I am writing from my childhood bedroom. Some of the books that still line the shelves: The Yearling, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, On the Road, The Tempest, Rabbit Run, Deliverance, The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, The Ox-Bow Incident, Franny and Zooey, Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems, and Hooray for Yiddish.
When cars come down Northrop Road, their headlights ricochet through the room’s corner windows. Tucked into my bed, at ten years old, I often imagined I was Anne Frank as the high-beams circled the room, soon to be followed by angry Nazi boots on the stair. Only we lived in a ranch. Later, I imagined a Helter Skelter scenario in our suburban neighborhood; when I learned that Sharon Tate was murdered on MY BIRTHDAY, I nearly plotzed*. But my most terrifying fantasy of all was imagining that we were the Clutter family, waiting to be murdered in our sleep by some two-bit criminals immortalized in one of my favorite books of all time.
I know, it explains a lot.
*Plotz: plats (standard) Yinglish, with juice. Rhymes with “dots.” German: platzen: to burst.
- Bust, burst, explode (“I laughed so hard I thought I would plotz!”)
- To be aggravated, frustrated, or infuriated to an extremity. (“He was so furious he almost plotzed!”)
–from Hooray for Yiddish, Leo Rosten
Filed under: Books, The End of the World as We Know It | 3 Comments »
Last night, when I was packing up all the poetry, a little piece of paper fluttered out of Anne Sexton’s Live or Die, a book I lived and died by at sixteen. It was a poem cut out of The New Yorker. It was “For Sheridan” by Robert Lowell. I had no idea who he was at the time, and I didn’t really understand the poem. But I felt the poem understood me. That is when I started buying up collections of Lowell’s poems. And now, thirty years later, the love affair continues as I finish reading the exquisite collection of letters between him and Elizabeth Bishop.
Had the great pleasure of seeing Conor Lovett of the 
Dearest Darling Readers of this Blog:
Betsy Lerner 
