[APPLAUSE]
Clark will read first.
We should all have such students, huh?
I'm going to read two stories.
They're quite brief, don't worry.
[LAUGHTER]
For the first one, you have to imagine
that you're living in a time when there were actually
cigarette smokers on airlines.
That's the only thing you have to bear in mind.
"My son had graduated from college in Oregon,
and I was on the way back-- my way back to my midwestern life.
A poet had delivered the graduation speech.
I took pleasure in his words--
a baby tiger, just born, has an ox eating spirit.
He did not mean, in the way of successful alumni
addressing their sleek young graduates,
that they should leap upon the backs of oxen,
though many seem to take it that way.
He meant for us to approach the world respectful of variety
and of necessity, he meant to contrast appearance
and appetite.
My boy and I ate under a tent and listened
to the projects of the new graduates around us,
and to their proud parents.
We watched the intact parental units dance to an orchestra,
then the older successful men and much younger wives
dance convincingly to the wives' music, and we left early.
My boy had been happy there, had drifted
into a countercultural community.
He had no project in mind except escape
and, though pleasant to everyone, hated his classmates.
A friend once said of him, ah, Saggitarian.
It was their nature to be adult in childhood,
and childish in maturity.
He seemed to be on course, and I wished him well.
It was the traditional leave taking of a father to a son--
I have raised you, inculcated you, educated you, warned you,
encouraged you, sent you every conflicting
signal in the universe.
You were in my arms for a couple of years,
in my hands for five or six, in my house for a dozen more.
You're bigger than me, stronger, you can slay an ox.
At the airport I had noticed the woman in the waiting room.
I sit in the smoking section though I don't smoke.
In general, I prefer people who smoke,
ox-eaters, fragile predators like cats.
Maureen O'Hara on a bad day, I thought, green eyes--
dating myself.
like the old guys dancing with much younger women,
like men my age with toddlers by the punchbowl.
A honey-roasted blonde, lumberjack shirt and faded
jeans, a backpack.
Maureen O'Hara on a bad day, or a distracted day
with the beacon of her beauty slightly broken,
is better than Maureen O'Hara on a good day, when
her helpless beauty could only bear down on you.
There would be no story if fate had not put us together
in 10A and 10B.
Her name was Patty, her husband in Richmond
went by the name of Terry.
And she was returning to Richmond, a city she hated,
from a 10 day camping trip with six male friends from Boston
College.
One of them had said, 'this is what movies are made of.'
My Big Chill, she said, Terry couldn't come.
Too busy making the President's Golden Circle, writing up
a million dollars in policies for the fifth straight year.
She'd been married 10 years, with him for 13.
Her story is racing ahead, I want to slow it down.
There are women who somehow make you feel and act and talk
better than you are, others, much worse, even when they
are the source of all your inspiration.
Patty, whom I will never see again, was among the first.
Two minutes with her, and I intuited nearly everything
about her.
Maybe not the four children, but the wistfulness about some
briefly opened door, some recent transcendence.
You were an actor, I said, quite confidently
and it wasn't my intuition, it was her actor's radiance.
Only some soaps, she said.
I did soaps for pay for more acting and singing and dancing
lessons.
An agency sent me to Atlanta for some Coke ads.
Three weeks for one of those Teach the World to Sing jobbies
and I met Terry-- he was in the theater then.
He saw me in an ad and he called the agency.
I was thrilled.
I acted in one of his plays.
His father had an insurance agency in Richmond,
and two years later the father died, and Terry...
Nothing happened in Oregon, she said.
I don't want you to get the wrong impression.
But something did, I said.
I was raped in Richmond.
Can you imagine, living alone in Boston and New York all
those years, hanging out with models and actors,
living in Hell's Kitchen, and I get raped in a parking
garage in Richmond?
I knew the name of every guy hanging out on the stoops
on 44th between 10th and Broadway.
I was a soft touch, I gave them money, I talked with them,
I got them tickets and some of my shows.
They would have died for me.
And I know she's telling the truth,
she is the sort that some men would kill for, some die for,
but Terry would kill her if something
had happened in Oregon.
Defending your life, I said, overcoming
fear, doubt, insecurity is what separates men from angels.
I'd seen Wings of Desire a few weeks earlier,
and I saw through her with such clarity I almost said,
Patty it's no accident we're sitting together.
I am the man put here to listen to you.
But I'm not a man.
I was killed in a BMW crash two weeks ago,
and you're my first case since I was sent down.
Somewhere over Utah I said, 'A lot of men will be returning
to their wives as dissatisfied with their marriages as you
are.'
One of them had said, 'Life has big plans for you.
Don't close it off.'
You love this man, don't you, Patty.
I want to go back to New York, but one of these men--
he lives in the woods, sort of a conservationist--
he hates the city.
He's never married, he's a kind of a soulmate.
Knows the trails, knows what to eat, what to avoid.
I feel safe with him, even in the woods.
I don't feel safe in Richmond with all my cars
and memberships.
He says I'm closing my life.
I lay in his arms at night--
nothing happened-- but I slept in ways I've
never slept before, like a baby, with dreams
I didn't want to leave.
One day, I was taking a bath in the river near the campsite
and I didn't know the men were all watching me.
They didn't tell me till we were sitting around the campfire
and they started exchanging opinions
on how I could improve my looks, starting
with my hair, or something, and then
getting more and more intimate, you know,
and I'm starting to get redder and redder.
I mean, four kids, and 36, I'm not
going to turn on many guys, especially not buck
naked in a snow fed stream
A true angel, perhaps, would have kissed her then,
or would have said like Willie Nelson,
if you don't want my peaches, baby,
then why you shake my tree?
Or he might have given up immortality on the spot,
traded omniscience and invisibility
for mutable ecstatic flesh, and all its agony.
A Penthouse fell out of one of the men's backpacks,
why do men buy it, is seeing pictures really
more pleasurable than a woman's body?
Ever watched Dockers ads, I ask.
Beer ads?
It was the only question I couldn't ask,
I felt he was measuring those girls against me in the river
and I didn't measure up, I'm all saggy,
I've got a little roll and Christ
if my legs were bananas they'd be selling at half price.
Well, you're a man, you've probably
noticed it's downhill pretty fast from my eyes, but my eyes,
I mean they need some shadow and all but I've
still got a bit of it, don't I?
Men were always in my power.
Professors were in my power.
God, this is awful, even priests, all the laps
I sat in-- we only hear about priests and little boys,
but believe me, the Church isn't all that sick.
[LAUGHTER]
Patty, I said, you are beautiful,
your eyes are the color of thin caramel glaze
over a crisp green apple and thoughts
of your body rising from the waters
leave me aghast with pleasure.
You still have it, you are exactly halfway
between my son and me, but life doesn't
have any more big plans for you, maybe
only one or two medium sized ones.
Leap, St Patty.
I present myself to you like a tethered bull in a pasture.
Rip my stupid throat out."
[APPLAUSE]