For many years, one of my most faithful correspondents was Susan Yolen, who I met on a front step, and who later became a co-worker at Bird Library. When she and her husband, Tim, moved to Connecticut, we kept in touch. And Susan kept my letters. Here are some excerpts.
September 13, 1978
Having seen Springsteen, where do I go from here? What's left?
June 11, 1979
I have been to church twice with Laurie now, and it's a) very meaningful to share that with her and b) hysterically funny as the congregation gives me the laser-like once/twice/thrice-over. The woman to my left was curious as I arrived alone, became intensely curious when Laurie's mother arrived and said, "Would you like some company?" and then, when Laurie came out with Mike (the pastor) as deacon, she must have seen my smile and then she knew. When the little red registration book came by, and I signed, she lunged for it, snapped it open and committed my name to fevered memory.
August 13, 1979
This coming weekend, Laurie and I go to Buffalo for the Family Picnic, and Laurie meets the folks. Some anticipation, some trepidation. Hope nobody gets too weird. There's real potential for that...
October 30, 1979
I did not meet with the Pope during his recent visit; I don't know how this rumor started.
January 28, 1984
They called Monday night, we met her Thursday and brought her home yesterday. Abbie Ruth Winship, blue eyes, red hair, born December 2, 1983, a wonderfully patient and calm and alert and loving infant, eight weeks old. She is the apple of her father's eye. This morning, while Laurie laid exhausted in bed, Abbie and I had formula and watched MTV.
I have little desire to do anything but hold her, or watch her. Literature will have to wait. Even rubber stamps seem unimportant. Sleep is still attractive, as is Laurie, but Abbie has agreed to cooperate and let me continue to pursue those interests, so I am unafraid.
Spring 1984
Abbie thrives. She continues to sleep 12 hours a night, eat with relish and grow. She discovered her feet on Wednesday. She's close to rolling back to front. She is generally patient, sociable, delightful. People who meet/see her are astounded by her sublime behavior, quiet yet alert. Even her crying is fairly mellow; she's never gone at it longer than five minutes. She has had her fussy days/times/evenings, but they are becoming less frequent as we learn to interpret and meet her needs more quickly.
We adore her. We're getting much better at fitting a life in while we care for her. I still miss Clete; I think he and Abbie would have hit it off well. In many ways, they are kindred spirits. Eat, sleep, play, love -- life's highest priorities. Clete was faster, but Abbie has no fleas.
September 24, 1984
I am a fool for this child, her jester, her butler, her crane, her vehicle, her historian, her presenter, her photographer, her secretary. I have never experienced anything quite as lovely as watching her learn, holding her while she sleeps, playing tag around the dining room table while she squeals with excitement, watching her face as she inspects my moustache, playing peek-a-boo (she does the work now), beaming down upon her while I eat dinner and she tours the chairs and table legs. She is a delight. She sleeps like a stone, never gets sick, smiles, chirps and coos often.
And when she reaches into her mouth and pulls out her beets to marvel at their purpleness, I say, "How cute." And when she rubs them into her hair, pushes them up her nose and smears them across her eyes, I am patient and saintly. So too with shotgun blasts of sweet potato and squash.
When she kicks her heels into her shit on the changing table and rolls over while my hand is plastered with Desitin, I hum children's songs.
And when her nap goes 30 minutes instead of the 120 I begged God for, I say, "Oh, what a wonderful opportunity to be with my child again." What a glorious chance once more to feel her fingernails dig into my lips and gums, her deft little pincers pulling out my moustache hairs in threes and fours, to see her exultant warrior expression as she rips loose my eyeglasses. Another chance to change her clothes just 10 minutes after the first change, to carefully nurse in a healthy meal and watch it blow back out under pressure.
Turnip, radish, Abbie the Hun on her March to the Sea, coy, innocent, creator of chaos, maker of magic.
She waves at me coming and going, the first thing I taught her. Yesterday she stood on her own two feet, hands free, for the first time, five seconds of precious amazement. I marvel at the emergence of a person. She smiles at the flowers on our bed sheets, speaks with measuring cups, waves a wooden spoon like a magic wand or an elderly king knighting a worthy of the realm.
September 6, 1987
A goat sneezed on my leg at the State Fair, and so life's adventure continues in Upstate New York. The Supreme Champion Sow slept in at 885 pounds (imagine the bacon) and I wanted to go to the Budweiser Monster Truck Spectacular but it was after my bedtime.
Yesterday, in order to sustain the level of excitement generated by the Fair, I painted the shutters. The sanding and knocking off of paint chips had been accomplished two weeks earlier at gunpoint, and I set to priming at 8:30 a.m. on a beautiful late summer morning. At 1:10 p.m., after a hearty lunch of ring baloney, I began laying on the first coat of green, generously swabbing each louver, leaving no corner, nook or cranny untouched. There are five windows, therefore ten shutters. I breezed through them all, finishing at 7:40 p.m., and called it a day. For the second coat, I am going to walk briskly by each shutter, show it the wet, green brush, and leave it at that.
February 5, 1990
I'm a correspondence criminal brought to bay. I've been busy and I've been lazy and February opened up with the flu, Laurie the taker, so I've been nurse and homemaker too, and I'm exhausted. Of course it had to snow at the same time so the driveway beckoned as well, the clearing of which was no more tricky than the opening of an Alpine pass. Twice it disappeared under a blanket of white; twice I liberated it for the safe passage of our family vehicle, and any delivery truck that might be bringing us expensive gifts.
I had to keep it open because Saturday was the promised day to Abbie. On January 27th, her Adoption Day, we told her that her gift would be a long-requested parakeet; a local priest breeds them (rectory, aviary, what's the difference?) for Parrots of Distinction, le shop du bird, and they would be six weeks old and ready to go on February 3rd.
So while Laurie remained at home and feigned coma, Abbie and I drove to the west side and purchased a cage, seed, millet, vitamins, bird toys and a blue parakeet, all for less than $100. Abbie named it Blueberry. She theorizes that all blue parakeets are girls; all green ones are boys.
I worried all the way home about how cold or warm it was in its box. I worried about getting the cage set up. I worried about feeding it. Then it escaped between box and cage and I worried all over the dining room floor in a harrowing under the table high-speed chase that left the bird and I freaked out. I read in the next hour that I should have worn gloves and a hat to disguise myself, lest the bird think of me as a source of terror for the next several months. Oh well.
(This morning I told a co-worker about the chase, and he told me that I got off light. He was left in charge of his mother's new parakeet at Christmas. "Let it fly around while I'm gone," she said. It began flying into the walls, hard, so Ken began leaping to catch it, and it flew into the kitchen, where a pot of water, for spaghetti, was boiling on the stove. The bird flew directly into the pot. Ken cried, "AAHHHHHH!" The bird crawled out of the boiling water and sat on the edge of the pot, its feathers going in six different directions and an odd look in its eyes. Ken cried, "OOOOHHHHH!" He put the bird back in the cage. During dinner, his sister says, "What's wrong with the bird?" And Ken says, "Eat your spaghetti." The next day, the budgie died, and Ken told his mother it was defective, and got her another one.)
Once safely in its cage (having been in the service, I felt obligated to buy a jumbo parrot cage; Laurie regained consciousness long enough to roll her eyes at the price), Blueberry sat perfectly still for several hours, too wigged out to move. Then I read it would like towels on the sides at first, so I draped them over the wire and the bird sidled up to one, keeping a weather eye on me, Yorg, the Destroyer. On Sunday it ate, and as of this morning, it appears to be getting used to its new situation, even going so far as to drink from its little yellow water dish.
When we add seed and change paper, it panics but does not peck, which is a big positive. Abbie wants desperately to hold Blueberry; we are counseling a gentle approach. Two days of perch rest before any training. I'm hoping it perceives Abbie as somewhat gentler than myself.
December 26, 1990
Abbie is "good," she replies. I would add that she is sensational, usually clad in pink or purple, still "into Barbie," a great lover of TV and books, learning to read at breathtaking speed, and quite beautiful for someone with missing teeth.
March 19, 1992
Well, we're having fun over here. Back in 1977-78, I did bibliographies of the works of and about Hunter S. Thompson, the father of Gonzo Journalism. Mostly because I wanted to read all that stuff, and Dr. Thompson was not yet, nor now, the darling of academia so no one else had bothered to do the work. I was an accidental pioneer, and had the good fortune of having the bibs published in the back of Thompson's The Great Shark Hunt. Then, exhausted, I stopped keeping track of his output.
So imagine my surprise when last November, some 14 years later, I get a phone call from a woman who is writing Thompson's biography. She found me in the microfiche master phone book (I'm the only Kihm Winship in America!) and said she wanted to interview me. I am the world expert on HST scholarship, she tells me. Whoa. I was/am astounded, but said, hey, if you have the courage to drive to Syracuse in mid-winter, come on up.
So in January, she drove up from Suffren, New York, took me out to dinner at Saratoga Steaks (Wild Turkey on the rocks, fresh baked bread, salad with creamy bleu, the petit filet mignon ("You have to have steak.") with fries, cabernet savignon and thanks for asking). What a night. Abbie sent us off to dinner saying, "Adios. Bon appetit!" and spent the next day walking around the house saying, "Charming woman. Delightful woman."
The biographer taped all my remarks and told me hair-raising HST stories (like every word of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is true -- think about that), and I did my best to give her the academic point of view on her subject. Then we went back home and I dragged out my HST file, which, as it turned out, was filled with magazines and articles she hadn't been able to find and things she didn't even know existed. The mother lode. She paid me $300 just to borrow them until August, easily the most generous gesture I've ever encountered in my life as a librarian/writer/soft touch.
Then I touted blushing Laurie as an indexer for the book, which led within a week to a proofreading job for another author in New York, Juli Huss, a woman doing a wonderful book on women and food (like what to make for breakfast when you have a "layover" and practically nothing in the fridge).
Today at the library, I discovered that the biographer, E. Jean Carroll, has a book called Female Difficulties and is a former Miss Cheerleader U.S.A. This has been too much fun.
Meanwhile, Laurie is driving to Connecticut to weekend with her sister (and have breakfast with Juli Huss in New York), leaving Abbie and I home to watch movies and eat junk food. Yes! It's Kihm Winship, corrupter of small persons. The video menu includes The Pink Panther, A Shot in the Dark, The Lady Vanishes, The Man Who Knew Too Much and Arsenic and Old Lace. All that and fat too.
Tonight we have free tickets to Disney on Ice; this time it's Peter Pan and Captain Hook doing double toe loops; I hope the costumers still have Dad's needs in mind, for at least one number, and that Abbie and her friend Anna don't have to go to the bathroom more than once.