– or a screed for Brian Fawcett
Sometimes, Fawcett, when I’m writing a piece, a long poem, for instance; and I come down with a case of claustrophobia as a consequence, in order to relieve myself of that unwelcome sensation, I start casting about for a larger backdrop, one that might better accommodate the particularities of a foreground which has gotten messy; in which I’ve run out of room to move freely. For the most part it works but not always; and in this instance, I don’t know if the sweep of history or, for that matter, the heaven or hell of a moral universe is going to be of much use in clarifying muddy waters.
But the other night in Toronto, after dinner at your house, and I was riding the streetcar across town to the Beaches, pretending all the while that the metropolis was exotic and contained within its precincts fabulous revelations as to the meaning of existence; and some out of his mind paranoid was raving about liberty and automobile insurance to no one in particular, it struck me that though we’ve been friends as well as adversaries in the realm of what constitutes a good or bad piece of writing; were mates on a baseball club hacking away at a game we both love; and though we nearly got as far as fisticuffs over a matter unrelated to literature, we did not directly compete with one another or otherwise sully or importune one another’s character beyond the usual squabblings and grievances such as will arise between any two human beings. Am I missing something?
There were plenty of excuses for gamemanship. How many homerun trots around the bases of eastside parks did you cherish? Who between us had the better grasp of western civilization? That we did not irredeemably antagonize one another I find scarcely believable, as it would seem to have been the case that, what with normal amounts of testosterone being available to us both, nature ought to have taken its course. Because I am, frankly, critical, opinionated. How could I not be, raised as an American, acculturated to the notion that one has to stand on one’s own feet and not whine; but living life as a Canadian of liberal tendencies, tendencies, however, that are darkened by serious pessimisms? You, too, have all the faults of the male over which women cluck their tongues. Even so, even with best friends I suppose it can be said that I joust, contest and rib in a spirit of play and good will; in the interest of contributing to this shaggy dog story one calls a civilization; in the attempt to honour the notion that literature is nothing more, really, than a conversation, even if a great deal of it is conducted in mutual solitudes, and, often enough, due to exacerbated circumstance, in alienation. It may be news to you that I possess a capacity for puckish play and waggish humour, but I have witnesses. But of the people I’ve known, no one more than you has been at such pains to indicate that, in life, come what may, you’re having the best of times, your giggles a juggernaut. Perhaps we cut one another the slack we did as, to have done otherwise, might’ve proved catastrophic; the insults were so much verbal static as opposed to dagger blows. Or else, underlying years of accumulated debris that are our quite real disagreements to do with literature and the interpretation of history, we have in common a view of something like a political ideal. I prefer to entertain the latter assertion, as flimsily optimistic as it may strike you and now and then strikes me in a lucid moment. But why set these words down? Why pick at old scabs and open up yet again old cans of worms?
And the answer is I don’t know why. A way to pass a few morning hours while at loose ends? Vague atonement for sins that have long since lost shape, mass, pungency? There’s a prescription for trouble. It’s impossible for me to ignore that the scene in Vancouver, such as it was, ruined not a few talents and did much worse damage, all in the name of a yankee poetic. To indulge a bit of revanchism, writing this piece? Always a possibility in this our fact-checking culture. Or a partial answer might acknowledge the fact that I learned, under duress, not to carelessly discard people. My first years in Vancouver were no bed of roses, the kind of conversation I was looking for hard to come by; and I was hungry to know things. Despite my distrust of tribal behaviour (as when media carves up for ratings that unicorn called the body-politic), I’m gregarious by temperament; the literary loner people see in me is a product of environment and experience, not a gambit of choice. The Cecil Hotel beer parlour was early on a minefield : on the one hand my appetite for learned chatter, on the other my aversion to empty bravado and the self-congratulatory, not to mention my disposition to side with underdogs and misfits and losers; and in the literary sweepstakes of that particular time, you were running with the winning pack, even if Lane put the boot to McFadden’s hind end, there in the bathroom stall, the latter man giggling helplessly all the while. It seemed an interesting variation on a fairly commonplace theme. Of course you might have pointed out that, from where you sat, you and your gallants were nowhere near anything like literary ascendancy; academia had a lock on everything and wasn’t about to admit anarchists and other scruffies like you into their legitimizing inner chambers. Point it out to your heart’s content, I wouldn’t have believed you for a second. Street tactics, social program, stimulants – that’s how one wages a revolution. It’s always about power except when one is on a crusade, a walking-talking caveat, and nothing kills like success. If academia was a sterile zoo for old fuddyduddies of formalist preoccupations, Tallman the professorial insurgent poking at it with all the endearing aplomb of an eccentric brandishing an umbrella, now it’s just a joke, from what I can see, terrified lest a single brain cell stir in its slumber of nightmares.
Well, let us grant that my view of it then was skewed. I did sense the need for a balancing perspective. I‘d compose letters to George Stanley, the poet I most respected out on the coast; an American with whom I had nothing in common; whose poems often irritated me, but whose spirit I recognized as being – how shall I say it? – ceremonious in the best sense of the word, almost severe; no, it was severe – poetry is a serious business though one need not show off the seriosity or strut about in vestments; just that some poets compel one to listen no matter what, and Stanley was one of those. True, I tore the letters up and never sent them, much to the man’s relief, I’m sure. Whew, close call. It was the intimidation factor : he’d just regard me as a trifler. Moreover, I couldn’t trust my motivations. And, to put it vulgarly, I wouldn’t have been able to stand myself if I thought I was sucking up. Besides, I was, at that time, beginning to realize I was going to go it alone, if only from sheer perversity and muleheadedness. So much for Olson, Duncan, Creeley and the other stalwarts of a medicine show in which I’d been initiated, some might say indoctrinated, Charles Potts the witch doctor. Hello Juvenal, Rilke, Yeats, Homer and so many others who, in their aggregate, were an even motlier crew. It had been the sight of Duncan swirling his cape about at an UBC do that set off in me everlasting giggles and I was never able to take him seriously thereafter. What a peacock. Blaser? He was marginally more sufferable in my view, but precious, for all that. Great concert hall voice, incomparable. By now I was reading Dante and Virgil, and you were good to me then, acting as a sounding board for my thoughts on those divines and offering up your own. I might’ve seen it coming, that you got the giggles at the spectacle of the consequent world-weariness you claimed to detect about my person. In silent retaliation, I figured you more clown than scholar, adept of bluster and bluff and subtext; and, as it’s said in the parlance, if that was what turned your crank, so be it. So be about your business, go to it. And now here I am, mucking up the muddy waters, composing one of those letters or bits of writing I would’ve addressed to Stanley once upon a time and didn’t; and I’m two pages and some in, and still, I’ve no clear idea what I mean to say; though it’s as if I keep seeing where the bodies are, the books, as well, sinking into the ocean like the steerage passengers of the Titanic. Ideas are vicious items, not to mention that one where, by liberating so many sub-atomic particles, said particles whizz about, collide and smash each other into even more infinitesimal bits. The CanLit Project.
Well, how about this? Over the course of dinner, that night, George Bowering remarked of John Metcalf – Canadian magus, British ex-pat – that Metcalf couldn’t abide the fact that too few colonials were writing the sentences of English gentlemen. I was about to retort that too many Canadian writers I’ve met could do worse than to write like sentences, but thought better of it, in the interests of harmony and the otherwise good humour we were enjoying at your table. Nonetheless, Bowering did cut to the quick, whether he meant to or not : that this thing frequently categorized as CanLit has been an insecure literature with a chip on its shoulder; and not much has changed, to judge by the swagger and coy, hypnotic gesturings of the thing in question in its attempt to gain respectability in the eyes of world literature. Besides, Bowering, in a sense, went for the glitz, acquired hyper-drive capabilities. Yogi Berra and French philosophers. Took to barking up a postmodernist beanstalk; and I don’t know what he expected to find at the top, but I wonder if he ever got the coins, the golden eggs, the harp of the ill-tempered giants up there in the clouds, though he seems to have done alright for himself. Still, there are virtues to the arguments of both Metcalf or Bowering; and I’ll wager there’s more common ground between them than not as when the enemy of my enemy is my friend; and I can, without undergoing even the slightest twinge of hypocrisy, feel kindred to each of these luminaries. Even so, there’s no reconciling in the trenches what appears to be rearguard and what imagines itself cutting edge; just that I was happy enough to tool about in my Fargo pickup truck in the boonies of B.C. with my beer and my dog and some anarchist buddy or another riding shotgun, all the while I was reading Montcrieff’s Proust and Gibbon at the expense of Kerouac who’s been someone’s idea of Top Gun with all the Right Stuff. I didn’t detect any illogic or ideological impurity in my attitude. CanLit had its opportunity, might’ve constructed a potent sentence with which to astonish the world, marrying elements of American spontaneity to British structure (up and until the point where the British formalisms get stuffy and fey or overly compensate by going punk); but CanLit chose not to, and I never understood why, really. Lack of nerve?
At this juncture, it might seem a good time to ask : what is a Canadian? What is Canadian literature? Well, it’s been asked, God knows, and answered numberless times, but I, for one, still have no earthly idea. Has it to do with the fact you’re incurably territorial, I some shambling outsider chary of irking the host? And yet it was you, so it seemed, who would turn Prince George into a shrine for the poet of Gloucester while I was looking for, well, Prince George. The nearest I ever got to feeling Canadian was to shoot snooker with Lane in the legion post in Vernon. To look on the cottonwoods and the river in Winnipeg. To drive a cab on Armistice Day in Vancouver. Poppies, Export A’s, rye-breath. To regard the cenotaph in Westmount. Indeed, in respect to the words immediately above, pour on the bagpipes, and I can be flipped into a condition of waxing lyrical in a sombre fashion. Real things happened. Real people died real deaths, be it for a noble cause; be it a waste. I came to resent Macklem for saying of me, on the back of one of my early books of poetry, he the publisher, that he’s one of us. One of what? Who’s us? But at the time his comment seemed to reassure; I was looking for the limit of the long reach of the New American Poetry. And I thought I might find in a purely Canadian fabric a new weave – I’d have settled for a single stitch – to try on, and derive from this a compass reading of sorts. Was not to be, for reasons I didn’t understand and probably still don’t. Perhaps I should’ve disappeared into the Artic and written humorous ditties on the subject of wolves. It was incomprehensible to me that Chuck Carlson believed that channelling Kerouac, and badly, would explain a logging town to himself. I might’ve put this to him, I can’t remember if I did, but what better revenge than to surpass the masterpieces of one’s colonial masters? What else was Yeats up to, exchanging the Celtic twilight for London fog? Propertius when he went to Rome, and Caesar had expropriated his birthright? And sure, Carlson argued that his instincts were spot on, Kerouac the way to go, the way out of boredom and mediocrity and straight into unlimited paranoia. And so, tuque splotched on his head, Gauloises cigarettes at the ready, an endless ribbon of narrow-gauge paper winding around the typewriter’s roller, as if impersonating a saxophone, he’d riff by way of words; and I was an amateur and I’d best keep clear. Genius at work. Little did he know, but I was rooting for him. Better his Americanized whimsies a la Kerouac than the theorizings of Olson ineptly applied. And in this here and in this now it’s all pretty much an Alice in Wonderland hissy fit; one brings bat, ball and mitt to the park and puts this or that poem into play, because one has alerted every nook and cranny of the cosmos that it’s happening, man, going down; but it doesn’t signify in the least a game of baseball in all its possible beauty.
So far as I know, the Russians, down to Ahkmatova and beyond, still regard Pushkin as the wellspring of Russian literature. You’ll forgive me, I trust, for thinking back in the 70’s that perhaps Lane could’ve provided the same service to CanLit. Don’t know what I was thinking. It wasn’t going to be Bowering because he was too ‘literary’ and William Carlos Williamsy. Perhaps Newlove got closest, or Purdy, or Layton, for that matter. Nowlan lied the least, as he didn’t pretend that the Calvinist broomstick up his you-know-where wasn’t anything other than what it was. One has to respect such honesty. There hasn’t been much of it, if any. Furberg had some of that honesty, in his critical thinking if not in his verses; and you took care of that in fairly short order, assigning him the opprobrium of a velvet-lined box from which you’d then claim those compromised verses sprang. (God only knows what you thought of Daryl Hine about whom no one said a word, not one in the years I was on the coast.) A bait and switch operation, as it wasn’t the suspect verses but Furberg’s capacity for parody that threatened; and he parodied everybody to a tee. Well, you pays your money, you takes your chances. So that I’m not suggesting we weep tears for the memory of Furberg, and he wouldn’t stand for it, in any case. It’s a bit like watching Godfathers I, II and III or a history of city-states, reflecting on these matters.
It was literally in your backyard, the barbecue fired up, Italian sausages on the grill, that Serafin and I dreamed up the idea of starting a review. Hoffer sniffed : consorting with enemy. Kociejowski would’ve observed that sure, just what the world needs, another magazine. It was my intention to recruit outside talent, world-class, if possible. Serafin rightly pointed out that it was impractical. How would we remunerate the talent, given that it wouldn’t look twice at a mickey mouse operation with delusions of grandeur? Serafin was obsessed with magazines and read them all, especially the more iconic rags back when popular culture actually meant something and wasn’t just a marketing ploy. I had everything to learn from him and he nothing to learn from me in that regard; just that, over that bone of contention concerning outside versus local talent, we fell out, irreparably so, and I came to see the review as just more of the same old same old. To this day, I believe you had a hand in what went down, expropriating turf for your own purposes, playing us all for chumps. Or maybe it was Hoffer pulling strings behind you pulling strings. Years and years ago.
You reminded me, that evening, as you proudly showed off your downtown Toronto demesne, and to be sure, I was envious, that you’d quit writing poetry. You said that Thesen, to whom you were once a husband, was the better poet, and that was why. But it’s on the record, I think (David Mason the bookseller related it to me) that you quit because you came to understand you might as well have stood on a street corner, wanking away in plain sight, for all the attention you’d get, writing the stuff. I say you shouldn’t have quit, not because you have some great but unaddressed talent; not because you necessarily have something of import to say that might go down better in verse than in your creative non-fiction, but because of the very futility of the exercise. What poet, male or female or cockatoo, ever rates the attention they think they deserve? Of course it’s a circus, all that shameless behaviour; and yes, were some of those poets to shut up and sort mail for a living, we’d shout hurray and hallelujah, there’s justice, after all; but in your case, and because I suspect that, at bottom, your heart’s in the right place, all that can be said is that you shirked the agonies. I would like to have seen you visibly suffer a bit more than you did; stew in the self-doubts, the inevitable humiliations; the shadows that lurk behind every perfect ego; the knowledge that most of what we write is dreck; the blind hope that maybe something made of one’s words might stick and bear scrutiny. You could’ve been a noble sonofabitch had you stuck with it; as it is, you were only smart.
♦
Well, now what? Do we bask in the afterglow of what was a fine enough evening, all’s forgiven and besides, what’s inimical to us both is the rising spectre of extremist politics and universal idiocy? Like you say, and rightly, swastikas are in themselves particularities, never mind the ideological framework which engendered them. Shall we, hubristically enough, by joining forces, save CanLit from itself, pull its navel-gazing head out of platitudinous sand? Or is it even a consideration anymore, some storm or another having long since blown over, issues of identity but a stale obsession of over the hill rhymesters and feministas? Immigrant cabbies packing quarantined Ph.D’s say more to me on this matter than ivory tower noodlers circling their wagons. Buday says why bother with novels if perusing them amounts to nothing more than a cultural chore? Larkin observed that poetry readings are just a cheap way to preen and prop up a house of cards. Even so, I’ve been witness to a handful of great readings, the first being one Potts gave in the 60’s at Pike’s Market in Seattle. Rather than dehydrate a world and reduce it down to all the splendour of a dried bean, he opened up the world; at least at that moment he did, irrespective of the poems that followed in the aftermath. I once drove through Idaho on the way to New Orleans; was in an Artaud state of mind, all of seventeen and a committed internationalist; and a chili burger consumed on the highway somewhere was a moveable feast seething with zealots and noble desperados and the League of Nations and Subterranean Homesick Blues; and I thought it a vision and it was only a kind of carsickness the cure for which was urban planning and central committees – your brand of stardust. Your homerun trot put the laws of nature in abeyance; you lumbering around the bases on your toes, throttle at maximum, pace just barely discernible. Perhaps CanLit has no subject matter save that of acquiring and demonstrating street creds; save for sentimental classics and the withering vagaries of the Cold War between the sexes. As per Kociejowski : ‘To write a great novel, you have to bore, sometimes, and if you’re afraid of that, you’ll always be a prisoner of what seems momentous; of what’s showy and false.’
You have enemies, some of whom ping on your radar; some of whom you’ve yet to identify, I think; who regard you as an elitist, your opinions and judgments so much turf-protecting shield-devices. You view yourself as a patriot, but they view themselves as patriots as well who were sold out to the equivalent of a literary protection-racket. No doubt, you ascribe it to jealousy, muddleheadness; to pathologies of one sort or another to be brushed aside, ignored, and if dangerous enough, crushed. I rooted for Acorn over Bowering, not that such fervour possibly matters now; and I’m confident that Bowering could care less at this late date, legacy in the bag. I watch Starnino sashay down the same broad boulevard. A new generation of poets might reasonably ask what Sibum’s on about. Signifies nothing to them for whom the history of humankind dates back no further than the Korean War, if that far, and those paleolithic rockandrollers. They’ve got everything they could possibly require – so they think.
A singularly stark fact : William Hoffer, the notorious bookseller, heinous villain to the CanLit crowd for his diatribes against arts-funding and what he deemed institutionalized mediocrity – he came between us, that is, if there were anything like a ‘between us’. He agitated against our cozy arrangement in the Old Europa where, under the malevolent gaze of the Hungarian, you gleefully red-pencilled my writings. There was no fun like the fun of being a writer. But with Hoffer, Sibum was lost to iniquity, or so your literary pals observed, and was to be pitied. And you wonder why I can’t much abide them. It was, it seemed, a friendly enough challenge you threw my way when we first met. Foolishly, I was wearing an aviator’s jacket and was therefore suspect. Well, I was getting about then on an old BMW motorcycle, hence the jacket. It took me a long while to realize that your gruffly jocular demeanour, your air of intellectual superiority, your macho schtick, were screens for insecurities and a sensitive nature out of synch with a logging town’s childhood milieu. Tough guys don’t dance, and all the rest of it. I’ve written about Hoffer elsewhere and haven’t the stomach to rehash the tale; just that the war you waged with him and he with you was all too often waged through me. I’ve been going about the past few years believing – a besetting madness, this – that I’d transcended the politics of the sand pile; could care less for the distinctions it bestows on the slaves grunting away in culture’s tin mines; and for the most part, it’s true. What else is humankind good for but to reward good behaviour and neuter oddities and ne’er-do-wells? Then dinner at your house after a hiatus of 20 years, and it was instantly obvious to me that one might transcend the temptations to comply and play at some game or another, but one doesn’t transcend history, even the in-house variety. To the extent that one can, and with dubious resources, one endeavours to step aside and let it roar by; and one can’t then, in good conscience, complain one has been overlooked. You’re the sort of fellow for whom history’s your cockpit, real or simulated. You love all those dials and gadgets. I don’t begrudge you your Rideau Hall and your private audience with its gardens. Commendable that your visit should’ve delighted you so. The ugly truth, and there’s none uglier, comes down to this, classic volte-face : CanLit matters, notwithstanding how often the indulgences and shabby practices dismay; and contrary to appearances, how deeply a lack of genuine generosity cripples. How else repay a debt to the country that gave me entrée so many years ago than to gain the better side of a much abused infinitive – to care? Or will you say I’ve flattered myself?
The honest provincial sometimes has more to say than the city mouse. Literature has no border stations. Nor is it limited by constraints of time and prevailing geists and fashions, though a writer’s backyard may be all he or she knows. Perhaps Bowering believes he got the best of all worlds. Perhaps he flatters himself. You dismissed Bringhurst, having it known he was on the CIA payroll, all because he wrote a pretty impressive poem or had lucked into it. One of nature’s quirks – that an arsehole could get so lucky. And that a man might have a sensibility however alien to yours, and not only a sensibility but a plainly evident commitment to craft suggested to you a storm trooper’s psyche or a vampire’s bloodlust; some nasty, in any case, such as bedevils honest, peace-loving folk who gentle themselves with the approved scriptures. Trivialize the enemy. Straight out of highschool. George W Bush got the White House, playing that game; and you may wince to hear it, but you two would’ve understood each other, perfectly. Well, it’s so much water under the bridge, and of waning interest. Though I’ve ceased to believe it exists, I respected your effort to come by a unified field-theory of history and much else, some first principle, perhaps, by which to live and die and order relations. In light of which, the lamb curry consumed, along with the sprouts; the cheeses brought out and the best grapes you’d seen, you said, in a long time, and they were marvellous; the wine bottomless; you might’ve brought on cigars and we toast the fact of having hung in there. Dog-like ease in the afternoon of the world. Literature. Beautiful and sympathetic women. Life’s grand. But what startled me, threw me for a loop, once you’d taken my measure, come to your own conclusions as to how well or how poorly I’ve fared since we last beheld one another in our tawdry glories, was the appearance of something like affection in your eyes. Troubling. New complication.
♦
And that, Fawcett, is where it lies, whether or not the evening was really nothing more than an interlude for us both; Bowering, as ever, the show man and the show must go on.
♦
It’s purely accidental – this bit of writing. I had no idea what to expect, that evening; I certainly entertained no prospect I’d come to write up what material those few hours resurrected on abandoned byways : old affections, hostilities, betrayals. It wasn’t as if I’d entered the cave of a terrorist, one of those palm-sized tape recorders in hand, and you were going to talk to me of your plans for the world. Could be that here I’ve capitulated to the temptation to think aloud – you the august sounding board. Could be that, not having given the ‘old days’ much considered thought in a long while, I’m just now beginning to see the vague outlines of what ifs and should’ve beens. And we may flatter ourselves that we’re holding a sane and steady course, bound for the future on a scale other than that of our domesticities and mortalities. Or else, we’ve already been shunted through some central gate either as barbarians or as schooled actors and we’re in it – this future, this crapshoot, this logical outcome of previous boondoggles; but I reckon the actuality is that we were hoovered up and we’re pinwheeling in a vacuum. Who knows when we’ll be set down and with whom? Who’ll turn up at our side when the experiment crashes, run out of wherewithal? Or perhaps the middle-classes will keep their heads and scupper any attempt by either the one per-centers or the zealots to put democracy on a collision course with some immoveable object. For all that, I’m no political thinker; you’re that creature, and you ought to know; you’ve made it your business to know a la the pundits of big media. But when I hear you seconding my more dire apprehensions, it’s unnerving, seeing how often in the past you characterized them as those of a ninny weary of what he imagines the vanities are. Perhaps you’ll think less of me for this writing. Perhaps you’ll regard me as does Solway – poet, pamphleteer, Zionist – as a nice enough guy but an effing idiot for failing to see the Big Picture. Perhaps you’ll say I’ve been holding back and you’ll wonder why. I didn’t believe there was any longer a conversation. The 80’s winding down, things between us parlous, at best; CanLit as an entity some misunderstood dragon, fire-breathing wuss, I didn’t believe what I had to say could interest you or anyone else north of a certain border and on this side of the pond; unless one counted the chatter to be had with stragglers in the baggage train; the gossiping, the carping at the officer corps. A few trips to Europe, and then, Montreal. Good God, what was this? A many-sided conversation, if intermittent, punctuated by long periods of silence. It seems a balance, if fraught with the occasional Solway harangue. A mature writer, I gape at the persistence of my adolescent fantasies vis a vis literature. I forgive myself this unseemliness as no one else will. Recently, as a girl and I smoked cigarettes outside a bookstore inside of which the girl’s mother was reading her poems, I said (this daughter, too, wished to write), ‘Look through that window carefully. It may seem the reality, that commaderie within, the applause, the huzzahs, but it isn’t. If you’re going to write, do so with all your heart, mind and soul. In the meantime, study the canon so that, if you must dismiss it, you’ll dismiss with authority and not as a pretender of obnoxious cant. What I’m saying to you is standard, as old as the hills; I didn’t invent it. Few people, if any, are going to genuinely care – if at all – how it’s going for you. You’re on your own. Keep clear of workshops.’ Et cetera. She was a little startled. Either I was a monster, a wrecker of communities; or perhaps she now had something to think about, she standing there in her denims and stomping boots, her world-weariness still sweet and fresh, but for how long? I wished her good luck, impatient to get to a bar and free of my best behaviour. Where I might ponder the good times of ‘bad back’ baseball, Hoffer sniffing all while that I was consorting with the enemy, he not satisfied with our epic battles over the snooker table; I at a loss to explain what failures of spirit estranged you two. Where I might recall, with affection, if you can believe it, the odd time you were just yourself, not a culture warrior; and you’d ask me if I listened to music while I wrote, and if so, was the music Mozart’s? It was an instance of naiveté on your part such as backlit your humanity. The question deserved a simple and direct answer. ‘No,’ I said, and perhaps you were relieved to hear it. And then the moment passed, like moments always pass.
§
Remind me never to invite Norm over for dinner again…