Such Days

Such days, such perfect days! The morning light alone as it pours thick as honey through the window pane! How can we not thank God every minute of our lives here? 

Here is a passage from one of John Updike's stories about a bot sick in bed as a child, seen through the eyes of the man he would become. All the longing for that simple time, all the gratitude in it I feel too right now. Bittersweet!"He had awoken with a sore throat and stayed home from school. Ferguson, turning the newspaper pages, heard the child’s mother mounting to him with breakfast on a tray and remembered those lost mornings when he, too, stayed home from school: the fresh orange juice seedy from its squeezing, the toast warm from its toasting and cut into strips, the Rice Krispies, the blue cream pitcher, the sugar, the japanned tray where his mother had arranged these good things like the blocks in an intelligence test, the fever-swollen mountains and valleys of the blankets where books and crayons and snub-nosed scissors kept losing themselves, the day outside the windows making its irresistible arc from morning to evening, the people of the town travelling to their duties and back, running to the trolley the people of the town travelling to their duties and back, running to the trolley and walking wearily back, his father out suffering among them, yet with no duty laid upon the child but to live, to stay safe and get well, to do that huge something called nothing. The house in all its reaches attended to him, settling, ticking, clucking in its stillness, an intricately worked setting for the jewel of his healing; all was nestled like a spoon beneath his life, his only life, his incredibly own, that he must not let drop."Ah! Indeed we must not let drop this life, this only life...  

Updike: Still the Best

I saw the thinly disguised remembrance of Updike's mother in The Sandstone Farmhouse. It appeared in The New Yorker shortly before my own mother died so suddenly. I wrote to him to offer my condolences and he wrote me right back, the nicest letter.I always said I would go and find the story and offer a bit of it here, maybe on some quiet summer day.It looks to me as though this is finally the day.It’s just this passage partway through the tale.His writing inspires me as much now as it did when I first read Rabbit Run, during Rest Hour the summer I was 13 and lying on my cot at summer camp.

Relatives and neighbors spoke to him with a soft gravity, as if he were fragile in grief. He knew he and his mother were regarded as having been unusually, perhaps unnaturally, close, whereas between themselves the fear was that they were not close enough. Why grieve? She was old and in pain, worn out, She was too frail in her last half-year to walk to the mailbox or lift a case of cat food or pull a clump of burdock. It was time; dying is the last favor we do for the world, the last tax we pay.He cried only once, during the funeral, quite unexpectedly, having taken his seat at the head of his raggedly extended family, suddenly free for the moment, of arrangements and decisions. An arm’s reach away from him gleamed the cherry-wood casket he had picked put at the undertaker’s three days before. The lustrous well-joined wood, soon to be buried – the sumptuous waste of it. She was in there and in his mind there appeared a mother conceived out of his earliest memories, a young slim woman dressed in a navy-blue suit, with white at her throat, dressed to go off to her job at the downtown department store, hurrying to catch the trolley car. She had once reminisced, “Oh how you’d run, and if you missed it, there wouldn’t be another for twenty minutes and you wanted to cry.” She had laughed, remembering.His tears kept coming, in a kind of triumph, a breakthrough, a torrent of empathy and pity for that lost young woman running past the Pennsylvania row houses, under the buttonwood trees, running to catch the trolley, the world of the 30s shabby and solid around her, the porches, the blue midsummer hydrangeas, this tiny well-dressed figure in her diminishing pocket of time, her future unknown, her death, her farm, far from her mind. This was the mother, apparently, that he had loved, the young woman living with him and others in a brick semi-detached house, a woman of the world, youthfully finding her way. During the war she worked in a parachute factory, wearing a bandanna on her head like the other women, plump like them by this time, merging with them and their chatter one lunch break when, he, somehow, had bicycled to the side entrance to see her. She was not like them, the tough other women, he knew, but for the moment had blended with them, did a job alongside them, and this too renewed his tears, his native pride in her then, when he was 10 or 11. She had tried to be a person, she had lived. There was something amazing, something immortal to him in the image of her running.He remembered, from their first years on the farm, a crisis with the roof; it was being reshingled by a team of Amishmen and they had left it partially open to the weather on the night of the thunderstorm. Crashes, flashes. Joey's parents and grandparents were all awake, and he, boy though he still was, was expected to help too; they rushed up and down the attic stairs with buckets, to save the plaster of the walls and ceilings below. There was a tarpaulin in the barn that might help; he found himself outdoors, in the downpour, and he had retained an image of running across the lawn in a flash of lightning that caught the white of her bare legs. She would not have been much over 40, and was still athletic; perhaps his father was included in this unsteady glimpse; there was a hilarity to it all, a violent health.Working his way, after her death, through all the accumulated souvenirs of her life, Joey was fascinated by the college yearbooks that preserved girlish image. Group photographs showed his mother as part of the hockey team, hiking club. With a magnifying glass he studied her unsmiling competitive face, with her hair in two balls at her ears and a headband over her bangs. Her face seemed slightly larger than the other girls’, a childlike oval broadest at the brow, its defenses relatively unevolved. As he sat there beside the cherry casket crying, his former wives and adult children stealing nervous peeks at him, the young woman ran for the trolley car, her breath catching, her panting mixed with a sighing laughter at herself, and the image was potent, as fertile, as a classic advertisement, which endlessly taps something deep and needy within us. The image of her running down the street away from him trailed like a comet’s tail the maternal enactments of those misty years when he was a child crayoning with him on the living room floor, sewing him Halloween costumes in the shape of Disney creatures, having him lift what she called the ‘skirts’ of the bushes while she pushed the old reel mower under them – but from her point of view; he seemed to feel from within his mother’s head the situation, herself and this small son, this defenseless gurgling hatched creature, and the tentative motions of her mind and instincts as she, as new to the mothering as he was to being alive, explored the terrain between them. In the attic he had found a padded baby blue scrapbook, conscientiously maintained, containing his first words, the date of his first crawl, and his hospital birth certificate imprinted with his inky day-old feet. The baths. The cod liver oil. The calls to  the doctor, the subscriptions to children’s magazine, the sweaters she knit. Trying to do the right thing, the normal thing, running toward her farm, her death. In his vision of her running she was bright and quick and small, like an animal caught in a gunsight.This was the mother he had loved, the mother before they moved, before she betrayed him with the farm and its sandstone house….

There is more of course but I will stop there. The mother in the story, like his own real mother, dropped dead in the kitchen of that sandstone farmhouse, lying there for a day or two before neighbors discovered her.About ten years ago I flew to see my friend Bobbie in Swarthmore. One day during my visit, she and I drove to the tiny village of Plowville  to look for this sandstone house as well as the one ‘in town’ in the larger township of Shillington with its storefronts and trolley tracks. When we walked into the to Town Hall there to ask the address, a man who knew him happened to overhear us and told us so many details about him, mostly about his loyalty to the town and his perennial graciousness.Four and a half years gone now but doesn’t he still live and move in my mind~ !

The Full Glass

It was john Updike’s birthday Tuesday, and how could I have missed that fact, he being a fellow Pisces and I owing such a debt to him for teaching me to 'tell'what I see.Look at the words of the narrator he gave life to in his story "The Full Glass,"  published in The New Yorker in 2008. I loved it so much on first reading it, I scanned the whole thing so I could keep it always.It begins “Approaching eighty, I sometimes see myself from a little distance, as a man I know but not intimately"  which seems so sad now because the man who created this piece never saw 80. He was dead less than a year after its publication.Then further down on that first page:

Now that I’m retired…I watch myself with a keener attention, as you’d keep an eye on a stranger who might start to go to pieces any minute. Some of my recently acquired habits strike me as curious. At night, having brushed my teeth and flossed and done the eyedrops and about to take my pills, I like to have the water glass already full. The rational explanation might be that, with a left hand clutching my pills, I don’t want to fumble at the faucet and simultaneously try to hold the glass with the right. Still, it’s more than a matter of convenience. There is a small but distinct pleasure, in a life with most pleasures levelled out of it, in having the full glass there on the white marble sink-top waiting for me, before I sluice down the anti-cholesterol pill, the anti-inflammatory, the sleeping, the calcium supplement (my wife’s idea, now that I get foot cramps in bed, somehow from the pressure of the top sheet), along with the Xalatan drops to stave off glaucoma and the Systane drops to ease dry eye. In the middle of the night, on the way to the bathroom, my eye feels like it has a beam in it, not a mote but literally a beam—I never took that image from the King James Version seriously before….

and then, of that one glass of water...

That healthy sweet swig near the end of the day has gotten to be something important, a tiny piece that fits in: the pills popped into my mouth, the full glass raised to my lips, the swallow that takes the pills down with it, all in less time than it takes to tell it, but tasting of bliss.

From there he goes on to describe the bliss he felt as a young person, who  woke up inside his life and like any person does and takes joy in all five of his senses.I read Rabbit Run when I was 12; it’s how I found out how sex works.But it wasn’t the sex that kept me reading. It was always the way he made you see what he was describing; the way he made you feel you were right there beside the characters he was moving through their own special world. A letter carrier who passed me crossing the street said it, when he saw me in 1990 toting my brand-new copy of his autobiography  Self-Consciousness: Memoirs by John Updike. “Hey I read that!” that man called out to me is we passed each other on the crosswalk. "That John Updike can make even psoriasis sound interesting!”He  sure made the world interesting for me. I told him so in a fan letter I sent along with the story I had written of my mother’s sudden death. I was responding to one of his short stories, again in The New Yorker, that was very obviously about the death of his own, real, mother. He wrote me back four days later , on a postcard, with a remark so kind that more than two years later when I was writing my first book I wrote a second time to ask if I could use his quote on the jacket ."Ok on the quote.  Good luck with the book," he wrote back, again by postcard, again not four days after I wrote him.He was like that is all I can say: generous, and decorous and kind. The world of letters is surely the poorer without him.Take six minutes and read "The Full Glass" now why not, which now, five years after publication, is available for anyone, just by clicking here.

Girls is for Everyone

I just want to say that I think Lena Dunham is amazing. Her show, HBO’s Girls, is SO funny and well-written and she is SO smart. I’ve heard a dozen podcast interviews with her if I’ve heard one and she sure enough is smart. Also humble. She freely admits how nice it has been to have parents in the arts, because they understand. Also to have parents who said she could still live at home with them as long as she paid her way.Hanna Horvath is the name of her character. Here are the four main  'ladies' in the show now in case you don't know them:I like that her best friend from college is in the show with her, sexy Jessa played by Jemima Kirke. I love the character of Soshonna Shapiro played by the versatile Zosia Mamet, daughter of David Mamet and  granddaughter of Russel Crouse, who wrote such blockbuster musicals as Anything Goes and The Sound of Music.I like that we get to see newsman Brian Williams’s daughter Alison every week, though she may be getting a tad too THIN lately. (eh?I love Elijah played by the wonderful Andrew Rannells is great too. His is a face any camera would love.And the honesty of  last season’s boyfriend is amazingly appealing to me. Adam Sackler, played by Adam Driver.In the first episode of the new season she is coming to his apartment every day because she more or less caused him to get in such a state at the end of Season One that he got hit by a truck. His leg is broken and he needs bedpan help. At one point she says to him, “You’re not being very nice to me right now” and he says back,  “When you’re in love you don’t have to be nice all the time.” Great writing! -  and in my book about as true a thing you can say about that raggedy ol’ thing called marriage oh yes.) Anyway I could look at that long crooked-nosed face of his all day and was surprised to see him in Spielberg’s Lincoln.Finally I think I love her because who in the history of capturing still or moving images has even been braver than she is about showing her soft untoned body in its true light in episode after episode? I read a John Updike passage lately where he spoke of a young woman’s thighs as looking ‘columnar'. Like the thighs of all young women, he said, and I thought for the millionth time how true and exact he was as an observer of us all.Lena is 26. I’m the flip of that age plus add a year but I feel the truth of everything she writes and says. I say here’s to her and her fine intelligence. She even reacted kindly when the puerile Howard Stern called her a 'little fat chick' on his radio show this week. Wit! Humor! Forbearance! She has it all. May she live to be a hundred!Here’s the trailer from season one, a perfect little ‘film’ all by itself, Her very last remark, made in an examination gown on her gynecologist’s table is one for the ages.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_L52eExAHU]

God Can't Be Shocked

Some people criticize John Updike, saying he objectified women, portraying them as mere sex objects and so on.I never saw it that way, even though I read Rabbit Run the summer of my 13^th year and felt my world split open upon reading the sex scenes. 'Grownups do this?' I asked myself stunned. This is what they're up to when they’re not buttering our toast or rotating the tires on the family car?'My big sister Nan had tried to clue me in on the particulars of sex; by the time she was ten she had sent away for a thousand pamphlets on the subject. And certainly her information was better than what the boy down the street said happens after you get married: He said they then take you into a secret room and tie you together by your underpants.What Updike described was much more specific. And once you got used to reading the actual truth, anything but shocking. No, he never objectified women, in my book; in my book he only loved and noticed them.He is the person who singlehandedly opened my eyes to writing. Three years he is gone now and it has taken me almost that long to read his final collection of short stories, slim as it is. I just didn’t want it to end, knowing there would be no others.Here's one thing he said that I love and agree with. He said his theory was that God already knows everything and can not be shocked.In the same essay he also said,

Only truth is useful. Only truth can be built upon. From a higher, inhuman point of view, only truth, however harsh, is holy. The fabricated truth of poetry and fiction makes a shelter in which I feel safe, sheltered within interlaced plausibility in the image of a real world for which I am not to blame. Out of soiled and restless life, I have refined my books.

I love that last sentence: Out of soiled and restless life I have refined my books. And I understand exactly the part about the shelter his creative writing made for him, remembering a description earlier in this book of the place he loved best as a child: it was the spot on the side porch of his first home where he would upend and then hide under the wicker furniture to become the observer unobserved.It’s what I wanted to be since my own baby days, only my spot was under the dining room table. Now I lurk in my car or on the park bench, listening to the old men and yelping teens and the women together talking. It’s what I have been since the dawn of the Reagan years when I began writing my column. For all these years I have written every week for the papers and now, here on this blog, I write every day.Seeing and then telling what you have seen is for me what I think it was for him too: merely a way of saying thanks for it.

Go to Bed!

I slept until 8:30 these last two days. 8:30! It scared me to death.I know John Updike preferred getting up later than everyone else – he liked to let others arrange the world before he stepped down into it he used to say - but you sure won’t catch us nervous types doing that. WE want to arrange the world, thanks very much. Aren’t we the ones responsible for making the sun rise every day? You know we are.I was only able to sleep so late because at 4am both days I got up and worked for an hour; just woke up at 4:00 on my own, wrote madly for a spell and fell back in the bed at 5:00, there to sleep like the dead.I’m doing too much, I know, but I’ve always done too much. Tonight I have to go to Parents Night at the high school, even though my own last kid graduated back in’ 02, but the second I get home I’m hitting the hay.Because tomorrow I'm taking 12 strangers to lunch.After bringing them on a walking tour of my town.In the pouring rain, poor lambs.Then I’m helping out at a dinner for 60 at 5:00, and after that, at around 9:00, I'm picking up a dining room table from a house in one town and delivering it to a house in another town.Being my kind of person really can wear you down, and I’ve noticed I look pretty wrecked along about now. Me and this poor guy, who looks so much older than he did in the year 2000, whew! Remind me never to become President.

You Slide Down Their Voices

How could I have copied out a mere half sentence of John Updike yesterday without giving the whole great passage? It’s from the short story “A & P”, at which arrive three girls in bathing suits.  “Sammy," the young guy working the register, describes the manager’s attempt to shame them for dressing the way they are dressed.When the prettiest of the girls responds Sammy suddenly 'sees' her whole life:  “All of a sudden I slid right down [it} into her living room. Her father and the other men were standing around in ice-cream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off a big plate and they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them.”That’s his view of their home, very different from the place to which he will return to after work: “When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it's a real racy affair Schlitz in tall glasses with "They'll Do It Every Time" cartoons stencilled on." Remember that old cartoon? Remember those free drinking glasses you got at the gas station, or because your grape jelly came in them? Ours were covered with pictures of the Flintstones and their good neighbors the Rubbles. But back to the master:

In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. …The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I knowit made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before.By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag -- she gives me little snort in passing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem -- by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the check-outs and the Special bins. They didn't even have shoes on. There was this chunky one, with the two-piece -- it was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit) -- there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn't quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long -- you know, the kind of girl other girls think is very "striking" and "attractive" but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much -- and then the third one, that wasn't quite so tall. She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders round. She didn't look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima donna legs. ….. She had on a kind of dirty-pink - - beige maybe, I don't know -- bathing suit with a little nubble all over it and, what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it hadn't been there you wouldn't have known there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.Lengel's pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the rest, but he doesn't miss that much. He comes over and says, "Girls, this isn't the beach."Queenie blushes, though maybe it's just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the first time, now that she was so close. "My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks"  - and it’s then that Sammy sees the life of privilege behind her voice, her origins “in a place “a place from which the crowd that runs the A & P must look pretty crummy.

This is three times more than I usually write here but how I miss this writer, gone from us since January of '09!. Every time I read him I slide down HIS voice and into HIS world. I just had to say that. I'm thinking of him these warm  days, seeing all around me the bare shoulders of the young girls in their suits and their camis, the lovely young the girls in their summer dresses.   

Notes from a Nobody

Back in 1993 when I was a serious Nobody (as opposed to now when I’m a Nobody with damaged hair) our late national treasure of a novelist and poet John Updike sent me a postcard in response to a column I sent him about an ABC boy who died young. I guess it was also about my mom dying in front of my eyes, the beauty of oranges piled in a bowl and how a woman cellist looks when she takes that instrument between her legs, which both embarrasses and moves you at the same time and makes you realize how Sex and Music and God really ARE all connected.)I’ve been reading Updike to cheer myself up. Others would read him to feel jealous but the thing with the guy is how generous he always was to everyone; how gracious, even to us little people: Back in ’93 he wrote a short story for The New Yorker about his mother dying. Anyone could see it was his real mom, so the column I sent him accompanied a condolence note. When he answered it he said I wrote ‘like a dream’ which is nonsense but such gallant nonsense. I’m writing for 1,000 years here and still no book offers! Still no requests for my endorsements on bras for your full-figured girls! I have never been on staff at a newspaper; haven’t earned a salary since I stopped teaching high school, topping out at the handsome figure of $12,000. But I have five books which I by-God published myself. And I make a princely ten dollars a column from the papers who still bother to pay me, who haven’t themselves gone under for the third time. And every April 15^th my husband David says “T, you couldn’t be earning LESS!” - to which I say 'So what?'Remember that great thing labor leader Eugene Debs said 100 years ago? "While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free”? Well where there's a way to lose money I have found it, all unwilling, or else it has found me. At the same time I do know this, that the best fun  I ever had was on the day I took the train to New York on my own dime, went to The Ethel Walker School in Brooklyn, taught the whole day and gave away five cartons of my funniest book, the one from my children’s childhood with all the pee-pee and bum-bum jokes in it.It's what God wants of me I think. And to have written all your adult life is such a privilege.These last seven days I have been writing my way out of sorrow over the death of my cat Charlotte and now here I am on the zillionth rainy day of this rainy cold summer and I feel swell. We’re on vacation with our mildewed clothes and Old Dave is doin’ the crossword ten feet away. Our remaining cat Abe is calculating the minutes 'til his next pig-out on fresh shrimp, eight strangers are coming over for drinks at 6 and God bless you guys I'm writing to you.To read what I said about the dead boy, the oranges and the cellist give me a minute. Takin’ a quick walk for the sake of the old bones, then I’ll put her up.Signed,The Cheeseball as she looked last month.(Took one look  at this pic and went straight to the beauty parlor. "I have black curly hair, dammit; Throw out the peroxide and the straighteners and let me be what I am." Today it's the color of charcoal ready for the steaks. And by God if the curl isn't comin' back at the edges too! (that's what's known as FAKE HAIR stuck to the back of my head in the photo. Marie Antoinette called. Cue the guillotine guys.)

John Updike Died Today

John Updike died today.I know where his house is and just how it sits on his lot.I know the route I could drive to get to it. I know all this because I loved him. I read Rabbit Run in the summer of ‘62 as an 8th grade girl. Three times in my adult years I wrote him and all three times he answered me in his courteous way: with typed postcards, hand-signed in the same blue ink he used to correct the mistakes and always with his own true street address, just as if he weren’t a great man and the best writer of our time who influenced so many of us, writers and non-writers alike.He honored the whole created world just by describing it so exactly and anyone could see his talent. Once I was crossing the street in downtown Boston when a letter carrier coming the other way saw a copy of his Self Consciousness tucked under my arm. “John Updike’s memoir, I read that!” he gaily called. “The guy can even make psoriasis interesting!”I want to say more tomorrow but for now all I can think to do is worry if I ever really told him how much I loved his work - for the way it helped me to see, and feel, and accept my own bumbling humanity and the humanity of others.“Thank you, Ms. Marotta, for your ever so encouraging letter,” he graciously wrote me last June.“Never stop writing,” I had written to him three days before.He seems to have stopped now and some would say for good, but ah, here’s the magic of all art: in his more-than-50 books he is talking to us still.

Be My Friend? Look, Here's My Allowance!

 Yesterday I seem to have invited everybody in my entire Contact list to be my 'Friend on Facebook' talk about embarrassing, since some of my contacts are famous people. Like Gloria Steinem. And Garrison Keillor I think maybe. And the POPE! and the Center for Wart Removal in Atlanta, and OK yes I’m making it up about the Pope and the Wart Lab but not the others. I HAVE these addresses but I never use them - or I use them only sparingly.

For example when I was younger, see photo, that's me in the chair sobbing, no of course not, that's me the mother, sorrowing over the first haircut... When I was younger my mom died at a party right in front of us all just as we were toasting her birthday, and this highly shocking event caused me in the 2 or 3 years following her death to do all kinds of odd things: Like wearing hats, I think to channel her old jauntiness. Like CRYING while giving speeches that were suppose to be light and funny, making the whole audience cry too, talk about your Typhoid Mary. And like writing letters to famous people.

I wrote to Ronald Reagan and sent him the column I did about him when I saw him in Concord NH. I wrote to the Prince of Wales after seeing him at the 350 birthday of Harvard. I remember sitting in the Yard looking up at all those ivy leaves declining like Latin nouns down the sides of the old buildings and thinking 'Damn you Ten Thousand Men of Harvard, why did you keep my kind out for like 99 % of your history?'

I wrote to Garrison Keillor when I applied to be the first Journalist in Space. I had mentioned him in my application essay and have always kinda figured that's why I got to the final 40 in that contest.

I even wrote to the great John Updike when I read a short story of his in the New Yorker that made it apparent his mum had died too. I sent him a condolence note and a copy of the column I wrote about Cal’s dramatic death – that was my mom's name, 'Cal', as jaunty a name as she was a person, a cigarette held tight in her teeth as she took the corners on two-wheels to get us to that convent school she enrolled us in by mistake where she was in a fight with the nuns from DAY ONE.

And they all wrote back, these famous characters: Ronnie R. wrote right back. The future King of England did too or at least His Honor Lord High-Fanny of the Royal Equerry wrote on his behalf. And Garrison Keillor and John Updike sent actual postcards, John Updike's saying a thing so nice about my writing it pulled me up out of obscurity like the wave of the Bibbity Bobbity Boo wand of Cinderella’s fairy godmother. In fact just last month he had another story in the New Yorker, this one so beautiful I was forced to write him again and what do you think? Another postcard came, as gracious as the first.

Now 15 years had passed between my first letter to him and my second, that's how careful I am. And I wouldn’t DREAM of writing to the Pope even if I had his email address, and the same goes for Lord High-Fanny who gave me some serious attitude in his letter just because my column said Prince Charlie wore the academic hood of his alma mater whereas in fact he wears the robes of the University of Wales just because he like OWNS Wales or some insignificant thing like that.

Gloria Steinem though? Gloria’s address I was saving for a special occasion, like offering myself to come be the jester at the next Inter-Galactic Women’s Conference. And now – agony!- my girl has called her girl if you can call an Address Book a girl and I seem to have asked her to be my friend on Facebook! The Queen gets invited to the worker bee’s after school party, Aaargh I could die! But, on the other hand in the last 24 hours I've heard from people I haven’t seen in decade and have admired their pictures and have written on their walls so why be embarrassed? Because really we're ALL members of the Class of '08, right? So really, why NOT write in each other's yearbooks?