Loss

During the life you have lived this far, you have lost enough people and things to know that there is no way to cope with grief, much less any way to go about avoiding the effects it will have on you. Given your experience to date in dealing with what you have left before you while attending to the things you wish to accomplish and experience, the reminders of what has been lost could overwhelm your enthusiasm for the present and your strategy for the future. Thus you are left vulnerable, a not uncommon place to be nor one where you are by any account alone.

You are used to the shelf life of persons, animal friends, and things are running on time lines, causing you to accept intellectually the notion of lifespan, but even in such cases, the heart has its own ways of dealing with what the intellect knows, transcending time, space, and causality.

You are less likely these days to be on the Hollywood Freeway, but whether you are traveling in that area alone or with others, when you pass the Woodman-Avenue turnoff, your thoughts and an occasional comment are drawn to Sam, the cat who visited you and stayed with you as your writing career grew, then, because you were home most days, opted to be your cat, who is buried on the hillside area adjacent the swimming pool that once belonged to George and Patsy Bishop, who invited you to inter Sam there, not far from their own friend, Black, as a gesture of solidarity and connectivity among human friends that developed as you became first George's editor, then friend.

Sometimes, when you are in Santa Monica, you will drive past the house your parents brought you to after you were born, and only the other day, in a writing workshop, when a student read a portion of her novel, set in Santa Monica at a particular locale, you were able to instruct her to have her character walk across the street to 516 Santa Monica, which you know is now a Chinese restaurant, but which was not always so because it was a remarkable place in which your father attempted for so many years various means of making a livelihood, not the least of which was inviting speculation on the outcome of various contests of speed among thoroughbred horses, but was also given over to the refurbishment and resale of luggage and trunks owned by some of the first-generation greats of the film industry.

Sometimes, when you see pictures of yourself at earlier ages, you blink at the preponderance of hair, curly, abundant, expansive in its cowlick abandon. On other occasions, seeing a runner plying one of your former routes, you are transported to the sixty-to-seventy-mile weeks of your own with your then dog companion, Molly. The male pattern hair hair loss is of little grief; you are fairly comfortable with the you of today, but thanks to the titanium replacements for the hips you were issued at birth, the best you could hope for would be half-hours on the treadmill at the Y, half-hours better spent in the pool.

As though it were a lathe, grief has in its way turned and formed your life, allowing you some voice in shaping outcomes and choices made after some loss, reminding you at all costs to cherish the immediacy about you and the manners in which you embrace it and those about you.

One of the great things a close and dear friend once said about you as he drive you to one of your destiny points of having your first hip-replacement surgery. "Because I've had the operation on my knee, I can appreciate how you'll come out of this, absolutely pain free. But

I'll always remember the way you walk now, as though you were trying to navigate through a pack of friendly dogs without stepping on one."

Paradigms Lost

The setting is a street corner in which Peter Sellers-as-Inspector Clouseau appears, seems interested in some item in a store window. A hybrid dog appears, standing next to him. And now, into the picture, a passerby stops, notices the dog, then looks to Sellers-as-Clouseau. "Does you dog bite?" the man asks.

Sellers shakes his head, no.

The man stoops to pet the dog, who thereupon bites him.

The man withdraws his hand quickly, turns to Sellers. "I thought you said you dog doesn't bite," he says with recrimination edging his voice.

"That's not my dog."

This narrative, although not mine, and probably improvised by Sellers, represents to me the archetype of the story I seem at this point in my life to tell. There are others, of course, but it always comes down to something like a variation on this theme. I did not know it at the time, but it seemed to have started with a story I wrote some years back, late 80s or early 90s, called "Molly." I'd met John Milton, editor of the South Dakota Review, at a sit down dinner at Dennis and Gail Lynds home. John asked me what I wrote and I told him with such force and clarity about stories as yet unwritten that I appear to have convinced us both. There was nothing for it but to go home and write "Molly" until I got it to the point where I had never been with a story before. Most of my published work and a bit of the unpublished related somehow to my sense of rules and of learned things rather than observed things and felt things.

Each of us has a kind of paradigm story to tell; the paradigm may change with the changes in the writers' life, but the urge to tell a story remains and so it is that we sense the paradigm in yet another way, then hasten to filter it through different characters, learning beyond rules and learned things, which if we are fortunate carries us on to the next paradigm, waiting for us to recognize it.