History of My Reading: Bluebird of Nothingness

 

Flora Severini high school graduation photo 1938 from a local newspaper

In late January 1974 my father called me in Cambridge to say my mother was in the hospital again and I should come home as soon as I could.  I did.  She had passed the five -year mark that was supposed to indicate she was safe from cancer’s recurrence, but nevertheless it had returned.

 She was in a hospital in Pittsburgh for evaluation and treatment, but basically because of her alarming condition. I soon learned that when my father had called, he’d been told she might not last the night. When I got there, she was out of immediate danger but was being given morphine for her severe pain. When she was conscious she talked a great deal, at times abruptly and irrationally, so that I barely recognized her. But at other times she spoke more calmly, with such conviction that even her strangest insights were compelling. 

The one instance I recall was her insistence that there was an essential piece of information in the work of Christopher Morley, and that a certain high school classmate would know what it was.  She pleaded with me to search it out.  So even as I knew how crazy it was I found this classmate from Youngwood High School in the late 1930s and called her from a pay phone near the hospital.  Of course she didn’t know anything but that they had both liked Morley’s writing. 

Morley was a prolific and well-known American journalist, humorist, essayist, poet and novelist from the 1920s through the 40s.  I don’t recall my mother mentioning him before, but I now surmise that his 1939-1940 best-selling novel Kitty Foyle (later a popular dramatic film starring Ginger Rodgers) was something she would have read. It was about the trials of a young working class woman from a small town who joined the new generation of overworked and underpaid office workers, and had romantic—and tragic--misadventures in confronting the biases of the wealthy ruling class.   Flora Severini, my mother, grew up in a small town in an immigrant family of modest means, graduated high school in 1938, and did some subsequent secretarial and clerical work, among other jobs before her marriage.  But what she remembered in the hospital, if anything real, remained a mystery.

 After a few days she had improved enough that she was taken off morphine and given other medication for pain.  But the doctors also concluded that further treatment of the disease itself was useless. She was taken to Westmoreland Hospital in our hometown of Greensburg.  She had been employed by that hospital for more than a decade, beginning when I was around 11 years old.  She’d worked her way up from a night shift clerk to an administrator and head of her department.  Though she hadn’t worked there for several years due to her illness, she was known and loved there.

Flora's First Communion photo

 She was given a private room, the last at the end of a corridor on an upper floor.  Across from her room was a visitors’ lounge.  Much of the time our family had it to ourselves.  Only a few of us could be in my mother’s room at a time.  Besides myself, there was my father and my sisters, Kathy and Debbie, joined many times by Kathy’s six year old daughter Chrissy, Debbie’s boyfriend Jerry, Kathy’s boyfriend Chad.  My uncle Carl, Flora’s younger brother came often from his job in Pittsburgh or his home in Murrysville, and eventually her younger sister Antoinette, who taught school in Maryland, came for the duration. My grandmother was nearly always there. Other relatives who lived in the area dropped by, as did Flora’s friends, especially those who worked with her at the hospital.

 Though her pain meds were less intense, my mother struggled with their effects.  At times she was lucid but dreamy. Her bed faced a large window, and I remember one day when we watched fast moving clouds over Seton Hill College, high on a distant hill. The school was built around the last remnants of what had been the most elaborate dwelling in Greensburg, built by a wealthy industrialist.  According to Andrew Carnegie, it was where he saw his first private library as a young railroad employee, and was inspired to someday build his own.

 Seen from the south, the college now was a collection of massive stone and brick buildings, replete with spires and turrets. That day she said it reminded her of Wuthering Heights.  I said that when I was younger, and gazing out at it from the living room picture window in our house on a different hill, I used to imagine it as a castle, and associated it with Robin Hood.

 (In fact my mother and I had seen it from a much closer vantage point in our first home together in the late 40s, from an attic apartment on College Avenue, at the foot of that long hill.) 

Flora at 16.  On the back she'd
written "The Dreamer"

There were moments I found my mother’s dreamy talk, with its sudden associations, its quick and at times surreal changes and non sequiturs (she once referred to “the letter Pete”) much more comfortable than what I was seeing and hearing around me.  The daily incongruities, the grotesque contrasts, set to the cheerful inanities from the television; the strained conversations and hospital absurdities, were hard to take.  

But both the pain meds and the pain played havoc with her lucidity. She got to the point that she (briefly) refused to eat, because she said she didn’t want to wake up one more day and not know where she was. 

 For the roughly eight weeks I was there, I lived in the family home.  I’d been there in November and most recently at Christmas. For some reason I had recorded the meal my mother made me the night before I started back to Cambridge: a hot turkey sandwich, mashed potatoes and gravy, and corn--probably made from Christmas leftovers.  It would turn out to be the last meal she made me, out of many. 

I recently found the last letter she wrote me, and the last letter I wrote her, both from that early January after I'd returned to Cambridge. She was enjoying the parakeet named Nikki that someone evidently gave her for Christmas (I have no memory of this), keeping her company in her daytimes alone.  She wrote that it was wonderful having me home.  I wrote back that I enjoyed being there with her, and that I noticed and appreciated the extra efforts she made for me, even if I didn't always say so at the time.  I apparently knew she was seeing the doctor soon, and wrote I hope the holidays didn't tire her too much. It's good to have evidence now that we were on good terms then, and that her last Christmas and New Year's were good ones.  

Now back in Greensburg, I went to the hospital every day, sometimes with my father but often on my own.  It wasn’t far: I could see it—and had seen it most of my life—from that same picture window.  Our house was on a hill just outside the city limits, and the hospital was on the next hill within the city itself.  So now I often walked to the hospital, on very familiar streets.

 I walked down along the West Newton Road to Hamilton Avenue, facing the corner where, as the first-born child, I’d waited with my mother for the green Hamilton-Stanton bus to downtown.  As I crossed Hamilton, a few blocks to my right was the building where I’d first gone to school—it was called Sacred Heart then.  It had been built when my mother was a girl, living close by, though she was already going to the nearest public school.

 If I chose to walk on Hamilton along its upward slope, I passed houses where schoolmates had lived, and the church rectory.  Down an alley was the old church where I’d had my First Communion and Confirmation, and where I’d served Mass on many early weekday mornings as well as Sundays.  This was likely the first church my grandparents and my mother had attended in their New World.

  Near the crest of the hill at Pittsburgh Street was the house where some Severini relatives still lived.  In the 1920s it was where my grandparents and mother first lived in America.  Looking ahead to where Hamilton terminated, I could see the corner that once hosted a pizza place, where as a young adolescent I played the nickel jukebox and mourned the sudden early death of Buddy Holly. 

Pittsburgh St. approach to Westmoreland Hospital

Up the steep hill of Pittsburgh Street—again passing family homes of high school classmates—was the entrance of Westmoreland Hospital, where I’d been born. But it was now connected to a newer, taller building, and was at least twice the size in 1974 as it had been in 1946.

 Or if I wanted the shorter way I might come at it from behind by walking straight up West Newton St. toward downtown, as I had countless times, carrying a baseball glove or books to return to the library, or 25 cents for the Saturday afternoon movies plus a nickel for a box of Dots or Root Beer Barrels.  But this time I would cut across on side streets to the hospital parking lot.

 I was there at all hours and often walked home late at night, reacquainting myself with a sky full of stars that had been hidden from me in Cambridge. Or seeing those old streets from the other side of dawn.  I enjoyed these walks, especially returning home.  Even if the air was cold and damp it was better than the stale florescent blankness inside the hospital. Occasionally I would escape for a few minutes outside, just to feel the rare winter sun on my face, and be assured it was still there. 

 I kept irregular hours and slept in spurts or great chunks.  Once in mid-March after falling asleep just after midnight I awoke at 2 a.m. in the silent house, and looked out the picture window into the now snowy night.  Through snowflakes I saw the white street lights, the green light down at the crossroads, the lit dome of the Court House, the Cathedral obscured by snow and trees.  I saw a township truck with sand for the roads stuck on my street, its yellow light turning and its wheels whining.

Flora at the 1939 New York World's Fair

 At first I did get away from the hospital at times, to escape the threatening tedium and persistent overload, and absorbing some sense of Greensburg now, where the late 60s I had left behind were still making waves. I recall once being in an unfamiliar bar in a familiar oddly shaped building--when it was new, it was the hip new food place eatery on Otterman Street where my father took me for hot chocolate after my Confirmation.  Now it featured drinks and a live rock band, and I remember standing too close to a guitar speaker, the music burning through me.

 Later I couldn’t stray far from my mother’s room, but I recall once feeling so stir-crazy that I called my old friend Clayton and extracted him from his family dinner to sit with me in a restaurant near the hospital. Once I escaped by myself up to Pennsylvania Avenue to a movie theatre, but alerted the manager that I might get a phone call from the hospital, and I sat at the end of the aisle at the back.  I don’t remember what was playing. 

 By early March, some remaining Cambridge and Boston Phoenix friends had learned from my housemate where I was and why, and I got a few letters.  Housemate Andrea herself wrote about house matters but also gossip.  I got Phoenix and “poetry biz” gossip from Celia Gilbert, and Janet Maslin wrote about hosting Joni Mitchell when she was in Boston for a concert.  She even went bowling with her and her traveling entourage.  Joni’s team always won, she reported: she had been on her high school bowling team and she had skills.

 As this is ostensibly a series about my reading, it is worth recording that splayed on a plastic cushioned chair in the small narrow visitors lounge, or eating countless toasted cheese and other bland sandwiches and slurping endless weak coffees at the brown counter of the hospital snack and gift shop (“The Hospitality Shop”) for those eight weeks, I was probably reading something almost constantly, but I don’t recall what.

 I remember there wasn’t a lot of choice.  The lounge (according to one of the notebooks and scraps that have survived) had a scattering of old magazines—months’ old Time, years old Sports Illustrated.  The Hospitality Shop had little of interest on its publications racks: lots of women’s magazines (“Cancer Tests That Can Save Your Life,” and 29 Spring Hairdos, plus the latest on the Kennedys and the Nixons), rifle magazines and True Detectives, gothic novels and comic books, and books of crossword puzzles.  My father bought those.  He did dozens of them in that visitors’ lounge.

 There were books at home: a miscellany of my mother’s book club books, books I’d left behind and some acquired by my sister Kathy and left there.  Among my fugitives was probably a set of three F. Scott Fitzgerald novels-- a few quotes in a notebook suggests that I re-read Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night.

 The one book I associate with this time was a children’s book, but not from my own childhood (though, for example, the My Book House set was still there.)  It was a hardback with an orange cover of The New Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit.  It was evidently bought used, probably by Kathy, possibly to read to Chrissy.  I’d never heard of Nesbit, but I was completely charmed by this book.  It was a very English set of childhood adventures in the late 19^th century.  The tales of the Bastable family are supposedly told by the eldest, Oswald, who suggests that when he grows up he hopes to be a pirate in his spare time. 

 Racial, ethnic and class attitudes of the times get a little squirmy now and then, though the children always have their hearts in the right place.  It’s very well written, and over the years I’ve acquired and read several more E. Nesbit children’s books.  When I first started reading the Harry Potter books, E. Nesbit was the first possible influence that came to mind, and I was pleased when J.K. Rowling said so. 

 This book did not remind me of my childhood, though I suppose you could say indirectly it did. It offered an alternative space, which I guess counts as escape. Still, as far as I recall, I did not seek or find inspiration or solace or anything profound in my reading in those weeks, partly I assume because those hours were characterized by the need to be vaguely alert amidst the tense boredom and exhaustion that mostly resulted in a persistent spaciness, with sharp moments that were emotional and yet complex and ambiguous, and very new to me.  I don’t know what this absence in my reading means.  I still don’t know what any of it meant.  I do recall that I guiltily experienced so much of it as grotesque.   

 In particular I did not read about death, though beyond poetry and philosophy there wasn’t much to read yet specifically about dealing with the situation we were in.  It was still something of a forbidden topic, which might help account for the fact that visitors didn’t really know what to say.

 Everyone knew my mother was dying, and no one said so—least of all to her. When the doctors in Pittsburgh told us but not her, I was angry.  My father followed the authority, the expert.  I somewhat self-righteously announced that if my mother ever asked me, I would tell her.

 Just after one of the doctor’s infrequent visits, probably in early March, she admitted that she almost asked him if she was ever getting out of this room, but was afraid of the answer.  So I kept quiet about it.

Flora in her back yard 1944

 When she was asleep or it was my turn to retreat to the lounge, I wrote letters (I specifically remember writing to Carol) and in notebooks. I noted the plethora of smoking in the hospital: smoke choking the few green plants; standing ashtrays full of butts under a No Smoking sign. Perhaps that’s what sent me to the public library, to look up stories on smoking in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, with an eye to eventually doing my own article.

 Generally we were a hapless and helpless lot.  We stood around, we sat around. The television in her room was a cynically cheerful counterpoint, though once I saw that it scared her—it was Nixon on the screen, and she was afraid of him.  Watergate was well underway, it had been for years; it was just five months or so from President Nixon’s resignation.

 Visitors came and went, most of them (like us) not really knowing what to say, struggling against the desire to get back to their lives, and the fear of facing sickness unto death.  I hadn’t yet read Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illych but by the time I did, this aspect of it would be familiar.  Years later, I taught this novella in an evening class with Margaret; the students were nurses from this very hospital.

 It struck me as hypocritical, but it was very human:the false optimism, both hollow and helpless,  with everyone playing the cheerfulness no one could actually feel: the bluebird of nothingness. It was a phrase I scribbled in my notebook at the time.

 When there were visitors in her more alert moments, I noticed my mother playing hostess, smoothing over any awkwardness with questions and conversation, calming their conflicting emotions and unease, their nervousness, their fear to get too close.

  We in the family who were there every day were so dependent on the nurses.  When one was bad, it led to alarm, anxiety and prolonged discussions of what to do.  Then she was replaced by an older nurse, who immediately took charge.  She was from “the sticks,” where she had a pet crow.  Her vocabulary and pronunciation said she lacked education and sophistication.  But she had a sure touch, physically and otherwise.  My mother told her she was worried that she couldn’t help with the family’s problems.  “You let them take care of their problems,” Gussie said, “and we’ll take care of yours.”

 Over the weeks, the pain and the fog got worse.  “A dream within a dream within a dream,” she said. When asked how the pain was, she didn’t know.  She couldn’t remember feeling it in the night.  Sometimes she couldn’t say how she felt at that moment.  She improvised, sometimes getting canny about her responses, and subtly suspicious, then sometimes abruptly frustrated because she wasn’t sure what she was being told and not told.  At times she wanted it to be over, and the next second she prayed that she could get up and walk.

 each breath was a cry

in that landscape of soft-edged

denial

but for now:

three merged

sighs of sleep

in the last hour

before dawn

and the next uncertain moment

  She found some escape.  She’d said that she’d been thinking about England, she didn’t know why. (I expect it was that view of Seton Hill.)  But it had an eerie feeling, she said.  Later she had times during several days when she believed that she was actually in England.  She had never been there but she named places she had perhaps seen in the movies or photographs or just read about, like Trafalgar Square.

Walt and Flora in 1945, year of their marriage

 Probably in mid March, my father’s father, my paternal grandfather Frank Kowinski, came to visit, and sat for some minutes at her bedside in his somber dark suit. In my life I’d seen him maybe a half dozen times outside of the home he shared with his daughter and her family in the “coal patch” town of United, the house where my father grew up, built by the United Coal Company. He probably still frequented the nearby Calumet Club, but otherwise, he seemed to spend most of his time alone in his basement.  

 Some time after he left my mother said, “When I saw that old man, I knew I had to be dying.  That’s the only thing that could get him here.”

 But it was also probably in mid-March that Debbie and her boyfriend Jerry talked to her alone, to tell her they were engaged to be married. 

 At times my mother still spoke from a different realm. I wrote down what she said to me late at night on Saturday, March 16.  At this remove I can only guess where I might have embellished a bit, but this is the essence of it, including most of the words:

 “One hundred years, one hundred years, one hundred years, to sleep, you’re sleepy, go ahead.  You’re sleepy, aren’t you?  Go ahead and sleep.  Go ahead and sleep.

It’s too late.  There. It’s gone.  It’s gone.  Now I want you to go.  Put on your coat and get your things and go away and forget.  Forget everything.  And then write it all down on paper, as something you have forgotten for a long time and then suddenly remembered.  Now don’t move.  Don’t get up or you will die.  Promise me, promise me that you’ll lie back, lie back and sleep and never get up.  And write it all down on paper, remember that your mother told you, think of other worlds…Now go, please, promise me that you’ll go now.”

 And yet soon she seemed much better. That week she even sat up in a chair for the first time in awhile.  We wondered at it, but the nurse cautioned us.  She’d seen this before, just ahead of the end.

  The room became more cheerful.  Debbie repositioned some of Chrissie’s painting high on the glass window of the door.  Near the bed was a ceramic goldfinch I’d purchased from the Hospitality Shop, when my mother wished for a bird to perch on the window ledge. It’s now on a shelf looking over my left shoulder.

 On Sunday, March 17, she sat up in bed and looked out on a bright day. She watched a clear blue sunny sky, and white clouds passing by slowly, slowly moving in one direction, some slowly breaking up, with pieces floating upward, and she listened to the wind blowing.

  Sunday evening she was visited by a priest and I believe made her confession, though I don’t remember being around at the time. By then she believed she was dying. Sunday night she had the whole family gathered around her and she said her final goodbye to everyone.  

 But when the moment was over, life resumed as if it hadn’t happened.  She asked for the television to be turned on.  It was a Peanuts special, which nobody watched.  She hadn’t been eating much, even with her mother and her children feeding her.  But now she ate one of the Girl Scout cookies someone had bought, a chocolate one.   Everyone else also had one, like a communion. Then she napped, and awoke to ask if the bills had been paid.

 Later she called me to her.  “ A long time ago, there was something I wanted to do.  I almost did it one night a long time ago, but I didn’t.  Everything sounds melodramatic coming out of this mouth, but now I guess it’s ok, I’m getting things straight in my mind bit by bit.  But today I did it, and I’m so glad.  I’m so glad I did it and it’s done.”

 “What did you do?”

 “I can’t tell you.  It was a little thing but it was the world and life and religion, you know.  I don’t know why I want to tell you these things but I do.  And now everything that I do, I’ll start and finish, start and finish, and the past is past, with nothing to do with the past.”

By then her sister Antoinette was there, my Aunt Toni, who my mother called Ant.  Once my mother was talking in spontaneous rhyme.  “She used to write poetry,” Ant said, and asked her, “Do you still write poetry?”  “Yes,” she said.  “Where is it? Where is your poetry?”  “Billy has it.”  I didn’t, or maybe I did.

 On the following Monday she was feeling worse.  “Something is wrong.  I don’t know what it is.  I try to get through but nobody understands.  I can’t tell what it is, because I don’t know what it is.”

 “I told you before, that I wanted to be pretty.  I didn’t want everyone to have to see me when I wasn’t pretty.  I’m sorry for that.  I wanted to make it easier.  But I couldn’t make it easier.”

 The last conversation I had with her was short and convoluted.  I don’t remember what it was about, something to do with how she was feeling at the moment, and finding the nurse. I don’t recall what I said.   But I do remember that she said: “If I trust anybody, I trust you.”  I still wonder if I earned that trust, or how.  But that’s the last conversation we had, and possibly the last words she spoke, except perhaps to the nurse.

 By then we knew the end was very close, and we were  there all the time, however bleary and nearly numb.  On Friday night, March 22, my aunt came into the visitors’ lounge and quietly told us all to come into the room.  When we got there my mother was breathing long throaty breaths.  I remember I was standing on her left side, at or near the head of the bed.  We stood without a word as she took those long heaving breaths until after an exhalation suddenly no inhalation came, just a long silence, a true absence of any sound.  Only my grandmother cried. None of the rest of us moved, we just looked down at my mother.  Eventually Aunt Toni standing across from me told us all we could touch her.

My mother and I making a snowman in front
of our first home together on College Ave.

 I certainly had been closer to my mother than I was with my father, and I once overheard him telling his father that I had taken her death harder than anyone.  I wasn’t aware of that at the time.  At this remove, I see myself then as a self-absorbed 27 year old, immersed in the world of contemporaries in the contemporary world, with only a vague sense of the past and an anxious purchase on the present, which was elsewhere.

 We had always written letters back and forth, talked on the phone as much as long distance rates permitted, and we talked when I visited home.  At the time I still felt, as I had since college, or perhaps since adolescence, that she and I inhabited different worlds. The whole generation gap thing didn’t help.  That distance and my defensiveness might well have faded in time. In any case, I felt the deprivation, the absence of her presence in subsequent years. I missed the conversations we might have had as we both got older, comparing memories and sharing observations.   She was only 54.

 But any process at that moment leading to any realization, even any real grief, had to be withheld, to first confront what to me were the bizarre protocols of the funeral, as they were in that time and place.   

 I was a relative innocent to these. This was only the second death in my close family.  Although I was home from college the summer my grandfather died, and I called some relatives to tell them, wrote his obituary for the newspaper and served as a pallbearer, that was the extent of my involvement with “the arrangements.” 

But now I suffered for the first time the (to me) absurd rituals: reviewing the long rows of coffins to select one, listening to discussions on the decision of a dress, of how to deal with relatives who felt snubbed, while privacy was suddenly gone as people trooped through the house with obscene amounts of food and solemn sentimentality.  The loud incongruity of it—which I experienced as indignity akin to cruelty—was too much for me. I erupted in violence against several innocent objects in the storage garage.

 I was particularly appalled by the so-called “viewing” at the funeral home.  My mother’s body and barely recognizable face in an open casket behind us and mostly ignored as the family stood in a placid line facing the other way to chat amiably with people we might not know well or hadn’t seen in years.  Even the nun who had most made my high school life miserable and who my mother despised, evidently showed up, although only Kathy saw her entrance, now habitless (thanks to those late 60s reforms.)  Even the Darvon or whatever I’d been given to take to cope with these hours didn’t insulate me, and I quietly sailed for the men’s room.  Whereupon, my sister said, the nun left in a huff. And the next day we did it again. 

I was however calm enough to appreciate the sincerity of the women from the hospital who had worked in my mother’s department, and who wanted us to know how much they admired her, how fair she was with everyone.  They wanted to tell their story.  Still, the venue freaked me out. 

We gathered for the funeral Mass at the relatively new St. Paul’s Church, just up to the next street from ours and across the Carbon Road.  The church had originally been designed to eventually become a gymnasium for the adjacent new school, but funds (and a large enough congregation) for a proper new church never materialized.  On this morning, before the service could begin and while the organist was played the preliminaries, a young altar boy in his cassock and surplus suddenly ran out to the altar and began crying “Fire!”  Eventually we saw wisps of smoke coming from the sacristy and cooler heads had everyone file out.

 Of the many people who attended, at this remove I remember only my cousins on my mother’s side. We stood around the parking lot and sat in cars as fire trucks arrived and departed, until we were told to go on to the Blessed Sacrament Cathedral, a large, tall gray stone building with turrets and spires, at the northern peak of Main Street in Greensburg.  The funeral would take place there.  Later the priest told the local newspaper that if this service hadn’t been scheduled, the fire at St. Paul’s might not have been discovered until much greater damage was done.  Meanwhile, my mother got a funeral Mass in the largest church in the county.    

 Shortly after the funeral I returned to Cambridge.  I would not be back to Greensburg for awhile, even missing the next Christmas.

History of My Reading: Friends and Other Strangers 1973-4

 In 1973 I was the Managing Editor for the Boston Phoenix arts and entertainment section, roughly half the newspaper each week.  In addition I was still its Books Editor and I was expected to keep writing regularly.

 One of my first unfamiliar tasks as managing editor was authorizing that week’s payments for our section’s freelance writers. A number of writers wrote for us regularly but were paid as freelancers (as I had been with my Book Reports column) but I discovered that the amount of those payments varied wildly.  Pretty much without anyone’s authorization, I increased the fees for those getting much less than others.  I got away with it.

I made a number of changes to the section, discontinuing some regular features and adding others, setting up rotations for the coverage other than the major areas of movies and pop music, and so on.  These and other changes were also meant to give the section an identity.

 The Arts Editors for music (Ben Gerson) and movies (Janet Maslin) continued to write lead pieces and to assign other pieces in their area.  I dealt directly with regular contributors and freelancers in other areas, as well as books. I didn’t hire staff on my own but I assigned to new freelancers. I had the final edit on all copy for the Second Section.  In several cases I was pleased to do for others what had been done for me: give that first assignment to writers who went on to writing careers. Most of the time I advocated for writers when there were problems, but there were also situations in which they were disappointed and there was nothing I could do.  Listening to people's problems--and bearing their secrets-- was part of my job, and also part of my social life.  

 I attended the weekly staff meeting but the business there mostly involved the news section.  Ideas for our stories got generated through conversations with the Arts Editors, staff members, freelancers and others, and (pretty often) out of my own head. I fielded some calls and a lot of mail from organizations and venues looking for coverage.

 That was the first thing to greet me when I arrived at the office—our receptionist Martha handed me a pile of pink slips with my accumulated messages, along with bigger piles of mail (including books.) She handled all calls first.  We must have had some kind of intercom system or perhaps she just rang my phone with the line number of my incoming call.  Working the phone was occasionally pleasant, mostly a chore, and sometimes maddening.

 The first part of my week generally involved working with writers on possibilities for future issues.  I might tinker with the lineup of stories scheduled for the next issue, if necessary.   When copy came in for that week, I worked with that.  I recall meeting with our regular contributor on art, Kenneth Baker, often down in the small lunch counter tucked into our building at street level.  I would peruse his usually immaculate copy while maneuvering a sandwich and coffee.  I didn’t understand much of what he was writing about, but if he could interest me in it as a reader for the time it took to read the piece, then it could appeal to other readers as ignorant as me as well as to contemporary art aficionados.  Baker went on to be the long-time art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.

 In general text editing was something of a challenge—deciding whether first impressions and sense of the piece were right, versus second or third reading. Copy- editing was a pleasure if I was relaxed enough—I was good at it.  I became aware of the temptation to change things just to show I’d worked on it, and fought it off as best I could. 

 Once I had enough copy in hand, and I factored in the photographs our staff photographer (Michael Dobo) had either taken or would take, and the advertising staff told us how many pages we could run, I met with the layout editor to solve the jigsaw puzzle of every page—where the copy, the ads and the photos would go.  There was often a little leeway, and decisions to be made later, not infrequently at the last minute. Often the layout had to be completed before I had all the copy.  An event near (or sometimes past) deadline was being covered, or essential copy that simply came in late.  Space was saved for those.   

Janet Maslin

Janet Maslin had moved to New York, so theoretically she saw movies sooner than their Boston run, but in practical terms, there was often some suspense as to when her review copy would arrive. (Janet had married Jon Landau, who had switched from editing record reviews to writing movie reviews for Rolling Stone, while he still wrote on music for The Real Paper. At a certain point Janet was also writing on music for a new national magazine based in New York, called New Times—which is unrelated to any current publication of that name.  I had been invited to their wedding, and had even picked out their wedding present: since they were both reviewing movies, at the Harvard Coop I found matching pens with a little light near the tip, so they could write in the dark.  But I came down with a sudden illness and didn’t make the trip to New York—not the first time this happened within view of a wedding.)

In any case, their New York experiment didn't last very long.  Within months they were back in Boston.  Once I happened to pass the Italian restaurant in Inman Square and saw them sitting at the window table where Carol and I used to eat, when that restaurant was smaller and unknown.

 Ben Gerson’s music pieces were always meticulously written, but also invariably late. They were so late at times that he took his piece directly to the composing room at the last possible moment to fill the space waiting for it, thereby coincidentally also avoiding any editor messing with his copy.

 There would be one day in the week that could last well into the night when the paper had to be put to bed, and I was wrestling with late copy as well as making adjustments when stories came in too long or too short, photos were missing or didn’t work, or ads that got dropped or added. I wrote headlines and captions, copy-read the printed copy on what I believe we still called the flats, then approved each page before it could go to the printer.

 The next day there would be “blue pages”—the paper as printed, except on a different kind of paper with blue print.  A few corrections were still possible at this stage.  When they were made, the issue was done.  And it was time to start work on the next.    

 I still wrote for the paper—among what survives in my files is an impressionistic rant on Muzak, an appreciation of One Hundred Years of Solitude on the occasion of Garcia Marquez’s birthday, a few Talk of the Town type pieces for the inside-cover column I started, and a Second Section cover piece on Picasso when he died.  There were times that a section cover story fell through, and I had to quickly write one.  I recall one forced ramble on the big awards in the arts and the various entertainment award shows.

 I started out working in the office next to the Editor’s office that used to belong to Kate Herriges.  Kate had been my strongest supporter when I started out in 1971, but she’d moved on.  Eventually the paper took over a large room on the building’s third floor, and I set up my headquarters there.  At one point, I shared that office with staff writers R.D. Rosen (eventually to be the author of the book and therefore part of the language: Psychobabble) and Jim Lardner, also a subsequent author, whose grandfather was Ring Lardner (and Ring, Jr. was his father.)  

 It was in that room that we entertained Ted Solataroff, editor of the New American Review (recast as American Review), one of the great publications of the era.  What I recall most about the afternoon he visited was basking in the sunshine coming through the high window, and speaking in euphoric and awestruck tones about the magnificence of One Hundred Years of Solitude.  That book, especially at that time, was the most magical literary work I’d ever encountered.  For years, whenever anyone asked me to recommend a book, I gave them a copy of this one, and it never failed, from Cambridge sophisticates to a western Pennsylvania waitress.

 Another interview I recall from that year was with writer Anthony Burgess.  He was in Boston for the premiere of the new musical based on Cyrano, for which he’d written the book and lyrics.  We were supposed to have lunch in his hotel suite but we never got past the drinks stage before his next interview was scheduled.  It was an exhilarating conversation as well as interview.  As I left he shook my hand and said with apparent feeling, “a very great pleasure.” 

 The Burgess interview came out when I was filling in for our regular theatre critic Carolyn Clay.  I was also writing about music and movies, which at that point constituted mini-vacations from managing, editing and books.  In February 1973 I wrote about a Neil Young concert.  His current album was Harvest, his biggest seller and the top album of 1972. He did three concerts in Boston that week, two of them at the huge Boston Gardens and one at the smaller Music Hall. His surprise opening act was Linda Ronstadt, who sang on his biggest single, “Heart of Gold.”

 In Young’s last appearance in Boston, he’d been nursing a bad back and did an all-acoustic tour, mostly seated and playing guitar and harmonica, and piano. This time he was playing a mixed set with the Stray Gators, the session musicians on Harvest, but his back wasn’t completely healed, so he again sat in a chair for part of the gig.  My piece began like this:

 “The band’s instruments were in place and tuned, and after suitable pause, a roadie finally brought out the final prop and placed it carefully at center stage.  The Chair: one part papal, one part electric, an all-organic, down-home chair, obviously not one of your backstage fold-ups, but something special that traveled with the tour. Then the house lights went out, part of the stage was darkened, then all of it—each change brought gradually louder swells of oohs and ahs.  As eyes adjusted to the dimness, a single shadow emerged from the back of the stage.  Tumultuous applause greeted a still longhaired, baggy-jeaned Neil Young, wearing what appeared to be the same flannel shirt he wore for his last Boston appearance more than two years ago, its condition suggesting that he’d been wearing it ever since.  He sat down.  The crowd went wild.”

 I then quoted Linda Ronstadt’s comments from the stage on the Boston Garden show the night before.  “Usually at these big concerts the kids come in and then get messed up, until they’re ready to be taken out in stretchers at the end.  Last night it was like they came in on stretchers.”  It was the beginning of the Quaalude era in pop music audiences.

  The concert itself included songs from Young’s entire career, already extraordinary, and was taped for possible inclusion on a live album.  At that point in my life, he was the songwriter and rock musician I most identified with. 

At some point in 1973 I met Harry Nilsson at a press affair.  I've forgotten this entirely but found a letter I wrote to him later with some information he wanted, which I also don't recall.  Apparently we had an actual conversation.

Then in April I reviewed the reggae-filled film The Harder They Come starring Jimmy Cliff, and predicted it would play in Cambridge forever—which it more or less did, running at the Orson Welles Cinema for over a year.

 Meanwhile the Phoenix was undergoing a couple of  major changes.  A managing editor for the entire paper was hired—a genial Englishman who was startingly older than the rest of us, though probably not by much.  But it was the new Editor that became consequential.

 The search for a new editor came down to a few remaining candidates (several top choices had dropped out of contention.)  I thought we’d found a pretty solid one, but then another candidate showed up, and exuded a cheerful charm.  I can’t say I was entirely immune to it—he quoted the likes of Wordsworth and Yeats, and offered bold ideas, like reviving the Dickensian tradition of serializing novels—this time in the Phoenix.  But I was also suspicious—I’d seen the damage so-called charismatic figures could do, not to mention con artists.  In Dickens tradition therefore, let's just call him Wily Brass.

Others also had misgiving but in the end, an editorial meeting vote was taken and Wily Brass was selected. He was the third of the three finalists; the top two had turned down the job. Steve Mindich took the recommendation and hired him.  At first Brass and I got along very well—after a pleasant dinner conversation, we walked around Boston until he found what he wanted to show me—an historical marker commemorating a reading of his work given by Charles Dickens on one of his two American tours (probably at the site of the old Tremont Theatre.) 

 But things quickly devolved between us, and between him and everybody else. His bold plans, like the serialized novel, went nowhere.  He was perceived to be arbitrary and unresponsive, petty and abusive, and borderline incompetent.  We had a number of staff and freelance defections, often to the Real Paper.  At one point I discovered that he was intercepting packages of books meant for review, including those addressed to me personally (once he purloined a personal gift), and keeping those he liked for his personal use.

 Over those months, Brass chipped away at my innovations and authority. I told at least one staff confidant that I was sure he intended to take control of the arts section, even if it meant driving me out.

 At the same time there was a movement to unionize the paper, including editorial staff, and become affiliated with the United Electrical Workers. It had begun the year before but was getting more intense in early 1973.  I thought the affiliation was a bit absurd but I supported the efforts to organize. There was a lot of discontent, and a lot of reasons for it.  It didn’t occur to me at first (or seemingly anyone else) that I was actually management now, so I attended some meetings.  After one, I was called into the publisher’s office where the paper’s lawyer grilled me on what I knew.  I simply refused to talk to him, and only Steven’s intervention kept it from becoming a shouting match or worse.

In addition to all this, I edited a Book supplement that spring.  I wrote the cover piece on Kurt Vonnegut’s new novel, Breakfast of Champions (which soon became the NYT top best-seller), a review of DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, reviews of poetry collections by James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates, and a number of short notices of forthcoming books. I solicited a piece on the new collection of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories from my Knox professor and ongoing friend, Doug Wilson.  Much to my embarrassment there was not enough room for it, but it was later published in a literary journal.

 

The supplement also included reviews of two avowedly ambitious novels: Philip Roth's The Great American Novel and American Mischief, a 500 page novel by Alan Lelchuck, who taught at Boston's Brandeis University--both pretty much forgotten.  Earlier that year we reviewed another massive work, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. This is the one that has lasted.  Its length and complexity were daunting,  though clearly it was a work of genius. In college I'd read maybe 100 pages of Pynchon's first mega-novel, V, (I remember in 1973, the New York Times Book Review relishing the pun of calling the new book V2, since that Nazi rocket was a main character in it.) I loved Pynchon's dynamic style but I couldn't follow the story.  Although I'd had no such problem with Pynchon's shorter 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49, it recurred with this book. 

 My experience was similar to my periodic confrontations with Joyce's Ulysses.  I would read and rapturously re-read the first Stephen Dedalus section, but I could only dip into fragments until the Molly Bloom soliloquy at the end.  Similarly I so loved the opening section of Gravity's Rainbow that I couldn't get past my confusion about the story to go much beyond it, for years.  It would in fact be at least a decade before I read it through--still mostly for the writing and its rhythms--and another several decades before I read it through again, with the help of a plot guide, and actually knew what was happening.  But in 1973, the style was exciting and inspiring enough, though I was pleased to find another dynamic voice in novels I could follow, by Don DeLillo.

The supplement went over well.  I got a letter from Joyce Carol Oates praising it: "What a marvelous issue! My husband and I are really impressed by the depth and background of reviewers.  Nothing seems treated flippantly or casually..." She passed along individual compliments, and mentioned she was sending a copy to her friend, Margaret Drabble, also reviewed in the supplement.  

 It was shortly after the books supplement came out in May that I took several weeks off.  I flew to Minnesota where I was hosted in St. Paul by Barbara Azer, sister of my Knox classmate, Mary.  I’d never been to the Twin Cities before, and Barbara and her roommates were excellent guides.  We picnicked on a bluff overlooking the place where the Mississippi began, and drove up past the immense devastated landscape in the iron range near Duluth to a little cabin on Lake Superior (where now there are expensive condos.)

 We even did some literary touring, visiting fields where Robert Bly lived (I got out of the car to imitate him reading poems about them), and a hotel bar once frequented by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  I asked the bartender reputed to have served Fitzgerald what he was like, and he gave the perfect answer: “He was a good tipper.”  Whether or not he actually had been there that long, it was a ready, pointed and potentially lucrative response.  

At that time in the early 1970s, what most of America knew about Minneapolis was that was the home of Mary Richards of the Mary Tyler Moore Show.  On my first visit to downtown Minneapolis (to meet up with one of Barbara’s housemates at the department store where she worked), we saw people lined up along the sidewalk watching some other people walking right down the middle of the street.  One of them was Mary Tyler Moore, on possibly her first visit to the city (though probably her second), filming a new introduction to the show.

 So on my first visit to downtown Minneapolis, the first person I saw was Mary Tyler Moore. This was the second such coincidence of that spring, and it wouldn’t be the last.  The first was while making my way to the Twin Cities.  Just before I left, I’d put the Phoenix second section to bed, leaving space in the music section for a review by Peter Herbst of the Paul Simon concert occurring the next night. It was in fact Paul Simon’s first concert as a solo performer—that is, without Garfunkel, for he had lots of musicians and singers as part of his show. 

 I went to that show, and the next morning to the Boston airport, where I picked up a copy of the Phoenix and read Peter’s review on the plane.  He hadn’t liked the concert as much as I did (or as Jon Landau did, writing in The Real Paper.)

 I was to change planes for Minneapolis at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, as many people did—it was the busiest in the country, and a hub before there were hubs.  As I walked to my new gate, carrying my guitar case and copy of the Phoenix, I had a stray thought of—wouldn’t it be something to run into Paul Simon?  After all, he was starting a tour, he might go through O’Hare.  Then I turned a corner and saw…Paul Simon.

 He was standing near a ticket counter chatting with a young woman wearing the uniform of an airline.  I realized I had a copy of the Phoenix in my hand, and took it over to him.  “Here,” I said, “you can read about yourself.”  As he opened the paper, I suddenly realized it was not my review in there but Peter’s more mixed one.  I quickly tried to cover: “I was at the concert, too, and I loved it.”  At which point the young woman looked puzzled, and I realized she didn’t know who he was, just some guy chatting her up.  For him perhaps a rare normal moment, charming someone who didn’t know he was a celebrity rock star.  “Don’t say anything else,” Paul Simon warned me.  I backed away, saying only, “I’ve got to a plane to catch.  Nice seeing you… Fred.”

 After the Twin Cities I flew back to Pittsburgh and spent the rest of my time off visiting my parents and other family and friends in and around Greensburg.  My mother had suffered through treatments for breast cancer over the past several years.  My recollections of what happened when are hazy, partly because in those years no one talked about these things (especially cancer, as if you could spread it by saying the word)—certainly not my family, and specifically not my father.  I was home for part of the time and I kept in touch when I wasn’t, but mostly these treatments and her health were distant backdrops to everything else. At this point the cancer was in remission. She was getting close to the five year survival point, which at the time was believed to signal something like a cure.

 She was still a bit fragile and tentative, but mostly herself.  I helped her plant flowers in pots and flowerboxes, and we watched the movie “Stormy Weather,” just about the only program on this new cable TV, just starting up.  She and my father had put a down payment on some land in Florida, and she showed me the plan for the condo where they eventually would live.  Before that, she said, she hoped to see Hawaii. 

 But I had a hard time sitting still.  Even in Minnesota, surrounded by even younger energies than mine, I had trouble gearing down from the relentless demands of my job, the frenetic hours of phone calls and conferences, quick evaluations and instant decisions, generating story ideas for the endless appetite of the Second Section, keeping track of rock concerts and promo events, while juggling a hundred things in my head that had to be done.  I was often tired and I experienced things at a distance, as if I wasn't really there.

 So in Greensburg I went out with old friends, hung out with my sisters and their crowd.  Eventually my mother said she was disappointed I didn’t spend more time at home.  As was typical in our family, she said this when it was too late for me to do anything about it.  I was due back in Boston.      

 I returned to the Phoenix to find an editorial staff in turmoil.  An ongoing conflict (I no longer recall what it was about) had come to a head.  The staff was united against Editor Brass, and conspired to steal the copy for an entire issue to force him to confront the issue.  I joined them.  When Brass realized what was going on, his dismissive arrogance turned to beet-red fear.  He gave in, temporarily settling things down.  Though I wasn’t particularly a leader in this action, it didn’t escape his notice that it happened once I was back.

 Meanwhile the unionizing efforts were stalling, and there were secret conclaves to discuss the possibility that there was an agent provocateur among the staff. 

In early June, another eerie coincidence.  I was walking near the Ritz when I had one of those wouldn’t it be strange if I ran into thoughts…this time it was Kurt Vonnegut.  But no, he wasn’t around the next corner.  However…That evening I attended a performance by a new band called Stories.  I’d been following them, gathering material for a piece ever since Ben Gerson and I had been flown down to Nashville by their record company to see them perform there.  (We stayed in the King of the Road motel, where the Bee Gees were also staying, but I didn’t catch a glimpse.)

 That night I went out with the band to a large all-night restaurant.  I was sitting in a booth with bassist Kenny Aaronson, listening to him comically complain about the absence of all these groupies he’d heard about, when I glanced across the room and into the somewhat hostile stare of Kurt Vonnegut.  He was there with a group of people apparently after a university speaking engagement. 

 The last was perhaps less of a coincidence than a portent.  One night in late June, probably after I’d put the Second Section to bed that week, I was walking home from the subway station at Central Square, when I cut through an alley from Mass Ave.  Ahead of me I saw a car’s headlights coming towards me, and a kitten facing me.  The car ran over the kitten.  I was more than upset—I felt immediately that it was a portent, and that night I called a woman at the Phoenix for whom I had, let us say, romantic feelings, of which she was well aware.  She reassured me and calmed me.

 After some problems with missing mail at my Columbia Street apartment, I had added a post office box at the main Post Office on Mass Ave. in Central Square. The next day I picked up mail there and got on the bus to work, down Mass Ave. to Bolyston Street in Boston and the Boston Phoenix offices, to wrap up the week and start on the next. There might have been an early birthday card in the mix, but there was a business-sized envelope with the orange Boston Phoenix return address but no name.

 Inside was a very short note written by the woman I’d been pining for, the one I’d spoken to the night before, telling me that in my time away from Boston she and one of my closer friends had begun an affair.  At the time it seemed grudging and cold, though perhaps it was trying to be gentle and even affectionate.  But both of them were on the Phoenix staff and I worked with them every day.  It felt like a betrayal, as well as a humiliating, impossible situation.  

 And suddenly there I was, approaching the Boylston Street offices.  I walked up the long stairs, then up another flight to my third floor office, unusually empty.  Perhaps I examined the blue pages one last time. I wrote a brief letter of resignation, gathered what personal belongings I wanted to take, left the letter in the reception area, and walked down the dark stairs to the bright street. 

 I’d been on the edge of quitting once before this. The incessant demands, the tawdry office, and the constant onslaught of emotional and auditory noise, had me shattered by my day's end.  Steven assured me then that over time I’d get used to the pace and intensity of the job. But since I’d been back I’d struggled to gear up again, after my vacation had been marred by my anxious inability to slow down. I felt oversaturated and isolated, especially with added layers of shifting conflict.  All the egos and agendas, the moods and misunderstandings, the hormones, the noise, everything out of proportion.  Surrounded constantly by so many people, I was often exhausted and lonely.  This final sudden situation was almost a metaphor for it all, as well as the paradigmatic last straw.

 Meanwhile, Editor Wily Brass was so eager to prevent any second thoughts or attempts by others to persuade me to return, that he accepted my resignation that same afternoon—by telegram.  I don’t think I’d ever received a telegram before, or since. (As I learned later there were such attempts to get me back, but Brass was intransigent.)  Within a few days, I was later informed, Brass mumbled aloud his plans to take over the Second Section himself, fulfilling my prophecy.

 I had a Saturday ritual of doing the week’s food shopping (including cat food) at the Purity Supreme supermarket in Central Square, and eating a tuna sandwich in their adjacent lunch counter while reading the Boston Globe, in particular the weekly “Lit’ry Life” column by George Fraiser, which dealt in Boston literary and media tidbits.  The Saturday following my resignation, this column noted a decline in quality at the Boston Phoenix, which “a number of Phoenix people” informed him was due to the incompetence of Editor Wily Brass.  Only a fierce loyalty to the paper, he wrote, kept old hands like Ben Gerson and Janet Maslin from resigning. 

 My name, as usual, wasn’t mentioned—I don’t think Fraiser ever mentioned me—probably a networking error on my part.  And this time I didn’t read the column at Purity Supreme.  It was hand-delivered to my mailbox by Phoenix poetry editor and friend Celia Gilbert, along with a note and birthday greetings.  That particular Saturday I had turned 27.  

I eventually heard from a few other editorial staff and writers (or just ran into them) but as was to be a pattern in my departures, the most open regrets came from support staff.  

I kept very much to myself the rest of that summer, with strange long days awake—sometimes 24 hours straight-- followed by almost as much sleep. For awhile I entertained the fantasy of sailing on a transatlantic liner to Europe to visit Carol (though by then only the Queen Elizabeth II was left) but I couldn’t even focus the energy to visit a friend in Gloucester up the coast as promised, which ended that friendship. I couldn’t be around anyone for very long. 

My one public responsibility was teaching a course in the Boston Adult Education program, which I’d been persuaded to do some months before.  It was called Best of the New Books, so basically a reading and discussion course, meeting one early evening a week (Mondays at 6:50) for eight weeks. I had a class of 13, seated easily around a long table. There was a nice age range, and though there were a couple of college students with an academic approach, I especially appreciated the openness and direct responses of the post-college age adults, including an older married couple.  In the midst of a melancholy haze, I enjoyed it as much as was possible.  

  Since I opted for paperbacks to limit the costs to students,  most of the books were months old, despite the course title.  So instead of Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (very new in hardcover), I chose  Slaughterhouse Five.  For the third class we read two fairly short novels: Don DeLillo’s End Zone and Margaret Drabble’s  Thank You All Very Much. The books in subsequent weeks were Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates, You Might As Well Live (biography of Dorothy Parker), Norman Mailer's collection of pieces titled Existential Errands, Anne Sexton's poems based on fairy tales, The Book of Folly, and finally,  the one I knew would be a winner, One Hundred Years of Solitude.  Although I didn't choose it, I would think I considered Kosinski's Being There. It’s interesting to reflect that in 1973 Marquez, DeLillo, Kosinski and Drabble were all relatively early in their careers, at least in America.

 I spent much of my time trying to write myself into coping with and even understanding what I’d been through, mostly in the forms of fiction and poetry. (But also the inevitable Shakespearian parody, with Wily Brass as Richard III.)  I was in revolt against concentrating exclusively on what was new—forthcoming books, new records. As I explained in a letter to Lester Bangs at Creem, most of the record companies had dropped me from their mailing lists when I became an editor, and now I was listening to music the way I used to—one or two albums at a time, repeated many times.  My records that summer were John Cale’s Paris 1919 and Joni Mitchell’s For the Roses.  Her "Judgment of the Moon and Stars" in particular.

 I did something similar with books, turning my reading to non-new writers in old paperbacks.  I had a definite Hemingway phase, which unfortunately showed up in my writing.  I recall reading several novels by Balzac and Stendhal for some reason. I applied for unemployment when I became eligible, and stood in the long lines at the unemployment office (there was a recession on) reading The Red and the Black. 

 I emerged somewhat in September, when I wrote a cover story for The Real Paper on Marlon Brando.  I wasn’t sure I was ready for a staff job yet, but I wasn’t offered one there anyway. Its editor confided that if I were a black woman he could hire me immediately.  I pass this on now with the amusement I felt then.  This was the social justice I’d supported, in action.  That it might have personal consequences for me was a fitting irony—even if I believed him, which I’m not sure I did. 

I still occasionally got invitations to music events. I always got music critic treatment at Passim, the Cambridge club down below the street, where the fabled folk Club 47 that had opened in 1958 with the debut of Joan Baez.  One evening that fall I sat with Janet Maslin and some others at the table near enough to singer Maria Muldaur to pick up the cable connector to her microphone that dropped to the floor.  This was her pop moment with “Midnight at the Oasis” on the radio, and she was radiantly beautiful.  When she clicked the cable back into the mike and thanked me, it was the closest I’d gotten to sex in some time. 

At some point that fall I found myself in the apartment of an attractive woman.  There’d been a bit of a vibe when we met one Saturday night through mutual friends from the Harvard Bookstore, and I went to see her Sunday afternoon to explore the possibilities.  It didn’t take long for me to realize I wasn’t really interested, and I don’t think she was either.  But I saw a paperback book in her living room of Larry McMurtry’s novel, All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers.  I’d seen it before—it was fairly fashionable—but I’d resisted it because the title made me angry: it was too close to my title for an admittedly still unwritten fiction to be called “Friends and Other Strangers,” after the Dylan line.  I hadn’t read any other McMurtry.

 Still, something should come of this wasted trip, so I took the T back to Harvard Square and bought a copy. I read it straight through, and then I read it again.  Its protagonist, Danny Deck, was soon my current tortured alter-ego.  McMurtry also was in the early phase of his long writing career.  These writers of 1973--Vonnegut, Garcia-Marquez, DeLillo, Pynchon and McMurtry--would be mainstays of my personal literary arcana for decades to come.

Probably in October I spent a week on assignment for a magazine--fascinating in its way but basically disastrous.  Carol returned on a visit from Europe for a week or so.  She'd had a scare in Switzerland that her Hodgkins had returned, but her doctors at Mass General confirmed it had not.  I went with her on the train to New York and she flew back from there.  We continued to correspond regularly for about another year, but this was the last time I saw her.

According to contemporaneous notes and letters, I spent some of November back in Greensburg, which must have included Thanksgiving.  My mother's health was of concern, though reports were typically vague.  I returned to Greensburg from Cambridge for Christmas.  It is also a blank in my memory, but I chanced upon a page torn out of a notebook that recorded my impressions of Christmas in Greensburg that year: the traditional dinner at my Severini grandmother’s, the annual visit to my Kowinski grandfather and his daughter’s family in United.  I noted that my elders seemed noticeably older, and that my mother was experiencing pains again, and that her hair had started to thin.  “Gone with the wind,” she said. 

 Then it was late January 1974 and I’d been back in Cambridge for awhile when I got a call one night from my father, who said my mother was in the hospital again, and I should come home as soon as I could.  I had one housemate left at the time, and I quickly arranged for her to again take care of my cats, and booked the next flight to Pittsburgh I could manage.