Call To My Father

Dear friends, today I am going to try to do something I don't know that I can do in the context of a blog, though I very much want to. I am going to try to write about my father.

I lost my dad on June 20, 1995, when he was fifty-five years old, and I was thirty-two. For years he had suffered from heart disease. A week before he died, knowing only that he wasn't doing very well, I went out to North Carolina to see him; I asked his doctor the prognosis, and was told my father had six months to live. My dad and I spent a wonderful week together, talking. Then I went home to check on things, telling him I would be back very soon. As soon as I got home to Texas I began looking into the possibility of a heart transplant for my father, something he had never wanted to do ("What if I get the heart of a bad person?") but was now, at long last, beginning to consider. I called him to tell him what I'd found out, and this is what we said to each other:

"Daddy, what are you doing?"

"I've been working."

"Daddy, why are you working? You need to rest. You work too hard."

"But if I don't work, I start thinking . . . about . . ."

"Daddy, Daddy, listen to me, I don't want you to go. I want you to stay. Please, I want you to stay. You have to fight to stay. You have to fight."

"I know, I know, but I don't know how."

"You need a new heart. Daddy, I would give you my heart if I could. Do you hear me? I would give you my heart."

At this point we both started crying, and my mom had to take the phone away.

I have to stop here now, for a minute.

***

We were able to get back on the line together, and talk about a transplant. He had been looking into this, too (this was all so much harder in those days before the internet). The last words we said to each other were, "I love you." Twenty hours later my father went into cardiac arrest. I flew to North Carolina, and fell into my mother's arms, telling her I should have stayed, my last words to my father shouldn't have been over a telephone. No, she told me. You know how he loved to talk on the phone. You know how it was easier for him to talk on the phone than to say anything face to face. You know you would never, never have had that conversation any other way.

And she was right.

***

My dad loved phones. Before he died, every Wednesday afternoon he would call me. Every Wednesday he would phone me to see how my writing was going, and every Wednesday I would tell him how hard it was, how I was struggling, trying to find the right words and sentences, trying to make the story come alive. My father, being a businessman in the shipping and transportation industry, didn't quite understand why I couldn't just slap the words down, box the pages up and send them out into the world. But still, every Wednesday he called, to see how my work was going . . .

My father died before any of my books were published. Before he left us, I didn't know, I didn't feel how real life was, how much it meant, and what it was: brief, exact, vivid. When he died, I wrote his eulogy, and it was the first piece of exact writing I'd ever composed. It was the first time I understood that a writer's responsibility is not just to make pleasing shapes and sounds and tales, but to capture with blunt honesty the life of a human being. Within six months of my father's death I finished my first novel. Within twelve it was accepted for publication. My mother gave me my creativity, my love of stories, my joy in people and my thirsty imagination. But my father, who till the end got up every time he was knocked down, knew how to go it alone when he had to and knew what it was to stare at the absolute, made me a writer.

***

When it came time to write my second novel, I wrote it for and about my dad. This is something I've never talked about publicly, until now.

My father didn't live to see me published--but he never had any doubt that I would be. That last week we spent together before he died, he told me story after story, and I made sure he saw me write them down, so that he would know: I will try to see that your stories will not be forgotten, that they will not disappear. He told me about hiding under a table and secretly scrawling a sentence into the wood. He told me how during the war he had wandered the ruins of Rotterdam, and found a bloody shoe. He told me how his father, a Nazi collaborator, was later caught, and how the entire family was punished, including my small father, only six years old. He told me how, as a fifty-year-old businessman, he was invited one day to lunch at a Rotterdam hotel--and didn't realize until he got there that it was his childhood prison, renovated. He told me he ate lunch in a daze, unable to speak of it with his colleague.

But when The Deadwood Beetle was published six years after my father's death, and dedicated For Carl, only those closest to me knew it was for and about my father. Because I was unable to speak of it. Six years after his death I still couldn't talk about him; I knew that if I tried, I would have to be led from the stage, or the bookstore, or the university hall, a wreck. And so I told no one. The stories were what mattered then. The telling of them. The recording. But I will say it now. The Deadwood Beetle is for and about my father.

My mom told me that once my dad said, frustrated, "She wants to be a writer so badly. And there's no way I can help her."

But you did, Daddy. You did.

***

As my father lay in the hospital on a breathing machine at the very end, his heartbeat fading away, we "talked" by phone one last time. As I raced to an airplane I stopped and sent him a fax--there was no internet, no email, no texting, then--and my mother, because the nurse said he might still be able to hear, read my words into his ear. I want to shout them out now:

"I am so proud of you, Daddy. And I am so proud of my love for you."

To fathers everywhere: you make us, even when you don't know that you do.

Thank you. Thank you. Daddy.

Tango

I chat with Becky as her puppy, Nala, rolls on the ground between us, that round little body savoring every position it can get into: left, right, head up, head down, on back, on stomach, nose to tail, tail to nose, up on all fours, strutting, tumbling, squirming, panting.

Becky adopts and trains Golden Retrievers, and at any given time has three or four of them. Some of them are bright and happy; others led hard lives before she took them in and have only slowly learned how to move through the world.

"Tango," she points to the shaded kennel behind us, "is still so afraid of people. Of course. That's what being locked in a tiny shed for the first year of your life will do to you. For the longest time she couldn't even extend her legs. She didn't even know how to run. How do you forgive people that? Is it any wonder she's afraid to look you in the eye?"

We were sitting at the edge of a park in Maybell, Colorado, surrounded by dogs running, racing. Some of these too, I knew, had come from unhappy pasts. But now they were pouncing with joy.

Nala, the puppy, was one of the lucky ones. She'd found a good home right from the beginning. She was still lolling on the ground in front of us, chewing my shoelaces.

When Becky isn't running with her dogs, she teaches special needs children. I ask her how her year has gone, and if she's teaching summer school.

"No," she shakes her head. "I love my kids. But I need a rest, too. It can be . . . intense."

Then, without my asking, she begins to tell me a story. As if it's so important, now that I've asked about her work, she has to tell it. It's the story of an eleven-year-old boy, Ellis.*

"At the beginning of every school year," she says, "I ask my students what they would like their goal for that year to be. What they want to accomplish. What they would like me to help them with. And Ellis, he raised his hand, and he said,

"'I want to walk.'"

It didn't seem a realistic goal, just then. Ellis had spent most of his young life locked in a small closet. His muscles, not allowed to move, had never grown or elongated properly. He had never been able to walk. He'd only recently been rescued and placed in a foster home--a wonderful and loving foster home, thank goodness. Now he wanted to learn how to walk. But he didn't want his family to know he was going to learn to walk, he told his teacher. He wanted to surprise them. That was the goal.

It didn't seem something that could be done in nine months, but Becky told Ellis: "Okay. If that's what you want to do, that's what we'll do."

And then she marshaled his other helpers, his therapists and his fellow students, and every school day they took time out from class to go out in the hallway and begin teaching Ellis how to walk.

Sometimes, in writing this blog, I am startled by the simple beauty of what people tell me.

As the months of the school year passed, Ellis made progress. First he could stand, aided. Then he could take steps, aided. Then he could walk a bit down the hall, aided. Then he could walk all the way down the hall, aided. Then he could walk from wall to wall, grabbing on. Then he could walk down the hall with spotters beside him.

As May drew closer, Ellis told his teacher he was ready to spring his surprise. He wanted to surprise his foster mother on Mother's Day. Even now the goal seemed uncertain, but Becky agreed it would be done. At this point Becky enlisted the help of Ellis' two foster brothers, who were let in on the plan. On Mother's Day, May 9, 2010, Ellis asked them to call their mother into the living room and sit down. She had no idea why. She sat down.

Ellis' two foster brothers then went and stood on either side of his chair. As they spotted him, Ellis got up and walked across the room to hug his weeping foster mom.

I'll mention in passing that most of the people I meet who train dogs are stoic, tough, and completely unflappable. Becky, with her closely cropped hair, strong legs and arms, determined chin and steady eyes, is no exception.

Her story over, she wiped her eyes quickly and stood up to get Tango out and run him.

"When I first met Tango, she couldn't do anything. Now look at her. Let's go, girl! Let's go go go."

--MD

*Ellis is not his real name.

Bruises

Over the weekend I attended a workshop led by Brooke Williams, author of the lovely memoir Halflives and my neighbor here in the beautiful southern Utah wilderness. Brooke is now at work on the story of one of his Mormon ancestors. Or possibly at work on more than one story about more than one ancestor. Brooke isn't sure. Dead people keep talking to him.

"Let's just be still and listen for a while," Brooke said, "and see if anyone comes to us, and just start writing and see what we find."

There were ten of us around the table. None of us regarded Brooke's request as an unreasonable one. Most of us were already in the habit of spending time with invisible people. Most of us knew that the job of the writer is to make the unseen seen.

I closed my eyes and waited. It wasn't long before a dead man came to me, a relation I'd been aware of but never thought--or wanted to think--much about, a violinist and teacher of violin who'd lived a long and (I hoped) productive life before being exterminated at the Sobibor concentration camp. His showing up surprised me; we'd never chatted before. (I really hadn't wanted to think about him.) But there he was. I was able to write a bit about how I knew about him, a few pages of stiff, self-conscious writing of the kind you do when you feel someone's right at your back. Then we took a break and went out for lunch, and then we came in again and sat down to write some more.

The afternoon was better; I wrote about how, when I was young, I didn't want to play the voilin because it would leave black marks on my neck. How I chose the flute instead, which ended up being a disaster because, not only did the instrument not touch me, it didn't suit me at all.

I thought about how, only recently, I'd picked up a friend's violin and how strangely familiar it and the bow had seemed.

You see, the voice said behind me, you need to play what fits naturally to your hand, even if it bruises you.

The work I do often comes painfully to me. I'm often tempted to play something else, something shiny instead of strung with gut. Then when I do . . .

You find you don't have the mouth for it.

Right.

Ah. So then you know.

Yes.

It was time to put our pens down and talk about what we'd written. Brooke had been chatting with a man on a train traveling West from Denver. Monette had a woman lead her down into a well and tell her to sit there. Diana didn't want to think about the dead anymore and wrote about a tree. Riley's grandfather, a World War II pilot, had killed himself and she didn't know why. Nancy had a woman tell her, "You can never speak all the love inside you."

"When you get to the core of things," Brooke said, "you end up writing a story that you think is not your story. But it is your story. Because it's everybody's story. Everybody lives there."

Andante.

--MD

Ghost Story

My husband and I like to visit cemeteries. In Santa Fe, New Mexico we took the dogs away from the crowded Plaza and headed instead to the oldest graveyard in town, a quiet, neglected strip of land on a busy street in a noisy, industrial neighborhood. Pull through the gates in late winter or early spring, and what you'll find are bare trees. Dead weeds. Row after row of gravel lanes, pocked with holes where the prairie dogs have burrowed under the caskets. Headstones marked with German names. Hispanic names. Some dating to the Civil War. Some, older still, broken away, names missing. Some of the newest are handmade: wooden boards inscribed with what looks, oddly, like silly-string, but on closer inspection turns out to be bright blue caulk. In one corner lie nothing but children who died in 1939. "Baby Boy." "Baby Lady." "Whom," one inscription goes on, "our arms never held, yet now hold so dear."

I jump at a sound. It's a pick-up truck pulling fast through the gates. Something about its speed and the scowl of the driver tells me we're in trouble. My husband puts the dogs on leash and waits to one side.

The driver pulls up to me. He seems angry.

"You're trespassing. And your dogs have to be leashed in this town."

I nod carefully at the strong, heavy-set Hispanic face with its light speckling of freckles. Something about writing this blog has taught me not to assume all hope is lost when two wary human beings meet for the first time.

"I'm very sorry," I say as my husband leads the dogs away. "We couldn't resist. This cemetery is so amazing. Beautiful. Does it have a name?"

"It doesn't have a name. It's private. And the dogs have to be--"

"I'm really sorry again. You're absolutely right. They're leashed now. But it's just so beautiful here, we couldn't resist coming in." I introduce myself. "Are you taking care of this beautiful place?"

He relaxes a bit, points to a red adobe house at the edge of the property.

"That's mine. And those are my German Shepherds, there. They're trained to chase intruders out. They're chained right now, or they could have seriously hurt your dogs."

That explained his anxiety. And now he goes on to explain, relaxing a bit more, that he and his wife have taken over the cemetery, after years and years of neglect, crime and vandalism. They were very protective of it.

"It doesn't have a name," he repeats. "A hundred years ago, it used to be something for the rich ladies of Santa Fe to take care of. But then it got handed to foundation after foundation, and each of 'em took worse care of it than the last." He shakes his long black hair over his steering wheel. "You should have seen it then."

After the state of New Mexico retired the cemetery's debts, including an unpaid $100,000 water bill, Pete, a landscaper, was allowed to take it on--providing he planted new trees and removed the dead ones, and obeyed a new law that didn't allow him to plant or water any grass.

"So," Pete sighs, "that's why it looks the way it does. But the families of the deceased are just glad someone's taking care of the place now. Used to be a drug den. The dealers would hide the stuff in the urns. Someone would come to pick it up. But I'm not afraid of thugs. I'm retired military, Special Ops. Airborne. I was in Columbia during the drug wars. I was there when we, you know, weren't there. So punks don't mess with me. It's just the prairie dogs that are the trouble now."

Especially the ones that liked to bring skeletal human hands and bits of chewed coffin to the surface.

"The families don't like that," Pete tells me.

"What do you do?"

"I have to gas them. I don't like that, either."

He points to some land connected to the cemetery and tells me it's where a concentration camp once stood. "That's where they put the Japanese during World War II. The barracks were right there. That wasn't so good, either."

"Is it scary here sometimes?"

"Yes. You see things. My wife and I both do."

"Like . . . ?"

There was a little girl. Both he and his wife had seen her many times. She seemed to live in their house. A white girl in a white dress, with short blond hair. She liked to let the dogs off their chains. They would hear her, and come out into the yard to find the dogs free.

I remembered all the children's graves in the corner.

"What happened in 1939 that so many people died, Pete?"

"Smallpox. They just . . . died. Sante Fe was just a hole in the wall in the old days. No medicine. No real doctors."

"Are you afraid of ghosts?"

His tattooed arms grip the steering wheel. "No. The spirits only bother you if you're a bad person. And I take care of this place. I planted all these trees. You should come back in the summer. It looks different then. Really green."

"I think it's wonderful you're bringing this place back to life."

"Well . . . I try. But sometimes it's not easy. The records are so bad. One time, when a film crew was here, we accidentally dug up an unmarked grave. There are all kinds of people under our feet we don't even know about."

"I guess we just have to be careful."

"You do. If you come back, keep your dogs on a leash."

"We will. Thanks."

We shook hands. As I leaned into the window I noticed Pete's black boots, his black jeans and his black sweatshirt with the full, black hood behind it.

--MD

A Story From One of America's Prisons

My friend and fellow writer Kathryn Patterson drew my attention to this story today, written in one of her classes for prisoners: "Nature for the Nature-Deprived" was written by Texas inmate Samuel Daugherty and submitted to the PEN American Center's 2010 Prison-Writing Contest, where it earned an Honorable Mention. An excerpt:

"Our world is concrete, steel, and red brick, and we must take nature where we can find it. Getting the chance to grow a plant, see the sky or water, or wiggle one’s toes in the grass, are special occurrences. The lengths we will go for our own slice of nature are unusual, indeed. One fellow I know in the hoe squad jumps in the water and goes swimming any time they lead him near. He could get shot for that, attempted escape. I’ve seen people do some strange things for their slice."

Take a look, and see what you think.

--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

Two Views of Manhattan, Part Two

In The Ramble in Central Park, Dick and Allen sit on a bench in front of a birdwatching area strung, like an avian Cirque du Soleil, with suspended Clorox containers and white athletic socks stuffed with seed. Sparrows, mostly, they say when I stop to ask what they're viewing. It's still early on, only two weeks into the season. But the Park, Dick explains to me casually, one leg folded over the other, is one of the best places to watch and wait, thanks to the migration. Dapper and obviously well-settled in the world, old men now, Dick and Allen have been watching birds together since the 1940's, when they were ten years old. They still make time to sit together, they tell me, both in the city and at their homes upstate and in the Colorado mountains. Today they sit at their ease in The Ramble, while a fat squirrel disappears into a Clorox bottle. At various moments they direct a young photographer they've hired, who's balancing on a ladder and behind a huge lens, to catch this bird or that one. They don't answer when I ask if there is something they have wanted to see all their lives, but haven't seen. Dick jokes only that Allen is old enough to have seen a Dodo.

The same day, in the Park, near the Museum of Natural History, I meet a dogwalker who doesn't offer his name, but who does tell me the name of the dog at the end of his leash: Penelope. Penelope is a lovely fawn and white pit bull. I can't remember ever thinking of a pit bull as being lovely. But she is. I learn that Penelope is up for adoption from a local group called Stray From the Heart. The dogwalker works for her foster family, and for others, walking up to twelve dogs a day--although he was, he nods toward me with a strange, unstable roll in his eyes, once upon a time a professional trumpet player, trained at Julliard and a regular performer at Radio City Music Hall. Pit bulls, he tells me, are not mad dogs. They're made that way. Most of those he walked came from the Bronx, where in addition to being fought they were strung up by their paws and beaten, to make them mean. With the economy being so bad, more strays were coming in than ever before; even sweet, tender things like Penelope, who had never been abused, but still, because she looked like a pit bull, would be hard to place. All that could be hoped, he told me before we parted ways at the next corner, was that the family who had her now would decide she was good enough to keep. And he hurried away in his dusty black coat and loose sneakers, Penelope close at his heels.

--MD

Photo by Bruce Barone

Merlin

Merlin is doing something on his front lawn I don't quite understand. As I walk by, he's cleaning a long canvas strap with a dull blade. The thick strap is suspended, stretched, between two trees. He nods at me and smiles from under a sharp black cowboy hat, saying good afternoon. I used to live in this neighborhood in Dallas, on this very street. But I don't remember him. He strikes me as someone I should remember. His beard is white, long and pointed. His eyeglasses are perfectly circular, the frames pewter-colored. Around his neck hangs a thin leather strap with a simple ring, like a wedding band, rung through it. The rust in his cheeks is matched by the rust in his tie-dyed t-shirt. His jeans are fresh blue, his moccassins mustard yellow. I nod and return the good afternoon, curious, but then continue down the street, marveling at how many of the old clapboard houses have been torn down, replaced by chunky Tudors in brick and stone. My old house, amazingly, is still standing. When I come back to the corner, Merlin is standing on the strap suspended between the two trees. He's balancing, walking back and forth, bouncing. It's a tightrope, I now realize. In the time it took me to walk the length of the block and back to his blue clapboard house, Merlin has pulled two thick crash pads onto the grass, placed them under the line, taken his mocassins off and hopped up and started jaunting. As he bounces and jumps clear, I ask him how long he's been tightrope-walking.

"It's not a tightrope." He shakes a white finger at me. "It's a slack-line."

"Oh. A slack-line. How long have you had it?"

"Since October. I can't do much yet. You should see what some people can do, though. Want to try it?"

"I think I have the wrong shoes on."

"Naw, girl. People do this in anything."

I kick my clogs off and stand in my socks on one of the crash pads while he takes the dull blade I'd seen him use earlier and cleans the grass and mud from the line. I tell him my name, and ask him his.

"I'm Merlin."

"Like the magician."

"I am a magician."

"What do I do?"

He explains I should get my right foot up on the line, first. I do, and the canvas strap, only an inch or so wide under my sock, starts vibrating wildly.

"No worries, that's just your nerves, girl. Pay it no heed. Hop up with the other foot now, and I'll hold you. Keep your eyes looking straight ahead, and don't ever ever ever look down. That's the trick. And when you think you're going to fall, just bend your knees."

"Okay."

I hold fast to Merlin's shoulders, and hop on. He's steady and solid and warm, so comforting that when I've finally got two feet on the line, I can't bring myself to let go of him. The strap is still vibrating crazily, and I don't see how I'll ever calm my nerves and balance. Then I remember. Just look straight ahead. And if you think you're going to fall, bend your knees. Let go.

I grab Merlin a few times until I feel it: that strange moment when you forget what you're doing, forget yourself, forget, for example, that's there's anything at all unlikely about meeting a stranger in a cowboy hat and suspending yourself two feet above his lawn on a canvas strap. It's only for a few seconds, but I balance.

I grab Merlin, laughing, and hop off.

"That's amazing," I pant. "You are a magician."

"Want to see something else?"

He unknots the thin strap from around his neck, and starts doing tricks with the wedding band looping through it. The ring jumps off the strap. It jumps back on. It's knotted in the leather. Then magically unknotted. It flies through the air, then lands smack in the knot again.

"You're good."

"Should be. I'm a street performer."

"You make a living that way?"

"I've always managed to stay alive."

"By doing tricks?"

"Well. I had a job once. The girl I was with then"--he swings the ring around on the strap--"she was younger than me, going to college and all that, and spending all her time around wannabe doctors and lawyers and such--she told me, one day, that she thought she was living with a bum. And I supposed that she was. So I decided I should show her that anyone can make money, if that's all you care about . . . and I got a job, and went to school, and then I started my own business, and pretty soon I was making money all over the place, in land surveying. But then one day I surveyed myself, you might say, and I noticed I hated everything. So I quit everything and went back to learning magic. And now I'm not with that girl anymore," he waves the ring again, "and I'm learning this." He points to the slack-line.

"And what do you hope to do on it?"

"Yoga poses. Tai chi. That will be hard. But good for me. Also I'd like to recite my poetry on it. I'm a poet, too. Want me to write a poem for you?"

"Yes, please."

He closes his eyes and improvises:

What are you afraid of? That you won't have enough money? Or enough food? Are you afraid you're going to die? Or that you won't live? Are you afraid you are going to fall? And that you won't get up again? Maybe you're afraid of everything, then? Everything there is? Let me ask you again, my friend. What is it that you're afraid of?

"Of falling," I admit.

He opens his eyes. "But I told you what to do."

Look straight ahead. Don't look down. Bend your knees. It's not a tightrope. It's a slack-line.

"Trust me, I know what I'm talking out," Merlin said before we shook hands and parted ways.

--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

Butterfly

"I don't know who broke our butterfly," Brandy tells us, "but when they find him, just hand him over to me, and I'll break his legs."

We're 150 feet underground. The air is damp, 85 degrees. The light is artificial. Brandy's cheeks are warm and flushed.

Sometimes, you need to go down to go up. I'd visited the Caverns of Sonora when I was twelve, but hardly remembered them. As a college student hitchhiking to California, my husband, standing here in the warm, wet light beside me, had once gotten as far as the cavern entrance, but didn't have enough money to go in. In those days, the cave was a small, family-run affair; it's still a family affair, and the same family still owns the place, but now there is a gleaming Visitors Center, and a campground with RV hookups, and a parking lot big enough to attract tour buses.

Yet on this deep, dead-of-winter day, we are the only ones in line.

Before we can go in and down, our guide Brandy has to take a call from her daughter's elementary school.

"Sorry," she blushes (she's blond and small and doesn't look much more than a kid herself). "Your child starts coughing, and right away they want to send her home with swine flu. I really feel bad you had to wait. But once we're down in the cave, we're completely cut off from everything." She smiles, her long lashes like wings.

She seals the air-tight door behind us, and we begin heading down toward the two miles of open cavern network. In less than a minute we're in another world. We've stepped and slipped into a plane of jewels. The Caverns of Sonora, Texas make Carlsbad look like an abandoned strip mine. Here, everything is so close, and so beautiful, it takes all you have not to touch it to make sure it, and you, are real.

Brandy is teaching us the names of the formations we're seeing as we go along: popcorn stone, flowstone, cave coral, cave drapery, columns, dogtooth spar, quartzes, soda straws, stalactites, stalagmites, helactites. Geodes "bake" like crystal-packed muffins on the walls.

"Now, all of this grows at a rate of one centimeter per 10,000 years," she tells us as we pass a huge column growing out of the floor, close to touching its twin descending from the ceiling. Called the "Kissing Column," the two formations are--yes--a mere centimeter apart.

My husband, who loves to talk to people and ask questions:

"So . . . do you like doing this for your job, Brandy?"

"I LOVE it! I love both things I do. I guide in the morning, and then I go to nursing sch00l in San Angelo at night. And then I practice my anatomy down here." She points to metacarpals of flowstone, brachial tubes of coral, helactites in the shape of mandibles. She also directs our attention to formations that look like bacon and pork chops. She savors the work.

My husband, ever interested in the consequences of actions over time, asks: "But if you like it so much, what will you do when you're all done with nursing school?"

"I don't know," Brandy grimaces, and switches off the lights. All through the cave, she's been turning the lights on and off as we go, so that what lies in front of us always remains in darkness, and what lies behind us is in darkness, and the only place illuminated is the place where we stand. "I don't want to think about that right now. Ask me later."

We pass signs of damage, places where tourists, unable to keep from reaching, have blackened the calcium walls with human oil. We pass through chambers of pure, undamaged white to reach Horseshoe Pond, an emerald lake surrounded by a halo of pearls. The water is so clear it hurts to look at it.

"This is my favorite room," Brandy says.

"Mine too," my husband nods.

At the deepest point in the cavern, Brandy turns off all the lights so we can appreciate the total blackness of its natural state. She informs us that if we stayed down like this for two weeks, we would start to go blind. "The retina starts to decay," she says matter-of-factly. Then she puts the lights on again. "Okay, so now I'm going to take you to see the butterfly--sad as that is."

The butterfly was once the glory, the pride and the emblem of the Caverns of Sonora. I remembered seeing it when I was twelve, so small and amber-colored and perfect, a marvel of accident. But a vandal had since broken off one of its translucent wings, probably while trying to steal it. It was a two-man operation: during a tour of more than thirty people, a "plant" at the head of the tour had distracted the guide, while a man at the back hopped the railing, attacked, and stuck the piece in his pocket. The damage wasn't discovered until the next tour came through.

"And then we cried." Brandy lowers her eyes. "All of us who work here cried and cried and cried and cried. It was horrible. They did end up figuring out who it was. From his credit card. He has a history. The Texas Rangers are still after him. But so far no luck. Anyway we don't do big tours anymore. No more."

The mood turns somber--but no sooner has Brandy turned the lights around us off and on again than she beats her long lashes and goes back to smiling and guiding. There is so much to SEE down here, after all, she says. Maybe we would discover something else just as beautiful. Maybe SHE would. There were seven miles of cave, total. She was always looking, among the thousands of formations, for the next butterfly.

As we begin to emerge from the depths, my husband asks Brandy what kind of nurse she would like to be.

"Life-flight."


--MD

I Celebrate The Reader

I'd arrived a bit early for the lecture I was scheduled to give, and was introducing myself to some of the audience trickling in who'd come to hear me talk about creativity and leaping forward in our lives and work, when a tall, quiet woman glanced over at me and seemed to want to catch my attention, yet seemed shy about it at the same time. I came over and we started chatting, and finally I asked her what it was she did.

"Nothing," she said.

"Nothing?"

She meant, she explained quickly, that she did nothing "creative." And added that she probably didn't really "belong" at my lecture. She was just . . . visiting.

"But what do you like to do?" I asked.

"Oh, I love to read. I have a book group. I have to read good books, and I have to be with people who know how to talk about books in a way that matters. So I started this group. There are just seven of us. But it's really important to me."

"So you created this group."

"Well . . ."

"And you love to read. And you create discussions about books, original discussions. And reading itself--that involves your imagination interacting with the imagination of an author. You create images in your head. You create your own reading of the book. Yes?"

"Well . . . "

Someone else came up to us. Again my new friend was asked what she did.

"Nothing," she answered, shyly.


***


My challenge to myself, this weekend, is to think more closely about that word "creative," and to dream up new and still better ways to tear down the walls that have inadvertently grown up around and hedged that word.

Creativity, my friends, isn't only over on this acre, and not on that one. As a writer, if I achieve anything at all, I achieve it through you, whose hearts and spirits and minds and eyes open to this page, who lend your memory and imagination to it, so that it no longer lies flat and full of dull symbols, but rises, as if under a wand. Reading is a deeply creative act. Readers, you are my partners in creativity. You are brush against my brush.

I celebrate, you, the reader. Click clack click clack. I make. You make happen.

--MD

Meeting House

The Live Oak Meeting House, where Friends gather each Sunday to sit in silence until the spirit moves them, wasn't entirely quiet, at first. The child in the pew in front of me whispered as she nuzzled against her grandmother's neck. The couple opposite me turned the pages of the books they had brought with them to read. A man behind me sniffled with a cold; in the windowseat to my left, two more children whispered and squirmed. A woman in front of the couple with the books wiped a tear from her eye, then began writing in a journal. Around and somehow over us was a sound--I was a visitor to the meeting, and thought at first it must be the cooling system, then decided it was recorded audio--inhaling and exhaling. Like amplified, human breathing.

At last all was silent but for this sound. Even the children held their peace. The woman with the journal continued to write. A middle-aged man behind her, with his eyes closed and his hands folded in his lap, hadn't moved a muscle in the fifteen minutes since the meeting had begun. I turned my head a little to the right, and saw, tucked in the corner, a young, pale woman in a wheelchair, a white hose attaching her to a breathing machine. This was the sound filling the Live Oak Meeting House.

After a few more minutes, a middle-aged man stood and said:

"I'm sitting here thinking of a man who once told me he wished he was young again. He said to me: 'God I wish I was seventy again.' It was forty years ago when he said this to me. Across a chessboard. We were playing in a tournament together, and I was a teenager, and I wanted to win so badly. And this man, who was in his eighties, could see it. So he looked up at me and he said, 'God I wish I could be young again. Young people tend to think only about beginnings. What you need to do is think about your end game. Even when you're young. Think. Think that way.' He ended up teaching me so much about chess, that afternoon. And then I never saw him again. Or thought about him much. Until last week. I remembered him, for one reason and another, and realized that after all these years I might be able to look him up on the Internet. And I couldn't believe what I found. He'd had a biography written about him. He'd helped to train Bobby Fischer. He'd been somebody.

"The more I read, the more I was astonished. He'd spent his whole life in and out of penitentiaries. He'd done time at Alcatraz. One of his specialties was stealing cars. Especially Volkswagens. He loved to steal Volkswagens. He'd steal them and turn back the odometers. And there was more. In the 1930's he'd been arrested while holding the bag of money in the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping case. He hadn't kidnapped the baby; he'd only claimed to, in a fraud, and then demanded ransom money, and when they came and gave it to him he got caught. Off to jail he went. His whole life was like that. Stealing cars. In and out of jail. What finally stopped him was a car accident. In a Volkswagen. When he was seventy years old. After that he just played chess. His whole life he was a con-man . . . I guess I'm just thinking, you never know who's sitting across from you."

The man sat down.

The woman's regular, controlled breathing filled the room again. I liked the sound of it. I liked the way it divided up the minutes, made me feel my own breath, and aware of the breathing around me, made me glad the woman was breathing, and getting help to breathe, and glad we were all breathing, and that we still had time.

At a signal, the children rose and were guided out to daycare, where their assignment for the day was to make a heart like a mirror, a heart covered in tinfoil, so that when you held it up, you would see your own face.


--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone