ESSAY: Grounded in Failure

By John Thorndike

On a chilly December morning two years ago I drove up to Columbus, Ohio to attend a meeting of the Ohio Arts Council. Each year three out-of-state panelists choose the OAC’s grant winners in fiction and nonfiction, and I wanted to hear their deliberations. If I hadn’t gone, I’d have received a letter about the fate of my submission—but it would only tell me if I’d passed or failed, if I’d won a grant or hadn’t. I wouldn’t know if the panelists had dismissed my work early on, or if it had stayed in close contention. Only by attending the meeting could I learn what they liked about the chapter of a novel I’d submitted, and what they didn’t.

Feeling hopeful, I sailed into Columbus on the tail end of morning traffic, parked my car in the hotel lot and walked inside. But there, amidst the gleaming woodwork and recessed lighting, my pulse took a jump. I followed the Arts Council signs down a set of carpeted stairs into a boxy, low-ceilinged room. The panel members sat around a table in front, while some twenty or thirty writers watched in silence from rows of stiff-backed chairs. Here the lights were fluorescent and the air filled with tension, and my heart was already banging.

I once heard a writer claim that he never paid attention to what people said about his work, and certainly not to any reviews of his books. Why listen, he said, when all it came to was “good doggie,” or “bad doggie.” I’ve never been so cavalier, nor as confident about what I’ve written. I have several friends who read my chapters, and I listen to their reactions—but they know me, and surely that colors their opinions. At this Arts Council meeting I had a chance to hear the blind evaluations of three writers who had no idea who I was, or who in the room had written what. It was worth a day’s outing, I thought, to hear their unbiased response.

But my heart would not slow down.

The moderator for the OAC explained the process to the audience. In the first round, the panelists would announce their scores of one, two, or three for each submission. Thus, each entry would earn a total score of from three to nine. After eliminating those that scored less than five, discussion of the better submissions would follow. Grants could be awarded for five or ten thousand dollars, to be decided by the panelists within their budget for the year.

All this I already knew, because just a year earlier I’d come to this same panel meeting to hear the verdict on a different chapter I’d submitted from the same novel. The scoring that day was split. They gave me a three, a two, and a one, which was not enough to win. I was disappointed—especially that somebody gave me a one—but it didn’t slow me down. I’ve been writing for years, I’ve published three books, I try to follow Goethe’s advice: “Do not hurry; do not rest.” I went home and kept writing, and now I had a new first chapter. I’d done a beautiful job, I thought. I’d rewritten it a dozen times, and to me it read just right.

Yet now, sitting in a room filled with other silent contestants, my confidence fled. I didn’t want to lose again. I studied the panelists at the table in front. They hadn’t said much so far. They seemed inscrutable, murmuring a few words among themselves and shuffling the submissions they had brought with them in manila envelopes, the ones they wanted to fight for. There was no talk among the watching writers. A few people drank from cups of coffee. I sat still in my chair, my anxiety growing in the airless room. I took deep and steady breaths. I tried to govern the speed of my heart, and instead it beat faster. The first round of scores began.

“Two.” “One.” “Two.”

“One.” “One.” “One.”

“Three.” “Two.” “Two.”

“One.” “Two.” “One.”

“Two.” “One.” “One.”

It was a long list and my number was near the end. I felt lightheaded. The panelists reported their scores to the moderator in calm and measured voices, but by now my heart was thrashing like an animal in a cage. My fingertips had turned numb and cold. This was crazy, I told myself. This wasn’t a firefight in Baghdad, it was a meeting in a downtown Columbus hotel. How nervous could this make me?

Very nervous. Panicked, almost, as they approached my number.

“Two.” “Three.” “One.”

“Two.” “Two.” “Two.”

“One.” “Two.” “One.”

And without the slightest pause, my scores: “One,” said the first panelist. “One,” said the second, and “One,” the third.

I held onto my chair. The blood drained out of my head, until I thought I might faint. I bent forward as if reaching for something in my book bag, and kept my head down for thirty seconds. Then I sat up slowly, with the edges of my vision shimmering. The panelists before me droned on, but I could make no sense of it. They could have been speaking in tongues.

They’d mixed up the numbers, I thought. But no. They had read the opening chapter of my novel and dismissed it. One, one, one. They hated it.

I waited in my seat until the panel took a break, then grabbed my bag and got out. I found my car, found the highway and headed home. On a clear stretch of road I erupted into long, throat-searing screams.


I’ve told this story to some of my friends. We call it the one one one story, a shorthand for disgrace and failure. Still, some months passed before I gave up on that novel. So three people didn’t like it—maybe that was just bad luck. I continued to wrestle with it, but all along I knew something was wrong with the book. The plot was hamstrung. I hadn’t thought anyone would see that in the first few pages, but the problem lay waiting.

Then, in the midst of my doubts about the book, a family crisis swept me away from Ohio. My father, who in the last couple of years had been showing signs of confusion and memory loss, grew abruptly worse. At our family gathering over Christmas it came clear to all of us that he could no longer live alone. My brothers and I talked about nursing homes, but our father was adamant on the subject. “Don’t ever put me in a place like that,” he’d told me the previous summer, after a visit to an old friend whose dementia was well advanced.

After New Year’s I packed my car, drove to Cape Cod and moved into my father’s house.

Though I took my computer, I didn’t think I’d be able to write there. I love a quiet, inviolate space where no one’s going to interrupt me—and at my father’s I would be on call day and night. Yet only ten days into my stay I began to keep a journal.

I’ve never been good with journals. I always think I should keep one, and never find the time. But now there was something I was driven to record: the rising tide of my father’s Alzheimer’s. Each morning I woke in the early dark and lay in bed with my laptop, a child monitor turned up so I could hear him breathing, asleep in his bed downstairs. And as long as he slept, I wrote. Every day there was something to record. Some incidents made me laugh—such as the time he insisted we had Mitt Romney, the dapper governor of Massachusetts, in our refrigerator. But mostly I wrote of the painful changes in my father’s life: how he could no longer read, how he spent whole days in a chair, staring at nothing. How he grew indifferent to walks, to the outdoors, even to the ocean. How his nouns vanished, and how his forgetfulness made conversations impossible. These were brutal changes in someone who had been, for over seventy years, an accomplished editor and writer.

Ten months later he died. I’d spent almost every day with him, and had my hand on his chest the night his heart stopped beating. I climbed into bed with him and put my arm around his neck, holding him in death as I’d never been able to in life. I got out of his bed and got back in, I watched his face, I chose his traveling clothes from the closet. I kept checking to make sure he wasn’t breathing, I felt his hands and feet grow cold. In the morning I called the hospice nurse, and my brother drove down from Vermont. The two polite owners of the local funeral home came over in a black van, we zipped my father into a body bag and they took him to a crematorium.

I was left with an enormous empty grief. Not that he was gone—he was ninety-two, and by the end had suffered enough—but because of how we’d failed each other. I’d loved him, and he’d loved me, but he was not an easy man to get close to. There were times I’d given up on him, times I might have found better ways to comfort him.

Out of that grief, I wrote. I went home to Ohio and wrote hard through a long winter and spring, and by July I was almost finished. I worked and reworked the opening pages of the book, then submitted them to the OAC as a nonfiction entry. And once again, on a cold December morning, I got into my car and headed for Columbus.

I left early, in the dark, and this time I was anxious from the moment I left home. The fifth gear of my little car had given out, and I pushed it to keep up with traffic. I listened to NPR and turned it off. I put a book on tape into the stereo and took it out. Following the map to a new hotel, I took a wrong turn. And all through the drive my heart went into a sprint whenever I thought of what might happen at the meeting. I found the hotel, went inside and sat down in another windowless room, under the same fluorescent lights.

I liked the looks of this year’s panelists. I wanted to like them. One had written a memoir about her famous father, so perhaps she’d be interested in my own father-and-son story. The other two were smiling and telling a joke or two. I hoped for the best but was ready to be crushed. My heart kept accelerating, and I didn’t even try to slow it down. Were my pages good enough? I could hardly remember what I’d written. The panelists sang out their numbers in the first round of scores, doing the fiction first. They began the nonfiction. They came to my number.

“Three.” “Three.” “Three.”

Yes. Yes.

I was flooded with relief, by a rich warmth in my back and limbs as the tension drained out of me. Filled with selfish pleasure, I settled down in my chair. Three, three, three, I kept repeating to myself, bathing in the glory of it.

It’s a happy ending. But I know I wouldn’t be writing this article if the outcomes were reversed, if two years ago I’d won, and this year I lost. Magazines want to publish—and people want to read—articles in which loss is overcome. Who’s going to publish a piece that’s all about losing some contest? Who’s going to publish the article I once started to write about the six months I spent promoting my last book, a memoir about raising my son. The traveling, the book signings, the interviews: so much effort and money, and it all came to nothing. Or came to little, because the memoir sold fewer copies than my first two books, for which I’d done almost no publicity at all. I never wrote that article, because in it I had only failed.

Yet now, as I think about those two trips to the Ohio Arts Council meetings, the one that knocks me around is the first. I’ve told my friends the three three three story, but it doesn’t hold as much power. The story that grips us is the one of shame and failure. And isn’t this usually the case in a novel or memoir? How much do we want to read about successful characters for whom everything works out fine? Not me. I want to read about people who are foolish and lost and locked in a battle. Not those who take an easy escalator to the next floor and smilingly accept their award, and a check.

I’m happy about my award. I was even giddy for a while. But when reading someone else’s story I want to see the characters torn apart. Some success at the end is fine, but the best stories are grounded in failure. Now, as I make notes for another book, I try to keep that in mind. It’s conflict and failure that light up a story. Failure, I tell myself: Grab the reader first with that.

John Thorndike is a novelist and memoirist whose books include Another Way Home, The Potato Baron, and Anna Delaney's Child.

ESSAY: Reading Habits

From Stock.xchng

By Mikita Brottman

Not many of us get through school, not to mention college, without developing our own imperatives and superstitions around reading and the feelings associated with it, whether these are feelings of pleasure, affection, guilt, dread, anxiety, or simple indifference. As we grow older, these emotions tend to linger in our private lives, whether we continue to read avidly, or recoil at the very sight of a book. No one has more insight into the confluence between reading and memory than Marcel Proust, and no one has written so well on the subject, or at such length. In this passage from Time Regained, the narrator describes the effect of this synergy:

A book which we read at a certain period does not merely remain forever conjoined to what existed around us; it remains also faithfully united to what we ourselves then were and thereafter it can be handled only by the sensibility, the personality that were then ours. If, even in thought, I pick up from the bookshelf François le Champi, immediately there rises within me a child who takes my place, who alone has the right to spell out the title François le Champi, and who reads it as he read it once before, with the same impression of what the weather was like then in the garden, the same dreams that were then shaping themselves in his mind about the different countries and about life, and the same anguish about the next day.

How well do you remember what you read? Think about a work of fiction you've read recently—what scenes, images or characters come to mind? Memories of reading can often be far more complex than memories of “real” events, since they combine “factual” memories—like your personal situation and social context at the time of reading—with the power of an aesthetic experience. So when you think of a book that had a profound impact on you, you often can't help but remember what you were doing and where you were when you first read it. Now think of a book that had no impact on you at all. Can you even remember one?

Do you see visual images of the story you're reading as it unfolds? If so, do you base the characters on people you know—friends, family, famous people, or composites of all three, as in dreams? Or are they totally new? Are the images in color, or black and white? Are they consistent, or do they come and go? For some, reading fiction can engage other sensory responses besides the visual, like smell, sound, taste, and ... well, I'm sure we've all had the experience of being sexually aroused by a fictional scene, or a character description. Some people say they have rich sensory experiences, as intense and realistic as an IMAX movie, that radiate outward from a verbal text, while others, including those who've been blind from birth, have experiences that are more conceptual. I wonder if these images are retained, stored in our memory long after we've finished reading, and whether, by focusing carefully, we're bringing them back to the surface of consciousness, or whether we're actually creating them afresh every time.

Some people regularly make friends with fictional characters, or even fall in love with them, or with their authors. Some can't prevent themselves from skipping to the end to find out what happens. Some feel compelled to read especially resonant passages aloud, to themselves, or to others. Have you ever had the strange experience of reading a book you hate, but you still can't stop reading it? Have you ever read a book that left a bitter taste in your mouth? What about a book you love to death, but nobody else seems to get?

In order to make sense of these emotions, you need to think carefully about your reading habits. Ask yourself the following questions, and compare your responses to those of the 56 readers I surveyed (equal parts British and American, men and women, academics and “laymen”).

(1) What book are you currently reading?

Of my 56 respondents, only one reported that he wasn't reading a book at the moment, though a few people could give me a title but not an author. About 16 said they were reading two or more books at the same time; 14 were reading history or biography, and the rest were reading works of fiction, mostly by contemporary bestselling authors like Dan Brown, J.K. Rowling, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, and Walter Mosley.

(2) How do you decide what book to read next?

Thinking about this question is a good way to discover how flexible or schematic you are in your reading habits. I know it's a generalization, but women seem far more easygoing than men in this respect (and in most other respects too, for that matter), but then, every regular reader has his or her own system of reading, however unacknowledged or unconscious. Think about it. Do you go for a long time between books, waiting for something to strike your fancy, or to be given something to read by friends or family, or do you go immediately from one book to the next? Do you make reading lists (in paper or in your head), and, if so, how strictly do you stick to them? Do you know exactly what you like, and stick to the work of particular authors, or a certain genre? Or maybe you never read anything but sword-and-sandal fiction, detective stories, literary “classics,” historical novels, or Harlequin romance. Do you go through binges? I do. I can recall, in the last couple of years, a true crime binge, a biography binge, a Philip Roth binge, and a binge on campus novels.

Twenty-two of my respondents said they rely on reviews in the Sunday papers, or recommendations from friends and family members. Eighteen said they just pick up whatever catches their eye in the bookshop or library, or on their bookshelves at home. The rest varied. Some people said they have a small group of favorite authors whose work they follow closely, buying each new book as soon as it comes out. Others said they have a bedside stack to work through, sometimes systematically, sometimes at random. (I always have a stack of around 10 books, and I'll almost never take them out of order, however tempting they may look—but then, I also have few qualms about giving up on a book if it doesn't engage me.) Some said they like to read books that correspond with their current situation—European novels while traveling in Europe, romance fiction when they're in love, and so on. Some said they visit bookstores to find something to read, picking up different books and reading their first pages; others pay more attention to price. For others, it's entirely a matter of serendipity—as one person put it, “a mysterious coalescence of urges and interests.”

(3) Do you always finish books, or do you give up on them? If you give up on them, how many pages does it usually take?

Out of the 56 readers I surveyed, only three said they never, ever gave up on a book (and I'm not sure I believe them). One commented: “I only start books I know I'm going to like;” another claimed, “even in high school, I read every assigned book cover to cover,” and the third said, “if I'm going to hate something, I want to hate it fully and thoroughly.” Everyone else admitted to giving up on books from time to time (though some confessed to feeling guilt about it), either because they find themselves struggling and losing interest, or because something more interesting comes along, or for other reasons (“I put it down for too long”; “It's due back at the library”; “I'll put them down and forget where I've put them”). Some people will give up after 10 pages or “one bad chapter,” others draw the line at three chapters, 30 to 60 pages, 150 pages, or “half-way.”

The last book I gave up on was Samuel Beckett's Molloy, which I added to my stack after my boyfriend enjoyed it so much. He went on to read the other works in the volume—Malone, and The Unnamable. I first gave up after about 60 pages, then a couple of days later I decided I'd try again, and made it through another 60 pages before conceding defeat. When I asked my readers to name a book they recall giving up on, titles mentioned more than once included Moby Dick (six), Don Quixote (six), As I Lay Dying (four), A Clockwork Orange (two), Midnight's Children (two), Foucault's Pendulum (two), Breakfast of Champions (two), The Three Musketeers (two), White Noise (two), Gravity's Rainbow (two) and—thank you—Molloy (two, including me).

(4) Do you generally separate your reading into “work” and “fun”?

This question was mainly directed at the academics, but I thought it would be interesting to find out whether this was a common distinction. Interestingly, those whose work involved “literary” reading—writers, literature students, journalists, academics in the humanities—did not, as a rule, separate their reading into “work” and “fun,” which I suppose makes sense, because, as one of my respondents commented, “there's no separation between work and interest—I work out of interest.” Those who did make a clear distinction between “work” and “fun” were generally engaged in administrative or managerial positions, where “work” reading consisted of reports and other business-related documents, so, as one person said, “most of my reading away from the office is fun—novels, newspapers, etc. I tend to do work reading at work.” A couple of exceptions were a woman doing a Ph.D. in history, who said “The reading I do for work and the reading I do for fun are so completely different, I consider them different activities,” and a philosophy professor, who made the comment: “I don't read pulp just to relax. TV is for that.”

(5) Do you ever re-read books you love? If so, how often? Please give examples, if possible.

Most people, it seems, re-read their favorite books on a regular basis, from every single year, to once every four or five years. About a quarter of my respondents said they'd re-read classics like The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, Ulysses, Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby, and The Time Machine. Others re-read mainly stories, poems, and sections of longer novels. A lot of people said they like to re-read their favorite contemporary novels, especially science fiction and fantasy—titles mentioned included Catch 22, Portnoy's Complaint, Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, Talisman, Dune, Blood Meridian, and the Harry Potter series. I was interested to discover that 17 of my respondents said they regularly returned to books they enjoyed in their childhood; particular favorites seem to be Catcher in the Rye, Watership Down, The Plague Dogs, A Wrinkle in Time, The Book of Three, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, and anything by Dr. Seuss.

By Antony Ruggiero, via Stock.xchng

(6) Can you read books in noisy places (e.g., on trains and buses)?

I tend to be a very relaxed reader, able to lose myself in a book whatever the circumstances around me, but my friend Mark can't read anything, not even a newspaper, if there are people talking nearby (his new method is to wear a pair of Bose earphones and listen to white noise on his iPod). From the readers I interviewed, there seem to be more people like me than like Mark. Only nine of my respondents said they couldn't read in noisy places. While many people said they preferred quiet, most people seem to have no problem tuning out external noise and absorbing themselves in their books. One person said, “I have even read under shell fire. It kept the fear from becoming overwhelming.”

A few people mentioned feeling uncomfortable and restless if they found themselves on public transport without having a book to read. I know this feeling well. Since I'm lucky enough to be able to read pretty much anywhere, regardless of circumstances, and since books are a part of my academic work, I rarely leave home without something to dip in and out of during the day. Even if I'm going out for dinner or to a movie, there's still sometimes a few moments when I might find myself alone, waiting for a friend, or for the lights to go down, and it's difficult for me to simply sit and wait. I read on the train and the subway—I even read standing up, if it's not too crowded. Of course, I'll read in all the usual places, too, during the little hiatuses in the day—in waiting rooms and in between appointments, while eating lunch (I know, mother, it's not polite).

Our notion of what reading is, and what it involves, is still defined by the physical and economic restraints it grew out of, from the texture of paper to the geography of libraries and bookstores. These notions generally depend on the material constraints of “real” books—but for some up-to-date types, these constraints no longer apply. None of my readers said as much, but some people have moved away from “real” books, preferring to read e-books on their laptops or Blackberry's, especially at work, when they can snatch only the occasional reading break. This is a natural side effect of our changing habits. We're busier than ever today, and, due to the increased pace of our lives, we apparently tend to read in very short “spurts” compared to the readers of two or three generations ago. These days, when we pick up a book, it's usually for 10 or 15 minutes rather than an hour or so—a fact that some people attribute to the influence of the media, especially television, with its commercial breaks every 12 minutes, and its six-second shots.

(7) Can you remember if a book has ever made you laugh out loud, or shed tears? If so, please give examples.

Everyone I interviewed could remember laughing out loud while reading, though not all of them could remember specific titles—which is interesting, because, while I'll often find things I read very funny and engaging, the pleasure always remains internal; I don't think I've ever laughed out loud at something I've read in a book. But everybody I interviewed could remember not just laughing out loud, but even the specific passages they laughed about. Portnoy's Complaint and Catch 22 got the most mentions, followed by The Corrections, The World According to Garp, The Diary of Bridget Jones, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Much Ado About Nothing, anything by P.G. Wodehouse, anything by Terry Pratchett, and Marley and Me: My Life with the World's Worst Dog. There were a few surprises here, too—for example, a psychiatrist confessed to laughing aloud only at Dilbert cartoons and a book called How to be a Jewish Mother; a writer mentioned often laughing out loud at his own fiction.

Crying is a bit more complicated, since most people don't cry as readily as they laugh—there's more of a taboo about shedding tears, especially for men. And tears seem more permeable, more labile than laughter: if you're already upset, or grieving, or broken-hearted, the slightest thing can set you off, though some books will make you cry no matter what mood you're in (Lolita does it to me every time). Twenty-six of my respondents (19 of them men) said that, while they know they've felt sad or emotionally moved by a book, they couldn't recall actually shedding tears. Others said they cried a lot, at “anything sentimental” or “any books about animals.” Titles mentioned were eclectic, and included The Pianist, Metamorphosis, A Child Called It, Jude the Obscure, “the last few pages of Finnegan's Wake,” The Corrections, Little Women, and Marley and Me (from the same person who said it made her laugh out loud).

_____________________

"A psychiatrist confessed to laughing aloud only at Dilbert cartoons and a book called How to be a Jewish Mother."

_____________________

Personally, I'll never forget the odd experience of crying helplessly over Beloved while absolutely hating the book—partly, I think, because at the time it felt as though the author was playing heartlessly, almost manipulatively, on my private emotions. Or maybe it was just me.

A couple of men made interesting connections between passages that made them cry and their own emotional pressure points:

The last two books that made me cry out loud were Coetzee's Disgrace and Chang Rae Lee's Aloft. Now that I think about it, both are about the collapse of their patriarch protagonist's life-worlds; that probably says loads. Towards the end of Aloft I just couldn't take it any more. I think it's the only time I had to take a few deep breaths before continuing to read.

I remember crying when reading the end of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. I found my mother finishing it in the kitchen one morning. She almost never read novels at this time. But here she was all red-eyed over this book. I read the novel after that. She handed it to me. I was about 23 then; I was having problems figuring out what to do in life, and I was butting heads with my father. I identified with the predicaments of the young men in the novel, the conflicts, and the complex bonds—sometimes unacknowledged—with the “fathers.”

Of course, where you read is going to effect how you read. If you mostly read in public or semi-public places, and if you tend to read in 10- or 15-minute intervals during your work day, then, unless you're a very gifted reader, it's going to be hard for you to get deeply involved in your book. If you're reading fiction, it's difficult to identify with characters and keep up with a nuanced plot when you have to stop reading every few minutes, and not many of us feel comfortable laughing aloud or shedding tears in public. One reader confessed to feeling overcome at the closing chapter of Brick Lane by Monica Ali: “I was on the tube and had to stop reading it due to tears!” Another recalled: “At school we had an hour a week of private reading time. I remember bringing in Spike Milligan's war memoirs and being nearly thrown out of class because I couldn't read it without laughing.”

(8) Where do you buy most of your books? How much do you spend on books each year?

I asked this question mainly out of curiosity, since I never go to bookshops any more, and buy all my books used, from Amazon. While online book-buying seems to be more and more common, according to my survey, most people still also buy from bookstores, and even when buying online, prefer new books to used. A number of people commented how much they used to enjoy hunting for bargains in used bookstores, and how sad they felt that the Internet had “put an end to all that,” since now “everybody knows exactly how much any book is worth.” I was surprised to learn how little even the most prolific readers seem to spend on books (though it's also possible that people were underestimating their expenditure). Nobody thought they spent more than $1,500 a year on books, and the average estimate was between $150 and $200. A lot of people said they rarely bought books at all, borrowing them instead from libraries, friends and family, or relying on desk or review copies; others said they get all their books from thrift stores, charity shops, and library sales.

(9) Do you use bookmarks, or dog-ear the pages of your books? Do you make marginal notes? If so, do you use pencil or pen?

Those who tend in the direction of fetishism responded to this question with expressions of mock outrage, perplexity, or disapproval. “Bah god no! ... I'd seriously punch someone who dog-eared my books”; “Turning pages down makes me cringe. NO MARGIN NOTES. ... Why would I make notes in the margins?”; “Dog-earing is to be frowned upon. It is analogous to twisting the arm of a child.”

Personally I have little restraint about dog-earing my corners (but then, I'm also often tempted to twist the arms of children). Since I buy my books used whenever possible, I also tend to make notes in the margins, in pen (if I can't find a pencil, which is most of the time), so basically, I'm with the person who said, of his books, “I don't mind how they look, as long as they're stuck together.” Surprisingly, we dog-earers are in the majority—most people, including people you might expect to have fetishizing tendencies, such as writers and literature professors, said they usually dog-eared page corners to keep their place, and often made notes in the margins. Others said they keep their place with Post-its, note cards, pens, pencils, loose book covers, hair pins, subway cards, candy wrappers, sticky tabs, receipts, plane tickets, photographs, paper clips, or other devices:

I have these bookmarks that I make from torn pieces of paper. ... When I am finished with a book ... it can have as many as 40 of these bits of paper sticking out at the top—like some kind of headdress or rooster's comb. It's totally inefficient and ridiculous and I will probably never quit sticking these papers in.

Anybody who reads a lot will probably recognize that, over the years, they've picked up a few funny habits, which makes it a bit easier to understand how some people come to fetishize their books, and perhaps even to sympathize with those people.

Think carefully for a moment. Do you have any unusual tendencies, while reading? For example, I have an odd habit—odd but not perhaps so unusual—of checking the page numbers every time I turn over a new leaf. I'm not sure what I'm checking for—just to be sure that they're in the right order, I suppose. (Though what would I do if they weren't? Write a letter to the Times?). Also, I usually check how long the chapter is before I start it. I'm not exactly sure why I do this, though I suppose it has something to do with my need to be in control, since I find it very hard to stop reading at random, so books without chapters, or books with uneven chapters, annoy me very much—though it's unclear why I should turn myself over like this to the power of the book. After all, I could stop anywhere, wherever I wanted to. (Couldn't I?)










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How quickly do you read? Do you skim through pages at top speed, or do you stop to savor the sentences along the way? I'm sure we've all had the experience of not being able to put a book down, but for some people this seems to be the norm: “I will read a book obsessively in a single sitting, doing nothing else all day,” said one person; another commented: “When I'm really reading a book, that's all I do until it's over!” I've noticed that, with books I'm especially enjoying, I have a tendency to want to draw out the pleasure as long as I can by allowing myself only a few pages at a time, and reading with extra care, taking my time, enjoying the foreplay, as it were. But then, when I come to the last few chapters I find it hard to restrain myself, and once I know the end is in sight, I charge ahead to the climax in one long session, unable to stop, rather like the way some people let themselves slurp, guzzle, and smack their lips when coming to the end of their meal.

And finally...

(10) Where, and when, do you do your best reading?

When truly absorbed in a book, you're in a kind of liminal zone between inner and outer worlds—awake, but unaware, inwardly focused, but, ideally, without the slightest bit of self-consciousness. The reader who's totally engrossed has no notion of time or place, no bodily sensations, no existence outside their book. This is why books can be so vital for those in dire circumstances—people who are bedridden, in prison, or in hospital. Books can remove you, however temporarily, from your ongoing ordeal.

According to Freud, reading, like art and creative writing, is a kind of daydreaming, childish and retrogressive; those with happy, fulfilled, distracting lives should have no need to escape into fiction. But most readers seem to feel that, in moderation at least, fiction enhances their lives, making them richer and more interesting. Almost everyone who's in the habit of reading tries to carve out some time to spend every day with a book, even if it's just a few minutes at night, before falling asleep. In fact, morning and night—the liminal edges of the day—are the times most people seem to spend with their books.

The etiquette of reading when you're not alone can be quite a touchy subject. Some people feel it's rude to read in company, and of course this is often true, but it all depends on the company, and how comfortable you are around them. For example, when you're in the first stages of a love affair, it seems absolutely inconceivable to get out a book and read; you have no interest in anything except being with your lover. Even waiting in a bar or restaurant, you're a mass of nerves, hardly able to order a drink, unable to focus, incapable even of reading a menu. But there comes a time when there's nothing more natural than for you and your lover to spend the evening together absorbed in your separate books.

Getting to this stage, however, can be a fragile and delicate process. How many nights do you have to spend with a new lover before it's acceptable, when, in his or her company, to reach out and take a book from the nightstand? In doing so, you're tacitly admitting that you've reached a stage when your lover's presence is less interesting to you, at least for a while, than printed words on a page. It's a sensitive moment, not to be undertaken without a clear knowledge of the risks involved. Will your new lover recoil with dismay at your thoughtless indifference, or will they smile agreeably, and reach for a book of their own? And what if they reach for their book too soon, too early in the relationship, before you're ready, before it feels right? Is there anything you can do? Should you say something, or should you just take it as a sign that the honeymoon is over?

And then, think about this: How many people do you know in whose company you'd feel comfortable losing yourself in a book? On the one hand, naturally, it's hard to imagine any more blatant signal that you're not interested in other people's conversation, and there are times—if you took out your book during a dinner party, for example, or in the middle of a first date—when no other interpretation could be possible. In different circumstances, however, settling down with a book can show that you feel completely at ease with somebody, so much so that you feel no obligation to make small talk, especially in circumstances when there's no need to stand upon ceremony—if you're both on a long trip, or enduring a tedious wait.

The readers I interviewed came up with a wide variety of responses to the question of where they do their best reading, from the general (“anywhere”; “at home”; “on vacation”) to the specific (“lying on my BACK with my head propped up”; “on the lounge chair with my feet up, something to drink and a cigarette”; “on a blanket or towel, in nature, with a glass of Sauvignon blanc”). People seem to have all kinds of favorite spots for reading: “in the chair in my office”; “at the pool”; “in Starbucks”; “on trains”; “on the beach”; “in my backyard, on a folding chair”; “in the library”; “in Central Park”; “on planes”; “on the sofa”; “in my easy chair”; “in the back seat of the car”; “in coffeehouses”; “in trees”; “in the hot tub.” And, while lots of people freely admitted to reading in the bath, nobody confessed to doing their best reading on the loo.

Like most people, I do most of my reading in bed at night. In the morning, if I don't have to get up right away, I'll spend at least half an hour reading in bed, which is, as most people seem to agree, the best place for intensive, immersive leisure reading. You can burrow down into the covers with your book or plump the pillows and sit up in your pajamas like a dainty invalid. You can stretch out, curl up, or snuggle under the quilt. If you feel guilty about staying in bed, or if it makes you antsy to look at the clock, you can lie on top of the covers and do some leg lifts while you read. You can make a nice pot of tea for the bedside table (it's even better if you can get somebody to make it for you). Of course, there are other places that are more commonly associated with reading—airport lounges, long flights, hospitals—but here we tend to read by necessity, as a way of passing the time, or to keep our mind off things. Lying supine in bed, everyone seems to agree, is the ideal place to read, the most conducive to immersion in the richness and complexity of another world.


Mikita Brottman is a professor of language and literature at the Maryland College Institute of Art. This essay is part of a book in progress about reading. Send your responses to these 10 questions, or any other thoughts about reading habits, to mbrottman@mica.edu.

ESSAY: A Mental Marathon

Photo by Mike Rosowski

By Dena Evans

I’d had some serious exposure to running in my life. In an alternative middle-school PE program, I walked 55 miles in 22 hours, and ran 29 miles in short stretches over the course of one day. I was no stranger to the endurance athlete’s crippling quad flames. In the high school and college years that followed, those formative experiences dissolved into a comfort zone of middle distance running, bracketed by revolving seasons of soccer and basketball, and finally into the coaching profession, where I spent my days telling other people how far and how fast they should go. Running a marathon was the last thing I felt like doing. One day, however, the marathon finally found itself shuffled to the top of the deck. I decided it was time to saddle up and find out what all the fuss was about.

My decision came about as much out of curiosity as out of the need for a goal and diversion when I quit my job as women’s cross-country coach at Stanford. My coaching experience also suggested that preparing for anything too fast and short would require me to make a commitment to training I was not logistically or mentally prepared to make.

It was that coaching side of my brain that led me to the second annual Nike Women’s Marathon in San Francisco. It was close, which was key, and it was relatively flat, also key as I knew the distance itself would be challenge enough. It was far enough ahead when I signed up in July that I could plan a sufficient number of weekly long runs. I asked my husband if he could commit to taking over parenting duties while I did those long runs, and, with his OK, I found myself doing the first that very Saturday. That 70 minutes at sunrise in Las Vegas, while there with him for a business event, was my longest run in a year and a half, since becoming pregnant with my second daughter.

The only part of training I hadn’t figured out yet was, um, why on earth I was doing it. I’m a fairly athletic person who likes running, but I do it mostly out of habit because it was the last organized sport I participated in at school and in my coaching work. I tend to get in ruts where I eat the same thing over and over, wear my hair the same way for years and years, and buy the same type of shoe over and over. Was running a rut?

I wondered if athletes who like running are drawn to marathons, or whether, in training for and running a marathon, marathoners become de facto runners along the way. As a person who ran, and who spent several years of my life with not just runners, but good ones, did I just get sucked into the notion that if you ran long enough a marathon was your eventual destiny? Where was the line between participation and competition? And could I ever be happy with a decision to simply participate when my life so far had been about how to muster good competitive results regardless of whether or not I felt like it? After spending years giving advice on how to run, could I take some myself, even from those whom I’d coached? If I really tried and failed, would I lose their respect?

Weeks turned into months, one identical pair of trainers into another, 70 minutes into 2 hours 25 minutes, and I readied for race day. A desire to canvass and explore more trails for a group of professional runners planning to winter in the area took me on some new runs west of Highway 280. To kill a couple hours in New York City on the day of a friend’s wedding, I ran 1 hour 52 minutes in Central Park, buying Gatorade from the vendor with sweaty dollars tucked in my shorts and practicing fluid intake in the 80-degree heat. Stroller runs with one or both daughters allowed me precious time for decompression. And I satisfied my weird goal of running to my house from the San Francisco Airport out of curiosity about the distance (along the San Francisco Bay Trail, 18.4 miles, according to my handy Garmin GPS device).

As the race approached, I flip-flopped between thinking competitively and telling people I just wanted to finish. I processed advice from athlete friends and even from Runner’s World, my reading of which was completely emblematic of my uncertain status—finisher or competitor? I took a free subscription from a few accrued airline miles. Universally scorned by the hardcore competitive crowd as a watered down rag for the masses, it encourages blasphemy such as walking during a race or running a marathon on a 3-day-a-week training plan, and each month it offers a new list of 10 ways to lose weight. The horror! It is, however, fun to read if you know the people featured or want to catch up on what John Q. Runner is up to these days.

The October issue featured a big article on Deena Kastor, once a summer camp roommate and now the American record holder in the event I was about to do for the first time. The November issue had Olympian Jen Rhines on the cover. I’d raced against her at the Penn Relays, and now she was a two-time Olympian! I tried not to focus on such disparities. You cross paths with someone in the days of untapped potential; then you think back and realize either how mediocre you were, or how poorly you have stewarded your opportunities. Passing thoughts, yes, but definitely obstacles to finding one’s focus. The coach of both of these athletes, Terrence Mahon, was the person for whom I was scouting running routes as he had recently taken the reigns of an elite team that trained in Mammoth Lakes.

“Hey Terrence, I saw the spread on Deena. Are you ready to become savior or anti-Christ?” I was ribbing him over the nonsensical bashing or glory he’d receive in the running community depending how Deena did in her upcoming race.

“Did you see the picture of her doing the speed ladder?” he said. “That’s what I was talking about in the stuff I sent the other day.”

He had e-mailed me the plyometrics and strength work he planned for the young team members.

And later…

“Hey guess what finally came in the mailbox today? Your wife on the cover of Runner’s World. Where did they find that corn field?”

“It was actually New Jersey.”

“Hey, tell Jen that as a first-time marathoner, I am following all of her advice, so I hope she was serious.”

She had given a few bullet points to help us newbies.

So, which was it? Was I part of the “cool crowd,” too much in the know to actually read Runner’s World, having discussions with coaches of top athletes about training, helping our nation’s best runners ascend to glory? Or was I just another goofball on the side of the road, huffing and puffing my way to the finish line?

I decided that I was going to have to make a goal time and stick to it. I did take Jen’s magazine advice and studied the elevation changes so that I would know which part of the race promised to be faster-paced. I packed bars into my waistband, and carbo-loaded conscientiously during the two days before race day. I navigated the occupational hazard of motherhood, fighting back a cold four or five days out, and after we put the girls to bed, I drove to San Francisco to bunk with my sister-in-law for the early start the next morning.

After little sleep and an unwelcome case of G-I distress, I found myself at once out of practice with the byproducts of nervous energy and coldly intellectual about how it was not to affect my outcome. Coach and athlete in one brain. Too crowded.

"Along the way, signs assured us that we were 'one step closer' to this or that, whether it be 'moving out from the shadows' or a foot massage. This was not your father’s marathon."

After an emergency stop at a coffee-shop bathroom on the way to the start, I leapt from the car in running attire and found my way to the start, consciously taking no warm-up. I had grabbed the 6:30-9 minute pace bracelet at the expo two days prior, and got a spot just a few rows behind the empty box where the elite start had occurred. Some 15,000 women (and a handful of men, described somewhat clumsily as the “men who support them”) we listened to Carol Lewis, erstwhile long jumper and longtime TV track analyst, handle emcee duties. It was odd to be listening to her here in the middle of San Francisco’s Union Square in the dark. Next came the inspirational comments of the biggest individual fund raiser for the race’s designated charity, leukemia and lymphoma research, and a cameo from Joan Benoit Samuelson, who seems to appear at a big race each week. (That day, she would run 1:29 for the half—her idea of an easy run, I assume).

The countdown. Voices increase. Seconds decrease. Then I start my watch as I cross the mat at the banner.


II.

Everything about the Nike Women’s Marathon—the title, the designs of the marathon-sponsored clothing, the website—was aimed at attracting more women to the brand while convincing them that they were improving themselves along the way. Along the course, one could take advantage of a jacket check at 2.5 miles for those who wanted to stay cozy at the starting line, an oxygen bar with several different flavors at about 10k, two Ghiradelli chocolate stations (OK, at mile 23.5, the last thing I am doing is wrestling with a fully wrapped, neat square of chocolate, no matter how good it is, and believe me I am a chocolate person). We were offered Luna Bars, Clif bar Shots, and even a “pedi-care” at mile 14 if you just wanted to take a load off and get your barking dogs massaged (those poor masseuses!). Before the race, we’d received e-mails with the inspirational stories of other runners, and along the way, signs assured us that we were “one step closer” to this or that, whether it be “moving out from the shadows” or a foot massage. This was not your father’s marathon.

The participants were of many different stripes as well—the elite start featured a pretty modest roster of 3-to-3:30 types along with a slightly more competitive half-marathon field. On the other end of the spectrum, the Team in Training contingent began its quest for the most part at 5:30 a.m. I started conservatively, but I don’t think anyone who started with me passed me after the initial downhill rush of the first mile. As I made steady progress along the San Francisco waterfront and into the Presidio and hilliest portions of the course, I had the opportunity to pass both my fellow 7-a.m. starters, the Team in Training walkers, and, eventually, even some of the elite-start marathoners once we diverged from the half-marathon route.

Again, I found myself considering the question of my true running identity. Every few yards, one of the Team in Training folk would shout, "Go team!" and receive a chanted reply. The desire to just finish, no matter the time, the desire to honor a loved one with an effort commemorative of their fight against disease, to wear purple shirts festooned with puff paint and safety pinned with pictures, Gatorade bottles strapped to their waists—that, I realized was not my club. Team in Training is an unbelievable organization that has raised multiple millions. But it has also received grief from the non-Runner’s World world for taking up spots and supposedly diluting the quality of these big races. The organization’s fliers encourage runners to “make it more meaningful next time,” as if an athlete couldn’t do that without a fund-raising group.

I was primarily struck by the unwavering sincerity with which each purple shirt greeted the events of the day. One purple shirt actually high-fived me. Another thanked me as I ran by (and I assume thanked many others ahead of and behind me) for being a mentor to them! I realized, faced with this Oprah’s book club of the running world, that however much I admired their charitable work and spirit, I carried a reserve of runner’s snobbery from my semi-successful days in the this and other sports. I would never shed my competitive instincts.

Along about nine miles, I passed two former track teammates from Stanford cheering from the side, and was momentarily buoyed much in the way anyone is when they hear their name called out among the masses. A mile or so later, I realized they were supporting two other former teammates, both of which were far better distance runners than myself, and who greeted me cheerfully as I came up. I saw a former fellow Farm Teamer jogging on the side in her own neighborhood, and at least three women I had coached ran the half, including the winner. Like myself, each has had to find a way to negotiate the gradual descent into age-mandated competitive decline, but here they were doing it in style, with several flavors of Oxygen at their disposal.

I was encouraged to be passing my former teammates, and picked up some steam during the next few downhill stretches. Shortly thereafter, I came up behind a woman I had known for years as a soccer enthusiast (and good player in her own right), as well as in her current vocation as a personal trainer around Stanford. As I greeted her along the way, she asked me why I had not started with the elites. This, I think, kind of summed up my no-man’s land situation in the running pantheon. She just assumed, because I had been kind of fast in a track event of some kind, and since I had some sort of loose affiliation with others who really had run fairly fast, that I would be among the elite group here. “No,” I assured her, “I didn’t even know they had an elite start until a couple of days ago. It’s my first one anyway—I don’t even know if I can finish!” She knew I was joking and scoffed at the notion of dropping out. Still, only 40 percent of me wanted to compete. The other 60 was still in participation land. As such, my attitude mirrored that of the race itself.

For example, in one of those quirks of road racing, the half marathon route broke from the marathon route at about 12 miles, only to regroup with the marathon route when it looped around at about mile 15. Finally, both races finished under the same banner. My family was utterly confused as to when I would appear, as people were walking yet seemingly ahead of me. My husband (given approximate splits by his dutiful wife) was trying to look out for me, yet was standing there with my daughters wondering why mommy was running so slow, or did they miss my finish? When the routes converged at mile 15, supposedly one side of the street was for halfers and the other for marathoners, but nobody knew that. I found myself weaving through walking spectators and walking participants, then squeezing through a suddenly narrow passage near the mile marker, just barely avoiding collision.

Though there were only 13 marathon finishers ahead of me, weaving among halfers moving at a 3:15 half-marathon pace, I felt a little let down. What was a fairly exciting moment for me in the presence of several hundred spectators was somehow completed in absolute obscurity. The walking half-marathoners received far more applause for their effort for traveling half as far and half as fast. In retrospect, of course, that was completely in keeping with the spirit of the event.
Finally across the finishing mat, the girl power continued. Tuxedo-clad, attractive young men handed out finishers’ necklaces from Tiffany & Co., a huge booth beckoned us to come take a picture with our buds, music pulsated, someone handed out bananas and free Jamba Juice cards, and the ubiquitous metallic blankets crinkled by. Carol Lewis, in her ski hat and sunglasses on the still-overcast day by the beach in San Francisco, acknowledged the band, a group of men losing street cred by the minute, dressed in cute fleece hoodies and Nike Shox trainers, singing U2 covers to a crowd of women reclining in comfy beanbag chairs. Finishers’ shirts were DriFIT V-necks in bright blue with a picture of a ponytailed female bounding off on a run and a female symbol where the “o” should be in Marathoner on the back.

I’d set a goal of 3:30 and finished in 3:15. I ran the second half faster than the first, and was fairly consistent throughout in my level of output. Although my longest training run was 18.5 miles, my biggest casualty was a self-destructing right big toenail that I was worried about primarily as a source of compensation, potentially leading to a stress fracture in my left leg. Again, my brain was too small for both coach and athlete. I was encouraged by the outcome, albeit ravaged by the soreness in the days afterward. I thoroughly enjoyed myself out there and as the miles melted away, it felt unbelievable to be trying hard and getting something for it instead of guiding a toddler only to have her disobey again and again, or coach an athlete only to have no control over her ultimate execution of my instruction.

The only one of the inspirational signs that got me was one right around the chocolate station. It told me that I was “one step closer…to becoming a marathoner.” OK. That actually spurred me on. A marathoner. Something I had never been, and something I would always be, should I finish.

Over the last little hill and down the two miles into the finish, I think the scales changed in the ratio between competitor and participant. By the time I had navigated the half marathoners, clutched my finisher’s necklace, and greeted two current collegiate athletes who used to call me their coach but had spent this day encouraging me, I was barely able to lift my legs yet, unafraid of the elements, waved off the foil blanket.

They hugged me and told me, "Good job!" I said thanks for the cheers and that it was a lot of fun. Then, suddenly, before the thought had even fully formed in my mind, before I was completely conscious of what a marathoner does at that point and from that point on, before I realized I was acting on a thought that hadn’t occurred to me in the 30 years, 4 months, 23 days I had been alive, something happened. After the Carol Lewis yelling, Team in Training walking, high school cheerleader braying, chocolate bar waving, Tiffany’s necklace earning circus I had just experienced, I bent at the waist, resting my hands on my knees. And turning to one of them, I blurted, “Hey, do think I qualified for Boston?”


Dena Evans is the former women's cross-country coach at Stanford University, where, as an undergraduate, she was on the track and soccer teams.

ESSAY: Once Again, Is Wal-Mart Good for the Working Class?

An economist argues that the recent campaigns launched against the chain are not just exercises in soft-hearted conscience soothing, but have solid economic and political rationales.

By L. Josh Bivens

A recent edition of Slate magazine featured a debate on “Is Wal-Mart Good for the Working Class”? The affirmative position was argued by Jason Furman, a chief economic advisor to John Kerry's presidential campaign. Barbara Ehrenreich took the opposing view, shaped in part by her experiences working undercover at the company as part of her research on how Americans stuck in low-wage labor markets make ends meet; research that culminated in a best-selling book, Nickel and Dimed.

It was a little strange reading the Slate contest. I’m firmly on Ehrenreich’s side, but I’m a professional economist so have much sympathy for how Furman argues. The former acknowledges early in the debate that there’s a culture clash, noting that pitting an economist against a non-economist regarding the merits of Wal-Mart is unlikely to be satisfying. Slate may have feared the esoterica that would have resulted from pitting two economists against each other, or may have just thought that no economist could be found to argue the negative side. Furman implicitly supports this latter interpretation at one point, saying:

"I don't find my views on Wal-Mart quite as counterintuitive as you seem to. Most economists who call themselves liberal, progressive, or Democratic probably feel the same way I do."

Furman’s right. Most economists who call themselves liberal, progressive, or Democratic would be with him (as, of course, would all of those who call themselves conservative, libertarian, or Republican, but that's no puzzle). Lest that close people’s minds regarding the hard-headedness of the brief against Wal-Mart, I thought I’d offer a sketch of why the recent campaigns launched against it (both public pressure and state and local legislation that would mandate improved pay and benefits for its workers) are not just exercises in soft-hearted conscience soothing that will result in more harm than good.

Most of those economists who call themselves liberal, progressive, or Democratic generally argue that the market should be allowed to churn out what it will, even if the results are a highly inequitable distribution of rewards. After the fact, they then would have a decent, compassionate government lean against this inequality through progressive taxes and transfer payments. This is eminently defensible, and if I could design an economy from the ground up, I’d rely on this approach almost as much as they, as I share with them a deep respect for the efficiency-enhancing quality of (most) markets.

Given the above, this crowd adopts a stance toward the Wal-Mart debate consisting of, well, telling its critics to back off and to rely on expanded government largess to help its workers claw their way to a better living. The benefits of Wal-Mart’s expansion (lower prices leading to consumer savings) are too valuable to be jeopardized by soft-headed special interest pleading.

This just won’t do, for three reasons. First, as a card-carrying economist, I have a hard time recommending the abandonment of one of the tools used by those concerned trying to aid the lot of the low-wage work force. After all, one of the great insights of the discipline is about the benefits of diversification, and the need for multiple instruments seems especially obvious right now given that the present government seems determined to reverse all inequality-fighting aspects of economic policy. Last month saw an attempt to repeal the estate tax (that falls only on the richest 0.5 percent of inheritances) while also voting down an increase in the minimum wage (that now has been beaten down by inflation to its lowest purchasing power in 51 years). Asking workers to sit tight and wait for more enlightened national leadership is requiring far too much patience on their part.

Second, I think we all need to think more seriously about how exactly we’re supposed to force our representatives to enact equity-supporting policies. The primary, and most effective, constituency for these policies is, unsurprisingly, organized labor. It’s hardly a secret that much of the funding for the anti-Wal-Mart groups comes from unions. (Nor is it a secret, for those who care to visit the homepage of the organization where I work, that a good, if minority, chunk of our funding also comes from unions. While people often assume that we adopt pro-union positions because we receive funds from labor, I think it puzzling that the reverse causality is never assumed.)

Another non-secret is the rapid decline in union membership that has occurred over the past two decades (the share of workers represented by a union has fallen from 23 percent in 1979 to under 13 percent today). Behind this decline is the fact that sectors traditionally most amenable to unionization (for structural reasons, not beneficence on the part of corporations) are declining in importance (manufacturing) while new jobs are being created in those sectors (retail) with little to no union history. The union-funded campaign against Wal-Mart is driven by the recognition that broad new sectors of the U.S. economy have to be organized for the labor movement to remain effective in coming decades. This retail organizing just cannot be done without engaging Wal-Mart, the largest single private employer in the U.S. economy. As long as Wal-Mart is allowed to remain union free and a relatively cheap employer, this will hamper new organizing drives at other retailers, and will put pressure on already organized sectors as Wal-Mart expands (consider, for instance, the California grocers strike of 2004).

So, wishing for, and arguing for, a decent government that leans against inequality is one thing. And, arguing that reliance on this government intervention alone provides the most effective and efficient outcome is defensible. But undercutting the efforts of the largest and most effective voice for exactly this kind of government in labor's most important campaign to retain a firm toe hold in American politics is something else entirely. The government programs countering inequality that are valued by progressive economists didn't just happen. They were fought for by a coalition whose vanguard was organized labor. Even if forcing Wal-Mart into paying better was inefficient in an economic sense (I don't really think it is—see more below), the long-run political benefits of having a strong labor movement are large enough that I just can't see value in hamstringing labor's attempt to retain and newly organize the retail sector.

Lastly, and, here's the type of esoterica that Slate probably feared in finding an anti-Wal-Mart economist, I disagree with the premise that enforcing wage and benefit mandates on Wal-Mart will inexorably reduce market efficiencies. That premise is rooted in the belief that labor markets are like markets for groceries—lots of sellers, lots of buyers, and enough competition among both employers and workers that neither side has any market power over the other. In labor markets like this, a price floor (say, a binding minimum wage or mandated compensation offer like that contained in recent Wal-Mart-directed legislation) leads to unemployment, as employers desire fewer workers at the higher wages while workers want to offer more labor at the higher wage.

It's fair to say that this is the predominant view of labor markets in the profession. However, a sizable (and growing, I think) minority think that low-wage labor markets like those inhabited by Wal-Mart actually behave more like a monopsony than a competitive market. Monopsony labor markets, strictly speaking, are those with only a single employer (think Old West company towns). Such employers have substantial market power over potential workers and set wages far below what economists would deem efficient. Wal-Mart obviously isn't a strict monopsonist, but, a host of real-world frictions that keep low-wage labor markets from operating competitively (commuting costs, information problems, and differing preferences about non-pecuniary job characteristics) give employers like Wal-Mart a degree of market power over potential workers.

There's a quick and dirty test to see if this vision of labor markets seems more convincing than the competitive one: What do you think would happen if Wal-Mart cut their wages by one cent per hour? Competitive labor market theory predicts that the company would instantly lose every single employee. Remember, employers allegedly have no say in what the market wage is, and paying under the competitively determined wage will lead to wholesale quits of their workforce. Monopsony theory says that they'd lose some workers, but not all, or even close to all.

Defenders of Wal-Mart love to argue that the public's voting with its feet proves that the corporation offer good jobs, and they frequently offer up stories like, "When Wal-Mart opened in X, 500 applicants came forward for 50 jobs." How does this not argue for their ability to wield some degree of monopsony power?

I don't expect to change colleagues' minds in this debate—my view wasn't decided by reading an op-edish piece, but, by thinking long and hard about these issues; presumably theirs were as well. But, it is important to explain to a wider audience that the anti-Wal-Mart campaign is not soft-headed. Too many people defer to what they assume is the unanimous sense of economists in debates like this, and, people need to realize that there's dissent within the profession both about the technical economics and the political reasoning that lies behind which policy interventions can be reasonably supported. It's also time that lefties realized that the discipline of economics isn't inherently hostile to them. The profession may be, but, the subject itself provides sustenance for all manner of political beliefs.

L. Josh Bivens is an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

ESSAY: A Runner's Tracks

"I can remember the wind whistling down the hill from St. Monica’s church, hitting me square in the face on the back stretch as I ran Coach Lananna’s 300's."

By Dena Evans

Even the most casual American track fan, flipping through the channels on a weekend afternoon, coming upon the familiar faces from the last Olympiad, and stopping for a few minutes to watch, probably has heard Larry Rawson challenge us to try what we're looking at. I wonder if anyone, in an effort to experience and understand the feats of the world’s greatest athletes, has actually taken him up on his admonition. Has anyone really gotten up, laced up the trainers, and headed down to the local high-school track to attempt to run a four-minute mile, 25 consecutive quarters in 65 seconds apiece, or throw a broom handle the length of a football field?

One early morning, I found myself out running a few months post-partum after my second child. I was overwhelmed, stressed out, in the midst of figuring out whether or not to leave my job as Stanford's women's cross-country coach. Our lifestyle left me with little time for reflection, and I leapt at every chance to run without the stroller. Often, that took me to the track to run laps. I kind of looked at myself from the outside in, laughing at the mess I was and making up commentary as if I were a competitor on a televised meet.

"Folks, now you will want to keep your eye on the woman running reverse direction in lane eight with her iPod. Notice the shuffling stride, the mismatched clothes, the way her leftover baby tummy jiggles as she goes. She is covering each of these laps in an amazing 2-minutes-15 per. Unbelievable. Just try going down to your local track and running even one lap at that amazing pace ..."

I thought of all the time I had spent through the last 30 years at these venues. When I type the keywords “local track” into the search engine of my memory, I come up with a fairly accurate record of myself.

One of my earliest memories takes me to a long-jump pit alongside a dusty dirt track at South Mercer Junior High on Mercer Island, a Seattle suburb. While my dad played Saturday morning pickup soccer with a group of then-young fathers, now grandfathers, I goofed around with some of the other kids or myself. My family has always had a pretty athletic bent, and I can picture my parents going to the other 400-meter facility in my hometown, at the high school, and my mom running steps while my dad ran laps.

The original Mercer Island High School cinder track was replaced in the 70’s with one of the county’s first all-weather tracks in a bowl directly next to it. So, a public school with an abundance of educational opportunities had the additional bonus of having two 400-meter tracks at its students' disposal. My high-school years included playing dozens of highly memorable (at least to me) soccer games on the fairly narrow pitch on the infield. I can still remember having to adjust the strength of corner kicks not to overshoot the goalmouth, my cleats against the hard track, lining up in lane six in order to run up and throw the ball into the center of the field, warming up with the team in our ramrod straight two lines, jogging back to midfield together after someone scored. I can smell the grass.

Outside the sticky chalk lines on this dewy field, I can remember the countless laps I ran around the track in competition--fast laps and slow laps, lazy laps, attentive laps, laps in the lead, laps following behind, my sole appearance in the 4 x 200 meters during the driving rain (no rainouts in Seattle!), my open 800 personal best freshman year when I went from a 2:25 interloper to a 2:16 serious high-school competitor in one race. Further back still, there was my first track-and-field race ever, in the annual elementary school meet where I was dusted year in and year out by a future high-school teammate who did club track and actually trained. Those were all important moments. However, I wonder if that place shaped me more in all the time I spent there outside of actual competition?

Navigating the perils of middle-school socializing, milling in crowds, trying so hard to be cool on that upper track while essentially ignoring the high-school football game being played below. The (now highly embarrassing) slow laps spent walking as a freshman, hand and hand with my super-cool older boyfriend around that upper track after I had finished my events at home meets. The lap in the back of the convertible at homecoming halftime senior year, when the awkwardness of the milling middle-school crowds had strangely and unexpectedly turned to acceptance. The endless sets of sprints--10's, 20's, 30's, 40's, 50's, and 120's--I ran on the upper-field grass trying to carve myself into soccer shape each summer while in college, interchanged with a session of two miles hard in preparation for the preseason Cooper fitness test.

To this day, during a hard and sustained effort of any kind, I will picture the panorama visible as one would skirt the contours of the upper track, and that will settle me down. I can remember the wind whistling down the hill from St. Monica’s church, hitting me square in the face on the back stretch as I ran Coach Lananna’s 300's, again trying to mold myself into shape for track while home for winter break.


II.

Each family has its own set of traditions, and ours always has us at the track. Driving almost yearly to my cousins’ ranch outside of Klamath Falls, Oregon, my family would stay in Eugene, where the first item on the agenda would be to head over to Hayward Field. During the years when I did not have much to train for, these trips would be just a couple of laps to say we did, a kick-around of the soccer ball, and off to dinner. Later, as athletics further formalized for my sister and me, this turned into a run through the cemetery behind Mac Court or over to Pre’s trails while my dad ran the steps of the homestretch grandstand and my sister played on the infield, or that week’s sprint workout for soccer on the bark-circled field behind the stadium.

Somehow my husband has fallen into this pattern as well. The historic Stanford Stadium track, complete with velodrome effect on the first curve, six narrow lanes, huge bubble in lane one as you come off the last curve, was the home stage for three years of track for me and five years of football for him. After a road trip to watch his girlfriend run in the Pac-10 meet, he posited that running the 1,500 just looked “so easy--like you were jogging! That cannot be that hard.” A few weeks later, that turned into an attempt to run 8 x 400 meters at 68 seconds on two minutes' rest with the aforementioned girlfriend at the newly renovated Cobb Track & Angell Field, just west of the Stadium. In contrast to the breathtaking and record-breaking performances yet to come at this facility when the lights were on and the stands were filled, a slightly less glamorous event unfolded and a new respect for distance running was born as the clock read (for one of us) 68, 73, skip one, 82, OK that’s it.

A summer or two later, we found ourselves at his old track, at Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, Maryland, where he was training for the free-agent football life he was to lead for the next year or so. One of his best friends, David Goldman, had come along for the ride to hang out since they had been so rarely at home at the same time. An erstwhile high-school hurdler who had spent more aggregate time since high school in the stands watching Bobby Knight’s Hoosiers at IU than exercising, Goldman suddenly challenged me, upon arrival back from a short run, to a 400, as I was supposedly “good at track.”

In what will go down as one of the most ridiculous iterations of athletics I have ever witnessed or been party to, I agreed, with Marlon as the starter. With the malaise of having completed a season, with a few weeks before the next begins in earnest, I started out with a gait more appropriate to doing multiple 1,000-meter repeats with short rests. Goldman, however, took off like he was running a 150 and I remembered the power of manly pride. Now under obligation to respond, I picked it up, buoyed by the appearance of the top of his head as it tipped back around the 200-meter mark, the jig already up. Still, he had about a 30-meter lead that not even pride could maintain as I shuffled along, making up most of it in the last 80 meters and crossing the line with him in what will go down in history officially, and for the sake of both our egos, as a dead heat. Goldman, who is now a financial-sector attorney in New York City, still brings this up every time I see him. Rarely in our carefully manicured lives do we strip away the inhibitions and just race like little kids. Nothing keeps it real like the most basic of athletic contests in the most basic of scenery, a deserted high-school track.


III.

I was recounting that episode at the Brooklyn Diner in midtown Manhattan, where my husband and our two kids were staying with the Stanford track team on its trip to the New York Armory Invitational in February of 2005. My older daughter, Adrienne, who had a plus size portion of 3-year-old energy, had also come to see the local track as life’s backdrop. She had spent a huge amount of time at practice, at meets, in airports, in airplanes. As a result, she could not pass the airport on the highway without expecting to be actually going on an airplane. She would assume that all people in our immediate vicinity in public places like airports or hotels are “with us” since she was used to traveling with the team. She retained a spectacular memory of which rental van we had each weekend.

My love of laps and my husband’s preference for sprints over distance running as the way to spend 30 minutes of working out has led us back many times to Cobb Track & Angell Field, and now, in our new neighborhood, to Sequoia High in Redwood City. Adrienne will play in the long-jump pit at Sequoia as any kid would, but she'll also yell “splits” to people running by (glancing at her wrist where a watch would be and yelling "46!!!” or a similarly random number), and she likes to just run as far as she can as fast as she can, sometimes starting with a toe on the line as one would a race, again activating the imaginary wristwatch.

In this first trip to New York’s historic Armory, from which her grandmother, my mother, still claims to have splinters from running (and falling) on the old wooden track surface in the 1960's, Adrienne, thus far cooped up on the upper level during the first day of the meet, was set free on the track as the last participants cooled down. After proceeding to run four straight laps (800 meters), she then headed to the end of the long-jump runway and, extending her hands over her head, demanded that we clap for her, emulating our outstanding triple jumper Erica McLain earlier that day. This practice has transformed our hallway at home into a makeshift runway where almost nightly we are instructed to clap as Adrienne sprints from the front door, and where couch cushions are set up to pad her landing. Although Erica is the favorite field event role model, we have also seen former Stanford NCAA champion and Olympic silver medalist Toby Stevenson’s pole vaulting (wrapping-paper cardboard core as pole) and fellow Stanford alum Jill Camarena’s shot-putting with a nerf ball after a week plus of Olympic Trials the summer prior.

The laps that Adrienne ran in New York, the ones that got us kicked out of the warm-up area at Sacramento (due to potential endangerment to herself and the Olympic hopefuls moving at full speed), and the many she runs around the playground at preschool, are physical exertions. I believe they are also expressions, in a way, of what she has absorbed from family culture--that such exertions can be considered fun. Her footfalls become mine. Mine become hers. Little-kid laps watching parents, followed by workout laps, competition laps, cool-down laps, high-school boyfriend laps, college-boyfriend laps, pregnant laps, stroller laps, laps chasing kids, happy laps, sad laps, laps at sunrise and earlier, laps at sunset and later. In my family, all these footprints on all these tracks, although not always visible, mark the stages of our lives.


IV.

During the years I coached at Stanford, I loved to see the facility filled on a hot competition day, high school athletes teaming in the backstretch stands with their tents sprawled across the grass, or an electric, record-setting night such as the Cardinal Invitational, fans packed on the homestretch and coaches lining the curve by the hammer cage, sipping their Starbucks. I loved even more the day before a meet, when the track virtually hummed with the unlimited potential of the participants shaking out, striding, stretching, and preparing for battle. But I loved most of all the cold, crisp stillness of the track after the meet had concluded, the people at home, hotel, or on their way while we broke down the equipment.

In those moments, I was sometimes elated, sometimes extremely upset, and almost always numbingly tired from the production and the emotional buildup. The razor-sharp edge of anticipation now blunted with the reality of what had just passed, as yet unexaminable, with work still to do. Carting boxes back to the their storage under the bleachers. Hunting through garbage cans with Marko Koers, a Dutch 800-meter specialist who had only hours before hit the Olympic A standard in his event and now was bereft of backpack with wallet and ID, car and hotel keys. Perhaps watching the Stanford guys in the last race padding around the infield in bare feet or picking up hip numbers stuck to the track after being discarded in the heat of the race or maybe in disgust afterward (rarely do you find a hip number discarded in joy).

Hayward Field at sundown. Hornet Stadium when the lights go out and I am waiting for an athlete at doping control, their performance ringing in my ears so loudly it feels as if someone is shouting. Franklin Field in freezing silence, left only with the empty cups and hot-dog wrappers discarded by the rowdies at the water-pit corner. Even in the exhale of an amazing athletic moment, these tracks revert comfortingly to their ordinary selves.

The local track hosts soccer and football games, tailgates and field days, wind sprints by the basketball team, PE classes. It absorbs the sweat of those resting between sets of steps run in surrounding stadiums, hears the gossip of the women power-walking in its outer lanes. It keeps our secrets. It treats us as equals. It never turns us away if we failed in our last efforts, whether those were to reach a personal best or simply to lose a couple pounds.

My laps around the Sequoia High track were slowed by my agonizing decision to leave my coaching job, and by the insufficient sleep of a new mother. Then they picked up a little as I decided to run a marathon. I haven’t tried to do too much training, lest I set up a schedule I can't keep. Beside the obligatory weekend long run, I try to just have one day where I go out to the track and do something pretty hard, just to see if I can. I call this training plan the Larry Rawson.

When I am on a plane descending into Seattle, I like to sit on the left side. On a U-turn over the northern part of the city, the flight plan will often take us under the cloud cover and offer a perfect view. If it's nighttime, the lights of my high school’s track are the most visible detail in the mostly residential area. At that moment, I don't think of sweat, tears, or triumphs. I just see home.

Dena Evans is the former women's cross-country coach at Stanford University, and, as an undergraduate, was on Stanford's track and soccer teams.

Modified photos. Original images from stock.xchng.

ESSAY: Independence Day

"Holding that warm, slim hand in mine, I sensed for the first time that I was someone other than who I’d been."

By Alexander C. Kafka

I’m sure that Independence Day has personal, metaphorical connotations for many people. Who can help but equate some private liberation with the patriotic kind, especially since the latter happens to fall—for kids, anyway—during summer vacation, when liberations flourish? For me, the day resonates with the splendidly helpless plummet into first serious love.

I was in the Young Artists Piano Program of the Tanglewood Institute, the famed summer music school in the Berkshires. There were less than a dozen of us studying with a clever and somewhat eccentric teacher, Gyorgi, and his considerably younger, soft-spoken, muscle-bound assistant Chris, a dancer-turned-pianist whom we all assumed was Gyorgi’s lover. (No, not their real names. None here are, except for Mike Udwin’s and Mayer Fishman’s, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) Gyorgi and Chris were wonderfully innovative—though at the time we were more likely to use the word “nuts.” They had us learn, among other assignments, pieces from an album called The Waltz Project, made up of new waltzes by contemporary composers like John Cage and Robert Moran and Joan Tower.

The YAPP pianists shared a campus—an old mansion and a bunch of teepee-shaped cabins—with some orchestral students, mostly wind and brass players, and miscellaneous other instrumentalists, like Lou, a college-age classical guitarist who bunked with me. Indian Hill, as it was called, was a short walk from Stockbridge and a bus ride away from the concert campus where the Boston Symphony, chamber groups, and other fabulous musicians—professional or would-be—rehearsed in the hot days and performed in the cool nights. The other instrumentalists were housed at another former school, near Lenox and the concert halls.

Truth to tell, I felt a bit over my head at YAPP. I was musical, had studied piano for some 11 years, had a knack for improvising and an above-average ear. But I was also somewhat lazy about practicing and, as a sight-reader, lousy to the point where, in retrospect, I suspect I had a kind of music-score dyslexia. I obscured that by memorizing fairly long and difficult works quite quickly, Chopin’s Ballade No. 3 in A-flat and Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque chief among them. Technically, I was decent, but a little behind my YAPP peers.

It was the summer before my senior year of high school, and it’s difficult to describe how free and sensuous and exhilarating and nerve-wracking Tanglewood was. Students were assumed to have adult self-discipline to match their advanced aesthetic sensibilities. To this day, I recall entering the campus driveway in the van from Pittsfield airport and seeing a gorgeous blonde girl in cutoffs and a bikini top, perched on a boulder and practicing the French horn. That appealed to the Wagnerian degenerate in me. But the summer, on the whole, was more redolent of Rousseau—especially because I’d spent the prior two summers at Interlochen, in Michigan, which you might call the West Point of arts programs.

Interlochen students wore uniforms (including absurd knicker-style pants with knee socks for the girls) and suffered such indignities as Date Gate and Shake Gate, where after concerts boys kissed their dates or shook their hands, under stallag-like supervision, before heading back en masse to a separate campus. Interlochen had lights-out and trumpet reveille and morning calisthenics.

At Tanglewood, for pianists anyway, there were lessons and master classes, but mostly there was solitary practice, in hot, small bug-ridden wooden sheds that the uninformed might easily have mistaken for outhouses. We were pretty much left to our own devices, and whatever rules may have been on the books, coed night visits to other bunks, or languorous walks to Stockbridge beneath tall, shady trees, were treated as casually as at a college campus.


II.

The majority of the YAPP students were Asian-American girls, and among them was Mia, a 16-year-old from Annandale, Virginia, just a short Beltway ride away from my home in Bethesda, Maryland. She was talented and serious about piano, but not in the mirthless tunnel-visioned way that some students were. She was slender and athletic, with long hair and preppy clothes. She had a quiet seriousness about her that, to me, represented both an exotic distance and a tidy wholesomeness, both of which I longed not only to be near, but to embody. I was, in fact, under something of an Asian spell that summer. My most heartfelt fantasy was to be transmogrified into Seiji Ozawa, wear white pajama suits while commanding a first-rate symphony with the sweep of my baton, and be surrounded at fund-raising soirees by tan, post-hippyish looking, monied babes with bell-like laughs. I wanted to sport Seiji’s humble, Cheshire-cat smile, the kind you can only get away with if you happen to be significantly better than everyone else on earth at what you do.

I was instead a modestly talented, insecure Jewish kid from a tight-knit, talkative, analytical family in the burbs. I had thickish aviator glasses, perpetually donned an over-stretched blue and white warm-up jacket I’d gotten as a bar-mitzvah gift several years before (the matching pants were too long and ungainly even for me), and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I did know, though, that I enjoyed the small circle of friendship and commonality with my YAPP friends, and that watching Mia, as I did none-too-subtly, I’m sure, I could at least take in some of what I couldn’t become.

The YAPP group became pretty close-knit in a short time, and Mia warmed to me, too. She laughed at my sophomoric riff on Mahler. We had read that he was superstitious about anyone being able to compose more than Beethoven’s nine symphonies. So I elaborated that he went on to write symphonies 9a, 9b, 9c, and 9d. Reading about Alma Mahler, as we munched on chocolate chip cookies on the lawn outside the amphitheater, we had a nice, puerile chortle over what it would be like to go out with a guy named Gropius. We walked by the sprinklers and through the lovely maze of hedges.

After dinner, the YAPPers would hang out on blankets at dusk on the Tanglewood lawn outside the huge Shed amphitheater drinking hot chocolate and listening to Mozart or Beethoven or Mahler. We couldn’t even see Ozawa and the symphony from where we were, but we’d look up at the dusk sky and see the musical cliffs and oceans and fire and plains that the orchestra created, then trekked through, in the brisk Berkshire ether.

On Independence Day, not too long into the YAPP season, Leonard Bernstein conducted a fun night of warhorses, culminating in the 1812 Overture and fireworks. It began to rain as we navigated through the exiting mob of tourists to the old school bus that served as our shuttle back to Indian Hill. The other students were in a rowdy, talkative mood after the celebrity and the cacophony and the crowds, but Mia and I, she in a tasteful pale green slicker, me in an awkward Super Surplus poncho, sat toward the rear of the bus, quiet, slouched, holding hands. I was happy beyond precedent. Holding that warm, slim hand in mine, I sensed for the first time that I was someone other than my heroes, other than what I coveted, other than who I’d been. I had not the faintest idea who this new guy was, but that didn’t matter as long as he was with Mia.

When we left the bus, Mia and I stood, paralyzed by lust and inexperience, in the rain on a corner of the lawn in front of the old school building, kissing long and deep. Every now and then, my mouth would make its way to her spicy, lean, wet neck and back to her mouth again, like a pony, restive and corralled. Occasionally, we’d stop and just catch our breath and murmur to each other. Our hands reached each other’s waists and backs, then bottoms through our jeans. The rain eased up, and we shivered in the leaf-sparkly damp, barely illuminated by a few dim security and street lights, stuck and thrilled. I tentatively reached a few fingers down her pants. She gently took my hand away and kissed me harder. Two things were clear. (1) We’d do nothing encroaching too near the domain called sex, and (2) I was her boyfriend.

Eventually, exhausted and frustrated and dazzled, we said goodnight. When I got back to my teepee, I fell onto my bed next to a shelf lined with music books along with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Sons and Lovers, and the other novels on my summer English reading list. Lou was quietly strumming Villa-Lobos ballads as I drifted off.



III.

Mia and I didn’t overdo the couple stuff when we were with the other YAPPers, at concerts, or heading down to Stockbridge for Cokes and potato skins at Michael’s restaurant. But when we were alone—say, sweaty after tennis at some courts down the road from Indian Hill­—we made out with the Olympic intensity that comes from knowing that this was the love sport we’d have that summer, that there would be no other. Well, almost no other. After a week or so, she’d allow me to grope around her panty line beneath the diminutive terry-cloth shorts she wore for tennis. And at night— when we returned from a vocal recital or chamber concert­­—I’d unbutton her blouse and she’d lie back on the steps of one of the practice sheds and let me undo her silk bra and kiss her small breasts. Once, her hand grazed the tip of me, but retreated in an instant.

I knew the names of her family members, that difficult subjects came easily to her in school, that she was dubious about our teacher’s obsession with contemporary waltzes. I knew that she took Catholicism seriously and I went to a pretty little church with her in Stockbridge and even played a Bach prelude and fugue on the organ toward the end of a service, though Mia dissuaded me, in my amative enthusiasm, from taking the Eucharist.

In other words, I knew her hardly at all, but I loved her—far beyond a crush, and with some inkling that what we had would not survive the shift to distance, small though it was, and the mundane of the school year. I knew boys—handsome, strong, accomplished, promising, confident boys—would surge around her. I knew girls—lovely, graceful, talented, sympathetic girls—would not even notice me, except perhaps in a hallway to give me a submission to the school literary magazine I co-edited. I knew lunches would not be spent in a quiet dining hall earnestly debating the best wrist action for playing Ravel’s Miroirs, but rather in a horrifyingly loud cafeteria trying to figure out, with Michael Udwin and Mayer Fishman, a calculus problem or what our back-up schools would be or what actually occurred at screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I saw Mia once more, for a date. I drove to Annandale, and we went to see An American Werewolf in London at a mall. The movie was scary and funny and sexy, but we were oddly somber, awkward. We kissed in the parking lot before I drove her home in my mom’s Granada, but something had changed. For Mia’s 17th birthday, I wrote her a poem, which five years later I foolishly threw away along with all my childhood poems. I remember only one line: “When you are near/love is not a complex thing.” But though I didn’t realize it then, the line was already nostalgia, and I never heard back from her. I sensed a rival whom I couldn’t rival. I was too hurt to pursue it. And I had other things to think about, most immediately the removal of four wisdom teeth, tryouts for The Music Man, and a dozen college application essays.

I went back to Tanglewood the next summer, as much out of habit as anything else. It was my sixth year of music camp. I was searching, I suppose, not for Mia—I’d heard she wouldn’t be there and was headed for Barnard in the fall—but for some equivalent intensity, warmth and bliss. Predictably, I found none. The YAPPers were on the Lenox campus this time around, and that was much less suited to pastoral daydreams and passion. One night, in the bland, slightly decrepit room I shared with two roommates, a window fell open on its chain above me, the glass shattering onto my blanket. I wasn’t hurt, but the incident seemed somehow telling.

The pianists were under the no-nonsense, traditional stewardship of another instructor. I practiced a great deal, not having the distractions I would have preferred, but my heart wasn’t in it. In my free time, I’d go to the Lenox library and read the Times and novels. From a friend, I borrowed a Walkman, the first I’d ever seen, and went on long strolls or jogs listening to Brahms, music that suited the lush, rolling hills and my melancholy mood.

At college that fall, I gleefully quit the piano to take up acting and ski team, which were considerably more social and fun. A year after that, I briefly dated a woman, Helen, who’d been in the YAPP program with me both those years at Tanglewood. A year younger than me, Helen had been the most musically and academically gifted of our YAPP cohort and she was the only one among us we could imagine successfully pursuing a concert career. She was very bright, in a sharp and brittle way, but also deeply sensitive. When she played piano, particularly Brahms, the interpretations were eerily wise and sad, as though there were a melancholy middle-aged virtuoso lurking inside her.

When we started seeing each other, she treated me badly—she was always late for dates, and around other people she’d practically ignore me, as if to show that couplehood would in no way dissuade her from being her own person. I think she was a little afraid of the intimacy, but also wished she were with someone who could confirm her sophistication (I didn’t fit that bill). And this was college, after all—she may have slighted me just to see if I’d put up with it. Surprisingly, I was sensible enough not to. I broke up with her after an evening of heavy petting and heavier sarcasm. I had a jar of pennies. She picked it up and hurled the pennies at me­—though, fortunately, not the jar—and stormed out of my dorm room. In my underwear, picking up the coins, one by one, listening to the Goldberg Variations on my battered pawn shop turntable, I realized the obvious—that whatever Helen had been seeking, I’d been seeking Mia.

Twenty-five years later, I’m married to a woman whom I adore and who prefers Nanci Griffith to Hindemith. We have delightful eight-year-old boy-and-girl twins who enjoy soccer, reading Cam Jansen and Jigsaw Jones mysteries, and putting on shows in our family room. Life is fabulously full, and I am fully aware how lucky I am, even if I’m not Seiji Ozawa, who I suppose by now is reckoning with his own memories of Tanglewood.

But for an instant every Independence Day—especially if it’s a rainy, breezy one with restless trees—I think of 1981, and of Mia. For me, that day, that summer, was a taste of pleasures to come and a person to become rather than trying to be. And each Independence Day I hope Mia feels that same slight stir, wherever she is.

And if she doesn’t, I don’t want to know.

An excerpt from this essay ran in The Washington Post.

Modified photo. Original from stock.xchng.