JAC Volume 12 Issue 2

In 1987, Norma Winterowd and Don Stewart were both undergoing chemotherapy. For decades, Don Stewart had been our cherished friend and good buddy, and the shared horrendous experience of cancer treatment created a loving bond that sustained Norma and, I'm certain, was a support for Don. He began writing to us in the late spring of 1987, and he penned his last letter from the hospital on January 30, 1991. In the two hundred and fifty or so pages of single-spaced letters that we received in those three and a half years, Don spoke about the profession; he kept us informed about Pat and their two beloved daughters, Ellen and Mary. He expressed his elation over the publication of My Yellowstone Years, an account of his summers as a ranger in the Park. And we received a running account of his work on the biography of Fred Newton Scott, a scholarly project that even chemotherapy could not slow down.

In the letters one finds the true Don: his quiet valor, his deep love for his family, his commitment to the profession in which he was a leader. But let Don speak for himself.

November 15, 1987. Please tell my friends at NCTE that I feel good and miss them all. If I could only get the white count up, I would come. Meanwhile, I write feverishly, read leisurely, and go fishing on Monday evenings with a colleague. Last time out I got a bunch of little bass and one crappie to hit a dry fly. All of this on a little lake set in the hills above Manhattan, far enough away from the town that we have had it all to ourselves, except for the owls, quail, and pheasants. Hope you are coming to the end of the chemo, Norma, and feeling better all the time. I'm on chemo indefinitely, but it doesn't cause me great discomfort, just a few lousy days every five weeks, after which I get my appetite back and feel terrific. Did I tell you I was working on The Election Night Party? That's my late afternoon fun work. It's a novel about a party on election night. It's also the name of a political party whose candidate in 1988 is Slats Grobnik. What happens on election night is. . . . But you'll have to wait until I get the damned book written and published. This one is just nutty enough that someone might publish it.

November 30, 1987. In your last letter, the one from Norma, there is what I call an "authentic line." It's the one that reads "My damn eyebrows even fell out." I can hear you say it, Norma, with all that matter-of-fact brusqueness and disgust which you can register on such occasions. It's the essential attitude to take with this cancer business. After so many treatments (I'm in the middle of number eleven now, a four-day course of pills during which I begin to feel progressively nauseous and generally shitty, to be quite frank about it), you just say to hell with it, bring on the pain. I've more or less assimilated the treatment week into my round of things I have to do, and we don't stew about it much anymore. If I have a prednisone withdrawal, fever and headache, I take some Tylenol, and the problem gradually goes away. I'll feel crummy tomorrow and Wednesday, but on Thursday I'll start to pick up again and then have another four weeks free of misery.

January 2, 1988. If you ran into any of my friends at MLA, I hope you gave them my regards. It looks now as if my blood counts are simply not going to rise to safe levels until I stop treatments, and that won't happen between now and March, so I'm beginning to reconcile myself to missing another CCCC meeting. I'll just walk around here, spit on the ground and say "Shit," a few times and then go back to work. The hell of it is that except for a few days after treatments, I really do feel good and full of frisk, and I really wanted to go to St. Louis and give the social constructionists a few things to think about. Well, maybe next year. I'll probably do a proposal for NCTE just in case I'm ready to travel by then.

March 9, 1988. I do not have the flu; it has been weeks since I had a treatment so I feel very good physically; but I have to confess that I'm suffering from a bit of nostalgia tonight. Normally, I would be feeling good about the fact that my CCCC paper was finished, I had my plane ticket and hotel reservation, and in a week I would be seeing old friends for another tussle of ideas about the best way to teach the kids to write. I have so many good memories of CCCC meetings; really feel disoriented when I know I should be there but am not. I got the same feeling one summer when I went with my sister's family out to Yellowstone. We camped for a few days at Madison Junction, where I had worked for eight of my thirteen Yellowstone summers, and I remember walking around the campground after we had set up the tent and got our gear in order. All of a sudden, I had this sense that I was exactly where I belonged. Do you know what I mean? That sense that you are in the place you are supposed to be at that time, like being home for supper in the evening, or with family at Christmas time. Everything felt so right. Even today, when June, July, and August come, I always feel just a bit disoriented around here. My body and brain tell me that I should be in the high country, telling the dudes to keep their cotton-picking hands out of the geysers and hot pools and off the bears and buffalo, fishing the Gibbon twice a week, and sitting around an evening campfire with my friends telling funny stories. In the background the theme from Gone With the Wind is playing.

October 18, 1988. Just got my copy of JAC, Ross. Read your paper on "chicken." Intriguing idea, but I don't know if I have enough guts to try that. I did something much more straight-laced for the magazine; I had a squirrely introduction, but Gary Olson and the reviewers couldn't handle it, so I reverted to "raking autumn leaves." Did I ever tell you that story? I didn't? Too bad. For years I have believed that the reason my writing was so square and unimaginative was that any latent creative spark I had as a kid was killed by my fifth grade teacher, Georgia Baker. She was rigorous and good for things like arithmetic, geography, spelling, reading, history, etc. But she didn't like anything unorthodox or experimental in writing. One day she tells us to write a short paper on a subject appropriate to Fall. Immediately, I knew what I was going to write. Good stuff. The rest of the class was whining away about not knowing what to do, so she suggested "raking Autumn Leaves." That way she got thirty or forty papers on the same damn dull subject. But not from me. I wasn't having any of that literary Pablum. I was off on a commando raid. You see, in those days kids started Halloweening two weeks before Halloween. I'm not talking about that panty-waist trick-or-treat stuff. I mean the hard stuff: soaping car windows, letting air out of tires, throwing small cans containing garbage on people's porches, sometimes through their screens, etc. The kids a block west of us always ranged up and down our block, and I was going to nail them.

Mom had decided to throw away a sack of overripe pears. I took them up on the roof of our back room. It was flat, and I could stand on it and look over the angled roof of our house out to the street. It was perfect cover. Well, I was out there, one cold October night, and down the block came Bob Peters, probably Bob Stoebick, maybe Ron White, and a few others. They gave our front screen an awful bang and took off across the yard. As they were doing this I lobbed three or four of those nice soft pears right into the area. I heard one kid cuss, then another, as they got splattered with some real sticky goo. And they couldn't figure out where the hell it was coming from. You can imagine the joy a nine-year-old kid would get out of an adventure like that.

So, I wrote it up in great detail. Thirty minutes later: "Donald Stewart! Come to my desk!" When she called you by your full name, you knew you were in trouble. She handed me the paper, a look of total contempt on her face, and said, "Throwing rotten fruit, indeed! Take this back to your seat and write something worthy of you!"

I felt like Hemingway would have felt if a publisher had returned the ms. to For Whom the Bell Tolls and said, "Killing people in Spain and ____ing a Spanish revolutionary, indeed! Take this back and write something worthy of you!" So, I wrote "Raking Autumn Leaves" and garbage like it for a good many years. That was my first course in Inhibition I. Good old Miss Baker.

January 27, 1989. So, how are you, Norma? Pat said the other day, "Norma should be over her treatments now; I wonder how she's doing." So, how are you doing? Well, we hope. I will start treatment thirteen a week from Friday. With me it's a siege. We keep treating as long as the disease keeps retreating. When I hit a plateau, we stop until it starts up again. Problem is that although I feel great four weeks out of five, my blood counts, particularly the white, stay low. Tomorrow I have to write to Andrea Lunsford and tell her that I will not get to St. Louis after all. If she wants to take me off the program and make room for someone who wants to read a paper, I should do that. If not, I'll probably ask Paul Bryant to read it for me. He did that last year, you'll recall. I still regret that: it would have been such fun to be on the same panel with you and Tillie, Ross. Well, apparently, I'm in my Emily Dickinson phase right now. The doctor says be patient. Okay, so it's patience he wants. I expend my riotous energy writing crazy papers and novels (am in the middle of a good one now).

March 9, 1989. There is some balm in Gilead. My twenty-year obsession is finally in print. Unfortunately, there are mistakes in the book which I should have corrected, but I'll get them in the second printing. The publisher thinks so optimistically! I hope the Yellowstone people will sell it out there. That's a market of 2,000,000 at which I'd have a shot. Even one-tenth of one percent of that market would be 2000 copies. Hmm. How about four-tenths of one percent?

April 6, 1989. We are just entering one of the two most beautiful periods of the year in Kansas. From September 20 to November 15 we can have lovely Fall weather. In the Spring it's April 1 to May 25 or so. Today the temperature topped at 70, the air was cool and dry, the sun was out, the grass is turning green, everything is starting to bloom—redbuds, flowering quince, forsythia, flowering crabs. Manhattan never looks better than at this time of year. A little later the lilacs will start and after that spirea (is that the way you spell it?), Russian olives, roses.

April 30, 1989. As Wilson Snipes would have said, years ago, "How you doin' Norma?" We hope you're enjoying the accumulating distance you're getting from those damned treatments and feeling like your old perky self again. I handled number fifteen pretty well, didn't even miss class on the day I felt the worst. In fact, I've been feeling so frisky that I"m hoping some good things are happening since I switched medicines. The doctor wanted to give me Oncovin (Vincristine), an intravenous medication from the start, but the listed side effects were so ghastly that I backed away from it. When we reached a stalemate this Spring, however, he said he wanted to use it, so I checked with a neurologist (the stuff's worst side effects are mostly neurological) and he said if my doctor wanted it, use it. Fortunately, I've not had any bad side effects and I'm hoping that the next immunoglobulin blood test shows a decrease in cancer cell generated proteins. It would be nice to get to a level at which I could discontinue treatments for awhile.

July 1, 1989. I got some great stuff from Berkeley this week. I was trying to put some more pieces into the Scott puzzle but had only inferences to go on from letters I had. Well, the archivist, bless him, sent me letters which revealed that my guess about his summer appointment in 1902 was right on the money. Gayley initiated it. He also sent me the summer school announcement so that I could see what courses Scott taught, what lectures he gave, etc. Some interesting notes. He was their first choice. Among the alternates, if they couldn't get Scott, were Kittredge (damn, that tickled me!), Brander Matthews of Columbia, and John M. Manly of Chicago. I keep telling people that Scott was a big gun. One of his associates that summer, another out-of-stater in the English Department, was a junior professor named Charles Sears Baldwin from Yale. Ever heard of that nice little fellow? Scott liked him, but in a "patting-on-the-head" way.

I'm also preparing a bomb for the Eastern snobs. I'm nearly finished with my examination of undergraduate programs in English. I've looked at almost two hundred. A point I won't be able to resist making is the contrast between programs at both ends of Pennsylvania. At prestigious Bryn Mawr, which is staffed entirely by Princetons, Yalies, and Bryn Mawrs, one finds a program completely untouched by any new work in linguistics, composition, rhetoric, and language. They barely acknowledge the boom in creative writing. At Carnegie-Mellon, Dick Young's handiwork is apparent. I will refer to Bryn Mawr's as a program locked in the 1950's. CMU's I will describe as a model for the twenty-first century. Won't the Bryn Mawr deans love that if they see it?

July 31, 1989. Sad to wish one's life away, but each year I am more than glad to mark the end of July. That means only one more month of potentially brutal heat and humidity. The first of September can be uncomfortable, but the nights begin to get cooler, and October gets ever closer. I love the Fall for its color and weather. Spring around here is pretty nice, too, especially April and May when everything starts blooming. But July is the pits . . . in Kansas. There was a time, long ago, when I welcomed it because I was in the mountains. I think that right now if I could have one wish I would wish for a summer at Middle Creek in Yellowstone. I don't need any more money; I have no pressing professional ambitions, although I keep working just because I like it; I don't have a strong impulse to travel to every point on the globe. No, I think a summer working on the gate and practicing my violin or fishing Middle Creek in my spare time would be as good a tonic as the fountain of youth old Ponce the Lion was hunting.

The mention of Ponce reminds me purely by association, not by logic, of a joke about Leon Cavallo. This was told to an orchestra in which I was playing by an Italian conductor who still had a good accent. It appears that a conductor and Cavallo were going round and round on the way a passage should be interpreted in one of Cavallo's operas. Finally, Cavallo became enraged and drew himself up, in most formidable European aristocratic style, and said:

"Sir! Do you know to whom you are speaking, Leon Cavallo, de Lion and de Horse?"

His brow intensely furrowed, a look of utter scorn and contempt on his brow, the conductor replied:

"Yes, I know to whom I am speaking. But you are not de Lion and you are not de Horse! You are the chackass!!!"

August 12, 1989. That brings me to another point, the whole issue of coherence. I have a question. How much is the coherence of a text the responsibility of the writer, and how much the responsibility of the reader? For a number of years I have consciously avoided, unless I absolutely can't help it, providing the kind of structure which most academics would call coherent. I'm referring, for example, to the essay which introduces a subject, points out the problems, and then details the manner in which the author is going to proceed. You do this in several places in this book, and for some reason I can't explain, it doesn't offend me. Whenever I read other peoples' work, however, I get annoyed by this and say to hell with it. This kind of thing appears at its worst when a speaker announces the five points he's going to make. One NCTE President did this in a speech, and a whole row of teachers beside me gave a huge sigh of dismay.

You may remember that when I gave the Chair's address at Detroit in 1983, I purposely avoided that pattern. I was determined to engage the interest of my audience and then see if I could keep them with me, wondering all the while just where the hell Stewart was going with this stuff. It worked, because a number of people spoke to me later about that speech. Anyway, when I write anything of an expository nature, I avoid, if possible, the self-conscious structure which announces all the joints in what's to come.

I had a run-in with PMLA and Phyllis Franklin on this very matter several years ago. I had written a paper which I felt was a model of coherence, but it was not the model academics are accustomed to seeing. Andrea Lunsford, Ed Corbett, and Win Horner, if I remember correctly, were encouraging me to submit to that pissant journal just to get us comp types a wedge in MLA's most sacred bastion. I got back a revise and re-submit evaluation, the gist of which was that my subject was interesting but my paper was not well organized. In your terms, their reader couldn't get the gist of what I was saying. I wrote to Phyllis, telling her that the paper was very tightly and carefully organized but that their readers were too stupid to see that—turned out that this particular reader was some guy at Indiana who I suspect was hardly dry behind the ears. Anyway, I told them to kiss off and sent the paper to my next choice where it was published, with very minor revisions, none of them having anything to do with organization.

So, you see my point. Coherence may be in the eye of the beholder. I'm willing to buy into the idea that writers and readers both shape texts, but I'm not willing to adapt a piece organized in a way that I think is a bit novel and refreshing to satisfy the demands of an editor or reviewer who can't follow a discussion unless the pigeon holes are framed in bright orange paper.

October 30, 1989. Dear Ross Sweetheart Baby How Are Ya Kid?

(That's Newhart's first line in the Abe Lincoln monologue.) Considering your consistent pummeling of MLA for being irrelevant and for publishing an irrelevant magazine, I have turned up something I thought would interest you. On Feb. 26, 1909, Fred Scott got a letter from Joel Spingarn of Columbia asking for Scott's input on a resolution passed at the 1908 meeting. This was the resolution:

Resolved, that a committee of five be appointed by the chair to consider the advisability of extending the scope of the publications of the Association, and to report to the Association at the next annual meeting.

Behind this apparently innocuous resolution appears to be a developing battle between the Harvards and the Columbias. Spingarn and his buddies at Columbia did not feel that PMLA adequately represented American scholarship, and they wanted to discover a way that the magazine would become "the recognized organ of American scholarship, not only for our own country, but for the world." He asks Scott and other members of the committee to respond to several questions. These questions imply that Grandgent of Harvard, the editor, is publishing stuff mainly by younger people and shutting out the old boys. They also suggest that Grandgent is using the magazine to publish doctoral dissertations, presumably from places he favors. In other questions, he wants to know if the "present editorial arrangements" are satisfactory or if they should be changed. In short, he's questioning Grandgent's editorial competence and integrity.

June 10, 1990. Hope Norma is still doing well. I've been up and down the past few months. Last Fall, I tried to help start the lawnmower, and I think I strained every muscle in my body. For about three months, I couldn't sleep on either side, and just getting out of bed was agony. That passed, but the cancer revived (I was in a partial remission) and my blood counts started dropping, so the doctor ordered some transfusions, had me get an implant near my left shoulder so that I could take chemotherapy more easily. The surgery was easy; the implant is terrific. I get IV's, blood transfusions, and chemo through it. I started the chemo again in February and got very good results for about four months, but signs now are that the chemo is suppressing my bone marrow too much. Also spent a week in a Topeka Hospital recovering from a secondary infection. The local doctors thought I was reacting to treatment and were content to let me die. My doctor in Topeka told me to get my butt in there and into the hospital. Came out of that in good shape. I was on four-week chemo intervals, but this last time the doctor said two more weeks because the number of infection fighting cells I have is low enough he doesn't want to put me in a bind. I'm beginning to think that if the cancer doesn't kill me the chemo will. I shouldn't complain. I'm cheating Father Time and Death every month now. In two weeks I'll be sixty, a much more respectable age to die than fifty-eight or fifty-nine. The doctor says he expects to get a lot more time than that. Suits me fine. Every day means a few more pages of Fred Scott done.

Pat and I celebrated our thirty-fifth last Sunday. We had a catered luncheon and about sixty guests in the church basement room. People around here are so cheap that they couldn't believe we were spending that much money. Did I ever tell you about the time I arranged for a room in the K-State Union for our state NCTE affiliate's officers? We had a meeting, then lunch. The secretary told me that the room rental would be $35. When I hesitated, she asked, "Does that seem a bit high?" I told her no, quite the contrary. I had just come from a meeting in New York where the electricians charged that much just to plug in an appliance. She told me that other groups which scheduled rooms in the Union thought that a bit steep. Life in the Midwest is a lot cheaper than on the coasts, no? I would guess that LA prices are right up there with those of the Big Rotten Apple.

August 10, 1990. P.S. I can't resist telling you another good Fred Scott story. Here's his diary entry, March 18, 1906: "Spoke at Y.M.C.A. building downtown on literary study of the Bible. Mistook a large, rotund, greasy man in silk hat for some distinguished visitor. Learned afterwards that he was agent for pills of some kind. Said he was from Worcester, Mass. and sang in two registers 'He is mine,' with interspersed unctuous remarks." The image of a great scholar like Scott deferring to some Chadband of a pill peddler strikes me as very funny. I think Scott thought it was pretty funny, too.

July 6, 1991. Let's start with honest student writing. When I first started teaching composition as a graduate student in KU's program—Fall, 1952—the first thing I noticed was that the kids had developed this absolutely phony style for classroom work. You can call it good-girl or good-boy prose, writing for teacher, or whatever you want, but its principal characteristic is that it is proper. It's the kids' idea of what some fussy teacher wants: no editorial or usage mistakes; topic sentences for each paragraph; all the right sentiments (if you think the teacher is opposed to drinking, smoking, pre-marital sex, etc., tell him/her you are, too). I thought back over my grade school and high school experience, how I'd been drilled to produce that kind of crap and had been burned every time I resisted. That annoyed the hell out of me. Worse yet, the stuff appearing on the pages of the kids' papers bore no resemblance to the lively chatter I heard before class, in the halls, on the campus sidewalks, at football games, etc.

That was when I first decided that I would have to find some way to get the kids to write like they talked, especially the interesting ones. It took me a long time to learn how to do that. I would have to say that I still can't do what you would like: show them, precisely, how that's done. There's a reason. Did you ever watch a great athlete like Michael Jordan trying to teach a kid to drive to the basket the way he, Jordan, does? The kid can try all his life, and he won't be able to do that because he's not wired like Michael Jordan. I would have to say that there are some things about writing we can't teach our kids, either. But, we can create situations in which they will choose the subjects they like to write about and feel free to write about them the way they talk about them. It's a matter of building trust, and that comes when a kid discovers that a teacher is really paying attention to what he says, telling him what he understands, what he likes, what he doesn't understand, what he doesn't like. Anyway, on the matter of honesty, I don't think we can teach it, but we can create the environment in which kids will trust us to accept them. Then they'll tell us what they really think in words they customarily use.

Voice is a much more difficult topic. I've been preoccupied with it for years. I'm happy to say that right now we have a graduate student in Education who is finishing a hell of a good thesis on voice. She got interested in the subject, read a mountain of stuff, and has put together a thesis which supplies a history, philosophy, and theory of voice that is better than anything I have seen. She defends on July 26. I hope she'll have time to polish it sufficiently that it will appear as a published book in the next year and a half. Anyway, as you point out, voice is a very intangible thing, and guys like Elbow spin cobwebs and cotton candy around the term and leave us no more enlightened than we were when we started. My own feeling is that voice in writing is a combination of at least four elements: vocabulary, sentence length, sentence rhythm (very important); and timbre. I know voice in writing exists because who the hell would ever confuse D.H. Lawrence and Mark Twain writing on the same subjects? For that matter, who would ever confuse Winterowd or Stewart on similar subjects? The problem is quantifying the damn thing. I think vocabulary is a part of it because all of us have certain words we like to use more than others. Timbre is related here, especially if readers have actually heard the spoken voices of the writers. For example, when I read your letters, I hear your voice in them. That way I know how certain words sound to you. When I write, I know that I choose certain words because of both vowel and consonant sounds I want to produce, but if a Bostonian is reading my stuff and has never heard me, what sounds in his inner ear is something different from what I think I'm producing. That's a problem with voice in writing.

August 2, 1991. Let me tell you about a hike Roger Phelps and I took in either 1953 or 1954. We went from Old Faithful to Shoshone Lake that day. Shoshone Lake is about seven or eight miles from Old Faithful, across the continental divide and some distance from the nearest road. Planes never flew over the park in those days, and so, when Roger and I got to the western shore of the lake, the most beautiful, small, white sand natural beach I have ever seen, about noon, we were the only persons within miles of that place. We had started early in the morning, in a parking area near Lone Star Geyser, followed the Firehole River up to a wooden bridge crossing it, and plunged into a developed lodgepole pine forest. After awhile, however, the trail started rising and twisting back on itself. The beautiful thing about such trails is that you could never forget the possibility of grizzly bears in the area. That thought alone, filled all my senses like an emery wheel working over an ax blade. Then we reached the top of the divide and found a tiny brook meandering through a large meadow. And under every overhung bank in that little stream, was a nice brook trout, waiting for something to eat. A few years later, when I hiked to that meadow, Al Jacobi showed me something I've never forgotten. He had been casting into a pool about ten feet wide, tapering to three or four. It was, at best four feet deep. He told me to look in it. I did. Nothing. Then he took the butt of his fly rod and poked around under the overhung banks at the back of the pool. A convoy of brook trout—I do not exaggerate; there must have been thirty fish in that group, a few really good sized—came out into the pool. And we wouldn't get them to hit anything.

Anyway, after leaving that high meadow, Roger and I followed Shoshone Creek down into Shoshone Lake. I remember sitting under a lodgepole pine near the shore, beginning to eat my lunch, and looking out over the lake. The water was as clear and cold as any I have experienced in a mountain lake. A small breeze occasionally shivered the surface of it. Ever so often I would hear that leg-cracking sound grasshoppers in flight make as they fly from one grass stem to another, kind of like a wind-up toy running down. Then I'd hear a splash as a big brown across the lake came up after something, perhaps a grasshopper which missed his target and lit in the water. Overall, however, was this immense hum of life. It's a paradox: that tremendous silence occurring at the same time you hear the hum of the heartbeat of the planet. That is what I was looking for when I went west, and I found it in the backcountry of Yellowstone. There is no way to measure how much that kind of experience enriched my life. I have heard that marvelous hum above Shoshone Lake in my mind when I was walking the streets of New York or Boston, when I was sitting through yet one more paper in a crowded hotel convention room in a city I have long since forgotten.

[And finally, in scratchy printing, this from the hospital in Topeka:]

January 30, 1992. Dear Ross and Norma,

As you can see, there have been some new developments here, and I wanted you to know that we got the letter to Mary [congratulating his daughter on her marriage]—good stories—and the MS. [for Composition in Context: Essays in Honor of Donald C. Stewart (Southern Illinois UP, forthcoming)], but I'm not functioning very well so haven't been able to respond. In a nutshell, I was hurting in the back enough that I couldn't teach, and I had about lost my blood-clotting ability. In the first thirty-six hours I was in the hospital I received four units of blood and one of platelets, had X-rays (for which they gave me a pain-killer which would have made an angry Kodiak bear docile), had a bone marrow biopsy, and first radiation treatment. Also had blood tests and constant interruption by someone taking my "vitals." Last night I finally got some sleep. My medical situation is pretty clear. The disease is getting me, but it's hard just to determine when I'll be got, so I keep working. . . .

I've had a kind of old home week in the hospital. Nurses on all the shifts remember me from October, 1990 (greatest love in history of St. Francis cancer patients, and if you believe that, I'll sell you some ocean-front property in western Kansas); the chaplain remembers me; the radiation therapist said Howdy-do, etc. They treat me well, audio visual services lent me a VCR so I could see Hamlet tonight. Next time I'll do Electric Horseman.

I would like to do more work, but I'm taking stuff that makes me sleepy or mentally disorganized, sick or constipated, etc. I need exercise, but am too anemic or too much in pain to get it in. And all those years I took good care of myself. God and I are going to have some long conversations.

My Yellowstone Years continues to generate interesting mail. My old boss, Dave Condon, made a video of his movies. I'd like to get home to see it. He lived in that park a long time.

Sack time. Just wanted you to know why I wasn't getting back as rapidly as usual. This old body is just giving out. Ross, I'm like Lee on the way to Appomattox Court House.

University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California