I Believe In A Kind Of Fidelity

My Mother Went To Demonstrations. I Remember Her Going To A Big Demonstration For Earl Brower And She Came Home Crying And Said The Communists Were Very Mean And Booed Their People. I Remember Feeling Sad At Her Feeling Sad.

My Vocabulary Is Adequate For Writing Notes And Keeping Journals But Absolutely Useless For An Active Moral Life.

I Saw My Ex-husband In The Street. I Was Sitting On The Steps Of The New Library. Hello, My Life, I Said. We Had Once Been Married For Twenty-seven Years, So I Felt Justified. He Said, What? What Life? No Life Of Mine.

When I Was About Twenty-one, I Published A Few Poems. Maybe I Wrote A Couple Of Stories Before, But I Really Began To Write Stories In My Mid-thirties. My Kids Were Still Little, And They Were In School And Day Care, And I Had Begun To Think A Lot About Wanting To Tell Some Stories And Not Being Able To Do It In Poetry.

I Might Write Four Lines Or I Might Write Twenty. I Subtract And I Add Until I Really Hit Something I Want To Do. You Don't Always Whittle Down, Sometimes You Whittle Up.