Any Life Is Lived In A Particular

Every Baby Born Unloved, Unwanted, Is A Bill That Will Come Due In Twenty Years With Interest, An Anger That Must Find A Target, A Pain That Will Beget Pain. A Decade Downstream A Child Screams, A Woman Falls, A Synagogue Is Torched, A Firing Squad Is Summoned, A Button Is Pushed And The World Burns.

There Are Obviously A Great Many Ways To Organize Some Fraction Of The Material In A Life.

I Said, I Like My Life. If Ihave To Give It Back, If Theytake It From Me, Let Me Onlynot Feel I Wasted Any, Let Menot Feel I Forgot To Love Anyonei Meant To Love, That I Forgotto Give What I Held In My Hands,that I Forgot To Do Some Littlepiece Of The Work That Wantedto Come Through.

Now That I Am In My Forties, She [my Mother] Tells Me I'm Beautiful; Now That I Am In My Forties, She Sends Me Presents And We Have The Long, Personal And Even Remarkably Honest Phone Calls I Always Wanted So Intensely I Forbade Myself To Imagine Them. How Strange. Perhaps Shaw Was Correct And If We Lived To Be Several Hundred Years Old, We Would Finally Work It All Out. I Am Deeply Grateful. With My Poems, I Finally Won Even My Mother. The Longest Wooing Of My Life.

I Think Having A Great Range Of Experiences In My Life Had Helped Me As A Writer, Particularly A Writer Of Fiction. I Have Known A Great Many Different Sorts Of People In Different Situations, And I Have A Notion How Very Well Of Badly People Can Behave In Times Of Stress Or Danger Or Violence.