Introduction concl:

Tale 3

A Great Golden Fairy Tale

“...a rainbow stretched from Delaware Water Gap to Pocono Mountain

spanning the firmament

a moment you couldn’t forget

especially given what followed.”

Thirty years or so after the Blackburn interviews, Dr. Lorenzo wrote a note to himself and to history when he heard that Bill had died, and in 2008 he dressed it up and attached it to an email to Sammy Martinez. It told of the day in 1974 when Bill decided to quit working for Fred Waring:

Two years after I met Bill, in late May or early June of seventy-four, I was working in the lower garden at Spring Lake, planting roses again, as a matter of fact, and Bill pulled up on my lower lawn, parked, and got out his tackle box, apparently interested in fishing, like many days after work. But this time he dropped the bomb that he was going to quit working for Fred Waring.

We pushed my trusty Sears aluminum rowboat into the lake and jumped in, like always, with rods and Bill’s triple-decker tackle box loaded with all those super special bass lures from all over the country, mostly Tennessee, each of which had an elaborate history that included, most importantly, what fish it had caught. Hercules rowed, as usual, and fed me a dose of fairy tales about Fred Waring – as usual – then stopped the boat over one of the deepest holes in the lake, and I caught an ice skate.

I was not taking it well. I should have applauded the news that he was leaving a difficult work situation and moving on. I should have promised a loan until he found work. Instead I thought about my own loss.

Bill rowed to the other side of the little lake, floating the boat. We fished. A family of spotted deer, big and little, fed gracefully a few feet away. The sun, approaching solstice, was very slowly setting, late in the evening. A cloud darkened everything and sprinkled the two of us, and a rainbow stretched from Delaware Water Gap to Pocono Mountain, spanning the firmament, a moment you couldn’t forget, especially given what followed.

I was sad, I realized, and I talked about myself for once, instead of asking questions to get him telling stories, my usual mode with him.

“When you tell funny stories about Fred Waring I forget what’s bothering me," I said.

He made a blustering joke of this. "You never told me that, mj!"

He would often see me as funny, almost always when I was serious.

"When we met," I said, "you would tell Waring fairy tales and I would forget the Kent State massacre. I would even forget Fred and his Republican money put egomaniac Richard Nixon in the White House a second darn time. I’d forget Nixon teargassed me during the November 69 candlelight procession in D.C., when I complained about his uselessly – heinously – killing 45,000 American boys my age in Vietnam. I’d even forget he secretly and therefore unconstitutionally bombed 100,000 Cambodian rice farmers to permanent useless death without permission of the Congress to which the Constitution gave exclusive right to bomb innocent Cambodian rice farmers or make any kind of ‘war’. Today when you told stories, I forgot to be upset about the stupid Watergate scandal. I forgot that Richard Nixon, once vice-president under Fred Waring’s best friend in the world, President Ike Eisenhower, but now the president himself, after a lifetime of topflight political and administrative experience keeping track of everything under the sun, including the greatest nation in history, has not been able to keep track of even ONE of his thousands of White House tapes or find it somehow, when ordered by a legitimate U.S. court to find it! Whenever you tell Waring stories, Bill, I forget I’m fed up!"

“I didn’t know you were fed up, mj,” he said, a little less blusteringly.

He forgot things too. He forgot that while he was promoting Fred Waring all those years, I'd been promoting late-sixties peace, love and brotherhood. He forgot, or maybe I’d forgotten to tell him, that after I’d married and moved to the Poconos in June ’72 I’d felt a little lost sometimes in the new world Dlune and I had created for ourselves. Then he had happened upon the scene a month later, and his friendship and stories in the rowboat fishing, and in front of his fireplace and mine, had given me something to hold on to. ‘These have been two great years for me’, I think I wanted to say, ‘and it seems to have had a lot to do with you and the Fred Waring fairy tale you brought into my life’.

Instead I said, "When you tell your Waring stories I feel like a little six year old boy. I’m morally pure. It’s 1949. I’m with my parents, following them around, learning to think like they do. We’re good sincere people, a nice family. Fred Waring is on TV every Sunday night. His hour-long music-show extravaganza reminds us we’re God’s children and we’re great and important. We bring peace and light to the world. I do my little part to help out, singing hymns in church, not dropping the sugar bowl, learning to read the backs of cereal boxes and generally behaving like a boy saint so as not to embarrass my preacher father. We don’t screw up. We go to war in other people’s countries, firebombing their beautiful ancient cities, like Dresden, into total undiscoverable smithereens, only for the very best, most moral, and carefully studied of reasons."

Bill was silent for once. He didn’t run across thoughtful self-revelation very often, probably. Few people did. A lot of people through the years had not enjoyed me much, whenever I’d gotten dead serious in this way.

I was thinking about my loss, caused by Bill’s leaving Fred, when I said, more brightly, "You should write a book about your life with FredII!"

It might keep the fairy tale going a little longer for us somehow, the four of us: that’s what I was feeling, I think.

"Why don't you DO that, mj?!" was the immediate response. A joke, I thought. He was still blustering in his usual joking way.

Whereas I didn’t talk much, generally speaking. And when I did, I usually said things carefully considered.

"I wrote a book," I smiled nervously, "before we moved here; about meeting Dlune and her Northwest Indian people in Canada. ‘The Remaking’, I called it. The whole manuscript is in a bunch of thick manila envelopes in a box in our bedroom closet."

"Mj," he sat up leaning on the oars, breathed in deeply, and delivered an elaborately unusual and dramatic kind of speech, just for me, his friend mj.

It was another one of his formalized ritual customs, you might say.[1] If he liked you enough, if he was enjoying the friendship enough, he would periodically rant a tease at you with loud half-mocking bombast, commemorating the friendship with a huge degree of joviality, admitting he liked you a fair amount but declaiming before man, God and the deer on the banks the litany of things that most boggled his intelligent and wise mind about you and your inscrutable universe. Loudly, very loudly, always smiling warmly and almost shouting: ‘It sure is strange I like you so much, mj lorenzo, when you do such strange things as this, this and this’, is what it added up to, except for being more flowery and less direct and much more celebratory, proclaiming your faults and strengths, both, in a loud, explosive, party-like laughing rant. He liked you a lot, it all said, in effect, only without using any words of the type men avoided – like the plague – saying to a buddy they cared about.

Even as early as the very first day we had met, come to think of it, right after telling me the Becky story, in fact, he had already begun to formulate the first of his great mj lorenzo litanies. He carried on jokingly for quite a while that day about the funny way I planted roses. I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about and was so overwhelmed by his noisy personality, his incredible knock-out energy and unusually good spirits and warmth and shocking interpersonal style in general, I could only smile and take it. But I found out that once Bill Blackburn had pegged you with a uniquely identifying characteristic that amused him for some inexplicable reason, the characteristic accompanied you wherever you went, just as Athena’s owl always accompanied Athena. You’d be at a fundraising concert he and Betty Ann had organized with huge personal bother to help you promote your drug and alcohol treatment program, and he would bring it up in front of every dignitary in the county about the funny way Dr. Lorenzo, the new county drug and alcohol chief, planted rose bushes. You would be in a dead serious board meeting for the Alcohol Council to discuss the possible momentous founding of a halfway house for alcoholics and up it would come with great uproar and clamor. And in front of your wife while the two couples played Monopoly or Liars’ Dice, he would bring that thing up with all his warmth and hilarity and tease and I would just sit there numb and bewildered, clear about nothing except that this all seemed to say he liked me because I amused him. Year after year it would pop up in the most impossible and embarrassing settings, this supposed characteristic you couldn’t grasp, since he never gave the specifics of why your rose technique was funny, and all you could do was sit and accept the roast, though never ever understanding what in the world was funny about your rose bush planting techniques anyway, never comprehending his exact purpose, except to understand that he was once again celebrating the friendship in public for all to hear, honoring it, admitting he had never forgotten the friendship because he would also inform everyone of all the times and places he had told the story of your funny roses to other people even after you had gone off to live in Colorado. He had probably told the tale to a thousand audiences. You were memorialized in his pantheon of heroes and anti-heroes deserving of hilarious tales that taught worthy but incomprehensible lessons. He could never let you forget your importance to him in this way, ever, for as long as you remained friends.

I finally got the feeling, after years and years of this inexplicable falderal, that he might have been trying to tell me something else about myself besides the fact that I planted rosebushes funny. But what might it have been? The message, if there was one, was so indirect and camouflaged with bombast and hilarity to soften you up, you never got the real and actual message. But finally trying to sum up the friendship one day after many years, I thought the overall gist that Bill might have been wanting to send me, maybe, from time to time down through the years, could have gone something like this: mj, you might be some big falutin’ doc shrink, but you sure don’t know very much about some pretty basic things, including your own crazy over-self-analyzed shrink self; but you’re okay anyway, you’re good enough for me: something like that. Whatever the true and critical teaching lesson might have been, he would never have rubbed my nose in it. He liked and respected me too much for that. And one of the reasons he liked me and respected me was this funny reason: I was not like Fred Waring in certain important ways. Maybe Fred and I both had our heads up our asses at a similar Anglo angle at times, but Bill could never have teased and ranted Fred about that hilarious angle as he could and did me, and it was one of the things he liked about me so much. Maybe I would never be able to see as clearly as he could just exactly how fucked up I was, but at least I accepted that I was fucked up and I looked sheepish whenever he teased me about it. Fred would have balked and bucked and kicked and bitten like a mean billy goat, or thrown a box of Shawnee golf shirts at Bill to shut him up.

Maybe Bill picked men to spend his earthly days around, like Fred – or me, even – who bewildered and fascinated him enough or challenged him in some way enough that they made good captivating source material for the art of storytelling he practiced whenever he wasn’t occupied with something else.

It’s too late now, sadly, but I wonder if I shouldn’t have tried at least once asking Bill to teach me all he knew about planting roses. Maybe he was trying to tell me he knew something about roses I didn’t know, even though I never saw him planting anything at all, not even once. Maybe he was hinting that I judged him too quickly, that there was a lot I didn’t know about him, that I underestimated him and what he could offer me as a friend, that I underestimated his knowledge of things in general and too often thought he needed my help, when in fact I needed his. Why did I hide out in silence so often, for instance, only wanting to hear stories about his boss while rarely talking about myself? Maybe with all that razzing he was trying to shake me loose and get me relaxed and talking like most friends talked. What was mj lorenzo hiding? Why hide behind a professional mask or shrink act or fairy tale when Bill Blackburn was around?

Or quite the contrary, maybe he was trying to tell me he knew nothing I didn’t know, or couldn’t know as well as he, easily, that I built him up too much in my imagination, lionized him inappropriately when I might have been already in possession of as much valuable knowledge as he without knowing it, and should have been walking around with as much ridiculous bombast as he, telling my own stories, instead of acting shy and giving all my power away to him. Why then didn’t he just come out with whatever he really felt? What was he hiding?  

It wasn’t too long after we met that he developed a second razz I remember much better. The point of this one, once again, was never as clear to me as it was to him, I assume, but I guess it had something to do with my gullibility. Since we each had married recently and now had almost identical homes, side by side, it seemed only natural we would compare notes on various aspects of our manly lives from time to time and this we did during intimate confessional or bragging moments, but all this wasn’t enough for Bill Blackburn
for some weird reason. He had to propel, once again, a comprehensible but quiet aspect of our friendship, this parallel between us, to a bewildering level of public hoopla and uproar. He began this strange creative process by mentioning to me one day how differently we made fires in our fireplaces. Each of us had just settled down with a woman and wanted to feel like a real man, and so would make a fire in the fireplace to feel cozy and warm and romantic, or to help guests feel good. I had never lived in a house with a working fireplace before, however; and I had dropped out of Boy Scouts after a week when I was twelve. But I had developed my technique from scratch intuitively, and gotten some good fires going in our new house at Spring Lake, except that one night I had thrown on a board that had been soaked in creosote at some point in its travels, and I had nearly burned down the house.

When the two of us were at my house Bill would witness my tireless efforts to keep a fire going. During a conversation with him, meaning while he told stories, I would have to get up again and again to throw logs on or push wood and embers around to create ventilation and log surface for a nice continuous burning fire. He would interrupt his story briefly each time, and compliment me on my hard work keeping a fire going, and in this way he had managed one night to draw out of me the story about the creosote error that had caused such a roaring fire with so much wicked smoke in the house that I’d had to use a chemical fire extinguisher to save the house, making a huge mess that hadn’t impressed Dlune very much with my manliness, especially since she was half Native American from freezing wilderness Alberta and knew fires well.

A week later he invited me next door to his house to talk and sip martinis. After we had talked a while, meaning of course, after I had listened to a few stories, he asked me how I liked the fire in his fireplace. It was decent, I said, about as full as one of my own. A half hour later he asked again. I said it was a good-bodied fire. It gave off heat and light and a feeling of warmth that made a guest feel welcome.

“How do you keep it going?” I asked, for he’d gotten up only once or twice to give the thing the barest attention, all this time.

“It’s an old Indian trick,” he said. He knew I respected his tribal background, though we hadn’t explored it much. That happened much later.

“Really?” I said, impressed. “What’s the trick?”

He wouldn’t say.

It was a ‘traditional’ secret.

The night progressed and I was increasingly amazed at the trick and let him know. He had gotten up to look at the fire only once or twice, and that was all he’d done, just – kind of dramatically – looked at it from several angles and then sat down again.

By now it was so late we knew bedtime was nearing, since we both had to work the next day, and still the fire was burning smoothly and brightly; yet he would not tell me the ‘old Indian trick’. But after one last dose of hemming and hawing he finally broke down and told me that he had bought a log at a supermarket, specially filled with fuel so it would burn for hours with no attention required. I had never heard of such a thing, of course, since I had been in medical training for years and years, cut off from normal human life, living in rented rooms and Victorian flats in the big log-less inner city of Philadelphia with my nose in huge, incomprehensible books. He laughed and laughed. I’d been the successful target of a well thought out practical joke, a real, true Indian ‘trick’.

He had psyched me out so well, in fact, that his trick for tricking me had worked absolutely perfectly, and I had waltzed innocently, virtually singing, straight into the trap. Ha ha ha.

Did I ever hear about that one! It came up more than the stupid rose bushes. It was his favorite story about me: how the big important doc shrink director of the State of Pennsylvania’s ‘Monroe County Drug and Alcohol Program’ had actually believed his neighbor Bill Blackburn’s story that he kept his fireplace going effortlessly by an ‘old Indian trick’ when it was just a fake old U.S. American factory-made gas log. He told the story any time I was around, especially if there was a third person who hadn’t heard it. Sometimes he told it even when everyone present had heard it several times before, and always with the greatest hoopla and tease. I would always forget it was coming. It would come out right at the very most dramatic and climactic moment of a party, the moment of greatest general affection and nostalgia and I would always be embarrassed to death, humbled and overwhelmed by his razzing affection one more time, just as I had been on the night he had told me he had bought the darn stupid gas thing at the supermarket.

At bottom Bill was an artist, I think, and structured his life to some extent around his art of storytelling, always looking for a story to tell, and the perfect occasion for telling it. Sometimes he even created events just in order to create a story, as in this case. Not just any funny story, but an important story. He looked for stories that taught something important. Once you knew him really well, you understood this better. You learned gradually what was important to him, and why he told the stories he did, even if it took your whole life to grasp the very, very basic point. And he may be dead now, technically speaking, and yet he still has me going like crazy with his inscrutable razzes, as you can see.

And I think one of the reasons we became such good friends was that we saw eye to eye from day one, that Fred Waring was as good a story as anyone could find. We just couldn’t agree at first on what the story was exactly.

"Anybody who plants roses the way you do, mj!” he shouted uproariously over his oars as lecturn, even though I was only two little rowboat seats away; “Anybody who reads books about shamans and Greek gods the way you do, would do that, write a book about Indians and leave it in a box!" He laughed up a small storm on the lake, rocking the aluminum Sears rowboat. His words bounced around the lake, echoing off banks. "Anybody who married a woman like Dlune, half Indian and half crazy Swede; any half-baked psychiatrist –, any Alcohol and Drug Chief who uses a Tennessee bass lure like YOU do, would DO a thing like that, mj."

Write a book about Indians and leave it in a box in a closet!

Then there followed an enormous explosion of Bill Blackburn uproar. He laughed and laughed the lake full of fish away, not just from our lake but from several other lakes, all of them ten miles away.

“...there followed an enormous explosion of Bill Blackburn uproar.

He laughed and laughed the lake full of fish away

not just from our lake but from several other lakes

all of them ten miles away.”

I smiled; sheepishly. He liked me. He thought I was funny because I laughed at his Fred Waring fairy tales, and because I wrote funny books about Dlune and me and left them in funny boxes in funny closets.

You had to laugh after an explosion of laughter of such enormity. It was inevitable. Fred Waring might have succeeded at fighting the urge, but I could not. And I didn’t want to. If you were alive, you wanted to laugh when Bill laughed. Only a dead man could resist giving in and laughing whenever Bill Blackburn laughed. Because: even if his joke or story didn’t get you laughing, laughter of the kind he laughed was funny in and of itself. His laughter, regardless of the subject, was enormously contagious and healing. Partly because: then, a minute later, you would be laughing at yourself after all, you would realize, because your laughing at his hilarity would creep up and over, somehow, and quietly absorb the joke he had just cracked at your expense. And now you yourself had become hilarious to yourself; really; once you had gotten to enjoy the special privilege of looking at yourself through the natural healthy filter of Bill Blackburn’s worldview.

He didn’t just practice the art of storytelling, in other words; in truth, he also practiced the art of psychic emotional healing, a fact it took me a near lifetime to grasp. Because, I guess, he did not fit into any of my usual categories that meant ‘healing professional’, like doctor, psychiatrist, psychotherapist, minister, school counselor, Tarot card reader, Indian guru, etc.

Later he actually commuted to Drew University and became a minister, but in 1974 nobody in the world foresaw Bill Blackburn as a preacher. And much later when they moved to Texas to live near Betty Ann's son, Mark, he threw off that mantle just as easily as he’d thrown it on.

Bill rowed to the little arm of the lake most removed from the houses, and pretended to seriously cast his line with lure. No fish came out, naturally, the way he had been yelling and screaming and shaking the whole territory into a storm, yet he acted surprised each time the lure came up out of the water with nothing on it, and he never owned he had chased the fish away.

Some of Bill’s actions made little sense, like this one. Obviously he knew it was pointless to continue fishing after all that yelling. He was a fishing mastermind, with a thousand good detailed stories about the country’s lures and lakes to prove it. As a result there have been times over the years when for a second I have suspected Bill had some other agenda than fishing when we went out in the boat together. And now, at age sixty, 29 years after the event, with half-Native American Bill just dead and buried in some dumb graveyard in the U.S., and me in Mexico, ‘retired’, giving everything serious thought, I find it hard to dismiss the possibility with certainty. I’m suspicious he sensed our hours together were saving my life. He wanted to keep the process going that day, even if it required he pretend to be fishing. He covered it up, because if I ever caught on to the fact that he was working on me, trying to plant critical seeds of life in my half-dead soul, I might pull away.

Meanwhile, though, I was bristling inside, instead of appreciating his act of caring. Why was he making me laugh at Dlune and me, when obviously he and Betty Ann were the funny ones? Okay, so I married a Canadian Indian who was part Swedish. But he WAS an Indian. He was from a sacked and humiliated tribe of Indians.

Soon after this I got interested in his Huron background and drove to Montreal one weekend to ask a published researcher of Huron ethnohistory what in the world had happened to Bill Blackburn’s Huron tribe. Where were the Huron? Why wasn’t there a Huron reservation? What ever happened to the poor Huron?

I never, ever told Bill about this, of course. He might have thought I was soft on him. Or he would have laughed for days or years or made me the subject of another three thousand public jokes. They would have heard about it from Water Gap to Mt. Pocono, the shrink from Drug and Alcohol who gave up a whole weekend of planting roses and a Monday of work, just to research the missing tribe called Huron, driving the entire eastern axis of New York State from south to north, 350 miles, all the way to a foreign country, Canada, then through disgusting Montreal big-city traffic to McGill University, just because his friend’s mother was Huron and somebody up there was an expert on the Huron. He had never known anybody like me, was the impression I got. I was unusual in Bill’s world apparently. Weird was the word maybe.

But was it so funny or weird that I read about shamans, really? Was it funny that Carlos Castaneda had asked a Yaqui Indian shaman to show him peyote? It certainly had brought some needed reflection into the world for a few minutes, hadn't it? Maybe I hadn’t read Castaneda’s books yet really, but you had told me about them, Sammy, and I had met your grandfather and he was a shaman, and you were too, so it was natural for me to be curious and to read. Plus, I had lived with a shaman for a whole long northern Canada winter, Dlune’s grandfather. And Bill WAS an Indian, so why laugh at me? Maybe he appreciated my interest and laughed for that reason. Was it possible? Maybe; but he never explained the real reason why he laughed so hard at me. And he didn’t make it easy to guess; not for me anyway.

And say what you want about ‘weird’ or ‘funny’ for marrying a one-thirty-second-part Swede, as I’d done: what about marrying a one hundred percent SWEDE woman like HE had done? Yet he razzed ME for marrying a part-Swede. What about ending up with a newly bought house painted the exact same blue and yellow colors as the Swedish flag, because your wife was a nut cake for Swedish anything; and she was such a knockout with her yellow hair and blue eyes that you couldn’t say ‘No, Sweedie dear, I’m sorry, but this ain’t Malmö or Swedish Minnetonka, Minnesota. It’s Minisink Hills, Pennsylvania, Betty Ann, and wooden clapboard houses here have to be white!’ Even though you always wanted it white since the moment you first saw it? You couldn’t say it because she was the famous Fred Waring stage centerpiece and superstar, blonde bomb knockout Betty Ann McCall, a musical genius and artist par excellence, and she wanted your white clapboard shack painted those funny clown colors of yellow and blue so she GOT it painted those funny clown colors. Now THAT was funny.

Betty Ann's birth parents, both, I figured, must have been blue-eyed and yellow-haired. I imagined them as very good looking, love-happy Minnesota Swede teen kids who couldn’t wait to experience real love. Betty Ann never met them. Whoever they were, they gave her up for adoption. The only thing in the whole world her adoptive parents had ever told her about her real parents was: “They were Swedish.” She was adopted by nice people with a Scotch-Irish name, McCall, and grew up in Minnesota with a nice upbringing, obviously, or she could never have turned out so fabulously fine. But none of that was ever good enough for poor ol’ tragically orphanized Betty Ann, and for the rest of her life she kept looking for friends, husbands and bosses who would parent her, even though she’d had perfectly acceptable adoptive parents, and even though she was long since an adult and should not have needed ongoing parenting all her life, as it seemed to me. Yet she still thought she did. Now, that was funnier than a shrink writing books and leaving them in a closet, wasn’t it? Because then Bill came along and married her, promising her to be all she would ever need in life, only to find out afterwards that she still needed to connect to her natural Swedish parents and it was impossible, naturally, and so as a substitute she had to surround herself with bright blue and yellow Swedish-looking things, and/or with people who were willing to act all parental toward her every time she forgot she was an adult and felt and acted like an abandoned little girl. And both compulsive behaviors drove Bill up the wall whenever he had to deal with their real life cockamamie consequences.[2]

I just kept my mouth shut, though. But really, the funny ones were the half-Huron and the orphan. Every morning as I went to work at the Monroe County Drug and Alcohol Program, a normal and routine job by comparison, the half-Huron and the orphan headed off somewhere with the mythical great white father of U.S. American music we had all grown up on, back in a forgotten childhood when we were all unfathomably naive and innocent. This was the funny story, really. Dlune and I were now living in an unfulfilled and imperfect world, maybe, but it was relatively up to date, at least, and appropriately future-oriented. Whereas the Blackburns had been living for years and were still living in a live, living fairy tale that somebody had forgotten to knock off with a telling blow, and I found that hilarious every day of the week.

Now Bill wanted to bring the Waring fairy tale to an end, finally, just when I thought I still needed it for comfort and amusement. He wanted to end all my fun laughing at him and Fred and Betty Ann and their crazy-ass fairy tale existence, so I could forget my own too-real one.

If Bill left Fred, I would have to deal with stronger doses of my own reality maybe. There would be no fairy tale around to soften the punch. Finally I understood why I was upset. I didn’t like the prospect.

The second time he said it, his tone was too serious to dismiss: "Why don't you write it, mj?”

He struck a third time immediately, and this time he was even more serious! Bill Blackburn actually seemed to be trying to get me to write a freaking book about Fred Waring! "I've always wanted to write this, mj; I'm not a writer," he added.

Who was?!!!

Friendship called for such a book, apparently! And Bill had done huge favors for me and I owed him a favor, possibly. So maybe we could celebrate our famous friendship with just such a crazy book, in other words.

Damn!

I’ve always hated saying ‘no’ to a friend, so I said nothing.

We rowed to shore, tied up the rowboat and went home.

I weighed the pros and cons for days, never able to decide to commit to something as huge as writing a book about friends and famous people that would almost certainly have to be published in the end, to make Bill happy. It certainly could not be left in a box, and yet I was trained as a psychiatrist, not a writer. That’s why I had left The Remaking in a box! Didn’t he get it? I had no idea how to go about writing or publishing a book, as I saw myself. I had no idea, even as late as the year 1974, that my father had published The Remaking informally behind my back three years before, in ’71, or that the crazy thing had actually attained a little success already. I didn’t hear about all of that until your friends at Penn, Sammy, ‘the Remaking pundits’ told me in 1980, six years later. So I just saw myself still, in ‘74, as a literary numbskull, a half-baked shrink with a writer’s yearning to write but no skill or chutzpa to pull it off. Why kid myself or anybody else?

But Bill went and talked to Betty Ann, and he called me one night after work to tell me that the two of them had talked about all of this and had set a date for a taped interview two weeks later on Saturday night.

DARN!

But not to worry, he said, because we would just have a good old time and treat the whole thing like a party, drinking martinis the way we always did.

Damn!

Darn.

Damn![3]

“Bill rowed to the other side of the little lake, floating the boat.

We fished.

A family of spotted deer, big and little, fed gracefully a few feet away.”