 who was so well-known in this community that he asked me not to do an introduction. Just to say he's an awful list of memoirs. And when we asked Howard Norman to come and speak, we were lucky to get a twofer. And we got Jane Shore, a famed, well-known, also in this community in beyond, who's going to be reading her poetry. So I'm just going to say one more thing. I cold-called Howard Norman about five years ago to come speak to our book group. And he did. And then Jane spoke to our book group. I mean, we've been friends ever since. So with a lot to do, Howard's going to come and speak here. They may need to pass the mic onto Jane if she can't reject enough to... I'll go up. Everyone can read her poems. And anyone who hasn't stopped by to get her poems, please pick one up or we can pass them around so that you can follow her as she reads them. So, okay, here's one person over here. So with that to do, we're going to bring Howard into the mic. Andre Mulrow said marriage is a conversation that ends too soon. The great Polish poet Cymborski said, really, you must look directly at the truth. Poets are married to language. It occurred to me that in my 40-year marriage with Jane, we've had simply put two kinds of conversations. There is the conversation of just daily life, of what to have for dinner, of too much or too little salt. The conversation about our daughter Emma, which it seems to me should be and is endless. The conversation of how to resolve this or that problem, of time passing, the ongoingness of things, ongoingness, ongoingness, of how to keep one's dignity and one's passionate engagements, of illness and injury and of aging in place, of falling and getting back up, of exuberance of the spirit and of the exhaustion of the spirit, of sadness and joy. The conversation about friends, of friendship, of how to put loneliness to good use. It's a conversation as Lee Chimans put it, of the 10,000 things. But there is a second conversation, often parallel and sometimes interwoven with the first. And that is the conversation about the constant presence of and constant preoccupation and engagement with literature. The conversation about the writing of books as a way to organize our emotions. Because what fate awaits a person who cannot organize their emotions? That was one of the questions that haunted Spinoza so much. Now I would not go so far as to agree with Virginia Woolf that nothing is real unless it is written down. Though quite often I feel that way. Being Jewish in a way I was raised to believe that eternity resides in the past and that memory is sank or sank. And the writing of the past, whether the Old Testament novels, poetry, philosophical treatises, that's where you can find every sort of human experience along with all sorts of instruction about how to live and not live one's life. In literature you can discover every destiny transposed by impeccable artistry. Take Chekhov for instance. You are reading a Chekhov story and you think all that is happening is people are having another dinner. And then you are amazed that during that dinner a character's complete happiness or complete despair is established. This afternoon I want to speak about something quite full of joy, often startling recognition and both subtle and seismic emotional response. The experience of reading over decades, final versions of Jane's poems. It is part of the intimacy of marriage to be sure, but never sanctimonious. It is far more what Yates meant when he said, the poet is never the person who sits down to breakfast. There is always a phantasmagoria. That is, if I pass Jane the butter and bread, yes, she is the most grounded person I have ever known, but I still cannot ever determine if she is living more inside a poem than just at breakfast, just existing with a poem separately. And why shouldn't she be? On a more basic level, so often I have read a poem of Jane's and said to myself, oh, so that's what my wife thought about that. And it is very, very interesting to live with someone who finds it quite natural to elevate the most quotidian moment to a level of poetic regard. So I've chosen five of Jane's poems that fit what I've described. They provided a kind of chronology in our marriage, but also, of course, stand alone with their autonomous insistences. The first is the title poem of her book Music Minus One. The term Music Minus One refers to published music where the melody part is absent so that a musician can play their instrument along with the background music of the band. This poem is about Jane's father, George Shore, who really became a father to me. Let's see. Sorry, he lost me. Jane's father, George Shore. In the years before and during World War II, George played clarinet, saxophone, and piccolo, and several of the most famous and most popular of the big band era, including the Clyde McCoy Orchestra, with whom he recorded the famous tune, Sugar Blues, and also saw combat in Europe. It's far too complicated to go into at length today, but when George returned from the war, he eventually owned and co-managed with Jane's mother a very elegant women's clothing store in North Bergen, New Jersey, a corduroy village. You will hear all the exacting and provocative aspects of that transition in Jane's poem, but imagine the severity of contrast between, as a very young man, playing in the big bands to going into a study or bedroom or any separate space to play along with the music minus one recording, to in essence disappear into the music, therefore disappear into the past. To say the very least, the symbolism of this was beautiful because it meant George somehow stayed with the music, but it was also heart-wrenching because quite literally George was the one of the big band era was minus of. He had other responsibilities. Something W. H. Auden wrote applies to this poem, I think, quote, a poem can provide a full emotional biography of a person without necessarily providing the complete chronology of their life. So Jane, so this is music minus one. I'm shorter. Thank you, Howard. It's interesting what you said because it's for me also is I don't often know what I'm thinking of or even what anything means until I write it. And usually I spend a long time on each on each poem, so it's an evolution for me, but well, I'll just read it. And I'm going to let Howard do most of the actual talking, which is like not like real life. So I know I know. So I'm going to read this poem and music minus one and Howard explained that it's a record and when we had phonographs. So Sunday afternoons, my father practiced flute in the family room. He warmed up playing scales while my mother worked the crossword puzzle in her wing chair like a throne. Three o'clock and she was still wearing her nightgown and slippers. Our store downstairs was closed. She was sick of looking at dresses all week. Sunday was her day of rest. I sprawled on the floor with my homework, each in our little orbit. My father gave it all up when he married her, abdicated like the Duke of Windsor. Music was no life for a family man. During the war, he had let the band in the Marine Corps in the South Pacific. In the photo, each man poses with his instrument except my father holding a baton. Clarinets and saxophones leaning against their chests like rifles at port arms. It was my job to start the record over. The sheet music staple to the album cover was propped on the music stand. The needle skated its single blade on smaller and smaller circles on black ice. The needle skipped. He was a little rusty. When he lost his place, it left a hole in the music like silence in a conversation. You had to imagine his life before the war. At 15, on the Lower East Side, he played weddings and bar mitzvahs. At 16, he toured with the big bands. You had to imagine him before he changed his name from Joseph Sharfglass to George Shore. You had to imagine him handsome in his baby blue tuxedo when he played with Clyde McCoy's orchestra. Lighting up hotel ballrooms from New York to California and all the road stops in between. One enchanted evening in Connecticut, he saw my mother. A week later, he shipped off to the war. You had to imagine his life before the war. The one night stands, the boys on the bus, and in its wake, the girls with plucked eyebrows and strapless dresses surrounding him like the mannequins as he stood behind the counter of his store waiting for customers in New Jersey on the Palisades. You had to imagine him occupying the uniform now folded neatly in his foot locker under the telescope popped with rust or blood stains, a souvenir from the war. The record spun, he caught his breath. The music raced on without him. I just heard something I hadn't heard before, which was Jane actually participating in the music minus one. You put that on and it reminded me of something Vladimir Horowitz said. I change page turners every two years because they know too much about me. I always found that quite mysterious. Thank you, Jane. The second poem is titled Reprise. Where did that come from? Reprise. We got married on a sultry June day in the backyard of the painter Michael Mazer and poet Gal Mazer. On that morning Jane was being attended to by women friends. My mother was there too. However, right across the street, I was alone in our apartment. Suddenly the phone rang. It was my mother. As far as marriage goes, she said, I have only one piece of advice. Every morning when you wake up, apologize to Jane. This is true. Mom, you don't have much faith in me, I said. It's just about men, she said. This is the time for a 17-page disquisition on my mother's peculiar sense of irony. But there were good friends and good food, a little dancing, a simple sweet ceremony. Later that night, Jane and I repaired to the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Boston for our wedding night. Now I have to mention that Jane's father, George, had born of experience and certitude, very strong opinions and wonderful stories about the famous classic jazz singers of the 1940s and 1950s, especially icons really, Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith, Tony Bennett, and others. But one figure stood out as a real mensch. It was Mel Tormé, also known as the Velvet Fog. As a singer, George thought Mel Tormé had impeccable timing. But what's more, and more importantly to him, treated everyone with professional respect, especially musicians. So Jane and I married for just a few hours, step into the lobby elevator of the Ritz Carlton, and the only other person in the elevator was Mel Tormé. This happened. He was in town for a performance. Now my wedding suit fit pretty nicely. But Mel Tormé had on a suit that looked as if his personal haberdasher was God. His toupee could have been in its perfect coiffed thickness and undulations, been a wave painted by Hokusai. And his shoes, I can't even tell you. And his cufflinks, I should only someday have such cufflinks. On our assent up to the wedding room, to our wedding room, the elevator stopped and with a good evening, off the elevator glided the Velvet Fog. We were incredulous. Not that I was insecure or anything. But what if Jane followed him down the corridor? All kidding aside, well, I think I'm kidding. Once in our hotel room, I said something that might have made Freud turn over in his grave. But I felt such exhilarated urgency. I said to Jane, I really think we have to call your father and tell him. And Jane understood everything. As Jane reads the poem Reprise, you'll notice it has several spectral elements. This is one of the things that always strikes deep chords with me. Not the least of which is Jane listening on a tape recorder to the voices of her dearly departed mom and dad. The rest of this is badly written. Jane, you should read this poem. Reprise. I can fill the rest in. So I should mention also that my father, besides, he played classical guitar after he retired, you know, retired from music. And the whole time he worked in the store, he also made animated films and he was a huge home movie enthusiast. And then he got into tape recording and, I mean, he was pretty fantastic. Howard's pretty great too. But let me read this. So my father, you know, had a collection of tapes and videos and things like that. So this is called Reprise. Rummaging through the old cassettes, my father taped off the classical radio station. My daughter finds, among Mozart and Bach, cataloged and labeled in his elegant hand, Jane and Howard's wedding, 1984. I didn't know my father taped that too. Disappearing with the boombox, my daughter shuts the master bedroom's door. An hour later, I walk in on her gate crashing our wedding, sprawling on our mattress bed, ear to the speaker. When she was younger, she used to insist that she was there at our wedding and we've told her it's impossible. She wasn't born yet, that she was there in spirit. She's not convinced. Hasn't she always been there, even when she wasn't? She laughs at the wedding march while her dad and I shakily walk down the aisle under the rented yellow and white tent, filling Mike and Gale's walnut-av backyard. Eavesdropping on the prayers, we repeat after the rabbi, phrased by Hebrew phrase. She claps when the rabbi pronounces us husband and wife and we kiss to applause. Her future father stomps on the goblet wrapped in the caterer's cloth napkin and glass shatters safely underfoot. She rewinds the tape back to the beginning to what she calls the really funny part. Back to before our murmuring guests sit down in the rented chairs on that sweltering June Sunday, 96 degrees, freezer wilting, family close to fainting, whipped cream on the cake about to turn. Back to before we stand under the canopy, back to before the ceremony, back to when my father presses the record button, clears his throat and says into the microphone, testing, testing a voice I last heard many years ago, a few days before he died. Shocked, I hear my dead mother say, George, are you sure the tape recorder's working? And my father says, I'm sure. My mother says, George, are you sure the batteries aren't dead? And my father answers patiently at first, then wearily, Essie, I'm sure. She asks him again, and he answers again. And here they are arguing in my bedroom, in the house my mother never stepped foot in. My daughter's eyes shine with laughter, mine with tears. Although I give anything to have them back, even for a moment, I clamp my hands over my ears, just as I used to when I was growing up, and shut them out again. So, in the summer of 2003, in the summer of 2003, a 40-year-old poet named Meridic of Vasirani was house-sitting our house in Washington, D.C., with her two-year-old son, Jahan. Later discovered in her journals was that she had auditioned what eventually happened, which was that she stabbed her son to death and then took her own life. We were at home in East Calus. I apologize for describing this so graphically, but it is what occurred. I wrote at length about the aftermath in a memoir called I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place. And eventually, we were able to speak in public about this with Susan Stanberg on NPR. Really, we barely got through that. But what I really want to say here most is that before our conversation with Susan Stanberg, Jane somehow organized her emotions. I really don't know how she managed this and wrote a poem called Fugue. Of course, a fugue is a contrapuntal polyphonic composition in which a short phrasing is introduced by one instrument, and then all the other parts are eventually interwoven in to make the whole. And I think you will hear, or I think what can't help be heard in Jane's reading of Fugue, but allow me to say that when I first read it, I was quite taken aback given the almost pulmonary force of emotion that had to be at work, how carefully structured it really had to be. And I remember William Merwin in a letter using the word bulwark, and he meant it, and it was about this poem, and he meant it in the sense of scriptures, quote, how strong our edifices must be, how strong the very bulwarks of memory must be, that ye may preserve and tell difficult stories to the generation that follows. So, Jane, this is Fugue. Of course, when something like that happens, it's so unimaginable. We were really out of our minds. This was an acquaintance, it wasn't a family member, but she did live in our house, and it was unimaginable. So I'm going to just give a little background. So I had a wonderful physician who called me up and said, do you need any pills? Like, do you need some tranquilizers? And yes, I did. And then she said this fantastic phrase, which this is the phrase that I've used throughout the poem. She said, it wasn't your story, it was theirs. It was like, you know, somehow, she wasn't my psychiatrist, but she kind of was. So she gave me something, and I was able, and I think maybe because there was the rapid, you know, like when you're obsessing about something, it goes through your mind again and again. So I was able to, not right away, but I did write down the phrase that she had said, and then when I was able to, wrote this poem, along with a couple of others, but that's all that I've written, and it's called Fugue. It was not our story, it was hers. That's how friends told us to think of it. It was not our story, it was hers. In what book does it say that you're supposed to live until you're 80? Our house was hers for the summer, our forks and knives and spoons. She seemed happy, waving goodbye. We said, so long, take care, enjoy. It was not our problem, it was hers. Her clothes hung in our closets, her little boy slept in our daughter's bed and played with our daughter's old toys. It was not our sadness, it was hers. Her sadness had nothing to do with us. She borrowed books from the library, scrubbed the bathtub, baked a pie. We were just going about our business. We were hundreds of miles away. It was not our madness, it was hers. She finished the book, sealed a letter in the envelope telling why. We replaced the bloody floored boards with her two dead bodies lay. We stained the new boards to match the old ones, a deep reddish strain. Our daughter first thought was blood until we told her it was not blood. And not our depression, it was hers. It was scraped, sanded, varnished. No one can tell. It could have happened to anyone, but it happened to us. We barely knew her, we weren't there. We didn't want to make their tragedy our tragedy. It was not our story. They had their story. We have ours. Harder poem to clap to. I know, I know. Thank you Jane. Perhaps any other poem might strike a lighter note. This next one is called Symbolism. And I don't think you have to have children to recognize this moment, but those of you that do have children or raise children will in your own way. And in Symbolism as you will hear, that title is heavily freighted with self-recognition as parents. And it also in style and tone has what feels like almost stenographic recall. The only other sense of recognition to mention here is that once you own up to the fact that you are capable of haplessly violating the absolutely powerful sense of dignity your child has, you then experience that child's response. And the sheer savviness and fearlessness in that response provides an almost uncanny sense of solace. She is going to be all right in this life. She's going to find her way. She already is finding it. And it's happening every single day right in front of you. So this one is called Symbolism. Well, my daughter, our daughter, having lived with two college professors, writers for ever. You used to hear us talk about our students all the time and, you know, different phrases, metaphors, symbols, etc. So this shocked both of us when this happened. This is lighter, so don't worry. Symbolism. I think it's our come up as parents and writers. Reading in bed, I hear my eight-year-old railing at her dad who's downstairs quietly trying to reason with her as she perches on a step halfway up between our first and second floors, halfway between her father and me, the center hallway and echo chamber for her meltdown that must have started down in the dining room, dessert plate still on the table, sparked with a teasing word, a joke misunderstood, the car of their argument accelerating from one to sixty, her foot on the gas and her father the fuel. Daddy, you think I'm so stupid that I don't know what symbolism is? I know what a symbol is. A cloud is a symbol of sadness. A flower is a symbol of happiness. And you, Daddy, are a symbol of meanness. I crack the door open and tiptoe down the stairs to sit on the step beside her, just as her father climbs halfway up, waving a box of Kleenex. We like to tell stories about Emma, and I'll just mention one really quickly. You know, we had different writers and visit. I know. Her first grade teacher. Yes, Jane wrote a poem about Miss Moulton. We had a lot of writers coming through and staying with us, and it was really lovely. But one night at dinner, a particular writer was holding forth way too long and with a kind of academic reductionist way of viewing something, and it was going on and on and on. You know, sort of brilliant disquisition, but, and Emma was quite little. She was at the table and into this about eight or ten minutes, and I was like, check please. And so the next day, there was an equally, equally if not a greater tedious event, which was a faculty meeting. And during the faculty meeting, the department chair was going on and on at length. And one of the other writers who was at the table was sitting across, who I talked with, and in the middle of this person going on and on and on, he caught my eye and I cut his eye and he went, just like that. And both of us burst into this terribly violating laughter, and we just had to leave the room. But I can't ever say check please without thinking of that moment. It was just great. I just learned something again. You know, I never would have thought about comeuppance, but I guess it was, you know, sort of many things at once, that little moment. I just felt very relieved afterwards that she had such toughness. I wanted to end with a Vermont poem because for obvious reasons, it's called Where to Find Us. And ostensibly, it's a poem about giving directions to one's own house to someone unfamiliar with the area. And remember, this is before GPS navigational devices. And so I'm imagining that many of you have had this experience where one of you is giving directions, and then the other person has a different way of giving directions. You're working with phenomenologically two pieces of data, a starting point and a destination point. How can things be so metaphysically misconstrued between those two things? And it happens all the time, I think. Ostensibly, it's a poem about giving directions, as I said. I'm the farthest thing from academic, and this poem does remind us of perhaps the different ways men and women see the world. I quote from a Lewis and Clark expedition report, quote, out here in the wilderness, one can feel quite lost without taking a single step. And, you know, you're sort of in your own house, and you may actually be giving directions to somebody that is going to get them lost, even though the details you think are very specific. You'll also notice, I think, in this poem, what Helen Vendler, critic, referred to. She wrote a long piece about Emily Dickinson's, a particular poem of Emily Dickinson's, which she referred to as a posthumous narration. Once you hear another way you might look at it is that the poet is getting the last word, and I'll come in on this a little bit after Jane reads this poem. Where to find us? After you've crossed the singing bridge and passed Le Geur's farm market, fresh pumpkins, peas, pick your own strawberries, drive two more miles, give or take a tenth. Here's where my husband always said, at Peck Hill Road hang a sharp left. And I'd add my two cents just to irk him, but you're not at Peck Hill Road yet. I always hated when he interrupted me giving directions, and he hated when I'd point out every landmark along the way. My woman's crow's nest view, not my husband's God's eye view. Directions we bickered over for 40 years. Watch for the tilted green wooden pole. You'll miss it. Everybody misses the turn the first time. For a century and a half it was left at the old sugar shack, and people knew exactly where to turn until it collapsed and was dismantled. Its barn board sold as fancy wainscotting for designer kitchens. You may see only an empty space, but to us that shack still disappearing board by board. When was the last time you saw us? You'd have to be blind not to see our three-story barn's rusted roof up ahead and our 1840s farmhouse. Are the clabberts still white? This house just didn't want to be painted. It liked being naked no matter how many coats we'd apply. It blistered and peeled the moment after the paint dried. If you're not stuck behind a swaying hay wagon or snow plow, from on peeler it should take you 20 minutes tops. Stick to my directions. You won't get lost. If you'd listen to my husband you'd be halfway to Montreal. Though it may look like no one's home, the mudroom door is always open. We're in the back pasture waiting buried under the crab apple tree. So it's a complicated overlapping panels of experience talking about Jane's poems. But you go through life with a person, I guess through time and space and dealing with the inevitable unrequited love with the world itself. And perhaps you want marriage to be a conversation that does not end. As Bill Merwin wrote in a letter to me, me and Paula, his wife, talk in many rooms. But it seems to me we also talk between the rooms. That way the very architectural space of our house is expanded to accommodate ever more conversation. Of course he's referring to Emily Dickinson's poem, I died for beauty but was scarce adjusted in the tomb. When one who died for truth was lain in an adjoining room. He questioned softly why I failed. For beauty, I replied, and I for truth. The two are one. We brethren are, he said. And so as kinsmen met a night, we talked between the rooms until the moss had reached our lips and covered up our names. So thank you for coming all this way. I wanted to say to Jane, you know, just after both of our birthdays, thank you for talking with me in rooms and between rooms. So we, I don't know if anyone would have any questions or anything but are you, is that okay? Yeah, yeah, if anybody. But thank you for coming. I know this is a complicated thing because the, it's almost, I remember very much when Jane and I were first going out. She let me stay in her apartment in Cambridge to work when she was teaching and I was snooping and I went into one of the office drawers and I pulled out a file cabinet. We really didn't know each other very well. I was already over the moon but we didn't really know each other. And I found this file, just a folder, regular folder like this. There were many of them. And it was literally, literally hundreds of drafts of a poem. And I thought to myself right then, this is the kind of person that I want to be with but also it was the first moment that answers the question of the talk today, what it's like to be married to a poet. No hurrying, just devotion to language and to a craft but also sort of the habitual nature of trying to get things right. And so that always comes back to me. So it's hard in a short talk to answer the question of what it's like but you could tell for the range of just those poems. Jane has attended to things that happen not just in the world but right in the house and it can be very strange experience but also one I'm very grateful for. So thank you for your beautiful reading, Jane. And I don't know if anyone has any questions. Yes. When we were first together, we read everything that each other wrote. And then, I don't know how many years later, when Howard got a really good editor, I figured and especially I'm not a prose writer and next year I want to give a talk if you guys will let me on what it's like to be married to a prose writer. And also Howard, thank you so much. I'm overwhelmed actually. Thank you. So we used to look at each other's work all the time but then it seemed to me because I didn't know how to write prose and she was a real editor. So sometimes now we read each other's work only when we ask each other or when something is finished. Howard, for me anyway, I don't know how I help you at all but with Howard it's like what's the through line of the poem? Or is it getting too wrought up and too much ornate symbolism and it's too long here. So that's what it's like. But yeah, we did do it all the time and we morphed into a different kind of relationship with it. But of course I couldn't really be the kind of poet in terms of being taken seriously by my mate because I wasn't married to Howard. And I was thinking yesterday I think, what if I married Billy Steinberg, the doctor? How would my life be different? And I realized being married to Howard is also like being married to literature and to like, it is! Because we have totally different tastes in things. I don't know how to use a stethoscope. He wouldn't have understood me anyway. But I mean it's seriously, my life has changed because of who I'm married to and how seriously I'm taken by him and vice versa I hope. I mean I can't yet. Because there's 10,000 moments within that question. But I would say I'm looking at Nadal and I'm thinking, you know, I think really the truth is that without being pollyannish about this, if you love poetry and I don't know, I really can't speak much about poetry. But I can say that you're around the utmost, I think Joseph Brotsky put it best, the utmost use of the language. And that is, unless you're another poet, I think you should just sort of stay away from that and make a few little comments. You know, you don't want to say too much because there's some fundamental deeply informing element that I'm never going to actually ever get. It's just not the way I think and it's not what I can recognize. But you do feel it when you're feeling it. I think that's really the answer for me is that there's a point in which very clearly something is going on with the language that I just, you know, you need to turn that over to other people. And that happens all the time. So I'm sure Victor knows exactly what I'm talking about because this is just, language for a prose writer is very different, I feel. It's another, for another topic, but yeah. So many of our friends have heard all this so much, know this so much about us already. Yeah, okay. First, I just love the admiration that you two have for one another. Oh. Having never been married. Well, Jane had a model, a good model, and I had a terrible model. So I think I adopted, I was happy to adopt Jane's parents in that regard. You know, my father left when I was very little boy and, you know, my mother did the best she could. But you know, so I think you, yeah. But thank you, I do. She's a photographer, but she also is a good writer. She's big appetites for life. She's finding her way. She writes a lot. And one thing she writes is handwritten letters. She, she has an old-fashioned epistolary life, which is really great. Yeah. And she's a very good critic, I have to say. She really speaks directly to you about stuff that you write, yeah. And friends. How was she in a restaurant? Check, please. Check, please. Yeah, it was so funny. And it didn't stop the guy, by the way. He just kept going. But, um, yeah. So thank you so much. Some of you drove a long way. Really appreciate it. Thank you. I just wanted to say that Howard said, I don't want to give a speech where everyone asks questions like, how often do you write? Do you have a schedule? Do you need a chair? Do you have a table? But you should be asking him those questions now because he said he would take questions. I'm kind of getting inspired about doing that. Please do it now. But, yeah, Howard and I joined with you. I mean, I didn't realize, and you and I talked last night, that you had spent so much time putting together such a wonderful tribute and introductions of James Poles. I mean, I feel like I have to go back and get annotations on the people you've quoted about the words. Oh, I hope that did sound like name-dropping. But it's really interesting, if I see it by depth. It really was interesting, however, how people respond to things that happen to you. I feel in a way like you should publish it. You should put it together in an essay with what you wrote and then have James Poles and then do it. I mean, it's just really too good to just be at the senior center. Bye, Erica. Bye, Tom. Thank you for driving all this way. On Marsh Wednesday. But in any event, one other thing. I've read almost all of Howard's books, but the reason I wasn't here quite on time was I was looking for Jane's book. And by the way, Jane has books over here if anyone wants to buy one. And I couldn't find mine, but I found a book of Howard's that I hadn't read. It was a book of essays, so I was going to chat with him after this conversation to ask him. I mean, the pages are yellow. I've owned it for like 20 years. I didn't even know I had it. But in any event, I'm going on and on. So next Wednesday is our last meeting. What else am I supposed to tell them? The last three films. Oh, and then we have the three films that are over at Savoy Theatre. And do they also start at 130? Yes. And they also started at 130. So if you've bought the whole subscription series, then you get to go. Hi, Bob. Bob just had his 85th birthday. Oh, Roosevelt. So in any event, yes, plan to come next week. I can't remember what the subject matter is, but Allison will remind me. President, this is the one. Oh, the election. Oh, yes. We have a professor from Middlebury College come in to talk to us about the election. So you want to finish on a strong point that's completely different than poetry. It's the world today. So in any event, come next week for 130. And then three movies. Matt and Mike is the first one. And I can't remember the other two. But thank you so much for coming today. Thank you.