Skidmore

Everyday I walk to town. Sometimes more than once. During the walk there are many moments of felicity, walking past all of the homes with lush vegetation, listening to my ipod on shuffle, thinking only of writing : the intricacies of craft, learning to translate all the salient details of any incident, the wealth of subjects. I pay special attention to all of the plants. What grows here? What do people like? It is colder here than Nelson. No rhododendrons, azaleas. Lots of hostas and hydrangeas. Hostas might be the floral emblem for the county of Saratoga. And then looking at the earth, does everyone have the same gardener? Even the less affluent homes have the earth mounded up just so with the same type of mulch everywhere and very few weeds. I feel very pathetic on the gardening front. I even have dreams where the secret is revealed to me and it is fertilizer.

Just as I leave campus there is a beautiful pine on the corner of the path. One afternoon the sun was shining, there was no wind, and at about 3:30pm the beautiful pine split and ½ of it fell onto the path that I walk on. It was very tragic. No one was there, but I did contemplate that with the ipod on I probably would not have heard the preemptory crack had I been walking by. Just like the guy in Cranbrook where the helicopter fell on him. I examined the split on the trunk carefully and you could see it had been a very gradual process with dirt and pine leaves accumulating in the wedge as the two sides gradually pulled apart. The ½ remaining is being cut down today. I was sad but knew that it was inevitable as the trunk seemed to have too narrow a waist where the missing part detached to support the rest of the tree.

I’m starting to understand why the program has so many returning students. I adore being immersed in the world of writing. As students there is no real expectation of each other. People rise at varied times with no embarrassment, no excuses. There is a collective understanding that the process of writing is so individual there is no need to adhere to a prescribed time frame. We meet as a class from 1-4pm M,W,F. Tuesday and Thurday afternoons are optional question periods with various visiting writers. Every evening are readings from visiting writers – almost all Pulitzer prize winners with an even balance of fiction writers and poets. Then after the readings are socials with fruit and cheese in order to mingle with students and visiting writers. I try to attend everything. You never know where you are going to get your next tidbit of information. I have noticed with admiration the regular attendance of a poet – Frank Bidart. I don’t know if he is on staff. But he is older and still attends and listens with great intensity. You have to admire that. The official head of program and his beautiful poet/teacher wife are also in attendance. I am quite intrigued by her because she always is smiling. I think that she has trained her face in that way, I don’t think it could have naturally fallen in that way. I enjoyed the week with Margot. I have a new appreciation for craft and also an intense interest. I used to think writers taught at these creative writing schools because they needed the money. Now I am able to see that it could be that they are just in love the mechanics of craft. It is sort of like having an intuitive knowledge of your native tongue and then being exposed to grammar and realizing that it is like a giant puzzle. A number of students in the class found Margot’s style of teaching very alienating. They believed she disliked, or in the words of one classmate ‘hated’ them. I found that she seemed to not like my comments but I was able to overlook it and in fact found myself freed by her ‘dislike’ – there was no need to impress her. Our new teacher is almost too funny. I find it difficult to concentrate on the subject because I’m laughing too uproariously at his comments. Unfortunately he will not let me have the class criticize my newly revised novel because he has put too much work into my older version. Oh, well.
Aside from attending classes or lectures I just walk around town. I have photographed many of the beautiful homes and I am interested to see if people can spot the new victorins vs. the old. Some of them have required much scrutiny by me and even then I’m not 100%. I usually ere on the side of thinking them reproductions if I am questioning.
On one of my rambles I encountered the taxi driver from the first day. He raced his taxi up to me at an intersection and said “Hey remember me.” I said of course, my first day in Saratoga. He quizzed me how I was liking it and I waxed on about the loveliness of it all. “Move here,” he demanded again. I hestitated, I can’t. Its lovely but… “Marry me.”
I just laughed. “I’m off Monday and Tuesday”. Oh, those are my most intense class days.
“When are you leaving?” He was prepared to drive me to the airport in his own car, but I felt a cab was better. So now I am to request him specifically and book ahead. Mark Buffo? I’m not sure about the last name. I didn’t think I’d forget it so fast. But I’m sure the story of a 44 yr old former horse trainer with a Brooklyn accent will be interesting.