Well, I've brought along a formulation.
I wrote this down, but I didn't write it.
Somebody else said this, and I wrote it
down as the way to do it.
This for me is like a touchstone.
It's the way to talk, the way to write.
It's our daughter Kit, when she was six years old.
We were coming home from the coast in Oregon,
and the family had been down there all day
and everyone got sleepy and it's a long way.
And so Kit, six years old, stood by the dashboard
to help daddy drive.
To talk and keep me awake while I got us home.
And she imagined a way of life for the two of us,
and this is what she said.
"We'd have a old car, the kind that gets flat tires,
but inside would be wolf skin on the seats
and warm fur on the steering wheel,
and wolf fur on all the buttons.
And we live in a ranch house, made out of logs
with a loft where you sleep.
And you'd walk a little ways.
There'd be the farm with the horses.
We'd drive to town, and we'd have flat tires
and be sort of old."
Well, it's the momentum of it that I wanted to get at.
The sort of trust, Kit didn't even know how to talk right.
We'd have an old car for instance, I remember.
And still what she had was the kind
of feeling for the ongoing experience in herself.
This is what I would like to try to locate,
and that's what I'd like to witness for her.