Thanks so much to everyone who renewed their subscription, and huge thanks as well to new paid subscribers. You are sustaining the publication as we enter year 2. What is the publication? I hope it keeps changing as new ideas form. Last night, I couldn’t sleep. I got up and wrote this. Later today, we’re going to a party with pizza and a dog. Who could not want pizza and a dog?
This week a fiction story of mine was published in “Dirt,” and a new piece ran in “The Paris Review.” I’ll post links at the bottom.
A reminder the next ZOOM conversation on writing memoir that doesn’t teach a moral lesson will be on Saturday, September 23 at 3-4pm EST. It’s free for PAID subscribers. If you would like to attend, please RSVP at: lauriestone@subsrack.com, and I will send you a link as we are closer to the date. We will record the conversation, and it will be available for PAID subscribers as well.
There are three buttons at the bottom of each post. I love reading your comments, and your reactions are super helpful in attracting subscribers, so please “like,” “share,” and “comment.”
Joy Part 2
Last night, we went to a gathering in support of Camphill Hudson, an organization that provides residences for adults with developmental disabilities. Members of the community live in houses and apartments around the town and meet for communal meals. They’re provided all forms of support—counseling, placement in volunteer jobs, and medical care. They are each other’s friends as well as friends with the staff. They have freedom and stimulation as they move about the town.
Our friend Kam Bellamy, who has lived as a staff member in several of the residences—first in the UK, where the organization started, as well as in Copake, in upstate New York—is on the board. We met Kam four years ago, shortly after moving to the Hudson area. At the time, she was director of the Churchtown Dairy, owned by Abby Rockefeller, that we can see from our house. It was one of those meetings you don’t know what to call except something good.
On my side, I call it love. Her laugh is falling water. She believes in the transformational powers of organic food. Who would argue? The last time Richard and I were at her place for dinner, I suggested we start a pop-up restaurant, where people could book meals at her house and possibly find themselves eating with strangers. I was willing to be her sous chef. I’m always looking for a way to stand in a kitchen, chopping things and talking to women. This is something I did with my mother and sister never. At dinner with Kam, I was calculating the cost of the food and how we could make money, when I noticed that Richard’s face was saying, “Kam is humoring you, change the subject.” At this point in life, I’m never going to learn to read a room.
During the gathering for Camphill, Onat Sanchez-Schwartz, the organization’s executive director, led seven or eight of the residents in a performance of “Let it Be.” Everyone was invited to sing along with the later verses. As I sang, I found myself becoming verklempt, and I didn’t know why. I almost never know why these feelings well up, and I’m always happy because they make me feel human. Or maybe the word is connected.
Richard reminded me of the song’s origins. Paul McCartney had a dream in 1968, during the tense period the Beatles were recording The White Album. McCartney would announce he was leaving the group on April 10 1970. In the dream, his mother, whose name was Mary and who had died of cancer when Paul was fourteen, says to him, “It will be all right, just let it be.”
He has said in many interviews the message comforted him, and as I think of these words now, I wonder how I can let things be. Do I mean, let things go? And by things, do I mean people? Do I mean the intense connections we form when we’re young, like the ones Paul had forged for so many years with his mates in the band and that were unraveling for reasons no one is ever going to know for sure? Right now, am I telling myself to let go of reasons?
Nothing compares to the friendships we form in earlier life. The taste of them, their smell and color. I think it has to do with the way, when you’re starting out, you’re a reed, open at both ends. You’re a reed, comparing notes with other reeds. Is this how it feels to you? Do you think this is how it’s supposed to go? Everything moves through you, and you think there is all the time in the world to fail. Keep going, I tell myself. Make new friends.
The other day, I was on the phone with a woman who is fifty years younger than me. She’s in her twenties, and I’m in my seventies. As we talk about love and work, I feel no difference in our ages. With some people, conversation is an animal you ride together. I couldn’t remember if, at her age, I’d ever had this kind of conversation with someone fifty years older than me. I don’t think so. Lots of people my age now, there’s no animal to ride together.
My young friend was telling me about her current boyfriend and the ways he was an upgrade from her previous boyfriend. The subject of sex rode in on its own animal. Not sex as in what we do in bed. Sex as our ability, at the flick of a neuron, to find everyone arousing and to see in the landscape a mirror of human restlessness. I told her what sex was like in the period before AIDS. Before herpes, even. What sex was like when, for the tiniest sliver in human history, it was possible to separate it in our minds from dying of a disease or dying in childbirth. We entered sex at the crossroads of the sexual revolution and the women’s movement. A double sense of freedom.
Were we really free? Of course not. Is any human who grows up in a family and lives in a society ever really free? Of course not. Was there slut shaming for women? Of course there was. Did it go into you? Of course it did. Did it change your course of behavior? It did not. Did you enjoy all the things you did in your quest to live as a sexual being the way male humans lived as sexual beings? No. Was pleasure the only point? Actually, it was. A kind of pleasure. The pleasure of freedom to try things and not be killed for them, the pleasure of finding out, one by one, what people were talking about in all those personal ads in The East Village Other. Did the Beatles look like they were having a good time while they grew hair on the heads and hair on their faces? Often, they looked like they were feeling pleasure. And where did that pleasure lead them? It led them where pleasure always leads you: to its interruption.
When I was young, you thought about sex when you didn’t have to think about work, family, and the relationships you were in. You thought about sex with people you knew, people you loved, people you would never speak to, like the man with the beautiful mouth I can still see standing in the door of the subway train. I said to my young friend, “One year I had sex with a ton of people. You would sit down in a movie theater alone and somehow walk out with a guy. When was there time to talk? Two men were both named Jim Davis. One Jim Davis called me, courteously, to say he had the clap. I wasn’t sure which Jim Davis he was. I couldn’t think of a way to ask the question.” I got tested and was fine. I never got an STD. Clap was maybe the worst thing you could get before AIDS, and it was easily treated once diagnosed.
I was lucky to fall into the wrinkle in time when Western women, who lived in cities, could push against the pressure to have babies. They could push against the pressure to be defined as humans who have babies—and believe me the pressure was enormous. It is still enormous, it hardly needs to be underscored since the overturn of Roe. I was lucky to go home with only one scary creep—that I remember. He was the cousin of someone I knew, and maybe that’s why I got him to leave.
I always used a diaphragm. How did I have my wits about me enough always to use a diaphragm? I was awake in those days. I didn’t drink or use drugs. I liked being awake, and maybe, with regard to the alcohol, I was thinking about the calories. I wouldn’t put it past me. It took the election of 2016 to learn the thrill of that first alcohol hit. In that golden time before AIDS, I was awake to remember much of it.
My young friend and I are getting to know each other. The last time we talked, it was mainly about work. She was editing of piece of mine. I don’t know how she feels about having a child. I don’t think that question is as defining for women these days as it was for me at her age and for the years after when I could still conceive. I think women who live in societies where they aren’t compelled to marry and have babies, I think these women are freer than we were to say early in their lives they don’t want children. I imagine this is greatly freeing.
The thing my young friend may not feel as I did is that sex when I was young wasn’t only an experience for me personally. It was a pursuit with social and symbolic meaning. It was part of the way we made community. Part of the way we made a counter society. As we were fucking our brains out—not really, but, you know, we thought we were, and maybe we actually were in comparison to how much sex young people have now—as we were fucking our brains out, we were fucking the way we’d been trained to understand ourselves as female humans, we were fucking with the idea that girls weren’t as sexual as boys, we were fucking with every last identity marker on the bar code that had been stamped on us by the world as it had spun for the last few thousand years. We were saying fuck-you to all that. And now, every time I imagine a woman anywhere in the world having an orgasm, I think: Good work.
To read “Cake,” a short story. https://dirt.fyi/article/2023/08/cake
To read “The Animal of a Life” in Paris Review https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/08/14/the-animal-of-a-life/
Oh, how I love this piece. Especially about the fucking.
When I started having sex herpes was on the front page of Time magazine. Then I moved to NYC and people were already sick with AIDS. The threat of death was always present and I wondered what it would be like without it. However, it didn’t keep me from fucking.
I do not have the sexual shame many women I know possess. Because it was the one area that I could clearly see-even as a child-men got to do whatever they wanted, and women didn’t.
I said “Fuck that.”
I experienced a particular glee while reading about the confusion over Jim Davis X 2. I love it. I had so much fun and am delighted you did as well.
This is a long comment but I can’t help it: I’ve wondered about starting a pop up restaurant myself. You can be my sous chef anytime. I don’t know WHEN I could do it but the desire is there. I love working in a kitchen.
Thank you again for giving me the delight of your marvelous work.
I so enjoyed reading this. As always, because of your way with words, and in particular, because so much of the content resonates for me. A friendly introvert, I have started countless spontaneous 1:1 conversations, most often when sharing a bench sipping a morning coffee. When it is with someone who is a young adult, I quietly, secretly thrill in being favored with such mutual openness to sharing views sans lenses colored by superficial assumptions. And yes, Laurie, those days of sexcapades!
I've never been a babe, but I betcha' I've had more lovers than most current lookers do or will have (for better and worse). Child-free and never married by choice, I am highly conscious that this status has not only gained some respectability - not pitied, but actually envied by some...And finally, my career has been centered on supporting people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families, so reading of your friendship with Kam in that context so warmed my heart.