(Even when you keep missing a beat)

How have you been? How was Thanksgiving? Mine was really nice, thanks, celebrating with friends (my age) who also lost their mom, two days before last Christmas. In honor of my mom, I made a version of Lynne’s homemade stuffing, and my dad and Jeff tried to make a version, too. Foods are touchstones. I hope you were able to make and enjoy some delicious touchstones, too, in the midst of feelings.

This year has been hard, hard, hard on far too many people on this earth and much of the world suffering is the hands of three white male power mongering thugs in their 70s (Trump, Putin, Netanyahu), and their minions, and I have this problem where I feel guilty even thinking about personal joy or grief amidst all the suffering. (As you know, I live alone for a reason.) And I’m struggling with myself, as we do. It’s funny to keep doing this at 61, but here we are.

To calm myself and try to recover a sense of why I’m alive, on the Monday for part of my time before reflection week over Thanksgiving (see what we might call “The White Blog”), I spent a day bookstore haunting, walking from W. 10^th Street in Greenwich Village over to E. 2^nd Street and Avenue B in the East Village (Alphabet City). At my first stop, the Three Lives & Company Booksellers, a lovely small corner door shop, I found and bought Patti Smith’s latest memoir, as well as another copy of Truman Capote’s Christmas classic in case, as the store manager agreed, “In case you need a gift in the hopper.”

Book store people get you. The same woman who rang me up helped a man whose female partner brought him in to help him take up reading as a hobby. (I had to sit with that, like reading was a rarefied activity.) He liked war and history; I wanted to recommend the Capote, but I didn’t interfere. I recently read that in the United States, only around 14% of adults read for pleasure. That really hurts me. Even my dad, Bernie, who didn’t graduate from high school, read the newspaper every day. I told you this: My mom, Lynne, bought him Travels with Charlie, and he liked it, but The Godfather was the book that hooked him. And this lack of American reading reminded me of something back nearly thirty years ago, in summer, a cousin and his wife and four kids were visiting, staying in the upstairs rooms in my parents’ small house—this was back when I was still teaching in Virginia, and my brother Pat lived there too. My brother Jeff lived in an apartment then and took the day off, and we all gathered to take my relatives into D.C. for the day. While we waited for them to come downstairs, my mom sat in her chair, my dad in his, Pat on the loveseat, Jeff in the corner chair, I in a side chair, each of us with a section or pages of The Washington Post (back when it was a real newspaper). We read. My cousin came downstairs into the little living room and stood still. Gradually, we looked up, “Oh, hey, John,” and he stood staring. I asked, “What’s wrong?” And he said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” What? “A family reading.” Though this was a weekday, we knew such times generally and all of my growing up as “Sunday.” (At Christmastime, we all listened together, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” That would’ve made his head explode.)

Patti’s memoir (I’m up to page 113, savoring it each night so as not to have it end) is essentially a beautiful love letter filled with gratitude to everyone who helped her become. And Patti (I feel I can call her that) has made videos on Substack, posted also on Instagram, and she talks about living in gratitude. I feel every word. In her latest (hyperlinked above) she talks about finishing her tour for the 50^th Anniversary of Horses, which I told you I was lucky enough to see at the Beacon here in New York.

One of the first people to help Patti Smith find her voice in the early years after she came to New York at age 19 was the budding playwright and musician Sam Shepard. I remember reading Shepard’s plays in college, after he’d won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Buried Child. I realize now that he’d only been a real voice in the theater for ten years when I first read him—that’s wild to me. He seemed so old and established. But then, when I saw Patti Smith’s cover for the album Horses, I couldn’t have known she was only 28 to my 11. She was worlds away.

In truth, I didn’t discover or really attend to Patti Smith at all until reading her memoir Just Kids. I’d heard “Gloria,” and “Because the Night,” and of course I knew who she was, had seen Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos of her, but she scared me. Sam Shepard scared me too—I designed costumes for of his two one-acts, Cowboys #2 and Red Cross, when I was in college, ca. 1984, and his writing was out there. (I was part of an acting ensemble for Savage/Love, a play he wrote with Joseph Chaikin, but we never got to perform it.) Smith’s memoir/fantasia The Year of the Monkey in part chronicles her time nursing Shepard as he was dying of ALS, spending days typing up his final book as he dictated it from a wheelchair. (I told you about his observation, “Patti Lee, we are a Beckett play.”)

When I read of Patti’s childhood, I feel embraced by love, recalling my own best parts of childhood. She writes like no one I’ve read—she’s as idiosyncratic on the page as on vinyl, and it’s just wonderful.

One of Smith’s childhood memories is of reading Oscar Wilde’s “fairy tale,” “The Selfish Giant.” When I became obsessed with Oscar Wilde at age 15, my mom gave me a collection of his stories for children, so I reread this particular tale the other night. I remember that I was turned off by the religious turn the tale took; but Smith spent part of her youth as a Jehovah’s Witness and took religion seriously, until she couldn’t anymore. By contrast, I grew up free from religion as a part of my life but still had questions about God. (Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret was a favorite book.) But I knew the feeling of that first book, that first story, the one that sparked the love of reading, the need to read more.

I know, I feel, I see how important reading is—for so many reasons beyond the stuff you learn. I was thinking about my cousin’s surprise at seeing a family reading together; now I imagine it’s families scrolling on phones, and while that is not dissimilar, the act is different. Scrolling is not meditation, somehow, but something that distances people. (There’s data on this.) There’s a calmness that comes when engaging quietly with print text. Something in the tactile element and the way our brains have spent centuries adjusting to the act of reading, and even better, surrounded by some books that everyone can see on display—it’s a shared experience even when it’s solitary. It’s not about algorithms, is what I mean.

And Patti Smith is so different from me, reading her memoir reminds me that sharing the particulars of our lives can lead to universals, in that we see ourselves as human. But I can love that Patti and I share a love of something Wildean, even if mine is his whole creative life. And like me, Smith has touchstone artists—hers Diego Rivera and Arthur Rimbaud; mine Katharine Hepburn and Virginia Woolf. Their art gave us our own humanity, opened the gate, turned on a light, pick a metaphor.

It’s such a lousy time to be human right now—“lousy” is hardly the word—and yet I know I need to walk around grateful. By some miracle on Friday, for example, I found my way through to finishing a major project at work, could see my way to the end, I mean, and was so relieved, that as I took my afternoon walk I fairly floated. It’s such a human thing. Even Patti Smith makes the finishing of her tour—a 50^th anniversary tour as a superstar—sound so human, and then she had a tooth seen to at the dentist, talked about moderating a talk back after the opening of the new Frankenstein and talking to Guillermo Del Toro like he’s a person, because he is, an artist like her, but a person. Creatives living their creative lives pausing at moments to scream, “Fuck Trump.” Like the rest of us.

We’re all doing our best, getting on with the work of our worlds. Loving our friends, our families, telling them that. Expressing gratitude for a good chair, a coat that keeps us warm, a hat that stays on in the wind. An orange. A book.

I’ll ruminate on all the horrors of our country again soon—I think I’m waiting for an idea of what we need to do, besides not quit. Remember was Sam said to Patti, “If you miss a beat, invent another.”

Sending love,

Miss O’