Day: March 2, 2013

 The sure sign of a dairy cow barn is the exhaust fan. No farmer would last long inside without one, especially in the summer.

My long weekend has shrunk down to a day, but mostly because of good and creative delays – Florence’s memoirs, working at the bookstore, publishing stuff. I’ll be back Monday, eager to wade into my Simon book again, continue sharing Florence Walrath’s “Memorable Memoirs,” and hopefully have some nice new photos. I’m bringing the big camera but only the 35 mm lens. Got to figure it out, spend some time messing with it.

My camera is great but nicked up and I worry about it having to go to shop or breaking down. I was looking through B & H Photo’s site for new cameras, and it struck me that I can’t afford a new camera right now, something that has never happened to me before. There, it felt good to say it. I have spent a lot of time in the last months and years considering what I can and can’t afford in my life, and to me, it is a considerable test of authenticity to come to terms with that issue. I have learned a big lesson. I can’t live a life I can’t pay for. I can’t have things I can’t afford. It just doesn’t work.

I think people who grew up with parents they are close to and listen to learn this, they know it.  People like me – I was not close to either of my parents, although I know they loved me and did their best – do not learn some of these lessons until they teach themselves. I am studying. My father never taught me one thing about money I can recall, or much else, except that the Red Sox lose a lot of pennant races. He did talk about that quite a bit.

At Bedlam Farm, when divorce and the recession and the publishing dramas hit, I suddenly found myself living a life I could not afford, another thing that had never happened to me before. I was crazy enough to have a dozen different jobs in my life, smart enough to always get another one, write another book or article. Truth is, I could not afford the farm, three cows, two goats, thirty-five sheep, a tractor, stacks of round bale hay, vet bills, a half dozen chickens, two barn cats and four dogs. Plus a big farmhouse and four wonderful barns. I rationalized it for a good while. I was living my life, I was brave, I was on the hero journey, I was above and beyond the rules that govern every single person reading this. It gives me a headache just to think about it. It’s what  alcoholics call magical thinking. I was addicted to delusion, one of the most powerful of drugs. I would find a way, write a book, cut a deal, have a brilliant inspiration. They call it grandiosity. When they make a movie about your life, it’s hard to be humble.

Many people cheered me on. My inbox filled with righteous message praising the determined and courageous person I represented myself to be. If TV crews came to my farm to interview, why would I need to worry about the cost of things. Good for me, the messages, keep going. What you put out there comes right back at you. Screw those businesses and banks, I was doing what I wanted. If the Internet sometimes sends nasty messages, it also sends a lot of praise. Sometimes one is not as real as the other. I drew the praise and support I needed, and confused it with reality. It was just as good as money for me, better, really, because you didn’t have to earn it. You have to be careful about praise.

But change kept coming, not mindful of the encouragement. The divorce was not simple or pleasant. The recession lingered. The price of a book dropped from $30 to $9. The publishing world as I knew it vanished. Facebook was more important than the New York Times Book Review. And my resultant crack-up and healing process was expensive, too. Even the spiritual path is not free.

This epiphany brought about  remarkable period of change, a process still very much underway.  A process I belatedly welcome. It is truthful. It feels better. I needed this to understand my life, to learn that I can’t have what I can afford. The cows went, the goats too, the tractor and the round bales,  most of the sheep and eventually, Bedlam Farm itself went up for sale. If my father did not teach me much, my grandmother tried, and I wish I had listened to her more carefully. One day we were in a candy store and I picked up a bunch of tootsie rolls and took them to the register. They were $3, a lot of money for candy then, much more than I had.

My grandmother, a stocky peasant wife who spoke almost no English, just stared me. I looked up at her and she asked me if I had $3 and I said I didn’t. She took me by the hand and walked me away from the cash register and leaned over and whispered to me, this loving woman who fled Russia with the clothes on her back and spent 60 years in a three-room walk-up four flights up and never had a vacation or new coat in her life, “Johnny, let me tell you this. You can’t buy what you can’t afford. Do  you understand me?” I nodded yes,  and put the tootsie rolls back, but the truth is I didn’t understand, but I think I do now, a half-century or so later.

Leafing through the B & H Photo site is good for me. I look at it every day, sometimes two or three times. I look at the camera I want and think how good it will be to buy it when I have the money and can afford it.

Off to Vermont. See you tomorrow.

I’m not doing so well at taking time off yet – tomorrow, for sure, we’re going away for the day. An exciting day between Florence’s journal, working at the bookstore, and then, seeing this very beautiful collaboration between Red and the artist Donna Wynbrandt. Donna comes and visits us on Saturdays when we are working in the bookstore, and she and Red connected, and then she started working on her art with Red, and watching them, something beautiful was happening, it seemed to be a collaboration, they seemed to be making the art together. I was mesmerized by this, and took some photos. I’ll put an album up on Facebook. Something was happening, some powerful thing between an open and creative human being and a dog who sometimes seems to be an intuitive, empathic being. A spirit dog.

When Florence Walrath was 75, perhaps at the urging of friends planning a birthday celebration, she recorded the story of her life, as she saw it. The work is remarkable, clear and poignant and simply written. Florence was a doer, not a brooder or deep thinker. She lived as full a life as it is possible to imagine – gardens, canning, riding in the summer, sledding and riding on frozen ground in the winter, friends, family, her beloved husband Harold.  Her story evokes Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor, House On The Prairie, another world, rich and enduring values of work and love and loyalty.

Florence’s voice is strong, certain, there was no trouble she ran from, not even at age 75. “The summer of 83 has been a busy one,” she wrote. “The garden was not good. I shot five rabbits and three woodchucks and still no garden. The raspberries were not many, no apples, a dry summer. The fall, lots of leaves had a boy to help two days. In Sept. I went on bus trip to Nashville to the Ole Opera, gone six days and had a wonderful time.”

There were many wonderful times and many tragic and painful ones in Florence’s life. I was up half the night reading the story, it never falters or quits, she never complains or reflects much, even when she and her family and neighbors and friends were hit with one tragedy and loss after another. Friends got sick, were killed in accidents, died of appendicitis. Her grandfather, she said, lost both eyes due to his “temper” when he whacked a cow so hard splinters flew into his eyes. The most emotion Florence showed was over the sudden death of her husband Harold, and although she never said one word in self-pity or complaint, it is clear she missed him deeply. He was always willing to share in her crazy adventures, she said. There were many of those.

Maria and I read the journals together in her living room, perhaps in the very spot where she wrote them. For a writer, this is a powerful experience and I want to do her justice. She is a colleague, it turns out, a fellow writer. Hers is not my story to tell, not my book to write, that is for her family. But I will share entries from the journal as I read them and digest them.

Florence’s matter-of-fact acceptance of life reminds me of the farm journals I read that inspired this blog. People toss the term “feminist” around,  but for Florence it was not a political ideal but a way of life. She bowed to no one and nothing, was brave and indomitable.  Her life was as fully lived as any life I am familiar with. One feels lazy just taking the time to read it. This life was filled with family, adventure, life to the limits. She was nearly killed a dozen times by her undramatic but simple accounts, thought nothing of riding horses through the snow in blizzards, shoveling her own walk at age 100, swimming in freezing water, sledding down hills too steep for cars. Her love of horses permeates the journals, they were always a part of her life.

Of our farmhouse, she wrote, “this home seems to be a place for accidents. A girl was killed in field north of house, car hit a pole. When we were trying to turn in our driveway when Carleen Granger on motorcycle hit us while trying to pass us. She hit pole and was killed. A new Dodge turned over in the yard, no one hurt and this winter a girl rolled her car into the horse pasture and thru rail fence landing upside down in the South yard. She was lucky not hurt, broke all windows, took out windshield and tore one door off. Took me over an hour to fix fence so horses would not get out. Eight below zero, out of a warm bed I caught a nice cold.”

Florence’s writings are a trove – her amazing dog Bob, who moved cattle and horses through Salem, a mare that saved her parents life,  banging her head on things, her life in a one-room schoolhouse, the hard early years with Harold. I’ll recount these anecdotes one at a time in the coming weeks and months, and perhaps Connie will led me do a reading from the journals at Battenkill Books. This is such a rich story, it brings the lost world of rural life so richly to life. I am honored and proud to tell her story here on this blog.

I met Florence when she was 101, and the steel was very present in her gaze.  She inspired us to buy her farm and move there. And her spirit is present in every inch of the house. How lucky I am to be able to share her remarkable story.