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"The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.
"The only thing that shatters dreams is compromise.
"Why not practice living as though we were extremely intelligent? How would we live if we were spiritually advanced?"
I reached the first page of the month's notes. "How do we save the whales? WE BUY 'EM! If whales were bought, and then made American citizens, or French or Australian or Jap-125
anese, there's no country in the world dare lay a hand on 'em!"
I raised my eyes to hers, over the notebook. "That's about it so far this month." "We buy 'em?" she said.
"I don't have the details of that worked out. Each whale would carry the flag of the country it belongs to, a giant passport, sort of. Waterproof, of course. The money from the sale of citizenships goes to a big Whale Fund, something like that. It could work." "What do you do with them?"
"Let 'em go where they want. Raise little whales . . ." She laughed. "I mean what do you do with your notes." "Oh. End of every month, I read them through, see what they're trying to tell me. Maybe a few will wind up in a story or a book, maybe they won't. To be a note is to lead a very uncertain life."
"These notes tonight, do they tell you anything?" "I don't know yet. A couple of them are saying I'm not too sure this planet is home. Do you ever have the feeling you're a tourist on earth? You'll be walking down the street and suddenly it's like a moving postcard around you? Here's how the people live here, in big house-shaped boxes to keep off 'rain' and 'snow,' holes cut in the sides so they can see out. They move around in smaller boxes, painted different colors, with wheels on the corners. They need this box-culture because each person thinks of herself and himself as locked in a box called a 'body,' arms and legs, fingers to move pencils and tools, languages because they've forgotten how to communicate, eyes because they've forgotten how to see. Odd little planet. Wish you were here. Home soon. Has that ever happened to you?"
"Once in a while. Not quite that way," she said.
"Can I get you anything from your kitchen?" I said, "a cookie or something?" " -
"No, thank you."
I got up and found the cookie-jar, put a leaning tower of chocolate-chips on a plate for each of us. "Milk?"
"No, thank you."
I brought the cookies and milks to the table.
"The notes remind. They help me remember that I'm a tourist on earth, remind me the funny customs they have here, how fond I am of the place. When I do that, I can almost recall what it's like where I came from. There's a magnet that's pulling on us, pulling us against the fence of this world's limits. I have this strange feeling that we come from the other side of the fence."
Leslie had questions about that, and she had answers I hadn't thought of. She knew a world-as-it-ought-to-be, that I bet her was a warless world-as-it-is on some parallel dimension. The idea bemused us, melted the clock away.
I picked a chocolate-chip cookie, imagined it warm, attacked it gently. Leslie sat back with a curious little smile, as though she cared about my notes, about the thoughts that I found so interesting.
"Have we talked about writing before?" I said.
"No." She reached for a cookie at last, her resistance broken by the patient ruthless proximity of her favorite morsel. "I'd love to hear. I'll bet you started early."
How odd, I thought. I want her to know who I am!
"Yep. Everywhere at home, when I was a kid, books. When I learned to crawl, there were books at nose-level. When I could stand, there were books that went on out of
sight, higher than I could reach. Books in German, Latin, Hebrew, Greek, English, Spanish.
"My dad was a minister, grew up in Wisconsin speaking German, learned English when he was six, studied Bible languages, speaks them still. My mother worked in Puerto Rico for years.
"Dad would read stories in German and translate them for me as he read; Mom would chat with me in Spanish even when I couldn't understand, so I grew up sort of basted in words. Delicious!
"I loved opening books to see how they'd begin. Writers create books the way we write lifetimes. A writer can: lead any character, to any event, for any purpose, to make any point. What does this writer do, or this one, I wanted to know, with a blank Page One? What do they do to my mind and my spirit, when I read their words? Do they love me or despise me or don't they care? Some writers are chloroform, I found out, but some are cloves and ginger.
"Then I went to high school, learned to hate English Grammar, so bored with it I'd yawn seventy times in a fifty-minute class, walk out at the end slapping my face to wake up. Came my senior year at Woodrow Wilson High School, Long Beach, California, I picked Creative Writing to duck the torment of English Literature. Room four-ten, it was. Sixth-period Creative Writing."
She moved her chair out from behind the chess table, listening.
"The teacher of the class was John Gartner, the football coach. But John Gartner, Leslie, he was also a writer! In person, a real writer! He wrote stories and articles for outdoor magazines, books for teenagers: Rock Taylor-Football Coach, Rock Taylor-Baseball Coach. A bear, he was, stood
about six-foot-five, hands this big; tough and fair and funny and angry sometimes, and we knew he loved his work and he loved us, too." All at once there was a tear in my eye, and I wiped it away, swiftly, thinking how strange. Haven't thought of Big John Gartner . . . he's been dead ten years and now there's this odd feeling in my throat. I hurried on, trusting she wouldn't notice.
