Seventy-five

Today, I turned seventy-five.

You kidding?  I think you have the wrong man.  Seventy-five is an age for, for old people.  Not for me.  Who's seventy-five, or 75?  Eleanor Roosevelt.  Walt Whitman.  Miss Havisham.  The Pope.  Not me. 

I feel like someone has give me a coat that I didn't order and that is too big for me and told me to put it on.

"I don't want to put it on," I say.  "It doesn't fit."

"Put it on anyway.  You don't have a choice."

Ok.

I was talking about this to a friend yesterday.

"Jesus, I'll be seventy-five tomorrow!"

"Age is just a number," she said.

"Yes, and in my case, a big one."

That guy who jauntily walked down the streets of New York City in 1975, age 30, is now 75?  No—he's still the same guy.  Still filled with a sense of wonder at everything around him.  Depressed, yes, now, because of the maelstrom outside.  But that's not unique to me.  Mostly, getting up wide-eyed.  Sap flowing.  

Speaking of that.

Looking out my window in Maine I see an eighty-foot Eastern white pine not fifty yards away, partially shrouded in fog. ("Shrouded" perhaps a tad unfortunate choice of word.)  It's noble as any king or queen who ever lived—maybe more so.  Looming, with huge branches going in awkward directions for reasons I wish I knew.  Silent, uncomplaining, constant.  Ancient, witness to so many comings and goings of us pipsqueak humans.  Breathing, too, like me.  Useful, earning its keep, many times over.  Breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen.  I just read one large tree can supply a day's oxygen for up to four people.

Old tree, a lot older than me, let me look up to you.  Let's take a deep breath, both of us.  Still many things to do.

Therapy

I've been in therapy, on and off, since the Cold War era.

I don't know how many therapists I've seen.  I would guess close to fifteen.  That sounds slutty.  But that's the way it was.  Each time, there was a good reason.  I was with a few therapists for quite a long time.  The longest, in New York City, a woman, around nine years.  She was expensive.  They all are, aren't they, but in New York, particularly so.  They almost have to be to maintain their collective reputation.  I used to joke about the woman I saw for so long.  I would say that one day walking by the Hudson River, I saw her in a big sailboat.  The boat was named, Thank You, Rich.

I can hear them now.  "How does that makes you feel?"

The first therapist I saw rescued me.  I know you've heard this before.  You may have even said it before.  But fact is, he did.  I was in college, down, down, down.  Possessed by demons.  (I've thought, from time to time, that an exorcism might not be a bad idea.)  A friend recommended this man.  I was terribly nervous.  He was a classic Freudian.  Lie down on the couch, facing away.  Whoa.  But I told him things that had been securely locked up inside, labeled, "Warning! Lethal, Disgusting, Only Me, Shameful, Do Not Repeat."  And lo--he didn't call the police.  He made me feel--human.

The therapists I've seen through the years haven't all been of the same quality.  But you could say that of car mechanics, plumbers or dentists, couldn't you?  Some I've seen briefly, to give me a new set of crampons to help climb a particularly slippery slope.  Then I'm off.  Some have been humorless.  Always a bad sign.  Some have been brilliant.  Some have been less than professional.  One cancelled appointments on a regular basis, not that good for the self-esteem.  Onward.

As the very wise poet, Molly Peacock, said to me once about seeing a therapist, "I need backup!"  Indeed.  Molly wrote a tender and loving book of poems about her therapist, The Analyst.  I guess this blog post will have to do for all mine.

I'm seeing a therapist now.  He's my backup.  And a good one.  He laughs at my jokes.  What's better than that?  After a lifetime of therapy, I've come to understand that I can't heal some of the wounds I had hoped to heal.  They are too profound. But I can become more aware, can hurt less, can do a bit better as a human.

So, all of you, every one of you, gather around.  Group hug.

Wallowing

I wallow in a lot of things, but self-pity, or feeling sorry for myself, is the most frequented pool where I do my world-class wallowing.  Especially now that I'm getting older. And older.

I realize that people can't stand self-pity, so I have to be creative. Inventive.  I'll start with something everyone can feel empathy for and then slip in my troubles. "Hey, those protestors sure got a raw deal and I'm lonely."

Here's another one that I thought up recently:  "President Trump announced that he isn't willing to compromise on his border wall and that face in the mirror is frightening."

I seize opportunities on the run.

Checkout lady at local supermarket:

"That will be fifty-three dollars and seventeen cents."

"Here's my card."

"Debit or credit?"

"I'm getting old."

I've even tried something like this with my pharmacist.  He just picked up the phone and called security.

Speaking of that: I'm really insecure.

The other day, I got so desperate, I splurged and hired one of those bi-planes that companies use for skywriting. I waited for an incredibly clear day and had them write....

                               RICHARD GOODMAN IS SEVENTY-THREE.  WHY?

all across the sky.

Anyway, I said I have to be creative. Well, you're listening aren't you? See? So, now that I have you here, I've got a few problems I want to share with you. Let's start off with the loss of memory I'm experiencing and then we'll move on to....
                                                           

City of Night

There is a certain pleasure in reading a book about a subject that at the time was taboo, about a practice that had to be clandestine. You're a kind voyeur, looking into a forbidden world, and there is satisfaction in that, because you suffer none of the stigma of being a peeping Tom, since the author himself is asking you to peer inside.

This was the case for me when I read John Rechy's City of Night, a book about the underworld of homosexuality in America. The book was published in 1963.  I read it around 1968, fifty years ago.
                                                           

This book about a young man who travels across the United States encountering a variety of strange people, many of them gay, who you would never hear or see otherwise--at least not then.  Very few people were openly gay at that time.  Homosexuality was considered by many to be aberrant, sinful, not to mention illegal.  Many people--my father being one of them--were disgusted by queers, as he called them.  That word had no positive connotations back then.  No one was proudly appropriating it.  

What books were out there about homosexuality?  There was Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar (1948). There was James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956).  What else?  The novels of Jean Genet.  The much earlier The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928). Most everything else was underground.  There was really no such thing as mainstream gay literature. 

Then came City of Night.

Rechy is a curious fellow.  Even as became famous with his book's success, he continued with his previous life.  He'd been a hustler.  Actually, he kept at it well into his fifties.  I didn't know anything about the author, though, when I read the book.

What happens when you read a book like this, about "a love that dare not speak its name," as the quaint phrase used to describe gay love, is that you feel just a bit complicit.  Hey, wait a minute, I seem to be enjoying this book a little too much.  Ever feel that way about a book about, say, a serial killer?  Or some kind of catastrophe?  

It gave me pause, reading this book.  I learned a little something about myself, about the complexities swirling inside. 

What I learned from Ebony

I don't remember when or where I read my first copy of Ebony Magazine. It was surely sometime in the late 1950s, though. How would I have found a copy in my segregated world of Virginia Beach, Virginia back then? It wasn't until 1959 that the schools in nearby Norfolk where integrated and then just barely. I grew up in a white Southern world with little knowledge of black people beyond their roles as cooks and maids. It's almost impossible to describe the effect of a background like that had on me. No, it is impossible.

                                                                             

In any case, somehow I got my hands on a copy of Ebony. (I later subscribed.) Now, I would venture to say that most white people never read Ebony in the 1950s and 1960s and probably still don't. It was really Life Magazine for black people. It was, basically, a way to show all aspects of black life in America, from the heralded high achievers to the everyday ordinary man and woman. It had an agenda, and that was to always show the positive side of black life in America. It didn't shy away from speaking up about civil rights, but that wasn't its main purpose, at least as I saw it.

Later, I even read Succeeding Against the Odds, the autobiography of Ebony's founder, John H. Johnson.  It's good.  By the way, when Johnson learned that 12% of his readers were white, he wasn't especially pleased.  "I want to be king of the black hill," he said, "not the mixed hill."  Sorry, Mr. Johnson!  I'm staying!

Looking into Ebony for me was like taking a trip to a foreign land. It was absolutely transfixing. Why? Because I saw black men and women, black families, doing the same things my family did. I had never seen that before. I saw black people in advertisements--with no white people. I saw them getting on airplanes, drinking Ballentine's Scotch, using Listerine, buying Goodyear Tires, ordering a Bell Telephone, using a GE hairdryer. Only someone who grew up in the segregated South as I did would understand how powerful this was.  The simple fact is that I knew nothing about how black men and women and their children lived.

                                                                           

                                                                                   

                                                                              

                                                                               

There was normally a story about a famous black person--Sammy Davis, Jr, Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte, Ralph Bunche, Marian Anderson and so on.

                                                                                

But there were many more stories that didn't make the national news, the stories of a high school baseball coach, a stock car driver, a construction foreman, a ballet instructor, the head of a reform school. My favorite department was "Speaking of People." It was a section that featured small but significant successes of ordinary people. This, more than anything, made a permanent impression on me. Here you had people who were just ordinary folks, doing well at what they did in just about every way you could imagine. I loved that part of the magazine.

                                                                      

Only drawback: Ebony had a disappointing recipe/cooking section, "A Date with a Dish". It was like many of the other cooking sections in magazines of that era, and that was the problem. With such an amazing tradition to draw from, the dishes were incredibly bland and ordinary. I knew how good it could be! It continued that way far into the era of Gourmet Magazine. Alas!

                                                                               

Well, can't have everything. The fact is, I read Ebony regularly from about 1959 to 1969. It influenced me, enlightened me, entertained me and surprised me. I don't read it anymore. I hardly read any magazines anymore. I'm glad it's still with us, though. And I wonder if there are many others like me who, through Ebony, crossed the color line when you simply couldn't any other way. And were the better for it.

Phil Deaver 1946-2018

Phil Deaver died April 29^th.  A mutual friend called me with the news.  I saw him for the last time two years ago, in the spring of 2016, when I went to visit him in Florida.    

Thinking about him, I summon up one of the sweetest men I have even known, full of good intentions and humor.  Fiction was everything to him, a religion.  He worshipped great fiction writers, especially living ones.  Ann Beattie was a good friend.  He loved Robert Stone and Richard Ford.  He was a fiction writer, to his very core.   His first book, Silent Retreats, a book of short stories, won the Flannery O’Connor Award in the late 1980s.  He had published a book of poems, How Men Pray, and an anthology about baseball.  I always thought he was a better poet than maybe he thought he was or wanted people to think he was.  I liked his poetry very much, and I remember how proud he was when Garrison Keillor chose one of his poems to read on The Writer’s Almanac.

He was a great friend, loyal and caring.  He was a complex man, and he wore his worries and insecurities on his sleeve.  I remember him at Spalding University, in Louisville, where we both taught, how nervous he was among people there, how insecure, wanting to be with people he knew and trusted.  He would insist on eating with just three or four people. You couldn’t help but love him and feel protective of him, he was so human. 

His father and grandfather had been killed in an automobile accident when he was 18, and that changed him forever and haunted him forever.  He told me the story of that day many times, with a matter-of-fact solemnity to it, and I often felt I was there with him when he returned home that day to hear the news from his sister.  This was the defining moment of his life, and it never was far from his mind or heart. He worshiped his father, who was a doctor in a small town in Illinois, until his life was cut short.

Phil was raised Catholic, and I don’t think he ever left his faith, despite what he might have claimed.  It was deeply there. He had a sense of Catholic guilt about him.  He told me that after his father died a group of Catholic elders from his town took him on a silent retreat.  It meant a great deal to him.  It’s not a coincidence that his first book is titled Silent Retreats.  He had a distinct way of talking, a Midwestern drawl with a slow cadence often leading to a bright punctuation of emphasis. He was rooted in the Midwest. 

I visited him twice in Florida before he became ill.  He arranged a reading for me at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, where he taught, and also at a local bookstore.  The bookstore reading was lightly attended, and he was mortified.  It didn’t bother me that much, having read at quite a few lightly-attended events in my time, but I know how he must have felt.  I’ve arranged readings that were sparsely attended.  You feel like you’ve let the reader down.  He hadn’t, of course.  Phil helped other writers, too.  He did everything he could through Rollins to aid writers he admired or who he felt were deserving.  I remember he brought in a young writer from New Orleans, who had been our student at Spalding, so she could meet with one of her literary heroes, Jamaica Kincaid.  This to me is what separates many writers from others.  Those who, like Phil, use whatever influence and funds they have, no to mention encouragement, to help emerging writers flourish and those who claim they will help, and don’t. When Phil pledged his help, he kept that pledge.  He was always enthusiastic about of my work, in more ways than one.

Phil (r) and me

He and I use to play a ridiculous sort of game where we posed as 1950’s TV cowboy heroes. I was the Cisco Kid, and he was Lash LaRue.  Which became simply, Cisco and Lash.  We had great fun with that.  We'd begin our letters to each other "Dear Lash" or "Dear Cisco." It meant something to us—that 1950s TV culture that helped raise us in a dull dry era.  It was some of the little romance America had back then.  We still had the Wild West.  We were intrigued by Lash.  He used a bullwhip to subdue the bad guys.  Think about it. 

He loved his children immensely and was immensely proud of them.  He went through hard times after he and his first wife divorced.  I loved to hear him tell the story of when he was absolutely broke.  I mean NO money.  He had his children for Christmas or Thanksgiving—forget which—and he didn’t have enough money to buy them a proper dinner.  He went to a gas station where they also sold fried chicken in a store run by the station.  The man who pumped the gas wouldn’t let him use his gas card to buy the chicken, so he had to return home with no food.  Imagine. And he told me the story of being arrested and going to jail for a night or two. I was jealous of that.  Phil was not a coarse man in any way.  He never talked about sex.  He rarely swore.  Baseball—he loved baseball.  A St. Louis Cardinals fan.  He would go to spring training games in Florida.  

When I heard from Susan Lilley, his wife at the time, that Phil had suffered a brain disorder, and that, as she put it, the old Phil was slipping away, I wanted to visit him before he slipped away altogether.  So, I went to Florida in the spring of 2016 to see him for a few days.  It was a sad trip.  Part of him was indeed gone, and I think that may be one of the saddest things that can happen to someone we love, to have their corporal selves there, right before you, unchanged, but to have the soul, the self, or much of the self, missing.  It didn’t make sense to me—there we were in his house where we had once laughed and bantered for hours—and I kept looking for Phil, the man with who I liked and admired so much and who was a wonderful friend, to appear, but he was not to be found. 

Fiction was sacred to him.  He was haunted by his Flannery O’Connor Award, weighed down by the burden of promise that honor bestowed on him and not producing another book.  So, when he published a new book of short stories, Forty Martyrs, in 2016, a fine book, just a month or so before I visited him, he, and all his friends and admirers, were relieved and happy.  His good friend Ann Beattie loved the stories.  Phil showed me a letter from her praising the book unreservedly, and he was immensely proud of that praise, which was so clearly sincere, as he should have been.  I have an autographed copy.  The dedication to his book reads,

                                                In memory of my father,

                                                 Philip F. Deaver, M.D.

                                                        1920-1964

Commencing with the simplest things--death

I was cleaning the apartment the other day and had Pandora tuned to the Bill Monroe station.  So it was country, it was bluegrass music, of the truest kind.

I listened for close to an hour.  Then something made me stop and listen to Ralph Stanley sing "Who Will Sing for Me."  Here's the first verse:

Oft I sing for my friends
When death's cold hand I see
When I reach my journey's end
Who will sing one song for me?

Then it struck me--and this is certainly not an original observation--how boldly and movingly country music talks about death.  There are so many great, poignant songs about death in country music.  The most famous is probably "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" by the Carter Family.  This is the first verse of that song:

I was standing by my window
On one cold and cloudy day
When I saw the hearse come rolling
For to carry my mother away.

Country music faces death.  Looks it straight in the eye.  Fears it.  Respects it.  It doesn't serve up any "Death, Be Not Proud" hokum.  (John Donne, it does not work.)

Those people--and here I mean the purebreds, the mountain singers, those from deep in the hollers where there isn't an un-genuine note--tell the truth.  That music will send chills down your spine.  It can be stark, but it's always true, the best of it.

Stark.  What is more stark than death?  I want to look it in the eye.  (Not for too long!)  I want death to know--I see you.  I know I will meet you one day.  And you will prevail.  These songs help me with that.  They give me courage. (And, yes, I am afraid.)  Especially at seventy-two, when I'm starting to hear footsteps.

Ralph Stanley wrote the most chilling, wonderful song about death.  He sings it unaccompanied, a capella, just that pure mountain voice of his.  It's called "O Death."  Some of the lyrics are below.  Nobody looked at death more clear-eyed than he.  But you have to listen to him sing the song. (Click here to do just that.)   It's something I can't describe.

Death, be proud.  Ralph Stanley wrote a killer song about you.

O, Death
O, Death
Won't you spare me over til another year
Well what is this that I can't see
With ice cold hands takin' hold of me
Well I am death, none can excel
I'll open the door to heaven or hell
Whoa, death someone would pray
Could you wait to call me another day?

Ralph Stanley

The Goncourt Brothers

They were Edmond (1822-96) and Jules (1830-70). They lived and worked in Paris as writers. They were inseparable.  

Their Journals, which they wrote together, are a delight to read, especially for a writer. They are chock-full of firsthand anecdotes about the era’s giant literary figures—Flaubert, Zola, Daudet, and so on. It was there that I read: "Flaubert told us that while writing the description of the poisoning scene of Madame Bovary, he had felt a pain as if he had a copper plate in his stomach, a pain which had made him vomit twice over."

Everything was fine until Jules (on the right) became very ill, possibly with MS.  Gradually, he became less able to fend for himself. Starting in 1870, the Journals were solely written by Edmond. Jules was no longer able to write. On April 18th, Edmond wrote about his deteriorating brother:

   "To witness, day by day, the destruction of everything that once went to mark out this young man…to see him emptying the salt-cellar over his fish, holding his fork in both hands, eating like a child, is too much for me to bear."

Then, this scene, which Edmond recorded on June 11:

   "We had nearly finished dinner at a restaurant.  The waiter brought him a bowl.  He used it clumsily.  People started looking at us. I said to him rather impatiently: 'Be careful, old fellow, please, or I shan’t be able to take you out to dinner any more.'  He promptly burst into tears, crying 'It’s not my fault, it’s not my fault!' And his tense, trembling hand sought mine on the tablecloth. 'It’s not my fault', he went on. 'I know how it upsets you, but I often want to and I can’t.' And his hand squeezed mine with a pitiful 'Forgive me'.

 "Then both of us started crying into our napkins in front of the astonished diners." 

Though it wasn't old age that killed Jules, the gradual helplessness that comes with growing old, accompanied by the various mind-destroying diseases that many of will face, seems, from everything I've seen, exactly the same. I look to my past to see my future. Who will be there to be tender toward me in my decline?

Audrey Meadows

I read that Sheila MacRae died on Thursday. She was the second Alice Kramden on "The Honeymooners," that wonderfully stark comedy that was part of the Jackie Gleason Show. I don't think I ever saw MacRae in the role of Alice. But I did see the original Alice, Audrey Meadows.  And thereby hangs a tale.

The original show, starred Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, a Brooklyn bus driver; Audrey Meadows as his wife, Alice; Art Carney as his upstairs neighbor, Ed Norton and Joyce Randolph as Ed's wife, Trixie. It was filmed live and ran—and I have a hard time believing this—for just one year. The show was set in the Kramden's apartment in Brooklyn and gave a whole new meaning to minimalism. The program was in black and white. The characters dressed plainly—Ralph in his bus driver's uniform, Norton wearing a white T-shirt and vest and a battered hat, Alice and Trixie in housewives dresses.
                                                                 

Ralph, Norton and Alice

I could go on, but that would make this post far longer that it should be and deviate from the aforementioned hanging tale.  But you do need to know—if you never saw the show—that Alice—Audrey Meadows—had the most dry, deadpan responses to Ralph's absurd demands. And that nasalized beauty of a voice of hers! Our family watched it. Millions did. And for me, a kid in 1950s southeastern Virginia, this was like being transported to a kind of Baghdad on a flying carpet with rabbit ears.

I guess I was about ten. I remember my mother gathered the three of us kids—my brother, sister and I—together one afternoon and said, "We're going to have a very special guest tonight. I want you to be on your best behavior."

The special guest was Audrey Meadows.

And why was Audrey Meadows coming to our house at 107 63rd Street in Virginia Beach, Virginia?  Because, as it turned out, she was married to a good friend of my father's. Now, you have to understand that the only Audrey Meadows we knew was Alice Kramden, and she was a plain woman--sharp as she was, she was still plain. In any case, I remember that when she and her husband arrived, we had already changed into out pajamas. The four adults had dinner, and then we—including a friend of my brothers' who was spending the night—were allowed to come down and meet Miss Meadows.
                                                                          

Audrey Meadows

And this is who we saw. The woman in the picture here. A princess. A genuine princess. She had long, lush strawberry blonde hair. I didn't know the word lush then, but that's what it was. I remember she was sitting on our rug, her legs to the side as if sidesaddle. She wore a lovely crinoline dress that rustled when she shifted. I had never seen anyone as beautiful. When she saw us, she smiled.  Just like in the picture here. Only she was animated, and sweet, and kind.

"Come on down, all of you!" she said. And we did.  Introductions were made. The friend of my brother's had broken his foot recently and wore a cast. When she saw that, she said, "What happened to you? Did you break your foot?" Our little friend was so shy he almost disappeared into himself.

"Come over here," she said. Sit next to me," she said. He did, changing colors rapidly as if he were a magic trick.

"Now, look here," she said. And she raised her many-layered skirt up an inch or so to reveal her knee. "Do you see that? she asked out friend. I don't think he could stand to look. "See that scar?  I broke my leg when I was a little girl. It was before the doctors knew what they do now, and so they left me with this scar."

"Ok, now, all of you," my mother said, "scoot upstairs and go to bed."

We walked upstairs and before disappearing into our rooms turned around. And Audrey Meadows waved a big wave at us and threw us all a kiss that, sometimes, when I close my eyes and reach back in my mind, I still feel today.

Vietnam story: Judy Hartline Elbring

As we all know, books can change lives. This is a case in point. When I found Women in Vietnam: The Oral History, edited by Ron Steinman, that's exactly what happened. I'd read quite a few books about Vietnam—the war of my generation—but I hadn't read a thing about the women who served there, most particularly the nurses. I stayed up half the night reading the testimonies of the nurses Steinman interviewed who served in Vietnam.  All the nurses' stories are stories of courage, but one nurse's story struck me especially deeply: Judy Hartline Elbring's.

Elbring volunteered to go toVietnam in 1967. (All nurses in Vietnam were volunteers.) She might have been shocked by what she encountered, but, as she told Steinman, "There wasn't time to be scared. There wasn't time to worry about anything except the immediate job at hand."  
                                                                        

Then she saw what it was really like.:

"To see a kid who's not that much younger than I am. He's my brother's age, and some of them are younger. They're eighteen and nineteen years old, and they're kids and they're skinny and they've been in the jungle too long and they haven't eaten well and the bones in their face show, and their uniforms are dirty and they smell bad, and now they're going to die. 

"I remember after we were through work and had done all we needed to do, there would always be a few of them that were behind a curtain in the area where we used to keep them. I would go back there with them, and I would pet them until they died because, I was like their mother, their sister, their girlfriend. I would stay with them until they died, because too many of them died alone, and that's not right. That's just not right."
                                                                              

Judy Hartline Elbring

So some of you mothers who lost sons in Vietnam, know that it might be that Judy Hartline Elbring was there with your boy, easing him into his dying, helping him in his hour of being taken away, so that he didn't make that journey alone.

She came home. She wore her uniform, and she was vilified. So she stopped wearing it. "There was no one to talk to about this." Nevertheless, she went back for a second tour. Her brother, a marine, was going to Vietnam, and she wanted to be there in case he was wounded. He was, and she was able, because of her rank as a captain and simply because of her will, to be airlifted to his base and to take care of him. 

She came home again. Then, the ensuing years. "I was just a nurse. I did my duty as I needed to do my duty. But what I didn't get was that I hadn't been welcomed home, and if that's important to me, it's got to be important for other women too. I had no idea this was still affecting me. I had no idea that not saying anything could carry this long a toll on me, on anyone. The part that scares me is, how many women are sitting on their anger, are sitting on their sadness?"
 
She ends her account with the picture in her mind of boy who died, a boy for whom she could do nothing. "He stays with me. I don't know why he stays with me, but he does. He comes back in my dreams. They're helpless dreams in a way. They're all the things I can't do anything about. I would love to be somebody's good dream. Oh God, wouldn't that be wonderful? I'd be very proud to be somebody's good dream."

I was so haunted by her qualities, I went and found her on the web. She lives in California, and she and her husband run an organization called Life Partners that helps couples with their relationships. I sent her a fan letter. She replied with a handwritten letter thanking me. So I had more than I ever could wish for: a letter from my new hero. I’m sure, through the years, she’s been more than one young wounded soldier's good dream.     
                                                     

Vietnam Women's Memorial

Mary

Beloved sister.

Want to take out a loan of time so I can have some more to thank you for everything you've done.  For me, yes.  But far more for others.

So self-effacing you are, so modest.

Sister, you need to know how much you've done, how much you've given.  So many are takers (raise my hand), but you give, give, give.

If I were the great award giver, the great announcer of accomplishments, this is what I would say:

Tonight we are honoring Mary Downs, who has tirelessly, her whole life, put others before her, who has made the world a kinder more compassionate place, who has lifted us higher, who has showed us the better angels of our nature.
                                                                         

Gentle, kind and unstinting in your search to provide comfort and a haven to those, human and animal, who can't provide it for themselves.

Luminous spirit and soul.  I've learned goodness from you.  Or tried to.

Oh Diana!

In the late 1970s, I belonged to the Midtown Squash Club in New York City.  It was a great little club.

One of the members was Diana Nyad.

She wasn't Diana with a capital D then, but she was getting there.  She was an amazing athlete to watch.  In incredible shape with a fierce drive and whiplash power in her stroke. I loved to watch her play.  Everyone knew her.   

But we didn't know what she would become.  A world-class squash player? An Olympic athlete of some kind?  The first woman to summit Everest?  All I know is that she put me in awe.

Through the years I heard about her from time to time.  I don't recall under what circumstances.  But then she began this Cuba to Florida swim, trying and trying.  She came front and center into the news.

I saw that she was on Twitter, so in the spring of 2012 I contacted her and told her I used to watch her play squash years go and that I loved watching her.  She replied.  "1970's huh?  Time sure flies."  We exchanged, oh, maybe five or six tweets.  It was such a treat to be "talking to her."

And now she's done it.  She tried and tried and if at first she didn't succeed, she did.

                                                           

And what did she say when she emerged from the water after 50-some hours in the ocean swimming?

"You're never too old to pursue your dreams."

She's sixty-four!                              

Georgia

Look at this woman.

She was beautiful when she was young.  But she had a haunting, defiant beauty when she was old.

She always did, always could, look a person in the eye.

She went to New Mexico, to the desert. She bought a house in 1940 and lived there until she died at 98, in 1986.

She had that essential rarefied beauty of the bleached skulls she loved to paint.

It doesn’t matter what you think of her paintings.  She was an artist in a man's world.  She did what she wanted to do and how she wanted to do it.  That was character.

I'd like to have a face with that rugged simplicity in my very old age.