I had a really transcendent reading experience over the weekend, in the guise of an eight-and-a-half-hour flight. The earlier part of the week, of course, was completely caught up in the site launch and the hacking and the constant re-reading of complimentary tweets about pubes and occasional stabs at being a parent, so all I’d managed to do was finish Yael Kohen’s delightful We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy, which I am very happy to recommend to all comers interested in that topic.

On the flight, prior to being permitted to access my Kindle, I opened a review copy of Rebecca Mead’s new book, My Life in Middlemarch. I am linking it for you below, but it literally does not come out until January 2014, so there is no reason to bother. I just can’t wait to talk about it, essentially, and what I’d really love is for all of us to commit to reading or re-reading or re-re-re-reading Middlemarch prior to next January, so we can have a glorious group discussion of both George Eliot’s masterpiece and Rebecca Mead’s brilliant memoir/biography/personal history/book review/conversation on said topic. For the record, you do not need to have read Middlemarch to appreciate it. It has been years, for me, and diminished my enjoyment not a jot.

Mead’s book grew from “Middlemarch and Me”, a piece that appeared in The New Yorker in 2011. Paywalled, so do what you have to do, subscribe, ask your friends. It was pretty much the best thing ever. It was beautiful, and astute, and penetratingly intelligent, and it was the sort of thing that makes you sick with envy if you’re in the habit of writing about yourself while pretending to write about other things and will never, ever be this good at it. And, as you may recall, it included these words: “But ‘Middlemarch’ is not about blooming late, or unexpectedly coming into one’s own after the unproductive flush of youth. ‘Middlemarch’ suggests that it is always too late to be what you might have been–but it also shows that, virtually without exception, the unrealized life is worth living.”

No, I know. I know. So I was excited to read the book, which offered the ultimate dream: that the magazine article you are devouring might suddenly say, “hey, do you want to meet up later?” and continue on for a few hundred pages in much the same vein it started. I do not want to get too much into the book itself, here. I’d like us, ideally, to read it together (AFTER Middlemarch, come on, you guys), but I will say that it is a work of exceptional generosity of spirit, and this paragraph hit me like the Ghost of Christmas Present lobbing a mincemeat pie at my head (I am totally not supposed to quote it, because these are uncorrected proofs, so keep it to yourself):

I didn’t go to libraries so much anymore. I’d become a journalist, so rather than immersing myself in books I tended to consult them fleetingly, then shelve them. I read much less for pleasure than I liked, and my grasp on literature–the field in which I’d sought to distinguish myself at seventeen–grew a little shakier every year, like a foreign language I didn’t have sufficient opportunity to speak.

So, obviously, newly chastened, freshly aware of the dangers of juggling four books and two thousand RSS feeds and kicking over piles of unread galleys to get to my bathroom, I read all 672 pages of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall in one go, finishing the last one as we began our initial descent into Newark. One mini-bottle of wine, two bathroom breaks. AFTER finishing the 278 pages of My Life in Middlemarch, because this girl’s still got some obsessive immersive literary gluttony left in her.

It was incredible. Oh, Wolf Hall‘s great, had you heard? Had you heard that mentioned somewhere? You may have, because everyone else read it in 2009 and awarded it prizes, and I only pretended to, because it’s 672 pages long and about the Tudors, so I knew I was GOING to love it, someday, eventually. And lots of people don’t like it (they are wrong, seriously, seriously wrong), but it’s extraordinarily good and I cried, embarrassingly, on the plane, at several parts, such that the painfully correct German man sitting next to me could no longer ignore my tears and began offering me his Swiss Air International chocolate squares to make me stop.

Wolf Hall is far too long, and not nearly long enough. If I were Mantel’s editor, I’d have made her cut a hundred pages for publication, then, as punishment for verbosity, write me four hundred more for my own pleasure. Yes, I know there is a sequel. Yes, I bought it before getting to Passport Control. All my life I’ve longed for someone to turn a gimlet eye on Thomas More’s murderous, heretic-torturing ways and tedious sense of moral superiority, and now I can rest.

But the experience, just the simple experience of reading an entire novel in one go, as I used to do three or four times a day, was immensely meaningful to me. No looking to see if Thomas Cromwell has any living descendants who are roughly my age. No image-searching “Wulfhall” to see if the ancestral seat of the Seymours is still around. No getting distracted by re-reading Royal Bodies. I’ve been working on devoting an hour a day to cordless reading, it’s been okay, but it’s rarely the same book. I dip in, I dip out. It doesn’t really work.

So, as we stride forward together into The Toast‘s books coverage, let’s try to give them what they deserve: our full and undivided attention. I don’t know what we’ll talk about next week. Probably Bring Up the Bodies, and Helen Garner’s The Spare Room.

Works Referenced:

George Eliot, Middlemarch (Indiebound | Amazon)
Helen Garner, The Spare Room (Indiebound | Amazon)
Yael Kohen, We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy (Indiebound | Amazon)
Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (Indiebound | Amazon)
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Indiebound | Amazon)
Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch (Amazon)

The post The Past Week in Reading: Rebecca Mead and Hilary Mantel appeared first on The Toast.

The delusion stretched so far that I remember constructing elaborate fantasies in which an unknown, wealthy relative would one day send me a dictaphone. Only then would I be able to record my friends’ impersonations of pop stars, and only then could I tape the private conversations that went on around the corner.

As I grew up, I forgot about Lois. Our typewriter broke, Lois & Clark got cancelled, and the dictaphone never arrived. My fantasies about using tape players to monitor, spy, and report on my family and friends were gradually replaced with more permissible dreams.

Yet I still remember how important, how disproportionately exciting, it seemed to be able to record and to play back voices.

*

Nobody knows who invented the dictaphone. Its history has long been muddled with the development of the phonograph, which was invented by Thomas Edison in 1877. Edison believed that the phonograph would be primarily used for office dictation, but the earliest machines recorded sound onto a tinfoil sheet, which soon proved to be inefficient.

It took a rival company to create the “Graphophone,” adding heavy wax cylinders to Edison’s design in order to make dictation clearer. Even so, Edison did not abandon the project entirely. Returning to his design when the cylinders became mass-produced in the 1880s, he created the rival “Ediphone.”

One of the dictaphone’s earliest prototypes was sent to Leo Tolstoy. The novelist politely approved of the machine. The “Ediphone” was wonderful, he said, but it would be “too dreadfully exciting” for him to use.

Tolstoy was not alone in his reservations and voice recording did not catch on as immediately as Edison had hoped. Capturing voices was uncanny in practice, a fact made all the more apparent by the machine’s scientific appearance, which dramatically contrasted with its production of disembodied voices.

This is something that novelists seemed particularly sensitive to. Several chapters of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, depict Dr. Seward, the administrator of an insane asylum, recording notes and interviews onto the new technology. Mina Harker, the long-suffering object of Dracula’s attentions, struggles to listen to the dictations, believing that traces of the doctor’s physical pain have been preserved in the recordings.

His speech, she claims, reveals something that would have remained concealed in his writing: “This machine is wonderful…but it is so cruelly true. It told me, in its very tones, the anguish of your heart…I have copied the words on my typewriter, and none other need now hear your heart beat, as I did.” Stoker perceives vulnerability in the recorded voice which is absent from the written word. Like Tolstoy, Mina describes the technology as “wonderful,” yet she cannot bring herself to continue using it and hurriedly transcribes to the page so that no one else might suffer.

In this instance, Seward’s pain is supernaturally induced, relating as it does to the insane and the vampiric. But the recordings are “so cruelly true” because recorded speech insists its presence. The written word exists in the past and is brought to the present by the reader, but speech can only ever exist in the present moment. The recorded voice travels through time, bringing with it the particular rhythms of the past. It dictates its own tempo from the point at which it was recorded and it is this insistence, this presence, that made the earliest dictaphones so unsettling.

*

Last month, I received a USB stick in the post. It was full of notes and photos from a trip I had taken, sent by a friend from Australia. Alongside the photos sat an MP3, an hour-and-a-half long. Pressing play, I heard a recording of the two of us in a bar.

We were telling stories to a dictaphone; stories about using dictaphones.

“Decadence,” my friend was saying, “He stole my brother’s voice.”

We had recorded a long and complex story about my friend’s relationships with another group of friends. My friend (who I shall call V) had gotten into the habit of sending tapes to the people she knew abroad. These tapes included quotes from her dad about literature, noises from her street, and long monologues about the punk scene in Melbourne.

Once, she sent a tape to a DJ friend in America, recording a heartfelt “I miss you” at the start of the message. She asked her brother to speak next. He was eighteen at the time, about to leave for Ecuador, and living as a self-confessed “decadent.”

“So, I ask him to explain what his concept of decadence is, I thought it would be funny–dead, dead funny. And my brother, he goes on this long spiel: ‘Decadence is masturbating with a champagne bottle. Man, it’s covering yourself in chocolate, all over – that’s decadence.’”

“A year later, he sends me a CD, where he’s spliced all this shit together. Going round and round is my brother talking about chocolate and champagne, and me telling him how much I’d missed him. Fuck that.”

The DJ had made the speech into a sample, looping “Decadence” and “masturbating” as refrains rooted in a bizarre and hectic psy-trance track. The sound of lasers squealed across the recording and V heard her emotional message isolated and echoed, alongside her brother’s ramblings.

“He never asked,” she said. “And if he had, I would have said no. Now someone, somewhere in America is listening to my brother talking about masturbating, covered in chocolate.”

The point, V claimed, was agency.

“He stole it,” she says, as the MP3 comes to an end, “he stole my brother’s voice.”

*

In 1886, Dostoyevsky hired a stenographer, after promising his publisher that he would deliver his next novel in six weeks. Vastly surpassing his expectations, he dictated The Gambler in twenty-six days. And then he married the girl.

The invention of the dictation machine emphasised the division of men’s and women’s labor roles. The process of recording was overtly sexualized. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Voice of Science” (1891), the recording of a young suitor is described in the following, subtlest of tones: “into the slots he thrust virgin plates, all ready to receive impression, and then, bearing the phonograph under his arm, he vanished into his own sanctum.” It would always be the male speaker, recording his thoughts, to be passively received by the female listener.

As the device made its way into offices, the image of conquest extended, with women envisioned as the dictation interpreters who would liberate men from the confines of the office. Marketing campaigns appealed to the wives of businessmen, pitching the dictaphone as a replacement stenographer. A machine for dictation decreased the contact time between the executive and his secretary, freeing men from the restrictive spaces of corporate life. With a dictaphone to hand, there was no silly young women to flirt with your husband, no temptation away from home.

Yet the dictaphone was never truly a success. Transcription pools were unpopular places to work because of the close supervision that employees were subjected to and the repetitive nature of the work. Women who were promoted to become private secretaries came to associate the dictaphone with a lower class of employee and stenography continued to be taught long after dictation machines were widely available.

Men and women alike noted that the process of dictation was both unskilled and antisocial. Taking dictation by hand was a valuable time for interaction. And for men in a position of power, private secretaries denoted achievement. A female employee added to the status of her employer, which was something that a machine would never do.

*

Ten years after giving up on Lois, I finally bought a dictaphone. I made my first recording in a car park behind a warehouse, flanked by four of my gamest friends. The first tape begins with giggles, the sound of traffic passing in the background.

Or rather, the tape begins with white noise, which is gradually dotted by laughter as we struggle to hold down the tiny record button.

The dictaphone became my peculiar notebook of street noises, buskers, drunks, and car radios. The recordings were inclusive but never done in secret.

I had always been a self-conscious keeper of diaries. I was unsure of who I was writing to and nervous that someone might read it. Notebooks, I found, removed this pressure. Sitting so peculiarly between fact and fiction, they held at least some claim to objectivity which I found to be liberating. They were based in a fallacy of random observation, bypassing a diary’s linearity, and foregoing its authority.

The writer of a notebook is not making claims to its reader; their notations need not have a purpose. Each entry remains neatly tied to the outside world, a respectful distance from interpretation and judgment, masquerading as record if it keeps events and emotions separate. Joan Didion famously wrote that the apparent randomness of observation was the closest thing to narrative truth that she could find. “Our notebooks give us away,” she suggested, because in the act of rereading what we once observed, the scene and its emotion reappear. With more clarity than a journal, with more detail than a ticket stub, the innocuous note of the cat in a triangle of sunlight brings us to our former selves as if returning to the scene in which we sat.

Yet the subjectivity of note-taking is inherent. The passers-by of a lunch hour, the gossip of distant relatives, the lines of a newspaper article as they veer into racism. We are marked by what we observe.

The dictaphone was a peculiar notebook because I rarely recorded with purpose. Only now, hearing voices that I haven’t heard in years, do I notice that these scenes are more vivid for their opacity. When I listen to these conversations, the places in which we sat return with more clarity simply because I have to fill in the blanks for myself. Filtering through the background noise, the muffled sounds from other tables, the chime of a clock in the distance, these sounds assert their presence as if no time has passed at all.

Physically, the dictaphone was beautiful: dark grey and unwieldy. It ran on full-sized tapes and had a red flashing light which constantly alerted the unsuspecting that it was recording. When it paused, the sound of powered-down batteries creaked out from its speaker, and when it rolled, it did so with a rich, mechanical clink.

Listening now, it seems strangest that I join in the same places. Out of the tape’s new distortion, two voices emerge, tossing innuendos around at the expense of Roald Dahl and his illustrator, Quentin Blake. This goes on for around twenty minutes, with no context or explanation, ending with an emotional rendition of “Yesterday” that eventually incapacitates each participant with giggles.

These are in-jokes so old that I can’t remember them. But when I listen to the tapes my laughter peaks at the same points as it did, in that car park, seven years ago. Roald and Quentin assert their presence as if no time has passed at all.

The dictaphone became a kind of notebook, but one in which there were many players. At parties, I passed it between friends–people would turn it cautiously in their hands, looking at me as if I were trying to catch them out. It was often met with hesitancy, but this quickly gave way to acceptance. After the fear had passed, everyone suffered from an attack of the Dear Diary’s and became insufferable show-offs.

“Note to self,” they would begin, “obtain a helper monkey.”

“Note to dictaphone,” they would conclude, “I love you.”

The fact that I was recording was then forgotten completely. Their normal voices returned.

My interest didn’t last. After six months, the recordings slowed. Soon, it took months, then years to fill a tape, until finally I stopped altogether. I found the dictaphone again last year, lying at the bottom of a box. Battery acid had leaked out the back, melding distorted postcards around its former frame and bubbling over the final tape which was still inside.

The contents of the tape are unknown.

The post Diaries and Dictaphones appeared first on The Toast.

Ok, I did read some. I read Goosebumps and the Wayside School stories and Calvin and Hobbes. I flipped through my mom’s old A. A. Milne books. I did my best with the Narnia series. But there are, apparently, large gaps in my collection, and there’s something about the modern penchant for nostalgia that shines a harsher light on this. Oh, the shock from my friends upon discovering I never read The Phantom Tollbooth. What did I mean, I hadn’t read Anne of Green Gables? How could I be a proper intellectual if I hadn’t spent my adolescence reading Little Women instead of making friends?

So with this series, I’m setting out to fill those gaps. This is my chance to see what my friends were talking about, and maybe retroactively get in on all those conversations. Or I’ll just see what nonsense everyone thought we should be taking in as children. It’ll be fun!

The Secret Garden (Indiebound | Amazon) was an obvious first choice, mostly because I already have a copy in my apartment. I have no idea how it got there, but I assume it was my mother’s. It’s a worn hardcover in faded-green canvas and full of illustrations. For some reason it ended up with me.

The Secret Garden is a pleasant book about a bunch of racists who are convinced that living in the windy moors of England somehow cures disease. Okay, that’s not all it is. It’s actually a pretty wonderful book. But, as with most books written before…1920? 1970? Last month? All right, just as with most books, it’s got some weird racist bits. These bits particularly struck home for me because my dad is an Indian immigrant. (I’ve been assured that A Little Princess is far more racist. I’ll get back to you on that.)

It starts off with Lady Mary (can we please pretend this is baby Lady Mary from Downton Abbey? People still watch that show, right? I know she’s supposed to be blonde but that would make her Lady Edith) wasting away in her palace in India because her parents don’t pay enough attention to her. (Colonialism!) Then her parents die, and Mary gets shipped to England to live with her uncle, Mr. Craven, in a different palace, except here people sometimes talk back to her and she doesn’t like that as much. Her new Yorkshire maid, Martha is like “Oh my god, why are you white?” because she expected everyone from India to be “a black,” but eventually the two of them start getting along, and Martha gets her to start running around outside and kibitzing with the gardener and stumbling upon…a secret.

I really love how shocked everyone is when she discovers the garden that her uncle shut up after his wife died, even though it’s basically all anyone talks about to her. “Oh, and by the way, there’s this garden that you never would find unless you were really looking and it’s locked because your benefactor, whom you’ve never met, forbids anyone to go in there, okay bye!” Then: “For some reason she couldn’t stop thinking about the garden.” They’re also surprised when she discovers her (also secret) invalid cousin, Colin, even though she hears him screaming in his room every single night.

So Mary spends most her time running around the gardens, trying to find the secret one, and working up an appetite. A good third of this book is dedicated to describing in detail just how “fat” Mary gets once she learns how to jump rope and do other active things, and though I do appreciate a setting where a little girl getting fat is a good thing, it is god damned boring. Chapter after chapter of how Martha’s mom thinks Mary should get some exercise, and Mary telling Martha “oh, your mom seems nice” and Mary going into the garden and hanging out with a bird. Maybe this is why I couldn’t get into these books when I was a kid. I lived in New York City with a mural that said “Crack is Wack” up the street from my apartment. I did not have time to read about a little girl who managed to finish an entire bowl of porridge.

In between the jump-roping and the eating, Mary sort of befriends Ben Weatherstaff, the crabby old groundskeeper, because they both like the same robin that keeps flying around the garden. At this point I start getting worried, because Mary is ten years old and doesn’t seem to have ever gone to school, and her only friends are an old man and possibly a bird. Someone in the book even suggests she should get a governess, but then Martha’s mom intervenes with, “Oh, she doesn’t need school, she needs to jump more rope!” And that’s how the patriarchy gets you.

Dickon is Martha’s brother. First, I spent the first 150 pages mentally referring to him as “Daikon,” like the radish, because I can’t read. Second, I am really worried about Dickon. Did they have meth back then? I think he’s on meth. He’s up every morning before the sun comes up, just wandering around the fields saying things like “ahahaha canna tha’ hear the birds and smell tha’ honey I’ve been here for four hours look a pony this is my friend the fox I eat one piece of toast a day and I’ve trained these squirrels to hang out on my shoulders because they trust me don’t you ever just want to crawl in the moor and die because it’s so beautiful I’m gonna dig now!!!!!!” It’s horrifying. It also doesn’t help that in my copy’s illustrations, he looks like Raggedy Katharine Hepburn. 

Anyway, the book moves on and pretty much forgets about Mary and Dickon to focus on Colin, Mary’s cousin who’s been told he’s an invalid his entire life. As soon as Colin starts trying to walk in the garden we never hear about Mary or even Dickon again, even though for the first three-quarters of the book she was its entire focus. What happened to her? Did she get nicer? Did she and Dickon fall in love? Way to follow through, Burnett. But Colin’s story is that he’s a little asshole who finally has someone (Mary) call him out on all the tantrums he throws, and he gets outside in the fresh English air and gains his strength and learns to walk until his dad comes home and loves him again.

For most of the book Colin is convinced he is going to die, because his weird doctor-uncle has told him he’s an ugly hunchback who is going to die. His doctor-uncle may or may not be next in line to inherit the mansion if Colin dies, so his motives may have been suspect. Sadly, it doesn’t pay off, and once Colin insists on going outside with Mary, his doctor-uncle basically says “well, that’s nice, you seem fine” and is never heard from again. Burnett seemed to want to write about four different books here.

As ridiculous as everything turned out to be, I actually liked Colin! I feel like as a kid, that’s who I would have connected with. Not the little girl who seems completely unappreciative that she has lived in not one, but two palaces in her young life. Not the little boy on meth. Give me the little boy who is surrounded by adults who lie to him and finally decides “fuck you, I’m going to walk.” That’s the narrative most young people reading YA connect to, regardless of how they grew up. It’s empowering to see a character your own age makes their own choices about their life! It’s fantastic! I was totally rooting for him…

Until he started saying some really terrible things. He was always sort of terrible, in the standard rich-kid-who-always-gets-his-way model, but he’s also ten and has been told every day of his life that he’s going to die, so I tried to cut him some slack. And most of the time he’s just totally enthusiastic about the garden and nature, so who cares if he yells at a maid or two? But then one day, Colin basically invents The Secret and tells old Ben Weatherstaff that all he has to do is say good things will happen to him and they magically will.

To counter this, Weatherstaff tells the story of Jem Fettleworth’s wife, who would “say th’ same thing over thousands o’ times–callin’ Jem a drunken brute,” until her husband “gave her a good hidin’.”

The post Jaya Catches Up: “The Secret Garden” appeared first on The Toast.

The groom’s father is the head of cardiology at Cedars Sinai; his mother is a professional clogger and performs with the senior dance troupe The Clogged Arteries.

The groom is a semi-professional hockey player. The bride is a dental implant artist.

The brides are both Olympic athletes. Helen set records in the shot put; Greta in the javelin. The bouquet toss will be held outside the reception hall in a nearby soccer field.

The couple met at the state fair, waiting in line for the bungee swing. Their friends abandoned them at the last minute due to nerves; the ride operator brought them together to even out the weight for their ride. The operator has been invited to the wedding.

The couple had originally planned to recite poetry, but opted instead to have matching piercings done at the ceremony.

The father of the bride is a podiatrist and has made custom orthotics for the couple on their big day.

The groom is a conceptual artist, and proposed by scratching “Will You Marry Me?” on the side of her car and lit a flaming heart on the hood. The best man is an auto body painter.

The mother of the bride is a cake decorator, however; the couple opted for pies at the reception. The bride’s mother plans to make a wedding cake in protest – banana cake with burnt almond frosting.

The mother and father of the bride are entomologists. The groom’s parents own a fleet of pest-control franchises. The couple have chosen to elope and will hold a reception at a later date.

During the karaoke portion, the bridesmaids performed a touching rendition of “This Boy,” by The Beatles. The groomsmen responded with a heart-felt performance of “In Your Eyes,” by Peter Gabriel. The bridesmaids returned with an a-cappella version of Pachelbel’s Canon in D, after which the groomsmen accepted defeat by performing “Love Will Keep Us Together” by Captain and Tennille.

The bride and groom partake in Civil War re-enactments; she portrays a battlefield nurse and he portrays an infantryman. They met when he “suffered” an “injury” on the battlefield. She “tended” to his “wounds” and they made a date for after the “war” was over.

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There’s a compulsion, I think, when writing about The Beatles, to try to emphasize your mega-fan status right out of the gate. That they mean more to you than to other people, or that the songs you like best are the best songs to best-like. That you understand that the only real reason to doubt that we are spiritually alone in the universe is that John Lennon and Paul McCartney grew up in Liverpool at the same time, and found each other. There are those who point to the complex workings of the human eyeball as a sign of an invisible hand, but I’ve only ever had my belief in the cosmic void tweaked by the existence of “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window.”

I was raised by a Paul mother and a John father, I should say that now. And I love my mother dearly, but my father has better taste in music, so I grew up a John girl. I was raised to have mild contempt for Paul, I will admit, because my father is a bit of a dick like that. My mother brought a Give My Regards to Broad Street album into the home, and my father refused to let it touch any of his own albums. Paul, it was explained to me, was a talented man with an irredeemable streak of honeyed sentimentality, held in check only tenuously by John’s crankier skill-set. Neither of them, he would remind me, could play a guitar correctly to save their lives. George eventually could, and Ringo was not a man who could possibly be objected to by anyone. Ringo wrote a song about an octopus’ garden.

I saw Paul McCartney, twice, at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn this past June.

It was great, I’m going to get that out of the way right now. I am not convinced by the health argument for vegetarianism, but Paul McCartney looked closer to fifty than seventy (his actual age at the time of the concert), and sounded thirty. He played for a thousand hours and did a million songs, including two million-song encores. Periodically, he took breaks from standing and playing the guitar in order to sit and play the piano. Two different pianos. Nor, really, could he bring himself to actually sit the entire time he was playing the piano. He was (simply) having a wonderful time. Why else would he bother? He doesn’t need the money, though I was happy to give him more. Be honest: have you adequately compensated The Beatles for the happiness they have brought you? Could you not do still more?

It’s not surprising that he still tours, really, when you imagine what it must feel like to be bathed in that much palpable human love for over three hours. And it wasn’t even just for the Beatles numbers. People love Paul McCartney so much that even obscure Wings songs were met with a wave of YOU DO YOU, GUY, THAT’S COOL. I was with a Wings fan, and she was so happy and full of love I thought she might explode. I was struck by the sudden realization that, had “Maybe I’m Amazed” been released under the rubric of The Beatles, we would probably consider it one of the fifty great love songs of our age, in the way that “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” would be played at all sporting events had it been recorded by a male singer.

His tribute to George (“Something” on the ukelele) was beautiful. His tribute to John was so classically Paul-not-quite-getting-John as to be more endearing than a more accurate tribute might have been. As though I, of course, could possibly be said to “get” John more than his oldest friend, which is laughable. I apologize.

What I mean, though, is that Paul elected to sing his song for John, “Here Today.” There is nothing wrong with “Here Today,” it’s very sweet. John would have hated it. Or, rather, he would have teased Paul about it, and called it “Puke Today” or “Here I Gag,” or something much funnier. But that’s okay. It’s a little adorable, when you think about it.

And here I come to the part I tried to explain to my father on the phone after the concert. Paul is better now. Paul makes more sense now. What was annoying about Paul, should you ever have been annoyed by Paul, was that he was 26 and pretending to be an old dude. I won’t insult your intelligence by making the obvious “When I’m Sixty-Four” comparison, any will do: “Yesterday,” “The Long and Winding Road,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Golden Slumbers.” Paul, who is a stone-cold genius and a lyrical wordsmith, always wrote songs like he was already a grandfather. And you knew he was getting head from models and doing drugs off inappropriate surfaces with the rest of the band, so it always seemed a little incongruous at the time.

But hearing a seventy-year-old Paul McCartney sing “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” is different. It’s not something twee and aggravating that you have to flip past on the White Album to get to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” or “Happiness is a Warm Gun.”

When Paul McCartney is singing “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” live, and you’re there, and he is just GOING FOR IT, you realize that, well, life goes on, brah. It does! He knows that better than a lot of people, even if he didn’t know it when he originally wrote and recorded it. Paul McCartney has grown into his own back catalogue, somewhere along the way.

May he outlive us all. Except for Ringo.

The post On Seeing Paul McCartney Live in 2013 appeared first on The Toast.

“How you doin’, kid?” she asked.

“Pretty good,” I said. My parents were out of town. The dogs were sleeping. I liked the broker bros buying Central American coke pads, the awkward Match couples holding sweaty hands, the sunburnt retirees distracting each other from larger compromises by bickering over bathroom fixtures. “How about you?”

“Not too bad,” she said. “The power went out and a tree fell on the house.”

Momma was worried a bear might climb the diagonal pine and enter the dining room through the broken window. This was a distressingly sane concern. She lives in a heavily wooded Hartford suburb filled with stories of putting green scat sightings. A few months earlier my aunt returned from a bike ride to find a black bear in the garage.

Still, things could have been worse. She had a mostly-charged phone and propane for the fireplace. “Mom and Dad are in New Orleans,” I said, “but you should totally drive over here tomorrow once the roads are clear.”

“There’s a tree in the driveway, too,” she said.

I muted the television and cleared my throat. “Are you warm enough?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” she said.

“Can you get through the night?” My tires were bald and I’d need to wait out the Pinot buzz. I own a home Breathalyzer, but it requires an expensive battery.

“Of course,” she said.

“How much snow do you have over there?” I asked. “We only got an inch but I heard there’s a foot at the airport.”

“It can’t be that much,” she said. “It’s not even Halloween, for crying out loud.”

“I’ll be there first thing in the morning,” I said. “Try to save a little bit of phone juice, just in case I have to get in touch on the way over.”

“Ha!” she said. “Who am I gonna call?”

The highways were clear and the sun was shining. I cranked the radio and chugged seltzer. But once the expressway ended, chaos began to unfold. Trees were down, traffic lights were dead, gas stations were closed, wires were everywhere. Roads were clogged with wet snow and abandoned vehicles. Everyone was busy shoveling their driveway or drinking cold coffee in the window. Sometimes disasters bring out the best in people, but they need some time to adjust. That morning it was still every man for himself. Tow trucks and line crews were distant fantasies. I idled at an intersection for ten minutes, squinting in the sun, suddenly realizing I didn’t have enough gas to get home.

Ordinarily, Momma’s subdivision is a labyrinthine network of leafy streets, loops of smooth pavement shaded by old trees. That morning the pristine lawns were disheveled, mailboxes and lampposts splintered and shattered. Sunlight punched through a twisted canopy. Confronted with a downed oak, I walked the last half-mile while trying to pinpoint the source of a persistent, greasy hum.

Momma was on the couch, huddled under blankets, fielding calls from her sister and daughters. The propane had run out in the middle of the night. She was worried about birds and bats and bears. Her bag was all packed. I propped a piece of plywood against the broken window and emptied her warm refrigerator.

“You won’t have power for a week,” I said.

“Oh boy,” she said. “It’s that bad, huh?”

“You won’t recognize it out there.” I pointed to her prescriptions on the windowsill. “You’d better bring those.”

She pulled a liter of vodka from the cabinet. “Have any of this at home?”

It was a Sunday, which meant there were no liquor sales in Connecticut. I shook my head.

“Better bring the bottle,” she said.

We started the walk to my car. I was worried about the fallen oak. When I climbed over it I’d stumbled and ripped my pants. I said we might have to tromp through some back yards, pry loose some fence planks. The hum was louder than before, joined by a rusty buzz. A station wagon drove up the hill and my grandmother waved it over.

“That’s Tom,” she said. “He’ll give us a ride.”

Tom circumvented the blockage through back channels I didn’t know about. “Have you ever seen anything like this?” Momma asked, with a touching yet slightly discomforting 83-year-old awe.

“Nope,” said Tom. “Sure haven’t.”

“Seems things are definitely getting worse,” she said.

Storm debris dangled from sagging power lines. The passable roads were cleared only to the width of deer paths. The October sun heated the destruction to a melty dream state. We were entering a dangerous new season.

“What’s that sound?” I finally asked, finger in my ear.

“Generators,” said Tom. “Generators and chainsaws.”

“It’s going to be a long winter,” said Momma.

On the highway I kept it at forty-five and turned off the heat. We passed disabled vehicles while coasting in neutral, eyes on the orange fuel light. I held my breath. Momma knotted her fingers. We finally happened to find a decrepit yet functional 7-11. A short line of weary motorists filled their tanks and lawnmower cans. They were all out of Regular.

On Halloween night I blew out the jack-o-lanterns, turned off the porch lights and fixed Momma her signature cocktail (“Vodka Sonic”: vodka, seltzer, tonic, lime, water glass). The news broadcasted a live press conference with the governor and Jeffrey Butler, the then-COO and comically inept mouthpiece of Connecticut Light & Power. Huge swaths of the state were still dark. Shelters were full and food pantries were bare.

“When do your parents get home?” Momma asked.

There was a knock at the door. I peeked out the window: a man and his costumed children stood in the moonlight with expectant looks on their faces.

“It’s trick-or-treaters,” I whispered.

“Oh, please,” said Momma. “Don’t they know we’ve declared a state of emergency?”

“Plus we don’t have any candy,” I said. “I can’t believe they walked all the way up the driveway in the dark.” I didn’t like to put out the trash at night without bringing along the meanest of the three dogs.

“Want me to get rid of them?”

“Yes, please,” I said.

I hid in the stairwell while Momma went to the door. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t have anything for you.”

“Oh,” said the man, dragging it out for maximum guilt extraction. “That’s all right.”

I watched her shut the door with a gracefully apologetic grimace. We returned to the press conference and finished our drinks. “Sorry the tonic is so flat,” I said.

“Oh,” said Momma, mimicking the man’s wounded tone. “That’s all right.”

A local contractor who sometimes threw me odd jobs had an in with some tree-removal people. They put Momma at the top of their list and chipped her trees for a low four-figure fee. Two months later the replacement window arrived and the contractor hired three French-Canadian brothers to frame them. I came along as extra muscle. While technically on the clock, I did my best to stay out of the way, hiding in the bathroom or making coffee that no one wanted. Momma put out a plate of cookies.

“Toss me a hammer,” one of the framers shouted in my direction.

I patted down my tool belt: cell phone, a few loose screws. “I don’t have one.” He stopped work just long enough to shoot me a glare. “I mean, I don’t have one on me.”

“Maybe I’ll go for a walk,” said Momma. I think the repairs were more violent than she’d expected. The hole in her wall was expanding. The contractor ripped trim from the window bay. I was terrified things would never look the same.

“I could pick up lunch,” I said. “I know how to do that.”

The house phone rang. I answered it. It was my aunt, calling to check in. “Well, thank God for you,” she said.

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Not all of the Lost Chicken’s shows were performed on a stage. Her street act–which may not have been an act at all–involved a public display of her pimp’s brutality. She would prevail upon passersby, begging for assistance, all while helping herself to the contents of their pockets.

By the 1870s, little had changed to balance the population of the sexes in San Francisco. Women were still in the minority, with limited economic options. Many had arrived with husbands or fathers who succumbed to cholera or yellow fever, which claimed nearly a third of the travelers along the California Trail. Some of them became laundresses, cooks, and homesteaders, but many had come to the West in order to become entertainers, and more than half of the women eventually became prostitutes.*

The Wild West offered perfunctory acceptance of the world’s oldest occupation, but this veneer of tolerance rarely benefited women in dire need of income. A commonly-held contemporary belief was that prostitution would prevent men starved for female companionship from raping “respectable” women. But sex work was not a particularly lucrative endeavor for most “soiled doves,” as they were called at the time. Most prostitutes did not work independently; the house proprietor–madam or pimp–took at least half of the women’s proceeds, and offered very little in the way of protection or security in return.

Prostitutes regularly suffered brutal assault from johns, and often contracted venereal and other communicable diseases, including tuberculosis and diphtheria. They endured medically dubious remedies and received painful, expensive abortions that were not always successful. Few were cured of whatever ailed them; many ended up dead, and those who lived found themselves in debt. Some drank themselves to death, and others overdosed on laudanum, a tincture of opium that was popular at the time. The most enterprising became mistresses to successful miners–at least while they stayed in town–but that was no guarantee of stability, either. Juanita, perhaps the most famous professional mistress of her day, was also the first woman to be hanged in California, lynched by an angry mob after killing a white man who attempted to sexually assault her.

And if they survived all of that, they were still out of the game by age 28.*

At the time, the Barbary Coast was largely populated by criminals looking to escape British penal colonies; the amount of wealth to be had only amplified the lawlessness and desperation of the day. It was not uncommon to see a carton of eggs sold for ten dollars; those caught stealing sometimes lost an ear to the affronted storeowner. There were no formalized civil services to regulate the new residents, who, far from their native communities, felt freed from moral and social constraints. Men committed murder in broad daylight on busy streets, and jailbreaks were frequent, as were public hangings by vigilantes. Police officers were in short supply, and there was little to no regulation of their training and behavior.

It was easy enough, then, for cross-dresser Jean Bonnet to lure prostitutes away from their difficult existence in to join her gang of lady pickpockets.

Many of Bonnet’s recruits came from Madame Johanna, whose brothel specialized in girls as young as fourteen, and never older than seventeen. Bonnet had frequented Johanna’s peep shows, but she knew plenty of other women on the Barbary Coast who would do just about anything to escape prostitution. She set up the gang’s headquarters in a shack on the waterfront, but when Blanche Buneau’s pimp threatened to disfigure her with acid, Bonnet moved to McNamara’s Hotel at the San Miguel Railway Station.

Most of the female pickpockets worked alone, often while pretending to be prostitutes. There were plenty of wealthy targets to be found inside the many casinos and saloons of the Californian frontier, which were numbered at over 500 by 1850. Miners and trappers would leave their claims for a few days and head south to the Barbary Coast, pockets heavy, looking to gamble and socialize. The house allowed, and even encouraged, women to circulate about the gambling tables. They served as a distraction when the house was up, and sometimes utilized the makeshift bedrooms, set aside for the purpose of prolonging a flush patron’s business.

There were a number of women thieves working independently at the time, many of whom avoided escape and capture for years. Annie Green was never convicted, policeman Jesse Brown Cook wrote in his journals, because no white man would admit to the police to having slept with a black woman. Rose Cady (pictured right) and Josie Stocking (pictured below left) only targeted married men, trusting that most would rather suffer a financial loss than publicize their infidelities.

Arrests were infrequent and rarely resulted in convictions. The common use of aliases, as well as inconsistent official bookkeeping, made it difficult to keep track of a lady pickpocket’s career. The majority of police log lacked corresponding mug shots, while taking down only the most basic biographical information. Mary Dugan was apparently “rather good looking,” and sentenced to four years for grand larceny in 1872, but officials did not note what she stole, where she lived at the time of her arrest, or where she went after she was released.

Other lady pickpockets, including the Lost Chicken, skipped town to avoid paying fines. Mary Ryan’s last known whereabouts was the county jail. After being released on charges of petty larceny, Gertrude Smith and Dolly Mickey left San Francisco entirely. Quite a few simply disappeared without a trace, and had probably planned on leaving San Francisco all along, just as soon as they managed to scrape together enough money or their luck ran out.

On the evening of September 14, 1876, Jean Bonnet was killed by a bullet meant for Blanche Buneau, a warning to other women who considered leaving their pimps for Bonnet’s protection. Without a leader, the gang broke up just a few short months after it formed.

We know very little about the fate of the rest of San Francisco’s lady pickpockets. Some of the most notorious went missing after the 1906 earthquake, which destroyed nearly 80 percent of the city’s buildings and killed around three thousand people. Fires blazed for days in the aftermath, and many survivors fled the city for good.

Old San Francisco became known as “the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind,” and the women who ended up in the rapidly growing city were particularly vulnerable, outnumbered and faced with few, often harrowing options. It seems highly unlikely that lady pickpockets pilfered from jacket pockets in hopes of becoming rich. They were just trying to survive.

Works Consulted
Asbury, Herbert. The Barbary Coast: an informal history of the San Francisco Underworld. (Indiebound | Amazon)
Butler, Anne M. Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West, 1965-90. (Amazon)
Chidsey, Donald Barr. The California Gold Rush. (Amazon)
*Enss, Chris. Pistol Packin’ Madams: True Stories of Notorious Women of the Old West. (Amazon)
Taniguchi, Nancy J. “Weaving a Different World: Women of the California Gold Rush. California History, Vol. 79, No. 2, pp.141-168.
Madams of the Barbary Coast, documentary film by Michael Rohde.

Images used gratefully with permission from Maria Forde and the SFPL.

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In short: my ex-boyfriend was killed in the war. I don’t know how else to put it, and I’ve tried different ways of phrasing it to make it sound less blunt, but it’s difficult. He was my first love and first true despair, he was the best person I knew and, for very a brief period of time, the worst. I toyed with his heart; I drove him crazy. He was the most significant figure in my life, the most pivotal. He was handsome, Tom Cruise-short, and always tan. In high school, he won Best Smile, but it was never a contest. His football coach talked about him with superlatives usually reserved for the pros. He was lazy and devastatingly smart; he loved Coke and plain white t-shirts. He was the first boy to see something electric in me, an electricity he desired.

We dated and broke up, reconnected and flirted and separated. Our relationship was composed of letters, chance IMs, long-distance phone calls (paid for with actual phone cards), breaks from school when I’d go over to his house and watch movies in his basement and, depending on the status of our relationship at the moment, graze knees. It was all incredibly chaste and suggestive, the way relationships at that age in a very Christian town can be. When he died, we hadn’t spoken in weeks, hadn’t formally dated in years. But I was broken in two.

His name was Luke, and until my junior year in high school, I had never really known him. He was a year older than I was; we’d gone to the same middle school, where he’d been popular in the way only confident, charismatic boys can be.

I was taking chemistry from one of the most committed misogynists in the school district–a brilliant teacher with a lecherous streak, who routinely remarked how pleasant it was to have cheerleaders (just me) in his class on game days (the days I wore short polyester skirts). The first day of class, I’d tried to arrange myself in a way so as to obtain a low-stress lab partner: someone who’d let me dominate everything and get us an A, the way I was used to handling group work. Everything was set, but then Luke, Mr. High School, walked into class five minutes late and took the only open desk right beside me. Mr. Misogyny put us together. I was terrified.

Luke was dating this hot–gorgeous–sophomore. She had long, pendulous hair and was good at volleyball, the way those type of girls are. Over the course of the year, I learned that he was smart, even though he spent most of his days dozing through the first fifteen minutes of class, placing his gum on his hat for safekeeping. We argued, we almost-flirted, we got As. When we did computer modeling, I drew a picture of him with some rudimentary painting program, featuring the only shirt of his that wasn’t white. He took it home and showed it to his mother, who folded it away for safekeeping until showing it to me nearly a decade later.

In my hometown, we take senior pictures, and we do them up right. We’re talking portfolios with six to ten shots, with at least one posed with your favorite symbol of recreation: a football, a cheerleading uniform, your gun, your truck, your baby. You ordered hundreds of wallet-size prints and inscribed them personally; it was like having business cards, only more important. Luke was a “rep” for one of the local photographers, which is just another way of saying that he was good-looking and popular, and his pictures were simple and excellent, the way pictures of people who need no adornment always are.

In the one he gave me, he’s wearing jeans and a white t-shirt and sitting on a stoop; his inscription was witty and brief and the best thing I’d received all year. He graduated and went off to the Virginia Military Institute, possibly the most surprising thing anyone from Northern Idaho has ever done. I went to France for the summer (possibly the second most surprising thing anyone from Northern Idaho has ever done) and settled in for senior year. It was just a friendship, and then it was over.

Until winter, when it wasn’t. The freshman year at VMI, endearingly dubbed the “Rat Year,” is a mix of physical and psychological hazing, characterized by very little access to worldly pleasures and a lot of elbow-crawling through the mud. There was, however, even in 1999, email access, which led to VERY DEEP exchanges via dial-up modem. He told me how his mentor would occasionally let him sit in his room and listen to music, usually verboten for first-years, and how he’d found himself growing addicted to Fiona Apple’s Tidal. This I could get behind.

A long-distance phone conversation or two, a vacation from school, a late night considering whether or not we’d make out. It was all very stressful and delicious. He loved the way I made chocolate chip cookies, the fights we’d have over feminism, my general willfulness and my committed notion that I’d be able to hold a conversation with his father,  a highly learned man who verbally decimated any girls that Luke and his brothers brought home. It’s not that his father was mean, exactly; it was that he had exacting standards, which is part of the reason Luke was the person he was.

After plenty of dithering, he convinced me to come over and meet the family. I wore a pair of khaki shorts and a light blue V-neck tank top, both from the Gap, because it was 1999 and that was how you looked nice. I got pushed in the pool and roundly teased and treated to an inquisition, which is another way of saying that I won the family over. I still found it hard to believe all of this was happening to me: I was a cheerleader without a boyfriend or a prom date, a status one of my male friends attributed to my status as a “ball buster,” which is Idaho shorthand for “a girl who talks in class.”  Suddenly, the world was rotating my way.

There were perfect days in July. He had two brothers and a kid sister, a discerning father and an indulgent mother. There were friends spiraling out to all corners of the back patio, endless supplies of burgers and chips (never beer; Luke’s family was not that kind of family). All the boys played football and had the physique unique to 17-year-old boys: lean, muscular, and completely effortless. When the sun went down we’d pile in the back of a truck and go to the video store, something ridiculous like Tim McGraw’s “Indian Outlaw” playing loud enough for everyone to hear, and pick out something horrible. After the movie, Luke would walk me to out to my car for a long goodbye, charged with the electricity of waiting all night for him to touch me. Sleep (very little); Work (horrible); Repeat.

Was he my boyfriend? Maybe. Yes. But then he went to boot camp in Oklahoma while I spent the summer working at the bagel shop. I wrote to him every day, and he replied the way a hero in a Nicholas Sparks novel would: every day, on small squares of lined paper, in a skinny, distinctive scrawl. The way he missed me was encoded in his descriptions of the calls of the drill sergeants, the hunger of the early morning. My mom watched the envelopes arrive with a mixture of bemusement and concern.

*

Our relationship fell apart, then reconstructed itself. In 2013, things might have been different. In 1999, we had IM and a once-weekly phone call. Eighteen-year-olds love too much to be contained in so little. By Christmas, we were officially split, but still spent every day we were both in town together. And so every break went for the next four years: I’d make fun of his new girlfriends, I’d force him to see better movies, I’d tease him with a confidence I lacked elsewhere. Sometimes there was a spark that we cultivated, other times one or the other us blew it out. But no one else’s opinion mattered more.

Always, we’d write. At this point he was spending the bulk of his breaks in one rigorous training program or another. Scuba, Ranger, Airborne–I don’t know the official names; all I know is how he’d laminate my letters and take them into the field. It gave me a sense of significance that few other things could, then or since. When I was studying abroad in France, he spent his spring break in Bermuda, drinking hard and breaking rules like military guys on vacation do. One night he got separated from the rest of his group, hopped some walls, shimmied up a balcony, made his way back into the hotel without a key, and wrote me a letter in Red Sharpie on the back pages of Gideon’s Bible: “I do love you, Annie. I guess I always will.”

 He folded the letter and sealed the envelope so he wouldn’t wake up in the morning and think twice. It was the first and the last time he said it.

*

Luke graduated from VMI and was stationed in the North Korean DMZ. So far, so (relatively) good. Before leaving Stateside, he sent me a thick, mysterious parcel. I was excited at first, but then, immediately terrified: it was five years’ worth of my letters, at least 200 in total, except for a few that had disintegrated in his pocket and one I’d written in anger. They were mine for safekeeping; they were mine to reread, to marvel and despair at. I had no way of tethering my heart to his own.

Then he was in Iraq, growing a mustache because that’s what you did to look less Western, sending back pictures of himself standing in front of the crumbling, whitewashed, ornate backdrop of a regime in decline.

People still understand what it meant to be in Fallujah in the fall of 2004. That’s where Luke was when he was killed by a stray IED, volunteering to take another soldier’s place on a security round. His brother sent an email in the early morning hours.

I was working as a nanny at the time; even if I hadn’t been in shock, I couldn’t have called in sick. I went to work and clung to that baby, weeping through his naps, tears streaming down my face as I pushed him around the block over and over again. That afternoon, I managed to tell the parents I worked for that I needed to go home to Idaho. My ex-boyfriend–my best friend–had been killed in Iraq, I told them. It was the first time I’d felt the shock of the words in my mouth.

What followed was a week of sleeplessness and alcohol and sitting in Luke’s house, surrounded by memories, barely holding my body together. His sister had a one-year-old son, and his face looked so much like Luke’s I wanted to stare at him forever, or never again. The only thing that seemed to help was collecting passages from our letters, photos, snippets of lyrics from CD liner notes, and compiling them in a notebook to give to his parents, evidence of the soft heart of their hard-edged boy. I left out the most embarrassing parts, left in the most revealing ones–the parts where he talked with plain reverence about his father, the way he described the clean lines of his spartan life at VMI, the closest he got to purple prose in his appreciation for Pearl Jam’s Ten.

There was a burial at Arlington Cemetery in the rain; I still felt so absent from my body that I couldn’t hold two thoughts in my head at once. On the cross-country flight back I had a full row to myself, and I lay prone and stared straight ahead, unable to sleep, addicted to my own grief.

The thick sorrow would lift over the next few months, but I started dreaming–deep, involved dreams–almost always featuring his entire family, Luke always alive, but leaving soon. I’d wake up crying, which, if you’ve never experienced it, is the strangest of sensations, the physical crossover from the subconscious to the conscious. Nearly ten years later, I still have these dreams, waking up exhausted and low, not because of some new realization that he’s gone, but because in the dream, he was not.

 I’m still friends with his family, and have watched as they’ve had more kids, all of whom look like Luke, and named them, in various fashions, after him. I’ve seen myself grow older than his forever 24 years, and wonder what he’d tease me about now, what his children would look like, whether his handwriting would be the same and whether he could still pull a “gainer” on his parents’ diving board, how much he’d hate Facebook and the fights we’d have over politics and the war, how his face would age but his smile would not. Apart from my parents, I have so little left for me in my hometown: he was always the reason for the return. Without him, I sleep too much.

I realize that I am one of thousands who have been forced to bear this type of loss. Which is part of what makes my story feel singular, even when it is not. But it’s still difficult to explain: at one point in the weeks after Luke’s death, someone, thinking I was out of earshot, asked a friend why I was so upset–it’s not like I was his girlfriend.

Truth. It was more. 

*

Luke intermittently loved and mostly hated poetry. I’d send him poem after poem, hoping to land on one he’d like. There was Archilochos, from the 7th century B.C., and a bit of Frost, but there was also a fragment of Longfellow–one he never admitted to loving, but which I found well-creased and battered in the packet of letters he sent me.

I don’t know how to end this story, because it’s a story that doesn’t end. But this is as good of a placeholder as any in a life that lives on vividly, inextricable from my own.

There are things of which I may not speak;
There are dreams that cannot die;
There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,
And bring a pallor into the cheek,
And a mist before the eye.
And the words of that fatal song
Come over me like a chill:
‘A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.’

 Image courtesy of colleen_taugher via Flickr.

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