Stuck on the train outside Newark. Snow and sleet pouring down, mostly sleet. My seatmate, who works in advertising, is reading James Joyce’s Ulysses.
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Way Back When Pt. 2
in Writing
My new roommate is not in the room, but he has staked out a bed. There’s a saxophone case in a corner, by the desk he has staked out. I unpack my suitcase. My trunk comes upstairs. I stow that. Still no roommate. I think I’m hungry. I go downstairs to the snack bar, there on the ground floor of the Castle, at the back. There’s something called a “cabinet” on the menu board. I order a milk shake and an egg salad sandwich on white bread. (Are we getting the picture here? Is this person’s gestalt coming into focus?). The milk shake turns out to be ice cream-less milk and chocolate syrup. (The “cabinet” turns out to be what the West Coast calls a milkshake; lots to learn; like “scrod.”) The egg salad sandwich sits in the pit of my stomach. I somehow manage to not throw up. This sets a pattern for my first two years at Brandeis–sheer terror coupled with pride at not throwing up, with some sleep-terrors and almost-pneumonia thrown in.
Read MoreFive Reasons Why I Write
in Writing
- I have to write. Without words I am bereft of purpose. There is no place to put the observations that engulf me. What is seen must be captured, assessed, noted, saved, savored, and ultimately shared.
Word and The Universe
in Writing
You’ve got a program. More accurately, your computer has a program. You begin to enter the date and suddenly handy-dandy Word completes it for you. Thank you, Word. Until it doesn’t. What!!??!! Suddenly, every day is February 23. Which means you (or in this case I) have to think about which day it is. And then, key by key by key (oh, the labor!) insert the real date.
Read MoreWay Back When Pt. 1
in Writing
September 1957. My new stepfather was a banker named Ray Gevrez Scott. He dropped me and my new stepbrother Richard (headed for MIT) in Boston after our cross-country road trip from California. Pre-interstate. Sharing the driving. Cheap motels. Landscape passing. Bad road food. Five days of Heaven. I mean, for me, the best two words in the English language are “Road Trip.”
Read MoreAnt Chalk
in Writing
Ruby and I met outside the Prado in Madrid two Octobers ago. It was late afternoon; I had a bad case of Museum Feet (a happy case, let me add: the Prado had been stunningly wonderful) and wanted to sit with a soda and read about home. There was a newsstand. A blond, American-looking woman was buying a Herald Tribune. I said something like "I hope your stocks are doing better than mine…" No plan on my part, just innocuous stranger-to-stranger-in-a-strange-land chat. Could have gone either way. The Uh-Huh Me Too Nod Turn and Leave; The Yeah Me Too How're You Doing Smile and Stay. It was, of course, the latter.
Read Moreqwertyuiop
in Writing
The typewriter was a gift from my mother. Must have been from her alone, after the divorce, because I have no memory of a typewriter back in the junior high day of writing dialogue about Caesar on Ides Eve. And I know there was no typewriter with me in Europe in 1952. I would definitely remember typing on the freighter during that three-week voyage to Le Havre, would probably have sat ostentatiously at the mess table during the typhoon, strapped myself in, and typed. There was no typewriter in my boarding school room at the Ecole Internationale de Geneve, nor during the summer travels to Scandanavia in England and France, nor during the winter term in the rented apartment. There was, however, a piano there for me to practice on. Several Mozart sonatas still come at me with steam heat and the strong smell of dead, wet, brown leaves.
Read MoreBeginning To Write
in Writing
At the top of the stairs, listening to my breath, I punch in the five number code, the red light turns green, there is a click, I open the door, I exhale and then inhale the air inside, a compound of old floor and new ideas. Once inside, I walk the eight steps down the hall, past the lockers on one side and the coat hooks on the other, and then I open the inner door and enter the room.
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