Category Archives: Writers

October 20, 2013 · 6:53 pm

What’s the Story Morning Glory?

As some things in the garden wither, others go full tilt.

A friend of mine came over with a shovel and a Beautyberry plant earlier in the summer. I didn’t know how Callicarpa Americana would take to the Cabin. Now its purple berries are practically fluorescent, a perfect complement to the orange leaves that have begun to carpet the grass around the bush.

I hauled out the brown tomato plants in the sun today, the wind whoosing through the tops of the phragmites. Sorted out the tall stakes for next year. One lone green tomato dangled from a shriveled branch.

Yet the purple cosmos are raging. And the bees are storming them.

I’m cutting them by the armful and bringing them into the living room, a bit of summer still in front of a roaring fall woodfire.

The rosemary in the garden stands tall, waiting for its time in the stew pot with a leg of lamb.

My celery is insane, a veritable hedge of the stuff. It never headed up but it still would be a great bed for a whole sea bass. I’ll have to go out and get me a fish.

Most impressive, though, are the morning glories. Dozens of blossoms open every day, their petals scrunched until they unfurl in the morning sun.

They don’t seem to understand that it’s fall, the time to fold up their tents. Well, they do fold up their tents, every day, since it’s the of the flower to bloom for a single day. “A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books,” said Whitman. The Japanese have led the world historically in cultivating varieties of the morning glory, and as of this count there are 1,000 odd species.

The ones going crazy in my garden are Heavenly Blue. As for their hallucinogenic properties, Aztec priests started that practice, though we’re perhaps more familiar with love generation baby boomers who ingested the seeds to open themselves to new experiences, as the blossom does the bee.

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October 15, 2013 · 8:54 pm

A Recipe for Meatballs and Longevity

I told Gil I’d make him meatballs for his birthday. His 60^th. I assembled the beef, the pork, the eggs, the breadcrumbs. Plenty of cheese.

I was making the same meatballs I always make, from the delectable recipe served at Patsy’s restaurant on 56^th Street in Manhattan. Frank Sinatra’s favorite joint.

That was a man who knew how to age gracefully. (Maybe eating Patsy’s meatballs helped?)

So does Gil. He said he’d take part in the meatballs’ production, though he had other things he could have been doing this afternoon. I showed him how you roll the meat in a pile of breadcrumbs. Good breadcrumbs. The better the quality, the better anything you make with them.

I asked Gil how it felt to be almost 60. “Quoting Danny Aiello in Once Around,” he said, “just when you feel like putting a gun in your mouth everybody wants to come over and celebrate.”

Mortality on your mind? I went on scooping meat. An ice cream scoop cures a myriad of cooking ills. The right size works for cookies and meatballs alike.

“No,” he said, “I don’t really feel like putting a gun in my mouth. But I do feel like quoting Danny Aiello.”

The meatballs sizzled in hot oil. We split a few open and almost burnt our mouths stealing a savory bite.

“How does it really feel,” I persisted.

“It feels great,” he said. “Everyone’s telling me I look 50.”

Gil’s had a habit, ever since I’ve known him (that’s about 20 hundred years now) of doing kitchen work with a towel slung over his shoulder. “No woman ever shot a man who was doing dishes,” Gil says. Now he’s of a certain age, he could give husband-ing lessons to the younger generation. Love and marriage, love and marriage…

We play Ry Cooder’s One Meatball — he couldn’t afford but one meatball — and toast the perfect specimen with cider.

Gil’s someday epitaph: He chopped the onions for his own birthday meatballs.

Patsy’s Meatballs Recipe

Combine ¾ c. breadcrumbs and 6 T. whole milk in a small bowl.

Heat 2 T. oil in a skillet; fry 2 medium onions chopped fine and 6 cloves garlic chopped fine.

In a large bowl, combine 1 ½ lb. ground beef, 1 ½ lb. ground pork, 3 large eggs and 3 egg yolks, slightly beaten, 3 T. chopped parsley, 3 T. chopped oregano, 1 ½ c. grated Parmesan. Salt and pepper. Combine well.

[Now, Patsy’s recipe entails an elaborate method of rolling out the meat mixture, cutting it, rolling it, etc., which I find too burdensome. I take a simpler route, which gets the meatballs to the finish line faster.]

Roll small balls of meat mixture in bread crumbs and fry them well in oil. Invite all your friends over, as this makes around six dozen meatballs.

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October 14, 2013 · 2:52 pm

Making Change

It’s a good day for working. I just finished proofing the third pass Savage Girl galleys. Found some periods and commas that persisted perversely in the manuscript despite everyone’s best efforts. A few tiny, tiny changes make all the difference. If. You. Ask. Me.

Yes, it’s a good day for scrunching your forehead and working. Especially if your work is being on the lookout for deer.

But isn’t it a better day for rolling in the grass? Those fallen leaves add a toasty texture to a run-of-the-mill back scratch.

Closer to waist level, the sun warms the fall berries. Where do they come from? The landscape has changed. All of the sudden they’re there.

Then there are the last of the morning glories, though they don’t know it. The deer have already had at most of their leaves. Soon the blooms will fold up their tent.

They mirror the arching sky. Contrails: someone’s going someplace.

The morning glories unfurl for just a single day. Their only work is being beautiful.

This morning I revamped the front page of this site, and I invite you to visit. To improve is to change, said Churchill. To be perfect is to change often. I don’t know that I change often enough or dramatically enough, but I’d like to try something new.

For one thing, I’m settling on an up-to-date author photo. Not quite sure, but this one’s a strong possibility. I like it because I seem bemused. Which I often am.

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October 12, 2013 · 10:38 pm

Dam It All

Friends in the audience, new and old. We met together upstairs at The Golden Notebook in Woodstock, New York.

It was a warm autumn day outside, and everything had that sun-burnished appearance. In the middle was a sign that beckoned: come inside, come inside, come inside.

Afterwards I wondered just what it was that made me so fascinated by beavers that I hold forth about them in every talk I give about The Orphanmaster.

True, not enough has been said about beaver.

New York was built on the foundation of the shaggy, rotund rodent with the frying pan tail.

The animal was easily trapped by Native Americans in their winter dens. The pelts were then traded with Europeans for copper, guns, rum, which was called “English milk.”

Cartographers dressed up their work with the animals.

Everyone wanted to know where the beavers were. In the 1600s, traders sent hundreds of thousands of pelts back to Europe. The sole reason for this huge trade? Beaver hats.

Not made from the fur proper, but from felt made from the fur, an extraordinarily complex process that involved a heavy dose of mercury, the chemical that made the Mad Hatter mad.

The felt was waterproof in an era before umbrellas. It was glossy, sturdy. The beaver – so the beaver hat was called – was the essential accoutrement for men and women of Europe. Everyone who could afford one had one, or two, or three. Beavers were bequeathed in wills.

In The Orphanmaster, everyone would have worn a beaver, even the women. All kinds of styles were available. Blandine, the protagonist of the story, is bent on getting rich buying and selling beaver pelts to Europe, venturing out into the woods to make her trades with Indian trappers.

Later, my friend Lloyd led us on a beaver hunt. Not to capture the animals but to see their impressive lodges.

Down the hill from his house was a magical if uneven path.

Far in the distance, across the pond, we could glimpse the rodents’ handiwork. More sun-burnishing.

A ways down the road, the ruins of an ancient lumber mill.

So much history of this area, the Catskill region of upstate New York, is a stumbleupon away. Like the antique bottles Lloyd’s daughter Alice excavates from the woods behind their house. Also in those woods, black bears rumble around, tearing open rotted logs to get at the creepy crawlers within.

We saw one more lodge at Yankeetown Pond — to the right, below. David Bowie owns the mountain above. Probably has befriended a few of the beavers over the years. Like to come up for a drink? I’m Bowie.

The finest specimen of the afternoon stood just to the side of the water, a gnawed tree that had clearly been someone’s snack.

The beaver population was hunted out in the seventeenth century in these parts and is only just coming back today in earnest. They found one at the Bronx Zoo a few years back. No one could understand where it came from. Its name, they decided, was not Ernest, but Jose.

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October 11, 2013 · 10:30 pm

The Golden Notebook in Golden Fall

Tomorrow will be a perfect day to take in the leaves upstate as they color up. If so much natural beauty wears thin and if you happen to be near Woodstock, New York, consider coming to The Golden Notebook for my 2:00 talk on The Orphanmaster. Signing copies, too. I know there are excellent lattes down the street and I’m pretty sure the nice people in the store will allow you to nurse one in in a paper cup while you sit back and enjoy my slide show — lots of nuggets about the way people, places and things looked in 1660s Manhattan. The raging beaver trade. The fashion of men in red-heeled pumps. What was it actually like, anyway? New York before it became New York. Imagine.

Please do come. I’ll be up on the second floor.

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October 10, 2013 · 6:51 pm

Going to the Chapel

I needed to get a new author photo and I wanted to pose against the neat red bricks of St. Paul’s Chapel on the campus of Columbia University. It was not difficult to set up, since Maud was the photographer and this is where she went to school.

When I.N. Phelps Stokes designed St. Pauls, it was the first non-McKim, Mead and White structure erected on campus. This was 1907. A photo from the time shows it looking new and bare. It would prove to be Stokes’ greatest architectural achievement.

Over a century later, the diminutive chapel’s Renaissance design still wins acclaim for its beacon-like green dome, its Italianate authenticity, its salmon-brick Guastavino vaults and its splendid acoustics. A schedule of magnificent music was posted outside the doors. People love to get hitched here.

Waiting for our photo session, I took a seat–as I had many times, many years ago, when I was studying writing and this was my school–on the curving stone bench across from the Chapel.

It actually spells out Love Your Alma Mater, but I like the more elemental, bare-bones message.

All around, the autumn hedges were producing moist red berries.

They looked like pieces of candy stuck there for the taking.

I ducked inside to check out Stokes’ inspired efforts. (Not pictured here, because no pictures allowed.) He created the glossy floors of marble fragments in intricate patterns resembling those you find in Italian churches, but these patterns are purely decorative, with no symbolic meaning. Sturdy wood chairs were preferable to pews, he decided. He and Edith had toured Italy in the winter and spring of 1905 as preparation for working on St. Pauls. During the trip he decided to bring back some wine – not just a few jugs of Chianti but 50 liters of red in casks that he then had decanted into half-pint bottles.

Stokes was a meticulous man, and a driven one. He wanted the job of designing St. Paul’s. His passion for the project was shared by his altruistic aunts, immensely wealthy sisters who refused to provided the funding unless their nephew was hired on.

I hovered in the back of the Chapel while mass was conducted in the nave. Short and sweet, body, wine, done.

My pictures also came about pronto. In the background the bricks, yes, to the side of the columned portico – at the top of each of those columns is a cherub carved by Gutzon Borglum, who was responsible for Mount Rushmore.

In the background of the photos stands a Quattrocento-style bronze lamp, pickled green by time, designed by sculptor Arturo Bianchini to show the four apostles of the Old Testament but also a pod of swimming dolphins.

Of course what you’ll see most of all in Maud’s pictures is not the bricks, not the dolphins, but my smile, beaming, because it is my daughter behind the camera and we are connecting through the medium of photography.

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October 9, 2013 · 3:00 pm

A Victorian Evening

There were not enough chairs. Victorian Society guests who came in late had to huddle by the door rather than join the hundred or so in the room. I was only a little distracted by all those wide eyes in the audience, drinking in the images on the screen behind me, so entranced were they by the Gilded Age. It was a marvelous evening.

The Victorian Society New York members are a lovely bunch, very serious about their history and dedicated to preserving the built past of the nineteenth century. Talking about I.N. Phelps Stokes and his passion for Old New York, I could see that that strong interest of his resonated personally with so many of this group. That Edith “Fiercely” Minturn’s old-fashioned beauty touched them.

There were some great minds and delicate sensibilities in the crowd. The master horologist John Metcalfe – clock expert, to you — with public school English diction and an L.L. Bean bag, informed me that when Newton and Edith Stokes packed up a sixteenth-century British house in 688 boxes to export and reassemble on the coast of Connecticut, they were not the only ones.

It was, apparently, a vogue at the time for those who could afford it. I knew that those of tremendous wealth paid people like Stanford White to cull the monasteries of Europe for great rooms that would be installed intact in their country houses. But I didn’t realize the wholesale shipping over of houses was a fashion for the fashionables until Mr. Metcalfe told me so.

There was the great preservationaist and historian Joyce Mendelsohn, who introduced me with the gracious admonition that listeners buy “two or three books “ and to give the extras to friends. Music to a writer’s ears.

An author herself, most recently of The Lower East Side Remembered and Revisited: A History and Guide to a Legendary New York Neighborhood, Joyce has been a pivotal presence in Victorian Society New York.

Then there was the architect-scholar David Parker, who first introduced me to the dripping-with-history Loeb house at 41 East 72 Street. David knows pretty much everything about buildings and interiors of the late nineteenth century, all of which he applied to the renovation of that brownstone, with its Herter furniture, Tiffany glass, Minton ceramics, swags of velvet and fantastically patterned wallpapers.

There was a woman from Fraunces Tavern that had me sign copies of all my books at the request of her boss there. Fraunces Tavern is one of the oldest structures in Manhattan – it was first opened by Samuel Fraunces in 1767 — and I was proud to give a talk there once before.

I hope I do so again soon.

One scholar present had completed a doctoral thesis called “Psychosexual Dynamics in the Ghost Stories of Henry James.”

If she had had a copy with her I would have bought it and asked her to sign it.

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October 8, 2013 · 12:14 pm

Sargent and the Newlywed Stokeses

John Singer Sargent painted Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes in 1897, during the couple’s honeymoon – a classic portrait and an icon of the time. The three of them spent weeks in his studio, with Sargent occasionally taking breaks to pound out tunes on his grand piano. The great painter was at the height of his career and almost too busy to make time for them, but an influential family friend had commissioned the work as a wedding gift.

Not everyone liked it. One critic called the painting “too clever for its own good.”

Bringing the portrait into existence had been a challenge for Sargent. According to I.N. Phelps Stokes, newlywed Edith “sat to” Sargent 25 times, posing over and over agin in a blue silk gown. Sargent finally got fed up with the formality and said “I want to paint you as you are.” Edith had come in from the hot London streets that day wearing informal attire, clothes drastically different than the diaphanous gowns the painter’s models typically posed in, and she had a fresh, dewy look about her cheeks.

In other words, she was sweating.

Come tonight to see more pictures and hear more nuggets about the Newton and Edith Stokes, their portrait, and their remarkable lives – Dominican Academy, 44 East 68^th Street, bet. Park and Madison, at 6pm, sponsored by the Victorian Society of New York. Free.

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October 7, 2013 · 11:34 am

Victorian Society Oct. 8 Talk

Please join me tomorrow evening, Tuesday October 8^th, at 6 pm, to hear a free talk I’m giving for the Victorian Society of New York on Love, Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance. The evening will take place at a school called the Dominican Academy that is housed in a historic mansion at 44 East 68^th Street, bet. Park and Madison, in NYC. Get there early for a seat!

For a little more info — according to the organization’s lecture schedule, my presentation:

“will discuss the life, times and passion of two remarkable individuals living in a remarkable age. Her book Love Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance is both a cultural history of America on the cusp of modernity and a biography of two of the era’s most interesting characters, Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes and his wife, Edith Minturn Stokes, whose double portrait by John Singer Sargent hangs in the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing. Love, Fiercely immerses readers in the world of the Astors and Vanderbilts, the “uppertens” and the “fashionables” in New York City and its satellite resorts. Zimmerman will also tell the parallel story of the couple’s reform work and of Mr. Stokes’s monumental tome, The Iconography of Manhattan Island.

I’ll show lots of great pictures and probably digress quite a bit from these topics, I hope enjoyably. And I’ll sign books after my talk, of course. So come if you can.

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September 26, 2013 · 5:33 pm

On Tiptoe

It’s a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes, quoth Robert Louis Stevenson.

Well, it’s good to have ten working toes at any age, I would say, as someone who is coming down the home stretch from foot surgery with a big toe that is being extremely uncooperative. It’s stiff, sore, and doesn’t want to help my foot walk smoothly. You will recognize me if you see me limping awkwardly toward you, my pins distinctly out of whack.

A physical therapist has been assigned to fiddle with, manipulate and macerate my hallux to get it where it has to go. Heat is being applied. Cold has been furnished. Exercises, ones that would bore to death a soul with healthy feet – a repeated ballet releve, rocking, wiggling—now earn my intensest interest. I have learned to pick up a marble with my toes and deposit it in a plastic bowl. A great achievement, don’t you know.

I looked to the Poetry Foundation for inspiration. A great poem called An Exchange between the Fingers and the Toes by the English wordsmith John Fuller describes a comical oneupsmanship between the sets of digits. In an interview, Fuller once explained that “a good poem takes some irresolvable complication, worries it to death like a dog with a bone, and leaves it still unresolved. The pleasure of the poem lies entirely in the worrying, the verbal growling and play. Life itself stubbornly remains entirely like a bone.”

In this verse, which speaks eloquently to my current state, the crafty fingers accuse the klutzy hallux at one point of being a “futile pig,” but the toes come back with eventual triumph:

Despite your fabrications and your cunning,

The deepest instinct is expressed in running.

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September 24, 2013 · 5:34 pm

In a New Light at the Guggenheim

I finally went, on the next to last day of the exhibition. The James Turrell installation, that is, called Aten Reign, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

It’s been up since June, and everyone said You’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.

Now I understand why.

Turrell is a conceptual artist who manipulates natural and artificial light on a grand scale. He’s been practicing his craft since the 1960s. “My art deals with light itself,” he has said. “It’s not the bearer of the revelation. It is the revelation.”

Sounds lofty. But when you enter the rotunda of the Guggenheim and look up to see the deep magic of colored orbs, eggs really, egg after egg after egg, created by lights projected on the concentric rings of the museum’s famous spiral, you see what he means. As you watch, the colors begin to shift, from pale silver to violet to tangerine to raspberry to acid lime. A fruit-sweetened flow of light.

My mind entered a waking dream state. I have to admit that I was equally fascinated by the 200 or so human animals on display beneath the well of light. Tourists. Natives. Suits and shorts, stripes and leggings and boots. Fifteen, twenty languages, who knew? It was one of those afternoons when people look especially beautiful. We were all in a cave filled with liquid light, all creatures awestruck, bemused, interested in the same phenomenon. Turrell is a Quaker, a faith he characterizes as having a “straightforward, strict presentation of the sublime.” Patient contemplation is a tenet of his work. It’s not a particular feature of life in New York City, usually, yet here it was.

A circular mat lay in the center of the space. People sprawled on the pad like participants at an old-fashioned happening, gaping upward at the magnificent spaces of Frank Lloyd Wright’s genius structure, now transformed to a Turrell Skyspace.

Museum goers waited calmly for a chance at the mat – it was easier to find a parking spot outside than a supine position on the Guggenheim’s floor. They tried to take pictures of the lights but were checked by guards. But Aten Reign begged for pictures. It reminded me of that experiment with toddlers and marshmallows, where a lady gives a kid a marshmallow and says if he holds off for x minutes without eating it, he’ll be given two. What kid can exert that much self control? Likewise, what adult at this luscious light show could resist clicking a phone upward even if it meant sneaking to do it?

I was reminded of Oscar Wilde’s famous line, We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Gil waded into the scrum, pretty spry for a nearly-sixty-year-old man – you had to move fast to claim a spot – and lay himself down, spellbound. “It was like a wrestling mat,” he told me afterward, “one where people have been pinned too many times.” The funk of the thousands of bodies since the show opened somehow added to the appeal.

The sky above went from ultraviolet to dark as a storm. Tranquillity descended. Was this what my sometime cynic of a husband liked to call the “theater of faint effect” – something that’s not necessarily going to change your life? Still, “I felt like I needed a lamaze coach” was what he told me later about the near birth experience he’d had. This would seem to partake of E.M. Forster’s “only connect,” with all of us touching this spiritual lozenge above us, this gleaming cough drop of a god, and at the same time touching each other.

A friend once told me about her experience walking on burning coals, that there was no rational reason for it but she was transformed by a mystical joy. No one knows exactly why, but it happens.

I sat on the bench that ran around the circular walls. Behind me I realized I was listening to the plash of a fountain. This is the first time I’ve ever employed that word. Later, at lunch in the museum’s somewhat pretentiously named restaurant, The Wright, I ate something I had never tried before, in a frisee salad: a skinned cherry tomato, poached or braised somehow to bring out its pulpy flavor. In the corner, Isaac Mizrahi with his doo-rag held forth in some kind of ecstatic state.

Everything appeared fresh after the Turrell show. September 25, the exhibit closes. There is only tomorrow. Go.

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September 19, 2013 · 4:06 pm

A Silver Signature

I made a mistake. After all my talk of streamlining my library, tossing out the old, letting in light, I winnowed too much. Books, as I wrote a few days ago, are not just about reading, but about your relationship with the volume, your history with what you hold in your hand.

I nearly threw away some vital history. After packing that big old box with dozens of titles and dropping it at the local branch library, I went home feeling liberated. My shelves were mine, filled with awesome novels and nonfiction, all the collection dusted and shiny.

Around midnight yesterday, my eyes popped open. I remembered that amid the floods of paper and cardboard around me I had held a silver-foil-covered book in my hands, turning the pages. As I stood there, I recalled reading it. Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. I’d liked it. I was over it, though, now. Into the box with the others.

But with the wee hour night thoughts closing in, I now remembered something else: a name on the first page, a small, careful signature in blue ink.

The name belonged to a friend of mine, who had presented the book to me when I was rehabbing after hip surgery three years ago. She had bought me the other two novels in Larsson’s series in paperback, but this one, in silver foil, a hardcover, belonged to her. I want that one back, she told me. We sat together in this dungeon-like rehab center, the unattainable sun outside the windows. She was one of the few friends who made it all the way there. When she left I gobbled down Larsson’s energetic creation, his tattooed girl, one volume after the next, in a slight haze of percocet, finishing the long, twisted, potent narrative before my two weeks of healing were through.

Not long after she gifted me with the Larsson trilogy, my friend passed away. Breast cancer took her way too soon. I kept the silver-foil-covered book she’d loaned me on my shelves, by now forgotten under a stack of other books. I want that one back, she’d said.

This morning I drove to the library where we’d left the giant box. The books had already been brought to a back room for sorting, the reference librarian said. We’re so sorry, she said, consoling me for the loss of the book. I felt I should be apologizing for causing so much trouble. She led the way back. Gil and I searched and searched, through stacks of hundreds of books. No silver foil. That tiny little connection, through a pop novel gift of my friend to me, had floated into the ether, and I wouldn’t see it again.

Driving home, my phone rang. The library. We have your book. Come back.

And so I reclaimed the silver foil – it had already been put on the sale cart – and brought it back to my home library. First, though, even before getting in the car, I cracked the spine and inspected the first-page signature. The hand of my friend, extending out of a book.

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September 17, 2013 · 7:01 pm

Out of My Library

If you don’t like the feeling of book dust on your hands, the sight of new gaps between the volumes on your shelves, the surprise discovery of tomes you missed even though you never knew you missed them – read no further.

I am in the grips of a book-shedding catharsis. I realized today – and this is the way it often happens for me – that I couldn’t let another hour go by without winnowing out my book shelves. I insisted that Gil sort his office, too. (He couldn’t find any to give up, but he tried.) The resulting 100 or so cast-off titles went into an extra-large packing box.

Off to the library.

A mother stood trying to corral her preschooler near the sidewalk. “Donations?” she said cheerfully. “Efficient way to bring them.”

“Is he a neighbor?” said her son.

“Maybe,” said the mom.

Local book sales bring together browsers with only a desultory interest, avid bargain hunters and steely-eyed professionals. Pop selections are only a minor part of the culture.

When we lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, resellers from all over bought Friends of the Library memberships so that they could go to the earlybird presale and scoop up multiple cartons of the most valuable items. That was okay, we managed to find plenty of gems on our own time – including some we had ourselves donated. Yes, it’s true: we turned in books for the sale that we later decided were simply too fascinating to pass by.

But it’s such a relief to weed out the honeys of yesteryear: The Man Who Quit Money by Mark Sundeen, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Dava Sobel’s Longitude, The Judgment of Paris by Ross King. All good reads, eye opening, brain teasing. None of them necessary to my life at the moment.

The Croton Free Library has just celebrated its 75^th anniversary. I hope that its patrons will enjoy my books as avidly as I did.

There are people with acres of shelves in their home library. Their libraries. Their nooks and end tables. Their bedside stacks. When we downsized to the Cabin, that life ended for us. We knew we’d have to focus a laser beam on what meant something to us. We carted out dozens of boxes for various libraries, dozens to sell at the Strand, and ended up leaving many freebies at the curb. Even if you mourn the loss of your books, it is worth it for the experience of a transaction at the historic institution of the Strand, which has been in business since 1927 on 12^th Street and Broadway in Manhattan.

The buyer peers down his spectacles and thumbs through your precious collection, calculating all in his head the value of each book before announcing the usually paltry total. Sometimes it is a triumph, enough for dinner in a decent restaurant. Those novels that you thought were brilliant, invaluable, they’re basically worthless at the Strand, while the store covets and compensates well for the scholarly and academic works you thought no one would ever want.

Now the smooth, dust-free spines of the books line up straight on my wooden shelves in the proper order – all of them books I have selected anew, that I want and need.

Some of them seem to have a special kinship even outside their genre. Not exactly subject. More, spirit.

Many, like these, have a story besides the narrative in the book – the story of my relationship with it. My mother-in-law gave me Stalking the Wild Asparagus when I was a newlywed with a house in an apple orchard and a nascent interest in gardening. Ian Frazier’s Great Plains has been a touchstone over the years in thinking about writing nonfiction. Wilderness and the American Mind dates from my college days and still holds my intense interest. Everyone who loves books has these intimacies with individual volumes, the how and why of how your relationship with it came about. Your foundation with it. These begin to make up the essence of a library, the authors that really meant something then and now.

The true reason to get rid of books? Honestly? To collect more books.

I needed space for a working library, all the ones I’m drawing on for my next novel. Any clue as to what the book’s about?

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September 14, 2013 · 7:23 pm

A Catskill Idyll

I really ought to get out more. Even if out means going from a cabin to a cottage with an adjacent bungalow as I did this weekend.

It was the gray, cool weather of late summer, more like fall. The Catskill Mountains. The cottage had a quaint disposition, the pet decorating project of antiquarian friends of friends. Charm bloomed in corners. On side tables, one of which held a seal enraptured with a ball.

Windowsills offered various small collections.

Dramatically tarnished old mirrors lined the walls.

We brought zinnias, butterscotch bars.

Neil, the host, grilled chicken over wood. There was sweet aged bourbon for some. For me, mango lemonade. A funny kind of tea, milky oat tops. Was it restorative in some way or just cut up grass in bags? Hard to say but worth gently debating. What music should we listen to? Everything sounded good.

A fire glowing in the stove, a healthy stack of wood.

Conversation about our kids growing up, finding their feet. About ourselves, still finding our feet. Will we ever find them? Monopoly and pet play.

The shaggy, gloomy, romantic Catskills offered up their forests and creeks.

Girdled, Neil the arborist says is the term for roots that entwine themselves like this. What about those trees, though, that entwine themselves as though in love? No special name, they just are.

Mushrooms gleamed against the mulch.

When the woods were so delightful we couldn’t stand any more, we took a drive through the weathered local community, Livingston Manor. An ancient graveyard, simply marked, appeared on Creamery Road.

Plain, as was the cemetery’s groundskeeping shed.

Something else simple appeared out of nowhere — a staunch old wood covered bridge dating to the late 1800s.

Sometime in the long afternoon I saw my friend Suzanne sitting by the fire, taking a pensive break from all the charm, the activity, the pets and children. The yap of conversation.

I thought of one of my favorite poems, perfect any day but especially for this place, the person, the moment: When You Are Old, by W.B. Yeats.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

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Filed under Art, Cooking, Culture, Dogs, Music, Nature, Poetry, Writers, Writing

September 12, 2013 · 9:43 pm

Kitchawan Dragonflies

Are dragonflies magic? My favorite insect, I think.

Humans have always had a fascination with them. We were creating amulets of the insects back in 1640 B.C. Egypt.

They’re prehistoric. Ravishing to look at. Voracious hunters. Fascinating to artists, like Wenceslas Hollar, the great 17^th century lithographer.

A cloud of hundreds of dragonflies swelled over our heads at the outdoor yoga class offered at Kitchawan Farm in the early dusk. The farm, in Ossining, was a place I’d always wanted to visit. It was September 11, and the class was free to whomever wanted to drop in, a way to mark the day.

Kathleen Clarke led the group. She usually was an instructor at Dragonfly Wellness nearby. Perhaps she brought the bugs?

I brought my boot and a desire to stretch my tight, tired muscles, sick of sitting with my foot up for six whole weeks. We laid out our mats, the dragonflies zooming and booming above.

I didn’t know if the people there would be nice about my infirmity. Maybe they’d be yoga-fascists, insisting on fast, sweaty gyrations, on keeping up a certain pace. But as soon as we set up, a woman hurried over to offer me a plastic chair in case I needed it. It turned out to be Linsay Cochran, who manages this century-old family farm. So gracious, and so welcoming.

There was a meditation to begin, and Kathleen suggested we think not so much of September 11, but perhaps more important, September 12. What did we do in the wake of the tragedy? I thought about the 11^th, watching the flames all the way down the Hudson, scoping from Hastings to New York City from the lawn next to the library, the dawning dread that this was real. But September 12^th – what did I do, actually? I think the day was about our shared shock, but also about the difficulty of explaining what had happened, to myself but also to my nine-year-old daughter.

At Kitchawan, in the dusk, we stretched our arms to the graying sky, held our hands in prayer position, again stretched our arms to the sky.

My Frankenstein boot presented no problem. Kindness, I felt, made my awkwardness a nonissue.

Kitchawan Farm has 20 acres, and specializes in flowers as well as vegetables and herbs. The blooms of later summer were all around.

“There shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart,” wrote Celia Thaxter, a popular gardener/writer of 1890s New England who is now, like so many women writers of that time, largely forgotten. If you are in need of eternal summer, give Linsay some advance notice and she will a bouquet for you.

Gil and I had wandered the rows when we first arrived. Decided on chard for dinner.

They’re mainly a CSA operation here at Kitchawan, and some people were coming to pick up their shares. Others picked up their wild, sweet children from the little summer camp there.

Late-season bounty crowded the tables.

We bought garlic from a young woman in the “stuga” (Swedish for cottage), two of a half dozen varieties. A garlic house, how charming.

Wished we could get closer to the horses – the farm boards 10 but they were all off behind fences in their horse dreamworlds, munching grass.

Gil had gone to walk in the woods of Kitchawan Preserve while I levitated under the dragonflies.

Linsay, laying out on her mat, was constantly attended by her large, gentle dog Pogo.

When the sun salutation came, I knew my foot was spent, so I moved my stretched-out body over to an Adirondack chair and watched the dragonflies recede.

I inhaled the scents of manure and herbs. Listened to the horses snort, the excited hens and rooster and guinea hens vocalize. I heard Kathleen taking the little group through the final meditation, murmuring a narrative that was all about compassion, gratitude, virtue, healing others. There was so much good feeling here at Kitchawan, they could sell it in bouquets by the roadside. Or, I guess, give it away.

Being able to heal others. I don’t know about anyone else there, but I felt a little healed. My foot was tired, but my soul weariness had been transported away by dragonflies.

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Filed under Art, Culture, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Photography, Writers

Category Archives: Writers

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