I went to a family wedding yesterday and I have a lot to assimilate. This family is not close to me, though they are to each other, large and close-knit. I am the (widowed) sister-in-law of their matriarch, a 90-year-old woman they all revere and I am included in funerals and wedding celebrations out of clan loyalty and respect to her. The result is an invitation to a special gathering about avery three years, long enough for me to forget most of the names and faces. I think I have already reported that I suffer from prosopagnosia, face blindness, an inability to remember faces; it's an awkward social defect. So right from the start I am struggling to put names to faces I don't recognize. It's a good thing I'm old and female because they don't expect much of me. (My sister-in-law's late husband said to me shortly after my husband, her brother, had died, and I was starting a belated writing career, beginning to be published and to make enough to support my four kids and me - he said, "We knew you were smart but we didn't think you were that smart.") So there I am, quiet and smiling and watching, watching, as most writers do. And I am reminded of that line of T.S Eliot's in his play The Family Reunion, "You all look so wrinkled and so young." We go on, we go on, and some of us don't change.

I'm still on the hand-written word and it's because of Marla that I'm adding more thoughts. Some years ago I had a fellowship to the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe with the express purpose of researching and writing a play about Alice James, sister of Henry and William. My Harvard Officer's card gave me access to the Houghton LIbrary where I had to leave everything in the cloakroom, taking nothing but a pencil and a piece of paper past the green baize door to enter the hallowed space. (They probably allow laptops now?) Inside I signed my name in blood and received two boxes: one with Henry's letters to Alice and one with Alice's letters to Henry, plus her companion/caregiver's letters to Henry as well. (Katherine...Loring, I think it was, have to check). Anyway, it was then that I got the opening scene, actually the set of the play I was to write. I saw Alice on her deathbed while Henry and Katherine kept vigil. The letters, especially the last ones, of Henry to William and Katherine to Henry, were blood-warm. I felt the emotions, I heard the silence, flowing into me through the words, written by hand. That's what my friend Marla brought back to me with her thoughtful note. I guess this is what makes hoarders of us all, a total reluctance to toss a piece of paper with a dead hand's words written on it. I guess that's about as close to immortality as anyone can hope for, living on in memory through (written) words. I guess that's all for now.