started with 9/11 and continues with the pandemic: folks from NYC began buying property up here. A hedge fund guy has bought up a goodly portion of our valley and tunneled into the mountain he bought to build his getaway. A micro-brewery up the valley and a lovely inn 1/2 mile east of us are wonderful additions as is a neighbor's charming guest cottage a bit to the west, but this has helped turn our little piece of heaven into a destination venue - who doesn't want to be here? - more traffic, more money, more houses, less country. There is a push in our small town to limit further B'n'B's and slow the traffic. I've been dreaming of those police straps embedded with nails that stretch across the road. Speed bumps have been suggested, but they would make it impossible to plow. I guess, in its way, we are becoming gentrified. I can imagine now how the locals must have felt when we first moved here. Did they think, "There goes the neighborhood?" Only, there weren't that many of us then. At our end of the valley, I counted two - me and J, and then Bev moved here with her horses. At the village end, five miles west, six people, sometime eight. Barely a dent; not even a dozen. 

But, there are pluses as well. This does not include the McMansion being built by the hedge fund manager's architect fully visible through the trees 500 yards across the creek. Suddenly, a familiar old walk becomes trespassing, but I was talking about the pluses. 

People! People are the pluses. 

I've gotten to be quite comfortable discussing pick-up trucks and bullet trajectories. It's fun but it's limited. Recently, at the local farmer's market, I actually heard two people talking about the Colbert show. There are literally six writers within a quarter mile of each other. We were invited to dinner and had cuisine and proper wines. These folks are smart and sassy and don't let their city ways keep them from  diving head-long into country. We enjoy each other. Came Rosh Hashana the tiny pod of Jewish folks met on a small bridge over our creek and tossed the contents of our pockets into the water as is the ancient custom, and the larger pod celebrates Halloween and New Year's with gusto, 4th of July and Labor Day week-end. Bourbon for an hour. A snack. We even have our own brand of Meals-n-Wheels. One of the women is an extraordinarily good and adventurous cook, and very, very generous. She'll make brisket, for example, and put a serving in each of our mailboxes. Many do maple syrup come March. I love it when a local I know well stops by for a sit/chat on our front porch, and I love it when a writer or a psychologist or an architect or an artist stops by for the same reason. We don't trespass. We live off the land and the land is us. We find ourselves part of a community, and that ain't bad, not at this stage of my game. I've surprised myself by enjoying myself. I mean, aren't Russian Jewish Intellectuals supposed to be misanthropes? So much for self awareness.

For a long time now, most of my life, I've felt a part of more than one world. I've always been able to talk with anyone - a president of the United States and the state trooper whose mother I've known forever, movie stars and mercenaries, book worms and jocks. I've tried to raise my children to be comfortable anywhere with anyone. We're no better than the next guy, and we're certainly no worse. A dear uncle, Uncle Milton, once told me that if I wanted other people to find me interesting, get them to talk about themselves. I've discovered some great stuff that way. I know what I think, but what do you think?

Back at Yale, Sartre's, "No Exit", seemed profound to me. Its last line - "Hell is other people" - struck me as God's proof. Years and years later, I've changed my mind. Heaven is other people, too.

 

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