My friends all find her wonderful, and think me very lucky. I think me very lucky, too. My wife was born in Detroit. My mother's parents were not killed in front of her when she was nine and my uncle, her older brother, who also was never actually born, would have been eleven. All this did not happen just before Christmas of 1932 in Arizona.
Memories are funny things.
My mother still weeps for her non-dead parents, my father did not end his life miserably, on the floor of his basement tenement apartment, suffering a heart attack brought on by years of drink. My friends, those who, like me, are not poets, do not tell me that my poetry needs to resound with more of the pain of someone else's life, need not ring with fury at the general implacability and unfairness of life, so, taking their advice to heart, I ignore them completely. Anyone can rant or rave, I do not want to say, but tell them anyway, the words formless in my brain. I see, I see, we nod in utter disagreement. I do not write letters to people in other countries, have not translated poems from the Hungarian, nor mentored an Aussie writer who has returned there, encouraged, and not left her husband in order to make a new, writer's life for herself.