Janet Berliner

RETURN TO THE STORYTELLERS HOMEPAGE

Unless something miraculous occurs, this is likely to be my last SU blog. For many months, I have been suffering intense chronic pain. In addition, I have the tremors. My hands hover over the keys like anxious hummingbirds, which makes writing well nigh impossible.  This blog came about because, this week, I was asked to write an Author’s Note for my Crichton Book.  Somehow, I did it, thus I have it to post for your interest-or not.  Be happy.

The house was parked halfway down a Santa Monica side street, close enough to the beach that, at seven in the morning, I could smell the December fog coming off the ocean.  I was an hour early. I sat on the concrete front step, watched a jogger sweat his way down the street, and lit a cigarette, reminding myself that I had better make sure to bury the ash and the butt.

Only hours before, I had finished the last of my preparation for this extraordinary assignment-a one-week interview with Dr. Michael Crichton-by reading his Master’s Thesis in anthropology.  The thesis explored the possible relevance between the size of the brain and other physical parts in man and animal against IQ and ability, demonstrating that a popular racist theory of the time-that the Egyptians were descended from Europeans, not Africans, since Africans could not have had the brain capacity to build such a great civilization-could not stand up to scientific examination.  The thesis included a photo of a male Jew’s nose being measured by calipers. I had read six million words of Michael’s work, including twelve drafts of Jurassic Park.  The first several of those used the children as the major protagonists, that being what Michael truly wished to write. Nobody had told me to read everything, but I was almost as OCD as Dr. Crichton.  Turned out to be a good thing, since I was quizzed mercilessly before he accepted me as worthy of doing the work I had set out to do.

Judging by the exterior of the house, this was to be a less-than-exciting week.  There was no flower to be seen, no name above the mail slot.  The grass was so well trimmed it looked as if the blades had been measured to make certain they were all the same height.

It all looked so ordinary that it felt institutional.

Half an hour into my wait, a car drove up.  My heart bounced, but three women climbed out. They introduced themselves as his staff.  One offered me a cup of coffee, which I gladly accepted.  She brought it outside along with her own and lit a cigarette. “No lectures,” she said.

I lit one of my own.

“How long you hoping to be around?” she asked.

Hoping? A strange choice of words, I thought, and said, “All week, early morning until dinnertime.”

She choked on a mouthful of coffee.  The other two women came out to see if there was a problem.

“This poor young woman thinks she’s going to interview Michael all day, every day, for a week.  Anyone for odds?” She looked at me with pity in her eyes.  “Twenty minutes is his max, Girl.  You’ll either run out in tears or he’ll get busy or bored and tell you to leave.”

“Oh well.” I dug a small grave for my butt. As long as I could ask him about the calipers and the weak endings and the lack of interest in characterization, my homework would have been worthwhile.

An SUV drove up to the house and parked.  The girl with me whispered good luck and made a rapid departure as Michael Crichton strode toward me.  He was six foot nine; I’m five two on a good day. I reminded myself that intimidation was not an option.

“You’re early,” he said.

I stood up. My nose was on line with his belly button. “One of my greatest failings,” I said.

He smiled.  For one, fleeting moment, he looked like a little boy. I would learn that he doled out smiles like bonuses. Most of the time his body language was arrogant and said, “I’m a big man, rich and famous.”

We entered the house. Like the garden, it was perfect, neat, spare. I sat down in the corner of a large, expensive leather sofa and placed my microcassette recorder between us. He took an armchair and stretched his legs along the coffee table. His feet made it perfectly to the end.

“How much of my work have you read?” he asked.

“All of it.”

“Really?”

The tone of his voice annoyed me.

“Yes,” I said. “Really.”

He began to grill me, in true professorial mode.

“Which one did you like most.”

“Travels.”

He looked surprised. “Why?”

“Because it’s the only one written in your true voice and because I’m a gypsy.”

Without further comment, he said, “Let’s get started.”

I hesitated.  He looked annoyed.

“I’d like to talk for a while first,” I said, trying not to sound as nervous as I felt.

“I’m a busy man,” he said. “Don’t waste my time.”

Was I closing in on twenty minutes? I glanced at my watch. “That’s more likely to happen if we don’t talk first,” I said.

A week later, we closed up shop.  I’d been presenting drafts daily. The big man was happy enough to send me flowers in ICU, where I lay after 7 days and nights of work. He said he looked forward to doing updates every few years, and then he took off for Hawaii.

Clearly, given where this book ends, the updates never happened. His life became additionally complicated by lawsuits, a divorce and remarriage, and a move to New York. He dealt with the book and movie sequels of Jurassic Park and with ER, and was increasingly involved with the Press as his novels began to deal with major political issues. As for our book, it had an ISBN number and was in the catalogue, but there was always something that stopped the process from reaching completion.

He returned to Los Angeles, remarried, was the victim of a home invasion in the little sterile house where we’d worked. The years passed, the wall around him, literally and figuratively, grew higher.

Only those closest to him knew that he was dying.

I hope, wherever he is, he’s writing Travels II.

–30–

I’m a bit late getting this post done this month as I had intended to include a video I had received from a cousin of mine who has MS. Many of you have probably seen the video in the time that it’s circulated the Internet. It shows three Chinese dancers, each of whom is missing at least one limb. The video isn’t about how sad it is that these dancers have lost limbs, but about the beauty they make dancing as they are.

Also, every year an old friend of mine sends me a calendar from the Foot and Mouth Painters. I don’t think it requires much explanation to know what that calendar contains.

Previously here on Storytellers Unplugged, I’ve mentioned some of the other charities I support, such as Half The Sky, where the wonderful Jenny Bowen and her staff work tirelessly to help the young orphans of China, mostly girls; or Plan International that helps children and their communities in poor areas all over the world. When I feel sorry for myself, I stop and write a letter to one of my foster daughters in Africa whom I support through Plan, or to Jenny Bowen to thank her for the work she does. Sometimes I write to old writer friends who are often forgotten in the rush of life.

The point I’m making, if you haven’t picked up on it, is that I try not to dwell on my own problems, as hard as that may be when your hands hurt just trying to tear the toilet paper off the roll. When I feel sorry for myself, I remember those who have it worse and yet go on. That allows me to go on.

So, hopefully, in the new year, when you feel your limitations pounding on you, instead of feeling sorry for yourself, you will do as the dancers I mentioned at the beginning have done and use what you have to make something beautiful.

I hope you’ve all had joyous holidays and let’s have a wonderful new year.

This October I wanted to share a story that was published earlier this year in DOORWAYS, the wonderful magazine edited by our own Mort Castle. If you’re not a reader of it, you should be. There are many wonderful stories to be found in its pages. I hope you think this is one of them. –Janet

The sun rose over Bloody Pond, promising another hot and humid Tennessee day and heightening the odor of decay and death. Little moved in the stillness of that dreadful morning, little except the shoulders of the slim Union soldier who knelt at the edge of the pond, looking out across the bodies. Thinking how well the night breezes had masked the stench with the heavy smell of peach blossoms from the orchard that lay at the eastern end of what, two days before, had been dubbed the Hornet’s Nest.

Next to the soldier lay an open haversack which held a stack of papers inked with the smudged words of a lengthy war report. Working with deft hands, the soldier transformed the pages into miniature boats, the kind that children construct when they go to the park to feed the swans. They formed a flotilla, which one by one the soldier floated out into the water, watching each boat until it wedged between bodies on a sea of mud and caked blood.

When the last boat had been launched, the soldier dug into the knapsack and retrieved Peter Louis’ journal. A drizzle began, soft and gentle. Grateful for the slight relief from the heat, the soldier formed a makeshift umbrella over the pages and began to read.

On a march, Peter wrote, a battery can travel up to five miles an hour on a good road. He wrote of the fires they built in holes in the ground, of the Confederate belief that food traveled less heavily in the belly than the haversack so they ate their 3-day rations at once and went hungry for the rest of the way. He wrote in the rain and on mud-stained pages of hearing Yankee bugles, of rumors of coughing cured by the application of red-hot pokers, of diarrhea and of nightmares of dead men yelling retreat, retreat. The only pleasant occurrence, he wrote, was the day they came across Northerners eating a breakfast of hot meat, white bread, and sweet coffee. Stealing into their camp, he filled his belly with food and his haversack with letters and photos.

He wrote that General Johnston sanctioned the scavenging by acquiring for himself a Yankee tin cup. He would use it to direct battle, he said, index finger hooked through the handle.

According to the journal, Peter endured intermittent showers and steamy sunshine with a certain degree of stoicism. He strangely felt no real fear until he was shot at by fellow Confederates who saw the dress-blue uniforms of the Orleans Guard and, thinking them the enemy, fired upon them. At that, he and the others turned their dress-blues–”graveyard clothes” the Federals called them, when they found out what had happened–inside out and wore them with the white silk linings visible. This to prevent being killed by their own who naturally assumed that anyone wearing blue had to be a Union soldier.

On April 5, 1862, encamped within a short distance of the enemy army which was going about its normal business, Peter wrote in his journal, unconsciously echoing what Sherman had written to Grant that very day: “I don’t believe that anything much will happen today. Some picket firing maybe. Nothing more.”

I will walk toward the picket line, he wrote.  No attacks are made at night on the line. It is an unspoken rule. It is a time for the swapping of tobacco and coffee and tall tales, a time for the gathering of firewood and courage. I will be safe there.

The reading was slow going, for between the lines the soldier’s mind set passages which did not exist on the page.  Finally, eyes blurred by fatigue, the soldier reread the last words of that last entry.

I will be safe there.

Then the words on the page gave way to the pages of memory—

#

—The walls of her room at Mrs. Rice’s House of Ill Repute were like sugar cookies, stippled, cream-colored, wafer thin. Even though she had pulled her bed away from the wall, she could hear everything in the room next door. The conversation wasn’t a problem, but when the sounds of intimacy started, she covered her head with her pillow.

Most of the time.

Today was not one of those days. Today she heard familiar laughter and covered the sounds with quiet sobbing. When the springs ceased to squeak and the laughter stopped, she moved to the open window and watched the pathway until she saw him.

Peter.

She bit down upon her lip to stop herself from heaping curses upon his head.

As if he had heard her, he turned and stared upward. She moved quickly aside. When she returned to her post, he was nowhere to be seen. She looked sideways at the small form lying so still, so very still, in its cot in the corner of the room.

Behind her, Mrs. Rice tapped lightly on the doorframe. “He ain’t never made a sound, has he?”

Lucy jumped, turned around, swiped at her tears with her sleeve. “No, Ma’am, Mrs. Rice. Not a single cry since…. What year is this, Mrs. Rice?” she asked.

“Far as I know, it’s the Year of Our Lord, Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-two. Least it was this morning. Why you asking, Girl?”

“Just countin’ how long I been in Memphis. Wonderin’ if I’ll ever get used to it, is all.”

“There’s a man downstairs on his way to New Orleans  says he saw you in the garden yesterday, and again just now right here.” Mrs. Rice joined Lucy at the window. “Says you remind him of someone. Says he’ll be back here in a week and wants you. No one else.”

Lucy stared out of the open window, across the rooftops of the city that had given her refuge. A breeze drifted into her small room. It brought with it a heavy scent of magnolias, so different from the soft fragrance of that other spring–the trees heralding Peter’s arrival with a celebration of flowers, as if the Lord had planned for him to be there during peach blossom season and fall in love with her.

By virtue of her roots, Lucy was born the light-skinned daughter of a slave family on a farm in Southern Tennessee, in the rich lands southwest of Pittsburg Landing. By virtue of her nature, she was born free as the flies that pecked at the sweet syrup of the peaches that grew in the orchards of her childhood.

Her master was a good enough man who did not ask much of her and let her go when he could have stopped her from leaving. He liked having her around. Every now and again he had her lift her skirts for him and show him her ankles, but he was a God-loving man and didn’t touch where another master might have touched. Truth to tell, she wouldn’t have minded a night here, an afternoon there, pleasuring him, but her Mama put the fear of The Lord into her. Her Daddy, he didn’t speak much, but her Mama, she was a different matter.

“Don’t you go making no white babies, Lucinda,” she said.

“I’m not making babies, Mama,” Lucy said. “Not ever.”

Which was true then and might have stayed true, were it not that during that spring of her fifteenth year, she fell in love with her master’s second cousin, come to spend Easter of 1859 in the countryside.

What a time they’d had, rolling around in the fragrant reds of fallen blossoms in the ten-acre peach orchard, in full bloom at the west end of the pond. How they’d laughed, scratching their initials into the trunk of the tree beneath which they had consummated their passion.

Making a baby, just as her Mama had feared.

She said nothing about this to Peter, not even when the blossoms fell, the fruit ripened, and he returned to his home in Cairo, Illinois. By the time she figured out how to follow him there, throwing herself successfully upon the mercy of her unusual master, her slim and boyish frame was distorted and heavy with child.

How angry Peter had been when she presented herself to him, Lucy thought. How ashamed before his fashionable Cairo family.

“It’s your child, too,” she’d said. “You got to care for it, Peter.”

Too late, she learned that though the disposition of her lover’s birth in Cairo, Illinois, made him a Yankee, he was, by disposition of his heart, a Confederate.

“Listen to you, talking like you’re white folk,” he said. “Me care for a nigger child? You’re crazy.”

Believing he would get over his shock, she let him take her to the local hotel. There, he made love to her once or twice, then beat her roundly until she was sure the baby loosened.

“You’re murdering your own child,” she sobbed.

“I hope so,” Peter muttered. Looking relieved, he told her he was leaving home to board the Mississippi steamboat captained by his old acquaintance, twenty five-year old Samuel Clemens, and dispatched her back to the South.

Only she didn’t go back to the farm. She headed straight down the Mississippi river on a cotton barge to the only place where she’d been told she’d be given shelter. This place, here, in Memphis, where she and her unborn child and her newly born hatred could find protection.

“What about the young man?” Mrs. Rice said. “I’ve not asked this of you before, but times is rough and he’s willing to pay a lot of money.”

“I’ll do it,” Lucy said, because she owed this to Mrs. Rice. To herself. To–she glanced again into the corner. “In one of the other rooms.”

The days and nights passed, as they were wont to do, and the time came for Lucy to keep her promise to Mrs. Rice.

“There is only one Lucy,” Peter said, as if they had last seen each other in the orchard and not in Cairo. “Only one Lucy and as desirable as ever.” He loosened the top button of his uniform jacket, reached out to touch her long hair, and let his gaze linger upon her breasts, still swollen with mother’s milk. She thought about killing him there and then. He deserved no less.

“Let us talk, Lucy,” he said. “Let us laugh and make love, as we did before.”

Swallowing the bile that rose at the thought of coupling with him again, she offered him a glass of wine. He took it, and several more. Becoming loquacious, he talked of his broken dream of joining Samuel Clemens on the river. “By the time he had made up my mind it was too late,” he said. “Clemens had been elected 2^nd Lieutenant in an irregular unit of 15 men whose self-proclaimed duty it was to keep an eye on Grant’s forces.”

Clemens being something of a hero to him, Peter had deliberated joining the same unit. Again, he thought too long. Quickly bored by saddle sores, Clemens said the hell with it. Riding an old mule because he’d injured his foot jumping out of a hayloft, he hightailed it back to silver country to take up a career as a journalist.

Peter lay back on the pillows and motioned for Lucy to join him. “Does that not sound to you to be the perfect life,” he said. “How much better to be a reporter than a soldier.”

He’d tried to get a job with the local paper, he told her. When that didn’t immediately pan out, he took a civilian job in the local telegraph office, where he figured he could read and learn from the important papers that passed regularly through his hands.

Though Grant was, to his regret, a Yankee, he was worthy, Peter thought, of admiration and imitation. This led to an affect which he’d adopted, that of chewing incessantly on an unlit cigar.  It also led to a deep interest in the Yankee reports that passed through his hands, many of which came from the pens of Generals Sherman and Grant.

When the papers particularly fascinated him, he took them home to study at his leisure, so that when the war was done–”I figure that to be only a matter of a few months”–he could make a name for himself by writing about them. He became familiar with the reports, returns, and information that Grant sent to Washington, telling of the strength and position of his command, as demanded by Secretary of War Stanton, otherwise known as “Old Man Mars.”

Since Peter kept the reports, they never reached their destination. Furious, Secretary Stanton complained to General Halleck, who at once suspended Grant from command and ordered him to Ft. Henry.

Learning of this, Peter felt pleased with his contribution to the war effort. After all, he had caused it to happen by secreting away the documents.

“I thought about ceremoniously burning the valuable papers I had kept,” he said, “but I could not let go of so significant a trophy.” Unless they actually saw the orders, Washington Headquarters would never know whether the General had dispatched the messages or failed to do so while in some alcoholic haze. “It will forever remain a mystery to which only I, Peter Louis, and you Lucy, hold the answer.”

“And if I tell them what you have done?” Lucy asked, almost casually.

“You wouldn’t do that.  You love me,” he said, and went on talking.

Peter’s pleasure at having changed the course of the war was short-lived. Grant’s replacement had received a leg injury; Grant was returned to duty to await first Buell’s army, then the arrival of Halleck who would take command.

By the end of February of the year 1962, Peter was ready to make a new contribution to the war effort. While he did not want to join the regular army and risk being wounded or killed, he had become enchanted by the romance of war and wanted to learn more first hand.

“I went down the Mississippi, involved myself in what some refer to as the illicit cotton trade, then decided to proceed to New Orleans and become a recorder. In truth, I had no special need to experience The Elephant, combat, first hand, but when I set eyes on this uniform I could not stop myself.” He paraded before the tall mirror that stood atop the dresser. “Do you not think I look handsome decked out in the dress-blues of the Orleans Guards Battalion, Sweet Lucy?”

“Where are you headed now?” Lucy asked.

“Dead in the direction of the peach orchards,” he said. “Wouldn’t you know they’d send me to Shiloh.”

Lucy never said another word, not then, not while he had his way with her, not afterward. Fate, synchronicity, coincidence–whatever it was that had brought Peter here–turned her into a puppet obedient to visions and voices that filled her mind. What exactly they meant her to do she did not yet know. But she would, she told herself. Soon enough, she would.

As Peter left, he put a generous wad of money on the dresser. “We’ll see each other again when it’s over,” he said.

Oh yes, we’ll see each other again. The thought came unbidden to Lucy. And then it will be over.

She returned to her room and stood, as she so often did, before the open window. “I have to go away for a while,” she whispered, her voice softer than the Memphis breeze. “But I’ll come back.” She drifted toward the cot in the corner. Bending over, she blew softly on her son’s face and wiped the trickle of sweat from his brow. “I promise I’ll come back.”

“Come back from where?” Mrs. Rice asked, moving from the frame of the doorway toward the battered rocking chair near the child’s cot. She sat down heavily. “You’re not going back to that place are you?”

Lucy nodded. “I got to.”

“You’ll never make it through. Look at yourself in the mirror. At best you look like a defenseless young woman, at worst you look like what you are.”

“A runaway?”

“Target practice or worse for the first trigger happy Confederate soldier who crosses your path.”

Reaching into the top drawer of her dresser, Lucy removed a pair of scissors and cropped her hair close to her head. Then she tore her petticoat into strips and bound up her breasts. A couple of Henna rinses and the transformation would be complete, she thought.

“I been through worse dangers. I been waiting for this time, Mrs. Rice.” Lucy glanced back down at the crib, at the child who had never uttered a sound, never opened his eyes, never talked or walked or shed a nightmare tear. Were it not for his bodily functions, he might as well not be alive. “Take care of him for me while I’m gone,” she said. “Take care of my little boy.”—

#

— The rain stopped. The moon rose, lighting peach orchards in full blossom reminiscent of the spring of Lucy’s youth. On the march to the farm, it had seemed to her that she would never be dry again, that her feet in their over-sized Union army issue boots would never lose their blisters or her stomach its need to unburden itself of its contents. Her thoughts were mostly of her parents, to whom she had many times written in care of the master.  After a long silence, he had written back, telling her with what seemed like genuine sorrow that her mother had died.  He had buried her in the family cemetery.  After the funeral, he wrote, her father had simply disappeared.

She would see them both again, she thought, as Peter moved toward picket line.  If God forgave her for what she had to do.

“Are you not afraid, Soldier?” she asked, keeping her voice muffled.

“Yes,” Peter said, surprising her. “Grant is a clever man. He must be prepared for all eventualities.”

“One can never be prepared for all eventualities,” she said, her face half turned away and masked by the brim of a cap pulled low.

“I would like to forget about the war for this night,” Peter said.

“I have thought of nothing else since we buried fifteen of our dead at Fallen Timbers. Would you walk with me in the orchard, Soldier?” Lucy said. “Surely if we decorate ourselves with blossoms we will be protected from harm.”

She slouched, head averted and walking awkwardly in a uniform that was much too big. They continued for a while in silence. Then, stopping several feet before a tree that stood directly in the moonlight, she pointed at the trunk.

Using her normal voice this time, she said, “Look. It’s still there.”

“Lucy?”

“Took you long enough,” she said. “I thought perhaps you had forgotten me again.” She removed her hat and turned to face him.

“How could I place you in this context? How could you be a soldier?”

“Why not? After what you did to me, it was easy. Besides, do you think I told them that I was a woman? A nigger woman?” she said, though her voice held more sorrow than hatred.

“I buried it here. Our love. Here among the blossoms. It has been waiting a long time for your return to this place where it was born, only to be silenced by your own hand.”

“What are you talking about?”

She laughed, a hollow, humorless sound. “Our love has no voice. You stole it. Now it’s time for you to give it back.”

At 8 a.m. April 6^th–the following morning–Sherman heard picket firing in his front.

Lucy heard it, too.

And Johnston, who hoped to drive the disorganized Federals into the swamps of Snake and Owl Creeks and destroy them.

To the Country Boys of Shiloh, the shots were an overture. They were young and inexperienced volunteers, but what they lacked in experience they made up for in valor. Advancing upon the enemy, they broke silence and sang as they marched to the band playing Dixie.

The shelling began, every fifteen minutes, red streaks arcing against the sky. By the end of the day, the Federals had been driven back to Pittsburg Landing, but that night, while the Rebels looted from captured Yankee camps and did little to reorganize their scattered units, Grant reinforced his lines with the fresh troops of General Buell and Lew Wallace and at dawn on the 7^th launched a counter attack which, by early afternoon, had the Confederates in full retreat.—

#

—Present reality pushed away the press of memory.  The sun, now at its height, fulfilled its brutal promise, burning into the back of Lucy’s neck and charring the flesh of the bodies floating face down on Bloody Pond. Lucy did not have to look down into the pond for Peter. There was no need. The bayonet was planted too deep. He could not have moved from the tree where she had left him.

Next to Lucy lay Peter’s haversack, empty now of all but his journal. She retrieved it once more from the knapsack and held it in her hand like a prayer book.  I must pray for their souls, she thought, but unable to find words, she stared out at that world of bombs and blossoms and blood and just listened to the dead and the dying.

Then, in her mind, or maybe her heart, she heard a different sound–the piercing cry of life floating to her from a whorehouse in Memphis.

Able at last to cry for herself, she wept out loud and began to pray.

-30-

by Janet Berliner

Last night I took a bath.

No big deal, you say?

Actually, it’s a huge deal for me. At the end of 2003, they wanted to pull the plug on me. Four years ago, I came home palsied, unable to eat or go to toilet on my own, and unable to walk or write my name.

It’s been a long journey from there to getting into that tub unaided: The realisation of a dream.

I tore a sheet of paper out of the notebook next to the tub and fashioned a little boat, which I floated in the water. Watching it, my mind drifted to a much larger tub — the Caribbean Sea. It’s 1993: My Rasta friend, David, bends his knees, folding his seven-foot frame almost in half so that he can give me an odd-shaped, bandana-wrapped package he holds in both hands like an offering. I have been fighting a medical crisis and am not strong enough to stand up and greet him. In fact, I have hardly moved from my straw wing-chair in close to a month, except to bathe and be carried to the balcony to watch sailboats move across the Caribbean sunsets over Egmont Bay.

I take the package from him and thank him in little more than a whisper.

David rises to his full height, enhanced to nearly eight feet by the dreadlocks piled high on his head and covered by a striped green, red and yellow knitted cap, the colors of Jamaica.

He bestows upon me one of his rare smiles and raises his arms into the air. “We dance again soon.” He turns in a circle. Poised, elegant, proud of his stature and of the healing arts for which he had been named King David by the inner islanders who live around Mount Sinai, at the edge of the Grand Etang Rain Forest.

I manage a smile, remembering our dance in the sultry early morning hours at Fantasia 2000 to Bob Marley’s “Get Up Stand Up.” Me, a 5’2″ fifty year old political exile from South Africa, being held up in the air at eye-level by David, a seven foot Rasta with the bearing of a king. He swirls around. We sing Marley’s political lyrics and are equally captive to the music and to the air scented by the sea and the blooming flamboyant trees that hang over the beach and the nightclub.

The contents of the bandana in my lap feel soft to the touch. “Fresh sweet Trini figs to heal you,” David says.

Could it be?

For the year before my illness, I have lived in the West Indies. I have searched forests and marketplaces for figs. The figs of my memory, small and pear-shaped, green on the outside — or the deep purple color of eggplants — with sweet-tasting flesh and seeds that crunch like Grape Nuts and taste like moist brown sugar. Sometimes I think that my entire life has been a search for the tropical and subtropical tree of the mulberry family that bears figs. Ficus carica. A search for the figs and Passion Flowers, the nasturtiums and freesias and wild avocados of my youth. Not just so that I can write of them, but so that I can touch and smell and taste them, the way I did as a child hiding, dreaming, in the lush profusion of an African garden.

In Grenada, I found more than twenty varieties of what the locals call figs, but they were not what I wanted. Those were bananas, everything from four-inch finger-bananas to plantains. Except for the fruity bananas, the islanders use them mostly in stews, to thicken them as we might use potatoes. I could not have known that what I sought was only to be found in Trinidad, 80 kilometers and an overnight ferry ride away.

David smiles. “I go now,” he says.

“Go to come back,” I answer my voice already stronger.

“Come soon,” he says, and is gone. Striding down a road without signposts toward the Sugar Mill where tonight, as on all Friday nights, there will be dancing and loving and fighting in the light of a yellow moon.

I undo the knot in the scarf and the figs tumble forth. I pick one up, smell it, and bite into it. As I savor its sweetness, I remember my first visit to Grenada…

…The Amazing Grace is an old freighter that was built to service the lighthouses along the Scottish coast and the islands of the North Sea. She’s steel-hulled, but her cabins and decks are primarily wood. In total, she holds about 200 passengers and crew, and her construction makes her perfect for visiting the small islands that large cruise ships can’t get near. Windjammer Barefoot Cruises used the Grace to supply its fleet of tall ships that sailed the Caribbean, but she also carried passengers looking for a less formal cruise experience.

As you left each island, generally at sunset, the strains of the song “Amazing Grace” filled the air, tugging at your heartstrings. I found a place alone each time and stayed there until dark. There is nothing more starlit than the Caribbean night sky. Each time I see it, out at sea, I feel at one with the grandeur of the universe. Intellectual doubts vanish, and I do not doubt the presence of a higher Power.

The Grace was scheduled to arrive in Grenada at dawn of the thirteenth day of our trip. All I knew about the island I had learned from books. It had been owned by the Portuguese, the French, and the British. The name started out as Concepción. The French changed it to Granada, the British to Grenade. Independence turned it into Grenada.

I learned that the island was small, twelve by twenty-five miles. It was known for its spices, its rain forest, its friendly people, it’s American Medical School, and its recent flirtation with Communism, which culminated in an attempt by Cuba to take the island and a rescue (not an invasion) by British and American forces. The currency is EC (Eastern Caribbean) $s.

The morning we arrived in Grenada, I awoke when the engines cut, and went to my porthole. We had stopped some distance from the island, yet close enough for me to see the U-shaped harbor and surroundings.

What I was looking at was like a miniature Monte Carlo. A rainbow of brightly colored tin and wooden houses, small hotels, and provision stores meandered from the top of several hills down to the business and restaurant district, which fringed the water. Fort George, like Monte Carlo’s famed Castle-Fort, crested the top of the left-hand hill. Below it, hidden from view on the far side of the hill, lay the central marketplace. Looming over that, at the top of Church Street, stood a cathedral whose bells pealed melodically and often. At the top of the opposite hill, replacing Monte Carlo’s Casinos, was a burned-out gun emplacement that spoke of the island’s recent revolution.

I was enchanted.

An hour or so later, the ship made its way into a harbor deep enough to take its hull. Eschewing tours, I found my way to Grand Anse, the longest, softest, whitest strip of beach I’d seen since South Africa, and there I stayed until the sun reached for the horizon.
I was not wearing a watch, but I knew from the position of the sun that I had better hurry if I was going to make it to the ship in time for departure. Since I had anticipated leaving the beach in plenty of time, I had not provided myself with enough money for a taxi back, so I walked through the Ramada Hotel’s gardens and foyer, stopped to ask my way to the bus stop, and hurried to the road.

After ten minutes, I asked the next person wandering by how often the buses came. “This be Sunday,” he said. “No schedule. Some time they come, some time they don’t. Better do this.”

He made the international sign of hitchhikers and laughed, apparently at my expression of dismay.

“Don’t worry. No body hurt you,” he said, pronouncing the word nobody as two, the same way he had done with sometime.

Realizing that I had no choice, I thumbed a ride with the next car. The driver stopped, stepped out of the car, and opened the passenger side. “Don’t worry,” he said, his voice deep and musical. “Here we consider it our duty to give anyone who doesn’t want to foot it a ride.”

I got into the car and examined the person I hoped would be my rescuer and not some maniacal killer of stranded women. He was extremely handsome, well over six feet tall, and wore a suit, something I hadn’t seen in the islands outside of hotel and bank personnel.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“The Grace, if it’s not too late.”

He glanced at his watch. “No problem,” he said. “You have thirty minutes. It only takes ten.”

No problem, I thought, trying to relax. No worries.

He introduced himself as Winston Whyte, politician and poet, and handed me his card. Within a few minutes, we were chatting freely.

“So you’re a poet,” I said.

My skepticism must have been evident. “I really am,” he responded. “I’ll prove it to you.”

Ignoring my time constraint, he pulled up at the side of what was already a narrow road and walked around to his trunk. Here it comes, I thought. Soon I’d really have no problem. No worries.

Fortunately for me, he did not return with a blunt instrument in his hand. What he clutched was the page proof of a manuscript, in its last stage of pre-production. He handed it to me and I glanced quickly at his bio, which described him and his old friend Son Mitchell, Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, as “High Yellow.” Winston’s color, it said, was due to the fact that his grandmother had been an Arawak princess. I glanced up at him. To me, his skin looked like café au lait.

“That is the only copy I have,” he said. He slowed down at the gate that led to the Grace. “By the time you come back, I’ll be a properly published writer.”
“Come back? Are you so sure I will?”

He laughed heartily. “You’ll go to come back,” he said. “Soon.”

I’m booking passage on a ship for the fall of 2009, wheelchair, oxygen, and all. It’s an outrageous dream that includes selling several books before then–some written, others in progress. But hey, I took a bath yesterday, so anything is possible.

SNAPSHOTS: 20th Century Mother Daughter Fiction is an anthology I edited with the extraordinary Joyce Carol Oates. It was a joyous experience and, for those who might be interested, it remains in print. Here’s the story I wrote for the book:

“Everything Old is New Again

by Janet Berliner

“Thank you for coming.

“Yes, brunch was a good idea, wasn’t it? Thank you for coming.

“We’ll get together soon.”

“Thank you for—”

—Leaving. Thank you for leaving. Don’t call me, I’ll call you. Jenny shut the door, leaned against it, and stared at the label on the last of her birthday gifts, the one still wrapped, the one she’d steadfastly pushed to the end of the line, like the pumpkin people inevitably insisted upon piling onto her Thanksgiving dinner plate.

The parcel was from her mother. At eighty, her handwriting remained clean and firm. Old Doll it said next to Contents. Value: Zero.

Like me, Jenny thought. Value: Zero. Contents: Old.

“Everything Old is New Again,” Peter Allen sang at her from her stereo set. She removed one fashionable black high-heeled shoe and hurled it at the CD player, uncaring of the damage she might do, though of course she’d care later. She always cared later.

“Everything old is old and getting older, you sonofabitch,” she said. Old or dead. Like Peter Allen who was dead, who had written the song as a tribute to Judy Garland, who was dead, too. Her face lived on in reruns, her voice in recordings. But she was dead just the same.

“Everything old is new again.”

Jenny didn’t sing along or think kindly of her friend Harlan whom she generally loved and who, seemingly a hundred years ago, had introduced her to the song. Instead, she drank the rest of her birthday champagne straight from the bottle, using it to swallow her last available dose of St. John’s Wort, which was supposed to cure her depression but so far hadn’t done a thing for her except make her itch. Then she curled up on the sofa with the leather bound special edition of Anna Karenina several of her friends had clubbed together to buy her because they knew it was her favorite book and because she was a writer. Or used to be.

One shoe off and one shoe on, she fell asleep. The phone woke her. She thought about letting it ring, but the residual hope that it might be her daughter changed her mind. It was the same hope that had sent her to the mailbox all week to retrieve cards from old friends with old lives, an ad for plastic surgery, a coupon for pizza, obligatory greetings from her doctor and her dentist.

Her hand hovered over the receiver. Maybe this year, this special year marked by her half century, her daughter would remember. Maybe, like a chrysalis, she had emerged from her Yuppie cocoon and become a caring, mature adult. Right. And maybe Jenny would fly to Vegas and win the Megabucks, or her publisher would offer her a million dollars to move to New York and become the darling of the Literati, scribbling away at the story of her miserable little life.

Which, she reminded herself, hadn’t really been all that miserable. At least not all of the time.

She could probably even persuade herself that her present life was acceptable if they could only all forgive each other — her daughter for Jenny’s treachery in insisting upon being a person, and she for her mother’s — what? She’d hated her mother forever, and she couldn’t remember why.

“Happy birthday, Mrs. Tobias. And how are you today?”

Disappointed, angered by a series of political calls, sales calls, “We’re doing a quick survey” calls, Jenny Tobias felt less than generous toward this one. “If you’re trying to sell me something, save your breath,” she said.

“This is something you need, something everyone needs, but most especially you now that you’ve entered your golden years.”

“My golden years? You must have the wrong Jennifer Tobias.”

“You’re fifty, Mrs. Tobias.”

This was a new wrinkle, maybe not one that showed on her face, but a new wrinkle nonetheless.

“Here in California we care about our senior citizens. We can provide you with a plot…”

“There’s something my editor would appreciate,” Jenny said. She disconnected the voice and laughed at the state of her universe. She hadn’t been able to write in a year and she’d finally been offered a plot. Only it was the wrong kind of plot. It was true what they said. Be careful about what you wish for and never fail to be specific.

On the other hand, maybe she had become a dinosaur. Maybe it was time to think about taking the big dirt nap?

She was a storyteller, born of the Diaspora into a long line of bards, but if she didn’t find a plot soon — the writing kind — she might as well be dead.

She wasn’t sure of much, but she did know that she did not love the new disposable society in which she lived; she did not love arthritis, or the fact that she was growing old. What she did love was Ibsen and Tolstoy, the look and feel of new yellow pads, the smell of newly sharpened pencils. Nor did she want much, just someone to give her back the wasted hours, for in regretting them, she had gained nothing and wasted more of the precious moments of her life.

She’d already lived for half a century and so what? She hadn’t written the Great American Novel, she was neither rich nor famous. Jimmy Buffett had cashed in with Pirate Looks At Fifty; Jong had turned facing fifty into a raging success.

All she was doing was getting older. She needed rejuvenation, a young lover, adventure, perhaps a return trip to Jerusalem and another camel ride.

She’d pack a single suitcase and leave all material things behind. After a lattè, a couple of cookies, and a quick trip to the drugstore for more Wort. After she’d called her daughter to say she’d forgiven her.

After she’d opened the parcel from her mother.

Which she might as well do now. Now was good. Now was fine. There’d never be another now, at least not exactly like this one.

She sat down and, balancing the gift on her lap, tore at the brown paper wrapping and lifted the lid of an old shoebox.

Happy birthday, Puppele, the note inside read.

Jenny flinched. She’d always hated being called Puppele, little doll, though why it distressed her so she had no idea.

I found this in an old suitcase and crocheted a new outfit for her, the note went on. I would have sent it to a doll’s hospital for repair, but there aren’t any around anymore. Perhaps if I’d had it repaired for you years ago, right after I retrieved it, things might have been different between us. Truth is, I put it away and life intruded and I forgot that I had it. Now you are decades older than I was when it all happened.…

The doll lay wrapped in a small, pink, satin-bound woolen blanket. Jenny removed it gently from its cardboard coffin. She opened the blanket and, operating through her fingertips like a blind person, caressed the porcelain. The doll’s hands and feet were chipped. Cold. Frostbitten. A few tiny sprouts of hair grew around the fringes of a jagged hole which exposed an empty, hollow head.

The face was a Dorian Gray wreckage. Shattered. A baby’s face, ravaged by layers of fine spider-web cracks

Crying, Jenny cradled the doll. Then she pillowed its head upon Anna Karenina. Seeing the juxtaposition, she picked up the brown paper wrapping and began to write…

Cape Town station. Winter cold and draughty on a June day in 1943. A child, her curly head lowered, her green eyes closed, sits on a bench marked “Whites Only.” She is hugging a porcelain doll with short, curly brown hair. The doll is her best friend.

“Won’t be long, Puppele,” her mother calls out.

The child looks up. I am the child. “My name’s Jenny,” I whisper. I stare at the words on the bench, distracting myself by sounding them out. I’m a precocious child. At almost four, I can sound out the words, but I don’t begin to comprehend their meaning any more than I understand what is happening on this strange day. My mother has abandoned the uniform of the South African reserves that she wears each day to her bookkeeping post at the Castle. She looks so pretty as she paces the platform, stopping every now and then to call me “Puppele” and hug me. Too hard. Too desperately. “He’s been in North Africa fighting the Nazis,” she says to me in German. “He’s been up there making it with some shiksa,” she will say later, when my eyes are closed and she thinks I’m asleep.

We are waiting for a stranger called Daddy. Waiting to take him home to a table laden with homemade kuchen. I am waiting to find out who he is. I’ve never seen him before but he must be important because Oma, Grandma, crocheted a new dress for me to wear, a pale blue dress with a string threaded through the waist. I roll the end of it around and around my finger until the tip is cold and white and has no feeling — like the rest of me.

I am supposed to be feeling something, aren’t I?

Something.

“Can you hear it? It’s coming. The train. Come over here. No, stay there.”

Mutti is shouting, primping, crying, laughing.

The train pulls into the station. Leaning out of the window waving a doll as big as I — with long blonde hair and an organdy dress and bonnet — is a big man. Smiling, he climbs off the train.

I struggle to find the concrete that’s there somewhere below my white button-down shoes. The man is with me before I reach the ground.

“You must be Jenny.”

He crouches down, takes away my old doll, the one I love, and places the big new doll in my arms.

I start to cry. The new doll is a stranger, like he is. I want my old dolly back but I don’t know how to tell him. The new doll is shiny and cold as my mother’s face. The man speaks and she listens.

“How are you, Greta? Well, I hope.”

He has not kissed me or my mother. He has not hugged us, touched us.

“No, I’m not coming home,” he says. “Not now. Maybe not ever. I have an — arrangement. A nurse. We met in North Africa.”

Jenny wanted to stop remembering. She got up, showered, made coffee to which she added a dash of brandy, but there was no escaping the story; it was like a physical presence, demanding her attention. Giving in to its urgency, she lit a candle against the waning day and sat down to watch the rest of it play out in her memory. United with the child she had long since buried, Jenny reexperienced her own pain. The pain that had caused her to hate her mother. The ache that had told her that her mother would have liked to throw her away so the stranger would stay and love her.…

“So it’s out with the old and in with the new,” her mother screamed. “You think you can do that? Abandon me? Or is it the responsibility of having a child. Do you want me to throw her away like an old doll? Like this?”

In a fury, she ripped Jenny’s best friend from the man’s arms and tossed it away. It flew through the air toward the train, which was slowly moving out of the station, smashed against it, disappeared.

If only she’d known that her mother had gone back to the station and retrieved the doll, Jenny thought. If only she’d been given the chance then to forgive her, to love her.

Crying softly over the lost years, Jenny picked up the doll. Cradling it in one arm, she picked up the phone and dialed her mother’s number. “I love you, Mutti,” she said.

“I love you, too, Puppele,” her mother responded.

“I know you do,” Jenny said. “I’ll call you soon. I promise.”

She replaced the receiver in its cradle and started to walk away. Darkness had settled on the world outside and the candle she’d lit was fluttering and almost burned out, but there was enough light to dial her daughter’s phone number.

“Forgive me,” she said, when her daughter picked up the phone.

“For what?” Her daughter’s voice was tense with negative expectations.

“For whatever it is you think I’ve done,” Jenny said lightly. “I do love you, you know.”

“I love you, too.” The voice was tentative, but it was a start. “Happy birthday, Mom. I have news for you. I’m going to have a baby. A boy.”

“Congratulations,” Jenny said. Ask his forgiveness early, she thought. But she didn’t say a word except goodbye. Then she flooded the room with light, reset the CD player, and sang along with Peter Allen, because even if he was dead, she wasn’t.

As a matter of fact, she was very much alive and everything old was new again. Maybe she wouldn’t ride any more camels, but she wasn’t ready for that big dirt nap yet, not while there was living and writing left undone.

Hell, if she played it right, she might even have time to inadvertently do more things for which she could ask forgiveness.

—
Early happy Mother’s Day to all, and my warmest wishes to Frank and his family. -Janet

by Janet Berliner

This month, writing through a period of dreadful pain, I wrote my first children’s novel. Despite the obvious adversity, I thoroughly enjoyed the work. Apparently my editor did, too, given that She “couldn’t put it down,” called it a book for kids from eight to eighty, and sent a check at once.

I have four novels-in-progress. I pulled up the one I had thought I would finish next, but my thoughts went elsewhere. What I really needed was to take a trip. Knowing that could not be, I started to feel sorry for myself.

Fortunately that state of being bores me very quickly, so I turned my thoughts to traveling days and started to write. Since I can’t find words without a title, I called what I was writing GO TO COME BACK: Journal of a Caribbean Eaveswatcher.

See what you think–

A writer who is traveling should study guidebooks and take voluminous notes.
The operative word there is should. The postscript is: Do what works for you.
In 1945, I flew on a plane for the first time. I was six years old, alone, and had a mastoid in each ear. I did not take notes.

Ten years later, I cruised the Indian Ocean from Cape Town to Durban and back. I brought home a beautiful, hand embroidered evening bag–which is now haute couture–and a pristine, empty notebook.

In-between, there were trains and cars and buses. At twenty-one, I left South Africa on a ship bound for Southampton, the first of countless trips to countless towns, cities, and countries.

Almost every time I took with me a clean notebook, but good intentions notwithstanding, I was always too busy eaveswatching on the world to make notes. I added a tape recorder, but didn’t use it.

Finally, I decided to make a simple camera my notepad. The first photo I took was of my foot in black sand. South Africa’s beaches are pure white; I didn’t know there were black sand beaches, and pink ones, and ones like Nice, covered in pebbles and half-naked ladies.
My mother was angry at my extravagance when she saw the photo. “Can’t you be more careful? All you got was a foot.”

She didn’t understand that my only stupidity was not writing date and location on the back of the photo. That foolish omission led me to collect local newspapers, travel brochures, and postcards along the way.

I continued to take pictures and added the device of writing letters to a carefully chosen friend, one who would keep them for me as a journal to be used on my return.

The letters were greatly appreciated, but somehow didn’t come back to me.

For me, travel meant renewal. It meant filling the void left after finishing a book or a relationship; it was also fodder for my stories. Yet hard as I tried, writing it all down the first time I went to a new place diminished the experience. There it was, sealed in ink, rather than a memory that lingered and grew in my head and heart and soul.

But here’s the rub.

While, for the most part, I didn’t make notes in foreign parts, almost all of my work is primarily set outside of where I live. Not only does travel inspire me after the fact, but I find it difficult to write a story set in a place I haven’t visited, even for as little as a few hours. In a very short time, I can get to know the smells and the colors and the texture of the air. I can see how people walk, the way they talk to one another, and the way they view strangers. One of my favorite people, a writer who is talented, rich, and famous, got that way by writing multiple books set in a country he’d never seen. For that, he has my admiration. Heaven only knows I’ve tried, but I just can’t do it.

It wasn’t until 1992, forty-seven years after that first plane ride, that I realized my travel affliction was not unique to me. I was discussing his book, Travels, with Michael Crichton and learned that he reacted exactly the same way I did. Even when he knew he was going somewhere to do research, it was only after the second or third visit that he buckled down to note-taking.

Nothing, he said, could change the fact that we had seen everything through the eyes of a writer, because that’s who we were. In retrospect, that was exactly what I had done. My conscience felt clear.

I do my best thinking either pacing or in a bathtub. That night, sitting in a tub after a full day spent interviewing Michael, I tore a sheet of paper out of the notebook next to the tub and fashioned a little boat, which I floated in the water. Watching it, my mind drifted to my travels and to the area of the world that always calls me to come back, the Caribbean.

In Israel I had found brotherhood neutralized by contention and a profusion of dried figs; in Greece I had found white sands and black olives; in America, I found Fig Newtons blooming on Supermarket shelves, along with warnings of calorie and fat content. In Spain…

…”You’re doing Europe at the wrong time,” someone said. If this is Tuesday it must be Belgium, echoed from times past, the Dark Ages, pre-computer, when I worked as a travel agent in South Africa. That was when travel agents had to be multilingual and plan the routes, book every hotel directly, individual tours, each flight and ship and bus for every traveler who came into the office wanting to “do” Europe, as if all of the countries of Europe blended into a pudding which they could swallow and regurgitate later with the help of Fodor’s.

More recently, I’d attended one of those “everybody mingle” events. I wandered into a group discussion about vacations and where, ideally, each person would prefer to live.

“What about you?” someone asked.

“The West Indies,” I said. “Grenada.” I used the correct pronunciation, Gre-NAY-da.

“Where’s that?” one man wanted to know.

“In the Caribbean, close to Trinidad.”

“Trinidad?” He thought for a moment. “Oh, you mean Grenada.” He pronounced it Gren-ah-da. “The place we invaded.”

I started to correct him, but stopped. They wouldn’t want him in Grena(y)da anyway.

“We’ve done the Caribbean.” His perky wife looked at me as if she expected applause.

Showing enormous restraint, I walked away without uttering another word. I wanted to yell, “You can’t¬ do Europe or the Caribbean or Africa or the United States.

Is every state in America the same? Have you seen the country once you’ve been up the Empire State Building? Do you understand the people?

Of course not, I thought, blowing gently on my paper boat to move it around. The Caribbean was a perfect example. I had traveled there countless times. No two islands were exactly alike in their history and politics, or in the daily behaviors of their people. The flora and fauna were different, as were the foods and the smells, the music and the breezes, the sand that caressed your feet, the sea that enfolded you like embryonic fluid or tossed you around like a mother-to-be with indigestion.

I got out of the tub with a vision.

While completing my present writing commitments, I would write a short retrospective of some of my first island experiences. Then I would return to the islands, this time to research and write. I would “do” the Caribbean at least one more time, this time with a sense of purpose: to show the singularity of each island.

The thought of visiting the islands yet again was enticing. Exhilarating. Doing so as a writer setting out to share the experience was daunting, but not overwhelming.

Wrapping myself in my robe, I went to my computer. Which memory, I wondered, would demand to be written first?

Now, the question is, do I go back to one of my thrillers or continue with this? And if I do, will anyone buy it?

That’s the question we all face, isn’t it, as we contemplate the rising cost of everything.
Like Scarlett, I’ll think about it tomorrow.

–Janet Berliner

By Janet Berliner

Since I, too, just finished and turned in a novel, I considered writing about post-book depression, but as two of my fellows have already well covered that issue this month, I decided to find something new.

A few weeks ago, I saw the movie “Talk to Me,” the story of Washington, D.C. DJ Ralph “Petey” Greene, an ex-con who became a popular talk show host and community activist in the 1960s. Where I was raised, we had no television, and given my dysfunctional background, radio and books were pretty much my only friends. One of my first paid writing gigs was for SABC, South African Broadcasting Company. One of the first celebrities I met in America was the infamous Don Imus.

In the late 1980s, Laurie Harper employed me to guide her through a final restructuring and rewrite of her book: Don Sherwood: The Life and Times of the World’s Greatest Disc Jockey. Her husband, Hap, was the first man to do airborne traffic reports from a plane, which he did for the radio station that employed Don Sherwood, with whom he had worked for a lot of years. Many of Sherwood’s fans were Hap’s fans, too. Through him, Laurie had the connections for the interviews. She soon found out that doing the research for such a book was only the beginning of a complex project and employed me as her editor.

What follows is as much as anything about the making of a biography. We decided, given her close deadline, that I would move into her townhouse and stay there until the book was done. And so it began. “Why you?” I asked her. “You didn’t know him. You were hardly alive when he was ‘The Greatest.’”

“Da Vinci did not have to attend the last supper to paint it,” she said. We were off and running.

Some quick background: In the fifties and sixties, a disc jockey by the name of Don Sherwood became a surrogate member of almost every family in the San Francisco Bay Area. His was the voice that woke them in the mornings, his were the jokes they laughed at, his the antics they followed in every newspaper in town. His fans had kept his memory alive since his death; they were ready for a celebration of Don’s reign as king of the airwaves. There was to be a bash at the San Francisco Fairmont on his birthday, September 7th, and all of the people who knew and loved him–as well as many of those whose careers got off the ground because of him–would be there. MacLeren Park would be dedicated to him and become Sherwood Forest, with a “bring your own shovel” tree planting. All kinds of other Sherwood-style fun and games would dot the period in-between.

Laurie’s purpose was to create a fascinating book, one unlike the dime-a-dozen celebrity biographies; it was to be different … special … particularly for those who lived in the Bay Area, but also for anyone interested the effects of fame and fandom.

Laurie Harper was a bright and beautiful young woman in her thirties for whom this book became much more than a chronicle of Don Sherwood’s escapades. In 1985, she was establishing the Sebastian Literary Agency. She had written one book–A Taste For Life–but she was definitely not looking for another book to write when she innocently asked the Sherwood family if anyone was assigned the biography. She didn’t even know who Don Sherwood was until she met and married Hap Harper, who at that time still did the airborne traffic watch on KSFO. She knew enough to be fascinated by the fact that she and Hap ran into Sherwood fans everywhere they went. She was a little girl during his heyday in the fifties and sixties, and Don hadn’t been on the radio for years, yet his fans’ love for him had not diminished.

She began to wonder what had lent this man his power and charisma, what had turned him into a legend in an industry where you’re lucky if people remember you two weeks after you’re gone.

“I did what I would have told any other writer in my “stable” to do,” she said. “I read How to Write a Biography. It was immediately clear, however, that in death, as in life, Don was not going to fit neatly into a standard structure, so I threw the book away.”

She went back to basics and asked herself for whom she was writing this book, what they wanted to know, what she wanted to know. Without knowing the story or the players, she began a random series of interviews–she had never seen him, heard him, read a single article about him. She met with: “You’re too young to understand what he was all about”; “You’ll never pull it off”; “You’ll quit.”Who could resist such a challenge? Not Laurie Harper!”

I didn’t write a thing for over two years. While running my agency, I interviewed people and followed leads during the evening, on weekends and holidays. Don’s old engineer, a wonderful man named Charlie Smith, gave me a bunch of tapes from the radio shows and I listened to them over and over.

“The Sherwood family, still skeptical, nonetheless gave me boxes of newspaper clippings–with hardly a date on anything. I spent months reading everything, trying to piece together what went with what, unable to tell what had happened, when, and how significant it was in the scheme of Don’s life. I taped and transcribed interviews, set up my files and working system, and wondered if all the bits and pieces, parallels and contradictions, would ever come together.”

By then, Laurie was developing an inner sense about the man–at least about the man everyone else thought Don was. But she was concerned about finding out who he was to himself and knew she wouldn’t feel satisfied until she began to see things from his perspective.

“I needed to make the connections between his private life and his public life, his professional victories and his personal losses.”

Don’s childhood was marked by his mother’s emotional, and sometimes physical, abuse. His father abandoned them and his Aunt Marie tried to balance things by smothering him. His school and teenage years were filled with rebellion, and his early marriages and frequent unemployment showed him to be a naive romantic. Then he hit it big on radio and television, and his quick wit, sharp tongue, imaginative escapades and devil-may-care attitude, at least publicly, masked any inner pain he might have been feeling.Patterns had begun to form, giving Laurie a path to follow.”After two years, there had at last come a point where I felt I knew what everyone else knew. It was time to try to fill in the blanks by writing. At first I dealt purely with the chronology of it all. Then I became the one person who knew more about Don than anyone. He had no one single person with whom he shared everything in his life, so everyone was learning new things about him. People were being brought together, reliving the era, beginning to really talk about things that had happened.

Having been a chronicler with all the distance in the world, Laurie suddenly developed a tendency to romanticize, to become sentimental. Again and again she had to force herself to step back and ask: how did Don see this? What did it mean to him? What would he say about it?

“I began to think about what it might feel like to see my own life all laid out like that, with someone else connecting the dots and drawing the conclusions. I began wondering about the patterns in my life, the choices I’d made, the values I’d based them on. That was when I realized that, underlying all Don’s fun and games, was a serious personal philosophy. The more I learned about it, the more I admired him. The most surprising feeling of all was realizing that I had become his friend, which shocked me after having spent so much time with people who had been hurt by him.”Don Sherwood was an alcoholic, a manic-depressive. It wasn’t until emphysema cornered him that he began the emotional task of making amends for allowing his personal demons to wreak havoc on family and friends.This is dealt with in the last third of the book and is the most powerful part of the biography. Here, the readers, get to the core of Don Sherwood the performer, and Danny Cohelan the man. For those already part of the fan club, this would confirm their love of the man; if not, this is where they would forgive him his weaknesses and take him into their hearts.”I couldn’t help but join The Club. The Sherwood attitude is contagious. He believed that each of us should control our own destiny, that we shouldn’t make deals with life, shouldn’t compromise who we are and what we want.”

In the course of her travels with Sherwood, Laurie met many fascinating people, many warm and wonderful ones–the family, talented DJs, and professionals who were a critical part of Don’s success. And the fans.Always the fans–a clan united by the man who sparked their imaginations, made them laugh, think and cry.

“It is a great sadness that Don never found the joy he gave others. Today we have support groups and organizations to help us deal with alcoholism and dysfunctional families. Those were either not yet available or not yet fully recognized when Don needed them. Maybe–probably–he wouldn’t have listened to them. But I can’t help wondering where “the world’s greatest disc jockey” would be today if he knew then what we know now.”

We worked together almost around the clock. Most of the time we were in accord. When we weren’t, we almost came to blows. I went to “my” room and packed more than once. When we were done, we collapsed onto the carpet and cried together.

Later, months later, I asked Laurie how she’d felt as she’d waited to see the results of her labors?

“I am thrilled that Don’s story turned out to be every bit as important and fascinating as I thought it would be and that I was able to find the right choice at the right time to tell Don Sherwood’s story. That was the hardest part, I think–admitting that I had the right to my own voice in all of this–that I wasn’t simply supposed to be a chronicler.”

Robin, Don Sherwood’s daughter, said, “It’s the book Dad would have wanted.”

What more could any biographer–any writer–want?

My lesson was this: Writing a retrospective brings with it memories, awareness, insights. Mostly it reconfirms that hindsight is the true harbinger of wisdom. I hope this piece has piqued some interest. As the book is no longer widely available, I can put any interested reader in touch with Laurie, who still has some copies she can sell.

—Janet Berliner

By Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem

Janet is buried hip deep in a deadline that she’s having trouble with thanks to the wonders of doctors deciding to “adjust” medication levels that were working. So, she asked her long-time friends Melanie and Steve Tem to fill in this month. In March, Wizards of the Coast Discoveries will be releasing the novel-length reimagining of their multi-award-winning novella “The Man On The Ceiling.” Publisher’s Weekly has already praised as “This visceral, psychological view of the horrors that occur in an average person’s life will draw in readers with delicate, exquisitely detailed and almost hypnotic language.” In honor of that, Steve and Melanie offer a back-and-forth on why writers write what they write, whatever you want to call it.

-=-=-=-=-

Steve: I remember that very early on I had this idea that it was an important part of the writer’s mission to give testimony, to say ‘This is the way it was for me during my time on the planet.’ But how do you do that as a fiction writer? Your job isn’t to write speeches, or to preach. And how do you risk embarrassing yourself? I know when I started out I wanted to be at least a little cool, to present an air of professionalism, to show that I was in control of my materials.

Melanie: It seems to me that often, in writing as in “real life,” giving testimony or bearing witness is all we can do–giving testimony to “here’s what it’s like for me right here and right now,” and bearing witness to what it’s like for other people as we imagine it and embody it through our characters and plots and through our willingness to take in other people’s stories.

And that’s no small thing.

Steve: That is no small thing, but it seems to me there are many forces which seduce us away from this basic mission. When you’re starting out, you want to sell stories, you want to build your resume, so you study the markets and you attempt to write what editor A appears to be buying. Or maybe you respond to a theme anthology invitation even though you don’t feel particularly driven to write on that theme. Nothing wrong with either of those approaches, but if you take that road enough times I think you forget there are other roads you can take.

If I may stretch the metaphor, I think writing about what really compels you is often an “off road” approach. You don’t have a particular market in mind, and the weight of emotion that often comes with this kind of writing often means that finding the right characters and structure to carry that weight becomes a difficult technical task. Sometimes it’s like relearning how to write with each new story.

 Melanie: At the same time, though, I often enjoy writing to “prompts”–which, in the case of markets, can be theme anthologies or market guidelines. For me, there are so many stories to be told that sometimes it’s a matter of sort of letting the line, with a creative magnet on the end of it, down into the teeming mass of possible stories and seeing what sticks to it.

Which is definitely a stretched simile.

Steve: That’s a good point. Sometimes, rather than trying to “say” something, you get better results by setting up an intriguing situation–a “prompt” or god-forbid a “market requirement”–and then see what comes out of that writing process. Better writers than I have suggested that “if you want to communicate, use a telephone,” the idea being that if you set up your situation properly, it will trigger all that stuff in the back of your mind, the stuff that really obsesses you, and that will come out on the page.

One of the things that was scariest, and most exciting, about working on the new “novel” version of The Man On The Ceiling was that some chapters just started out as writing prompts–”Naming Names” or “A Sense of Place” or something weird like “Reality Puddles.” One of us would start writing, and all this material would come pouring out–memories, dreams, reflections–things that were really essential to us, coming out onto the page and (with judicious editing of course) finding a structure.

Melanie: TMOC was quite a ride! I found myself dredging up all sorts of “prompts.” “Reality puddles” was a phrase given to me many years ago by a schizophrenic teen who preferred to honor and explore the unique perspective rather than medicating it; in the midst of all the crazy imagery, this young adventurer told me, “every once in a while reality puddles, and I can rest.” That stayed with me.

“Asymptote,” “Hitting the Quarter Mark,” “A Sense of Place”–all those phrases, chapter headings in TMOC, were things someone said to me or I picked up in conversation and stored away in my subconscious. Later, when I needed them–when I sort of sent out the message to my subconscious–there they were, like found objects.

You better be careful what you say to a writer….

Steve: So it’s an exploration, not just into your own passions and the realities you observe, but into the invisible worlds behind those realities, into imagination and into deep metaphor, worlds which inform what you feel and the realities you observe. You go there, and you report back. You testify. For me, this is what fantasy writing is all about.

This kind of testimony concerning “what it was like” has been traditionally, I believe, reserved for “serious” writers writing in the realistic tradition. The likes of Charles Dickens, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Dos Passos, Frank Norris, Don DeLillo–wildly different in their approaches, certainly, but all seeming to report on the events and the psychology of their times. Reporters and witnesses. Fantasy writers are almost invariably excluded. Critics and readers generally don’t expect fantasy to provide information as to what it was like. They tend to expect fantasy to report on “this is where we escaped to.” And of course a lot of fantasy writers buy into this. Readers/the critics/the writers tend to see fantasy as something separate from the writings that provide us with testimony. They see fantasy in terms of entertainment values alone.

I like to think that fantasy can do both. I think that even as a young reader I thought of fantasy in terms of testimony, providing information about what couldn’t be seen, what couldn’t be touched, and yet which had a very real and concrete affect on my life.

Melanie: My goal is to accept as few labels as I can get away with. I eschew those personality tests, for instance, like Meyers-Briggs, that make me choose which I would rather do, go to a party or take a walk alone in the mountains, and won’t let me give my real choice, which is “both.” I think the “types” that are said to come out of those inventories are reductionist. We should be striving for greater diversity, broader experience, deeper truth–not trying to make things simple.

So I have trouble with labels like “fantasy,” “horror,” “serious literature.” All of the above, I say–and more!

 

 

By Janet Berliner

 

My best student sent me a holiday card and added the words, “Writing is hard.” 

I wrote back, “Who promised easy?”

Then I thought about it. A lot. 

Writing is hard. Being published is almost impossible.  Making a living out of words is about as close as you can get to a fool’s dream.  So, why try?

In 1936, the great Oscar Hammerstein II wrote: “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, I gotta love one man till I die.” Somehow I’m sure he won’t roll over in his grave if I paraphrase as follows, “I gotta love those tales till I die,” because either way it’s about love.

And so we write–in closets, in journals, for hire and on spec. Okay you say.  What’s new about that?  What’s new, I think, is that we forget what we could be doing –what most of the world does–working 9 to 5 in a job we detest while praying there won’t be cutbacks.

I’m saying that, in doing what we passionately love, we’ve been given a gift that truly keeps on giving, and too often we forget how damn lucky we are.

Which too-lengthy sentence provides me with a segue for the other thing I want to talk about: The season of gifting.

Realizing, as most of have, that we spend a lot of money at this time of year, not only on presents, but on cards and wrapping, I long ago changed paths. Children and best friends still get gifts from me, but overall I send contributions to Childreach – Plan International, a children’s charity I’ve supported for many years. The money goes directly to the children and the villages in the country of my choice. I have two African foster children whom I’ve supported monthly for fifteen years.  Their letters, photos, and growth have given me far more than I gave them. For $22 a month, I help provide meds and schooling, mosquito nets and toilets. 

At Christmas and other gift-giving times, I send $10 donations for mosquito netting.  $10 protects one family from malaria, the biggest killer along with AIDS. Childreach sends a (pretty) card to the person whose name was put on the donation, and I have a triple winner: I feel good, Childreach can provide more help, the recipient feels good.

My daughter has adopted two glorious Chinese daughters, so I do the same with Half The Sky.  That’s what she wants for birthdays and anniversaries.

Think about it.

I hope you had a happy holiday and that the New Year brings you and yours good health and productivity.

A combination of physical difficulties and crazed deadlines have forced me to decide to forego writing a regular blog post, so instead, here’s a fun story I wrote to rid myself of a recurring dream.–Janet Berliner 

     She is fifteen when the dreams invade her nights.

     By the time she is not-quite forty, the dreams are like lovers she hates, but cannot live without–frightening her as much by their absence as by their presence.  She finds a new therapist, buys a new notebook, records again the details of the dreams . . . 

     . . . she is moving slowly down the corridor of her grandmother’s pre-war Riverside apartment.  She knows that she is dreaming.  At first, everything around her is black and white, then the edges soften, running into each other like wet paint.  She waits for the greyness to come, to release her body from gravity’s constraints.  She can almost touch the sensations free flight will bring–sensual, warm, safe–like love without risk. 

     She is floating now.  She cannot see the end of the passageway, yet she knows with certainty that she will soon be outside.

     Outside.  Color and sunshine.  She hovers at the crest of a tier of rolling lawns, trying to delay her journey to the bottom, anticipating the flight with pleasure, its end with dread.

     But she is not the master of her body.  Setting aside all thought of what is to come, she concentrates on the scent of freesias drifting from the field below, on the poppies and forget-me-nots blooming wild as far as the horizon.  Forgetting, she allows herself to be happy–

     She is in a room, a conference room, standing before what appears to be a tribunal.  At the head of the table sits a woman dressed in black and white.  There is nothing muted about this scene, or about the woman, yet the dreamer cannot see her features, hidden in shadow beneath a wide-brimmed black straw hat.

     The dreamer is frightened.  The people in the room are all talking at once, talking at her.  Why is she on trial, being judged? She feels herself growing smaller and smaller–

     Lilliputian, she returns to the sunlight.  The door of the tribunal is shut behind her and she feels safe again, surrounded by color.  Though she does not really recognize anything, she knows she is in a small beach community she visited once as a child.  The knowledge comes from the smell of the salt in the air, the texture of the sea breeze, the crunch of sand beneath her feet.

     She looks down and sees that she is wearing a flowing white dress, embellished with lace and seed pearls.  She is carrying a basket on her arm, a picnic basket filled with flowers.  She is sixteen or seventeen, perhaps a little older.

     A young couple strolls along the other side of the street.  Their movements parallel hers.  They know her and she knows them, but they do not acknowledge her as they walk toward the ocean.

     When she reaches the beach, she stops.  A low, concrete divider, no more than four fingers wide, separates the street from the beach. 

     Without looking at her, the two young people step over the retaining wall and head into the water.  She watches them go, sad but unwilling to make a move to join them.  She is frightened again.  Something tells her a tidal wave is coming, and she feels eyes burning into the back of her neck.

     Dreaming still, she recalls another dream–a nightmare–remembering it in such infinite detail that she thinks she might be having a dream within a dream–

     She is swimming in the oily water of a busy harbor.  She has no idea how she got there.  All she knows is that she feels like the ancient mariner, condemned to the water forever.  She is surrounded by immense ships–tankers and cruise ships.  They are black and white.  She knows she will not drown, yet she has the sense that if she breathes in too deeply she will not be able to exhale again.  Ever–

     Back on the beach in the sunlight, she turns at last to identify the eyes staring at her.

     Behind her, she can see a semi-circle of concrete.  In its center, under a striped umbrella, a woman bends over a telescope.  Her hat identifies her as the woman from the tribunal.

     “You’re invading my privacy,” the dreamer says.

     When the woman does not respond, the dreamer moves closer.

     “How dare you!”  She is shouting.  “You’re intruding on my life.  You have no right!”

     The woman looks up and smiles.  She moves into the sunlight, but even then her features are blurred.  She beckons with a gloved hand.

     The dreamer moves to her side and turns to look at the ocean.

     The tidal wave has begun.  It moves in slow-motion.  Though the dreamer is terrified, she keeps thinking how beautiful it is.  The woman has stepped back but the dreamer stays on, watching the wave rise, curl, flatten, rise, curl, flatten.  It moves across the beach in a perfect sine curve, avoiding the couple, sweeping the dreamer into the water.

     For a moment, she enjoys being at the mercy of the ocean.  She tries to relax and move with the wave.  Then the current tugs at her legs and she knows that if she wants to survive she is going to have to fight her way to shore.  She can hear people shouting for help.  She sees a man and a boy, a father and son.  The boy’s head is bobbing in and out of the water, just beyond the man’s reach.  She struggles to find bottom with her toes, to test the depth of the water, but the sand moves too fast beneath her feet.  Her energy is flagging.  If she tries to help the man, the boy, she will drown.

     She makes it to the beach.  Lying on an incline in the safe part of the sine curve, she tries not to listen to the cries for help.  She covers her ears with her hands.  Hearing them still, she begins to scream . . .

     Her screams wake her from the nightmare.  Her pillow is wet with her own tears.  No one is there to hear her scream–to comfort her.  She lies alone in the dark, replaying the dream.  She can remember each detail, but she cannot identify the woman. 

     She takes out her notebook and records the details of the dreams for her new therapist, the one her mother chose.  Her mother calls to remind her about the appointment.

     “This one is well-trained,” she says.  “And he’s single.” 

     The therapist is well-trained.  And clever.  And proud of his cleverness.  It takes him no time at all to identify the dream-figures.

     The woman pays him.  Thanks him.  Leaves. 

     The dreams do not return.

     At dawn on her fortieth birthday, the ex-dreamer stands on a cliff in Half Moon Bay.  She can see two bodies on the beach below and a striped umbrella.  As she raises her arms and begs the greyness to come, she wonders if, this time, someone will hear her scream.