THE WILL OF THE PEN

I woke up this morning with words clear: “One needs one’s parents even more at the end of life than at the beginning.” An unattractive irony; perhaps this is the “amends” for not being there for THEM when they were kitting up for THE END. But it’s my generation which is reaching the end now in record numbers, and we wear the mask which reminds us with every breath that it’s coming. (And, given the plague, we are beeping like an open refrigerator! “Keep distance!!! At risk!”)

My excellent trainer walks me round the block. I am the small dog. Or the child, for life IS a circle, not a line, and some of us truly are desperate for the familiar Real Life Gatherings. The Steps, like eggs, a dozen, full of protein, guaranteed to keep us on our steady trail to our cherished Home—the Log Cabin, the small Palisades place above the Bank. (For the record, even Real Banks are over. And it’s passé to write checks.)

I reread three of Joan Didion’s books this weekend. Joan has always been, after Mary McCarthy, the one I write UP to. I love the dry power of her Northern California voice. I knew her and her husband, the brilliant writer John Gregory Dunne. We’d meet at gatherings in the late Fifties and Sixties, and I longed for a marriage like theirs, where we’d BOTH be driven and excited by each other’s work. Their marriage had a solemn dedication, very much like my parents’ marriage.

A graduate of the Academy for the Arts in New York, my mother was a great painter and an extraordinary pianist. She had her studio where she painted portraits. My father was a screenwriter and a producer who went on to head a major studio, mainly because he didn’t treat stars like merchandise.

But like all things now, the language of marriage has changed. And I live in dread solitude.

When the machines we have do not work, we must remember the will of the pen. It needs no charging. The pen is always here, waiting like a real live husband or two loving parents, to take you where you want to go. Or maybe more like the family horse. You just buckle up, hop on, and there you are with your beloved companion. Maybe husbands aren’t like that. The roles of man and woman are changing like music. When I hold my pen, I become a conductor. Like the notes of music, words sweep me into the rhythm, the tune of a story. I play the music my mother loved when I am writing.

I used to lie under the piano when she came in from painting. While she played, I would draw strokes and shapes in my notebook, gestures and expressions of people, horses, dogs, and shapes of the crystal perfume bottles which my father bought for her, and I’d look over her shoulder to the big window and see the olive and the pepper tree dancing with each other in the breeze.