Life and Death: a memoir -- iii

continued from yesterday--

On the only Sunday morning, I walked out into a meadow, away from people, where I found an Adirondack chair and sat for an hour. There was no Sunday worship anywhere, but the Sabbatarian in me made it clear that I needed to do something for worship—not for God’s sake but for my own. So I went out alone and tried to imagine what the soft arm of my son—just three years old--would feel like in my fingers if I were back home. I concentrated on that touch, at the same time I recited, over and over again, the poem I knew best, the 23rd psalm.

I remember a beautiful mountain stream, but there were no still waters at Bread Loaf Writers Conference the summer of 1980. If there were, I didn’t see them. But that Sabbath’s very personal worship, right there in the middle of the madness, was a meditation I’ve never forgotten, maybe the only true meditation I’ve ever done, a few verses from Psalm 23, a hybrid mantra in an Adirondack chair.

Toward the end of our stay, another friend, also a waiter, a man who had also shown me a snapshot of his young family, another poet, simply decided that when opportunity presented itself, he wanted to act. He too climbed into bed with another conferee. I don’t even remember his name, but what I remember was that when the waiters had their reading one night, he read from his work without once looking down at a text, all of his work memorized. 

We’d been friends from the beginning, so I asked him about his unfaithfulness. “I don’t get it,” I said to him. “Why?”

A writer had to experience absolutely everything he could in order to be the best he can, he said. A writer has to know, to know by having lived.

I didn’t laugh, and I still don’t. I was, after all, something of an innocent, even though I’d never considered myself such before. And I wondered, really, if he wasn’t right, in a way. Should he ever want to write about how being unfaithful feels, he had a better shot at authority.

When we boarded a plane to leave Bread Loaf, I happened to line up just behind Deborah Digges as the two of us stood on the stairway to our commuter jet. We hadn’t spoken much in the last week; she’d been otherwise occupied. We hadn’t sat together at the gate either, but when we got on board I happened to be just behind her. I don’t know if she had thought of me the way I did of her, as someone who understood her better, perhaps, than others; but when that line balked for a minute, she looked at me and shook her head. “Jim, I hope this plane crashes,” she said.

She’d been wooed by a celebrity poet, and she’d fallen. On the dance floor, the two of them looked like smarmy high school lovers, which would have seemed embarrassing if it hadn’t happened to so many others. But right then, as we boarded, I knew her pain, even though I knew nothing about her relationship to the husband she’d seemingly forgotten.

If I said anything to her at all at that moment, it’s gone from my memory. We found our seats. I didn’t sit beside her.