Getting the Cat into the Bag and the Story into the Narrative

You do not anthropomorphize animals.  You do have frequent conversations with them, most of them in the spirit of conveying some sense of your feelings and attitudes toward the animal, a sharing as it were of your mood and regard for the animal.  In return, you hope for some reciprocal sense that the animal is sharing some sentiments and personalized presence with you.

Thus the word conversation should be rendered in quotation marks, an additional sign that you do not consider the exchange to be the same kind of exchange you'd have with another human, nor that you anticipate or expect the same kind of communication.  Most of these "conversations" were with dogs or cats, an occasional bird, one or two rats, and a squadron of squirrels.

You are well into conversations with Goldfarb, the cat who has roomed with you since the 29th of April.  Goldfarb is by no means the first cat in your life; there have been Sam, Maud, Vincent, Morris, Armand, and a cadre of offspring from a feral mother you dubbed Madam Ovary.  Of them all, Goldfarb is more outgoing in his affectionate nature.  He is also the first the matter of a carrying case has become an issue.

For reasons you cannot hope to explain, Sam was disposed to take walks with you and allowed himself to be taken in the car, on a number of occasions on rather prolonged vacations.  When he required visits to a veterinarian, you simply lifted him, told him we were about to visit Dr. Altman, then off we went to Studio City, which was home base for Dr. Altman.

One or two interim cats between Sam and Goldfarb required standard kitty litter box facilities, but Goldfarb is the first cat who requires litter box, indoor scratch pads, and a carrying case.  The others were able to see to their own sanitation and scratching needs.  Although Goldfarb spends a good deal of his time out of doors, he, unlike many of the cats in your life, has yet to offer to contribute the short hair domestic equivalent of rent in the form of birds, lizards, rats, voles, or gophers.  You are happy with this status because you already know more about the inner physiology of such life forms than you wish to know.

Because you had fifteen or sixteen years with your late dog, Sally, the conversations ranged over a spectrum of subjects including your inner debates about whether to go to a particular event, whether she was comfortable with where you'd left her in a parked car, if she were hungry or thirsty or wished to rid herself of some waste.  As a consequence of these varied dialogues, you developed a growing sense of her tastes to the point where you could pretty well anticipate her current preference for, say, the albacore tuna sandwich over the double cheese burger at The Habit.

Even though this borders on your fanciful interpretation of the transaction, there were in fact times when you'd bring her the albacore which she would not eat or the cheeseburger, which she also spurned, indicating with her behavior that she either was not hungry when you thought she was or that you misread her preferences.

At home, she was pretty good at communicating with eye contact and body language a range of requests and preferences.  Even when you had the sense from her behavior that she wanted something and you had no clear what, you nevertheless had the distinct impression she was trying to communicate something.

Your long history of conversation was not only a bonding experience but an immediate communication of some intent or some sharing of mood.

A portion of your conversation with Goldfarb has to do with your wish to acclimate him with the carrying case in order for him to have a check up and receive any necessary shots from Bonnie Franklin, who will become Goldfarb's de facto veterinarian, even to the point where, should he go missing, then be found, the Home Again medallion which refers to his embedded microchip, will supply your phone number and the number of Dr. Franklin's Your Pals Pet Hospital.

You've already blown two appointments with Dr. Franklin because Goldfarb is adept at avoiding allowing himself to be placed in a rather expensive, padded, multi-zippered carrying case.  Your first venture was to lace the interior of the carrying case with catnip and indeed, he once went inside it to get at the source.  When it was time to leave for the vet, Goldfarb successfully defended his wishes to remain outside the carrying case.

You've subsequently tried luring him into the case with treats and catnip, dropping a towel over him, and trying to life him, as per instructions on a YouTube video presented by a vet, into a pillow case.

Friends have suggested oven mitts, leather gloves, and large boxes.  Goldfarb seems equal in his resistance to all these and his eagerness to be close to you to the point of soliciting contact.  Brian Fagan, the no-nonsense archaeologist, who happens to be a Brit, has suggested you simply approach the cat, tell him stiff upper lip and tally ho, and into the cage.  This is no idle speculation; Fagan has dedicated his most recent book, The Attacking Sea, to Atticus Catticus Moose.  But even Fagan has said that the matter often requires two persons, perhaps one to life, the other to hold the carrier at the ready.

Your observation from your cat carrier experiences is that Goldfarb remains eager for contact and affection and is steadfast in his wish to avoid any contacts with the carrying case.

In many ways, getting Goldfarb into his comfortable, lined, washable, zippered carrying case is of a piece with trying to get an idea into the semblance of a story.  A cat, sensing a destination of a carrying case, tends to extend his legs, making him or her larger than the opening of the carrying case.  In addition, it is your observation that the cat will wriggle, extend claws, perhaps bite, certainly cry out in some form of protest.  A dramatic concept will sometimes extend its legs or adopt other resisting maneuvers.

You are left with a number of scratch marks, a wary cat, a stubborn story, and plenty to talk about.

In Tent City

You are at comfortable ease with your default position being a willingness to share.  Even when you don't initiate the sharing, your comfort zone allows you to acknowledge your willingness nevertheless, should you be asked to share most things.

You'll want to devote a fuller and more focused investigation to the attitudes, tones of voice, or other external clues in orbit that cause you to deliver a prompt, incisive "No" to requests.  One no in particular comes from a charity you once extended a twenty-five-dollar donation, some two or three years ago.  Since that donation, you've received requests from the same charity, often printed on high-quality paper stock with a significant enough basis weight to bump the request beyond the standard first-class postal rates.  By your estimation, the charity has spent well over twice the amount on subsequent requests and (you're wondering whether to put quotation marks about the word)newsletters, a fact you reckon defines the charity's use of funds to add direct help to their cause.

That prologue established, you venture the two things you stand most of all willing to share are stories and enthusiasm.  Although you often find yourself hoping for a better balance, you hold no illusions about the number of persons alert to accept your stories, even less illusions about the possibility of individuals who are willing to go to great lengths to avoid your stories at all costs or, the nail the door shut, at no cost whatsoever.

If you are rich in anything, you are rich in enthusiasm.  A publisher, interviewing you to run the Los Angeles office of her empire, asked you what was so special about you.  Your reply focused on your taste and your enthusiasm.

The publisher waved both away.  "You must keep both in check or you will be contracting a great many books that do not earn their keep,"  she said with what seemed to you at the time as a snap.

You sensed your fate for being hired on the line there, demanding an appropriate reply.  "In balance,"  you said, "my aggregate sales will outweigh any losses."  You could as well have said--and thought to do so--"My average will be every bit as profitable as yours."  You could well have said, but wisely thought not to, "My monthly salary is the merest decimal of your monthly returns."  (By which you meant the staggering rate of massmarket paperbacks that found their way to the pulping machines.)

She apparently liked your attention to those matters, but she also reminded you whenever she saw you about curbing your enthusiasm.

You suppose there are individuals who curb their intensity and appetite for what they are doing.  You have met individuals who have what you consider anemia of enthusiasm.  You have met individuals who have taken you on for your enthusiasm and intensity.  As well, you have taken your own self on for those times when your intensity was not up to your standards.

The dichotomy is quite clear:  you can be intense or not.  You can be intense about living and the stages associated with one's orbit through living, or you can be inert or passive to the point of adopting Bartleby's choice of preferring not to do whatever is requested of him.  Although there are arguments to be made for Bartleby's seeming passivity being quite a straightforward --mixing the philosopher and metaphor here--No, In Thunder (See Carlyle), he pretty well shut down.  You have no talent for a complete shutdown, even when saddened or depressed or frustrated.  You are pleased to be lacking this ability.  When you see it resident in others, you have neither envy nor jealousy.

However dismal the emotional climate in which you have found yourself, there has always been something above and beyond the climate which you can discover to the point where it will suffuse you with the energy necessary to move along the path toward the next venture.

There are times when, knowing you will be spending the evening at home, you will nevertheless bathe, shave, and select a fresh shirt to pursue your planned evening.  The matter does not need to rest there.  You may just as well prefer the comfort of a sweat shirt, athletic socks, and gym shoes.  Such matters are choices, made after deliberations.  The deliberations come from--you guessed it--intensity.

Your choice in friends and activities depend on intensity.  You are comfortable with sharing only such intensity as you have at the moment, but knowing you are to be with friends or if the "friend" is a book or a concerto or ballet or long recording of a jam session, the offer is still there and you enjoy the extent of your being a host in terms of the intensity you offer as a host, whether it is to close ones, to students, to your work, and of course to yourself.

The pickled watermelon rind, the pate terrine, the Hollandaise sauce, the English digestive biscuits, and other seeming anomalies in the kitchen storage are reflections of various degrees of intensity and enthusiasm.

Why would you ever chose not to be intense?  You've tried any number of modes, of places at the depths of despair, frustration, doubt.  You've tried as well elation, mischievousness, curiosity, unabashed appreciation.  Regardless; down or up, why would you chose to entertain any of these without intensity?

The short story, pure and simple

The short story as not only a format but rather your format has been much on your mind of late, prompted by the forthcoming publication of a collection of yours, later on in the year, enhanced by numerous digressions in classroom and workshop conversations, and in its way nailed further into place by a conversation at lunch today with a writer you much admire.

In another world, the world of your emergence into accepting the inevitability of your wish to be a storyteller, your embarking on a study of the form, and the soul-wrenching realization that you were lacking at least two qualities necessary to be a writer of short stories, you launched the most unfloatable craft into the gushing stream of narrative.  For some years, perhaps ten or twelve, you persisted at learning via reading and trying your own hand, aiming for some result that would in any way float.

You originally met Thomas McGuane through your great pal, Barnaby Conrad.  Lunch today was filled with reminiscences and fish stories and your happening to have triggered a recollection of a favored story by John Cheever, whom McGuane greatly admired. Then came McGuane's expressed regret that the short story was being pushed to the side by publishers' and agents' demands for novels (from which each stood to make some income).

Thus you launch into a story related to you by Barnaby Conrad in which Irwin Shaw, highly successful with his stories and novels, constantly sought to champion Cheever, thus McGuane is off and running on a series of writers of that (and his) generation.

Such exchanges, especially with someone who knew and was friends with some of your favorites (Bernard Malamud, for instance) and who shares your regard for John Updike, cause the short form to blaze in the smithy of your enthusiasm, reminding you of personal battles won, which is to say realizations that there was a short story you could and did write, that there are short stories you can still write, that there are in fact new and contemporary short story writers you can (and do) read and admire and learn from in ways that expand the landscape of the you short stories, that in fact pay off on the efforts you extended when you earlier attempted to launch those unwieldy ventures.

Your summer is before you, a gaping, wide sea of time and opportunity and potential.  Your obligations and projects are before you, and now, as of the energy from this long leisurely lunch discussion, the siren call of short stories.  Wide and gaping as the summer before you is, it is not so wide nor gaping as to allow you to get in all the obligations and projects.  In many ways, the best you can hope for is that among the course proposals you sent to the dean, Writing the Modern Short Story is among the two chosen for the Fall quarter.

Now, for the moment, what you have to contend with is a recurrent theme that began during your first semester as an undergraduate at UCLA, where, at final exam time, you were either presented as a cosmic gift an idea for a short story that crosscut your studies or you found the short story as a means of being lured away from studying for your finals.  Either way, the short story won.

Short story for you is a person wanting something he or she knows to be an equivalent of the Sirens, luring Odysseus's sailors from their appointed task.  A short story is the consequences of the wanting; it is a headlong rush to some kind of engagement with some aspect of the cosmos, which is to say the known reality, demonstrating to the characters and you the vast expanse of unknown reality and the potential for discovery within it.

You could not have articulated this before, nor could you have expressed the philosophy that a scene is two or more individuals stepping into an arena or crucible, each believing he is right.  You could not have known how much you valued the short stories of Lee K. Abbott or Deborah Eisenberg because you'd not yet reached the point of reading them and the consequences of being yanked by the scruff of the neck into their narrative reality, where characters do things that bring blush to their cheeks and fire to your emotions and empathy.

True enough, you have made remarkable discoveries while writing novels, in particular discoveries arising from not knowing how to write novels.  But on balance, you've learned more about writing, discovery, and the short story from not knowing how to write short stories.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Lie

Food for thought about lies, truth, reliability of narration, declarative sentences, and that grand old bugaboo, defensiveness.

1.  The relative length and complexity of an explanation of some kind of behavior determines the degree to which the explanation is judged to be a lie.

2.  Truth is not always simple.  However complex they may be in presentation, excuses can be reduced to basic declarative sentences such as:

I was wrong.

I forgot.

I was busy.

I didn't feel like it.

I didn't look.

I didn't think it mattered.

3.  Characters within fictional narratives are more concerned about truth than you are.  This is a certain metric whether the characters are in a story you are reading or a story you are writing.

4.  The closer you sit to your own motives and agendas, the less thought you are required to spend on truth and the more energy you will have as a consequence to devote to your immediate and long-term agendas.

5.  The less thought, the greater the likelihood of honesty.  Thus the door has been pried open to admit the relationship between length of explanation and suspicious behavior and possible ulterior motive.

We find humor in an imagined, fanciful explanation of self-serving behavior from a young person because we are playing off the layers of defensiveness coating out own intentions.  I was going to the store to buy the milk you gave me the money to buy, when I was set upon a group of cranky older boys who forced me to in stead by chocolate-covered marshmallow cookies, which they then forced me to eat, knowing you would be upset I did not return with the milk or the money you gave me for its purchase.

How often do you find yourself essaying such explanations for behavior which could be described in more simple, direct terms?  In addition, how does the density of truthfulness increase with the simplicity and directness of your explanation?

Do you have any helpful clues to measure the degree of variation your reliability as a narrator undergoes as your explanations gather more complexity?

Given your understanding of the metric described and arrived at through indirection in these previous paragraphs, can you see any possible effects resident within your decision to tell one or more lies about one or more subjects?

While on the subject, what are your thoughts about loud, verbal or written insistence?  Don't you in fact consider such outbursts to be tells of defensiveness?  I said I didn't do it, dammit.

But there is truth, isn't there, in the inference that defensiveness raises suspicions that the truth is somehow being distorted or occluded?

Now comes the stopper:  Is an excuse a defensive lie?  Do we make excuses to avoid recognizing the dread the truth causes us to recognize?

You were too busy to look.

Happy Bar-Mitzvah, Marvin

You have not been connected with the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference since 2011, but because so many friends are associated with it, you've taken to breakfasting across the street at a large building still called a bath house, located at beach edge across the street from the conference venue.

Friendships extend back to the mid or late 1970s, when you first began leading the late night fiction workshop.  Of these, one of the more significant is with Leonard Tourney, whom you met in the mid 80s and with whom your friendship merged into a business partnership lasting until he left his teaching position at UCSB, then moved to Provo, UT, where he began a second career at BYU.

You and Leonard participated in hundreds of so-called mystery evenings or weekends, in which you wrote, directed, and performed before audiences composed of individuals on employee retreats or tourist junkets of various sorts.  Your most memorable of these performances were at the Gainey Winery in Santa Ynez, but you have also performed at The Music Academy of the West, and various hotels, historical sites, and restaurants from Los Angeles north to San Luis Obispo.

You also gave weekend writing seminaars and co-hosted the Lions Den Saturday Morning Writing Workshop, which you have continued to host to this day, and the bi-monthly Woodside (suburb of Palo Alto, CA) workshop for twenty or so years, and which you ran solo until 2012.

In tastes and temperaments, you differ, giving your students a rich set of choices to follow.  Leonard seems to construct his plots as well-developed from the earliest draft.  Yours are more tentative and improvisational.  Given your rather edgy impatience and his immense patience, the potential for heated disagreement between you was instructive in its constant non-presence or relative lack.  Thus the resulting chemistry between you was of mutual benefit and, you like to think, instructive for your student clients.

Your favorite reminiscence of your times together came when your plans for one of your mystery plays called for the prop of a birthday cake.  Knowing you and Leonard would be the ones to share the cake after the performance was done, you went to a local bakery where you knew the pastry chef had studied in France and where he produced high-quality pastries.  Luck was with you.

The pastry chef gave you a cake with a message on it, Happy bar-mitzvah, Marvin, which had been a series of mistakes on the part of the order department, involving the fact that the bar-mitzvah boy's name was not Marvin and that it was scheduled a week later than thought.  The cake, with the greeting to Marvin, fit the cheap, exploitative personality of one of the characters in our drama.  The event being celebrated in our play was a birthday, not a bar-mitzvah, and out character was named William.  Thus the cake symbolized the cheap crassness of the character who bought it second-hand for use as a birthday cake.

You and Leonard knocked that cake back with a half-gallon of milk.  Years later, perhaps twenty, at Leonard's farewell party in Santa Barbara, you went to the same bakery, ordered a cake, and asked for the words Happy bar-mitzvah, Marvin, to be displayed on the surface of the cake.

Passing through the desert offerings at the buffet table spread for his farewell party, Leonard came upon the cake, stopped for a moment, his brow furrowed in thought until a smile of recognition arrived.  He reached for a pocket camera to take a shot.  "You know,"  he said while we were working our way through potato salad and hot dogs and deserts, "I've often thought of that original cake as a symbol of our doing those mystery plays.  I'm so pleased you remembered this."

On such gestures does friendship ride.

Tonight, you met for dinner at Cafe Luna where your conversation ran a spectrum of remembered high and low points in the friendship, of successes, failures, gains and losses.  Somewhere in the middle of your taking off on the way the Republicans were already at work demonizing Hillary Clinton and your own preference for Elizabeth Warren as a viable presidential candidate, you saw Leonard's expression change, his glance shift to the side.  He suddenly lifted his hand to offer polite interruption signals to you, then began calling out a woman's name.

You turned to see the target of his greeting.  The name rang a bell and even caused a kind of minor fugue state because you'd mentioned the name the day before at breakfast reminiscence.  Margi Mainquist.  Early in 1986, when Leonard had returned to Santa Barbara from an unpleasant teaching tenure at the University of Tulsa, he'd gone to the UCSB special programs department to present them with a pitch for putting on a week-end-long murder Mystery Play, "Murder at Morro Bay,"  He'd gone to pitch the idea and secure from the University a suitable second-in-command, which turned out to be you.  Thus dinner with Leonard was joined by the individual who'd brought you and Leonard together twenty-seven years ago.

For her part, Margi Mainquist's alert face twitched with pleased recognition.  "I know you two from somewhere,"  she said.  "You both look so familiar and fun.  It's been a while, but I know I know you."

You stood.  "Of course,"  you said, extending your hand.  "Tourney.  Leonard Tourney."  And you made a sweeping gesture toward Leonard.  "  Shelly,"  you said.  "Shelly Lowenkopf.  If it hadn't been for you, we'd be sitting at separate tables tonight."

"Now I know you,"  Margi Mainquist said.  "You're not Leonard Tourney.  Only Shelly Lowenkopf would do such a thing."

On such recognition does friendship ride.

Free Your Inner Lobster, or, A Lobster Is a Story, Waiting

All narrative, fiction and non- alike, is a process of discovery.  From the get-go, the reader is being manipulated; important dramatic or factual information is being withheld for presentation at critical thematic moments.  The reader knows this on some level, which is part of the excitement of being a reader.

The writer is not on such agreeable ground.  Writers who have been at their craft for a while understand they are indeed writing to manipulate, buit they also know they are writing to discover any significant number of things about the work at hand, about their own self-understanding, and about the potential for unexpected trysts on an existential basis with cosmic truths.

You join your brother and sister writers in the "don't think" approach to writing early drafts, wherein we write to discover how much we know about the individuals wrapped up in the narrative, who they are, and what they want.  Sometimes we learn so much that the entire vector of the story undergoes surprising changes before our eyes, with things emerging on the computer screen or notebook page that dazzle and often stun us intgo wondering if we have the chops to bring this effort off.  In some ways, early draft is like booking a short weekend tour, only to discover we have been Shanghaied into a multi-continent tour.

A significant plateau we reach during these early drafts is the exact spot where the finished work will begin, at which point we also discover whose story or narrative the work is.  Another plateau, not reached with as much ease as might seem probable, is the tone of the work, which is to say the relevant character's attitude to life in general and the narrative in specificity.  Is this a noir or otherwise dark venture?  Does the narrator harbor resentments or desires for revenge?  Is this in fact a narrative about redemption?  Does it follow the nineteenth- and twentieth-century conventions leading to the comedic ending, where the "they" who are the characters "live happily ever after"?

You sometimes in early drafts discover a near reversal of dramatic attitude, starting with visions of revenge or punishment before morphing into growing understanding that leads to forgiveness or dedicated accommodation.  The reverse is also possible, wherein after an easy-going, laissez faire attitude, your characters inform you that the world about them and you has undergone some social upheaval and evolution.

In its way, these introductory paragraphs exemplify the process where the writer dips a tentative toe into waters that may be on the surface a placid pond or lake, only to become fraught with undertow and crosscurrent as the characters wade into the seemingly negligible depths.  Discovery also reveals the level of emotional intensity on which the narrative takes place.  In other, more specific words, discovery shows us we have not turned on the heat under the crucible that is story.  We have not made matters more fraught, more necessary, more urgent, more conflicted, more tentative.

The shrewd actor, gaining familiarity with a role, asks what the character wants and why the character wants it now.  Right now.

By peeling away the outer drafts of the onion in early drafts, the writer discovers the gnaw and drive behind the character's facade.  Fear?  Perhaps.  Envy?  Nice motive.  Control freak?  Lovely character attribute.  When characters first appear on stage in a story, they are still exerting some kind of facade management, perhaps even to the point of not allowing themselves to see the cat scratching at the door to gain exit.  To put it another way, a lobster in a tall bain marie, half filled with water, has no urgent motive to escape.  The lobster in the pot does not yet recognize its predicament, but as readers, we've been in enough existential pots to recognize the need for concern.  Know it or not, we've begun rooting for the lobster.

So far as discovery is concerned, there was no thought of a lobster when this essay was begun.  The cat, scratching atg the door provided enough impetus for the lobster to begin waving its claws about, attempting to attract some attention.  In effect, you were drawn to examine the movement, then you came upon the lobster,  You were immediately taken by the trapped nature of the lobster as, indeed, you are by any number of individuals in tight spaces during early paragraphs.

A lobster in a pot of cold water works for about a paragraph, but then someone must come along to turn the heat on, adjusting it to a high burn.  If not, our concerns begin to wane.

Such wisdom as there may be in these vagrant paragraphs tells us to start with the water beginning to warm up to the point where the lobster is scuttling to get free of its sepulcher.  We have all of us felt direct empathy with the lobster.

Although this will appear to be a reach, what we need now is a character, a youngish individual who is neither brat nor Shirley Temple, who appears on stage, wondering aloud, "What happened to my pet lobster?"  Now we are concerned for the youngster and the lobster.  After all, a youngster and a pet speak to our deeper sympathies yet.

In our heart, we know the lobster is doomed.  We know the youngster is about to understand the vulnerability of an attachment to anything--even a lobster.  But we are on yet another vital cusp here:  Will this one experience, this one loss of an unusual pet, cause this young person to Teflon over his or her feelings to the point of foreclosing any further attachments?

We are saying in this absurdist example that all attachment bears risk, that there are even more painful experiences ahead if we do not give our heart on a regular basis, the painful experience of having a calloused and cut-off awareness.

We learn from early drafts.  When you began these paragraphs, lobster was furthest from your mind.  You had no idea a lobster was loitering about in your awareness.  Turning up the heat on him or her caused it to skitter up the sides of the pot.

No pasta with lobster sauce for you this evening.  You've learned this, as well.

In Memoriam

At first glimpse, the venue seems like anything but a memorial, in fact, more like the deck and lawn of the home of your late friend.  At least thirty lawn tables and chairs are scattered about a wide, shady patch at the rear of the Santa Barbara Historical Museum, its decor adobe buildings and a simulacrum of what Santa Barbara was, back then when the Spaniards and Californios were in residence.

On second glimpse, you see any number of persons who at first became familiar to you because they were on the deck or lawn of your late friend or at the writer's conference he brought to life every year, thus individuals such as Sandy Vanocer, whom you followed back when there was on NBC TV News a Huntley-Brinkley Report.  Thus Eva Marie Saint, back when there was On the Waterfront.  Thus a number of pals from the time when you were among their midst as faculty of the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference.  Thus actor-writer-turned politician, Chris Mitchum.  Thus the motion picture producer, Kipling Hagopian.  Thus any number of local writers, performers, entertainers whom, in the absolute context of this being a small town, you see with some regularity.  Thus, as if in added recognition of this being a small town, your next-door neighbors, you looking at them and they at you in a sense of momentary disorientation, as in, what's he doing here.

What all of us were doing was paying yet another kind of fond farewell to the late, much lamented Barnaby Conrad, who in official terms, was once Barnaby Conrad, Junior.

As a new arrival to the growing throng of invitees, you are set upon by Chris Mitchum, who wonders if you still do your Saturday workshop because he is having troubles getting at the memoir of his late father, Robert.  You are also set upon by he who is Barnaby Conrad, III, whom you refer to as BC3, telling you about the lineup of speakers and designating you as clean-up, on the theory that you are quick on your feet and will vamp around any repetitions the speakers before you might offer.

The Conrad daughters, Tani (short for Cayetana) and Kendall, and stepsons Michael and Billy, and BC 3 have put some thought into the ambiance and the invitation list.  Hearing the amplified piano and the songs being played, you are thrown an additional step off stride; you look to see where the piano is so that you can greet the player--until you realize the player you'd imagined was in fact the reason for everyone being here, you included.

Another toss off stride is the hugeness and eclectic nature of the celebrants who, by their diversity and number, remind you of the presence of the man you'd come to greet once again.

After giving the guests a chance to become socially and alcohol lubricated, BC3 takes to the mike and begins being host, welcoming us, thanking us for coming to own up to the hole that has been left in our individual and collective lives with the departure of Barnaby Conrad, Jr.  Of course we are all mourning a different person, a protean individual who, as the speakers commence their eulogies, use the attribution "renaissance man."  Kipling Hagopian actually compares Conrad with an actual renaissance man to make the description even more vivid.

The tide is growing in admiration, but it is a sad admiration, its various aspects and nuances and reach adding to an effect of the maudlin, which is not a good tone for a memorial, not for this man, who had no patience for the maudlin, whose trompe l'oeil paintings and constructions embodied mischief and tomfoolery.

You've crafted your remarks, which come in at a tad over a hundred words, but you recognize, as BC3 introduces you as clean-up hitter that you'd be contributing to the maudlin effect if you deliver only your prepared remarks.

You sketch in the thousands of lunches you shared with BC over the years, not to mention breakfasts and dinners, arriving quickly at a relatively recent lunch, when he was well into his 80s.  You and he were at a favored venue, the Pharmacy Lunchroom at the Upper Village in Montecito, munching away on their remarkable egg salad sandwiches when a statuesque and stately young woman entered.  Conrad noticed her immediately, grabbed your forearm and said, "Oh, to be seventy-five again."

The strategy worked.  Loud guffaws had the sound of firecrackers.  The audience was thinking of Conrad as a presence again.  Then you were able to deliver your remarks.

"Barnaby Conrad has left us,"  you said, "a legacy of portraits, demonstrating for us the quirky, memorable dignity of humans and animals.

"With his mischievous and rascally trick-of-the-eye trompe l'oeil paintings and constructions, he taught us to seek the unexpected surprises lurking within the ordinary.

"His stories, narratives, and reminisences brought us all close enough to these remarkable events and characters that we sometimes see them--events and characters alike--as our very own.

"Considerable and memorable as these accomplishments of his may seem, they are sent into total eclipse by his presence, which showed us what it is like to have a friend."

There was nothing more to say after that, so you got yourself a beer and stood among your friends.