Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 8

Organizing. . .

—From CB—

Organizing: an essential activity for multi-billion dollar industries and for a superannuated geezer in California who’s trying to juggle six balls and not step on a cat. He’s extremely talented in the process of making lists and strategies, having done it all his life—less certain in the follow-thru.

The immediate problem is in writing. There’s no deadline, no opening-night for prose fiction. The world doesn’t really need another novel, novella, short story, or flash fiction. Your bowel alone sets the timing, and for me the digestive process goes pretty fast.

The challenge is the geography of rewrites. I write (a) on an iPad in my doggy reading chair and (b) on the iMac in the office. With the last novel, I was simultaneously working to finish the first draft of the ending, a first rewrite of what I’d done up to that point, and a rewrite of the rewrite. Going back and forth between two computers and making separate documents for each chapter, I had to develop a sure-fire labeling system to keep working on the most recent fragment.

(Of course I could have reverted to the 5,000-year-old strategy of writing by hand. This would have solved the problem, as my handwriting is totally illegible, somewhat resembling chickens doing a hat-dance. The world would have been deprived, but would take not the slightest notice.)

Yet every sure-fire system requires compliance. Which in this case requires only that I move my butt from one chair to another nearby. Yes, I could put wheels on my ass or even jet-powered skis, or I could just do it the old-fashioned way—that ancient method, walking.

My system is broken down. I have two versions of Chapter 14, plus two versions of Chapter 14 plugged into the second draft and third draft. I have a distinct memory of shifting a section of text to another spot, which I can’t find. And the added pain of feeling like a total fool.

Truth be known, I don’t really know myself. I think there’s an inner core, maybe a pretty nice guy, but I can’t say who that is. I know him only from external evidence—what he writes, if he weeds the garden, all that. So it occurred to me that perhaps I don’t really want to write Chapter 14 and this is a subconscious revolt. Perhaps in my deepest heart I just want to eat, and increased frustration will drive me to peanut butter.

But it doesn’t work. I just bull through it, and after Chapter 14 comes Chapter 15 and all that follows. I thought I was sufficiently skilled in procrastination—what about all those years in grad school?—but I just keep churning it out.

###

Blizzard. . .

—From EF—

I’ve managed to get back to writing on Book Two of the memoir and have eased into it by going back to its beginning and doing revision. I was feeling pretty strung out after Conrad’s bad fall and hospitalization, and reading about our winter of 74/75 gave an interesting perspective.  

We had moved to an awful basement apartment in Chicago, and Conrad had developed a bizarre medical problem that was making our life hell. There was no diagnosis yet, but it caused sudden manic fits, hallucinations, or sometimes a coma, and life was pure chaos. Our son turned two on November 27th, and Johanna was born December 11th. This is what January was like.

On December 26th, CB went to the hospital for four days of tests. It was a trial run for me—two weeks later he would be admitted for nine days to undergo tests that could clinch his diagnosis. I had recovered enough from my C-section to manage by myself the first time and I told myself that the long haul would be OK. I wasn’t counting on the weather.

The Super Bowl Blizzard has its own Wikipedia entry. It started its rampage on January 9, spawned a historic number of tornadoes, and blew through the Midwest. Howling winds drove snow into drifts that buried cars and killed livestock. By the time it hit Chicago, it had dumped its heaviest snow but still had enough to paralyze all traffic. I have no idea how he got to the hospital on the 13th.

Those days were bizarre. Cooped up in our little domestic dungeon with only my two offspring to judge me, I gave a big fuck-you to proper routine. We ate when we felt like it, Jo could nurse at whim, bedtime was whenever, and my only responsibility was to keep us all clean and fed. It wasn’t long before I was desperately lonely for my mate’s embrace, but we did have phone calls. Being a research patient, his only expense was for a rental TV, and I just about fell down laughing when he told me about his late-night hallucination. He didn’t know what he was watching, but he was sure his brain was playing its tricks—cartoons of Queen Victoria with people opening the lid of her head. Turned out he was watching the early broadcasts of Monty Python.

The rest of it wasn’t funny. It started like the old joke about a toothache: the minute you walk into the dentist’s office, it stops. The doctors needed to provoke an extreme blood-sugar crash so they could draw blood samples, and they stopped feeding him. He starved and starved and nothing happened—until it did. And when it hit, it was like the first time back in Milwaukee when he started pitching a terrifying fit.

His hospital team grabbed whatever parts they could catch and wrestled him down flat on the bed. They finally got their blood, and all during the struggle one nurse kept very still, her face close to his, and whispered, “I know what you’re feeling. The rational part of you is in there watching yourself with horror. I know you can hear me. Believe me when I say this will pass, you’ll be yourself again.” Later, CB thanked her. She told him that she’d had epileptic seizures in the past that were now controlled by medication, but she’d never forgotten seeing what her out-of-control body would do. Chance had sent him an angel.  

         And it sent me one day I’ll never forget.. The blizzard had blocked the streets with dense drifts, so I had to walk through the snow to the supermarket for food. The baby was on my front in her Snugli and our son was slogging along in snowsuit and boots. Halfway back with frozen hands gripping a heavy grocery bag, I was confronted with my little boy’s refusal to walk. He sat down on his butt and cried. I managed to pick him up, and then I realized, “I can’t do this.” The baby, the boy, and the bag were a huge unwieldy load, and underfoot was drifts, ruts, and ice. I just stood there for a stunned minute. And then I walked us home.

###

 

Self-exam. . .

—From CB—

I’m not one to do a great deal of self-assessment. Self-involvement, yes, but not really evaluating the mechanism or its spirit. I’m much more interested in evaluating the third draft of my current novel. I tend to outsource my deeper feelings. That’s included my recent hospital stay: I only know what I feel by writing about it, and I guess I have to trust the author. But a good excuse for doing a blog is the need, at times, to come up with a subject, and sometimes I choose what I know least about and would like to know more: myself. So this is a rapid run over the corpus and soul.

Physically I’m pretty good at 81. I had open-heart surgery about ten years ago, no desire to repeat it, but no reason to. All my lab readings look good, and I only take two cheap medications, one for cholesterol, one for hypertension. An upper partial denture, but otherwise my teeth do fine, as long as I remember to put them in. My vision is funky, but I’ve always coped with the squinty genes of one grandfather, and the other seems to have gifted me with being old.

Recently, I was hospitalized with the results of a fall. It taught me (a) that I’m mortal, (b) that I hate hospitals, and (c) that relearning what you’ve known all your life, such as walking, is pretty miraculous and not so easy as you thought.

My brain shows its age. Short-term memory goes in and out of focus, and I depend on the thesaurus much more than I should. But wild ideas still spring forth, and I pounce on them: three volumes of micro-fiction in the last three years. And despite a firm resolve not to write another novel, one’s finished and another is on its way.

I’m spiritually compromised. I feel I know myself all too well, and don’t always like what I know. At heart I’m a solipsistic, selfish creature, but I do my best not to be, and my best is pretty good. I’m highly judgmental, but only upon myself. I hold myself to a higher standard than the rest of the human race. I cope with isolation but don’t like it. Of course my mate makes up for a lot. Still, theatre was our life: it involved collaborators, long-term or brief, and audience response and sitting around with others after the show. We’ve been part of many groups, though mostly on the fringes, with many friends—now distant or dead or only on Facebook. The bins of puppets and shelves of plays staring at me feel accusatory somehow: had I been able to make them famous and market them, they might rest in peace.

There’s a play-reading group at a local arts center, and we were invited to hear some bits from RASH ACTS, our anthology of short sketches. It was a total joy to hear these in other voices, and especially to hear the laughter: the damned stuff still holds up! At the end, we were asked to read a very surreal piece, “At the Prom with Kali,” and the response was something we could dine on for many days.

In short, I think I feel proud of being part of the human race, despite its many flaws and criminal acts. And I feel pretty good about my small contributions. And I’d like to stick around as long as I can, just to see what happens.

###

Little Things. . .

—From EF—

Sometimes it’s the little things that surprise, that bring a tear, that suffuse with warmth. After his release from the hospital, it knocked me over to look up and see Conrad washing the dishes. Plunk, one more beautiful piece put back in the heart’s jigsaw. Today Johanna went into a rampage of weeding and revealed that I actually had the last bits of a garden under the waist-high mess I’d let happen, and then she watered the chard that’s still growing and harvested the last of the collards. We ate them.

After two days of shrinking from the challenge, I dug out the router I haven’t used in fifteen years, bought a 45-degree chamfer bit, sacrificed some 2×4 scraps learning how to use it, and made the stair rail’s newel post look classy by beveling the top. When I suddenly noticed some countersunk screw dents I’d missed, Jo just made a funny Italian joke as I grabbed the wood-filler I’d put away five minutes ago. Earlier, when I said I felt odd and not at all like myself, she urged me to go take a damn nap. I finally had the space to let go of it all, and shed the tears I’ve stoppered up for nearly a month.

Our cat, Shadow, who delights in running into a storage closet from which it’s hell to extract him, got past me. For some reason, I just stood in the door and said, “Here, Shadow.” He crawled out of the jumbled piles in the back, came up to the door, and walked out with me.

The man whose job it is to evaluate the need for Home Health Care for discharged patients spent a meticulous hour testing and interviewing Conrad, walking him up and down some stairs, ushering him into and out of the tub, asking what year it is and what day of the week (Medicare cares about this), then said, “You’re too good for me! You don’t need any of this.” When I laughed, he giggled back.

Little things—scraps—made the mosaics in Pompeii, the stunning quilt Jo created for her bed, and the albums CB’s mom kept for every single year of his life. Moments. Big things make headlines; litte ones make a life.

My Times in Hell. . .

Six days in London, and now flying out to visit our daughter in Tuscany. So far it’s been hell. Life, the old saw goes, is what happens when you’ve made other plans.

Main problem: my foot. My fault in choosing the wrong shoes. After the third day, I’m walking in pain: the left toe joint so swollen I can barely get on my shoe. Still, I managed two museums, saw roomsful of Turner and Rembrandt, and finally got interested in the Impressionists. Saw one play—beautifully acted, cleverly written, utterly despicable. Despite wild applause, I couldn’t help feeling we all left the theatre as lesser human beings than when we walked in. And a pretty-good film. The one thing I wanted to see, a new work by Complicite, I had to bail on, due to lameness and next day’s prospects of limping around an airport. This was wise.

Other problem: the hostel, the worst I’ve ever been in my long and checkered career. Two small bathrooms for about 50 people, no common room or kitchen, no place to sit and write, and while one takes one’s chances in a room of six sleepers, there must be an Olympic qualifying event for competitive snoring. Top honors goes to a portly man speaking Russian or Ukrainian—one of those languages with lots of POOTS and RASTS and NIKS—who, after diddling his tweets, launched into a nonstop cross between Steve Reich and Wagner for hours, until suddenly reaching a climax, like bombing himself, and then silence.

Second honors go to the farter in the bunk above me last night. It took a bit of time (but I had all night) to distinguish his farts from the bed-squawk whenever someone turned over, but I became skilled at making the distinction. Most notable was one so long and plaintive that you wondered what might come at the end.

The hostel rooms were above a pub, and I treated myself to many pints of Guinness. On arrival in London I was so fagged-out from an overnight flight and finding the hostel that for supper I ate one of the pub’s much-vaunted burgers, whose meat must have been from a horse too old to boil for glue. My punishment for being a carnivore.

I didn’t get much writing done: no place to write. But I did finish a chapter of my new novel, surreal fantasy, and gave my hero a crushed foot to drag through his days, as I drag mine, like whimpering roadkill.

And much looking forward to days with my daughter and her guy, and hopefully healing. At age 81, you gotta be philosophical.

###

I continue my trip to Hell. My London jaunt was total disaster. Then a lovely six days in Tuscany with my daughter, good food, talk, and a trip to the shoe store for sandals that don’t squeeze, then back to London for a day and flying home. In celebration, we went to the ocean to picnic, and Hell came on for an encore.

Putting the picnic basket in the back seat, I blacked out and collapsed. Elizabeth saw me flat on the asphalt, called 911, and I entered the throes of Santa Rosa Memorial, where sleep is a thing of the past. Five days of tests and pills to find what happened. Brain bleed, but small and stopped. Only current symptom is a very slow, weak right leg. The plan is to transfer me to a physical-therapy facility, but WHEN seems to be a volleyball. Nothing happens on Sunday except I write this and try to dump.

I’ve had many stays in hospitals: people do try to keep me alive, for whatever purpose. In high school I had a hernia operation. In 1975, two weeks of diagnosis and another week for an insulinoma operation. In the reachable past, open-heart surgery. I could write up reviews for Tripadvisor. So I’m grateful, though ungodly bored. There’s a free TV, though that’s like being in bed with a jibbering idiot.

So I’m doing a fair amount of reading: DON QUIXOTE, which seems to be the source of all conspiracy theories—every encounter with reality blamed on enchanters (a.k.a. the Deep State). And a book my daughter loaned me, the diary of a German Jewish prof through the Hitler years—something that prevents me from feeling too sorry for myself.

And working on a novella based on a play we wrote and produced many years ago. It proceeds at about a sentence per hour. This is not the most pleasant working environment, yet a pretty good excuse for not working.

Elizabeth reports the cats are unsettled.

###

Writing. . .

—From CB—

We’re in the final stage of our novel DESSIE, reading aloud a chapter a day, and sometimes changing a comma, sometimes a paragraph. The intention is to finish before I go to Europe on Mar. 15.

Why? It’s unpublishable—grim, funny, fits no genre, and if it were actually accepted by an agent, it’d be two years before it’s published, by which time we may be dead—not the best career move. Or if we self-publish, it’ll have a dozen sales and then lie there. But so be it. I think when it’s finished, we’ll offer free PDF’s to anyone who wants to read it. And then probably self-publish, which is cheap.

I firmly resolved that this would be the last novel. Actually, I resolved that the previous one. And so, in the tradition of chronic derangement, I’m six chapters into the next.

The new project harks back to an earlier play. Why, I’ve wondered, have we in recent years done novels of plays we’ve written— DESSIE, AKEDAH, BLIND WALLS, LONG SHADOW, TAPDANCER, MASKS, REALISTS? Perhaps it’s that we lack ideas, perhaps we don’t want those stories to die. But I think it’s more than that.

If you go back to a memory, perhaps you look on it in a different way. Same with a story. I see Kenneth from the perspective of 2023, not of 1976, and it’s the same bent character but a different person seeing him. Now he’s informed by what I see as magical thinking of the worst sort, a Don Quixote delusion born from a desperate need. Then, he was sad, lovable Kenneth. Now, we’ll see.

We’re blest with having money enough, so that imperative is off the table, assuming we don’t live to 100. There’s a freedom in being 81 and unknown. Whatever I do, it’s not for career, it’s solely for the fact of doing it. Of course I’d like readers, and of course I’d like praise; this stuff gets reworked, goes through many drafts, and edited within an inch of its life. But it’s entirely what the story wants to do.

I wonder how STORY has become so important to me. A lifetime in theatre, of course, but how did that evolve beyond a way, in high school, to meet girls? Yet after I met some, it continued. Comedy, tragedy, musical, realism, melodrama, farce, the multiplicity of forms—yet lurking behind all was a story of human yearning and choice. I’ve created some despicable characters, and played some that Shakespeare brought forth, but I’ve always tried to empathize with the worst of them, to see the action from many points of view, to tease out what calls me to it. If I know at the start, there’s no point in pursuing it.

Which I guess is the key. It’s the only way I have of knowing myself. I’ve always felt closest to Ibsen, Brecht, and Beckett, I suppose because their work embodies its own contradictions. As do I. As does every human being. Chekhov is the same, though with the edges smoothed off. On occasion, I’ve been accused in reviews of doing a show more for myself than for the audience, and there’s an element of truth in that. Of course I want people to like it, and I’m never done with the tinkering, but I have to follow what the story, taken into my heart, wants itself to be.

###

—From EF—Last Sunday it was a wild and lovely day at the ...

—From EF—

Last Sunday it was a wild and lovely day at the ocean, rain and wind but moderate enough for about a gazillion gulls to practice gliding in groups. We weren’t nuts, we stayed inside and had our picnic in the car, and got the added pleasure of watching the amazing pattern the rivulets of rain made on the windshield. The ocean always puts on a complicated show, Seeing that through the silken pattern of the rainflow was exquisite.

On the way home, winding the familiar road through the coastal hills, I looked across at Conrad’s profile and was suddenly verklempt, totally overwhelmed with a rush of emotion. The pages of memory shuffled like a deck of cards, and the present became alive with the past. All the times, all the miles, all the years of looking across at my man with his hands on the wheel as we traveled the hundreds of thousand of miles of our touring life on the road. We just about wore the wheels off three successive Dodge Maxivans in those years, and most of the time it was as a family.

Memories. In 1977, driving through the night from gritty Chicago toward new life in the green hills of eastern Pennsylvania, our three-year-old daughter rolled over in the big bed, looked out the window and said, “Look, Mama! The moon is coming with us!” Our first tour in Texas, realizing that the roadkill we’d been seeing was armadillos. Cresting a mountain ridge coming into San Francisco at night, suddenly seeing the land below as a velvet lapful of jewels. Following a Carolina host to his home for dinner and finding we’d been following the wrong car when it pulled into a supermarket parking lot. And omigod, the night we had to sleep in the van outside Atlanta—the four of us and two other actors.

We developed survival comfort strategies for nights in the van. A dear friend (that’s you, Michael) told us his choice of road-booze for a last nip was Southern Comfort. After nearly gagging, I came to like it. One Saturday night we were sacking out in southeastern PA, somewhere near Oxford, and realized there wasn’t anything in the flask. I’d seen a liquor store not far back up the road, but as we got there it was closing and we were told that everything in PA was closing too. We were only a couple of miles from Delaware, so we kept going. As we pulled into a parking lot we found that Delaware was indeed open later, but was also just closing. We went back to the road and took a left turn into Maryland, a dependable pit of sin, and scored. The whole three-state trip took half an hour, and then we slept well. Next morning, the Unitarians had no idea.

It was always a Dodge Maxi, not a Roma caravan, but there was a magic about being road-warriors. This spring Conrad’s going to London and later I’m going to Brittany, and each of us will spend four or five days in Italy with our daughter. The moon followed her all the way there.      

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DISMANTLEMENT. . .

 —From CB—

The Facebook post screamed DISMANTLE THE STRUCTURES OF OPPRESSION! Good idea, I thought, even though it was only 8 a.m. and I hadn’t had my coffee. I could kick the can down the road forever, but the weather had cleared and this morning might be a good time to strike.

How do I do that? I wrote. I vote Liberal and I don’t own a bank.

That brought a flood of response, the gist being Figure it out, asshole. Somehow I felt they lacked the time for dialogue. One non-abusive respondent wrote Talk to your friends. I replied that all my friends would certainly agree but would ask the same question: How? Her reply was Google it.

I had thought I was asking a question. But I realized that you don’t ask a question of someone screaming a primal scream. It only proves that you’re reactionary, privileged, and impolite.

But I would take the bull by the horns. No more pussyfooting around. Later that morning, I shuffled up to a young couple in the downtown coffee shop and said in an affable tone, “Dismantle the structures of oppression.”

“How?” the young woman asked.

“Google it.”

I shuffled off, hopeful that the pair I left giggling behind me might find a new, creative way to dismantle the structures of oppression.

#

I was bone weary of primal screams. Down with patriarchy! Down with capitalism! Down with white supremacy! I recalled a Shakespeare play I’d seen on stage with an old man raging against the storm, no word heard above the thunder: no actor could prevail against the special effects.

I tried to reason it out with my cats, pouring out my despair at the exploitation, the persistent wars, the death of the planet, and my own impotence in the face of it all. Shadow licked his nether parts, while Garfy scratched in the cat pan.

It happened to be my day off, so I might deal with it after lunch. Nothing was so crucial. I knew the state of the world I was bequeathing to my kids. Both were past voting age but still voted, though with scant shreds of hope. I felt akin to last year’s drunken driver who missed the turn and rammed a utility pole, with his six-year-old in the car. What got him drunk enough to do that? Only the audience at a film of limb-ripping chainsaws and exploding heads would enjoy the horror of our terror.

After lunch—I’d enjoyed the leftovers from last night, black beans and cole slaw—I sat down to serious work. On Facebook I wrote Should I die? but didn’t send it, nor did I post Let’s all die. I thought of Is it really worth it? and Put up or shut up, but it felt futile to rely on suicide for any constructive dismantlement of oppression. They would surely find a way to monetize suicide.

At last I settled on a strictly non-partisan Smash the state! True, the anarchist implications didn’t reflect the subtleties of my politics. Smashing the state might risk totalitarian rule by Amazon or rampant death-squads, but at least that would be a start.

So that’s what I posted: Smash the state! I got a couple of Likes and fourteen Laugh emojis, which wasn’t what I expected. Clearly most of the respondents didn’t take me seriously, but who ever took you seriously if you didn’t threaten mass murder, or even then?

At least I had put my voice out there, not that it did much good. I brooded all day while paying the bills, cutting the brambles away from the garden plot, washing the car, then was struck by a thought. I might suggest that we all put our kids in passenger seats, get dead drunk, and ram into utility poles—all over the country, all at midnight Eastern Standard Time. Some act of mindless desperation might at least get some play on social media.

I started to write the post, then didn’t. Someone might take me seriously, which would be even worse than getting a Laugh emoji.

 ###

 

Practicing Medicine. . .

—From EF—

When I was in the seventh grade, I was sure that I would become an MD. I still have the little carefully-stapled booklet of all the detailed ink drawings I did that year of every damn bone in the body. I managed to ignore the cognitive dissonance of embracing this path while continuing to attend the Christian Science Sunday School. I just kept my mouth shut and played the hymns on the little pump organ that nobody else could play. I never believed any of it, just memorized what I was expected to say, and didn’t ever realize how bizarre it all was.

My cover was blown when I won a Merit Scholarship in high school and a big hometown newspaper feature said I was admitted to an honors pre-med program at the University of Michigan. I more or less heaved a sigh of relief and never went back to the Christian Science place. I was enraptured with my own medical plans and could conveniently deep-six my strange schizoid “religious” experience. Neither of my parents had ties there, my mother just thought it had a rosy glow, and it was somewhere to get rid of me for Sunday mornings.

OK, I’m not an MD, I’m in theatre, but I would have been a good doc. I have an acute ability for diagnosis, but I keep it to myself. I did work in medical and dental offices while Conrad was earning his degrees, and I saw the work of some fine practitioners. In his last year, I worked for a brilliant internist who was six months behind in his billing. He was a true mensch. I remember one time when he did a bone-marrow biopsy on a patient who was a total Rosalind Russell, red lipstick and abundant dark hair and vitality that could have powered a city’s electrical grid.

That procedure is incredibly painful, involving jamming a large-bore needle directly into the breastbone and aspirating marrow. I could hear the two of them in the treatment room telling dirty jokes and roaring with laughter. He finished, she left, and he went back into the back room the nurses had prepared for him, laid himself down and wept. They’d seen it before. This was her last remission. That man practiced medicine with a capital M.

Much later we did performances and workshops in Pennsylvania at the Hershey Medical Center where a friend was on the Family Practice faculty. He wanted to expose his first-year students to our work, opening insights into the human experience before they got down to the “cellular level,” as he put it. He was not only a teacher, he was a Family Practice MD himself. In that specialty, you see and know every member of a family, which gives unique insights into diagnosis and treatment.

Soon after we moved to California, I found a good physician for us, at least for a while. He’d spent a long time as an ER doc in New Jersey, and he was a tough funny guy with a Jersey accent. No stuffed shirt he, and he’d listen when we talked to him. Time went on, and he got older, and the way of doing medicine changed. Now he had to spend most of his time with us trying his best to log everything on his office laptop, because now that was how you practiced medicine. I missed him but was relieved when he retired. It hurt him to try to give care in the middle of a machine.

We stayed with what had been his group practice, but it changed in disconcerting ways. The roster of people became a revolving door, and we never got to know any particular MD. Then Covid hit, they didn’t answer their phone, you couldn’t knock on the door, your only method of communication was to put a note on their web-portal. Primary-care physician? What’s that? But they did take Medicare.

It wasn’t useless. When CB tested positive for Covid, my note on the Portal got a prompt response and an immediate Rx for Pavloxid. But he needs a referral to a neurologist, which we requested at least two years ago. They found one, but he retired and nobody told us why we weren’t getting to see anybody. It’s all new people again now, and we’re trying again. Neurologists who take Medicare don’t grow on vines.

I asked around to try to get names of physicians who actually see people. I got one very strong recommendation, but he can’t take new patients because he’s staying in the office way past dinnertime to care for the ones he has. That office recommended two others, but they only do “Concierge” medicine. You pay $1500 a year, every year, but that just gets you on the list; you still pay for the office visits and treatment.

I’m glad I went into theatre.

###

 

  

Getting Rid of It. . .

—From CB—

At some point, accumulation becomes a curse. As one enters the age of the endgame—EF 82, CB 81—you begin to lie awake in the dark hearing the choir intone, “You can’t take it with you.”

Money is easy. We made our wills long ago, realizing that drunk drivers proliferate.The bank accounts offered little challenge. They’re just electrons and store easily. We have to depend on the good will and good sense of our kids in dividing up the other stuff of value, house and car and the like. The rest of it is what keeps me awake at night.

Books galore, some artwork, furniture, and tons of knickknacks. I can only say take what you like and junk the rest, or invite the hordes to descend to loot it. Neither kid has room for much: one lives in Italy, the other in a San Francisco apartment already stacked to the brim with books.

What’s more perplexing is our product: stacks of our printed books and manuscripts, videos, boxes of reviews & press, and eighteen large bins of puppets. If we’d gotten famous, we could donate it as archive material, but we’ve always flown under the radar in mainstream theatre, alternative theatre, public radio, puppetry, and fiction. And mostly way under the under-the-radar.

Not a big problem for me that it all gets junked. I say that repeatedly, and might believe it someday. But the truth is, my work is just one step down from my kids. Of course the kids don’t sit in a shelf, they don’t get stored in bins, they don’t proliferate, they grow and change. They’re their own creatures.

But a playscript or a novel or a puppet is a child to me, as Jeff Bezos’ net worth is a creature to him. It’s part of who I am, and we fight for survival, just as the Argentinian ants, attracted by my muffin crumbs at the keyboard, scurry around to avoid my malevolent pinch. I’ve had many other fellow artists pass—it seems to be a common thing at this age—but I’ve never had a conversation with them, since they’re dead, about what they’ve left behind.

Ir’s a crapshoot, as I learned from being on grants panels. Something gets said, and the whole discussion shifts. Ten thousand bucks vanishes or looms in the blink of an eye. (And those were the days when ten thousand bucks was a lot of money.) You can only live the life that you live. You can only spawn the work that you spawn. All the rest is the movement of tectonic plates, making the mountains rise or the sea gush in.

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