TomFoodery

Memories of Augusta

2010-11-10T14:48:00.000-08:00

Our cat Augusta has been dead for two months now, but I still think about her every day. From time to time I write down memories of her. Here are some of them, in the order in which they came to me--no order at all, I guess.

Some unspeakable villain abandoned this tiny six-week-old kitten in deep snow on December 1st or 2nd, 1995, at the head of the driveway of the West Boulder Ranch, my home in Montana, where Elizabeth had only recently come to live with me. We knew that the kitten had come the whole quarter-mile down the drive because later in the day I backtracked, following her little footprint in the snow.

I had been in the tractor barn when I saw a little black animal dart behind something. I pursued it and eventually captured the terrified kitten.

The daughter of our ranch manager was visiting at the time, and she wanted to adopt her. At first we said fine. Then we learned that the little girl already had two cats, and she lived with her mother in what in Montana is known as a trailer house, and her mother did not want another cat. Thus by default the kitten became ours.

We named her Augusta in honor of P. G. Wodehouse’s priceless character Augustus (Gussie) Fink-Nottle. We thought we were going to call her Gussie, but she soon displayed a sort of dignified self-possession to which her full name seemed better suited.

I cut down a cardboard box and filled it with dirt and leaf duff for a temporary litter box, and she knew right away what it was for. When I went to the refrigerator to get some milk and to look for something for her to eat, she stood in front of it with her little stump of a tail vibrating. We now knew she had been raised in a household. Well, I say raised: When we took her to the vet for a checkup and vaccination, he estimated her age at six weeks.

The iron rule was that she would not be allowed to sleep in the bedroom. That lasted two days. We had made her a little bed, but when we moved it into the bedroom—after two nights of the most pitiful mewing—she was not interested. With great politeness she curled up at the foot of our bed, between our feet, and did not come farther toward our heads.

Her two favorite toys both came from a pet shop in Billings. The best of her life, by far, was the Anchovy Mouse, a hardish plastic cylinder with a rattle of some sort inside and covered with supposedly anchovy-scented orange and green fake fur. She adored it. Played with it for years, long after it had lost its smell. I tried and tried to find another one but never could—couldn’t even find anyone who had ever heard of such a thing.

The other was the Spider Ball, an adaptation of the Furry Spider after she had pulled off most of its black pipe-cleaner legs. I wound the legs into a fuzzy black ball that rolled well and bounced well. Hannah Hinchman told us that cats could be taught to retrieve. When Augusta was on the bed in the morning, we would throw the Spider Ball and she would chase it, and sometimes, by God, she would bring it back. With lavish praise, she began to get the idea. She never really learned to retrieve with any consistency, but then we didn’t try to teach her with any real consistency either. But she did continue to love to chase the Spider Ball, and I believe I made at least a couple of others over the years.

She liked to go outside, but she never liked the snow. I remember so well one time when she was quite little when she came back in the back door (through the kitchen bathroom) crying pitifully, with snow packed between the little black pads of her toes. We held them and melted it out.

When Elizabeth and I came back from our honeymoon in July 1996, we found to our immense dismay that our ranch manager’s idiot niece, whom we had hired to live in the house and take care of Augusta, had abandoned the job after five days and gone home to Wyoming. For the rest of the time we were away, the manager’s idiot son came over and fed her and from time to time cleaned out her litter box, but never did anything more. Six-month-old Augusta had basically been ignored for a month, left alone except to be fed. We always believed that this isolation powerfully influence her subsequent fear of strangers.

And as I look back over my appointment calendar for December 1995 and the first five months of 1996, I find that we ourselves were away a great deal. In fact we left Augusta for the first time on December 19—seventeen days after we first laid eyes on her. We left her in the care of the little girl who had wanted to keep her, in fact, in that cat-packed trailer outside of Big Timber.

We went to New York for what seems to have been a week in February 1996. We went to Mexico for a week in March. San Francisco, a week in April. New York in May. It seems we bear some responsibility for Augusta’s loneliness too.

Shame on us. And yet—we could have been worse. Many cats have suffered much worse fates. Yeah, and so have said, through the ages, jailers, sadists, freaks, pederasts, torturers....And yet: However much she may have been neglected, mayn’t she have slept through much of the time in those times—hours, days—in some confidence that we would be coming back, that she was loved, that love was the fundamental condition of her existence?—because her existence was fundamentally social and we were her society in toto. She did seem to be able to sleep through dull nothingness, like long car trips. Can we say that she could do the same in our long absences. Well, wishes are horses and beggars can ride. No?

I can say that she never knew resentment, never showed anger or peevishness on our return, only gladness: going up and down between the dining room chair legs on tiptoe, back arched, wanting to be pulled out (even if gripping the rug with her claws) and held and touched and talked to—shy, but so glad to see us.

Sometimes when we came home, especially in later years, she would wake up from sleep so deep that she would appear at the top of the stairs blinking as if coming out of a dark cave. Is that really you, at long last? And then she would find herself, get into gear, bop down the stairs, full of beans, shining gladness, herself again, Augusta. Good kitty. Happy kitty.

Sometimes she would hide behind the dining room curtains with her tail sticking out.

Sometimes she would be stuck in a closet all day and never let out a peep. When you opened the door, out she would stroll.

When I was sick or sad, she always knew, and always came to be with me on the bed. If I felt broken-hearted, her manner was especially gentle. The worse I felt, the closer she would come—even to my face.

She was always gentle. Gentleness may have been her essential quality.

Lying in the sun. How when the sun came from behind her it showed that she was in fact, secretly, a striped cat! Brown and darker brown. This always amazed me.

She did not much like being picked up until her last couple of weeks alive, but sometimes, despite herself, she would put a paw over your shoulder and let herself be carried like a baby. In early years, she would really struggle, no matter how benign your purpose.

Motel insanity. Kitty Valium in Nevada: bumping into the furniture, falling off the bed, yowling all night.

Sniffing your extended index finger as a morning greeting in bed—always almost as if it were new.

Walking the upstairs banister tra la la, no slightest worry of falling.

Rarely: locked out of the house and hollering like a banshee.

In a quiet room, the unmistakable sound of Augusta coming at a trot: bup bup bup bup.

Concomitant: She always knew the sound of either Elizabeth or me or both coming up the front steps, and always would come to greet us.

Especially when she was young, she would plunge into laundry fresh and warm from the dryer and bury herself inside. She always loved to lie in laundry even when it wasn’t warm.

In middle years, when I peed she would put her paws on the rim of the toilet and watch where the stream hit the water. When it stopped, she jumped down immediately.

When she was really licking her butt good, she would raise one back leg to a perfect vertical, as if in yoga, beautifully displaying those four little black pads.

Augusta knew when and how to look you in the eye—in what I think of as a human way, to connect, to see what you’re thinking, not the “animal” way which is a challenge: She would check to see how you were feeling, what was going on between the two of you.

Sleeping in a near-perfect circle with her head totally upside down. Even, sometimes, on the bed next to me: That was real security.

When she saw the brush in your hand, more often than not she would “assume the position.” You would say, “brushing?”—she knew the word well—and you could see her whole body relax into that sphinx posture, facing away from you, head high, ready.

Jumping up on the dining table and biting the flowers, especially if they were tulips. She didn’t want to eat them—she just wanted to annoy us slightly. It was like messing with the rubber monkey on my desk when I was working, just to bug me.

So many times, in Montana, my heart would sink when I, or we, called and called, “Augusta! Augusta! Au-gusss-taaaa...!” and she would not come, damn her. The heart-sinking was always premature, of course, because she always did come (except for the few times when she was stuck somewhere—up a cottonwood tree all night, chased into a culvert by coyotes, etc.).

At last, in the sunset light, she would come bounding, glad, and oh! I was gladder (she had no idea), in arcs over the tall grass, black arcs over the gold green, her eyes at the top of each arc calibrating all the necessary information: where I was, the house, the fence, the light, the distance, perhaps her joy, perhaps even the joy between us, the joy we shared in those moments as she came closer, closer. Those eager eyes. Augusta! Piece of shit! Do you realize how we’ve been worrying? Well, of course not.

Especially once we had moved to Bush Street, Augusta particularly liked to have company when she used her litter box. Often she would wait until both Elizabeth and I were in the kitchen, especially if she needed to poop.

There came a time in her last couple of years—it may have had to do with some change in the food we were giving her—when her shit smelled unbelievably foul. Sometimes, moreover, it was liquidy, goopy. The stench could fill the kitchen and soon the whole downstairs within minutes, and so naturally we would scoop up the poop and bag it up and get it the hell out of the house in a hurry. This embarrassed Augusta, and often then, after delivering a particularly stinky one, she would dive through her cat door, fleeing outside. I don’t think it was that she minded the smell herself—she was ashamed that it bothered us so much.

Augusta loved a sandbox freshly scooped and combed smooth. Best of all was when, roughly monthly, we threw out the old sand, washed the litter box thoroughly, and filled it deep with new, preferably unscented Arm & Hammer cat litter. She could hardly wait to get in and christen it with a big fresh poop.

She loved cereal milk—the milk left when we finished our breakfast cereal. Elizabeth believed that her particular vocalization when she knew it was coming—and she did have one—actually sounded like “milk,” and, well, it sort of did. Sometimes she would sneak onto the table and start lapping it up right there if she thought she could get away with it, and sometimes she could.

Augusta never bit anybody, except Elizabeth, and that was only for fun. Elizabeth was actually somewhat horrified, and yet she also played along, half playing, half serious. This was almost always in the morning, when Elizabeth would be wearing a robe and slippers. Augusta’s favorite targets were her ankles or, if the slippers were backless, her heels. She would follow with her tail straight up and her head already cocked sideways and her mouth partway open, ready to nip. Oh, how she loved to do it! At other times, when scolded or otherwise discouraged—sometimes Elizabeth would drop a newspaper on the floor in front of her, wham! which really did set her back—Augusta would then settle for biting the hem of Elizabeth’s robe. Never once did she try this with me, or anybody else.

Sometimes, when Elizabeth bent over her, Augusta would bite her hair.

There was a particular look on her face when she was thinking about starting a round of the biting gam . We called it, naturally, bitey. Uh oh, she’s looking bitey.

Of course she loved to hunt, especially when she was young. In Montana there were mice and voles and other little mammals, which she would often torture before finally gulping them down in two bites. In San Francisco, when we first moved to Bush Street in 1998, the basement of the house next door was infested with rats, and Augusta kept coming into our house with tiny baby ones in her mouth, very not dead. It was an unspeakably filthy place, full of rotting old furniture, broken bicycles, darkness. We soon closed it off so she couldn’t get in.

In both Montana and San Francisco there were always birds, and she loved to kill them too. She could bat a hummingbird out of the air on the fly. And would chomp it and swallow it quickly. Other birds took a little more work, and she would ultimately pull them in half before swallowing them; she never really chewed them particularly, just got them in her mouth and swallowed them down, beak, feet, feathers and all.

My favorite one was the mourning dove she brought into the house one day very much alive but firmly clamped in her mouth. It looked as if it was three-quarters as big as she was, and she held it with such grace and pride she reminded me of a retriever dog. It wasn’t long before she released the bird, and the epic chase began. She caught it repeatedly, and released it again and again. At first it was fun to watch, but after a while the poor bird was bleeding all over everything and I was seriously trying to catch it. I didn’t want to spoil her hunt altogether, but I did think that the coup de grace might just as well take place outside. In the event, I was able to catch the dove only as it was near death from shock, perched on the rim of the bathtub.

Augusta did not appreciate the interference, but politely followed her dove outside and made swift work of its dispatching. She didn't eat it.

Forward into the Past in Quest of Craig Claiborne

2010-11-06T14:37:00.000-07:00

I've been continuing to cook my way into Craig Claiborne's mind. Amanda Hesser's new Essential New York Times Cookbook reprints a ton of his recipes, and she has done an excellent job of choosing particularly evocative ones. For some longtime Brit friends last night I did Claiborne's roast filet of beef with bordelaise sauce. Filet is generally deprecated as mushy and flavorless, but that which I got from the Golden Gate Meat Company--which really does have the best of everything--was dry-aged and firm and luscious (and organic and amazingly expensive).

For the sauce I cheated a bit by using Golden Gate's veal stock, which they make completely according to the rules. It's a very easy sauce once you've got that. You just reduce some red wine with shallots down to a goo, combine it with the stock, and reduce that slowly till it's saucy-ish. At that point it seemed a little sour and a little bitter, so I strained out the shallots, which had gotten kind of pickly; then I added a wee tad of sugar, which did the trick.

The meat cooks very fast indeed--I barely caught it at 125 in the fat end after only fifteen minutes. After a good twenty-minute rest, however, it was uniformly rosy straight through. A few tablespoons of butter gave my bordelaise the body it needed, and bingo, that was one hell of a roast beef.

Per person I served also one carrot roasted golden brown and one ratte potato roasted crisp in butter, and that austere plate looked like something that Craig would have approved.

And now I've been thinking in the opposite direction--toward a future, this one most likely altogether hypothetical because it looks as if we're not going to be cooking a Thanksgiving dinner this year and even if we were, Elizabeth would never tolerate this menu. My idea was not one of these deconstructions that are so fashionable these days but rather an extrapolation of the basic American Thanksgiving stuff into classical French dishes. Or mostly or sort of. Hence this menu, which also postulates a bunch of staff, which of course is not in the cards either:

*

Consommé de dinde aux gnocchi di ricotta, di potiron, and de truffe noire.

Salad of “sticks”—puntarelle, celery, carrot, fennel, maybe fried bucatini, all dropped haphazard on the plate like “52 pickup” and dressed with walnut oil, lime juice, and salt.

With the first two courses, Champagne.

*

Blanquette de dinde à l’ancienne, aux trompettes de la mort; sauce à la crème et à la truffe blanche.

Three purées: chestnut, turnip, and carrot.

Candied crisp-roasted cranberries.

Cornbread “crackers.”

With this, a Rhine auslese.

*

Three blue cheeses: Humboldt Fog, Roquefort, and Stilton, each with a different honey; plain bread. With a young Port or an older Sauternes.

*

Warren pear, candied huckleberries, licorice. With eau de vie de Poire.

A nice nap.

MEMO TO WRITERS, RESTAURATEURS, CHEFS, AND WAITERS

2010-10-06T10:59:00.000-07:00

Please, ladies and gentlemen:

1) My heroine, mentor, and sweetheart Dorothy Kalins recently told me she was making a list of certain words that need to be flushed entirely out of the food world. Mine, or a beginning of one, is below. I’m sure there are others besides the ones here, and I’d love to hear from anyone who’d like to contribute to this Hall of Shame:

über-[anything] (usually misspelled “uber-” without the umlaut)
program (e.g., “cocktail program”)
crispy (the word is crisp, people)
veggie
rustic
decadent
eponymous
[anything]-centric

2) There are also words that every person in the food world damn well ought to how to pronounce and even to spell. And yet, it seems, rather many do not know:

sommelier: In a highly regarded new restaurant in San Francisco the other night, the waiter repeated what seems to have become the egregiously widespread howler in which the word sounds like that benighted nation on the Horn of Africa. It is pronounced, in American, roughly, súmmle-yay. Not Somalia.

mascarpone: In a restaurant review in the New York Times of October 6, 2010, under the byline of the rightly renowned Sam Sifton—I must believe that this was not his but an editor’s error—the word was misspelled as it is so often so painfully mispronounced, as marscapone. Whether or not you decide to append the Italian é sound at the end, please just pay attention to the order of the consonants at the beginning: mas-car, preferably with a broad a so as not to rhyme with NASCAR.

restaurateur: There is no n in this word. If you’ve been saying it wrong all your life, it may take some practice, but you will feel a great endorphin rush when at last it becomes effortless.

granità: As the grave accent, so often missing from menus and hence from minds, makes clear, the emphasis is on the third syllable, not the second.

panino: An Italian sandwich. Two of them are panini. No matter how many of them you’re talking about, they are never paninis.

ravioli et al.: Here admittedly things get complicated. In Italian it’s a plural word, as is spaghetti. In American, however, by long usage, both have become pretty much singular. “Ravioli is one of my favorite dishes” doesn’t sound wrong to me. But “He makes these great white truffle raviolis” hurts. An American person wishing not to sound subliterate would do well to treat the word ravioli as both singular and plural according to context, and never to tack on that tacky s.

CULINARY TIME TRAVEL

2010-09-29T17:15:00.000-07:00

Research for my biography of Craig Claiborne, if I’m really going to have a feel for the world he knew, entails quite a bit of cooking—cooking the food that Craig knew and loved.

His tastes were wide-ranging. He was the first to bring authentic regional Italian cooking to this country: He introduced an unknown housewife named Marcella Hazan to the American public. He co-wrote (with Virginia Lee) the first American cookbook of genuine Chinese cuisine. Before Craig, the only Americans who had ever heard of the food of Sichuan were those of Chinese heritage. Vietnamese, Indian, Brazilian, and a dozen more—they were either unfamiliar or entirely unknown before Craig Claiborne wrote about them in the New York Times.

The way he did it, most of the time, would be to write features about experts raised in the particular traditions, like Marcella. They would come to his house and cook, and he would take meticulous notes. For all but his earliest years at the paper, the translation of those notes into recipes manageable in a home kitchen was mainly the work of Pierre Franey, a French chef who had been trained in the pure classic tradition but who could cook absolutely anything, and beautifully. It took Craig years of struggle to persuade the Times to give Pierre a co-byline, and even then it always read, “by Craig Claiborne [then a second line in a smaller font] with Pierre Franey.”

Because Craig was gay, a lot of people just assumed that he and Pierre were a couple, which drove Pierre and his wife and his three kids nuts. But they were a great team nonetheless, and although they enjoyed their adventures in the foods of the world, Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey considered traditional French cuisine to stand above all others.

And so that’s what I’ve been cooking. It is not easy to do. I started learning it—from Julia Volume One and the New York Times Cookbook (by C. Claiborne)—forty years ago, and I am still very far from mastering the art. But I dare say that a great many young tatted, shaved, and hardwared chefs who pride themselves on dazzling the palates of San Franciscans and New Yorkers couldn’t do a much better sole in white wine with mushrooms than...well, okay, maybe they could do it as well as I can, but they’d never try. Too boring. Too tame.

Of course they couldn’t really taste it. Their own palates have long since been bludgeoned into near-insensibility by overdoses of salt, capsaicin, and other toxins otherwise useful when modestly used.

They can throw together fried pig’s ears and peach confit, pasta with cockscombs and barely dead crustaceans, they can build towers of color, layers of ooze and crunch, shocks of habañero in smears of maple syrup, and maybe you’ll still taste whatever the dish is allegedly about—was it duck, was it fish?—but let ’em try sole with white wine and mushrooms and get it just right.

I got it just right the first time. I’m not bragging; I was lucky. Then there was the second time, to be described in due course. A dish like this is so sensitive to even the smallest errors. There is nowhere to hide. You can’t amp it up with fennel pollen and asparagus foam.

Okay, here’s the dish. For two.

I got glistening-fresh filets of petrale sole from the San Francisco Fish Company, in the Ferry Building, where they sell nothing but the sustainable and best. I had always been rather a snob about Pacific flatfish—too flabby, too soft compared to Atlantic flounders, which in turn of course can’t hold a candle to Dover or Mediterranean sole—but petrale is great if you treat it like the delicate princess it is. Never has a foodstuff been worthier of the warning Don’t Fuck It Up.

Across the aisle is the mushroom place. I bought a couple of king trumpets, which really aren’t all that different from regular white mushrooms, just prettier and a little less earthy-tasting.

The most beautiful cooking vessel I own is an oval stainless-steel-lined copper...would you call it a dish?—I don’t think it’s a casserole, it’s too shallow—with handles at each end. Elizabeth gave it to me, and I remember absolutely swooning over it. In it I cooked some fine-chopped shallots in butter and then the mushrooms, sliced fine along the vertical axis. I poured in white wine—an unoaked nowhere-near-D.O.C. French chardonnay that we get cheap but is delicious—in about the amount I was guessing would come about halfway up the fish, and boiled off the alcohol.

I let that cool all the way down and then laid in the fish. I had to add a little more wine to get the level right. Fish stock would have been better. Then you do this cool French thing of cutting a piece of wax paper to fit, buttering it, and laying it over the top. Oh, and I had put some bits of butter on top of the fish as well. Tiny sprinkle of salt, no pepper.

You bring it to just short of a boil on top of the stove and then move it—gently, gently—into a 350-degree oven. After four and a half minutes I poked it with a knife and it was already just about done, but still nice and firm. Whew.

I have a big wide spatula that I almost never need to use, but for this it was perfect: I lifted the filets onto a warm plate and covered them with foil to keep warm, and they did not break, which for me with sole, I believe, was a first. Some of the mushrooms stuck to the fish, while most of them I just poured into a saucepan along with what turned out to be a ton of juice—I mean, maybe two cups? a lot more than I expected—which I proceeded to boil down as fast as I could to two or three tablespoons. To that I added crème fraîche, maybe a quarter of a cup, and it thickened up nicely. Tasted great. I mounted it with a tablespoon of butter just for the French hell of it, and it tasted even better.

Your sole doucement, doucement onto hot plates, sauce it up, sprinkle with a few snips of chive, and praise the Lord.

Then last night I did it again, except with a couple of shrimp chopped up and added at the very end. Well, I didn’t do it again—I tried to do it again, and I Fucked It Up.

I must have cooked the mushrooms too long, first of all, because they were meaty and tough. I put the oven on 400 instead of 350 and kept the fish in for five minutes instead of 4.5, and those two factors together made it soft and fall-aparty, no resistance to the tooth at all—yucko. The wine I used—some Argentinian torrontés-chardonnay blend—must have been too harsh, and I didn’t use enough cream, and I didn’t reduce it enough either, so the sauce was both too acidic and too thin. I could have corrected that, I suppose, but I forgot to even taste it. Also I didn’t add any butter.

I mean, everything was just this close to right, but the combination of those relatively small errors made what had been a truly sublime dish kind of a mess. Not bad, really, but precisely the kind of thing that gave old-fashioned French cooking a bad name back in the day.

Sorry, Craig.

AUGUSTA'S LAST DAYS

2010-09-06T14:36:00.000-07:00

San Francisco, Thursday, September 2, 2010. For the last week and more, our beloved fifteen-year-old cat, Augusta, has been eating less and less. She acts hungry, meows for food, but then will either take only a few bites or pass it up altogether. Her affect has been foggy, disoriented. Her eyes are not fully open and bright. She moves very slowly. And she has been losing weight quickly.

We took her to Pets Unlimited (a superb if awkwardly named veterinary hospital) at nine this this morning, to Dr. Randy Bowman, our favorite vet. She weighed 2.63 kg, or 5.8 lb., down from 7.1 lb. on July 21—only six week ago—a loss of 18 percent in six weeks. Bowman palpated her and found a hard mass in her lower abdomen. He had Elizabeth and me both feel it.

Randy then took her off to be x-rayed. It took over an hour, for some reason. Then he called us in to look at two pictures, one from the side, the other from above, both showing the mass. One possibility he had mentioned was an impacted fecal mass, but this wasn’t that. This was virtually certainly a tumor, he said. A radiologist will still be looking at the x-ray, tomorrow, and will confirm that. We could, he said, also get an ultrasound image that could further confirm that it is a tumor; but he also said that if she were his cat, he wouldn’t do it. And after all, what would be the point? The diagnosis can’t be a hundred percent confident, but everything is consistent with cancer, specifically the type most common in cats, lymphoma.

At her age, he said, surgery would be risky, and with the tumor having reached this size, the chance of success would be low. She’s going to die.

Probably pretty soon. How soon we don’t know. Meanwhile, we will see if two drugs can get her eating again and feeling better: Buprenex, a liquid to spread on her gums twice a day, for pain; and Mirtazapine every three days, an appetite stimulant. They gave her a first dose of both drugs, but while we were waiting for the prescriptions to take home, Augusta threw up white foam in her carrying case—almost certainly the Mirtazapine. So we’re going to have to give that to her again once she calms down.

It seemed as if the pain medication was making her feel somewhat better already. Perhaps it was the injection of fluids they gave her. She ate a small plateful of canteloupe and at least some regular cat food. But her affect remained dull, wan. She stayed with us awhile, then when we rose she ran away, presumably thinking we were going to put her in the box again.

She came and sniffed at her bucket bed on my desk, but didn’t stay. Elizabeth and I went out to lunch, and we don’t know where Augusta is now (1:15). The cat door is blocked, so she’s in the house somewhere, probably in Elizabeth’s closet, her latest hidey-hole.
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6:15 p.m. She remains holed up in the closet. When she sees me, she cries in a way I have never heard before. A cry of pain? A cry for help? I put out the little snacks and she comes out and sniffs at them and goes back in. I bring canteloupe and water. She comes out purring, but walking very weakly. She seems about to take a bite of caneloupe but stops, and walks about five steps toward the bedroom. Then she turns and goes back into the closet.

I’ve tried to call her downstairs to eat properly; she does not respond. Elizabeth is endlessly on the phone with a computer problem. Is Augusta dying now?

Maybe it’s just pain. It’s only two hours before she’s due for more pain medicine. I could try to give it to her, but maybe it’s all the hard handling she has endured that has made her so fearful and withdrawn, and wrestling her mouth open again would only exacerbate that. You have to rub the liquid on her gums or the inside of her cheeks.

(I have omitted that in the early afternoon I talked to the vet on the phone and he recommended going ahead with the appetite-stimulant pill. The first attempt failed: When we thought she had swallowed it, she ran away spitting it out in pieces. The second time, she did swallow it and ate a few crunchies just after. But it has obviously not worked to improve her appetite—and it is supposed to do so for three days.)
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9:25 p.m. She is dying. She looks as if it might be tonight. In any case she looks miserable. I talked to the hospital, and they’re open 24 hours, and can give her a sedative that will keep her semi-conscious for six to eight hours. If we were to decide to put her to sleep, they can do it anytime around the clock. But we’ve both checked in with her, and she still responds with purring and some evidence of gratification to schmunking and being talked to. Elizabeth thinks it best to wait till morning, and I’ve somewhat reluctantly come to agree. How after all do we know if she’s in pain?

We do know that she has not responded at all to either of the drugs. I ran to Mollie Stone’s a few minutes ago for the supposedly heroin-like and notoriously un-nutritious “white food” known as Fancy Feast Medley, and Augusta wouldn’t touch that either. I had taken her downstairs in my arms—she purred the whole way—but once there she still wouldn’t even drink water, just took a weary look and trudged back upstairs to her hidey-hole in Elizabeth’s closet. She is leaving.

I went to have a brief visit with her, and she was seemingly glad to see me, although she did not get up from her little towel bed, nor was she interested in my presentation of: canteloupe, white food, regular food, or water. Her eyes are heavy and dull (Elizabeth had just said that when she last saw her, not long before, they had been bright), but she did not make the low moan of despair or pain that has been so heart-breaking earlier. Elizabeth remarked that she is not seeking the total isolation that dying cats are commonly said to seek. My response is that she has gone beyond that, and just wants to be with us. A guess, but I think I’m right. The old saw about cats attaching to a place rather than people has never been true of Augusta.

I suppose it will be tomorrow morning that we take her to be put to sleep, and it will be a gentler and kinder death than most people ever know. The suffering will be ours, not hers.
________________________________________

11 p.m. Augusta seems to be demented. Elizabeth has found that she is excited by the look and sound of the crunchies bag (what we call the cat snacks branded as Pounce); and she will come out of the hidey-hole and rub against my hand—hungrily—to get at them. Then she can’t find them on the plate with regular cat food, but when I spread them on the wood floor she does, and eats...all of two. She can be lured out a couple of times more, and takes a delusively purposeful walk of five feet toward the bedroom and then turns, purpose lost, back toward and then into the closet. She is starving herself, not even drinking water.

We have been watching the end of the movie “Babel,” which we couldn’t finish a couple of nights ago because the DVD was faulty—it’s a good film—but we haven’t been able to watch long without stopping it to talk about Augusta. We had planned first to get something from the store for dinner, and then we were going to make pesto from materials at hand, but in the end we ordered sushi in. Ordinarily the smell of the raw fish would have brought Augusta downstairs pronto, and she’d have jumped onto the coffee table to prowl rather rudely at our plates, but of course tonight she did not come.

I can hear Elizabeth down the hall talking to Augusta, and I know how much Augusta loves to hear her voice.
________________________________________

Friday, September 3, 2010, 12:15 p.m. Elizabeth spent the night in a sleeping bag outside the closet. Augusta seems to have spent the whole night inside without coming out. About 6:30, I got up, and Augusta did come out, acting hungry, and I wanted to see if she would follow me downstairs for some breakfast—and she did. I opened a fresh can of “white food,” and she ate at it enthusiastically, then quit after an intake of at most two tablespoons. She went and peed in her box and look out through the back door, which I opened, to see if she wanted to go out and take some morning sun. She didn’t, but when I returned to the chair next to her food bowls she came back and ate some more white food.

Then she went back upstairs—virtually running, at a healthy clip until the last three stairs, when she slowed way down. She went straight back into the closet. We have been able to lure her out several times, and she continues to be very interested in the Pounces package, but when you give her actual Pounces she doesn’t eat them. She did poop in her upstairs box, then went back later to cover it up, and she sharpened her claws on the rug, which I take as a sign of some vitality. She still responds to being petted, but she is not leaving her hidey-hole, and she cannot possibly be even maintaining her weight.

Elizabeth left a call on Bowman’s voicemail, and I have a list of talking points for him, as follows:

• First, report: no increase in appetite; we’ve stopped the pain medication because it seemed to make her cry and perhaps also to be more disoriented. Describe her current behavior: closet; brief engagement; liking to be petted; interest in food, sometimes a few bites, more often just a few sniffs, then back into closet. She has gone downstairs and can run upstairs easily, but even then all she does is head into the closet.

• What’s to be gained from waiting for the radiologist’s report?

• At this point, what is the percentage likelihood of a turnaround or even modest improvement? Are there other drugs—e.g., steroids (injected?)—that might give her a couple of weeks of comfort and also restore her appetite?

• Will you do the job [euthanasia] yourself?

• Will the hospital handle cremation?

We’ve decided on cremation mainly for practical reasons. If we were in Montana—and I wish we were, it seems like the right place for her, either at the old West Boulder Ranch where she grew up or at the Langston House where she has spent her last summers—then we would bury her whole body. But here there’s so little space, and who knows what sort of pipes and other obstacles I may encounter digging even a small hole? We are going to bury her ashes right next to the back stoop (“Because she’s such a stoopey!” Elizabeth said last night), along with her favorite first two toys, the anchovy mouse and the spider ball, and the toy that in various forms has been her lifelong favorite, the plain old chasing-ribbbon. We also decided to cut out and bury with her her embroidered name from “the bucket,” the doughnut-shaped bed that sits on the old kneehole desk behind my computer table. Whenever I was working, she could sleep there feeling secure, or look out the little window at birds, or just keep watch over me.
________________________________________

5:00 p.m. Elizabeth’s errands kept her away most of the afternoon. She talked to Bowman on her cell, and his answers were:

• The radiology report confirms a large solid mass consistent with a tumor. A sonogram is pointless; it would only re-confirm the same.

• An injection of steroids might give her a period of apparent improvement, but then the decline would be the same. She had actually begun losing weight three years ago, but we had begun putting prednisolone in her food, which kept her appetite up did not slow the progress of the disease. The pattern, if we gave her injected steroids now, would be the same but much faster and probably more painful because of the now greatly increased rate of tumor growth.

• Randy will do the euthanasia himself, but is booked all day tomorrow. He is willing to give up his lunch hour if that’s our decision. He doesn’t want to rush us. He will not be back till next Wednesday. Of course it doesn’t have to be done only by him, though both Elizabeth and I will feel most comfortable with him doing it.

• Cremation is done elsewhere, but the hospital takes care of it.

Meanwhile Augusta has had a somewhat decent afternoon. I’ve stayed with her constantly, mostly downstairs. She lay in the sun. She went out twice more (and had to be blocked both times from the grotty hidey-hole under the Grayson stairs). (I did inspect that, by the way: It’s not a place where she could escape from us, but it would be pretty hard, and dirty, business dragging her out, so we’ve agreed to keep her from going there.) She has eaten some hamburger, and a very few Pounces, but she is definitely not keeping up. On the other hand, lying or sitting in the sun on the kitchen rug, she did not seem like a creature who had lost all capacity for pleasure. When she moves, she does seem uncomfortable, but not in agony.

Is it too soon, because she can still have a few days of not-hellish life? Or is it time, because all that’s ahead of her is decline? We’re going to have to decide.

We made three lists to help us decide.

Things she can or will no longer do:
eat (barely)
use the cat door
get in the bucket (even with help)
do a banana
get up on loveseat and fleece
go into E’s office
play on blue paper
swat at ribbon
respond to catnip
chase anything

Things she can still do:
lie in the sun and enjoy it
enjoy petting or brushing, albeit only for a short time
come when called
use litter box, both ways
get onto the bed and come to me to be rubbed
be excited about food even when unable to eat
run upstairs, most of the way
fight hard against pills

Bad symptoms:
weight loss 18 percent since July 21 (six weeks)
wan affect
weakness
very slow movement
almost no groomy
increased startle response
no response to appetite stimulant
negative response to pain medication

We looked at her weight on our vet visit records:
9/2/10: 2.63 kg = 5.8 lb
7/21/10: 3.23 kg = 7.1 lb
4/17/09: 2.8 kg = 6.2 lb (This was when we began prednisolone)
10/7/08: 3.06 kg = 6.7 lb
12/27/07: 3.37 kg = 7.4 lb (18 percent decline in six months)
6/23/07: 4.14 kg = 9.1 lb
12/15/06: 4.14 kg = 9.1 lb
6/29/06: 4.54 kg = 10 lb
10/10/05: 10 lb
12/23/04: 9.5 lb
5/3/04: 9.25 lb
9/17/03: 10 lb
4/12/02: 9.75 lb
2/5/01: 9.75 lb

No point in drawing a graph. Clearly, something had begun happening in the second half of 2007, and we had been able to forestall the weight loss by giving her prednisolone in her food, but then in the last six weeks her weight has gone off a cliff.

We concluded that if she was better tomorrow, we would wait and see if she might start eating and feeling a little better; that if she was worse, we would go ahead and have her put to sleep that day; that if she was the same, we would have to decide then.
________________________________________

Saturday, September 4, 2010. I spent most of the night in the sleeping bag next to Augusta. She left the closet at least once, when I was asleep, to eat some of the raw hamburger and all the Pounces that had been left out and also to use the litter box in the bathroom. I went to bed about three and returned about seven. She was wide awake but showed no inclination to come out. Her posture looked uncomfortable. She did not sleep at all. She did orient towards me, and she was purring constantly—the constant purr, I have read, being either a symptom of pain or a harbinger of death. I have also read recently, online (and who knows what information online is reliable), that the purring is a self-calming, and that a cat who is terrified or in extreme pain does not do it. One writer said that it means that the cat both knows she is dying and is comfortable.

I went back to bed till eight o’clock. Then when I put on my robe, she came out and followed me readily downstairs. She acted hungry, following me to the pantry. I presented her with raw beef, fresh crunchy food, a few Pounces, and three successive kinds of canned cat food, at each of which she only sniffed. Nor did she touch her water. After sitting with me for a while, she went back upstairs.

When Elizabeth came down about half an hour later, Augusta followed. We tried milk, and two more fresh cans of cat food, and a different flavor of Pounce. She ate one Pounce. I sat on the floor, and she stayed with me again for a while, and I brushed her, which she seemed to enjoy. But her posture remained uncomfortable.

Elizabeth and I agreed that if we could get Randy Bowman to perform the euthanasia today as he had said he thought he would be able to do on his lunch hour, then today was the day.

Augusta would face only further weight loss, and further decline. It would not be long before some organ or another would fail. She seems no longer to experience pleasure beyond a few seconds of petting or brushing—and even that soon becomes bothersome, and she moves away from it. In her hidey hole, she has begun turning her face away from us.

Elizabeth has left a message on Randy’s voicemail.

I spend much of the morning lying on the floor outside the closet, just to be with Augusta. I hope it comforts her, but there’s no way to know.

11:45 a.m. An assistant has called back, and offered either 12:30 or 4:00. We choose the earlier time. She assures us that we will not have to wait in the waiting areas, where barking dogs always scare Augusta. She recommends that we arrive at 12:40, and we will be taken straight to some room.

12:15 p.m. I go again to lie on the floor next to Augusta. She is curled up well back in the closet, where it’s quite dark. She is purring much of the time. Occasionally she changes position very slowly, and, I think, painfully. Occasionally I stroke her head, and I think she likes it. She begins to lick a front paw, as though she’s going to wash her face, but then she lays her chin on the paw. From time to time she looks at me. From time to time she closes her eyes. Mostly she just stares at nothing.

These are my last minutes with her, her last minutes alive. They pass one by one by one.
________________________________________

12:40 p.m. We are shown into a room at Pets Unlimited, and Randy Bowman comes in right behind us. We put Augusta on a soft towel underlain by a pad on a table. It seems to be both an operating room and a death room—there are two cheesy paintings each of a pair of animals gazing into a sunset. Augusta is calm and no more afraid than she usually is at the vet’s. Randy explains that he will first give her an intramuscular injection that will act over the course of five to ten minutes to sedate her into unconsciousness. He administers that at 12:45, and it hurts: Augusta squirms and turns as though to try to bite him, and she makes brief eye contact with Elizabeth, but she relaxes quickly, staring straight ahead, very still. I watch her flanks moving as she breathes, and as her breath slows very slightly. As imperceptibly as the hour hand on a clock, it seems, she lowers her head to the towel. We continue to stroke her gently as she relaxes, relaxes.

12:50 p.m. Her nose is on the towel. I move her chin so she can breathe more easily. Randy checks her blink response, which is still there. Two minutes later it is not. He takes an amazingly noisy electric shaver to the front of her right front leg, making the vein there easily visible. She does not react at all to the noise, which under ordinary circumstances would have scared the shit out of her. Her eyes are open, but she is totally unconscious.

Elizabeth and I both continue to stroke and to hold Augusta. Elizabeth asks Randy to show her where to put her hand so that she can feel Augusta’s heart beating.

12:55 p.m. Randy injects a very large syringeful of barbiturates into the vein in her shaven foreleg. Her heart stops instantly. He tells us that her brain has died equally instantly.

We have read to expect several possibilities: a series of deep, searing last breaths; shuddering; urination; a release of her bowels. None of these comes to pass. She is simply utterly still.

We stay with her a few minutes. She looks exactly like herself alive. I try unsuccessfully to close her eyes. I put my fingers between her toes, something she didn’t like much when she was alive but something I alway loved the feeling of. As we leave, Randy is wrapping Augusta’s body in a towel, to take her to a freezer.
________________________________________

He has given us a brochure for a pet crematorium and cemetery in Colma, the Bay Area’s famous city of the dead. They will pick her up and return her ashes to Pets Unlimited. They have a ghoulish website offering a wide variety of urns. You cannot enlarge the pictures, nor are the prices given. You can have a pine box for free. That’s what we’re going to take.
________________________________________

She was never afraid of us. Inevitably sometimes we would step on her tail or trip over her, but that left no memory: She was never afraid we would hurt her.

Soon her places are empty, the litter boxes gone, her food bowls, the Bucket.

Even her last morning, she would come when I called her name. In my mind I can’t stop calling her name.
________________________________________

Augusta was born in Montana—abandoned in the snow —and grew up there. She has come back with us every summer since we moved to San Francisco, and always loved it. This is our last picture of her, taken this past July 29, in Elizabeth’s shadow, on the lawn of our little rented house in Melville, Montana.

When you’re bored with Bordeaux, you’re bored with life.

2010-08-21T15:14:00.000-07:00

(My apology to Dr. Johnson for mangling his famous encomium to London.)

“Bordeaux Loses Prestige Among Younger Wine Lovers,” went the headline in The New York Times of May 19, 2010.

The article, by the Times’s chief wine writer, Eric Asimov, said that Paul Grieco, at his oenophilic Manhattan restaurant Hearth and two serious wine bars, offers fifty wines by the glass and not one of them is a Bordeaux.

Asimov also quoted a thirty-year-old California importer saying, “I don’t know many people who like or drink Bordeaux….You’re never sure who is making the wine. I think for me and people my age, we’re going back to grower-producers—people who are there the whole way—and Bordeaux seems the opposite of that.” (The guy seemed to be quite proud of being a moron.)

“Good Bordeaux might start at $35 to $50 retail, and $85 to $100 in a restaurant, and soar from there,” wrote Asimov himself.

Which happpens to be total bullshit.

The great growths of Bordeaux do cost a lot of money, but there are dozens of small producers making splendid wines for very reasonable prices. I just looked at the web site of K&L Wines in San Francisco, and at the moment they have precisely fifty Bordeaux under fifteen dollars a bottle, and knowing K&L as I do I’ll betcha there’s not one of them that’s less than pretty good.

Some restaurateurs and sommeliers will tell you they avoid Bordeaux because they can’t afford to devote so much cellar space to wine that takes so long to mature. For most of the petits châteaux, in fact that need not be a concern: Nearly all of them are ready to drink as soon as they’re shipped. The predominant varietal in many of these lesser-known Bordeaux is merlot, but they taste nothing like the flabby, chocolatey, high-alcohol California cough syrups that have given merlot such a bad name. Even the little Bordeaux taste like Bordeaux, with soft, dusty tannins, enough cabernet for backbone, deep aromas of blackcurrant and loam, and low enough alcohol levels to bring all their complexity into balance.

(Okay, I know there are good merlots produced in California, but find me one for less than fifteen bucks.)

All this brings me to Daniel Johnnes.

Daniel has been one of my heroes for a long time—since 1985 or so, when Drew Nieporent opened a restaurant called Montrachet in a rather bleak neighborhood that had come to be known as TriBeCa (for Triangle Below Canal), and Daniel was a waiter there. The food was fantastic, the chef the then unknown David Bouley. As the name implies, Montrachet specialized in Burgundies, and they had very, very good ones, most of which, like their namesake, were very, very expensive. But knowing how much I loved red Burgundy that was true to the old tradition—pale, light on the tongue, at once delicate and intense—sometimes Daniel would find a bottle that embodied all that and also wasn’t murder on the wallet, and he would hold it aside for me.

Daniel’s story through the next twenty-five years is a rocket ride: sommelier at soon-celebrated Montrachet; wine director of Drew Nieporent’s growing collection of restaurants; Robert Parker calling him “our nation’s finest (and nicest) sommelier”; his own Burgundy importing company; magazine articles, TV appearances, a published book; making his own wines in Oregon (the Willamette Valley) and Burgundy itself (Gevrey-Chambertin); wine director for Daniel Boulud, the best chef in the United States, and Boulud’s international restaurant group; award after award.

Daniel Johnnes also puts on an annual series of dinners and tastings modeled on the venerable Paulée de Meursault, spread out across three days and nights, with a substantial piece of the proceeds going to charity. The Paulées of New York and San Francisco bring together many of the great growers of Burgundy and their wines, and for American lovers of Burgundy they are pretty much the ultimate party.

So: Mr. Burgundy. But a man who knows wine better than, well, better than just about anybody. Imagine my delight, then, when, last week, from Daniel Boulud I got an invitation to a wine-tasting dinner featuring “The ‘Other’ Bordeaux”:

While Bordeaux is known for the prestige and accompanying high prices of the classified growths, the region offers many small, quality-driven, family-owned properties along the Garonne and Dordogne rivers. Daniel Johnnes, our Wine Director, has been traveling and tasting there to seek out lesser-known, value-driven Bordeaux to feature in Daniel Boulud’s restaurants.

To celebrate their arrival, Daniel will co-host a dinner with four châteaux owners, here to share their wines and their stories. Many of them are practicing sustainable viticulture and limiting yields to emphasize quality. Removed from the glamorous world of the classified growths, these wine makers are inspired to connect with you, the wine-loving public.

DATE: Monday, September 13, 2010

TIME: 7:00 PM

LOCATION: db Bistro Moderne, 55 W. 44th St between 5th and 6th Avenues

PRICE: $135/person, all-inclusive, 4 course dinner, 11 wines

In addition to wines from our four special guests we’ll also pour selections from seven other small châteaux, 11 wines in all, paired with a late-summer four-course dinner by db Bistro Moderne’s Chef Laurent Kalkotour.

Château Beauséjour
Patricia and Pierre Bernault

Château Jean Faux
Pascal Collotte

Château La Croix Lartigue
Stephane Derenoncourt

Château Robin
Jérôme Caillé

Château De Clotte, Côtes de Castillon
Château La Coudraie, Bordeaux
Château Saint-Dominique, Puisseguin Saint-Emilion
Château De la Huste, Fronsac
Château Saint Julian, Bordeaux Supérieur
Roc de Manoir, Côtes de Castillon
Château Mondésir-Gazin, Premières Côte de Blaye

Take that, Eric Asimov and all the rest of y’all wine-by-the-glass slurpers of blackberry-jam zinfandel, vanillafied chardonnay, ink-black overextracted pinot noir, and mud-flat merlot!

The price is quite a bargain, too. I do wish I could go.

Tonight, pals Dorothy Kalins and Roger Sherman are in from New York, and we’re going to the almost-sublime Hong Kong restaurant the Mayflower, way out in the fog and chill of outer Geary. We will bring our own Alsatian riesling—there's a whole other wine story—and we shall raise a glass to Daniel Johnnes.

A Glimpse of Bad Luck in the State Founded on Luck

2010-08-09T16:08:00.000-07:00

Lovelock, Nevada, August 2, 2010.

We count our blessings.

Last Day in Montana

2010-08-09T16:05:00.000-07:00

Saturday, July 31, 2010.

My sixty-third birthday. God damn.

Also the day we must clear out. The house is leased to someone else starting tomorrow. I have packed and mailed five boxes home, and still my ol’ M3 is heavily laden. Elizabeth has decided to drive with me to San Francisco, along with Augusta the cat.

Augusta is a Montana native, having been abandoned in the snow—How can anybody do such a thing?—in November 1995, when we were living on the West Boulder Ranch and not yet married. She grew up among coyotes and bears, stalwart, valiant, a huntress. Mice, voles, and, yes, the occasional songbird she’d bite in half and wolf down. We left the West Boulder in June of 1997 to return to city life, but we have come back to Montana every summer, always with Augusta. At fifteen, with hip dysplasia, and after so much city life, she no longer hunts, and we must fear for her even near the house, for a coyote, an eagle, an owl could make a quick snatch of her that she’d now be too slow to evade.

Owls. There are always a pair of great horned owls across the creek and downstream a bit, though we’ve never found their nest. We had not seen their young either, till a couple of days ago, when I went down to the Sweet Grass to photograph its astonishing transformation, new cottonwoods forming bulwarks that may be foundations of new islands, the logjams growing thicker with ever more débris and themselves therefore also possibly creating new land, alders sinking roots into the rocks and sand deep enough perhaps to withstand even a runoff as brutal as this year’s. The birds had nested, the babies had fledged, many had gone, and the woods were largely silent till I heard a harsh loud shriek, repeated, repeated, nearby. I climbed the bank into the grass, now rank and knotted and in places taller than me. The giant coneflowers blazed yellow in the blackening green. Many of the trees were losing their charcoaled bark, turning from black to stark white. On one scraggly, twisted little dead sapling about six feet high perched a bird much too big for it, unquestionably an owl, unquestionably a great horned because no other is so big, but with puffs of down and white feathers sticking out here and there as from a rotting old pillow, and as I took a step toward it, and another and another, the doggone bird didn’t move, just kept shrieking at me. Finally I got it: This was a baby, it didn’t want to fly, or maybe even couldn’t, Where are my mom and my dad, what am I supposed to do? They never did show, but Owl Junior did in fact know how to fly, albeit not very well, and did manage to flap his way to a proper treetop. I should never have forced him to do so. Or, okay, her.

A birthday dinner with great friends at a genuinely local steakhouse in Livingston, not one of the woefully self-conscious “fine dining” establishments that cater to tourists and newcomers with menus of ghastly, recklessly complex concoctions invariably mispronounced so egregiously by your server (insert name here) that the pain is though not new nonetheless acute; here at the Buffalo Jump you get a well grilled steak of cow or bison, a baked potato in foil or French fries, and very surprisingly excellent green beans. Martinis. We bring wine, they don’t charge corkage. A grocery store cake. A damn fine time.

Summer's Circle Closing

2010-08-09T15:25:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, July 27, 2010.

Time is slipping away.

Elizabeth is here. The Melville postmaster, Rick Schuler, has disapproved of her working so hard, spending so much time in frenetic San Francisco, and not being in Montana; he has greeted her return—for a whole week—with a hearty welcome and a soupçon of reprobation, along the lines of We want to see more of you next summer. Linda and Glen Westervelt, who keep the store (and are therefore Rick’s sole companions for much of every day, even now in high summer), are too shy to scold Elizabeth, but they have shown concern for my solitude. Sparse on the land though the citizens of Sweet Grass County are—3600 on its 1,187,200 acres, and half of them crammed into Big Timber—they are as social as New Yorkers, and, like New Yorkers, they wonder a bit at a person who likes to be alone.

I am happy that the folks at the B.S. Corner now understand that I’m not some wacko loner, that I like to come and linger over one of Linda’s excellent burgers to hear the midday palaver of busted gears and rusted gates and cows out on the county road, and that I do still have a wife.

We go to the prairie, this time with Anita Pagliaro’s sister, Carla, a painter. We find many familiar flowers gone (these I have indicated below by showing their names in red) but quite a few new ones as well, and dammit, I have forgotten to bring pen and paper. The fact that this list exists will be explained anon.

Potentilla, a new species, prostrate, on flat shale
Aster sp., new
Allium cernuum: nodding onion—new and abundant
Shepherdia canadensis: buffaloberry—newly in bloom
some other shrub I ought to know, pretty clusters of flowers, opp. lvs.
Oxytropis splendens: showy crazyweed—this has been blooming for weeks and is now fading, but I’m just now figuring out the ID
Liatris punctata: dotted gayfeather—new; the signal flower of latening summer
Grindelia squarrosa: curlycup gumweed—acts like a weed (roadsides, bare soil) but is in fact a native
Ratibida columnifera: prairie coneflower
Erigeron pumilus: shaggy daisy
Solidago nana: low goldenrod
Potentilla diversifolia: regular old cinquefoil
Potentilla hippiana: silver cinquefoil
Oxytropis besseyi: Bessey’s crazyweed
Lupinus sp., best guess is argenteus: silvery lupine—I’ll never get these straight—in its glory now
Gaillardia aristata: blanketflower—many fewer
Eriogonum umbellatum: sulphur buckwheat, now fading to pink
Agoseris glauca: false dandelion
Anaphalis margaritacea: pearly everlasting—lasting but not really in flower
Linum perenne: flax
Penstemon eriantherus: fuzzytongue penstemon
Senecio canus: silvery groundsel
Cryptantha celosioides: miner’s candle—mostly gone
Cryptantha flavoculata: yellow-eyed cryptanth—mostly gone
Arenaria sp.: sand spurrey—mostly gone
Helianthella: little sunflower, the last few, up high
Campanula rotundifolia: harebell—the last few
Orobanche sp.: broomrape—amazing dark pink, turning to yellow as the flowers open; bright yellow center of fl.—mostly fading
mystery flower, small orange five petals, phloxlike fl., grasslike lvs.
Allium style
Phacelia linearis: threadleaf phacelia
Potentilla fruticosa: shrubby cinquefoil
Sedum sp. (lanceolatum?): yellow flower, almost orange
Erigeron compositus: cutleaf daisy
Oenothera caespitosa: gumbo evening primrose
Castilleja sessiliflora: Great Plains paintbrush—a few still there but faded
Sphaeralcea munroana: orange globemallow
Achillea millefolia: yarrow
Gilia congesta: ballhead gilia
Hymenoxys acaulis: stemless goldenweed—last few, hanging on
Eriogonum sp.: another buckwheat, cream-white sparse balls
Gaura coccinea: scarlet gaura

And TWO flowers of the day, both new, neither a true clover:

Dalea purpurea: purple prairie-clover

And Dalea candida: white prairie-clover

And as we return, heading for the same old barbed wire fence at the precisely the same place where it tore my leg open seventeen days ago, where Anita and I the next day tried and failed to recover my notepad and pen, I see from the corner of my eye a color that does not belong: lilac. Winking in the wind. It is my notepad, rained on and shredded, my one page of notes long faded to nothing, but no longer litter. Carla comes over to share my astonishment, looks down, and says, “Here’s your pen.” It is stomped flat by who knows how many cows but it still writes.

Hence the list above.

Hence the completion of the circle of summer two thousand and ten.

Summer's Sweetness on the Sweet Grass

2010-07-20T16:08:00.000-07:00

Monday, July 19, 2010.
Praise to the common yarrow!
Achillea millefolium, beauty of wilderness meadows and trash-strewn vacant lots from American coast to coast—no, more: of the whole Northern Hemisphere. It is our floral equivalent to the robin, all-summer companion, ever-dapper, ever-cheerful, all too easily taken for granted. Our dear Lauren always makes a point of petting the first yarrow she sees, gently, as if it were a good but sensitive dog. Achilles carried it into battle to stanch his soldiers’ wounds.

The summer’s most beautiful and most fleeting flower has come and is already going: Calochortus gunnisonii, the Gunnison’s Mariposa lily, rising like a risen soul above the prairie grasses.

Other flowers new to the scene:
Cicuta douglasii: water hemlock
Heracleum lanatum: cow-parsnip
Ligusticum filicinum: fern-leaved lovage
Oenothera hookeri: Hooker’s evening-primrose
Ratibida columnifera: prairie coneflower
? Lactuca pulchella: wild lettuce? (3' h., pink dandelionlike fl.)
Monarda fistulosa: wild bergamot
Erigeron pumilus: shaggy daisy
Senecio [triangularis?]: some kinda groundsel
Rudbeckia laciniata: coneflower
Rosa woodsii: wild rose
Solidago [multiradiata? gigantea? lepida? missouriensis? nemoralis? velutina?]
Solidago nana: low goldenrod
? Viguiera multiflora: showy goldeneye?

Also a rather rare new bird: the prairie, or Richardson’s, merlin, a low-flying, unbelievably fast small falcon of vision-blurring acrobatic skill, at whose approach all the little birds panic and dive for cover. At least one of them each day must fail to find cover, for they are his entire diet.

The Sweet Grass is finally low enough to fish. On my first cast of the morning, about ten o’clock, of a little bead-head hare’s-ear nymph, I hooked and landed the biggest trout I've ever caught in this creek, a prodigious brown, twenty inches, a good pound and a half, with a great hooked jaw—the signature of an alpha male—and skin of blazing gold. He was tired, and hung panting as I held him till he had his breath back, and then shot away into the green deep.

The pool was newly scoured out by this spring’s ferocious runoff, basically the new home pool, straight across from the little one-board footbridge that takes me from the house over an irrigation ditch to the creekbed, which now looks, misleadingly, like a scene of devastation, with towering black-and-white logjams of burned and bleached cottonwood trees and limbs washed down from the 2007 fire. The logjams and all the débris they have caught have played havoc with the old channels. Just here, once the water was falling and no longer a single all-drowning sheet, there were five channels, each essentially new, braiding in and out, smashing into the jams and one another, purling back on themselves, grinding out cutbanks deeply enough to uproot tall trees, which now have fallen into the creek (their leaves still green and fluttering) to found further logjams and yet more new channels, convergences, islands, rockbars, beaches, mudflats, riffles, rapids, backwaters, standing waves, sluices, vortices. Each has its own contending voice: You turn your head this way and that and every degree of rotation composes a different chorale. The rushing shallows are hunting grounds for great blue herons, ospreys, bald eagles.

I have been trying not to think about Craig Claiborne, but it’s impossible. As though compelled by his ghost, I bought a big, gross, pimpled beef tongue, boiled it, skimmed the grotty stock, peeled the now gray and rigor-mortised upper surface and tip, carved off the tendons and unnameable attachments of the underneath. With store-bought—but organic!—beef stock and vegetables and a fresh for-the-purpose bottle I made Madeira sauce. I sliced the meat, braised the slices, didn’t like the sauce’s thin consistency, made a roux, overthickened the sauce, forgot to add the final schplup of additional Madeira, and, oh, to hell with it, voilà, langue de boeuf à la madère. I considered myself lucky, in Montana, to have found a langue-loving guest in my neighbor, fellow Greater Yellowstone Coalitionist, and longtime pal Farwell Smith, who lived in New York in the glory days of Le Pavillon, when sauces were almost as thick as the glop I put in front of him. On rice, by the way, not the mashed potatoes I had had in mind but was unable to produce owing to lack of potatoes.

Farwell kindly brought a bottle of Columbia Crest cabernet, from Washington, which tasted just right with the tongue, but Lord, Lord, why must these American wines be so goddam thick? Well, anyhow. For dessert—I don’t make desserts, especially baked ones, those are Elizabeth’s domain, but damn it, she’s not here, is she?—I attempted a clafouti aux cerises, a recipe for which had been in some online newspaper or other a couple of days ago. I was encouraged to give it a shot by the facts that 1) greatly to my surprise there is in this generally under-equipped kitchen a cherry-pitter and 2) I had some very good cherries. It’s easier than pie. You pit your cherries, you make the world’s simplest batter (flour, eggs, sugar, vanilla, milk, salt), you melt some butter and sugar in a frying pan, throw in the cherries, cook ’em a little, pour on the batter, and bake the thing brown and that’s it. Bam.

Walking in Starlight

2010-07-20T16:04:00.000-07:00

Thursday, July 15, 2010.

Walking in starlight. How many of us have ever walked in starlight? I mean when the only light is starlight. Walked in starlight when the only sound is that of the rushing of water? Oh, this stillness, this brightness and dark. I thought I saw the moon aching to rise but midnight came and that bulge of glimmer at the eastern horizon was unchanged (a faraway ranch light, presumably; later I looked up the time of moonrise, and it had been in the late afternoon). The Milky Way was an arc southeast to northwest. The stars blurred only slightly at the sunset edge to the west—still that strong at eleven o’clock! Otherwise they were pure unfaded velvet-and-spangle curtain to the black edge of the earth. A silver one hung above the southern slope of Porcupine Butte. A golden one rose above the prairie.

And why must the moron neighbor upstream flood his world with a spotlight of at least 200 watts?

Faith and Redemption on the Restigouche River and on the Montana Prairie

2010-07-14T08:45:00.000-07:00

Monday, July 12, 2010.

O what a nasty noose we wind / when we contrive to fall behind.

I was invited to go salmon fishing in Canada, see. On the Restigouche, said to be the best Atlantic salmon river in North America. The water was low and the fishing slow, but it was grand—good friends, splendid landscape, an old fishing culture, fine local people. Real maritime weather: The river forms the boundary between Quebec and New Brunswick, and debouches into the Bay of Chaleur, a place of fog, slant needle rain on upriver winds, a century, two centuries of conflict between francophones and anglophones, between the French- and English-speaking whites and the Micmac Indians.

It is a big river—the name means five rivers, and each of those fingers of its hand is prodigious—and the whole watershed has been ruined several times, by clearcutting and siltation, by horse-drawn scows dragged across the spawning beds, by Micmac gill-netting; yet magnificently, again and again, it has recovered. But will it survive climate change? high-tech factory ships on the deep-water feeding grounds off Greenland? I skimmed a book copyrighted 1852 predicting the imminent collapse of the Restigouche salmon fishery. It’s always comforting to find a text or metaphor for hope, however false the premise.

—The psychologist Martin Seligman has repeatedly shown that optimism gets results even on pretty flimsy predicates. Baseball teams win, marriages thrive, and of course religions prosper on faith. I vividly remember my friend the wonderfully named Episcopal priest Donald Goodness telling me that the most absurd, most unbelievable tenets of Christian doctrine—Moses parting the sea, the virgin birth, the miracles, the resurrection—were precisely those which had endowed the church with its durability, because they force the believer to abandon reason, to take leave of all that is verifiable, to hope for life in the face of undeniable, stinking, grinning death. Otherwise, what? We give up? I’d rather believe that the salmon will go on returning to the Restigouche.

The day before yesterday I finally hauled my ass out of the house—it seemed to have taken me some days to figure out that I was back in Montana for real—and went for my accustomed walk out onto the prairie. The godwits and curlews were gone—no, there was one pair of curlews, whirling and calling, not near. The only scolding nesters left were the upland sandpipers, burbling a protest feeble in contrast to that of their brawny oceanic cousins. And of course the flora had changed utterly in the two weeks since I had walked this land. The death-camas had all gone to seed, the little sunflowers, Helianthella, had disappeared, cheer-bright larkspur gone. But the grasses were tall and green, the summer ripening.

As I crossed a pasture full of what seemed to be contented cows and calves, I felt a presence behind. I turned to see a black cow pacing along, definitely following me. “Hey,” I told her, “wrong-o. You don’t want to follow me. Go away.” I waved my arms a bit and strode on, but I felt her still there. When I turned again, she was quite a bit closer. “Really,” I said, “this is too much. Get the hell away from me. What do you think you’re doing?” I mean, this was only a cow. In reply to my command she blew hard through her nostrils and started slamming the turf with a front hoof, hard enough to blast great chunks of sod loose and raise clouds of dust—quite the cartoon image, one might say, but her mien was entirely serious and so I took her to be. I looked around for my options. The nearest tree was about half a mile away and across a couple of barbed-wire fences. I also had no idea whether I could outrun a cow; I sort of doubted it. I figured I might just have to stand my ground and throw my daypack in her face if she really came charging. I looked forward again, along my originally intended line of travel, and this time I saw the problem: a black hump in the grass: her calf: dead. I was standing precisely between her and it. Oh.

It was, as Bertie Wooster likes to say, with me the work of a moment to change my bearing by ninety degrees and quietly, somehow without making a fuss, skedaddle, which also conveniently headed me toward a low ridge behind which I could take myself out of mother’s sight. Indeed, as soon as I was no longer blocking her access to her late baby, she was no longer in a mood to trample me into the dirt. I sprang eagerly over a place in the fence I could stretch low enough to do so, and made my way up into the wilder, cow-free reaches of the butte. In the shade of a limber pine, looking out across a hundred miles of Montana to the still snow-blanketed Beartooths, I had some lunch and collated my flower notes from the walk up:

Potentilla diversifolia: regular old cinquefoil
Potentilla hippiana: silver cinquefoil
Oxytropis besseyi: Bessey’s crazyweed (I think)
Lupinus sp.: I'll never get these straight
Gaillardia aristata
Eriogonum umbellatum: sulphur buckwheat
Phacelia franklinii
Agoseris glauca: false dandelion
Anaphalis margaritacea: pearly everlasting
Linum perenne: flax
Penstemon eriantherus: fuzzytongue penstemon
Senecio canus: silvery groundsel
Cryptantha celosioides: miner’s candle
Cryptantha flavoculata: yellow-eyed cryptanth
Arenaria sp.: sand spurrey
Helianthella: little sunflower, the last few, up high
Campanula rotundifolia: harebell
Orobanche sp.: broomrape—amazing dark pink, turning to yellow as the flowers open; bright yellow center of fl.
mystery flower, small orange five petals, phloxlike fl., grasslike lvs.
Allium style
Phacelia linearis: threadleaf phacelia
Potentilla fruticosa: shrubby cinquefoil
Sedum sp. (lanceolatum?): yellow flower, almost orange
Erigeron compositus: cutleaf daisy
Oenothera caespitosa: gumbo evening primrose
Castilleja sessiliflora: Great Plains paintbrush
Sphaeralcea coccinea: scarlet globemallow
Achillea millefolia: yarrow
Gilia congesta: ballhead gilia
Solidago sp.: goldenrod
Hymenoxys acaulis: stemless goldenweed—last few, hanging on
Eriogonum sp.: cream-white sparse balls
Gaura coccinea: scarlet gaura

The way home was through the goddam pasture with the goddam dead calf and the goddam mad cow. But before I ever had to face that music, as I swung my left, trailing leg over the same barbed wire I had crossed on the way up and which now I thought, without thinking, I had pushed down far enough, a barb caught my pants and, yes, my leg, tearing into both. I lost my balance altogether and fell headlong into the pasture, like—again a Bertie Wooster phrase comes to mind—the delivery of a ton of coals. I hit the ground hard. Nice hard rocks, too. Wrenched my back, cut my elbow in several spots. I sat up dizzily and had a look at myself and thought, Golly, this could have been an awful lot worse. For one thing, I was at least two or three miles from the nearest anything like another person, and I might very well have broken an arm, maybe a leg, I might have ripped open the vein that ran one inch away from my deepish puncture and cut. I was glad I had my trusty little first aid kit. I swabbed out the cut with a sterile wet-pad, and more or less stanched the bleeding with a couple of good tight bandaids, and started limping homeward, feeling like a moron. Once again—how many times have I had to say this to myself?—Why can you not keep in mind the simple maxim Be Here Now?

At first I thought the dead calf had been miraculously resurrected, but in fact it was still there, just not visible from uphill, and its mother had apparently finished mourning and returned to the sodality of the herd. So on I trudged. Halfway home, I realized that I had dropped my notepad and pen as I fell and had left them behind, that’s how rattled I was.

Once back in the land of indoor plumbing, I washed holy hell out of my cut, four or five times with soap and water, pulling it apart to get all the gradu out, and then went after it with alcohol, and then pulled it together with fresher bigger bandaids, and then went online to find out about barbed wire cuts. Mayo Clinic said if you haven’t had a tetanus shot in ten years, you should get one. But mightn’t I weasel past that somehow? For one thing, no way could I remember back ten years, and maybe I’d had one, what with my horse accidents and whatnot. I figured that if anywhere would let me tough it on through like a True Cow Boy, it would be the Pioneer Medical Center in Big Timber. I called. The nurse there informed me that tetanus lurks in the soils hereabouts and I ought to take it seriously. Online again, just to triangulate. A few highlights from health.google.com:

Tetanus is infection of the nervous system with the potentially deadly bacteri[um] Clostridium tetani.

Tetanus often begins with mild spasms in the jaw muscles (lockjaw). The spasms can also affect the chest, neck, back, and abdominal muscles....Sometimes the spasms affect muscles that help with breathing....Prolonged muscular action causes sudden, powerful, and painful contractions of muscle groups....These episodes can cause fractures and muscle tears.

Other symptoms include:

* Drooling
* Excessive sweating
* Fever
* Hand or foot spasms
* Irritability
* Swallowing difficulty
* Uncontrolled urination or defecation

I was damn well going to get the shot. The P.M.C. was on my way to Livingston anyhow. I was going to dinner at my dear friend Anita Pagliaro’s, where I was also going to see beloved Doug and Andrea Peacock for the first time since last summer. The Big Timber emergency room is a pretty calm outfit. I got my shot, which didn’t hurt worth a durn, and drove on to Anita’s, the coolest house in Livingston, in fact one of the coolest in the known universe. See www.anitapagliaro.com and click on bungalow and see how cool.

The loss of that notepad kept bugging me. I had stuffed all my notes in my pocket except the last page, but I hated the picture of my lilac-colored litter fluttering across that untrammeled landscape. In any case Anita wanted to see the place, so she came over next morning, and out we strolled. We did not find notepad or pen. We did see the dead calf, but the mom didn’t seem to take notice of us. As we headed home after a fine lunch of egg salad sandwiches on supermarket bread, honest fresh cherries, and Fig Newtons (not the Paul Newman organic ones, which are greatly inferior to the originals, thank you very much), we came across another heap of calf, this one alive. Barely. It lifted its head, gave us a pitiful look, and wearily laid its head back down. This poor creature was far from any occupied pasture, and the one below was much too well fenced—my leg could tell you about that—for this little guy to have jumped out. A mystery.

I called my landlord, rancher Paul, to report, but he wasn’t home. He hadn’t, in fact, been home for some days, since I’d had various other ranch news to call in, such as the dead calf. Oh, and another mortality, that of a cow about the size of a UPS truck whom I had come across a couple of days earlier, rotting away by the side of a ranch road, the cynosure of half the raven population of Montana, her empty eye sockets boiling with maggots.

Anita had an appointment in the Paradise Valley, and I had some spareribs to heat up, as well as more Gravity’s Rainbow to crawl a little farther toward the still-distant end of. I had read it before, in 1972, when it was new, and it is just as impenetrably strange and gripping and impossibly unreadable yet unputdownable now as it was then. I’ve been reading the sucker for two months.

That brings us to this morning, 7:45. Paul pulls up outside my house, I go out, he asks if I wouldn’t mind showing him where the sick calf is. We head out in true rancher style, jouncing across the prairie on Paul’s indefatigable four-wheel-drive steed. Every God-damned wire gate that I have so assiduously crafted a (walking) route to avoid, I, as Mr. Shotgun, now have to open and, in mortal fear of another barbed-wire gash, then to stretch closed.

We stop off to visit the dead calf on the way up. Paul asks if I remember the number of the freeze-brand on the mother’s side. “Oh, sure, Paul,” I say. His thought is that if we can identify the mom, he might be able to get her to adopt the sick calf once we find it. His next move is to start kicking the dead calf around in the hope that that will attract the interest of the mother cow. Indeed one comes trotting. “See how tight her bag is?” Paul points out—the full udder of a mother who hasn’t been nursing. But then comes another cow, with another more or less tight bag. Then another. Within a few minutes we have about twenty cows all sniffing at the dead calf. “To hell with it,” says Paul. “Maybe we can do something on the way back.”

We grind on up the butte, steeper and potholier as we ascend. In due course we arrive at the place where Anita and I saw the sick calf. There is no calf. Paul and I start prowling on foot, and it isn’t long before I hear him hollering for me across the coulee, and there, sure enough, in a stand of limber pines, is the calf, grazing. Skinny, but not looking three-quarters dead anymore.

We mount back into the pickup, Paul plunges it straight into and out of the coulee—scaring the shit out of his passenger—and then we make a wide circle uphill from the calf. Paul thinks he has some rope behind the seat. I find a piece about seven feet long that looks like clothesline. He knots it into a semblance of a lasso.

Tom chortles; Paul shrugs. “It’s all I’ve got,” he says. “What I’m hoping is he’s weak enough he’ll just let me walk up to him and drop this loop around his neck. He’s got to be part of the herd that was up here three or four weeks ago. We thought he was lost, gone. I can’t believe he’s still alive.”

One very short, very quiet step at a time, Paul creeps closer and closer up behind the calf. With each step he takes, the calf takes one step away, but inch by inch Paul is gaining. When at last he is perhaps two feet behind, the calf bolts—pretty doggone zippily, too, for an animal supposedly at death’s door. Next thing I know, Paul is diving through the air, and with one extended hand has grabbed the tippy-tip of the animal’s tail.

Very quickly he goes hand over hand up the tail, and then in a blur he has gripped a leg, tipped the calf sideways, dumped it on the ground, and is sitting on top of it whipping his little length of rope, or clothesline, around its ankles. Just like in the rodeo.

The awesomest passage of this rodeo-cowboy scene is when right in the middle of the furious action Paul’s hat comes off and he pauses in his calf-tying-up to reach casually across the grass and put it back on. (I hasten to add that this is not a Cowboy Hat. Those are for official rodeos, in town. Ranchers at work wear regular old billed caps with labels on the front like half of everybody else in America.) Within a minute he has picked that scrawny little critter up like an attaché case and dumped it into the bed of the pickup.

“What would have happened it you’d missed?” I inquire.

“I damn near did,” he says. “We’d have had to chase him till he got tired enough to catch.” I look around: coulees, rimrock, scree, rock, down timber, badger holes. Nice place for a picnic with Anita and Fig Newtons, but broken, nasty country to be trying to run on. “We’d do it like coyotes. You’d run him awhile, then I’d run him.”

“Sounds like it might have taken some time.”

“Oh, yes,” says Paul.

“How close did you come to missing grabbing him by the tail?”

“Close.”

I feel like the girl in a silent melodrama: Oh, Paul! My hero! Also I’m thinking back to when I got in the truck about an hour and a half ago. The idea, as I recall it, was that I was going to show him where the sick calf had been. There wasn’t anything in the contract about chasing animals all over Porcupine Butte all morning at the risk of limb and life.

Never mind. All is well. My hero!

Ahem. The clear-eyed fact to be remembered, shoving poetic license aside, is that this was not primarily a precious life saved; for it is a life not long to be lived; what will have been saved, come a year, is a good thousand dollars’ worth of beef.

On the way back, Paul even got one of the moms to come alone to the dead calf. She did not seem inclined to murder him. Must have been his Air of Quiet Authority. He wrote down her number and said that from here on out it was going to be up to his brother-in-law to come get her and put her in the barn with her new stepson; she was his cow. I then learned that one of the ways you encourage a reluctant foster mother is to skin the dead calf and make a sort of sweater out of the cape, with four holes for the legs of the adoptee, so that he’ll smell like a blood relation.

I am so glad I am not a rancher.

A Bluebird Day on the Prairie

2010-07-14T08:40:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, June 23, 2010.

A morning stroll, a bluebird day on the prairie. Cows have been moved in, still pregnant—Paul is calving even later this year. For the last three years, he has been keeping calves of the year through the winter and selling them as yearlings. A nearly essential element of Montana ranching lore is the bitter-cold middle-of-the-night February calving: Our ranch manager on the West Boulder had built a little sled on which he could pull a half-frozen newborn from some distant pasture to the warmth of a barn. June and July calving abolishes that, and I say bravo.

Modest changes to the flora. The death-camas is the most abundant I’ve ever seen it, and taller than I’ve ever seen it. Most of the helianthella, the little sunflower, is gone, as is the sweetvetch. Newly in bloom:

Potentilla diversifolia: varileaf cinquefoil
Potentilla fruticosa: shrubby cinquefoil
Sedum lanceolatum: lanceleaf stonecrop
Castilleja sp.: Indian paintbrush, dark pink with yellow-tipped petals
Gaillardia aristata: blanketflower (only a single flower)
Orobanche fasciculata: clustered broomrape
Phacelia linearis: threadleaf phacelia

The godwits and curlews are much more abundant, thank God, though not nearly so plentiful as last year. They are as outraged as ever by my presence in their nesting habitat. The godwits in particular are almost scary, flying straight at me at high speed and shrieking, only to veer off about twenty feet out. I love these birds.

Along a pasture fence, a pair of very blond coyotes were sniffing eagerly at something. They ran away as soon as they saw me, of course, and what the object of their interest was turned out to be one of the grossest sights I’ve ever seen—a cow placenta, so fresh it was practically breathing; bloody, glistening, big.

There was a buck antelope coughing chuff chuff at me on a rise, with his little herd of three does. Then as I dropped into a coulee I almost jumped out of my skin, so loud was the roary bark of what must have been another antelope, very close. I climbed quickly to the point of a steep moraine and could see for a good mile—and not a tree—and no antelope. I don’t know how they do this, but they do it. Maybe they find these little folds in the landscape that somehow they know keep them below most observers’—in particular, predators’—possible sightlines?

High, high above the butte, an eagle. That bird at that moment could doubtless see several hundred antelope here and there across the prairie, including many fawns; but would never dare trying to snatch even the newest-born: Not only the strutting, shiftless males have horns; the moms can use theirs to deadly effect.

Nature Boy and (part-time) Nature Girl

2010-06-21T13:00:00.000-07:00

Sunday, June 13, 2010.

A walk across the prairie and up the lower slopes of Porcupine Butte. The shorebirds—long-billed curlew, marbled godwit, upland sandpiper—seem to be many fewer this year. Or are they just later? Other birds are still arriving, the latest being eastern kingbirds and nighthawks, both of which have just shown up in the last couple of days.

Flowers were many:

Cerastium arvense: field chickweed
Zigadenus venenosus: death-camas
Allium textile: textile onion
Phlox sp.
Linum perenne: flax
Delphinium bicolor: low larkspur
Astragalus drummondii: Drummond’s sweetvetch
Helianthella uniflora: little sunflower
Tetraneura acaulis a.k.a. Hymenoxys acaulis: stemless sunflower
Antennaria neglecta: field pussytoes
Gaillardia aristata: blanketflower (not really quite blooming yet)
Penstemon eriantherus: hairy penstemon
Lupinus (sericeus?): some damn lupine, you tell me
Phacelia franklinii: Franklin’s phacelia
Hymenoxys acaulis: stemless sunflower
Cryptantha celosioides: miner’s candle
Oenothera caespitosa: gumbo evening-primrose
Draba sp.: cushion draba
Draba sp.: taller
Leucocrinum montanum: sand lily
Erysimum asperum: wallflower
Cryptantha interrupta: bristly cryptantha
Senecio canus: silvery groundsel
Prunus virginiana: chokecherry
Balsamorhiza sagittata: arrowleaf balsamroot
Erigeron speciosus: showy fleabane
Erigeron compositus: cutleaf daisy
Lomatium cous: cous biscuitroot
Lithospermum ruderale: western gromwell
Geranium viscosissimum: sticky geranium
Ribes sp.: some gooseberry
Viola nuttallii: Nuttall’s violet

I made it to what I considered the last reasonably achievable rimrock, getting on top of which involved a very steep stairstep cowpath defile between cliff faces (behind Elizabeth, I should add)—and worth the effort, for the sensational view of the Absarokas, the Beartooths, the Belts, the Snowies, the prairie; and, to me most rewarding, just underfoot, the young and vigorous limber pines amid the many old ones killed by blister rust, as well as a few just-starting Douglas-firs.

Elizabeth wanted to climb around the next bend, scouting for a possible way to the top for our next venture up this way (a route I consider, on the basis of the topo map, impossible), and she came upon a…bear! A dark one, possibly one of the two we saw on the grassy, open, easy northern slope of the butte last year (the right and only way to the top, in my opinion).

Porcupine Butte does not seem like proper habitat for Ursus americanus. There’s not enough forest, and black bears are forest bears. Well, aren’t they? And what about connectivity? If they’re going to reproduce, they’ve got to be in touch with the larger population—which would mean, at a minimum, the Crazies, which I imagine support not very many bears. It probably also means some genetic linkage to the Cayuse Hills to the south and beyond them the Beartooths and the Absarokas and therefore the whole Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. And it’s possible that there’s a link to the north as well: If they can make it across the grasslands to the Belts, then there’s a reasonable chance that there’s gene flow all the way up, to the northern limit of black bears in Alaska. And the ranchland north of here is mighty lonesome country.

So: proper habitat? What makes this possible is not so much forest as peace and quiet. The amazingly low human density around here allows Porcupine Butte’s few (two?) bears to stroll across ranches by night, maybe even to travel up and down stream corridors at dawn and dusk, and thereby to remain part of the metapopulation of the northern Rockies. Wow.

And of course the butte itself offers an abundance of bear food—grass, forbs, roots, bugs, rodents, carrion—that is available to them only because of the nearly total lack of disturbance by humans. They walk around in the open in the middle of the day, as Elizabeth’s encounter shows. That bear, by the way, was not in the least freaked out. It had a look at her and just ambled off. No panicky run for the trees.

As we came back across the prairie, where the grass thanks to the rains seems to have grown a good foot in the last week, we saw a brown something moving in the green, and then a pair of little muley ears: It was an infant mule deer fawn, commanded by its mother to lie down flat but too new at the game to know that when hiding it is best to include the ears. She herself was entirely invisible—ears flattened—though certainly nearby.

I then proceeded to ruin a perfectly good organic and local pork shoulder steak. I thought, Well, shoulder, it needs some cooking, so first I tried to braise it in some weird organic barbecue sauce I’d bought at the Bozeman Co-op, with vinegar, but it smelled so bad once heated that I threw it out, rinsed off the pork, and began again with white wine; and the longer I cooked it, the stiffer it got. After an hour and half, starving, we (“we”) gave up. I threw it on the grill, as I had always planned to do at the end, and though this hardly seemed possible, it got stiffer and drier yet. I also had cooked collard greens, and overdosed them with both garlic and vinegar to such an extent that they were downright repulsive.

Elizabeth had gathered many morels, however, the day before, and, richly buttered, they saved our dinner from utter uneatableness.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010.

And Elizabeth is already gone, back to venture capital and software. I'm quiet, I'm lonely.

One of my least favorite painters, at his worst, painted clouds like these, ranks of edgeless gray smudges across the azure night sky, El Greco. For once an evidence in nature of whatever it was he saw in his lost-in-labyrinths out-in-the-out-there-too-long San-Geronimo mind.

Thursday, June 17, 2010.

O a blessing, a benison! At what I call in my mind now Antelope Pass, not a pass at all but just an up-wedged shale-bed and its companion moraine over which one comes for the last mile to this place and where there are nearly always a particularly imperial pronghorn buck and his varying harem of does and now fawns: Not thirty feet up, white wings beating, long necks outstretched, unimaginable in these parts anymore but unmistakable, and magnificent, a pair of trumpeter swans! The biggest birds, by weight, in North America, and not long ago nearly lost to toxins and slaughter. They must be nesting on one of the glacial pothole lakes up towards Two Dot.

This, this is why we come here, and stay, and watch, and are so deeply grateful.

Sunday, June 20, 2010.

Imagine my delight at finding one of these in the kitchen sink this morning:

Very tiny:

And moving very slowly. Naturally I took it to be one of Satan's favorite tick species.

In fact it is a pseudoscorpion. Which is not an insect, not a tick, not a spider. It is an arachnid, but not a spider. It is a member of an order all its own, the Pseudoscorpiones. There are more than 400 genera of pseudscorpions, comprising some 3300-odd species, with more being discovered all the time. They live all over the world, and all of them are entirely harmless.

That fact is by now moot, of course, because I killed the little motherfucker on sight.
…

Evening: a slow-rolling storm in the deep-bass timbre of Hendrick Hudson and his crew bowling ninepins in Rip van Winkle’s Catskills sky: Wouldn’t you think it would be hard for bats to fly in such a steady dense rain, with those leathern wings? Well, they do it

Delight, but in context

2010-06-16T09:39:00.000-07:00

Friday, June 11, 2010.

Elizabeth is here, and Montana spring has returned to do its stuff—house-shaking thunder-slams followed by an afternoon and night of cold, soaking rain. She said she could hear the grass growing. She also always manages to see the birds I’ve missed, in this case yellow warbler, vesper sparrow, great horned owl. I did have the delight of a few seconds of rocketing bluebird.

Speaking of delight: the wines of Pierre Sparr, of Sigolsheim. More soon to come on Alsace, as I will be retro-blogging my recent travels there. Sigolsheim was a nice enough town, the nicest thing about it (besides Sparr’s vineyards and winery) being its position between Kaysersberg and Zellenberg, my two favorite towns in that fate-favored region. Um…I guess I should say that fate favored it for a long time a long time ago, and has favored it again since World War II. Alsace has known some ugly times in the last couple of hundred years, jerked violently back and forth by France and Germany. The Third Reich’s cruelty to Alsace was unspeakable, as the heartbreaking war memorials and empty synagogues today attest.

Bucatini last night with chicken livers, morels, and cream; accompanied by Pierre Sparr’s 2007 reserve pinot blanc. “Since 1680,” the label says, and all I can think is, God, what must the Sparr family have endured? The wine tastes different, perhaps better, I believe, when you know its history.

It rained all afternoon. As I sat at the dining room table interviewing Gael Greene on the phone—she was the restaurant critic for New York magazine from 1968 to 2008, and she loved Craig Claiborne—I was also looking out the window into the cottonwoods, and just when she paused to check an incoming Tweet, I saw a fawn so newly born it could barely walk, wobbling behind its mom. Within an hour I had seen another, and perhaps a third (or the first a second time). By dusk, a deep gray one in that rain, the fawns were not just steady on their feet but bopping along, jumping over downed limbs with ease.

(Above: The Americans arrive in Colmar, 1945.)

There’s fresh snow on the Crazies this morning, all the way down into the forested slopes. And here, at 11:45 a.m., it’s all of forty-six degrees. Spring!

Montana Xenophobia?

2010-06-08T08:58:00.000-07:00

Saturday, June 5, 2010.

My dear neighbor Farwell Smith invited me for lunch at his place a few miles down the road, but it was my turn and I still had much remaining from the magnificent roast chicken. Plain old chicken sandwiches—with mayonnaise out of the jar on crumbly, not so good local multigrain bread—were just dandy. And then the last of my lovely California fruit: cherries and apricots, the ripeness of the latter finally at the drool stage.

Apropos of my Craig Claiborne project, Farwell and I talked about the first great wave of American travel to Europe, which he was on the front edge of: As a member of the rollicking Harvard College class of '48 he and a couple of hundred of his classmates crammed into some slow-chugging liner for the voyage of a lifetime, destination Le Havre and la liberté. They played a drinking game of which the loser had his face plunged into a cream pie.

Under the head of Never a dull moment among the dull moments: As I headed home this evening from my first walk out onto the just-greening prairie I saw something moving on the meadow in front of the house that just damn it looked like…binocs, please, and, yes, it was: a big fat male wild turkey, and then in case you had an ounce of doubt he spread his tail in full display. I tried an Indian sneak, and did get a photograph, though not a good one, and no great display, but unmistakably a tom turkey, a big new addition to the Langston yard list.

As always—it still seems odd—the earliest best flowers come in the bleakest habitat. I climbed the rubbly deserty little butte that once was mined for gravel and has remained nearly barren, and there found the following (obviously, I need help at the species level):

field chickweed, Cerastium arvense
fennel-leaved lomatium? Lomatium foeniculaceum
[but might be cous]
cliff anemone? Anemone multifida
Parry’s townsendia, Townsendia parryi
sand lily, Leucocrinum montanum
textile onion, Allium textile
field pussytoes, Antennaria neglecta
obscure bluebells? Mertensia viridis?
low larkspur, Delphinium bicolor
bristly cryptantha, Cryptantha interrupta
silvery groundsel, Senecio canus
shorter yellow composite, big center, sagelike lvs, petals sq at tip
tiny yellow multiple, lotuslike?
cutleaf daisy, Erigeron compositus
bent-flowered milkvetch? Astragulus vexilliflexus?
tiny yellow clover, Trifolium sp.
silky crazyweed, Oxytropis sericea
wallflower, Erysimum asperum
death-camas, Zigadenus venenosus
orange globemallow, Sphaeralcea coccinea

long-billed curlews
marbled godwits
meadowlark
upland sandpiper (a species elsewhere in steep decline)
—All very quiet: not nesting yet?

The morels have been visited by several neighbors and plucked in large volume. One person left with twenty pounds. They did seem infinite. So, of course, once upon a time, did passenger pigeons and the buffalo. This afternoon the morels remaining are rusty or worse. Rain is expected—maybe there will be another crop then.

For dinner, more of the chicken that keeps on giving, simply cold. I flavored some mayonnaise with toasted cumin seeds pounded in the mortar with sea salt and black pepper; saffron soaked in cream; and a tiny bit of cayenne. My avocado was shot, having gone straight from hard to rotten. My potato salad was, well, it was a disaster--my bugaboo, too damn much vinegar, which a dose of sugar couldn't fix. Arugula was fine, especially with this terrific St. Pierre California olive oil. Dr. Loosen's basic riesling, 8.5 percent alcohol, sweet and sting in viola-violin harmony, was just right.

In the late dusk a herd of deer—mixed, both mule and whitetail—passed through the cottonwoods, at least twenty, almost in file, more than half of them very small yearlings.

Monday, June 7, 2010.

To “downtown” Melville for the first time. It consists of one building, known as the Big Sky Corner, which comprises post office (with postmaster Rick), store (not much there, lots of open space on the shelves, intermittently overseen by Glen), and lunch counter (under the aegis of one or both Lindas).

The men gave me hearty handshakes, the women hugs. We were all glad to see one another. I asked them each how they’d wintered, and they all wanted to know about my new book project.

There’s always talk there, and it was natural, with the writer being welcomed back into “the country,” that today the subject was books. Glen was recommending one by a guy who had reconstructed the Battle of the Big Horn in main part by using his metal detector and his knowledge of bullet forensics; he had determined that Custer was shot in the head at the beginning of the battle by his own scout, a Crow (fellow tribesman, that is, of the Indians Custer was there to attack), and that the scout was then shot multiple times in the back by Custer’s troops. My pal Howard, a highly intellectual mechanic who is often to be seen at the B.S. Corner, told me about a rare book of which he owns two copies, a fictional memoir of a nineteenth century British trader in West Africa. He offered to lend me one of his copies, and I’m going to take him up on it.

I thought back to a gas station I’d stopped at in Idaho on the way up here, where a fellow with a Montana-licensed van took a look at my California plates and asked, “You wouldn’t be headed to Montana, would you?

I said I was.

“Well, you better be careful.”

Why was that?

“They all hate Californians. They’re all rednecks. They’ve got guns, too.”

I told him I had lived here for years and come back every summer since—with California plates—and had never experienced even a hint of hostility. I allowed there might have been some behind my back.

“Well, you better watch out. I’m leaving. I been in Livingston three years and had nothing but trouble. I’m going back to California. Livingston’s nothing but rednecks.”

I said that Livingston had been our nearest town when we lived on the West Boulder River. We shopped there, we had many friends there, I tried to do a large New Urbanist development there and so had come to know the politicians, the bankers, the whole business community—and I had never experienced anything worse than political opposition; and even that had been polite.

“I was homeless half the time. Lived in my van.”

Oh. Well. Hm. Nowhere much to go with our conversation at that point. No doubt he had in fact known a different Montana.

2010-06-08T08:44:00.000-07:00

Friday, June 4, 2010.

Those morels: I just sautéed them in butter, and then salted them. I try not to use the word sublime too often, but in this case it is the mot juste. And with them a roast chicken truly worthy. I had brought it in the cooler all the way from the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market in San Francisco because I have yet to find in Montana any chicken to compare to these raised by Norman and Aimee Gunsell of Mountain Ranch Organics. The only comparable chicken I have ever tasted is the legendary blue-legged poulet de Bresse. Both walk around outside from an early age, eating what they find in the fields, both grow at least twice as slowly as supermarket chickens, and both develop a dense, chewy, sensationally flavorful flesh. And somehow the meat on a three-and-a-half-pound bird just keeps coming—maybe because a small serving seems like a big one, it’s so satisfying. Next to those sublime morels and a little potato gratin, all it wanted was a spoonful of pan juices. And a couple of glasses of '07 Bourgogne rouge.

Fact of the day from The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America: “Common Grackle, Quiscalus quiscula…Uncommon.” Well, not uncommon at Langston House. They're pockety-pocking for bugs all over the meadows, long tails bobbing, yellow eyes sharp: Unlike the robins, they dislike being watched, take to the trees when I raise my binoculars. The males have an iridescent blue mantle.

Yesterday—and despite camera in hand, and because Joe Stern, my only neighbor, and his dog were out for a walk on the other side of the flood, and this would be our first greeting of the year—I failed to take a photograph of Sweet Grass Creek sheeting across my driveway, at least a hundred yards’ width of it and moving fast. I have never seen the water this high. Every kind of limb and twig and grodu was strewn through the woods in intricate fractals, which showed that scary though it was, the creek was already falling. In fact, my friend and landlord Paul Hawks, on the phone, confirmed that after he had left in his tall four-wheel-drive pickup earlier in the afternoon, he had neglected to call to tell me that I was flooded in. At that time, he said, the water pouring over the little road was a good six inches deep. No fool, not even Tom Fool, would dare to try to swim a low-slung M3 Beamer across that.

Last evening’s crop of morels was beyond anything I could have imagined—so freshly emerged they all but glowed, literally hundreds within sight as I stood in one place under the burned cottonwoods. I gathered perhaps a pound. But they weren’t as good as they were last night, mushy, the taste imprecise; I think I didn’t let them dry long enough.

Back in Montana, back to serious posting, I mean it this time

2010-06-02T16:43:00.000-07:00

Langston House, Greater Metropolitan Melville, Montana, June 2, 2010.

How do they have robins anywhere else when it seems that all the robins in the world are gathered here? And all hollering. Starting at five in the morning. Welcome to Montana.

There are many other birds as well. Sandhill cranes, for example, are much louder than robins. Eagles are better-looking. Warblers warble. But the robins—suburban and human-tolerant though they are—run the joint.

Never mind the hours of phone hell trying to get the internet connection up and going.

Look at the blazing white snow on the Crazies, the broken tree limbs bobbing down Sweet Grass Creek and slamming into the new log jams, the first flowers in the woods, so much blacker and deader than I had thought they were going to be by now: violets violet and white; crazyweed; strawberry; phacelia in the creekbed gravel; bluebells amid the leggy new cottonwoods in the burn.

And: morels. Their feet in the burn. Pale blond. I research them online, I soak them in cold salt water so the tiny bugs will depart, and finally, just to be (as it were) dead certain, I take them to my dear neighbor Elli Hawks for approval, who assures me that they are unmistakably fine. Ah. I believe there will be more tomorrow. I believe there will be a great many, because the habitat in which I found them—blackened, moist, sandy soil—is widespread. Voilà:

And the water in the house, from the new well, is exquisitely clear.

Thunderstorms yesterday, curtains of blinding downpour as I drove north from Big Timber. More gathering over the mountains this afternoon, and the sky purple-black to the east, at the prairie horizon.

It has been three and a half years since that savage November fire, and recovery (vegetative, I mean) is everywhere; yet so are weeds—houndstongue, thistle, mustard—and the unhappy smell of wet charcoal. Young tender browse is abundant, but there seem, at least at first glance, or sniff, to be a lot of dead deer. I must ask about this, someone who knows.

A NEW YORK MEMORY, C. 1975

2010-01-04T16:45:00.000-08:00

Never were Louise and I more at home in New York than when we went to see Bobby Short at the Café Carlyle.

I learned that if you went for dinner, as few did, you would have a table in front, ten feet from the great man, the most perfect wearer of black tie in New York, the smiler of the brightest smile, the best-ever embodiment of the Cole Porter persona. We would order steak tartare, with its staring raw egg yolk, and a bottle of Champagne, and the headwaiter, recognizing (I flatter us to think) the very type of a good-looking and sophisticated and young Manhattan couple—younger than nearly everybody else in the joint—would refill our glasses and joke with us till at last the lights went down, and Short and his bassist and drummer would take their places in the dark.

With a thunderous hammering chord he would herald his entrance, the lights would blaze, his eyes would blaze, and Short would almost bellow his way into a grand old Porter song—say, “At Long Last, Love”—and we were there, we were in it, in him, in love, in New York, even back in the now mythic moment of the song’s making in the thirties, believing in forever. That past was long; why shouldn’t our future be equally so? I in my double-breasted slim-waisted navy-blue Paul Stuart suit, Louise in her silk Armani and Tiffany pearls, we looked the immortals that New York Magazine and our own friends too believed in. And when we spoke, and joked, and laughed, and danced, we limned—all unknowing—the patterns that our peers of course had not themselves designed but felt from within as though they had. At the end of the song, Short stood up suddenly from his bench, launched himself, really, with a huge smile, his eyes sweeping the room, demanding applause.

His eyes rested a moment, pleased, on us: He knew us, he recognized us, we were the type he wanted there. And then one bright Sunday brunch at the Trattoria Alfredo on Hudson Street we saw him, wearing a blazer and an ascot, sitting with the clothing designer Calvin Klein. Our companions were a young French girl and her fiancé, Anne and David, both undergraduates at Columbia, both spectacularly good-looking. Via a waiter Klein sent a note to David, asking if he was interested in modeling for him. It occurred to Louise and me for the first time, such innocents, that Bobby Short might be gay. We didn’t like the thought. We liked the romantic woman-loving man who occupied those songs. David, a lifelong New Yorker, rolled his eyes and said, “Tom, are you kidding me? Just look at the fucking ascot.”

David did end up doing some modeling, and appeared (fully clothed) in a few Calvin Klein magazine ads. Every single male involved was queer—David’s word—but nobody ever bothered him. Then he started medical school and was too busy to continue. He didn’t need the money anyway.

Louise and I continued to go see Bobby Short at the Café Carlyle, and his performances were always magical. Who cared about the man’s private life? We were all New Yorkers.

CRAIG CLAIBORNE: DIGGING IN

2009-12-04T14:01:00.000-08:00

A week and a bit ago, I spent eight days in New York and one in East Hampton, Long Island, where Craig (we're on first-name terms now) lived for most of his professional life. My mission was to interview some of the people who knew him best and who knew him as it were from different angles. It was an illuminating experience, and already, here only at the beginning of my research, I can see that he presented often dramatically varying versions of himself to different people. And so what is developing is, you might say, a sort of cubist portrait.

Just to mention three of the people I talked with:

Arthur Gelb, now 87, was for many years the managing editor of the New York Times, and if ever there was a Grand Old Man of that Great Gray Lady, he's it. He started from almost nothing, a poor kid from the streets of the Bronx, and rose to what is of course one of the most powerful positions of influence in the world. (He tells his own story with vigor and wit in his memoir, "City Room"--a wonderful book redolent of cigarette smoke, strong whiskey, fedoras, all the classic appurtenances of the good old days of reporterdom; his is a story also of courage and integrity.) Gelb was CC's protector and defender at the Times. He created a wall of safety around Craig that meant, effectively, that the food editor and restaurant critic didn't really have a boss. He was free to write as he chose, travel where he chose, make a culinary star of whatever clever home cook he chose, condemn a restaurant as he saw fit (and a Claiborne condemnation could be a restaurant's death sentence). It was Gelb who saw to it that CC and his columns were treated, at the Times, with a seriousness and respect equal to that accorded the paper's critics of books, art, film, and the theatre.

Gelb is still a strong-willed, strongly opinionated powerhouse. He and his wife, Barbara, wrote a biography of Eugene O'Neill when they were quite young, and now they're writing another one. "Covering the same ground?" I asked, a little mystified. "With the benefit of improved perspective," he said, from a height (both figurative and literal; he's very tall).

Ed Giobbi is as diminutive as Gelb is towering. An artist by trade, a very good one indeed, he is also widely known as a brilliant cook; and has published several cookbooks. He was a friend of Craig's from way back and all the way to the end. Unlike many of the others in CC's orbit, Giobbi never wanted anything from him--they were simply friends. Like the truest of true friends, he saw Craig whole, and did not shrink from criticizing him. He struggled with Craig's tragic weaknesses--especially his drinking, which grew worse and worse as Craig grew older and sicker. He also had many funny stories to tell about Craig's less troubling weaknesses, most of them harmless enough to call mere eccentricities. The more we talked--and we talked for hours--the more eccentric I realized Craig Claiborne truly was. And the more intriguing this project became.

The richest interview of all was with Diane Franey, the daughter of the late Pierre Franey, who shared a byline with Craig Claiborne for many years. Pierre was not really a co-writer--he was French, for one thing, with an imperfect command of English--but he was certainly a co-creator of the many joyous occasions that formed the basis for the best of CC's writing about food and food people. Craig discovered Pierre in 1960, when he was chef at what was then indisputably the best restaurant in the United States, Le Pavillon. When the tyrannical owner of the restaurant demanded concessions from the kitchen staff, Pierre led the whole staff out on strike, Craig got wind of this unprecedented scandal, and the story got major play in the New York Times. Suddenly a new category of star had been born: the star chef, an idea that had never before existed in America. And Craig and Pierre became friends for life, and, before long, collaborators--Pierre at the stove, Craig at the typewriter.

What I had not known till meeting Diane was how Pierre's wife and children became Craig's family. For years Pierre worked with Craig without compensation--he literally refused to take money--and so Craig, in gratitude, would shower the whole Franey family with gifts. They often went on vacation together, all on Craig's dime. They were so comfortable together that even though Pierre and his wife Betty knew that Craig was gay, they had no problem with little Diane being Craig's roommate aboard ship or in a hotel (the children were too young to know what it even meant). (It was a source of some irritation through the years that people who knew that Craig was gay but didn't really know him or Pierre just assumed that they were a couple.)

Diane's mother died just a year or so ago, and she now lives in the house she grew up in, a short distance from Craig's East Hampton house. She was just a kid through some of the most important years of Craig's and Pierre's collaboration, but she has a most remarkable memory. She went to nearly every dinner party, knew the regulars, knew the food, knew her father and Craig inside and out. She also has an extraordinary collection of memorabilia, which I didn't have nearly enough time to go through with her. I'll be going back and setting aside much more time for that. One of the real treats of that trip to East Hampton was going with Diane to Craig's first beach house, where many of her fondest memories are set. It has been remodeled, but the dazzling view across Gardiner's Bay remains the same, and she could re-create in her mind where every piece of furniture, every pot and pan used to be. It was the first time she had been there in over forty years, and she was clearly moved.

I had a number of other conversations and will have many more. It is fascinating to see a person taking shape this way. When I have finished writing this book, I believe I will be the one person in the world who knows Craig Claiborne best, because I'll have seen him through so many eyes. And what a gratifying opportunity, and honor, it will be to share that portrait.

GEARING UP FOR CRAIG CLAIBORNE

2009-11-06T17:13:00.000-08:00

I'm mapping this biography job out almost as thoroughly as a real grown-up writer would do. I've got a couple of dozen books on order--I will soon own everything Claiborne ever published. And I'm making a list of the interviews I need to do, and putting the names in order of priority. I leave for New York a week from tomorrow--November 14--and will be there for eight days, seeing as many people as I possibly can.

The most important interview of all, with Arthur Gelb, is already scheduled. Gelb was for many years managing editor of the New York Times, and he was Craig Claiborne's protector and defender par excellence. Apparently CC sort of didn't have a real boss--he was an independent power center at the Times--and that unique position was due to Gelb's indulgence. I don't want to spoil the story, but in later years Gelb played a critical role in what amounted to a plunge into darkness on CC's part. Gelb is a classic old newspaperman, with a growly voice and a get-it-done hurriedness. I'm reading his memoir now, "City Room," of the days when the newsroom was full of smoke and noise and characters.

I hope also to see Diane Franey out in East Hampton, Long Island, where CC lived for many years. Diane's father, Pierre, was considered probably the most brilliant chef in America when he resigned from the best French restaurant in America, Le Pavillon, and began to work with Craig Claiborne at the Times. Their partnership was extraordinary, and CC had a hard time getting Franey's contribution recognized by the paper. In fact he had to quit to persuade them. When he came back, thenceforward the byline would be "by Craig Claiborne with Pierre Franey." It drove them both nuts that a lot of people thought they were a gay couple. CC was gay, and Franey was not. His daughter inherited a ton of memorabilia from their work together, and she remembers both of them vividly, so that's going to be an important interview too. Diane is expecting a grandchild, however, precisely on the day our interview is scheduled, and if that baby's not late, then we're going to have to get together later on in the winter. It looks as if I'm going to be in and out of New York a lot.

Because New York still feels more like home to me than any other place on earth, and because I have so many wonderful friends there, and because I just love that city and its people, I am very happy at the prospect of going there often over the coming months.

REALLY, REALLY, THIS TIME I MEAN IT

2009-10-26T15:48:00.000-07:00

I'm serious, I'm getting back into the blogging business.

I've just made a deal with the Free Press to write a book about Craig Claiborne, the first food editor of the New York Times. He was kind of the father of everything in the food world--before him there wasn't much but gray roast beef and canned green beans and a few not very good French restaurants.

What I'm planning to do with the blog is not so much to publish samples of my manuscript as to document the process of researching and writing the book. Right now all I've done is write the proposal that was sent around to publishers. Well, I say "all." My ruthless agent, David McCormick, kept me writing and re-writing the damned thing all through the summer and well into the fall before he'd even show it to anybody. I am, in the end, grateful to him, but it was an exhausting experience.

I've also been blessed with a singular piece of luck, in the form of a thesis on Claiborne written by Georgeanna Milam Chapman for her master's degree at the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture. She did an amazing amount of research, and she has made the whole thing available to me. She is also going to be helping me as I go along, as is her major professor, the redoubtable John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance as well as a notable food writer. Georgeanna and John T. know a great deal about Claiborne--he was a Mississippi Delta boy--and they have both been wonderfully generous to me with their knowledge and their time.

I was in New York a couple of weeks ago and met with my new editor, Emily Loose, and we talked a bunch about all the "non-writing" aspects that are so important to a book's success these days. Literary purists don't love to think about this stuff, and I'm not perfectly comfortable with it myself, but it's the real world, and I remind myself about how artists in the Renaissance had to butter up popes and cardinals and so forth. 'Twas ever so, in fact. Anyway, in the last few days I've been working on this non-writing business, making lists of all the people whom I want to know about the book before it comes out, events we might tie it too, places I might try to publish an excerpt, and so on. Now I start lining up interviews: I'm going back to New York in a couple of weeks for that purpose--that's where many of the most important surviving witnesses to Claiborne's life are. (He died in 2000, at the age of 79.)

When I was in New York I also had dinner at Claiborne's favorite restaurant, Le Veau d'Or, which astonishingly is still there and unchanged. Even M. Treboux, the owner and host, 85 years old, is still there every night, rising creakily from his chair to greet every arriving party, "Bonsoir, madame, bonsoir, monsieur." The whole place is beautifully old and old-fashioned, and I had a meal that Claiborne would have ordered (I know this from his not very good memoir, "A Feast Made for Laughter") (more on that some other time): a martini; a bowl of cool vichyssoise sprinkled with chives; veal kidneys in mustard sauce atop a really much too large mountain of rice (Claiborne detested overlarge portions); and--where else can you get this in New York?--floating island! Was it great? No. But it was fine, and it was a ride in a time machine. The crowd was elegant, civilized, and, so refreshingly, quiet. M. Treboux will be one of my first interviews.

Elegance. Civilization. Gentility. These are going to be some of the qualities Claiborne will evince in the narrative. He felt himself to be an antique in his lifetime, swept aside by waves of vulgarity. Was he...a fuddy-duddy? And in taking this on, and in espousing those values, am I, now, too, or becoming one? I'm not going to worry about it.

The popularity of Barack Obama, I believe, attests to the enduring appeal of elegance and gentility. But I digress.

Bye for now.

A Birthday Story

2009-06-30T09:32:00.001-07:00

Well, we're in Montana. I've been here since the first of June, and I've got quite a lot of material built up for this blog. The first thing I'm posting--below--dates back to the summer of 2007. It tells about one of the biggest events of my life, one forever linked to my experience of the mountain West. I would like to add up front that I have recovered completely from my injuries.

A BIRTHDAY STORY

To celebrate my sixtieth birthday, Elizabeth and I and eight of our most beloved friends--Bob and Grace Anderson, Cheryl Bader, Doug and Roxie Hart, Bob Kiesling and Chris Nielson, and Lexi Rome--were taking a pack trip to Two Ocean Pass, in Wyoming. Two Ocean Pass is a place of deep significance for me, first in my imagination (in the long story “Desire” and my still unfinished novel of the same name), before I had ever seen it, and later as a destination of pilgrimage, the true Northwest Passage, and surely one of the most beautiful places on the earth.

I say the true Northwest Passage, because with the exception of the ice-choked Arctic and the artificial Panama Canal, it is the only water link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans: From the tiny Two Ocean Lake atop Two Ocean Plateau, some ten thousand feet above sea level, the rivulet Two Ocean Creek runs down to Two Ocean Pass, where, exactly astride the Continental Divide, it splits into Atlantic and Pacific creeks, the former a tributary of the Yellowstone River and flowing therefore to the Missouri and the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico and ultimately to the Atlantic Ocean, the latter a tributary of the Snake River, flowing to the Columbia and thence to the Pacific.

There were two particular landscapes I wanted to revisit and to show to Elizabeth and my friends: Two Ocean Plateau, a big mountain whose miles-wide top, comprising meadow and snowfield and krummholz, is so gentle that once achieved--steeply‑‑to explore it asks little more than a stroll; and the valley of the upper Yellowstone, where the wide smooth river winds through a miles-wide plain of willow and meadow and marsh ramparted by volcanic cliffs, like the plateau a wilderness landscape of amazing gentleness. How, I always wondered, had that valley not had a major road rammed through it?

We had booked our trip with an outfitter named John Winter, whom we knew only by his excellent references, because he had a semi-permanent camp near the Parting of the Waters. We were told he was an old-timey outfitter, gruff but good-tempered, a noted Christian, with a string of excellent horses. The morning of our departure, July 20, 2007, the day before my birthday, John sized each of us up briefly and assigned us to our horses. Because in the context of our group I was relatively experienced, he put me on a horse named Chub (the name due to his ample rump), who I immediately sensed would require some conscious application of effort to govern well.

Dude horses, more often than not, must bear loads consisting of people unaccustomed to riding, often big fat hunters, who, in the usual words of some wrangler on every trip, “just set there like a sack of potatoes.” The horses tend to laze along, daydreaming, then realize they’ve fallen behind and rush, trotting, to catch up. It makes for a very uncomfortable ride, from which at day’s end the dudes usually descend sore of butt and exhausted. Doug and Rox were by far our best equestrians, and John gave Doug a distinctly green and rambunctious paint horse, with whom Doug had to struggle all day. My horse had clearly been well trained, once upon a time, but it was also clear that he was not often well ridden. I determined immediately to communicate to Chub that today he was going to be well and consciously ridden. To get that across, I chose an exercise that our great young horsemanship teacher of former days, Buck Brannaman, liked to recommend for the purpose, namely, backing the horse carefully, first straight back, then in a leftward arc, then a rightward. I should also have worked with Chub on the ground, particularly to be sure that he would yield a soft neck, but everybody was in a hurry to get going, because it was already eleven o’clock, the day was going to be very hot, and we had some twenty-one miles to cover. We could, and doubtless should, have left much earlier in the day, but nobody had ever told us in advance where and when we were to gather; we found out only the previous night when John Winter came to Turpin Meadow Lodge and told somebody that we should meet at the outfitters’ trailhead; he was apparently not very specific about the time.

Chub was compliant, but reluctantly. When I rode behind Doug, who kept his horse walking out briskly, Chub was at first still inclined to fall into the old lag-and-trot routine, but he soon enough learned that I was not going to allow him to trot, period, and though I still felt the surge build in him pretty often, I nearly always manage to quell it before he put it into operation. When I rode behind Lexi, however, who was not really riding her horse at all, and was in fact letting him lag-and-trot at will, Chub was almost impossible to keep in line. It was particularly tough when he lost sight of the horse in front of him; then he was almost wild to catch up. For most of the day, therefore, I managed to stay behind either Doug or Roxie, and Chub behaved himself.

The staff did nothing to help us all day. A wrangler named Keith was at the head of our column, leading a long string of pack mules. They should have had another wrangler at the rear of the pack string to watch for tilting packs and accidental unhookings, but that task fell faute de mieux to Doug Hart, and indeed on numerous occasions he had to race forward and help Keith put the string back together. Keith was single-mindedly hell-bent on just getting to camp in good time; and he rarely looked back as he should have done to check on his mules. When Doug had to leave the line to help Keith, Chub would become jittery and skittish. Far at the rear of our procession, the cook, Mary Beth, followed along, out of sight and out of hearing of most of us. Our outfitter himself was a half mile or so farther behind, with a second mule string, and so it was that all day long we had no information about where we were, how much farther we had to go, when we might rest, or anything else. We had also not been provided with enough water, and all of us were dehydrated.

There were two occasions when I sensed trouble with my horse. On the first, when it had been much too long between waterings, Chub bullied his way very aggressively into the midst of the other drinking horses--so aggressively that one of them gave him a remonstrative kick, and Roxie rode her horse out of the traffic jam with a baleful eye on Chub, saying, “That horse bugs me, and I’m just getting out of his way.” The other occasion came when we had all to detour around a tangle of fallen trees. Only a few other horses had been through the deadfall, and the going was delicate and difficult, requiring our horses to step high over the crisscrossed trunks and into narrow spaces between. Where the detour returned to the main trail, it required a powerful bound forward and up, and unfortunately a broken limb was in such a position that it could easily have injured the riders passing through. The limb in fact jammed me in the chest, and I remember thinking that if I hadn’t seen it at the last instant and half-dodged it, it could easily have stabbed me in the chest. I later learned that Elizabeth had had to flatten herself against her horse’s back to avoid it. And Cheryl, who I believe at that time was the next in line after me, though some distance back, had a terrible experience there. Her horse, rather than picking his way carefully through the downfall, jumped each of the trunks, plunged into the narrow space between, jumped again, and finally regained the trail with a leap of such force that Cheryl’s body was whipped back and forth like a willow switch. Her back hurt very badly, and she cried out to me that she wanted to get off and stretch and check herself, but with the other horses, including mine, so far ahead now, her horse refused to stop. We should never have been allowed to spread out in such a fashion, and Keith surely should have stopped and led each of our horses through that dangerous passage.

When I turned Chub back toward Cheryl to help, he resisted fiercely. This, as far as he was concerned, was exactly the wrong direction, and he wasn’t having it. I equally fiercely wasn’t going to tolerate his disobedience, and I forced him to go back to Cheryl, where I got quickly off and held her horse still so she could dismount. After Cheryl had determined that she was uninjured, she remounted, and then I started to do the same, but by then Chub was dancing and wrenching himself away from me so vehemently that I couldn’t get into the saddle. When I finally got him stopped long enough to climb aboard, he whirled again and was ready to charge ahead to catch up with the others, now somewhere well ahead and out of sight. When I made clear that this wasn’t going to be allowed, Chub had the nerve to rear and whirl, almost knocking me off. I pulled him in and assured him that such behavior was not going to be tolerated, and eventually we caught up to the others; but Chub was still angry and restless.

It was getting late in the day--after five by now--and both people and horses were showing the strain. We had no idea where our camp was going to be. At last the Parting of the Waters came, and then it went, and on we rode. Finally we saw a big camp in a grove of trees, with white pyramidal tents scattered in the shadows. Doug and I also noted that there were several people there, and we concluded that it must not be our camp, which we expected to be empty.

For the last hour or so Doug had been leading Chris Nielson’s horse, after she had decided to walk along with Kez (he was nursing an injured leg), and at this moment the horse managed to pull away from him, and Doug dropped the halter rope. He and I then started “playing cowboy,” trying to pick up the lead without getting down from our own horses. I realized later that that horse had pulled away almost certainly because he knew, as we did not, that we had arrived at our camp. Finally Doug dismounted, and I grabbed the loose horse’s bridle. This brought that horse’s head into sudden close proximity to Chub’s head, and he reacted violently, wrenching himself away despite my message, via the reins, that I wanted him to hold still till Doug could come and pick up the other’s horse’s lead. I let go that bridle immediately, but now I found myself in a traffic jam: The rest of the party, their horses also all undoubtedly aware that their long day was over, were piling in behind me, and Chub, feeling crowded, was starting to get crazy.

I decided to try to back him out of the traffic jam, but he was having none of that. To my rein pressure he responded with a violent sawing of his head, and I reacted by increasing the pressure and insisting that he do as he was being told. I know now 1) that if I’d only been informed that we had arrived, none of this would have happened, I would simply have gotten off the horse and led him into camp; and 2) that once the traffic jam had begun, I should not have tried to wrestle Chub into obedience but should instead have relaxed the reins and let him find his own way out of the jam. In the event, however, when Chub couldn’t free himself from the rein pressure by violently tossing his head, he reared again, as though he would climb out of the traffic into the sky.

Instead of releasing the reins, as I now know I should have done, and grabbing Chub’s mane up near the top of his head and pushing him forward and down, I continued to pull on the reins as he rose. I guess this was a sort of panic, my unconscious and very fast reaction being to hold on tight so I wouldn’t slide off backwards. But of course that is precisely what Chub was trying to get me to do, and as he continued to climb the sky I had no choice, and fell backward, from I don’t know what height, hitting the ground hard with my whole back, with a terrible noise.

All of this took place, I believe, in less than a second. As I hit the ground, I looked up and could see the sky full of horse, falling backward on top of me. Somehow I managed to roll slightly to the right, and somehow Chub managed not to fall with his full weight on top of me. Obviously, if he had done that, I wouldn’t be writing this; I would be either paralyzed or dead. Lexi, Cheryl, Doug, Elizabeth, and Roxie all saw him fall, and all were convinced that I was going to die: They perceived that Chub had fallen on me with his full weight. I bore some responsibility for the accident: My having hung on to the reins had helped pull Chub off balance, and caused him to fall backward, flailing, out of his own control--himself, I imagine, in a panic.

I could tell that I was in pain, but I was not feeling the pain. My first reaction was a kind of exhilaration: I’m alive! The second was a determination to stand up and see if my legs and spine and hands were working. Lexi tried to keep me down; everybody wanted me to stay down--what if I had a head injury, a back injury. I didn’t care; I wanted to stand up; and I did. Ascertaining that I seemed to be mechanically functional, I obediently lay back down. Elizabeth was in a panic, squatting on the ground, trembling violently, beginning to sob, desperate for water, saying she felt she might have heart failure. I couldn’t believe it, but I ended up wandering around looking for water for her. Eventually somebody showed up with water for both of us, and I went horizontal again. Where were the staff--Keith and Mary Beth? Certainly not attending to me.

John Winter and his second pack string arrived within a few minutes, and he was obviously very upset. I don’t remember much about what happened in the first minutes after the accident, except that everybody came and had a look at me. Lexi and Cheryl were also crying, both thinking I was hurt much more badly than I was in fact. That was touching. At some point over the next day or so, each of them told me that she loved me. Elizabeth began to recover, and at some point she went up to our tent and set up our mattresses, sleeping bags, and so forth, and then she came and got me and led me up the hill. I remember how badly it hurt my sacrum to walk, especially to put weight on my left foot, and then when I stretched out inside the tent the pain washed over me at last in a great engulfing waves, and I was crying. I had also begun to let myself feel some fear--fear of all the terrible things that could have happened with the slightest change of angles. The saddle horn could have driven into my chest. I could have been crushed by the full weigh of the horse. I could have been paralyzed from the neck down--for life. I could have landed on a rock (there was a good sharp one nearby) and pierced my back, perhaps broken it. I could have had massive internal injuries, sufficient to kill me. I could have broken my skull. Well, the possibilities were endless, and I forced myself not to dwell on them. But how could I not think about the accident? It filled my mind to its remotest corners, and still does, ten weeks later to the day, as I write these few emendations.

And it didn’t have to happen. If only someone--someone on the staff--had said, simply, “We’re here!” I would have hopped down off that horse, led him to wherever he was to be debarrassed of his tack, and sat my butt on the ground with a bottle of cold creek water. Sure, I would have had more trouble with him in the coming days, but this was truly a freak accident, a sudden concatenation of circumstances that were extremely unlikely to occur again.

That night, whenever I changed position--which I needed to do often, because I seemed to be hurting everywhere--an involuntary groan, really quite a dreadful sound, would escape me. Grace, in the morning, thought I’d been having nightmares. She was right in a sense, but I wasn’t asleep at the time. All I had for pain was Ibuprofen. Cheryl had one pill of some sort of muscle relaxant, and Grace had some prescription anti-inflammatory that seemed to have no more effect than the high doses of Ibuprofen I had begun immediately to take.

In the morning--my sixtieth birthday, oh, boy--we had to discuss the option of getting a helicopter to take me to the hospital. Nobody knew what it would cost. Somebody said a thousand dollars, somebody else ten thousand. Nobody knew, of course, whether my insurance would cover it. What I did know was that if I left by helicopter, I would be ruining everybody else’s trip. I found it hard to imagine their enjoying the whole program--party, hikes, rides--while not knowing what sort of shape I was in. On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine riding, and in fact at that point I could barely make it walking from our tent to the cook tent, a matter of about sixty feet. I decided to postpone the decision.

That night, before my birthday party began, John Winter offered to say a blessing, which turned out to be quite a prayer, invoking divine aid in my healing. His sincerity was real, and deep. It meant a great deal to me. The party that followed was a riot. Kez had brought funny hats for all, and there were Champagne and good red wine and steaks and even a German chocolate birthday cake that Mary Beth had made in an improvised oven comprising little more than a cardboard box lined with aluminum foil and set on the propane-heated griddle. It was good, too. I didn’t last long, but it was a lovely party, and I felt that if I had to be hurt like this, I couldn’t do it among finer friends. Elizabeth, too, was extraordinary. My present from her was a hand-written “menu” describing a January trip to Paris. She had the whole thing mapped out! Possibly the nicest present I’ve ever gotten.

The next morning, I felt considerably worse than I had yet felt, and it was time to talk helicopter. I tried riding a horse: Walking was barely tolerable, trotting beyond unbearable. John began to conclude that we should at least find out what the helicopter options were. He dispatched a wrangler to ride the ten miles to the Hawk’s Rest patrol cabin. The ranger there was an old acquaintance of mine from my days on the board of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, John Lounsbury; he had been a district ranger in Yellowstone Park. He had already paid our camp a visit, on the morning of my birthday, and had a look at me, and agreed that we might wait a couple of days to see how I did. But now that I was doing badly and thinking of trying to get out, the ranger with the radio was out on patrol, who knew where.

Meanwhile John Winter was trying in all his spare moments to tame Chub, whom the accident seemed rather to have deranged. Chub bucked and snorted and whirled, and, yes, reared. At one point John, on the ground, kicked the horse in the chin, hard. Doug and Rox watched John struggling with Chub, and they said, “Tom, they should never have put you on that horse. Nobody should have been riding that horse.”

I found myself strangely sympathizing with Chub--a sentiment nobody shared. I thought, He has two main flaws, both fixable: 1) He crowds other horses, as he had done when we watered, and yet he also can’t stand to be crowded, especially from behind; and 2) he’s so herdbound that he nearly panics when he loses sight of the other horses. And he had good qualities: He walked right out, though keeping him from breaking into a trot required constant supervision; he had a good strong gait, long steps; he had picked his way meticulously through the tangle of downfall, always steady and careful when it counted; he was relatively comfortable to sit, despite his rather grand girth; he was even affectionate and calm except when he was disturbed by isolation. I wondered also if the fact that he turned out to be missing a shoe could have added to his fatigue and frustration toward the end of the day. (He had huge, dinner-plate-sized, feet, evidently some draft-horse blood--which is so often, at least in other horses, a calming element.)

Our wrangler went back the next morning to see if John Lounsbury had returned, and he had. He said he would have to come to our camp to determine my condition before he could order a helicopter. He had seen me all bushy-tailed and cheerful in the false euphoria of my early shock, and now probably would doubt whether I warranted so dramatic and expensive a measure. So I decided to let it go a day and see how I was. I didn’t get much better, and after another night, in the dim pre-dawn of five o’clock, I heard people talking softly and saddling up a horse. Sure enough, it was John Winter and the wrangler, and they were heading to Hawk’s Rest to take the next steps toward getting the helicopter. I told them that I was feeling much better that morning‑‑and was I? I’m not sure. I asked them not to go, and they agreed, with some relief, I think, and unsaddled their horses.

And so I passed the week in camp, trying a walk only once. In the end we decided that Glenn [Winter?], John Winter’s uncle, a longtime backcountry horseman about eighty years old who had just come along for the ride, would lead me out on the quietest horse in the string, going very slowly so that my horse would never be tempted to trot. Elizabeth decided to come along. It worked very well--a long, slow day, and painful of course, but bearable.

We had a nice farewell diner at Turpin Meadow Lodge, and then I faced another long day, this time in the car, heading “home” to Melville, Montana, where we had rented a house for the months of June and July. (More on that to come.)

I couldn’t stand the thought of a long day in the emergency room in Bozeman or Billings--and I had only two days to prepare for the long drive home, with a great deal of packing and other work to do--so I contented myself with a visit to the Pioneer Medical Center in Big Timber. The doctor there was on loan from the Billings hospital, and had studied at the medical school of the University of California at San Francisco--one of the best--and I felt quite confident in him, but the young x-ray technician, who barely spoke English and seemed hardly to know where he was, inspired no confidence at all, and indeed when the eight films came back, seven of them were virtually opaque. The doctor said that their equipment was quite old, and that in the x-rays he could read only that my spine seemed to be okay. After pressing on me here and there, he said he thought I didn’t have any broken ribs, but I should go to a medical center as soon as I got home to San Francisco. The big thing was that he gave me a prescription for Vicodin, which made a major difference in the pain--a week, now, since the accident.

Cheryl and Elizabeth were both to be flying from Billings on Tuesday, August 7, to Memmphis and San Francisco, respectively, but Elizabeth left the closet door open that allowed our cat, Augusta, access to her hidey-hole, so when the time came for departure and there was apparently no way to get the cat out, Elizabeth decided that it would be better in any case if she were to drive me home. Well, yes, especially since driving on Vicodin wasn’t recommended. It was rather queer that it took this mistake for the right thing to come to pass, but I was still glad. Elizabeth took Cheryl to Billings, and Augusta soon reappeared.

We packed up and prepared to leave early in the morning of Thursday, August 9, but I had had so much pain on the night of the 7th that the doc had given me a new Rx, this one for oxycodone, a real narcotic. It was in fact more effective, but I seemed to have a paradoxical reaction to it: Far from making me sleepy, it kept me awake for hour after hour. At three o’clock in the morning I was still awake, and I left a note for Elizabeth begging that we not leave till noon. I still didn’t get a decent night’s sleep.

But we pressed on, and made it to Elko, Nevada, something like seven hundred miles, with four minutes to go before the great Star Hotel Basque steakhouse was to close. We left Augusta in the car because if we had taken the time to check in to our motel we’d have missed our good dinner. We were giddy with fatigue, but that superb steak and a bottle of Marqués de Murrieta Rioja were wonderfully refreshing.

We slept well. Augusta, for the first time in her long, miserable career of raising hell all night in motels, stayed quiet, and though she wasn’t easy to dislodge from under the bed in the morning, we were on the road by nine, and home before seven. Exhausted, and, in my case, hurting pretty badly.

I went the next day, a Saturday, to the urgent care unit at UCSF hospital on Parnassus, and waited about two hours till finally a “real” city doctor saw me. He ordered up some x-rays, which took a while longer. He said that the good news was that I had no broken bones, but that I should nevertheless see a back doctor as soon as possible because of my still-hurting sacroiliac. Back doctors seem to be scarce in San Francisco in August, but finally my primary doctor’s assistant found me one who could see me that coming Tuesday, August 14. He was not an orthopedist but an osteopath and an internist, but my doc Andereck’s partner, Jane Hightower, recommended him highly. Robert Minkowsky turned out to be very amusing, very thorough, and a perfect image of a Jewish New York doctor; which I found comforting even before he began practicing on me. He said that even though the UCSF doc had told me I had no broken bones, the radiology report made no mention of my ribs--despite the fact that that doc had told me that they also would be x-rayed. Well, so Minkowsky sent me in to the California Pacific Medical Center for what would be my third x-ray session. I didn’t see why I needed to see Dr. Jane Hightower after Minkowsky, but she had asked me to come in, so I did. She poked at me and spent most of the time bragging about her pioneering work on mercury contamination in fish; she assured me also that I had no broken bones.

But later that day Minkowsky called to say that the new x-ray report had come to him, and I had three broken ribs. This was now over two weeks after the accident. It didn’t really matter that much, however, since the treatment was to be nothing at all--just no lifting, please, no hiking, no strain of any kind. Hightower, to her credit, called to apologize and told me that I had very supple bones...for a man of my age....

I’m writing this September 1, 2007. The last couple of weeks have been mainly a time of idleness and of getting adjusted to the persistent core of the story, which is that I came very close to either dying or being paralyzed. When I told the whole story to my sometime psychotherapist, Cynthia Kessler, in greater detail than I had subjected anybody else to, she recommended that I write this. Well, I can’t see that it will ever have any commercial application, but, pace Dr. Johnson ("No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money"), I agreed that it was a good idea.

Well, basically I think I’ve done the job now and so will quit.

2009-05-26T13:44:00.000-07:00

Whew...it's been a while. Apologies to all. I've been in ferment.

Like bread dough, or wine, I suppose. Anyhow: I've finally been persuaded by my literary agent, David McCormick, whose judgment I esteem highly, that now is not the time to try to sell my memoir. "Market conditions," doncha know. Plus there's what my non-soft-spoken publisher said to me when I first raised the idea to her: "Look, Tom, you're not famous and you're not a drug addict." Okay, okay.

What David has wanted me to do all along is either a food book or a biography--to take advantage of the success of my Alice Waters book. Well, what I've finally stumbled on is both: the life story of Craig Claiborne.

I know, I can hear the sound of heads being scratched from here. Who? Well, if you're from New York and you're old enough, or you're in any part of the food universe, of course you know who he was. For those of you outside those categories: He created the food universe as we know it. As the first food critic and food editor of the New York Times, he was all-powerful, and seemingly all-knowing. Actually, rather than belabor this, I think I'll just cut and paste a little short piece I wrote about him in 1999 for Saveur magazine:

"As food editor of The New York Times for over thirty years, Craig Claiborne famously did whatever the hell he wanted to do. In 1957, when he started, New York was tyrannized by a handful of stuffy French restaurants that really weren't very good, and on April 13, 1959, Claiborne socked them in their collective nose: ELEGANCE OF CUISINE IS ON WANE IN U.S., ran his headline--on the front page of the Sunday Times.

"One reason for that waning may well have been how few Americans really cared what they ate. It was the age of frozen TV dinners, tuna casseroles, miniature marshmallows, Jell-o. Claiborne was a natural esthete and a Swiss-trained chef, and he was appalled. But he was also thoroughly American. He did love the classic haute cuisine of Henri Soulé's legendarily snobbish Le Pavillon, but he also loved great Chinese cooking, and Italian, and Mexican, and Spanish, and Southern. He recognized that people who love good food are bound together across cultures and through time, and that the wildly various gene pool of America put us in a uniquely privileged position, if only we would seize the opportunity.

"Craig Claiborne embodied the equal opportunity of excellence wherever bred. He brought rigor to restaurant criticism, with the first use in this country of a rating system and a clear understanding of the techniques, the ingredients, and the artistry that must be combined in true culinary excellence. In The New York Times Cookbook Claiborne simply put the food that he liked best, and damn the distinctions of foreign and domestic, high and low.

"His writing for the Times came to embody a way of life, in which cooking and eating seemed always to take place in the context of friendship. Claiborne's kitchen on Long Island became a theatre of celebration, to which an invitation was both a command and a delight. Penelope Casas, Marcella Hazan, or Diana Kennedy might whip up a feast while Claiborne clattered away on his big IBM typewriter, laughing and sipping champagne. The great chefs of the world would answer the summons to East Hampton, and the event, as Claiborne would report it, was less a cooking lesson than a party. His friendship with the former chef of Le Pavillon, Pierre Franey, led to many years of collaboration; that friendship was so deep that when the Times, in 1972, declined to give Franey equal credit for the work he shared with Claiborne, Claiborne quit.

"When he returned to the paper two years later, the by-line would read, "By Craig Claiborne with Pierre Franey." When Claiborne, with a $300 bid in a charity auction, won a dinner for two anywhere in the world with no limit on the cost, it was Franey he took along. With intricate planning and a host of elderly wines, they managed to spend $4000 in a tiny Paris bistro. The meal made the front page and met with outrage and wonderment worldwide. It wasn't really all that good, Claiborne cattily confided. And the Times hadn't even known he was going until he filed his story.

"Craig Claiborne wanted America to become a good place to eat, and as usual he got his way. I wonder what he's having for dinner tonight."

Pretty sappy piece. Makes no mention of the darkness that haunted him from childhood on. Claiborne was gay when being out was out of the question, and it troubled him deeply. His last years were spent in misery, isolation, and an alcoholic fog (he died in 2000). He thrived on friendship, and then all of a sudden, after years, would inexplicably blow off a friend forever. The more I learn about him, the more complex and self-contradictory he becomes. He really does seem like a character from Shakespeare, heroic one moment, contemptible the next, blind to himself, then suddenly acutely self-knowing. It's going to be a doozy of a project.

Best of all, John T. Edge, the redoubtable head of the Southern Foodways Alliance--part of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, based at Ole Miss--has introduced me to a former graduate student of his who spent two years researching her thesis on...Craig Claiborne. Georgeanna Milam Chapman grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi, not far from Memphis, so we both know at least a later version of the world into which Claiborne was born. Morever, having been born in Sunflower, Mississippi, in 1920, he occupied precisely the social station and Delta culture that my father did, who was born only 35 miles away and seven years earlier.

There's going to be a big Claiborne powwow / celebration in New York on June 12, which John T. is piloting, and it seems as though everybody still alive who knew him is going to be there. Best of all, Georgeanna, despite having a baby just four months old, is coming too. (She's bringing her mama to help take care of the little girl.) It looks as though, assuming all goes well, Georgeanna's going to work with me on the book, and that will make the whole thing a great deal easier. And quicker. I should say less slow.

Meanwhile, I'm gearing up to head to Montana. I leave this coming Saturday, and about mid-morning as I near the Nevada line, my good ol' Techno-Violet 1996 BMW M3 will pass its hundred-thousandth mile. As I try do do every year, I will take at least part of the trip on obscure, winding roads--in this case a very obscure one north out of Elko, Nevada, to Mountain Home, Idaho, and then across central Idaho. That first leg from Elko is right at 200 miles and there's not even a gas station along the way. The M3 needs to breathe! at least once or twice a year.

Supposedly I was going to be there all of June and July in monklike seclusion, with Elizabeth joining me late in June. I was going to rise at dawn, or before, every day, and keep a journal as I did last year, except this year I was going to post it here. I'm still going to stick with that as well as I can, but now I've got to go to New York June 10-16 for the Claiborne powwow and associated stuff, and only a few days after I get back I'm off to Cleveland for my dear niece Dr. Kate Blumoff's wedding, and not long after that the Montana social whirl gets to whirling. All us summer folks catching up, dinner parties, picnics, etc.--you'd think it was the coast of Maine. And then we've got very welcome guests coming for a week in July: My best friend going all the way back to, I think, fifth grade, Bob Towery, and his wife, Patty. Somewhere in the midst of all that, I am determined to find some stillness, identify our daily-changing panoply of wildflowers, stand in the middle of Sweet Grass Creek and maybe catch a trout or two, climb into the Crazy Mountains and, this year, all the way to the top of Elephant Head Mountain, pick huckleberries and blueberries, get to know the sandhill cranes, whimbrels, godwits, curlews nesting out on the prairie....

Enough for now.

CHAPTER EIGHT: MORNING: 1965-1966

2009-04-14T14:37:00.000-07:00

(This is the eighth chapter of my memoir, and the last one so far that's fully written. I'm now involved in a couple of other projects, and it may be a while before I return to this one. But return I will. I have promised myself to finish this--that is, to bring it up to 1993. A sequel will pick the story up from there and take it--well, I don't know where.)

As my parents pulled away from the curb in their long green Buick Electra, I burst into tears. This made no sense. For the three days of the drive from Whitehaven to New Haven, we had mostly sat in grim silence, in the grip of an unnameable malaise. All three of us seemed to be angry, but I think none of us knew at what; I certainly didn’t. Looking back, I wonder if we were just unhappy that we weren’t going to be together, however miserable we made ourselves together.

Behind me, Bingham Hall rose in mock-Gothic grandeur, filling with my fellow freshmen. Bingham was one of the relatively nicer residence halls (Yale did not use the word dormitory) on the Old Campus, the city-block quadrangle where all but a few freshmen lived. There were to be four of us in suite 1092, which comprised two bedrooms and an unusually large living room with a bay window overlooking the Green. None of us knew one another. Joe Seiter was a swimmer from Ohio, even greener than me. Simon Whitney was an eccentric intellectual from New Jersey, scion of a great intellectual family many of whose men had gone to Yale. (One of them, Eli, was the inventor of the cotton gin, the technology that had made possible the cruel culture into which my father had been born.) And then there was Rick Platt, whose Yale heritage went back almost to its founding in 1701: In 1718 the college had moved to New Haven, and one of Rick’s forebears was among the donors of land for it; Rick’s family had been prominent at Yale and in New York ever since. He had graduated from Phillips Andover Academy and was rich and knew everything about Yale and wore his comprehensive advantages without false modesty, and I was scared to death of him. He knew I was, and didn’t seem to trouble himself about it. I would soon learn that his blithe disregard of my discomfort was a conscious act of decency: To have recognized my distress would have been to condescend to me. That was the first of his countless kindnesses.

That evening we trooped into the cavernous Commons, where all thousand freshmen and many graduate students were fed three times a day. Rick knew and greeted quite a few guys, for Andover as usual had provided more of the class of 1969 than any other school. Ours would be the last class in which public school boys were the minority, but minority we were, by definition new and ignorant and, most of us, less well heeled, and we would in Yale’s nature’s way be silently demeaned as such. At least I wasn’t a bursary boy (a scholarship student, with mandatory on-campus employment), collecting others’ dirty dishes and mopping the floors. Rick introduced his three ungainly new roommates around with deft aplomb.

We absorbed much social information in those first few days, most of it from watching Rick’s ilk taking their places in the ecosystem. They seemed to me to do it effortlessly. The cultivation of that appearance of perfect ease was one of the most striking behaviors we could learn, or not, or disdain. So it was, by this and a thousand other half-conscious fine distinctions, that the freshmen quickly sorted themselves into categories, little knowing that most of them would wear their archetypes, like turtles’ carapaces, unchangeable through the next four years.

The smell of Commons also never changed, from morning to night or season to season. It was, most saliently, of soup—tomatoes, beef, celery, carrots, and onions its relentless theme—but also of disinfectant, bacon grease, old leather, polished oak, male adolescence, and spilled milk.

Milk was dispensed from heavy plastic fifteen-gallon bladders controlled by a valve that nearly always leaked a bit. Later in freshman year, when water-balloon warfare had come to define the common ethos of the Old Campus, Joe Seiter stood atop Bingham’s nine-story tower, wedged into the battlement and lifting one of those bladders over his head. Filled with water now, it weighed ninety pounds. He looked like Hercules. Below him—for word of his great act of daring had traveled fast—several hundred freshmen raised our voices in a raw animal cheer. With awesome strength he heaved the world’s largest water balloon into the air. It fell, twisting, and fell, and fell, and exploded. Water shot a hundred feet in all directions. It was magnficent. Never again would a bursary boy—for Seiter was one—be seen as less than a possible hero.

+

We were the last all-male class of Yale College. We were the last class to wear coats and ties to every meal and therefore to most classes as well. We were the last to be graded with numbers, seventy to a hundred. We were the last to suffer under strict parietal hours—no girls in the rooms after midnight, their hotels locked down like high-security prisons. My teachers called me Mr. McNamee, and I addressed them as Mr., Mrs., or Miss; never were they referred to as or called professors. We smoked in class. Neither the liquor stores in the neighborhood nor the University itself observed the minimum drinking age of twenty-one. When our magnificent president, Kingman Brewster, rose to address us in his perfectly tailored double-breased suit and his deep patrician voice, he said his duty was to provide the nation with one thousand male leaders each year. Even the lowest of us were superior beings; the highest were like gods.

Tradition permeated life at Yale, and at least in the fall of 1965, conformity to it was largely taken for granted. We would buy a big wool banner to proclaim YALE on our living room walls. We would order Yale-crested stationery with our new Yale Station addresses. We would subscribe to the Yale laundry service (which may have sounded déclassé but made its student operators rich), the Banner (the yearbook), the Yale Daily News, The New York Herald Tribune, and The New York Times. In preparation for the mandatory Body Mechanics course at the gym, we were photographed nude with posture indicators sticking out of us like sparse porcupine quills; many years later I heard that there was a gay-underground trade in these images. We wore Bass Weejuns and Top-Siders and heavy wingtips, khaki or gray flannel trousers, oxford-cloth button-down-collared shirts, crew-neck sweaters, tweed jackets or navy blazers from J. Press, White’s, and Chipp in New Haven or Brooks Brothers in New York. In any of those stores we were waited on like royalty—you filled out a brief form, and could charge whatever you liked. We bought ties bearing the emblems of the schools where we prepped (Whitehaven High School of course didn’t have a tie) or our new residential colleges (there were twelve of these, where we would live after freshman year—we inmates of Bingham were already assigned to Silliman College). We went to Mory’s on Monday nights to drink Green Cups from old silver trophies and to hear the Whiffenpoofs sing old Yale songs.

To the tables down at Mory's,
To the place where Louis dwells,
To the dear old Temple Bar
We love so well,

Sing the Whiffenpoofs assembled
With their glasses raised on high,
And the magic of their singing casts its spell.

Yes, the magic of their singing
Of the songs we love so well:
"Shall I, Wasting" and "Mavourneen" and the rest.
We will serenade our Louis
While life and voice shall last,
Then we'll pass and be forgotten with the rest.

We are poor little lambs
Who have lost our way.
Baa! Baa! Baa!
We are little black sheep
Who have gone astray.
Baa! Baa! Baa!

Gentlemen songsters off on a spree,
Damned from here to eternity--
God have mercy on such as we.
Baa! Baa! Baa!

At football games, we sang incessantly the idiotic fight song that Cole Porter had written when an undergraduate here:

Bulldog, bulldog, bow wow wow! EEE-liii-Yale!”

Entirely unconsciously, I aligned myself with a crowd whom I deemed to be Winners—not the geniuses or the great jocks but those who would be Winners in Life. They were mostly preppies, mostly rich, highly ironical in conversation, brutal in the putting-down of grinds, nerds, and losers. Nearly all of them had silly nicknames. From them I learned new slang: quiff for girl or girls; helmet for the brown helmet of shit on one’s head administered by an unwilling quiff; a-m-a-a-a-zing for anything above moderately good; flamer (short for flaming asshole), a blowhard or showoff; doon, a moron; weenie, a weakling, a nobody, a whiner; blip (short for psychedelic blippo), a longhair or dope smoker (in use until we all started smoking dope also). A few of these guys were pretty openly standoffish toward me, my background being so far below their standard, but many more took particular trouble to guide me in the mysterious folkways of their ilk. One of my best ciceroni was Jeff Wheelwright—“Wheels”—a walking encyclopedia of insulting argot and inside information.

“You should know,” Wheelwright recalls, “that I take credit for Garry Trudeau's ‘Doonesbury.’ The original doon was my St. Paul’s classmate Charlie Pillsbury (who later roomed with Trudeau and my brother Joe in Davenport College). But I was the one who affixed Doon to Pillsbury."

There were also formal organizations, seemingly hundreds of them—the Record (humor magazine), the Lit, the Political Union (every conceivable flavor of party, and much formal debate), WYBC radio, the Dramat, the Marching Band (proudly the most satirical in the nation—they would run onto the field in chaos before settling grumpily into formation), the Russian Chorus, the big whole-class teams in every sport, including some I’d never heard of, such as lacrosse, and quite a few others I’d never seen—polo, soccer, squash, rugby, and crew). Each residential college fielded its own team in all the usual sports plus fencing, sailing, wrestling, hockey, and bridge. Perhaps the topmost of all Yale traditions were the a capella singing groups. Everybody seemed to be joining something, or a number of somethings. Showing an early, inarticulable aversion to organization, I joined nothing.

+

I wrote long, passionate letters of love to Susan Love until she dumped me, by post, good and hard. My feelings were hurt plenty, but I had known it was coming. Now I could face the now. The quest for quiff obsessed us all; a great many of us were still virgins. As the days grew short and New Haven lapsed into its customary weeks on end of rain and fog, longing rose in the blood like rage. We piled into stuffy, smoky cars for mixers at Smith, Vassar, Mt. Holyoke, and farther. Girls came to our own dances by sassy busloads. Very few of us had girlfriends, and the preppies had very little experience of girls at all, so there was a lot of loitering at the edge of the dance floor silently pining, sucking down beer after rancid beer. The girls were fabulous, with long, straight, lustrous hair, short plaid skirts, pastel Capezio ballet slippers, silver laughs. I was a doon.

Eventually, despite all, a few connections were made, which led to others, à la “Your roommate should meet my roommate.” Through an old girlfriend of Rick Platt’s at Vassar I had my first actual date, with a girl a foot taller than me and the musculature of a fullback. I remember dancing with my nose between her breasts, which smelled rather nice. She was awarded a nickname, The Elk.

Then there was a very rich and very pretty girl from New York, who asked me to be her escort at her début. Deb party, deb party, I heard the term a hundred times a week. I had never been to one. This one was to be at the Plaza Hotel, and white tie. White tie, and I hadn’t even had a chance to wear my suave shawl-collared tuxedo. I took the train into town, found my way to the formalwear rental joint all Yalies used (well, those who didn’t already own a white tie), got suited up, and presented myself at the girl’s house’s door, in the East Fifties just off Sutton Place. Her little brothers’ and sisters’ toys littered the front hall, which was narrow and unprepossing; but then, as she came down the stairs in sparkling splendor, I realized that her family’s house was five stories high—like a real house turned on its end. My early years in New York had never introduced me to the concept of the brownstone townhouse.

In the next few minutes I learned how to hail a cab, how to pay, how much to tip, how a white-gloved arm rested ever so lightly inside one’s elbow as one mounted the stairs to the ballroom. My date had already rehearsed me on the promenade and presentation, and we got through that pretty painlessly. I saw a number of Yalies I recognized, but none I knew. She, however, knew nearly everyone, and much of my evening consisted of trailing along behind her, being introduced and then ignored in breathless conversations about wonderful people and divine places I’d never heard of.

The party turned out to be a charity ball, and therefore had a cash bar. This I had not been warned about. We drank a lot, and my exchequeur dwindled apace. Then there was the Brasserie, where we all went after the party, I thoroughly drunk but sober enough to be stunned at the price of the drinks, and how much everybody consumed. I believe there were a few in our group who splashed about in a fountain. By four in the morning I had just enough money left to get my date home in a taxi. Neither of us had had a very good time, and I never saw her again.

Rick Platt had arranged for me to lodge in the apartment of an old aunt of his at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street. In the inkily empty city, with my return train ticket and not one dollar bill in my wallet, it was a very long walk from that brownstone. My only obligation to my hostess was to join her for breakfast at seven-thirty. I was still fairly drunk, and could not open my eyes properly.

“Where are you from?” demanded the grande dame, who clearly did not give a damn.

“Well, Memphis, but when I was a kid we lived in New---“

“Memphis. Ah,” she said, and rang a little silver bell.

A daintily uniformed maid—a white girl—served us a dainty little breakfast. I managed to choke down my eggs and drink my coffee and not be sick. I never saw her again either.

One bright Friday afternoon we hung a sheet from our bay window, crudely lettered PARTY—GIRLS WANTED—FREE DRINKS. We cranked up the Rolling Stones and faced the speakers out the window. Crude gesture though it was, we managed to harvest a few townies (there was a nice Yale word), in one of whom I saw a possible opportunity to dispose at last of my virginity. She was ugly, young, and dazzled by Yale. We went on several furtive, sordid dates, and grappled in the dark behind Sally’s Apizza (she pronounced it ah-beets), which she assured me was New Haven’s best (Yalies pronounced it New Hayven). She maintained possession of her treasure. I was not nearly as ashamed as I should have been.

+

In sexual foolishness and insensitivity I had lots of company. In academic matters, we all began with consultation and cooperation—a wise, kind graduate student ordained to be our counselor lived just next door, the gracious Dean of Silliman College enjoyed dispensing advice, and Rick Platt had the skinny on just about every course on offer—but once we had chosen our curriculum, we were each alone.

I have not yet forgiven Rick for urging me to get out of Rocks and Stars (a semester of geology followed by another of astronomy, a notorious “gut” heavily populated with jocks) and to sign up for physics, a full year’s worth of serious study. Three mornings a week, the class began at an ungodly hour (eight) in the faraway altitudes of Prospect Avenue. The book, the teacher, and his scribbled formulae on the blackboard were incomprehensible to me. The guy I sat behind had on the back of his neck a gigantic, red, and oozing carbuncle, at which he worked his fingers angrily throughout the classes I was attending less and less often. At year’s end, the teacher would call me in to explain that the only reason he had given me a passing grade was so that I might not be seen on Science Hill again.

On the other hand, our Bingham counselor wondered, considering my performance in high school, why I had not signed up for a course more advanced than English 15. How, he asked, had I scored on my English A.P.?

My what? Neither I nor my Whitehaven guidance counselors had ever heard of advanced placement tests, which virtually all my Yale classmates had taken several of.

Well, not to worry, he believed I would do well in English 25, a survey of English poetry, and he made a particular request on my behalf. I have forgotten his name, but never my gratitude to him, for English 25 under Mrs. Finkelstein was sheer esthetic delight. In the swirl and murk of family discord, girl troubles, social disorientation, and the nurturing of my self-regard, I had nearly forgotten beauty. Mrs. Finkelstein began our first class by braying out the opening lines of the Canterbury Tales in an accent composed of three equal parts of Russian, Oxonian, and Middle English, replete with trilled Rs (Whan that Ah-prrril) and back-of-throat unvoiced fricatives (the drrroughte of Marrrch)—it was gibberish, but it was beautiful. Soon enough it would no longer be gibberish but a symphony that plays in my mind to this day. How could this big, bluff Russian have so entirely mastered not only the matter but also the magic of all of English literature? Who knew, but she had, and every class revealed another facet of miracle. She transformed Spenser from irrelevant antiquity to shepherds’ songs of aching heart and sweet repose. We discovered that Pope could be a laugh riot. In Milton we flew and plunged and raged with Satan, imagining imagining [sic] all that with blind eyes. With spring would come Wordsworth, and what at Whitehaven had been a pompous thee or thou would become, through Mrs. Finkelstein’s passion and precision, a vividly particular, exquisitely observed object or person. This beauty, I came to believe, was what I was born for.

With the leaden exception of physics, I floated through the academic months like a hot-air balloon, aloft on pure residual ego and the hot air with which I filled my papers and exams. I loved my French course and its urbane Parisian teacher. I loved psychology, its Skinner boxes and penis envy. I loved the history of music, dissecting a Bach cantata, plumbing the ramifying depths of the sonata form. I loved navigating the labyrinth of the country’s second-biggest library (after Harvard’s, natch). I loved that I could drink bourbon with one hand and read Pound with the other. But I had no discipline; I had never learned to organize an extended essay or to look deep into the heart of a poem. Luckily I learned the high value much of Yale set on bullshit. If you could say it well, and I could; if you could spin out a wacky, hopelessly complex theory from fragments of philosophy, history, and the classics, and I could; if you could stay up all night till you lost all conscious control and some blue muse began to babble bullshit through your pen, and at times I did—then you could stay afloat. But only for so long. Sympathy was deeply ingrained in Yale’s academic culture, as was kindness, as was tolerance for personal woes and teenage angst, but eventually—after the old Whitehaven boy’s struggle to be the new Yale Man at Christmas at home, after the crush and exhaustion of Reading Period, and at last with the January-bitter blast of exams—bullshit started smelling like bullshit, my balloon ran out of hot air, and the only voice left speaking comprehensibly was that of the numbers. As a scholar, said my grades, Tom wasn’t doing so great.

And yet. What I was learning from my peers seemed just as important as what I was not quite living up to in the academic realm. It was hard sometimes to swallow my envy. So-and-so had been skiing at Gstaad last month. Another guy’s dad was ambassador to Japan. Somebody was going to spend the summer doing marine research in the Antarctic or making wine in Austria. They had read War and Peace in Russian. They played the harpsichor, they played the drums, they played golf at St. Andrew’s. Their family had a hundred million dollars and five houses. Their mother was a movie star. So they knew stuff, and I soaked it up thirstily.

Simon Whitney, another of my roommates, had made a perfect eight hundred on both the verbal and the math Scholastic Aptitude Tests. His I.Q., someone said, was beyond measurement. His uncle was one of the greatest mathematicians of the century. His father taught economics at Rutgers, and advised presidents. His mother played the cello. What I learned from Simon was that there was no limit to eccentricity. When his dirty clothes piled too high on his bed, he slept on the floor. In order not to be disturbed at his homework, he made a turban of a towel and wedged a buzzing electric toothbrush into its folds. One winter afternoon, when I had been reading alone in the living room for a couple of hours and it was time for dinner, I went to the closet to get my overcoat, and there stood Simon, staring at me blankly, saying nothing, only the faintest glimmer of amusement on his face. He had stood in the dark at least half the afternoon just waiting to weird the hell out of somebody.

Rick Platt and I stayed up late talking almost every night, till we were hungry enough for a second dinner at a greasy spoon somewhere off campus. He seemed to know everything. Or what he didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing. My envy of him and his tribe began to melt away. The snobbery and really quite nasty putdowns that figured so prominently in the behavior of so many Yalies of privilege came to seem weakly defensive. I hadn’t been able to imagine the competitiveness among them: To me they had seemed a bloc of uniform privilege. Now I was starting to understand that their swagger concealed that especially anxious insecurity which is born of the closest differences in rank. And they themselves, some anyhow, were discovering, with difficulty, that kindness begat kindness, and that unfeigned interest was more productive than the reflexive brushoffs of the unfamiliar that were their inheritance.

I also began to sense that the nonspecific longing that attached itself to sex or money or social power could also do work inside a poem, and yield a greater reward there.

+

So I told myself anyway, when the better angels of my nature paid me one of their occasional calls. I was writing poetry, and seeking beauty not only in it but everywhere—in a breeze, a tune, a turn of someone else’s phrase. I went to New York to visit a guy I knew from Whitehaven, a year older, who went to Columbia. Columbia was great—brainy, intense, cosmopolitan—and my old friend had become all that too. The Beatles’ Rubber Soul was just out, and we shared a passion for it; and now we shared a marijuana cigarette. As is often the case with first-time users, the effect was so unfamiliar that I didn’t recognize. The prescription for such neophytes is to smoke some more, which I did. Still not stoned? Torch up another one. Now I got it. Now I heard and heard into the depths of the depths of the soul of the soul of the strange new music of the Beatles, with its droning sitars and underwater voices. One day long thence, pot would turn around and bite me, but that winter night it brought me beauty on a filigreed tray, nestled in thistledown, scented with divinity.

All this intellectual and esthetic elevation was very nice, but it wasn’t getting me the thing I had most craved for at least the last three years, viz., laid. At the first surge of want—and these occurred about a dozen times a day—poetics, beauty, philosophy, and even the delights of getting high flew out the window. With both the townies and the Seven Sisters I had gotten nowhere. Now, along with virtually everybody else in my class, I invested three bucks in what I believe was the first computer-dating scheme, Operation Match. It had been invented at Harvard. Why hadn’t I applied there? They took only four courses to our five, and everybody, now including me, knew that Yale was much harder. Anyway, where was I, Operation Match. You assigned a value, one through five, to a list of your own qualities and then to a list of the qualities you desired in a match. Brains: self, five; girl, four. Looks: self, three; girl, five. Sex appeal: five, five! There were also yes-or-no questions: “Is extensive sexual activity (in) preparation for marriage part of ‘growing up’?” and “Do you believe in a God who answers prayer?’” After a very long wait (computers were slower then), I got a printout of six names, addresses, and phone numbers. Five of the girls being at Smith, I arranged to spend an entire Saturday in Northampton, meeting them one after another on the hour. Not one of them appealed, and I don’t think any of them liked me much either. The sixth name was that of a girl at Wheaton, a story for later. This was getting ridiculous. I had to make a plan.

It wasn’t really a plan, but based on careful consideration of the odds, I invited for the big spring weekend the music-loving girl from Whitehaven who had never quite been my girlfriend but whose intellectual bent would, I hoped, be impressed by this freshly minted Yalie. She was at Vanderbilt, no mean college itself though lacking, in my view, Yale’s je ne sais quoi of prestige. How Yale’s prestige would add to Tommy’s sexual allure I guess I hadn’t thought through. She flew up, she looked lovely, we danced, we laughed, we kissed, we drank, this was great. We were just plain comfortable together. Somewhere in a dark corner outside, we drank some more, kissed some more. A thin shell of fear I hadn’t known myself to have been wearing all these months shattered and fell away in a shower of ice, sublimated into air before it hit the ground. When we pretended to say good night in the lobby of the Taft Hotel, we agreed that I would sneak in, shortly.

It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes since our parting, but when she came to the door something had happened to the girl. Wobbling. Slurring her words. Eyes not quite matching in angle. She was just unbelievably shitfaced. This according to campus wisdom was to be considered a lucky break, if not indeed a necessary precondition. We lay down together, and I kissed her. When our lips parted, she was asleep. Well, unconscious. She began to talk, urgent nonsense, eyes still closed. She awoke, she looked at me, and a plume of vomit flew out of her mouth.

I put the ruined, stinking bedspread in the bathtub and filled it with hot water. I washed her face. I got her awake enough to drink a glass of water. I tried to kiss her, but she fell away, passed out again. This was not the plan.

She threw up again, all over her dress. Hm. Well, I had to take it off, didn’t I? And sent it also to the tub. I didn’t have to take off my own clothes, but I did. She put her head under my chin and resumed babbling nonsense, this time also crying—the only time I’ve ever seen somebody weep while unconscious. Did I consider fucking her while she was dead to the world? I did. But a Yale man would not stoop that low. So I told myself.

Sooner or later she was bound to sober up. The thing to do was for both of us to get some sleep. I took off her underwear, and then mine, so that we’d both be ready and randy when she returned to the planet bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and primed by half a night of naked contiguity.

I had no idea that she had eaten so much. By dawn the blankets, the sheets, and the pillowcases had joined the dress and the bedspread in the tub. I had found a rough extra blanket in the closet and wrapped us tightly in that. She half woke; I kissed her, ignoring her breath, which wasn’t easy. I guided her hand; it was limp, and so, soon, was I.

She had to make the Connecticut Limo to LaGuardia. “I’m sorry,” she said. She dressed foggily, and stuffed her clothes in a bag, leaving last night’s outfit behind in the vomit-soaked wreckage.

The student room rate was ten dollars for the two nights, which I had paid in advance. I now left ten dollars more on the bureau, with a one-word note for the poor maid: “Sorry.” Would I be hunted down and dunned a hundred, two hundred bucks? Which I did not have and could not ask my father for. Would I be expelled?

She left. Nothing happened.

+

I had been back home only a couple of days when, on June 5, 1966, the civil rights hero James Meredith, now a student at Columbia Law School, set out from Memphis on foot—carrying a Bible and an ebony cane, and accompanied by six friends—to march through Mississippi. His aim was both to calm his own fear, which still haunted him, and to encourage the nearly half-million Negroes of the state to register to vote, or try to. He made it one night and twenty-eight miles before he was shot.

His wounds were not fatal, and his assailant was swiftly caught. The next day, June 7, twenty marchers renewed Meredith’s March Against Fear. In a sort of miracle, dozens and soon hundreds of people showed up and joined in, marching two by two down Highway 51. I held hands with a black girl of about sixteen who was literally shivering with terror. As we passed, white people lined the highway, spewing verbal abuse. Scary-looking Mississippi Highway Patrolmen were posted every few yards to protect us—a big change from not long ago. One old woman shrieked from the porch of her rundown little house, “Buzzards! Food for buzzards, that’s all y’all are!”

When I came home that evening and reported on my day’s activity, my father and mother both sat mute in frozen fury; and so the domestic tone for the summer, indeed for years to come, was set.

+

Fortunately I had plenty to do to keep me elsewhere. I was working full time at the Whitehaven Press—Bob Towery’s parents’ business, you may recall—and all my old pals had come home from their various colleges with terrific ideas for revelry and deviltry. We roamed in packs from party to party, smoking, drinking, dancing, flirting. My parents left town for a weekend, and the horde descended. In my own childhood bed, the younger sister of my blonde bombshell of the summer of ’64 granted my life’s deepest wish. She was so drunk that by the next day she had no recollection of that glorious occasion.

+

The clenched dread that filled the air of my home stayed in me for decades, sometimes dormant but ever ready to wake. It kept me afraid of reaching, of touching, of risking honest emotion. It led to poetry of labyrinthine obscurity, daring the reader—the poet’s ultimate parental authority—to understand it. It could not be understood, in fact, because it revealed so little of its maker. I wasn’t alone in this situation by any means: The Modern Literature I was now learning to revere—Faulkner, Eliot, Joyce—blew smoke in the face of the reader’s innocent longing to “get it.” Soon I would come to know music and painting of the same unacknowledged hostility. What did the tone row say but Fuck You? I would in time be a protégé of Leonard Bernstein, whose music, because popular and accessible and even beautiful, I was taught to deem cheap and vulgar. I did not have the courage, or let’s say the knowledge, to dream of beauty as a physical entity, a substantial being, a thing that I could touch and could feel. Fear lay coiled in my heart like a snake in the cold, waiting for sunlight, not knowing, in its darkness, even that it was capable of striking, and also of crawling out of itself soft and transformed and vulnerable. I did not know that the opposite of fear is love.

+

And then, in July of 1966, a couple of my buddies from Knoxville—fellow veterans of that fateful convention—were coming for a visit, and I needed dates for them, and because they would be visiting probably only this once, it would be okay to ask out on their behalf a girl already going steady with one of my old neighborhood pals. I tried a couple of new possibilities for myself, struck out, and ended up stuck with my sweet New Jersey ex-girlfriend, by whom I now fancied myself bored stiff. So at the last second I made a switch: The Knoxville guy could go out with her, she was fine for him, and I could indulge my curiosity about Louise Rossett (pronounced “rosette”), whom I had more or less known since I was seven and she was five but who seemed always, though charming, rather remote.

When I showed up at her door and announced myself and not the Knoxville guy as her date, her face clouded, for to continue with me would be to violate the terms of going steady with my old friend. In the end, because we were really just a big group, not a group of couples, she thought it would be all right. Proximity crawled out of itself to emerge as intimacy, and intimacy metamorphosed in an hour into rapture. This was love, oh, love, oh, yes, and would be forever.

For our first real date, the evening of Monday, July 18, 1966, I asked Louise to join me at a Congressional campaign rally that I had to cover for the Whitehaven Press. The candidate was one Ray Blanton, an achingly bad speaker who, years later, would be a convicted felon. It was a notably poor choice of venue, but I was in a hurry. Afterwards I took her to Leonard’s Barbecue, and, on her front porch one minute before Whitehaven’s universally acknowledged deadline for girls to be home, I kissed her. She kissed me back, softly, seriously.

+

In the moonlit courtyard of the Brooks Art Gallery, the four marble Muses watched over us as we kissed and dreamed. I was certain that this was the girl I would marry. She was perhaps not quite so sure. I was certain that the recent loss of my virginity had at last made me a man, one worthy of Louise’s virginity. But she was sixteen—not yet an age when nice Whitehaven girls engaged in sexual intercourse—and though Louise was hot-blooded, she was not at all ready. We swirled around each other in an ecstasy of abstention, an ecstasy purer and probably more powerful than sexual congress itself might have been, unencumbered as it was with the complexities of bodies, timing, secrecy, fear, guilt, and ignorance that were to come. We peered into each others’ souls. I breathed the scent of her hair. She held me close, and we kissed and kissed and kissed and kissed.

We listened to the Memphis Symphony under the stars in Overton Park. To the Bitter Lemon Coffee House, Memphis’s most bohemian gathering-place, we went to hear the surpassingly strange and gifted guitarist John Fahey in his false identity as Blind Joe Death, wearing opaque round sunglasses and fumbling for his weirdly tuned guitar. We were thrilled when Fahey, now as himself, led our city’s own Furry Lewis onto that same stage, where, amply plied with whisky, the old man would flail at his slide guitar and caterwaul the rawest blues I’d ever heard. The Bitter Lemon served “cocktails” concocted of sweet juices in flamboyant parrot colors and served in brandy snifters. They were nonalcoholic, but nearby there was a pizzeria, run by an ancient Olympic bicycle champion—the walls were covered with photographs of his glory days—who, being Italian, found the American refusal to serve wine to minors an offense against civilization and who, therefore, with a gesture indicating his appreciation of our absolute discretion, would bring us with our pizzas little tumblers of harsh red wine he had made in the bassement.

As the summer was ending, and I soon to return to New Haven, not to see her again until Christmas, I decided to take Louise to dinner at Justine’s. Justine’s was a legend, a grand antebellum townhouse marooned in solitary splendor amidst warehouses in one of Memphis’s grimmest ghettoes, its façade unmarked by a sign. The idea was that if you didn’t know where and what Justine’s was, you shouldn’t try going there. It was expensive, and French, and most of the clientele came from the old Memphis gentry to whom Whitehaven, despite my mother’s social rise among them, was a backwater.

In those days, restaurants in Memphis were forbidden to serve liquor, wine, or beer; even to Justine’s you had to bring your own. The only place to obtain an alcoholic beverage legally was from a liquor store. I was under age in any case, but damn it, I wanted us to have a bottle of wine, and good wine too.

My friends and I had had some success in identifying ragged old men in parking lots who for a modest tip would acquire the vodka or bourbon or beer we desired, but hardly any of the liquor stores in Memphis carried much more wine than wino fuel. My research had now identified one store that had a wide selection of wines and would sell it to minors—only wine, and only if you seemed serious about it. I asked the man there to recommend a wine to take to Justine’s, and he asked me what we were going to eat and how much I wanted to spend. I said probably filet mignon, and five dollars. “If you’re willing to go to eight,” he said, “I can give you something you’ll never forget.” My love knew no limits, so I splurged.

The tall, starched, scowling maître d’hôtel at Justine’s slipped the bottle from its brown paper bag and started to hand it on to a waiter, but he paused a moment as his eyes fell on the label and his brows lifted. Justine’s invariable policy was to stick teenagers in a back room and serve them with icy distance, but now we were marched in state to a table in the old front parlor, beneath a crystal chandelier. The waiter replaced the regular wine glasses with huge glittering globes. When he poured me a taste of my wine, and its dark, sweet, soul-deep scent billowed into the room, I knew that this was going to be different from the screw-topped Lake Country Red which my friends and I swilled down at parties.

And oh, my. I had not known until that moment that anything could taste so good. I studied the label, telling myself to remember it. It was Château Lafite-Rothschild—a Bordeaux wine, I would later learn—of the 1961 vintage, one of the greatest wines ever made. Eight bucks.

CHAPTER SEVEN: FOREDAWN: 1964-1965

2009-04-07T15:56:00.000-07:00

(The seventh chapter of my memoir.)

It was that time of night when the darkest gray gathers above the black of the earth and then a thread of gold parts them. Face down on Towery’s living room carpet, I smelled vomit and awoke. I made my way into the back yard to pee, and the gold was turning to flame, which was burning twin holes in my head, each optic nerve a wire of pain. Even in the autumn perfume of browning magnolia and dewy grass the stench persisted; it was my shirt.

We had discovered vodka. Towery’s parents were out of town, and his older sister, much amused, had bought us two fifths. Other guys were involved. There had been some acrobatics in the house—I seem to recall backward somersaults—and a broken glass tabletop. An older guy, with a driver’s license, had driven us around Whitehaven in Clyde, Towery’s father’s huge yellow Cadillac, so we could holler at people. With my head out the window I threw up, and the wind slurred the mess down the flank of the car to the taillights. We went to the Toddle House and had cheeseburgers and their famous Black Bottom pie. I think we tried to go to some girl’s party and were turned away. Towery and I had each gotten drunk, gotten sick, passed out, and sobered up three times.

The Towerys had wall-to-wall carpet throughout the house, and in said carpet there were now about a half-dozen Jackson Pollocks of agglutinated puke. His parents were due home that evening. It was Sunday, and the cleaning services we called all wanted to be paid double time—a hundred and fifty bucks was the lowest bid. Suppressing our gag reflexes with all that remained of our strength, we cleaned the whole house ourselves.

+

I had become a person who was not in touch with his own body: That drunken rout and others that succeeded it were a quest for sensation strong enough to feel. I ate for nourishment, not for pleasure. I played no sports. I no longer wandered the swamp: It was gone now, and with it the scratches and sprains and bites and stings—the touch—of wilderness adventure. That land of physical fear, populated by rattlesnakes, copperheads, and water moccasins, had been paved over; the swamp had been drained. I worked in the library and read mountains of books. I was in touch with one particular part of my body, but that did not constitute real consciousness. There were hands held at the movies, and kisses, to be sure, but most of the time my body was not a temple but a toxic waste site, thick with allergy’s excretions, virus on virus, acne, bad dreams, low cravings, and poisonous fear of the future.

Rarely, I told myself that I was mind and heart, sublime, ethereal, an emergent Man of passion and genius; a poet, transcending the bodily. Ha. Our dinner table had become a place of so much unspoken, so much concealed, such falsehood and spiritual absence, such about-to-snap tension, that our dogs lost their native gaiety and watched from a distance, trying to think about nothing but food. I had become, my mother said, sarcastic, and not seldom some sly word-arrow of mine would pierce her and she would snap, reeling off my lifetime’s-worth of crimes, misdemeanors, inconsiderateness, selfishness, and failure to take out the garbage. Her nose turned red, her brown eyes black. I froze inside. My father drank his coffee in mute support of the indictment. My sister cried and ran to her bedroom.

In less than a year, I would be free of all that. Columbia wrote to me inviting me to apply. New York! Yes! I felt it surge in my blood. Delicatessen, brilliant Jewish girls in berets, the dark perfume of the subway. The elder brother of one of my closest pals, however, insisted that the place for me was Yale. (He would be thrown out at the end of that same school year—a considerable accomplishment, for Yale felt that losing a student was a failure on its part. But no amount of counseling had been able to get the guy to class or keep him away from the bridge table.) Yes, Yale! Tweed jackets! Pipe smoking! Manly poetry, Goethe, Fitzgerald.

And so why not Princeton? And as for poetry, wasn’t there a place called Harvard crawling with poets? I have no idea. Maybe this was that second-place syndrome again, since Yale seemed to be second to Harvard in nearly everything. Boston University would be my easy fallback, and for no reason I can recall I also applied to William and Mary.

B.U. took me readily, Columbia wrote to me as “Chester T. McNamee III,” but it was a yes nonetheless, and William and Mary turned me down. Inconceivable! I was at my lifetime peak of egotism. I would sashay into the big grim room for the SATs, rush through the questions, and never check my answers, so that I could be the first to sashay out, leaving behind the ozone stink of fear, others’ fear; and I did very well on such tests. I didn’t even want to go to William and Mary, so how could they have turned me down? And now, worst: Yale put me on the waiting list. Was it twenty guys long, or five thousand? They weren’t saying.

Now I had to get in. Columbia had been too easy. Fuck William and Mary. I was going to go to Yale. My father, suddenly my hero, flew into action. There was an alumnus in Memphis who had given a tea for applicants and made quiet recommendations to the admissions department; my father called him and voluminously pleaded his case, my case. He wrote to old Met Life colleagues in New York who were Yale alumni (and well above him in rank at the company). In the most passionate language I had ever known to issue from his mouth or pen, he wrote to the dean of admissions, lauding to highest heaven this accomplished, hard-working, supremely disciplined son—I was of course none of the above except son—and, frankly, begging that I be taken. What other possible string might there have been to pull? None. No matter: After two weeks of dread, I was in after all.

And now my father would have to shoulder the financial burden of four years of Yale. This was going to be a genuine burden, but he didn’t want me to have a scholarship, or to work, or even to take a student loan. I have never been sufficiently grateful, I fear.

Now that grades no longer mattered, I gave myself over to the sheer joy of learning, led with the lightest of touch and the deepest of seriousness by the sort of teacher for whom so many sentimental tributes have been written. Whitehaven had a grand total of two “honors” courses: history (not much of a class) and English, the enchanted domain of David R. Davis. Maybe Yale would be like this, I thought. The scope of the class was all of English literature; Mr. Davis’s particular interest was in our understanding of it and our expression of that understanding. Although I had been writing stuff for years—pseudo-Romantic poems, eccentric little stories, my mock-bluster column in the school paper—this was the first time my heart ached with the urge to get it right, to be clear, to think ahead and organize, to seek felicity and grace of style. All these I fumbled at but kept striving after, and Mr. Davis rewarded my struggle with measured praise and stintless compassion. I began to unclench from the unconscious stoop that shrinking from unnameable dread had bent me to. I was a kid, who knew not much more than nothing about anything, and yet Mr. Davis was taking me seriously. I was opening up like a flower; I was happy.

My sense of smell seemed to be opening too. A good half the time in my younger years, my nose had been swollen shut by allergy, and when it wasn’t, the scent of any plant threatened burning mucosa, paroxysms of a hundred helpless sneezes in a row, the fifth hankerchief of the day soaked through. Twice a week I would be dragged to the allergist, jabbed with a couple of dozen allergens, then given a shot; eventually my mother, having practiced on oranges, gave me the shots, often painfully. They didn’t help much. A whiff of pollen or mold, and I’d be sneezing, stobbed ub, biserable. Now, though, all of a sudden, the privet along the roadside I walked to school, the wild onions in the lawn, the roses at dusk were glories. Shoe polish, our dogs’ ears, asphalt in the rain; Old Spice, Chanel No. 5, My Sin; smoke, of grass fire, Leonard’s barbecue pit, cigarettes (my mother’s, my father’s, my friends’, my own, for everybody seemed to smoke); a neighbor’s gift of still-warm bread, ribeye steak fat aflame on the grill, a just-cut orange; on dress-up dinner dates—my latest expression of coolth—the tarragon tang of sauce béarnaise, the long ago lost but now refound Boston-harbor scent of lobster, the unctuous voluptuousnes of real, fresh butter melting on the tongue—and, supremely, unconsciously but potently, girls’ pheromones: The burgeoning of my olfactory faculty, though I did not know it at the time, reinvigorated the evolution of my love of nature.

“What is love?” my mentor-to-be, Robert Penn Warren, would write. “One name for it is knowledge.”

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The previous spring in Chattanooga, during my hour and a half of stumping for the vice presidency of the state high school press association, a pal and I had been handing out Vote-for-Tommy cards and chortling over the rustic dress and mien of the assorted yokels, hicks, rubes, and hayseeds of my potential constituency—“Didja see the cow shit on that one’s shoes?” etc.—when Whoa, Nelly! across the lobby came a phalanx of girls so good-looking, so beautifully turned out, so urbane that all we could do was stare and gibber. The political phase of my campaign was over; the interpersonal part had begun.

There was also one funny-looking, gimpy-footed guy, who would be one of my best friends from then on. One of the girls—tall, with wavy chestnut hair, wide-set dark eyes, and wide, full lips—would turn out to be for years the girl I would have married had I not married Louise. And another, small, with enormous blue eyes and a small, plush mouth that just said Kiss Me, was Susan Love. Oh, love, thy name was everywhere! Her surname was my command.

There was just one hitch. She was from Knoxville. Remember that Tennessee is a long east-west parallelogram, with Memphis in the lower left-hand corner—and Knoxville damn near the top right. Four hundred miles away.

I didn’t see Susan again till the next round of conventions, in the spring of 1965. After the humiliation of the summer before, I had found a less dangerous sort of girlfriend, quiet and intellectual, with pale, pale skin and truly black hair. She opened my ears—to Dvořák’s New World, Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, Rubinstein playing the Moonlight and Pathétique. Her voice was low and gentle, her manner calmly genteel. We talked and talked. And kissed, some, with moderate passion. We never went steady, indeed I was in permanent second place, because she also went out with one of my friends and academic competitors. A couple of years later I would learn that he had seen his father shoot his mother dead and that his dates with this soft, fine girl nearly always culminated in a brutal dry rape; and she never spoke a word.

And then came Nashville, the Andrew Jackson Hotel, and Susan, and kisses, kisses deep and soft, kisses again and again. We rode in a taxicab, her first time to do so. We ordered our first takeout Chinese food. We sat on my hotel room bed to eat it, and one of the Whitehaven chaperones busted in on us with a fusillade of reproach, and somehow I found the moxie to tell her off in return, and she steamed out defeated; Susan and I resumed learning to use chopsticks. We put price tags on the artwork in the hotel halls. In a junk store I bought a toilet. When I got it home, my mother’s reaction was surprisingly quiet. She now knew that I was nuts.

Graduation was approaching. Under my father’s proud guidance, I got my first tuxedo. There were parties at the country club, the University Club, churches, hotels, big houses with big lawns and shrub-shadows where couples embraced. There was the senior tea. There were the Key Club banquet, the Honor Banquet, a banquet for the top-ranking four percent of all the seniors in Shelby County. Mr. Davis gave a small, elegant party at his house for his best students—the proudest occasion of all, in all this whirl, for those of us so honored. And there was the Twirp Dance, a costume party to which the girls asked the boys. Much to my astonishment, my perfidious blonde inamorata of the summer before invited me, and proposed that we go as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. She procured overalls, a work shirt, and heavy boots, and with mascara she beautifully recreated the scraggy sideburns and wispy beard of the man himself. For me she found a long black wig, an A-line dress (short enough to make the most of my shapely, very hairy legs), and a pair of high-heeled sandals.

Susan took the train all the way from Knoxville to be my date at the Senior Prom. Here was an impossible romance if ever there was one: Come fall, I was going to be in New Haven, Connecticut, Susan in some Tennessee hill town. (She could easily have gone anywhere, had her benighted parents not insisted on imprisoning her in a little bible college close to home yet also essentially inescapable.) We would be eight hundred miles apart in physical distance, even farther in other ways. I was nonetheless rapturously in love, and certain of our glorious future together, which you may take as indicative of many delusions to come.

We danced, we kissed, I was the gladdest knight at the ball, she the most beautiful belle. We wrote impassioned letters all summer. I went to Knoxville in August; more kisses, more professions of permanence.

Towery gave me one of his looks—man of the world, my friend, my pitier—and said, We need to go to New Orleans.

Our first dinner was at Antoine’s, the city’s grandest, most overbearing restaurant. Generations of New Orleans’ crusty, insular upper crust had been coddled here, each family with its “own” waiter, dishes specially prepared only for them, and their own particular table in one of the many little back rooms reached by a labyrinth both physical and social. Tourists were herded with something less than ceremony into the big front dining room. I was wearing my first double-breasted suit—navy, “summer-weight” wool, so named by someone who had never been to New Orleans in August—and was drenched in sweat. The menu was entirely in French, which was fine with me. I’d had two good years of it, and moreover had been studying up on food words.

“Le Service ‘Chez Antoine’ Strictement à la Carte,” the menu began, threateningly. Meaning: no free vegetables, no fixed-price bargain meals, you pay for everything except salt, pepper, water, and maybe a toothpick. There seemed to be hundreds of dishes, many with names comprehensible only to the grandees of the labyrinth: Canapé Balthazar, Crevettes à la Richman, Les Busters Grillés, Oeuf Sardou, Filet de Boeuf Robespierre en Casserole, Pigeonneau Sauce Paradis, Tomate Frappée à la Jules Caesar.

The waiter actually had a thin black mustache and slicked-back hair; also the posture of a Marine at attention. “Bonsoir,” Towery and I greeted him gaily, in chorus.

“Good evening, gentlemen.”

Was he smiling? If so, was it in mockery? I gestured helplessly at the wilderness of the menu.

“You will allow me perhaps to suggest to you a few things?” The smile was real, and not even of amusement. He was being nice to us. We’d been warned not to expect anything of the sort. “Antoine’s, of course, is the originator of Oysters Rockefeller. I recommend you start with them. To follow, perfect would be our tournedos with sauce béarnaise. It is a type of small filet of beef. We are also famous for our pommes soufflés; you will see. Creamed spinach? Very good. And now, on the wine list—"

This was what was so utterly cool about New Orleans. The drinking age was universally disregarded.

“—We cannot go wrong with a fine red Bordeaux. Perhaps—“

Here he pointed, his index fingertip resting tactfully under the price. “Why not?” we said, bons vivants to the coeur. I can’t remember what château it was, but at that price it was surely one of the greats.

The wine arrived in a silver basket, reclining in the attitude of an ancient Roman banqueter. We watched transfixed the cutting of the capsule, the slow pulling of the cork, the meticulous pour of perhaps a tablespoon into a miniature wine glass. The waiter lifted it to the light, swirled it, stuck his big in as far as it would go, inhaled deeply, took a taste, chewed on it, smacked his lips once, smiled, bowed slightly, and poured, an inch each in our glasses with bowls four times that deep. We raised them to each other, and then to the waiter, and sipped. We actually had no idea whether it was delicious or not, but we were sure it was delicious because it was so expensive.

The oysters Rockefeller arrived steaming, nestled in blazing-hot rock salt and shrouded in a green glop tasting vaguely of licorice. “This is either the best or the weirdest thing I’ve ever put in my mouth,” said Towery. “And don’t try it yet. I just burned the shit out of my tongue.”

I waited, then tasted. “The weirdest and the best.”

The tournedos weren’t much bigger around than a silver dollar but a good inch thick. We each got two, atop a slick of some wine-dark sauce and topped in turn with an epiphany—comprising, I would learn one day ages thence, butter, egg yolk, shallots, vinegar, tarragon, and, at least chez Antoine, manna. The potatoes were crisp little pillows that burst with a crackle on the tongue, releasing some other divine essence in the form of a vapor that rose to the brain and blessed it. And: Wine, O Wine, for ever shall I love thee.

A junior waiter pushed a cart of polished wood and brass to our tableside. I was pretty sure we’d ordered the crêpes Suzette, or, that is, we’d accepted our savior’s suggestion. We had no idea what they were. He arrived, turned the little thin pancakes gently in a chafing dish, poured brandy over, and set them alight. I don’t need to tell you how good they were. Couldn’t anyway.

We floated to the door; our waiter bowed us solemnly out. New Orleans air engulfed us; sweat burst from our brows, ran down our inner arms, pooled in our shoes. We wandered, drunk, in bliss.

We remained drunk for the next several days. It was customary in New Orleans, we learned happily, to greet the morning with a strongly alcoholic eye-opener. Brennan’s Restaurant gave birth to this evil tradition, and it was there at the source that we conducted our explorations. The Absinthe Suissesse was nice, the Ramos Gin Fizz a knockout in more ways than one, but our favorite, hands down, was Milk Punch—brandy, light cream, powdered sugar, and a dash of vanilla, with fresh nutmeg grated on top. At Galatoire’s we had turtle soup, trout amandine, white Burgundy, and a stiff dose of New Orleans rudeness. We ate three or four dozen oysters at the Acme. We had beignets and chicory coffee at the Café du Monde. It was ninety degrees with ninety-percent humidity at midnight, but we prowled merrily on, profusely exuding ethanol, other toxins, and salt. We lurched through the streets drinking tall, red, vile Hurricanes, as did so many of our fellow-revelers, whom from time to time we would regale with old Boy Scout songs. We sat on the hard benches of Preservation Hall and listened to suspendered old men with leather skin play the best dixieland in the world. This was the greatest place in the world. And by the way, wasn’t the world a great place.

Our last night, drunker than ever by a considerable degree, I urinated on a fire hydrant in in Jackson Square in full view of the surging crowds and a horrified Towery. We both vomited in the gutter a couple of times. All good visitors to New Orleans, we reasoned, did that. Une tradition de plus, non?

There was still one thing we hadn’t done. We hailed a cab and asked the driver to take us to a whorehouse. We traveled down dark streets into the voodoo netherland of the real, tourist-averse French Quarter, where knives glinted in the summer air, where Stagger Lee left Billy bleeding on the barroom floor, where dice and drugs and wailing clarinets ruled the night.
The taxi pulled up at a lonesome corner. “Just down deah, haifway down de block,” growled the cabbie, in a voice of ten thousand reefers. “Wheh dem lights at.” We tipped the hell out of him and tottered toward the lights and glory. It was a police station.

CHAPTER SIX: DISTANT LIGHTNING: 1963-1964

2009-03-11T15:10:00.000-07:00

(This is the sixth chapter of my memoir.)

The interstate still wasn’t finished into Mississippi, so we rode old thrumming two-lane Highway 51 to Oxford, where Ole Miss was playing what was always the game of the year, against Mississippi State. We brought Dr. Jim Biles with us. Dr. Biles’s daddy, also a doctor, had birthed my daddy, and the son had birthed me. Dr. Biles had gone to Columbia Medical School and done postgraduate work at Heidelberg; he was a learned, careful, funny man, an excellent physician; but he was a Mississippi white man to the core, a casual, carefree, absolute racist. I now considered myself an official representative of the Civil Rights Movement, and I angrily pointed out the miserable, falling-down shacks past which we glided mile after mile. “Tommy?” he cried, in his high, hoarse, perpetually amused voice, his grammar parodic. “What you don’t understand is that those niggers happy like that. They happy! Long as nobody mess with them.”

There was a lot of messing in 1963. George Wallace, newly elected governor of Alabama, roared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!” Martin Luther King and his fast-growing army of followers were repeatedly arrested in protests against segregation. A Ku Klux Klansman murdered one of them, Medgar Evers, in Mississippi, and was exonerated by an all-white jury. The polite usage was no longer the passive, mild “colored” but strong, oppositional “black.” James Meredith had just become the first black graduate of Ole Miss, after four years of being cussed and spat at. Rednecks had firebombed a black church in Alabama and killed four little girls. Dr. King, as we faithful called him, proclaimed his dream, that his own four little children “will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Dr. Biles’s easy use of “nigger” was, I believe, half unconscious and half to provoke me. My father, no fan of Martin Luther King or his movement, was not much of a racist, but neither did he challenge his friend’s bluster or his choice of language. We were supposed to be having a good time today.

Dr. Biles was a proud graduate of Ole Miss, and my father, a native Mississippian, though he had actually gone to Georgia Tech (and had had to drop out to help his family through the Depression), had through the years made himself a virtual Ole Miss alumnus. Daddy was in ecstasy when, as this season, as so often, the Rebels were invincible. (And yes, they were named for the soldiers of the Confederacy, whose stars and bars adorned their helmets and the thousands of battle flags waving fiercely in the stands.) Johnny Vaught had been coaching, and winning and winning, since the year I was born.

We found shade and a sea of others like us under the grand old oaks and magnolias of the Grove. There we laid out the picnic that Mama and Mrs. Biles had fixed us—cold fried chicken, deviled eggs, potato salad, cole slaw, country ham biscuits, coconut cake, a thermos of hot sweet coffee—and my anger melted away in the warm flow of joy all around us. Dr. Biles took an occasional modest nip from a silver flask, in which my father, the son of a binge drinker, did not share. From time to time, the famous cheer would arise spontaneously:

Are you ready?
Hell, yeah! Damn right!
Hotty toddy, God almighty
Who in the hell are we, hey!
Flim flam, fim bam!
OLE MISS, BY DAMN!

Ole Miss and Mississippi State played to a tie.

+

So grave was the principal’s voice on the public address system that our chemistry class, and indeed the whole school, fell instantly silent. President Kennedy had been killed. Billy Crawford—one of the boys on our block though not really one of us—rose to his feet, stabbed his fist into the air, and yelled, “We got him!” Billy’s mother was a snap-tempered, much-reviled guidance counselor at Whitehaven High School, as well as a member of the John Birch Society, which was anathema to even the farthest-right of our parents’ plenty-conservative cohort; and she had thoroughly indoctrinated her son. No one spoke, and he sat back down. The silence was long, and then girls began to cry, and then boys.

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The board of directors of the Whitehaven Methodist Church, under the chairmanship of Charles T. McNamee, Jr., voted, in 1964, to move our eleven-o’clock Sunday service to ten-fifty, in order to give us a ten-minute head start on the Presbyterians and Episcopalians for lunch at the Whitehaven Country Club.

My favorite Sunday lunch there was fried frogs’ legs and mashed potatoes with brown gravy. I also loved, as did my mother, the lobster Newburg, aromatic with cooking sherry. I also loved, as did my sister, the South African Rock Lobster Tail with drawn butter. Roosevelt, the chef, made a legendary banana cream pie, but I preferred his parfait, layer on bright layer of ice creams and whipped cream in a tall tapered glass. We drank iced tea at all seasons.

Summer brought the best club lunches of all, when our mothers worked on their tans with one eye on their bridge hands and one on the kids splashing happily in the pool. On the patio where they sat at painted steel tables and did not open the umbrellas, it was usually well over a hundred degrees, the concrete impossible to walk on in bare feet, even wet ones. In a ten-by-ten-foot clapboard shed, the kid-beloved waiter named Brother scraped his griddle and sizzled his grease, and through a tiny screen door onto a narrow shelf he slid the world’s most perfect hamburgers, slapped flat and thin and hence well crisped, lavishly dressed with mustard, dill pickles, and onion. Brother’s onion rings were equally sublime. We also loved Mary, a sweet-tempered woman who sometimes substituted for the saucily impertinent Brother, but she just couldn’t get those onion rings right.

One day I saw a little girl, probably five years old, working up her nerve to jump into her father’s arms in the shallow end of the pool. “It’s all right,” he said, “don’t worry, I’ll catch you.” She drew herself up, half terrified, and plunged, all the way in. Her father swept her up, both of them laughing in the pure joy that only unconditional trust engenders. Would she carry the trust and confidence she learned that day through the rest of her life? I like to think so.

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It was rumored that civil rights protesters were going to come to the Whitehaven Methodist Church. Some people said, Well, you know, all they do is come and sit in the back and then they leave, but many in the congregation were in a panic. Several members of the board wanted to put axe handles through the brass doorpulls. They themselves would stand just inside, with more axe handles, maybe with guns. My father calmed them down and talked them slowly through the ugly newspaper stories, the further interest in the church as a site for protest, and the scorn that such action would evoke. He did not need to ask what Jesus would have done. That question brooded silently in at least some of their consciences. No protesters ever showed up.

+

The other race I longed to understand, albeit also across a chasm, was the female. I really liked girls. Specific ones, of course, I craved, both in my heart and in my glands—my mind’s role little more than an offstage voice—and by the time I was sixteen one goal had subsumed all others in my life: I needed, I had, to get laid. The main problem was that in Whitehaven no one my age got laid (so I believed) except hoods and sluts. I made a weak attempt at one of the latter, sneaking her out on dates to barbecue joints and pizza parlors way across town where nobody else went. I convinced myself, more or less, of the okayness of her Woolworth’s perfume and her bleached strawstack hair, but she soon enough had my number, and repaid my ardor with contempt. I also had respectable girlfriends, with whom I would gladly have had carnal congress if I’d had a clue how and they’d have let me, both conditions as remote as the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

In the moments when my animal urges were sufficiently suppressed, I just plain liked these girls. They were nicer and smarter than boys, and more fun, and much more enjoyable to look at. None of them ever tried to hurt or humiliate me, as nearly every boy I’d ever known had at some point tried to do (examples: shot in butt by BB gun; scrotum nearly twisted off in locker room; “friend” sneaks up behind at urinal, grabs belt, shakes till I pee all over myself). The elaborate courtesy that reigned in my relations with girls had its roots in dancing school, where I had learned to bow and to ask for the honor of this dance and to hold them just close enough for us both to feel, oh, so sweetly, the heat of each other’s bodies, and to move together, together, as one two three, one two three, one; and now in its flowering, courtesy was more beautiful than I had ever imagined in its germinal days. And sure, it mitigated against my supreme goal, but supreme goals seemed in our world rarely to have been much on anybody’s mind. Wanting something out of reach was discouraged by every force at work in our social order.

My girlfriend in the fall of 1963 embodied niceness, prettiness, and propriety, although with an ironic sparkle in her blue eyes. Her hair was blond, her figure trim. She wore pearls and was always beautifully dressed. She had just moved from New Jersey, and her voice was more refined than that of the local girls. She was just right for me.

In Whitehaven’s system of social hierarchy a quiet change was taking place, and I was among its beneficiaries. By this age, at least in our high school society, one’s family’s position didn’t count for much; what had always carried sixteen-year-old boys to the upper levels of prestige were toughness, athleticism, taciturnity, and a readiness to fight. Faced with provocation, which didn’t take much, they beat the shit out of guys. They wore mirthless, often cruel smiles. Their ways with girls were rigidly ritualized: In season, the girls watched them on the playing field and cheered demurely (unless, as was often the case, the girls were cheerleaders, in which case they swiveled their hips lasciviously and yelled), and then the guys, freshly showered, hair wet, reeking of Old Spice cologne, would escort them in triumph to Leonard’s Bar-B-Q on the redneck South Side of Memphis. (Only a few years back, this ritual was likely to be broken at least once in the season by a fight behind the stands after the game, most often with South Side High School, the toughest, meanest bastards in city or county; but fighting, suddenly, even one-on-one, was now out of fashion.) At other times of year, the big guy, resplendent in his black letter jacket with the big gold W, would take his gal to one of the rococo movie palaces downtown, and then they’d go to Leonard’s.

Now, Leonard’s happens to have been the greatest pit-barbecue restaurant on the planet. The quality of the pork shoulder slowly roasted over logs of cured hickory was the foundation of its greatness. These were local country pigs, not too big, not too small, fed, I believe, on ambrosia, manna, pecans, and morning dew. The “pit” was actually a windowless concrete blockhouse with a single door that opened into smoky darkness. The golden meat was only faintly visible as the leathery old pitmaster turned the spits. I took my girlfriend to see it in action. We heard occasional hisses as drips of fat hit the coals. The pitmaster closed the door, shook out a Lucky, and regarded us with yellow eyes. He was so dark and sweat-slick he looked as if he himself had been smoked and slow-cooked for decades. “Sure smells good,” I said.

“It is good,” he replied.

“You been working here a long time?”

“Pretty long.”

“Well, we’re going to go inside and eat some of your barbecue.”

He turned away with a drag on his cigarette.

We went inside and took a table. I was wearing a tweed jacket, a button-down shirt, a carefully double-Windsor-knotted tie. My girlfriend wore a blue dress of some diaphanous material that swished and swirled as she walked. The football giants began to swagger in, with a nod to their few chosen non-athlete peers. Their girls’ hair was teased higher and sprayed tighter than that of the girls of the less-favored. The atmosphere was ecstatic, the athletes at the high point of their lives: Whitehaven, undefeated for the last two years, had tonight won the state football championship. And Leonard’s was the place for le tout Whitehaven High School to be.

Once in a while my friends deigned to sample places other schools went—the Pig ’n’ Whistle (private-school kids, sassy young black waiters, more hamburgers than barbecue despite the latter’s pretty high quality; though also sensational onion rings); Coletta’s Pizza (barbecue pizza a popular option, or half barbecue and half pepperoni); night clubs (foodless) that required fake IDs and hip flasks and more nerve than most of us had—but Leonard’s, for kids from Whitehaven, was very heaven. You could be served in your car, with a tray clipped on outside and the heavy smoke from the pit soaking into your sweater and your pores, which was fun sometimes; you could go up and down and visit with your pals through their own car windows, see who was out with whom. But the scene, the lekking ground, with silver dollars embedded in the foyer floor and hormones thick as river air, was here inside.

My favorite waitress, a red-headed crane of a woman with a smoker’s rasp, presented herself with pencil poised over pad. There were a great many things on the menu—barbecued baloney, barbecued Polish sausage, beef barbecue, wonderful ribs, fried catfish with hushpuppies--but if you were a couple from Whitehaven on a date, you ordered a Mr. Pig sandwich, a bean pot, and a Coke. You could try that other stuff with your parents.

You could have your barbecue white, that is, entirely from the inside of the slow-smoked shoulder; or brown, including lots of crunchily caramelized outside; or mixed, which girls, ever eager to please or at least not to displease, often chose. The pork was succulent, just fatty enough, chopped, not pulled, topped with yellow, small-grained cole slaw and a slather of Leonard’s sublime sweet sauce. The buns were just buns. More sweet sauce and a fiery hot one, in a short, unlabeled pharmaceutical bottle, sat on each table. The bean pot, too hot to touch, bean-slop burned to its sides, came on a plate of its own with a little paper cup of the same cole slaw. Custom required that one dump out the slaw and pour the beans on top of it, so that there was a cool bright center to be worked toward through the spicy, glutinous, brick-red beans. Everything was soft and sweet and spicy.

Those were the tastes of our kisses. Whitehaven, ever expanding, always had plenty of dead-end unpaved roads which in a year or two would be lined with houses and asphalted. Some spots were so popular that groups of cars would gather there, each containing a couple hungrily making out, sometimes two couples. I chose to be alone with my girlfriend, kissing and groping and sweating and rock-hard and, finally, gently, pushed away.

And there, at length, our romance ran aground. Every guy I knew was getting somewhere—to first base (touching a breast), or second (below), or even better. Some, for all I knew, might have been going all the way (our code held that no one brag, even speak, of a such a thing). My lovely girlfriend, a pious Catholic, would kiss for hours, but that was it. I was too hungry for her, and she was too buttoned-up for me. I never did like her as much as I thought I should.

What was more, the field was wide-open. It no longer seemed impossible for me to ask the prettiest girls out, or the even cooler few who were becoming sexy as well. It would be years until I understood, but I know now that since the assassination of President Kennedy there had been a storm gathering, and of it such changes were the first soft breezes and distant summer lightning. As if overnight, the jocks and other tough guys were no longer at the top. It was okay—it was admired!—to make good grades. I was not what came later to be known as a nerd, though I did have my nerdy qualities. I was small of stature, studious, bespectacled, decidedly non-tough. Worse, I had a growing tendency to use big words and talk about poetry. But I was certainly no romantic hero, and I had never beaten the shit out of anybody. I had my own column in the Broadcaster, the school newspaper. It was printed at the Whitehaven Press, both a printing business and our community’s weekly newspaper, which Towery’s parents owned. There I met real newspaper people, affectionately cynical and, in the context, worldly. The photographer, once a jazz musician, still smoked marijuana and never stopped talking. I loved the clatter of the old typesetting machine under the swift fingers of the Dickensian old rogue Mr. Henry (I still don’t know if that was his first or last name). I can still smell those innocent poisons, the melting lead and the letterpress ink. Just behind was the Lottaburger stand: Both the building and the counter within were perfect circles. The inimitable Lottaburger itself was huge, grease-soaked, piled high with condiments, superb in every way. A large simulacrum of it twirled slowly atop a pole on the roof.

I was the number-two editor of the Broadcaster. At the Tennessee High School Press Association’s convention in Chattanooga, I ran for the vice presidency. I seem to have had sort of a thing for second place. Anyhow, I did win.

There was also, that spring, the election of the president of the Whitehaven High School senior class for the coming year. At the leading edge of postwar baby boom, the Class of 1965 was the biggest the school had ever had—over five hundred. The two guys nominated were both of the brainy, four-eyed sort who had been grit under the wheels of the football great no more than three years before. I lost.

It was the spring of the Beatles. Most of my pals were letting their hair grow. This was worse even than Elvis! My father and every other father in my ken, not to mention most of the guys in our newly deposed jock class, all regarded the Beatles and even the Rolling Stones as decidedly effeminate. This was not what Winners were supposed to look like—but in early April 1964, all five of the top five singles on the pop charts were Beatles songs.

From my pal Richard Dickson’s column in the Broadcaster:

Tommy McNamee (it seems like I’ve always got something to say about him) has gone berserk. Nothing new, you say? Well, it’s been coming all along….He has a truth movement. He makes little signs for everything. He really went wild at the library last week. Simple things like a sign that reads “chair” on a chair and “magazine” on a magazine weren’t too disturbing. But under a modern art painting “modern art thing”! That’s pretty gross. He also had a sign on the wall that read “sign.” On the librarian’s back (much to her discomfort) was a sign that read “librarian person.” He challenges the school to spread truths....

Like those shaggy, faggy rock-and-rollers, I was a Winner. I had talked my teachers out of having to do homework. “If I can make over 95 on the six-weeks test without it,” I argued, “what’s wrong with that?” And they said Okay, and I made those 95s, and better, often 100s. Whitehaven wasn’t a very hard school. It was just the right smallness of pond for me to feel like a mighty big fish in.

Late that spring I fell in, fell in love, in fact, with another blue-eyed blonde, who was not only nice, smart, smart-alecky, graceful, and unbelievably good-looking but—at the same time—sexy. She always wore her hair down and loose, and knew well how to let it fall over one eye and then with a lift of her chin swing it back. She didn’t have the little short-stepping twittery walk that the other girls had; she had long legs, she swung them long, she pulled her shoulders back, which pushed her breasts up and forward, there was full-bodied freedom in her walk. Watching her coming down the hall toward me, swinging her hips and smiling, I couldn’t believe my luck.

One thing that probably didn’t hurt was my mother’s car, a sky-blue 1961 Chevrolet Impala convertible with the big, 327-cubic-inch V-8 and a four-barrel carburetor that roared like a hurricane when I had sneakily removed the air filter. I had always loved cars, but cars this cool existed in another realm—magazines—out of reach, beyond the farthest horizon. The notion of a girlfriend like this was equally unimaginable. Yet here I was with both.

Out at road’s end in the Chevy with the top down and the moon above, she returned my passion in almost equal measure. But there was never enough time. All good girls, even my not-altogether-good girlfriend, had to be home by midnight. I did not like taking her home, nor, for that matter, picking her up. She lived in a crummy neighborhood in a crummy little house with a fat, bad-tempered mother and a seldom-seen country boy of a father, who worked on the railroad and drank.

Then came summer. I was working part-time at the Whitehaven Public Library, and loving the long literary conversations I had with the remarkable old ladies who were the full-time librarians. It was always quiet. It wasn’t much of a town for reading. Half an hour could pass without the door opening. I also had long days of freedom, to plow through the stacks of books I brought home or, much better, to roam the earth with my girlfriend. We roasted on the imported-sand beach of Sardis Reservoir, an hour down into Mississippi, and as night fell we grappled in the Chevy, our hot skin peeling stickily away from the hot naugahyde, coming closer and closer, I believed, to the possibility of the real thing. Once, we swam a long way across to the colored beach, where we were greeted with silence and stares. Back where we belonged, we walked along the sand holding hands, my girlfriend in a delectably reckless bikini. She swung her long hair back and kissed me in front of the world.

The world: our little, little world. Once in a while, especially with the help of the librarians, I could not help seeing out, to the great world beyond the limits of my understanding. On June 21, 1964, the Ku Klux Klan murdered three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, in Mississippi. On July 2, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Two weeks later, Harlem rioted. On August 7, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving the president essentially unlimited power to repel North Vietnamese attacks on American armed forces. On August 28, Bob Dylan introduced the Beatles to marijuana. On September 1, I asked my blonde and beautiful girlfriend to join me for a round of fun on the Labor Day weekend, including a summer’s-end trip to the beach at Sardis—and maybe, at last——

She said she couldn’t go. She had a date with my best friend. He came over later that day and said he’d been seeing her all summer. There was something I didn’t like about the way he said “seeing.”

“You’ve—made love to her?” I demanded.

Yes.

“All summer long you’ve been fucking her behind my back?”

Yes.

He let me slug him, hard. My time of triumph was over.

I shut myself in the bathroom and poached myself in the bathtub for hours, sobbing. My parents called through the door, begging me to come out and tell them what was wrong. They couldn’t get in, because I had pulled out a drawer that blocked the door. Finally I said I would come out if I didn’t have to tell them what was wrong. They asked me if I wanted to go to a psychiatrist. Sobbing again, I said yes. I told the psychiatrist I would tell him what had happened as long as he promised not to tell my parents. He told me I should tell them myself. I said no, and neither could he. All right, he said, and I told him. He told me it was normal for me to feel that way. I was fine.

My best friend went out with that girl for the next six years, into college and after. Then he married her. That lasted six months. With one of his best friends she ran off to Texas.

CHAPTER FIVE: SCOUTING: 1960

2009-03-04T13:21:00.000-08:00

(The fifth chapter of my memoir.)

I’ve always liked the Twelve Points of the Boy Scout Law, because they have all always applied to me in perfect descending order, from the truly true at the top to the, oh, um, well, something else? as they approach the bottom. A scout is

· trustworthy (“People can depend on him,” says the Boy
Scout Handbook—yep);

· loyal (to a fault);

· helpful (see below);

· friendly (risk-averse);

· courteous (because my mother would have killed me if I hadn’t been, and her ghost keeps a gimlet eye on me to this day);

· kind (“does not harm or kill any living thing”—in this I grossly failed, as a ruthless BB-gunner of songbirds, to kill which was a crime, especially if you shot a mockingbird, the Tennessee state bird, which I found especially easy to hit);

· obedient (here I really begin to slide);

· cheerful (once in a while);

· thrifty (still doesn’t know the meaning of the word);

· brave (“can face danger although he is afraid”—no, runs like hell);

· clean (“keeps his body and mind fit and clean”—well, body yes) ;

· reverent (ha!).

My first cooking was as a Boy Scout: a coffee can into which I piled hamburger meat, onions, and potatoes and which I then buried in the coals of our campfire. An hour later, voilà! When I uncapped it, everything was simultaneously burned and raw. Pretty much everybody’s was the same, and we all choked it down.

By now I had learned to detest the food at school—not only Buzzy Michael’s worm-riddled blackeyed peas but tuna sandwiches so wet the bread clung to the roof of your mouth, summer squash swimming in slack water, rice under pale, congealing gravy, slimy okra, slimy spinach, slimy canned asparagus, slimy canned potatoes, cold hot dogs on clammy cold buns, baked spaghetti under a glazed-hard roof of melted cheese, baked chicken so dry it sucked up all the spit in your mouth, and the worst of the worst, salmon croquettes you could have smelled from Arkansas. Compared to school food and scout food, my mother’s cooking didn’t seem so bad.

She tried hard. Each of the four of us got a different breakfast: my father, eggs, bacon, coffee with cream (real) and sugar; Janie, cinnamon toast or some other sweet thing; my mother, dry toast, four cups of acrid black coffee from an ancient, battered aluminum percolator, and several cigarettes; me, o.j. (frozen), chocolate milk, and a grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And until I got to seventh grade or so and discovered that bringing your lunch was hopelessly uncool, at least a couple of days a week my mother would pack my little gray steel lunchbox tidily with good tuna sandwiches (sweet with Miracle Whip) or American cheese ones, or ham, the bread always white, wrapped in crisp wax paper; a little bag of potato chips; a pickle; a piece of fruit and a cookie. Red-plaid thermos of milk. Hard to beat—happy food.

Scouting was happy too. We worshiped our scoutmaster, the square-jawed American Airlines pilot “Pappy” Conner, and we eagerly took up the discipline he imposed on us (lining up, marching, clean camp, silence in meetings). Pappy could do anything in the woods, and was infinitely kind. I loved getting my merit badges: making just-so fires, tracking animals and making plaster-of-Paris casts of their footprints, learning the bandages and splints of first aid, memorizing the Bill of Rights (for Citizenship), signaling by Morse code and semaphor, and, soon to be momentous, lifesaving

Boy Scout camp, on the other hand, in the Ozarks of northwestern Arkansas, was bad. Pappy wasn’t there, the counselors were sadists, the outhouse wasps buzzed so mercilessly between one’s bare ass and the unspeakable heap below that some of us were admitted to the infirmary suffering from advanced constipation. Once a grunting brute of a counselor, under the guise of teaching me the cross-chest carry for rescuing someone drowning—required for the Lifesaving merit badge—grabbed me, hard, telling me that drowning people were likely to do that, and sank me, and held me there till I began to drown and he let go. I swam to shore, choking, as he laughed.

But there was also canoeing on the icy, clear South Fork of the Spring River, high boy-voices singing Dip, dip, and swing them back, flashing like silver, swift as the wild goose flies.

+

Corpses of frogs, fish, snakes, and crawdads were ranged along my bedroom bookshelves in jars of denatured alcohol. Then my wild bachelor uncle from the Delta, to my mother's horror, gave me a BB gun. No songbird was safe. The first shot usually only knocked it senseless from its perch, and I would seek it out in the brush to administer the coup de grce to the brain. I made no pretense of collecting them; I left my victims where they lay. My favorite target was the mockingbird, the Tennessee state bird, illegal to kill. What could have possessed me? Remembering this makes my throat clench with shame.

The pursuit of Eagle Scouthood led me to gentler concerns. To take casts of animal tracks for my nature merit badge, I traveled deeper into the old forest than I had ever gone. There were mysteries at every step. Why did the mother raccoon and her family stop here? What made the heron take flight? Fox prints at the edge of the water: did the fox swim, or leap? Hence, slowly, my rage to possess wild creatures was displaced by empathy.

In a little pasture far back in the woods I found a dead calf. The head was twisted half around, the eyes staring into the sky. The skin was peeled back from the rib cage, which was crawling with flies. One leg had been eaten down to the bone. The day was hot, but the flesh had not yet begun to stink, so the kill must have been very recent, and the predator nearby. Crows called. A sharp hind edge of cloudshade swept across the grass, and in the sudden brightness there was a clarity that I had never seen before, as if a veil had been lifted from the face of the world.

I looked for tracks, found one, and took its cast. It was big, three inches across. My field guide said, unbelievably, cougar! Mountain lion! Panther.

Not until years later, when the cast was long lost, did I realize what a find that may have been. Felis concolor is extinct now in the Mississippi valley. Indeed the cougar may be gone everywhere east of the Rockies, except for the minuscule and dwindling population of the Florida panther subspecies. Could this have been one of the last Eastern cougars? Or was it, as a wildlife biologist suggested to me recently, the hybrid of a calf‑killing dog and a boy's eager imagination?

The old-growth forest was cut down, and not even for lumber: the great trees were bulldozed into piles and burned. Most of the topsoil washed away, and the red clay beneath it required laborious cultivation to sustain the newly unrolled swaths of zoysia and Bermuda grass sod. Saplings were planted, and wired upright. The lakes were drained, and the black people moved out. The last hobo known to have visited Whitehaven was found dead beneath a hedge. We got a shopping center, and an interstate highway. Fluoridation of our drinking water was fought, thought to be a Communist plot to curb the birth rate. I had my first summer job as a carpenter's helper, putting up drywall in new houses.

Improved pesticides came onto the market, and it was possible now to drive through the Delta bottoms with no more than an occasional sweep of the windshield wipers. My wild uncle, who kept bongos and a conga drum in his den closet, got married. The ospreys disappeared from the cypresstop nests, the alligators from the bayous. The only lake left was appropriated by tough teenagers as a beer‑drinking hideout; they raped a girl there. Quails no longer shuffled in the leaves on the lawn.

What had been done to Nonconnah Creek was done now to its tributaries. New sewers leaked into the stagnant trench that was all that remained of my creek's headwaters. Our grapevine‑draped swimming hole and the alligator snapping turtle's riffle lasted longer, but we could get there on bicycles now, on smooth blacktop. Often we didn't make it that far, having stopped off to chew gum and laugh in some girl’s yard and lost track of time. When the last of my creek was ditched out, I believe I did not notice.

+

Thanks to my Boy Scout training—and my mother’s determined character—I saved a man’s life. From the front page of the Memphis Press-Scimitar of June 16, 1960:

SCOUT TOMMY McNAMEE, ONLY 13, SAVES MAN:
Mouth-to-Mouth Respiration Until Firemen Arrive

One of the things 13-year-old Tommy McNamee likes most about Scouting is first aid.

The thing he likes most about first aid is studying about artificial respiration.

Tommy and other members of Boy Scout Troop 30 of Whitehaven Methodist Church decided last year to enroll in a Red Cross class in first aid. They learned how to apply mouth-to-mouth respiration.

The training helped Tommy to save a man’s life in Hot Springs, Ark., yesterday.

The man is Otho Cooper, 54, of Philadelphia, Miss., who was vacationing in Hot Springs. He fell into a swimming pool after an apparent blackout, was pulled out of the pool by some swimmers and then revived by Tommy, who gave him mouth-to-mouth respiration for about four minutes until firemen arrived to help.

Cooper went to a Hot Springs hospital, where doctors gave Tommy credit for saving his life.

Tommy, a First Class Scout, is the son of Mr. and Mrs. C. T. McNamee of 1391 Oakwood Drive.

Tommy was in Hot Springs because his father was on an insurance convention.

Tommy seems certain of winning some honors. The Advancement Committee of the Chickasaw Council of the Boy Scouts will send a review of his heroism to the National Court of Honor, Boy Scouts of America.

Well, what the newspaper neglected to mention was that I would never have gone near Otho Cooper if my mother hadn’t been hissing in my ear the whole time, “Tommy, go, you’ve got to help him, those people are killing him.” Some people were trying to give him the old push-on-the-chest-and-flap-the-elbows style of artificial respiration, to no avail. “He’s got his Lifesaving Merit Badge!” my mother proclaimed, shoving me forward through the crowd of gawkers. Lying inert in his puddle, Otho Cooper was to all appearances already dead, his body white as paper, his face purple as a muscadine grape. My mother chased off the hapless artificial-respirators. I lifted Otho Cooper’s head into the proper throat-clearing position, and then dropped his head, hard, on the concrete. The sound it made was precisely my idea of how the cracking of a skull would sound. I was certain that if he wasn’t already dead, I had now killed him. “Hurry, Tommy,” whispered my mother, urgently. Suppressing a gag, I put my mouth over his. He was surely not fifty-four but a hundred years old. He had not shaved for a couple of days, and his fat purple tongue seemed to have bristles, too. I pinched his nose shut and blew, and nothing happened. “Harder,” said my mother. I blew, and he bubbled faintly way down inside. Blow, bubble, blow, gurgle, blow, choke, and so on for what seemed a very long while, until suddenly Otho Cooper erupted, a great gush of water and then a geyser of vomit. And at last a mucus-choked gasp, and another.

The swimming pool was cut into the side of the mountain and could be reached only through an upper floor of the Arlington Hotel, so the firemen were having to hack their way through the rock-strewn woods to open a way in for their truck, without which their respirator didn’t work. Finally they broke through, and Otho Cooper, now mechanically inflated and deflated, hazily returned to the land of the living.

Several weeks later, I received a package from Otho Cooper, Philadelphia, Mississippi. Inside it was my reward—a wallet—and in the wallet was…twenty bucks? a hundred? No, not a God-damned thing.

+

In July of 1960, several dozen of my sweltering fellow merit-badge-earners and I—including my bosom pal Towery—rode buses to join fifty-six-thousand-odd others on the arid plains below Pike’s Peak, near Colorado Springs, in celebration of the fiftieth birthday of the Boy Scouts of America. The official account of the Jamboree, as it was called, reminds me that “We did our own cooking—breakfast, lunch, and supper—the whole thing. It wasn’t the Waldorf, but it was good. One night we cooked 25,741 pounds of steak.” We also consumed “9,895 cases of breakfast food, 2,525 cases of canned fruit, 5,567 cases of canned vegetables, 2,607 cases of canned meat, 21,250 pounds of ground beef, 577,960 quarts of milk, 43,980 quarts of fresh orange juice, 132,330 loaves of bread, 10,224 pies, 46,342 heads of lettuce, 45,200 peaches, 77,400 bananas.” Hey, and we saw cue-ball-pated President Dwight D. Eisenhower standing waving from his Lincoln convertible, and Sheriff Matt Dillon from TV, and I ate bear meat and was bitten by a horned toad. At night, beneath the blazing Milky Way—far brighter here in the Rockies than ever in humidity-shrouded Memphis—we lay on our backs listened to our genius of a Senior Patrol Leader tell us the great Greek stories of the constellations. Best of all, we saw, hanging between the back legs of Boys’ Life magazine’s official mascot, a burro (well-)named Pedro, the biggest penis in the world.

+

In fifth grade I had been president of the He Man Woman Haters Club. By seventh, I had secret girlfriends and soul-deep longings, for which no slightest passage of information from my parents or anybody else had prepared me. My friends and I were in fact remarkably free, in large part thanks to our parents’ ignorance of us. They mistrusted all forms of personal insight. They had inherited emotional distance as a way of being. War, poverty, deracination, and the mysterious, not yet named epidemic of emotional depression that was spreading through American society combined in an all-darkening pall of unconsciousness. History—Indian genocide, slavery, frontier violence and crime, Jim Crow—was a presence not to be known too intimately. Generations of denial had eventuated in a culture of indifference, a shutdown of emotional intelligence, an inexpressible need not to know. Passion was certainly not to be trusted. Teenagers in Paris kissed on bridges as adults flowed smiling past; Whitehaven’s teenagers were confined to furtive grappling at the ends of gravel roads. Mistrust was effectively mitigated in one place: church. You could trust Jesus. You could trust the minister. You could trust your brethren of the congregation. Hence the immitigable shock when one of the pillars of Whitehaven, good Christian man, commissioner of county roads, confessed to taking thousands of dollars in kickbacks from contractors and went to prison.

Once in a while, a grownup would have a “nervous breakdown,” a girl would get pregnant, a boy would hear voices. They disappeared.

The general unconsciousness obscured dangers great and small, and redounded to freedom for us kids. There were no seat belts in our cars, we played baseball, not softball, we played tackle football, unsupervised, not touch. The notion of putting on a helmet to ride your bicycle was risible. We didn’t have play dates; we just went outside, found one another, and played. We rode our bikes to moon around at pretty girls’ houses, and, I’m not quite sure why except maybe on our shared general principle of keeping our distance, we lied to our parents about where we’d been. The swamps and forests of our adventures were seriously wild places, nearly wilderness, stretching for miles, and in them lurked an abundance of ticks, chiggers, highly aggressive wasps of many species, copperheads, water moccasins, rattlesnakes. We smoked the stalks of some weed with a pithy, porous center, doing God knows what to our lungs. We nailed two-by-fours to the great columnar trunks of tulip-trees and climbed them to inconceivable heights. Our creek’s water was infested with worms, flagellates, amoebae, and other dire parasites. We went fishing and hooked ourselves through the thumb and learned to push the barb on through to be clipped by somebody’s rusty needlenose pliers, and never to cry in the process. As long as I was home and presentable and seated at the dinner table by six o’clock, my father was content. If I was five minutes late, he gravely, sadly slipped off his belt, took me outside, and strapped me hard on the butt. I am punctual to this day.

There was a good deal of violence in our world, little of it condemned in any quarter. When you broke a rule at school, you got licks with a stout wooden paddle, sometimes wielded by a teacher, sometimes, more painfully, by the principal. White people’s dogs bit colored people. Our eggs were delivered sometimes by a white man, sometimes by a colored man, and our dogs knew which was which when the station wagon the egg men shared turned into the driveway: They ignored the white man and barked in fury at the colored one. Boys got in fights at school, in people’s back yards, behind a church, and other boys gathered to cheer them on; no one intervened unless the match was severely imbalanced. Bad older boys—hoods—fought gangs from enemy high schools late at night in obscure industrial parking lots, and it was widely believed, and perhaps true, that sometimes they fought with chains or knives. Bullying was rampant from third grade up, and almost never attended to except by informal peer coalitions formed for justice or vengeance, whose only means of retribution was violence.

Violence was often the means of enforcing discipline at school. On January 8, 1962, I wrote an anonymous letter to the principal decrying the acts of an enraged phys ed coach who had paddled every member of his class, including me, when none of us would (or, in my case, could) identify a kid whose fooling around with the water fountain in the gym lobby had resulted in a puddle on the concrete floor. He hit us really hard, too. And then began again, one brutal wham each on the butt. When the bell rang, he bellowed, “This will start again tomorrow!” I didn’t dare send the letter, of course. The principal would probably have paddled me too.

+

The quarter-square-mile block on which we lived—“nice” houses on three sides, grand ones on the fourth—was home to thirteen boys exactly the same age, and one girl. Within easy walking or biking distance were a dozen more guys. We were a society unto ourselves, unevenly democratic, with constantly shifting alliances, grudges, hierarchy. We rode our bikes to school together in good weather, a relative term in that climate. In bad—which meant really bad: downpours, freezing rain, snow, temperature below twenty-five (the concept of “too hot” was unknown)—our mothers carpooled. We chose up sides for baseball, basketball, football, and red rover. I, small and unaggressive, was often the last to be chosen. My doing better in school than any of the rest of them counted for nothing. Dominance was this society’s only currency.

My father threw a baseball at me, hard. It glanced off my gloved fingertip, which burned with pain. “Just pick it up and throw it,” he scolded as I failed to keep tears in. I threw. “You throw like a damn girl,” he said, disgusted. He insisted I sign up for Peewee League anyhow. I played right field, couldn’t catch anything, struck out over and over.

We wandered the world freely. Bobby Towery and I would ride the bus to downtown Memphis and gorge ourselves on minuscule Krystal hamburgers, square, thin, a nickel apiece, delicious. We’d take ourselves to a movie. We roamed the army-surplus store admiring the hand grenades, machine-gun tripods, camouflage pup tents, padded helmets; we bought canvas-covered canteens, folding shovels, a bayonet, hatchets with which we slew young trees. We had been hearing lately of jungle warfare, and in the swamp we played at it, sweating.

We were still children, ahistorical, culturally isolated, and just beginning to feel, though not yet to recognize, the faint rumble, as from deep in the earth, of the real war, the prodigious violence, the hatred, the catastrophes that were soon to envelop us.

CHAPTER FOUR: RECIPES: 1959

2009-02-23T13:31:00.000-08:00

(The fourth chapter of my memoir.)

You might think, given the multiplicity of regional origins of my friends’ households, that their mothers’ cooking would have represented a panoply of Southern culinary styles. The fact, however, was that for real Southern cooking we had to turn to people’s maids, who were always colored (as we were on pain of a spanking instructed to describe all persons of African descent) and who ate no food but Southern. That was probably why we got more authentic, albeit lousy, food in the school cafeteria: All the cooks were colored. What the white folks ate was certainly Southern in some respects, but more significant was the triumph of processed, frozen, or canned “convenience” foods that had swept across the nation in the wake of World War II. The whites of Whitehaven clung fiercely to some of their Southernness—their casual racism, their home-country accents, high school and college football, mothers as housewives whenever that was economically possible—but cultural homogenization was big in the kitchen, nowhere more so than ours, my mother a Yankee and my father ferocious in his rejection of any food redolent of Depression poverty. He wanted “good old regular American food,” which in his way of thinking included fried chicken, fried pork chops, fried fish, and the cornbread which my mother never could master (it crumbled; he shook his head). In the homes of my friends whose mothers were Southern-born, or the few who had cooks, a great cultural fusion was under way, illustrated vividly in the locally edited cookbooks—of churches, Junior Leagues, ladies’ clubs—that were being published by the thousands all over the country and piling up on Whitehaven’s kitchen shelves.

My mother had over a hundred of these things. Among them:

The Memphis Cook Book, first published by the Junior League in 1952, preserved a few local classics—Okra Pickle, Southern Pecan Pie, Willie’s Bread Crumb Griddle Cakes, Wild Goose (“1st, shoot him”), Corn and Ham Fritters, Cheese Grits—but the like of those were sparsely distributed among the dozens of “convenience” and “fusion” recipes—Seven Can Soup, Fondue de Poulet à la Crème, Indian Curry, Casserole Supreme of Broccoli and Carrots, Frito Dish, Mushrooms Flambé, Hawaiian Delight (lemon Jell-o, canned pineapple, sour cream), Mock Plum Pudding, Mock Pizza Pie.

The Coahoma Cook Book, published by the women’s club of Coahoma, Mississippi—my daddy’s old neck of the woods—proclaimed itself “a book with a background, not the broad, general background of ‘Southern Cooking,’ but one made distinctive by the soupçon of Coahoma flavoring.” Exactly what that flavoring was is hard to glean from such dishes as Stuffed Dill Pickle, Moon Lake Party Punch, Fried Toast, Ham-Oyster Casserole, Shushed Eggs, Chess Pie, and Hebrew Cookies; but the book praises the local bounty of “fruits, nuts, poultry, dairy products, meat, etc., produced on the plantations” and “the game still reasonably plentiful behind the levees and in the cypress breaks.” Southern cooking was still in fashion in rural Mississippi, but even Coahoma wasn’t spared the incursions of Eggplant à la “Palmarissa,” Charlotte “Russee,” Marshmallow Salad, Venetian Apple Pie, and Olive Oil Pickle.

Our Delta Dining, published by The Mothers Club of the County Day School in Marks, Mississippi, preserved some local classics—Grandmother’s Spoon Bread, Lilly Mae’s Hush Puppies, Peach Fritters, Whoopie Pies—while also struggling for a sort of sophistication, of which the saddest example is “Petete ’De Jenue,” which I can translate only as petit déjeuner, meaning breakfast but in fact a casserole dish comprising butter or margarine, ground beef, canned tomatoes, onions, garlic, canned mushrooms, noodles, canned ripe olives, and Wisconsin Cheese.

The attempt to convey an impression of worldliness spilled into absurdity in Bayou Cuisine: Its Tradition and Transition, published by St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church of Indianola, Mississippi, which divided its recipes in a “historical panorama” of the influences underlying the regional style—Indian, French, English, Early Settlement, and so forth, even unto International Origin and Space Age. The principal influence on the true old Southern cooking—African American tradition—unsurprisingly did not rate its own chapter. This cookbook’s “Primitive Aborigine, Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations”—before Andy Jackson sent them packing along the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma in the 1830s—allegedlly feasted on Salmon Party Mound, Honey Dew Fruit Salad, Barbecue on Buns, Hasenpfeffer, Duck Nero, and, well, why not, Indian Pudding.

Hernando De Soto and his gold-crazed Spaniards, in the remarkably capacious view of Bayou Cuisine, brought to the region Egg Ring “Cheairs,” Cucumber Freeze in Avocado, Kum-Back Sauce, Thousand Island Dressing, Chicken Tamale Casserole Cuban Style, Chasen’s Chili, and Coctel Après Dinner.

The French, first as hairy voyageurs and later as lace-cuffed New Orleanians, truly did bring French food to the bayou country, though well to the south of Indianola. The trappers’ Boiled Beaver Tail and Squirrel on a Stick aren’t treated of in Bayou Cuisine, but such genuinely Creole delicacies as Pompano en Papillote, Oysters Rockefeller, Oyster Bisque, Jambalaya, Shrimp Remoulade, Beignets, and Pralines all have a legitimate claim in our region’s culinary ancestry (we didn’t invent them, but we cooked them). One wonders, however, about crediting French tradition with Liz’s Frozen Fruit Salad (with marshmallows), Light Opera Fudge, or a String Bean Casserole built on canned mushroom soup and Ritz crackers.

The “Mississippi Territory” chapter covers the period between 1798 and 1817, when the Chickasaw and Choctaw were still officially in charge while throngs of white immigrants, hundreds of mules, and thousands of slaves were slashing and burning tens of thousands of acres of native forest. Here again, as in the French chapter, Bayou Cuisine includes old dishes well worth remembering—Virginia Punch, Ham Pie, Fried Green Tomatoes, Hopping John, Okra Patties, Pecan Cake, and Raisin Pie. But neither Bobette’s Stew, Cheese Balls in Aspic, Ham Loaf, Chicken Salad Soufflé, Mushroom Rice Casserole, nor Shrimp Harpin can be achieved without canned soup, which I believe was unavailable in the early nineteenth century.

I pass lightly over the “Ante Bellum,” “Post Bellum,” “Delta Chefs,” and “Art” chapters in order to rush into the real fun, the dishes devised in my lifetime. From “International Origin”: Bloody Mary Soup, Cracker Ball Soup, Italian Sweet-Sour Slaw, Talarini (= taglierine, presumably), Chinese Cheese Wafers, Jezebel Sauce, and Torch Bananas. And from our own Sputnik-haunted “Space Age”: Hot Cheese Planet Puffs, Apollo Oyster Patties, Instant Russian Tea, Cherry Coke Salad, Curry Rapido, Moon Meat Pies, Pork Chops A-Go-Go, Milky Way Cake, and Twinkie Pie.

Some sort of new Southern cuisine was being born. Luckily, natural selection soon removed most of it from the meme pool.

Twenty years later, my mother and her peers would be traveling to New York, San Francisco, Paris, and Rome, and tasting the dishes that their church cookbooks adumbrated so clumsily. In the meantime, there were treasures to be found amid the marshmallow salads and canned-soup extravaganzas, including one dish I still adore, credited in The Memphis Cook Book to the Old Southern Tea Room of Vicksburg:

Oysters “Johnny Reb”

2 qts. oysters, drained
½ c. finely chopped parsley
½ c. finely chopped shallots or onions
salt and pepper
Tabasco
1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
2 Tbsp. lemon juice
½ c. melted butter
2 c. fine cracker crumbs
paprika
¾ c. half milk and cream

Place a layer of oysters in bottom of greased shallow two-quart baking dish. Sprinkle with half of parsley, shallots, seasonings, lemon juice, butter, and crumbs. Make another layer of the same. Sprinkle with paprika. Just before baking, pour the milk into evenly spaced holes, being very careful not to moisten crumb topping all over. Bake at 375 degrees for about 30 minutes, or until firm. Yield: 12 to 15 portions.

The South had a rich culinary tradition which Whitehaven’s mothers were to a great degree trying to escape. My own mother’s escape was from the sooty industrial and railyard town of her childhood, six hundred miles up the Mississippi from Memphis. Despite much ethnic diversity—eastern Europeans of every stripe, Germans, Danes, Swedes, Irish, Pennsylvania Dutch, New Englanders—the food of Savanna, Illinois, was as grim as its mills. Mama’s collection held only one recipe compendium from there, Savanna’s Own Cook Book. The Cinnamon Apples Salad depended on cinnamon candy and red food coloring. There was Baked Cabbage, baked in white sauce. Casserole Potatoes were sliced, then baked in water and butter or margarine (baked in water?). Hamburger Pie combined meat, bread crumbs, “favorite seasonings,” canned tomato soup, and mustard. Molded Horseradish was made from lemon Jell-O. There was, vividly evoking the Depression, Mock Chicken. Texas Hot Dish brought together an unholy alliance of Spam, canned chicken noodle soup, evaporated milk, and oatmeal. Gumdrop Cookies: sugar, shortening, flour, and gumdrops. And these were Savanna’s fancy food.

Only a generation before, most of our Southern forebears had lived on farms or plantations, where not only the cash crop of cotton was grown but also chickens, guinea hens, turkeys, ducks, geese, pigs, and cows, as well as orchards and vegetable gardens big enough to yield fruits and vegetables for the entire year, fresh in summer and skillfully canned for the fallow months. Few of our grandfathers lacked a shotgun and a rifle, for in those days before the ruthless monocropping of postwar, chemical-based industrial farms there were still extensive forests, canebrakes, and swamps throughout the rural South, in which doves, quail, wild ducks and geese, rabbits, squirrels, raccoons, opossums, bear, deer, and wild honey were to be had, and the yowl of the panther was still occasionally heard. I sometimes wonder if my father’s longevity—he’s 94 and going strong as I write this—may be due to his early diet of home-grown chicken, milk, and greens.

The cookbooks of my daddy’s parents’ and grandparents’ day were altogether different from my mother’s. Housekeeping in Old Virginia by Marion Cabell Tyree, published in 1879, offered six recipes for calf’s-head soup, the very sight of which would have set most of Whitehaven’s housewives to shrieking. The quantities to be “put up” were prodigious—“Slice one gallon green tomatoes”; “Boil twelve pounds soft peaches”; “Put three pounds brown sugar to every squeezed gallon of juice”; “Separate 100 oysters from their liquor”—and the recipes were mouth-watering: cold sturgeon “scolloped” with homemade mayonnaise flavored with celery and cayenne; roast wild goose stuffed with celery, hard-boiled eggs, mashed potatoes, pork fat, butter, turnips, onions, and pepper vinegar; chicken fried in lard and served with cornmeal mush (we might call it polenta now); cymling (pattypan squash) fritters; tomato marmalade; dark fig cake; pork sweetbreads stewed in milk and butter. Not a can of soup in sight.

We were far from our history, and far from contemporary life beyond our circumscript horizons. Although corporate affiliations, fraternal organizations, and churches linked our families to the wider world, those ties were not avenues. Nearly everyone was far enough from his European roots to have no old country to visit or even remember. Our name was Irish, and we knew that the first American McNamee—Charles—had arrived in Virginia in 1820 from Newtown Stuart in Ulster, but not much of our blood was Irish, and none of our family culture was. Only my name connected me to him. Whitehaven’s old countries were Mississippi, Arkansas, and rural Tennessee. We vacationed just far enough beyond them to feel a gentle, unthreatening foreignness—the steaminess, gambling, beaches, and spicy shrimp boils of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast; the green, German hills and smoky sausages of the Wisconsin Dells; the hillbilly hardscrabble of the Ozarks and southern Appalachians, with their moonshine and air of sullen exclusion, where we could feel privileged and blessed.

My parents and my sister Janie and I went to the Gulf Coast, where gambling and liquor were illegal but nevertheless taxed by the state of Mississippi. Biloxi was little-league louche compared to New Orleans, but the same scents hung in the heavy air, of salt water, beer, fish, magnolias, cheap cigars, cheap perfume. We ate in restaurants! Every day! The Friendship House in Mississippi City with its tall, solemn waiters! The Black Angus, where they cooked thick steaks before your eyes with a little signpost stuck in each to indicate its desired doneness! We had blue crabs boiled in spicy broth, then spilled out on newspaper-covered picnic tables to be smashed with mallets. We licked that luscious juice from our fingers. I ordered a baked red snapper, and, something I’d never seen before, it arrived staring me in the face. You could get a mountain of fried shrimp for a dollar. And oh, my God, I swallowed oysters raw. Somehow my parents got a shrimp boat to take me out, and I brought back a mess of pink shrimp still wriggling in their net bag along with tiny flounders, crabs, shiners, eels, transparent squid.

My family’s sojourn in New York made us just a little exotic. For all her apartness, my mother had unavoidably absorbed a bit of Manhattan. Amid the dreary casseroles and congealed salads of Savanna’s Own Cook Book there were several blank pages headed, “Write Extra Recipes Here,” and on one, in her New York days, my mother had inscribed two of her own, one for broiled or barbecued South African Lobster Tails, the other for Rock Lobster Thermidor—dishes unlikely to have been tasted in Savanna, Illinois.

Recipes, in any case, came into use infrequently—at my mother’s ladies’ luncheons and my parents’ evening bridge club. I remember in particular her Pyrex casseroles of turkey Tetrazzini and her revolting Jello-based congealed salads. Our family dinners were much better: fried chicken, rib steaks cooked on the grill—my mother started the charcoal with lawn-mower gasoline, tossing a match from ten feet away and still having to duck from the stunning whumpf! of the explosion—excellent French fries, a dessert called apple float, comprising equal parts whipped cream and canned applesauce. Every Tuesday evening, my father went to Kiwanis Club, and my mother was then free to cook what she liked and he didn’t, such as chicken livers. My sister and I both detested those, and soon enough my mother gave in and started giving us what we really wanted: Chef Boy-Ar-Dee pizza, which came, as I recall, entirely out of a box; butter-and-sugar sandwiches (margarine, actually) or cinnamon toast; Swanson’s TV dinners, which we adored. Best of all, we got to set up little folding individual tables in the den and watch television.

Special occasions brought out my mother’s worst cooking. I remember one Thanksgiving when she got up in the middle of the night to start the turkey cooking at two hundred degrees; by dinnertime, it had long since given up its last ounce of fluid. We liked the cranberry sauce that came from a can; she made congealed cranberry salad with orange peel and other horrors in it. In the gravy gray, unspeakable chunks of turkey organs swam. The sweet potatoes were so heavily sugared as to set the teeth on edge. The rolls were store-bought and underbaked. Of the Brussels sprouts, the less said the better.

We were still so far from the great world! Whitehaven fought fluoridation of its water supply on the grounds that it was a Communist plot to damage American’ reproductive capacity. Whitehaven stood idly by as its innocent waterways were raped by the Army Corps of Engineers. Only a few in Whitehaven read books; I know, because I grew up going at least weekly with my mother (president of the local ladies’ book club) to the always almost-empty library. Our political heritage was the Democratic Party—the Republicans were still the party of Lincoln—but in 1960 most of Whitehaven voted for Nixon, to keep that left-wing Catholic snob Kennedy out (at a cost far more dire than anyone could foresee). My mother voted for Kennedy, a mild gesture but one sufficient to drive my father nearly to rage.

Elvis Presley was the idol of Whitehaven’s kids, the devil incarnate to their parents. His grandiose ersatz-plantation manse stood not a mile from our house, and sometimes he would suddenly, shyly appear at one of our pickup football games, astride a pink Harley-Davidson or at the wheel of one of his several pink Cadillac convertibles and usually accompanied by a bubble-haired, gum-snapping girl so utterly wrong in every detail that the gnashing of my mother’s teeth could be heard from every church pulpit in Whitehaven. The seeds of the culture wars had been planted, in our town and in our family.

The undoing of Whitehaven’s isolation was to come in a thousand tiny breaches, most of them at first no more than pinpricks. Through each came a tiny leakage inward of the world beyond; very little of Whitehaven would actually reach out into it until much later (as when I was launched, like an early space probe, into the barely breathable altitudes of Yale).

Among Whitehaven’s strongest defenses against cultural invasion was its all-pervasive racism. Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 had brought an official end to segregation, but the reality took until 1957 to penetrate our perimeter, when television brought us the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, only a hundred and forty miles to our west. We watched transfixed as Governor Orval Faubus called out the National Guard against those skinny, scared, dark-faced kids. We watched the white students and parents snarling and spitting at them. We watched as the outraged President Eisenhower federalized Faubus’s Guard and sent in the 101st Airborne. At ten years old, I felt the first strange flush of shame in my whiteness. The “white only” water fountains in Lowenstein’s department store (and everywhere else), the separate waiting rooms in our family doctor’s office, the segregation of everything around us, were suddenly visible. Bobby Towery and I stole from the window of the laundromat at the Whitehaven Plaza Shopping Center the wooden sign that read

WHITE ONLY
Or Maid in Uniform

and we burned it.

I had already seen plenty of poverty, among both white and colored, when my mother took me along with her either into our local ghettos or out into the country to bring Thanksgiving turkey and groceries to the reeking shacks of the poor. For the Cancer Society she took sick poor people, smelling even worse, to the hospital and home again, with me cowering miserably in the front seat. Our poor people were very poor, often hungry, and it was worse down in the Mississippi Delta, where my daddy’s kinfolks all still lived, but until the civil rights movement burst in on us poverty seemed yet another fixed property of our world. Beginning to understand disadvantage as political, a function of active discrimination, and therefore ameliorable, tore a hole in my isolation, and through it shone a light almost unbearably bright.

The few colored people I had known were all servants—maids, cooks, country club waiters—and I did not understand their unfailing niceness as professional obligation (and a fragile trap door above the pit of poverty). Like many another quality assumed at first under duress, this niceness, I believe, often became genuine. Modine, my favorite among the succession of maids who served our family, I loved with a purer and more open heart, I swear, than I loved my mother. Sometimes on Saturdays Mama would deliver me to the creaking, unpainted tenement where Modine lived in a one-room apartment, and it would be an afternoon in paradise. Modine cooked neckbone stew and lima beans and collard greens on a wood-burning stove. She smelled of smoke and good food when she took me in her arms and I laid my head on her bosom. My mother and father both had hard edges, hard voices, and the hard duty of disciplining a willful child; Modine was all softness, a voice like a whisper, hands of inexpressible gentleness.

I continued to visit Modine for years after I needed baby-sitting. Photographs of John and Robert Kennedy appeared on the doily on top of her little brown TV, to be followed by one of Martin Luther King. By then I could feel not only the gentleness but the strength of her grip. We didn’t have to talk about Dr. King and the Kennedys; without a word she understood that I understood. I saw in her profile and color some American Indian ancestry—another people I had now begun to recognize as abused and heroic. When I sat on Modine’s sagging, chenille-covered bed and ate her soup from a chipped plate on my lap, I now know, she was feeding me her strength and courage. She had, perhaps wittingly, put me under a grave obligation, to live up to them.

CHAPTER THREE: THE BEGINNING: 1947-1958

2009-02-16T15:18:00.000-08:00

(This is the third chapter of my memoir.)

It took me till I was thirty years old to remember nursing at my mother’s breast. I was under deep hypnosis, with the aim of quitting smoking, and the psychiatrist was taking me back and back by stages, prompting me to recall tastes and smells, any sensation that arrived through the nose or the mouth, and the events and emotions associated with them. I didn’t just remember them; I was there. I smelled hickory smoke and tasted barbecue, which took me to post-barbecue necking with a girl in my mother’s sky-blue Chevy convertible under the moon, our skin peeling stickily away from the naugahyde seats, on my right forefinger my first whiff of pussy-nectar. I smelled griddle-grease and tasted the greatest hamburgers of all time, handed through the foot-square screen door in the little cook shack at the country club pool. I smelled the burnt-insulation stink of the subway in summer—here I would have been somewhere between three and six years old, after we had moved to New York from Memphis and before we moved back—and my mother’s minty breath when she had bought chewing gum from the slot-and-button machine mounted on a peeling-painted steel column. I smelled my first pizza on East Fourteenth Street, “pizza puoy,” the guy all in white called it who brought it, and I burned my tongue and the roof of my mouth. I remembered sitting punished in the hallway on the rug where I was put when bad—this was earlier yet, I must have been no more than two or three years old—and the maid sweeping me into her arms in secret defiance of my mother, and the scent of her starched cotton uniform and sweet breath. I smelled honeysuckle, magnolias, roses, my orange-blossom-perfumed aunt and grandmother, the Mississippi Delta’s flower-scented pesticides, the cotton compresses smelling like potato chips, the dusty dank of my grandmother’s carpet. I scraped my knees on it; I must have been still crawling. I smelled fresh diapers and the acidic stench of dirty ones in the hamper. I ate applesauce, spinach purée, sweet potatoes from a loop-handled silver spoon in a grownup’s hand, “airplane” (food) sailing into “hangar” (mouth). I reached up and touched my father’s rough late-afternoon beard. It was summer forever, hot all day, hot all night, the hum-pulse of the oscillating fan, the breeze on my belly. And finally I lay crooked in my mother’s arm, sucking down her hot sweet milk, smacking my lips, feeling and tasting the sweat on her breast.

The doctor dredged me back through time as though from the bottom of the sea. The clock told me that I had been under for four hours. I walked unsteadily west on East Seventy-second Street, south through the twin rows of yellowing elms along the park, my nerves raw to the glaring chrome and blaring horns of the traffic down Fifth Avenue. New York was too bright and too loud. I walked all the way home to West Ninth Street and went to sleep.

When I woke, I went out on the little back porch and smoked a cigarette: Take that, doc! Then I brushed my teeth and washed my face in the idiotic hope that Louise wouldn’t smell the truth.

My mother and father were not comfortable in Manhattan; they made friends mostly among Metropolitan’s other expatriates. My sister, Jane, was born in 1952, and our mother withdrew further from the world and into motherhood. I went to kindergarten at Christ Church, at Park Avenue and Sixtieth Street, where I met children of real privilege and worldliness, and brought them home to my parents’ delight. Then I went to first grade at a public school near home, from which I brought home Puerto Rican, black, and God-knows-what-they-were friends, to my parents’ dismay.

We moved back south in 1954, to an apartment in Memphis, a temporary base while our new house was under construction in the unincorporated suburb of Whitehaven (originally White’s Station on the Southern Rail Road; the name had nothing to do with skin color). I began second grade at Whitehaven Grade School that fall.

It was still a country town, with a cotton gin, one bank, one café, a hardware store, a couple of gas stations, a general store on whose unpainted wood porch old men sat whittling and lying through the afternoons. When we moved in, Whitehaven was home to about five thousand people; by the time I graduated from high school, there would be fifty thousand, beneficiaries of the GI Bill and the postwar boom who had poured in from the country and small towns all across the middle South, where agriculture was rapidly automating and opportunities drying up. Our mothers and fathers were children of the Great Depression, and nearly all of them had known some degree of poverty. The scarcity of money in their childhoods had either stymied any travel or prompted the sort that evoked no lyrical memories—grimy buses, boxcars, shoe leather, all destined for soup lines, unemployment lines, degradation, destitution. Many of our parents were now far from their parents and grandparents, whose agrarian and also isolated lives resembled the life of Whitehaven not at all, with its shopping center, new houses, white-collar commuting, ambition, hope, prosperity, propriety, and ungrateful children.

Only a few of my classmates came from Memphis families. My father , Charles Thomas McNamee, Jr., had been born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and raised in the village of Tutwiler, near Clarksdale, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. He had met my mother in her also very small home town of Savanna, Illinois, in the midst of World War II; he was an Army ordnance officer, and there was an arms depot there. She was doubtful about living in the frightening South, and my father’s mother, who featured herself a grande dame (while lacking the money usually considered the requisite excuse for such attitudes), could hardly bring herself to speak to his son’s lipsticked, red-nailed bride.

My mother, née Gladys Mae Runyan, had been a child not of the poor but certainly of the lower orders. Her father had run through a string of jobs, many of them as what Illinois called a tavernkeeper, a man who cussed and spat and got in “scraps.” Her mother was an obese, ill-tempered hypochondriac who never laughed and rarely smiled and had a lot of bad things to say about just about anybody or anything in Savanna. My mother had well and truly escaped, the first in her family to graduate from college, the University of Iowa, and to live in a big city, first teaching in Chicago and later working in the physics department at the University of Chicago.

Despite Whitehaven’s rapid growth and nonnative identity, real Northerners like my mother were very few. She became Southern quickly, addressing him as Charles in four or five syllables. (His mother called him Charles Thomas, to differentiate him from his father; his friends all called him Cholly. I, Charles Thomas McNamee, III, was Tom to my mother, Tommy to all other adults and to girls, McNamee to my pals.) Whitehaven was a sprawling social laboratory in which these thousands of newcomers were reinventing themselves as modern commuters and housewives. Hence the country club, golf, tennis, bridge, a saddle club, a library, book groups, Buicks, Oldsmobiles, and Cadillacs. Hence the great middle layer of Whitehaven’s social stratigraphy.

Within that layer, especially with the passing of time and the maturation of affinities, there was a good deal of further stratification. College-educated fathers climbing the managerial pyramid, college-educated mothers decreeing piano and dancing lessons and proper ways of speaking, and their heedlessly fortune-favored, whining children formed an upper middle class that managed to be at once bounded and permeable. That is, if you acted “right,” you could get in almost without effort and without any distinction of ancestry; and once you were in, you defended your class’s standards staunchly against impostors. Within that class, there was an additional, sometimes confounding denominational layering: Baptists on the bottom, then Methodists, then Presbyterians, and on top the almighty though few Episcopalians. Below the Baptists you were beyond the middle-class pale, back in ducktails-and-chewing-tobacco land. Which is not to say there weren’t a lot—a lot—of roof-rattling, Bible-hollering, hand-clapping, foot-stomping, raw-floored, tongue-speaking, some said even snake-handling churches in Whitehaven, many of their congregants upwardly ascendant as well but unwilling to let go of that precious link to their heritage. I was taught, by subtly unspoken example, to ignore certain children’s existence.

We went to the Whitehaven Methodist Church every Sunday, Sunday school at nine-thirty, church proper at eleven. We sat near the front, always in the same pew, fourth row right, on the aisle—practically under the preacher’s nose. My mother was always turned out superbly, in suit, hat, pearls, and beautiful shoes, and my father, who insisted that she dress in nothing but the best, himself quietly but just as carefully clad, in dark suit, white shirt, muted tie, black wingtip shoes. Louise and her parents, who lived a short walk from the church, went there, too, less regularly, and I did not yet know any of them.

Both my parents became prominent in the church and in the larger community, as volunteers, as whizzes at bridge, as leaders. My father was elected chairman of the church board. My mother belonged to the fanciest women’s club in Memphis, chaired the Shelby County chapter of the American Cancer Society, and played serious tennis. Both of them spoke perfect English and had impeccable manners. They were paragons of order and respectability. Hence my early attraction to disorder and rebellion.

Those qualities were splendidly embodied in my friend Buzzy. He was fat and mean and funny, and in third grade I worshiped him. I hadn’t yet learned what it was like to behave really badly in school, but Buzzy was an excellent teacher. He also was a person of some privilege within the walls of Whitehaven Grade School—or so, at least, he assumed—because the principal was his uncle.

Although there were black kids living within a five-minute walk, the school was, of course, racially segregated; most of the students were Anglo-Saxon Protestants, a category that had come to include not only the great majority who were of British heritage but also the “Scotch-Irish” and people of German descent. (I was some of each, plus French and Swedish.) There were a few with Italian names. There were a scanter few with names like Cohen and Weinstein, but I don’t think they were actually Jewish, at least not anymore. The Catholics—the other Italians, the non-Ulster Irish, and a few of eastern European ancestry—had their own school. The cooks and janitors were without exception black, and to us they were anonymous bordering on invisible. It was a telling index of the time and place that my classmate Bo Olswanger’s father, Berl Olswanger—the biggest bandleader in Memphis, our Lester Lanin, indispensable at debutante parties and fancy weddings, and a member in good standing of the Whitehaven Presbyterian Church—was denied membership in the not very exclusive Whitehaven Country Club because he was a convert, many years before, from Judaism.

And yet there was a considerable range of diversity in the school’s demography. Across the road from the grade school, Whitehaven High happened to be the home of the machine and woodworking shops for the whole Shelby County school system, and therefore drew young men from all over the county who saw their future as laborers in garages, factories, and construction. Not many of them were going to escape those early-ordained destinies, any more than the janitors and kitchen ladies could have escaped theirs. By the time they were in high school these boys were readily identifiable as a type, by their hair styles (heavily waxed flattops, or grease and ducktails, or a revolting combination of both), their footware (say, black loafers with white lightningbolts down the side), their bad grammar, and their bellicosity. Their distaff counterparts pursued their educations in cosmetology or sometimes “home economics,” and they too, by the age of fourteen or so, were easy to categorize on sight, with their hair “ratted” into giant egg shapes, heavy makeup, open-mouthed gum-chewing, and minimal to zero orthodontic treatment.

When you’re nine years old, however, no kids have ducktails yet, and you don’t give a damn anyway who their parents are or how poor they are or if they say “he don’t.” Nature formed us for an arcadian democracy. But nurture—never more stern than when in hands newly endowed with authority—saw in fine gradations of social class a host of opportunities for the nurtured to rise, even if that meant an increment in social standing so small that only a mother could see it.

There was a top layer above us, thin but apparently impenetrable. There weren’t very many of them, and everybody knew who they were. They were—rich. They traveled abroad. They lived in big houses, often with pillared porticoes, and joined the more important clubs in tony (for Memphis) East Memphis. We knew them—they belonged to our club too—and we played with their kids and those kids went to the public school, but their distinction was never lost on us. It didn’t matter if their fortunes weren’t generations deep; Whitehaven couldn’t afford that Yankee sort of snobbery. One of the great men of the town had been a poor boy from Mississippi who had founded the first television station in Memphis, made a pile of money, built himself a big ol’ white stucco mansion in the California Spanish style, staring down on Highway 51—our equivalent of Main Street, and the artery from Mississippi (two miles to the south) along which his erstwhile peers, driving their trucks and jalopies to town, were obliged to pass in (we believed) disdainful review.

Buzzy was only a cousin of that great man’s family, but he wore a cloak of privilege nevertheless. So when the day came when we passed through the cafeteria line and sat down together and Buzzy lifted a forkful of blackeyed peas to eye level to inspect what was indubitably a caterpillar, he did not hesitate to run full tilt at our august principal shrieking imperiously, “Uncle Benny, Uncle Benny! There’s a worm in my blackeyed peas!”

“Buzzy,” replied Mr. Buford with an affable smile, “where else do you think you can get meat with your black-eyed peas for a nickel?”

Some twenty miles to the south of Whitehaven lay the Mississippi Delta, destination of the early-morning busloads of black children turned out of their schools each spring to chop cotton and each fall to pick it while we white children stayed at our desks. The Delta was my daddy's ancestral home, and his kin all still lived there. When we drove down to see them, Highway 61 would plunge from the wide bright cottonfields into dark bayou bottoms, and the windshield would be so spattered with bugs that we had to stop to scrape them off. Dead deer and snakes and owls and opossums lay sprawled on the bridgesides. Ospreys nested in the cypresstops, and there were alligators in the mud.

To the east rose the scrub‑and‑clay uplands of Fayette County, Tennessee's poorest county, pig country, Klan country, buzzard country. West was the River, too huge and too strong to be quite real to a boy of seven.

What was real was closer to home. A big Hereford bull lived across the road, a chaser of children. Down our side of Oakwood Drive there was a row of seven new houses, and beyond its dead end a deep forest began, with swamps and lakes and mysteries in it. Spring nights, the frog chorus there sang loud. In an abandoned barn pulled half down by honeysuckle vines, mud daubers built their terrible castles, tube on tube of wasp‑brick. Because I was allergic, my mama said, one sting could kill me. I grew to dread all insects--June bugs, yellowjackets, bumblebees, dragonflies alike.

The hedge, the lawn, the big hollow sweetgum in the front yard, the maples and dogwoods and pines, even the scruffy bushes that screened our garbage cans were wildlife habitat. Hundreds of songbirds squabbled at my mother's feeders. A family of rabbits every spring, shuffling quails and burbling doves, and countless reptiles and amphibians all thrived around our house. At lightning-bug time, my friends and I had “toadfrog”-catching contests. You could catch three dozen of those warty, poison-peeing monsters in an hour, some of them fat as a softball. Terrariums, their glass walls slimed with the leavings of mudpuppies, skinks, snails, and prize toads, were my pride. I also tried to keep box tortoises and various snakes, but they always escaped, often inside the house.

Behind our house was a sharecropper's shack, with a friendly old retired workhorse. Later, when the shack had given way to the grounds of a grandiose white-columned pseudo-mansion, there came a fancier horse, who would eat my father's Chesterfield cigarettes from my hand. At the bottom of the pasture, a little creek had its source.

I cannot remember when I first began to follow that creek downstream. It flowed slowly and opaquely along the bottom of a deep winding gouge cut through layers of the wind‑deposited silt called loess. Loess is a very fine and viscid stuff, and it makes one hell of a mud. Where the water backed up, the muck could be waist-deep on a boy. My mother always said I was the muddiest boy of all when my pals and I came trudging home at suppertime.

Above a pool where the creek slowed to stillness, we would swing on grapevines and do cannonballs into water the color of coffee with cream, where the bottom was a bottomless ooze. Snakes swam there, including the dread cottonmouth. Kingfishers laughed in the willows and tall tuliptrees. Catfish took hooked bits of hot dog we dangled from cane poles on lines bobbered with porcupine quills. Once, a gang of us blundered on a hobo camp so freshly abandoned that a half can of beans was still warm on the coals.

As we grew older, I often went into the swamp by myself. I was a melancholy boy, sometimes lonely even among my friends. My solitary wanderings began, I think, as flights, from games in which I could not excel, from an uncomprehended restlessness, from the sweat and tumble and perplexity of social boyhood; but before long my long after-school afternoons alone in the woods had grown into pilgrimages, my weekends and summers rhapsodic quests: I felt that I was seeking something, and sometimes, I know, I found it, though I still could not tell you what it was.

Beyond the tangled muscadine and honeysuckle jungles, beyond the canebrakes in which whole chattering flocks of birds could hide, beyond the old overgrown fields snarled with blackberries and cocklebur, there came an even, easy, open floor of dead leaves and low, soft plants, pillared with trees of awesome girth and height. The canopy was far above, punctured only intermittently by the sun. I believe that this forest had never been logged, although, like some of these others, that memory may be colored by desire. I remember the air as very humid, very hot, very still. I remember the buzzing of wasps in that air, and, in response, the beating of my fretful heart.

My little creek (did it have a name? I never wondered) fed a larger one that fed Nonconnah Creek, which in turn fed the Mississippi River. Nonconnah was occasionally so audacious as to flood its own flood plain, and the Army Corps of Engineers dealt severely with such impertinence. Their chosen instrument of correction was the dragline, a great toothed scoop on a crane. It could rip out a ton of root‑riddled earth in one bite. The messy, inefficient eccentricities of Nonconnah Creek‑‑the oxbows, the riffles and pools, the braided channels, the islanded swamps, the tupelo bottoms‑‑were chastened into an orderly, straight‑running ditch. The rate of flow was thus increased, and flooding prevented, and development of previously unusable land made possible. That thousands of such acts of discipline would bring on anarchy downstream was not particularly a worry, for quelling the Mississippi's rebellion farther south would mean more contracts for the contractors, one of whom was the father of one of my neighborhood pals. Racing ever faster, full of the sediment that the old flood bottoms and swamps used to retain, the Mississippi today wants to crash through its banks down near Natchez and pour into the Atchafalaya basin‑‑and leave New Orleans sitting on a mudflat. To prevent this will require one of the most expensive public-works projects in the history of the United States.

The dragline first came when the old one‑lane wooden bridge at Mill Branch Road was to be replaced. Growling and grunting, it chewed out the bridge pool and left on the bank two Alps of mud. They were the only steep hills we ever had, and they made a splendid place for dirt‑clod fights--just the kind of thing my friends loved and I hated. In that deeper water the fishing improved, but where once a boy could sit all day undisturbed but by an occasional truckload of cotton banging over the planks toward the gin, now there was constant traffic: workers and materials for the tract-house subdivisions springing up to the south. I took my cane pole farther now, to the lakes.

My prey was mostly smaller here than the catfish of the creek, but better eating‑‑bream, and crappies, and once in a while a largemouth bass. No matter how early I might come or how late stay, the best fishing spots always seemed to be occupied by an elderly black man or woman with little to say to a white child. I wonder now, did they fear that I might be the landowner's son? And who did own that land? The thought never crossed my mind. They would nod, and keep on fishing, catching ten fish to my one. For them, of course, it was not sport.

There was a place on the creek we called the rapids‑‑it was just a gravelly riffle, really‑‑and there, one day, my best friend, Bobby Towery, and I came upon the most stupendous animal we had ever met outside the zoo. I knew at once, from my avid reading in field guides, that this was the mighty Alligator Snapping Turtle--you could tell by the three mountainous keels on his carapace--the largest species of freshwater turtle in the world, sometimes surpassing two hundred pounds. He was very far from his home, which was supposed to be the Mississippi River.

Snappers are swimmers, not walkers, and this one seemed to have run aground. A gingerly probe with a stick elicited only a slight drawing‑in of his huge plated head. We agreed that there was only one thing to be done: we had to capture the turtle. With my trusty Boy Scout hatchet we cut down a small tree and laid the trunk, about two inches thick, across the gravel shallows to block him from escaping into the opaque pool below. While Towery stood guard, I ran home for my green coaster wagon. When I got back, the turtle had not moved a muscle.

We had the idea that if we could get him to bite the pole he would not let go, and then we might haul him to land. How to get him into the wagon we would worry about later. But even with some pretty rowdy poking at his great hooked beak, the snapper could not be tempted to do more than flinch.

We sat on the bank and considered waiting him out. How hideous, how beautiful, how fierce, how still he was! How primitive, how ancient. What was time to a creature like this? Two boys could never outwait such a turtle.

We decided we would try to flip him onto his back. And then what? We'd see. At least he would be immobilized. Prying and pushing and sweating and slipping‑‑and terrified that one slip would tumble us in on top of him‑‑we got our pole beneath him, and the alligator snapping turtle came to life. He whirled‑‑I know, turtles aren't supposed to whirl, but this one did‑‑and bit our two‑inch pole in half, and clawed his way into deep water and was gone.

CHAPTER TWO: HONEYMOON: 1970

2009-02-09T14:23:00.000-08:00

(This is the second chapter of my memoir, as romantic as the first one was grim.)

The parents of one of my roommates at Yale had a house in Jamaica. For a wedding present he gave Louise and me three weeks there. We were married on June 27, 1970, Louise having graduated from Mary Baldwin College in three years so that we could hurry the great day. She was twenty years old, I twenty-two. The only foreign country I had been to was Canada—I think—that is, I think I had gone about twenty feet into it on a slippery woven-rope gangway beneath the roar of Niagara Falls. Jamaica would be Louise’s first time outside the United States. We rented a car at Montego Bay and crept through the throngs of the city and thence sped into a world all new to us, of jungle, sugarcane fields, pastel shanties, skinny chickens, skinnier dogs, people walking everywhere, who gave very friendly but incomprehensible directions.

When we passed through the gate of the Tryall Club, as that colony of rich foreigners was known, we were in another new world, twenty-two hundred impeccably groomed acres, with platoons of laborers trimming, gardening, scissoring on hands and knees, a guard in fatigues with a heavy rifle over his shoulder, and then the houses, low and gleaming, and beyond them the dazzle of the sea. The staff gathered to greet us at the door: Iris, the short, fat cook, and boss of the place, smiling widely; the tall, reserved housemaid, Hilda; the even shyer second maid, whose name I’ve forgotten; Susan, the laundress, shyest of all; and Duke, the gardener, who fairly glowed with good cheer and entirely lacked the almost military formality of his colleagues.

Duke carried our bags in, and Hilda unpacked our stuff, gently folding each garment and laying it in a drawer, also putting aside for Susan those items which she deemed to be in need of pressing. As we looked on in mute fascination, Iris stuck her head in and commanded, “Gwaan take a swim. It too hot.” (We would soon learn that “too” meant “very” in Jamaican patois.) The staff dissolved out of the room, Hilda closing the door so quietly that all we heard was the soft click of the latchbolt. Louise had a new bikini. Soon we were swirling in the pool, its water perhaps one degree shy of body temperature, as congenial as a womb. Duke approached across the lawn with a bottle in one hand and a machete in the other. Putting down the bottle, kicking off his sandals, and hooking the great knife to his belt, he proceeded to shinny up a coconut palm with practiced ease. Thwack! and down came a fat green coconut, and then another, and another. Duke scrambled down, hacked off one end of the green outer shells, and then with a single stroke opened the hard and hairy inner nut, keeping upmost the hole thus created, so that the precious coconut water would not spill. Into each he poured a generous portion of Jamaican rum. From his pocket he produced three paper straws, and, grinning, the three of us sipped. Rum in the sun—instant booze wooze.

“You want another?”

Clearly he did, but we, dehydrated and travel-weary, were already pie-eyed. Iris was giving Duke her glare of official censure from the porch as she delivered a tray to the glass-topped table, arranged a bowl of hibiscus flowers just so, set two places with linen (starched) and silver (heavy, sterling) and china (thin, enameled and gilded), and said, “Come, children,” not quite laughing at our gee-whiz innocence.

We sat down to the most beautiful plate of food I had ever beheld, a seventeenth-century Dutch still life come to life but tropically transformed: little ruddy pineapples, their interiors scooped out, cubed, and heaped back into their shells; a fan of sliced papaya, for each bright-orange crescent a tiny pale-green lime cut in half; a spray of three-inch-long bananas; orange sections each trimmed of its membrane and cut away from its skin almost but not quite to the base; clusters of guavas; wedges of sweetsop; and best of all, two yellow-pink mangoes whose flesh had been removed in such a way that the shell formed a little barrel with a jack-o’-lantern-like lid—Iris had cut the flesh away from the seed, cut it in cubes and then, evidently having cubed more than these two mangoes, re-filled the skins to the top. We had eaten oranges, pineapples, and bananas before, though none so luscious as these, and the rest of the fruit was entirely new to us.

We were so happy!

Duke taught us to snorkel over the reefs: We stayed on the surface while he dove, sometimes fifteen feet down, through the clear, clear water, wearing a mask and snorkel but no fins and brandishing a terrifying spear gun. The corals, fishes, tubeworms, sea anemones, the whole symphony of the reef was yet another unprecedented composition of sheer beauty. Occasionally Duke would take aim and nail a nice fat fish, which he would stuff into a net bag, which as it filled trailed a dark smoke of blood behind him. Louise wondered if this would draw sharks. If it had, I reasoned, surely they would home in on the fish in the bag, not us. But weren’t we, she asked, bigger, easier prey? No shark came, though the silver barracudas that followed us just below the surface, with their staring eyes and fiendish teeth, were sufficiently scary, despite the assurances we had read that they were quite harmless. Sometimes Duke would pry a lobster by hand out of its hole, and there would be lime-scented lobster salad for lunch.

As Iris discovered how great was our enthusiasm for her cooking, she went to ever-greater lengths to justify it. A fisherman, dressed in virtual rags, would appear with a fish two feet long, weighing probably ten pounds, and Iris would negotiate a price, never cheap, and turn to us for the money. She would roast Mr. Fish—I have no idea what species these creatures may have been—with tomatoes, onions, garlic, and peppers both sweet and hot, and oh! I realized I had never till that moment tasted how good fish could be. The abundant leftovers would make a lovely salad for lunch the next day, and feed the staff as well. The fisherman came one day with a crab I recall as having long, angrily thrashing legs and a spiky black carapace—another perfect salad, just mayonnaise, lime juice, sweet onion, and crab.

We would go with Iris to Mr. Reed’s store just down the road, where she would prod and disapprove nearly everything and shake her chubby forefinger in Mr. Reed’s face, denouncing his prices. The fruit and vegetables she finally, grudgingly settled for were sensationally good. Then we would go with Iris to the big central market in Montego, a jostling, laughing, singing, tout-shout-echoing arena of sweet-natured madness through which Iris made her way like a great ship parting the ocean. Iris had her favored “higglers,” and to them she went without a glance at the inferior stands she drew us sternly past. The farm ladies wore headscarves that could have been West African; some of the little boys running errands were barefoot; grizzled old men puffed on pipes and did nothing. The intensity of color, the density of life, rivaled those of the reef. Even the eggs were all colors. The meat, jaggedly butchered and hanging on hooks, was the color of blood; the butchers languidly brushed the flies away, or didn’t. Chickens here had feet and heads, pink, beady-eyed, sinewy, meant for the pot, not the frying pan. Cho-chos—chayotes—were among Iris’s favorite vegetables, and we too learned to love their pale green, delicate flesh. Louise doled out the cash, quite a lot of it, it seemed to us, but we knew that if we questioned no matter how politely any of Iris’s purchasing decisions, she would fix us with a suddenly cold eye and demand, “You tink me not know? Children, be quiet.”

We tried a few fancy restaurants and nearly crawled out of our skins in impatience. “It will soon come,” a waiter would say before disappearing for half an hour. The food was for the most part unconsciously parodic—a clumsy take on French, a fussification of Jamaican. Expensive, too.

Iris had the ugliest dog I had (or have) ever seen, name of Timmy, a fat, listless, rheumy-eyed door-blocker with a thin off-white pelage flecked here and there with little random spots. He yawned, and farted, and could barely rouse himself to a dutiful bark at the fisherman. Imagine, therefore, our shock when Iris approached us one day at lunch with tears in her eyes, knotting her hands, to announce that Timmy had killed a neighboring farmer’s goat, and, yes, we had to pay him for it. It seemed to me that Iris should be the liable party, but we really had no idea how poor she might be and in any case we were the beneficiaries of so much kindness and generosity—from my roommate and his family, and from the staff—that surely we must oblige. I do not believe that compensation for the dead goat entailed a transfer of ownership and a subsequent currying, though it was certainly possible that Iris would not disturb guests with such news. I believe she had at some point offered us goat—nice young goat from the market, not Timmy’s doubtless elderly victim—and we had drawn the line there. More fools we.

I had heard that the quality of Jamaican marijuana was beyond beyond. But the fellows around the market in town who whispered furtively, “smoke, smoke,” or just “ganja, mon,” frightened me, most particularly because I could make out less than a quarter of anything else they might say. Would it be the pretext for a robbery, maybe also a beating? And the goods, oregano? I had been living in New York, on West Seventy-second Street, for nine months, and in 1970 transactions of that nature, on upper Broadway, were not rare. Finally, one day at the pool, I worked up the nerve to ask Duke if he knew where some of this famous ganja could be obtained. In his grin I think I could see every one of his teeth, and in his laugh I heard, “Naa worry, mon.” It arrived the next day, tightly bound in a twist of brown paper, maybe a quarter of an ounce, five dollars Jamaican.

Ho boy. It was almost all bud, golden-green, hardly a seed, and so resinous it stained the fingers. After we’d taken a couple of puffs judiciously downwind from the house and all other settlement, the only place that seemed safe to go was the pool. This had the effect of mitigating the loss of sense of up versus down that had been among the first signs of the delirium churning through our brains. In water, gravity was defeated, one bobbed up and stayed up, half in the world, technically present, and half in the amniotic past of all mammals. We splashed and paddled and floated and laughed and laughed and laughed. It was broad daylight, mid-afternoon, and by dinner we were still so stoned that we ate at least twice as much as was our custom. Did Iris give us her mistrustful eye? Who knows? We couldn’t look at her.

Oh, love!

Whenever we ventured out, we were instantly sweating. On our return we would find clothes ready to change into, folded just so and still warm from the sun and Susan’s iron. Or we might just lie cooling naked in our privacy as the sweet-scented late-afternoon breeze breathed through the jalousie windows; perhaps too sunburned to touch each other, too hot with love not to. The room in memory white, white, the sea-dazzle softened into air white from within, air softened into caress by the slow white ceiling fan. Through the slats flame trees, hibiscus, orchids, epiphytes, banana birds, banana trees, a darkening sea-horizon beneath a billowing thunderhead. Slow reading, slow walking in the velvet dark, a butterfly slowly closing and opening its wings, slow to wake, slow to sleep. Each taste—buttered toast, poached egg, coffee of the Blue Mountains, banana, fried plantain, coconut chips, tomato, avocado, limeade, cool soup, cool lobster, cool wine, the salt on each other’s lips—each taste a slow blossoming, consciousness becoming memory, the remembering effortless, unconscious, none of this ever to be forgotten, none of this ever to be lost. Each taste, each kiss a certainty.

TRULY GREAT INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM

2009-02-02T14:58:00.000-08:00

href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/world/europe/02czech.html?ref=world"

JOHN UPDIKE

2009-01-28T13:19:00.000-08:00

The next-t0-last of American literature's giants has died, too young. Philip Roth now stands alone at the top of Olympus. Somebody's going to have to excel or succeed him, but it's hard (for me) to see who.

CHAPTER ONE: THE END: 1993

2009-01-27T15:44:00.000-08:00

(This, despite the title, is the first chapter of my memoir. It does get happier after this.)

“I’m alone,” I said. Silvano shook my hand with his customary genial mutter of what I took to be welcome, and led me to a small table in the second-nicest part of the place. When I used to come with my wife, Louise, he would put us right up front; she was nearly always considered an asset to the visual appeal of a restaurant. It was not unusual for me to be eating alone here—most of the waiters knew to bring me an extra fork to keep my book open. When Louise was out of town, which she had been more and more over the last ten years, and I was going to dine alone, I would do so at one of a handful of restaurants in Greenwich Village in which I felt welcome and comfortable. Nowhere did I feel more thoroughly at home than at Da Silvano.

Louise and I had been eating there since the place opened, in 1975. We knew Silvano Marchetto even before that, when he was a waiter at another of our favored local joints, the Derby Steak House. The early Da Silvano was tiny—four tables—but the pure Tuscan food and the creative variations Silvano played on it were stunningly good. I suppose you could say that Silvano was the chef, in that he did conceive of and refine all the dishes—somewhere offstage, for you rarely saw him in the kitchen and never wearing chef’s whites. The man at the stove, who seemed to cook everything, was a diminutive, never-named Central American with a lot of Indian blood in his looks and absolute precision and grace in his cooking. There was frequent turnover in the restaurant’s other personnel, but that guy was always there. I wondered if he could understand Silvano, who was considered unintelligible in both English and Italian. Maybe they communicated by sign language. In any case, they hardly ever spoke.

Louise and I had lived through much change at Silvano’s. Our favorite waiter, who could neglect his other customers for ten minutes on end to regale us with his weekend tanning on Tar Beach (his roof), died of AIDS. Silvano’s parents showed up one evening, and didn’t leave for years. They always sat at the same table against the wall in the front room, the mom scowling at the guests, the dad seemingly of milder temperament. They seldom spoke to each other, and never to the guests. They saw us hundreds of times but never showed the faintest sign of recognition. Occasionally la mamma would buttonhole Silvano and give him a large piece of her mind in loud, rapid-fire, strongly Tuscan-accented Italian. One night, after the restaurant had expanded into the former laundromat next door, Silvano came in to what was now a second front room, rolled the steel fire door shut with a thundrous boom, and screamed at the top of his lungs, “My mother is driving me crrrazy!"

There was for years a “manager” in a chic though somewhat ill-kept Italian suit who who seemed never to do anything but sway wanly back and forth in front of the antipasti display, wrapped in gloom. Occasionally, despondently, he would extend to me a weak, damp hand of good evening or good night. He was quite obviously drunk all the time. Why did Silvano keep him on? Who knew? And there was the Egyptian waiter Ali, very fat and very tall and very young, who quit to go home and get married. Silvano, who loved him, flew to Cairo, but Ali was not, as he had promised to be, at the airport to meet him. Silvano did not have a phone number for Ali. Try as he might, Silvano could not find him. Back in New York, one night Silvano got a scratchy international call from Ali: He was so sad, he said, the wedding had been called off.

“I came to Cairo! You didn’t even show up at the airport! I turned around and flew home!”

“I know,” said Ali, sadly.

We learned Italian wine there. We learned that for all the complicated and laborious Julia Child cooking we had taught ourselves, lobster Thermidor wasn’t necessarily better than grilled sardines with olive oil and lemon juice. We talked through the years. One night near Christmas in 1989, it was to Silvano’s that we were supposed to go when Louise simply did not come home. Hours passed. She did not call. I was wild with worry. When at last she appeared, she explained that she had gone out for a quick drink with one of her clients, but he was in despair over his deteriorating marriage and couldn’t stop talking about it, and she just couldn’t pull herself away to call me. Ten months later I would learn that Louise had fallen in love with him and wanted to leave me.

Tonight, therefore, I was deeply alone. After two and a half years of my struggling to keep our marriage together and Louise’s struggling to escape it, after the judge had twice thrown out Louise’s suit for divorce—because she had alleged bad behavior on my part that was apparently the fruit of her and her lawyer’s overheated imaginations, and I had simply held fast, at first in hope of reconciliation and then later in quest of an equitable financial settlement—we had at last come to an agreement. It was still sinking in; I was only now learning fully the disparity between solitude and loneliness. I had always loved my solitude, whether backpacking alone in the Beartooths or eavesdropping on my fellow-diners as their own marriages were taking shape or falling apart. Solitude was an act of will; loneliness was affliction, injury, chronic pain.

Before walking the three blocks down Sixth Avenue to Silvano’s that night, I had had two stiff Dewar’s Scotches at home—a newish thing for me, since I’d been for years almost exclusively a wine guy—and a couple of cigarettes too, tobacco being another instrument of self-destruction I had recently re-employed. With my pinzimonio I had a glass of Silvano’s house white, which was never very good. Then I ordered a half-portion of one of my favorite dishes, taglierini alla contadina, sauced with sausages, peas, onions, tomatoes, and cream, with which I drank the house red, an excellent, leathery, dusty-dry Chianti.

One of Silvano’s more doubtful innovations had been, years back, the introduction of an endless recitation of off-menu “specials” by the waiter, sometimes a dozen and a half of them, with no prices given and in fact no hope whatever for the non-savant civilian of remembering more than a few of them. And so the poor waiter, often a recently arrived, good-looking, confused young Florentine with no more than a rudimentary command of English, would have to repeat the list, often twice—and always word for word (“de duck vertically roasted and steamed in dry vermoot”), for Silvano drilled his crew mercilessly and would tolerate no variation in the descriptions he crafted. The prices of the specials tended to be rather higher than those of the items on the small printed menu, which were already higher than those of other Italian restaurants of the level of luxury (modest) of Da Silvano. But we always tolerated these idiosyncrasies, because the food was sensationally good, widely unrecognized as such—Tuscan food being so plain and modest in a city so neither—and because we loved Silvano in all his weirdness. By this point, however, after some years of complaint from me and other regulars, he had begun to attach to a corner of the menu a photocopied list of the specials, and finally, still more recently, under further pressure, he had deigned to include the prices. The steak Robespierre, a recurring special, just a few rare slices over raw, undressed arugula, with a few sprigs of fried rosemary scattered around, was as fine a steak as could be found in New York, and I’m including the Palm and Peter Luger’s. I ordered that next, with another generous glass of red wine. With my tiramisu—a dish which I believe Silvano introduced to New York—I had a glass of golden vin santo, and then another. I was, of course, stuffed, and drunk.

I was alone in our house, which was soon to be sold. One twenty-one Washington Place was unique, an early twentieth-century Georgian Revival built at grade level on an old stone basement, all that remained of the 1820s Federal that had preceded it and burned down. The house was not large, twenty feet wide and four stories high, the topmost one rented out, illegally, as a separate apartment. At the back of the lot, across a formally symmetrical flagstone terrace, was a one-room cottage in which a doctor had dwelled, paying the same controlled wartime rent of $160 a month, since 1944. The poet Edward Arlington Robinson, famous for his bleak poem “Richard Cory,” had once lived in the cottage. The ceilings in the main house featured ornate plaster cornices, corbels, and medallions. Each room had a beautifully carved marble fireplace, eight in all, each different from the others. The dining room still had its original, exquisitely block-printed wallpaper, the famous “El Dorado” made in 1849 by Zuber et Cie of Rixheim, France, described by the Cooper-Hewitt Museum as “a gorgeously hued panorama representing the four major continents…a flower-covered terrace, including a peacock, overlooking a lake, representing Europe; architectural ruins, minarets, and a pagoda symbolizing Asia; the Nile River, desert plants, and Egyptian ruins, recalling Africa; and, lushest of all, a small city near Vera Cruz, Mexico, with exotic flora and fauna, representing the Americas.” The library was paneled in mahogany. The floors were as solid as steel, the wiring and heating up-to-date—rarities in a New York house. The original, loudly groaning elevator was still in place, though its gigantic, grease-covered transformer, motor, and switching mechanism in the basement frequently failed. The ground-floor front room had a floor of black-and-white marble squares and was separated from the dining room by double glass-paned doors affording a long view through the dining room’s French windows into what soon would be a splendid garden. This was the original owner’s law office, and would be my office now. The kitchen was small but ergonomically flawless, and included a six-burner restaurant range. When we moved to Washington Place in 1986, I knew that this was where we would live for the rest of our lives.

I poured another Scotch, and took a Polaroid photograph of myself in the mirror, weeping.

Novelist, poet, critic, naturalist, nature writer, conservationist; Scholar of the House at Yale, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, winner of both the top fiction and the top poetry prizes. Protégé of Robert Penn Warren and Leonard Bernstein. World traveler, art connoisseur, gourmet, oenophile, accomplished cook, charming host. Snappy dresser, good driver, good citizen. Sound investor and planner; esthete; excellent master of cats. A guy with wonderful friends (the best of whom had buoyed me through torrents of torment for the last three years), some rich, some distinguished, some even geniuses, some dating to childhood, some recent, most funny, all trustworthy, loyal, helpful, and kind. Author of the definitive book on the grizzly bear; of a manifesto precisely defining nature and conservation; of a historical novel that didn’t sell so much but was decidedly a succès d’estime. Freshly under contract for a book about the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, a cause to which I had devoted years. Allergic, depressive, tortured by dermatitis, frequently laid low for weeks by respiratory infections, attention-deficit-disordered. In the middle (at least going by the scale my father would eventually establish) of the journey of my life, forty-five years old, with one year to go until the twenty-fifth reunion of the Yale College class of 1969—the big one, the reunion a hardback book is published for (and which I would be the editor of, setting down for the record our own iterations of our achievements), the reunion when they expect big contributions because surely by now we are at the peak of our achievements.

My achievements in fact seemed paltry, and certainly had never been remunerative enough for me even to think of a big contribution. Year after year, I had been a financial failure; Louise made all the money, and supported me. I was a failure as a husband. Mr. Big Shot. Look at you, sobbing in self-pity.

+

It was time to move to Montana. There was no Da Silvano there, no Lutèce, no Four Seasons, no Le Bernardin, nor a decent deli, nor a real bagel. What good meals I would eat, I would cook myself. I had become pretty adept at Indian food, which with the proper dried spices and Basmati rice and whatnot from lower Lexington Avenue would allow me to turn thrice-frozen factory chicken into a decent biriani. I planned to get back to New York several times a year, and I had several close albeit far-flung friends in Montana—who would generously bestow on me all sorts of game—but mainly I would be living and eating alone.

In 1988, flush with merger-magic cash, Louise and I had joined with two much richer partners to buy the West Boulder Ranch, a magnificent four-thousand-odd acres of some of the most glorious landscape in the world. A river ran through it—pristine, little fished, full of large and gullible trout—pouring down from headwaters deep in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, whose northern boundary lay only a few miles away. The land, though overgrazed and in places badly weed-infested, retained an intricate mosaic of natural habitats—grasslands, shrublands, wetlands, beaver ponds, aspen groves, Douglas-fir forest, lodegpole pine, gallery forests of tall cottonwood and spruce along the river, a big pond, willow-shrouded springs—and so it remained a superb place for wildlife of all (I think) the species known to inhabit the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, including grizzly bears, the subject of my first book.

Later, as president of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, I had learned that all that was lacking from a complete complement of the region’s post-Pleistocene fauna were gray wolves; they had been wiped out by a government extermination campaign in the nineteen-twenties. It would not be many years, however, before we would hear them howling in the distance, and it was to work for and then to document their restoration that I needed to be in Montana full-time.

There were, obviously, other reasons. I needed the encompassing beauty of that place to heal my broken heart, perhaps also to inspire my exhausted mind. After far too much calculation of how it might just be possible for me to keep both the house on Washington Place and a one-third share in the ranch, it had become obvious that one or the other had to go; the choice was both agonizing and inevitable. And then there was my lovely, loving girlfriend, who wanted to marry me but whom I felt more and more strongly I needed to get away from. I was still too freshly and painfully wounded even to think of marrying. We kidded ourselves that we would still somehow be “together” while twenty-two hundred miles apart. Yet she was smart enough and sweet enough to give me a dinner at Montrachet, with all my closest friends, that could have no other character than that of farewell. I remember in particular the first course, at each place a miniature pumpkin whose stem you lifted to release a gust of spicy soup-steam. With it we drank a semi-sweet Vouvray.

+

I was in the library, on the second floor, packing up my books for the move. At the edge of my vision I saw something move. I looked out into the hall, and there, on the rug, was a squirrel, up on its hind legs, hands primly on belly, bright-eyed, fluffy-furred a really quite beautiful salt-and-pepper fur that shaded into buffy rose on the muzzle. I knew the back door downstairs was open to the garden, so I yelled at the squirrel to go back where it had come from, but it only stared at me and twitched its tail. I opened a back window and chased the squirrel out through it and closed the sash.

Two minutes later, there was the squirrel in the hall again, just looking at me, perfectly calm. This time I was going to harry it downstairs and close the back door, but the squirrel elected to go upstairs.

It went to the apartment on the fourth floor, which had been vacant for a year and which I rarely entered. The squirrel, on the other hand, had evidently been there quite a lot. While my unwelcome guest scrabbled frantically at the skylight, I, in a daze of astonishment, surveyed the evidence of its previous visits. A foot-wide hole had been clawed out of the plaster, down to the brick. The window mullions had been chewed to splinters. The white bedspread, the floors, the kitchen counter, and the toilet bowl (the squirrel's drinking pond) were covered with hundreds of little black footprints and little black turds. I opened the window and again chased the squirrel into the ivy outside.

I closed the house up tight, and for some days things were quiet. Then one night I had dinner with a couple of recently married friends—they were full of joy: she had just found out she was pregnant—and I told them about the squirrel, and I took them upstairs to show them the damage, and there, in the middle of the night, in a supposedly completely sealed apartment, was the squirrel, digging frantically at the closed window.

I hollered bloody murder, and the squirrel shot up the chimney. Aha.

This was curious, though. Why, if the squirrel knew the way up the chimney, had it been so intent on getting out some other way?

My friend found an inconclusive clue. The fireplace was piled high with firewood, and tucked into the midst of it was a loose wad of straw, leaves, twigs, scraps of paper, strips of plastic. Your squirrel is building a nest, he said. We flattened the fire screen against the opening and barricaded it with logs.

Late that night—quite drunk, again, and full of grief and rage—I went back to check, and there was the squirrel in the fireplace, digging at the screen. Soon enough, I figured, it was going to dig a hole through that just as it had in the plaster wall.

I hollered the squirrel up the chimney, pulled out the firewood, threw all the nest material back in, checked that the flue was open, and tossed in a match.

The stuff went up like the tinder it was, but instead of up and out, the smoke—dense, white, and foul—was boiling into the room. Choking, I crawled along the floor to the fireplace and stuck the poker up the chimney, where it met what could only have been more nest material. I prodded and poked, and with a whumpf! it all, a good bushel, came down, and smothered the flames.

It smoldered, and smoked, and then in a burst of gases it caught. Flame streamed up the flue, roaring like a jet engine. I ran downstairs and out back, and sparks were swirling out of the chimney, but there seemed for the moment no danger of torching the neighborhood, so I charged back upstairs to tend my bonfire.

With primeval fixity I stared into it, sweat stinging my eyes, and now I saw something moving. And then I heard the noise: a high, soft, hoarse chee chee chee chee, over and over; unquestionably an animal cry. At the edge of the still-roaring flames now I saw a baby squirrel, only recently born, its eyes yet unopened, its tail burned bare, a black-edged scarlet wound in its back. It writhed toward the screen, and air. Another appeared on the other side of the fire, also squirming and mewing and burned and beyond doubt doomed.

What could I do? Was I going to find a vet in the middle of the night and have them euthanized after who knows how long of unspeakable suffering? (I had heard it said that the pain of severe burns is the worst pain of all.)

No. It was terrible, but the most humane choice: I took the poker and flipped the two baby squirrels into the heart of the fire. A third appeared, and it too I lifted and dropped to its incineration.

At last the mother squirrel came down the chimney. I recognized her, of course. She was able to reach one of the babies, and it wrapped its toes and fingers weakly in her fur and held on. She reached the screen, and climbed slowly up it and now was clinging to it spreadeagled, looking at me.

A squirrel's face does not show horror or pain. Where one might have thought to see a grimace, a gape, something, there was only dull, flat nothingness, at least insofar as this other species could tell.

Her tail too was burned bare, the backs of her thighs, all four feet. She tried once to return for another baby, but she lost consciousness and fell on her side beside the fire, which had begun to wane. The baby on her back shrieked on; the others were silent now.

Somehow she came to, and climbed back up the fire screen, much more badly burned now, and still she stared.

She was going to die, either slowly if I did nothing or less so if I did what I did: I kicked her and her mewing baby back into the fire.

I piled on paper and kindling and logs, then more paper, more logs. Flame entirely filled the fireplace, and still I piled wood on, and still I could not look away.

By morning not even a bone could be found in the ashes.

+

Oh, time!

Silvano tubby, round-cheeked, a blue-eyed boy; Silvano thin, chic, presbyopic, gold-braceleted; Silvano graying, thickening, married at last (to a New Yorker cartoonist), a celebrities’ darling.

Nine twenty-seven on the humid night of July 13, 1977: Janice Scott and I at a table outside, she facing downtown and gasping, “Oh, my God,” as that whole half of the city went dark, I facing the other way to see the Empire State Building and all the rest go black; as yet unknown by us, Louise at that very instant touching down at LaGuardia, the whole airport also suddenly lightless; Silvano driving his Volkswagen Bug up onto the sidewalk so that the headlights illumined the restaurant and dinner could go on. The streets full of flashlights, self-appointed traffic cops at every corner. On West Ninety-fifth Street, where Louise and I had lived until two years before, rioting, looting, and fire; in Greenwich Village, laughter and singing and candles.

The infinite subtle variations of sangiovese: Chianti Rúfina, Chianti Classico, Brunello di Montalcino, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, Carmignano. The birth of the Super Tuscans—ah, Flaccianello! Le Pergole Torte! Sammarco!—even then, in keeping with Silvano’s tradition, a little too pricey, but still affordable, rich, deep, powerful. Discovery upon discovery: fried zucchini flowers, arugula, white truffles, bagna caôda, puntarelle, raw artichoke salad, panzanella, pappa al pomodoro, ribollita, spaghetti puttanesca, taglierini with sea urchins and avocado, calf’s liver with fried sage leaves, carpaccio, calamari in zimino, stinco d’agnello, tripe, roasted goat, panna cotta, tiramisu, vin santo with cantucci to dip in it. Every one of these, we tasted for the first time at Da Silvano.

Time. Louise, always braless, bold-nippled in the tight thin shirts from Stone Free, the hippie store on West Seventy-second; Louise in the forties-vamp dresses I found for her in Soho; Louise in the very short very tight skirts that all official advice would deny to the rising young advertising executive; Louise’s hair evolving from auburn to strawberry-blond to straw-blond; Louise in ever-heavier gold I brought to her from Tiffany’s in tribute to her rising; Louise in the high high heels in which she would walk to work, never lowering herself to the secretarial practice of walking in sneakers with your heels in a bag; Louise in the post-op clown shoes which her high heels had earned her; Louise in the mink coat which she’d dreamed of for so long and which a raging humaniac, one day, on Hudson Street, spat on; Louise in presidential Armani, fresh from the Concorde. Promotions; mergers; equity. Awards; magazine features—youngest vice president in the business, youngest president of a major agency. The iron-fist-in-velvet-glove feminist with the house-husband who wrote and failed to write and cooked every dinner and planned every vacation—each more splendid than the last—and spent much money and made nearly none. I see her coming through the door of Da Silvano, over and over, over the years, always beautiful, always perfectly dressed and perfectly groomed and perfectly composed, always a perfect figure, never more than a hundred pounds, growing stronger and stronger and farther and farther away.

+

In Montana I was to find most of the solace I sought. I would meet my future wife there, and take her to New York, and take her to Da Silvano, to detoxify my nostalgia—regret was still acting on me as a sort of psychic poison. At the least, being back home, as I still thought of New York, with Elizabeth, and returning again and again would serve to add layers of fresh associations. We would have our rehearsal dinner at Silvano’s, the night before our wedding. But that’s a story for another time.

Fortuitous alignment of days and eras.

2009-01-19T10:13:00.000-08:00

Obama's concert yesterday, Martin Luther King's birthday today, Obama's inauguration tomorrow. The human instinct for patterns would tempt nearly any of us, I think, to see a shape in that constellation; of course the concert and the inauguration had to be where they are, but the place of the King holiday between them is pure serendipity. Any statistician would say so, and could prove it. But there's good reason, in this case, to indulge our instinctive "recognition" of that false pattern--one of the frequent cases in which belief in a fiction confers greater advantage (in this case, moral integrity) than the mere facts could do.

The great psychologist Martin Seligman has been finding the benefits of certain self-deceptions for decades. To anybody who hasn't read his Learned Optimism, I can't commend it passionately enough. One of his findings is that depressed people have more accurate perceptions, but the Pollyannas not only are happier but also get more done.

Given a congenitally depressive nature, when I hear King's speech my mind goes immediately to the tragedies that followed, especially the assassinations of JFK and of King himself, and in them I read a pattern of tragedy extending through all the years from 1963 in Dallas to this morning in Iraq; but then, reminding myself of Seligman, I can say, Okay, maybe so, but maybe, also, that long chapter ends today, and tomorrow in Washington Barack Obama turns the page to open a new one.

When King gave that speech, I had just turned sixteen, and was about to begin my sophomore year in high school--in Memphis, the city where less than five years later he would be murdered. Looking back, I see another pattern. I would find my moral philosophy first, crudely, in the Sunday school and church to which I was chained from infancy till my escape to the North; I would find it more fully realized in "I Have a Dream" and in the death of its creator; and years later I would see that the unearthly faith of King and the cruel tragedy of his death rhyme well with the pattern I have come to love most in Italian renaissance paintings: the serene stillness of the Madonna coexisting, and coincident in time, with the irreduceable, incomprehensible evil of the Crucifixion. Are those real patterns, or just more self-helpfully illusory ones? Does it matter?

Now at last I can thank my father for so relentlessly hounding me to Sunday school and church, where my instinct for recognizing the pattern of coextensive good and evil took root. Or I could if he were alive. He has been dead for not quite four months. If he had made it to ninety-five (on November 26, 2008) I would still be crowing shamelessly to him about Obama, whom he didn't have much use for. (He was not precisely a bigot, but he was a white man from the Mississippi Delta, and only two generations of descent from slave owners.) I like to think that as so many other conservatives seem to have done lately, he might have come around a little toward believing in the dreams of Obama--which, Obama says, came from his father. That would have put me in a mood sufficiently grateful at last to thank my own father for helping me to be here in this moment of grace.

THERE'LL BE DANCIN' IN THE STREETS

2009-01-12T10:12:00.000-08:00

Monday, January 19, 2009 at 11:59pm will be the final day of one of the worst political eras America has faced. Exactly twelve hours later, the new, 44th President of the USA, Barack Obama will take over from what was one of the worst presidencies this nation has gone through.

Feel free to invite anyone you know for this massive, world wide celebration as we all wait for a new presidency that will hopefully end this error which was of having George W. Bush "elected" not just once, but twice.

For more information on the revelries and a way to invite more revelers: click here.

Generosity: A Winner's Advice

2009-01-07T16:31:00.000-08:00

I'm veering away from the memoir excerpts this week, because I thought that the following piece, from Nature magazine, is so profound, and so cheering in what so many of us hope is a time of renewal.

Nature 456, 579 (4 December 2008) | doi:10.1038/456579a; Published online 3 December 2008

Generosity: A winner's advice

Martin A. Nowak¹

Martin A. Nowak is professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University and director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, 1 Brattle Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. He is the author of Evolutionary Dynamics.
Email: nowak@fas.harvard.edu

One day while I was still at Oxford, Bob May gave me some advice: "You never lose for being too generous". I was impressed because Bob is a winner. To him winning a game is everything. He has thought more deeply about winning and losing than anyone else I know. As his wife once said, "When he plays with the dog, he plays to win." At the time, Bob was not only my adviser but also one to the British government. A few years later he would become president of the Royal Society, Lord May of Oxford and the recipient of many prestigious awards.

A mathematical analysis of human behaviour suggests that Bob was right. Generosity is an essential feature of winning strategies in games that explore human interactions. These strategies underpin many of the choices people make in everyday life, and shed light on how our unusually cooperative ways have evolved.

Biologists recognize two fundamental forces of evolution: mutation and selection. I want to add a third: cooperation. Cooperation occurs when one individual pays a cost so that another receives a benefit. Here, cost and benefit are measured in terms of reproductive success. Reproduction can be genetic or cultural, the latter involving the spread of knowledge and ideas.

Only if certain mechanisms are involved can natural selection favour individuals who reduce their own fitness to increase that of a competitor. One such mechanism is direct reciprocity: my strategy depends on what you have done to me. Another is indirect reciprocity: my strategy depends on what you have done to me and on what you have done to others.

In both, mathematical analysis shows that winning strategies tend to be generous, hopeful and forgiving. Generous here means not seeking to get more than one's opponent; hopeful means cooperating in the first move or in the absence of information; and forgiving means attempting to re-establish cooperation after an accidental defection. These three traits are related. If I am generous, it is easier for me to forgive, and also to be hopeful and take the risk of cooperating with newcomers. (Italics added by Tom.)

In the Wimbledon championship, you must defeat your opponent to move to the next round. But everyday life is not like a tennis tournament. Instead, most of our interactions occur in a population of players, and pay-off accumulates over encounters with many different people. Because overall success is proportional to that pay-off sum, the other person in any one encounter is more a partner than an opponent. If I am willing to let others have a slightly bigger share of the pie, then people will want to share pies with me. Generosity bakes successful deals.

Experiments have confirmed the success of generosity. A typical set-up involves students and computer screens. The computer pairs random individuals. One person, the donor, is asked if she wishes to transfer some money to the recipient. She is informed about the recipient's decisions in previous rounds with other players. The experiment shows that people base their decision on what the recipient has done before. Generous people are more likely to receive donations.

Similar reputation-based systems operate in e-commerce. When buying a camera online, you might consider both the price and the seller's reputation. Consumers are willing to pay higher prices if the seller is thought to be reliable. Successful websites are those with good reputations.

So why aren't humans always 'generous, hopeful and forgiving'? Part of the explanation may be that cooperation is never a stable state. Mathematical studies show that it is constantly challenged by defection. In a society of defectors where no-one helps, a cluster of cooperating individuals can emerge if, by chance, a few people start playing a direct reciprocity strategy called tit-for-tat: I do whatever you have done to me. Tit-for-tat can't persist for long because its appetite for revenge is self-destructive. It is soon replaced by 'generous tit-for-tat'. Here, I cooperate whenever you have cooperated, but sometimes even when you have defected. In other words, I am forgiving. For a while, cooperation thrives. But in a generous tit-for-tat population, the emergence of unconditional cooperators eventually invites the invasion of defectors. This leads to cycles of cooperation and defection — which could account, at least in part, for the mix of cooperators and defectors that persists in human societies.

Mathematical models allow a precise investigation of fundamental aspects of human behaviour. The games described here occur in every society. Ancestral humans spent most of their time in small groups where interactions were repeated. The same is true for most dealings in modern life: repeat encounters are always possible and reputation is typically at stake. The evolution of prosocial behaviour cannot be understood outside the framework of direct or indirect reciprocity. Indeed, I believe that games of indirect reciprocity have provided the crucial selection pressures for social intelligence and language.

In such games, social intelligence is needed to monitor and interpret the interactions of others. We follow with great interest what our fellow creatures do to us and to others. When deciding how to act, we take into account — often subconsciously — the possible consequences for our own reputation. Moreover, our own observations are often not enough; we want to learn from the experiences of others. Spreading the rumours of indirect reciprocity requires language. As my colleague David Haig once remarked "for direct reciprocity you need a face, for indirect reciprocity you need a name".