 Wow, it's just, you know, I go through my life like a lot of people wondering, you know, why am I here? Should I be here this afternoon morning? It's no exception. To be in the presence of Ali and Ben and to be reading with you both is a miracle and I'm grateful and it'll be like a moment, a little, you know, the career of any writer. As probably a lot of us know, this is a moment to remember and to take home. Okay, I'm going to read from this book, All My Puny Sorrows. And I'm going to read from chapter two. It's not actually the beginning that would be chapter one but it's close to the beginning. It's a very conventional setup. Elfrida doesn't do interviews. One time she let me interview her for my cheesy class newspaper but that's it. I was 11 and she was leaving home again this time for good. She was on her way to Norway for a recital and to study with an old man she referred to as the Wizard of Oslo. She was 17. She'd finished high school early at Christmas. She'd got honors everything and six scholarships to study the piano on a prize from the Governor General of Canada for highest marks which sent the elders into paroxysms of rage and fear. One day at dinner, a few weeks before she was due to leave, Elf casually mentioned that while she was in Europe, she might as well go to Russia to explore her roots and my father almost stopped breathing. You will not, he said. Yeah, I might, said Elf, why not? My grandparents originally came from a tiny Mennonite village in Siberia in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution. Terrible things happened to them there in the land of blood and he hinted the place, the slightest mention of anything Russian and my parents would start clawing the air. Plotich was the language of shame. Mennonites had learned to remain silent to shoulder their pain. My grandfather's parents were murdered in a field beside their barn but their son, my father's father, survived by burying himself in a pile of manure. Then, a few days later, he was put in a cattle car and taken with thousands of other Mennonites to Moscow and from there sent off to Canada. When Elf was born, he told my parents, don't teach your kids Plotich if you want them to survive. When my mother went to university to become a therapist, she learned that suffering, even though it may have happened a long time ago, is something that has passed from one generation to the next to the next like flexibility or grace or dyslexia. My grandfather had big green eyes and dimly lit scenes of slaughter, blood on snow, played out behind them all the time, even when he smiled. Absurdities and lies, Yoli said my mother, the worst thing you can do in life is be a bully. My interview happened in the car on the way to the airport in Winnipeg. As usual, our parents were in the front seat. My dad was driving and Elf and I were in the back. You're never coming back, are you? I whispered to her. She told me that was the stupidest thing she'd ever heard. We looked at fields and snow. She was wearing her white leather choker with a blue bead and an army jacket. We were driving over black ice. Is that your question for the interview, she asked me? Yeah, I said. Yoli, she said, you should have prepared other questions. Okay, I said, what's so hot about playing the piano? She told me that the most important thing was to establish the tenderness right off the bat or at least close to the top of the piece, just a hint of it, a whisper, but a deep whisper because the tension will mount, the excitement and the drama will build. I was writing it down as fast as I could. And when the action rises, the audience might remember the earlier moment of tenderness and remembering will make them long to return to infancy, to safety, to pure love. Then you might move away from that, put the violence and agony of life into every note, building, building still, until there is an important decision to make. Return to tenderness, even briefly, glancingly, or continue on with the truth, the violence, the pain, the tragedy to the very end. Okay, I said, that should do it. Well, thanks for sort of answering my question, weirdo. Both choices are valid. She said, it depends on what you wanna leave your audience. Happy and content, innocent again, like babies are wild and restless and yearning for something they've barely known. Both are good. Got it, thanks. I said, who's gonna be your page turner now? Some Norwegian? She took a book out of her army backpack. She was into military, issued everything like Patty Hearst and Che Guevara and checked it onto my lap. When you're finished with that horse series, she said, your real life starts here. She tapped the book with her finger. She was referring to my obsession with the black stallion. Also, I had recently started horseback riding lessons with my friend Julie and was on my way to becoming third best barrel racer in the provincial under 13 category, which contained only three members. In a way, I'm relieved that you're going to Oslo, I said. It was either that or Hitchhike Barefoot to the West Coast, she said. The roads are icy, said my father. See that semi in the ditch? He wanted to change the subject. Elf's hitchhiking plan was a crazy idea he had buried. My mother had laughed and said, Hitchhiking Barefoot to the West Coast is a reasonable idea, maybe, but not in January. She didn't believe in burying anything. What is this? I was looking at the book Elf had given me. Oh my God, Yolande, she said. When you see the words collected poems on the cover of a book, what do you think is inside the book? Can you drive any faster? I asked my father. We don't want her to miss her plane. I was trying to act tough, but I truly believe that I might die from heartbreak when my sister went away. To the extent that I had written a secret will bequeathing my skateboard to Julie and my lifeless body to Elf, which I hoped would make her feel really guilty for leaving me to die alone. I had nothing else but my skateboard and my body to give to people, but I attached a note of gratitude to my parents and a drawing of a motorcycle with a New Hampshire state motto, live free or die. And by the way, I said, I'm not reading those horse books anymore. What are you reading then? My sister asked Adorno, I said. She laughed. Oh, because you saw that I'm reading him? She asked. Don't say reading him, I said. You think you're so big? Yoli said, Elf. Don't say you think you're so big. That's what everyone around here says when somebody purports to know about something. I could say tomorrow is Thursday and you'd say, oh, you think you're so big? Don't say it anymore, it's déclassé. Our mother said, Elf, come on, enough advice on how to live like a dilettante. You'll be gone soon. We should be using this precious time to have fun. Elf sank back and explained that she was just trying to help me survive the world outside her hemlet. And also she added, dilettante is the exact wrong word for you to have used in this situation. Okay, Elf said my mom, but let's just speak English or sing or something like that. She'd had 15 brothers and sisters, so she knew about keeping the peace. Our father suggested we play I Spy. Oh my God, Elf whispered into my ear, are we six? Don't ever tell them that I've had three different types of sex already, okay? What do you mean three? Elf told me that after the poet Shelly drowned, his body was cremated right there on the beach, but his heart didn't burn, so his wife Mary kept it in a small silk bag in her desk. I asked her if it wouldn't have rotted and began to smell, but she said no, it had calcified like a skull, and that really it was only the remains of his heart. I told her that I would do that for her too, keep her heart with me in my desk or in my gym bag or my pencil case, somewhere very safe. And she hugged me and laughed and told me I was sweet, but that really it was a romantic thing for lovers to do. Before she disappeared behind the frosted glass doors of airport security, Elf and I played one last game of concentration, and in the midst of all that leg slapping and hand clapping, she said swivel head, that was her nickname for me, because I was very often looking around for solid clues to what was going on and never finding them. You better write me letters. I said, yeah, I will, but they'll be boring. Nothing happens in my life. Nothing has to happen, she said, for it to be life. Well, I said I'll try. No, Yelly said Elf, better than that. She yanked on my arms, please, you have to, I'm counting on you. They were calling her flight, and she released her grip. She was pulling away from me. Our parents did stricken, but acting brave, smiling big and dabbing at their eyes with tissues. So I said, I will, okay, take a chill pill. All right, said Elf, I'm out of here. Also don't say chill pill. I do, everybody, I know she was crying, but she turned her head away at the very last second, so I wouldn't notice, and I thought I should include that in a letter to her under observations if things meant to be hidden. On the way home from the airport, my mother drove, and my father lay in the back seat with his eyes closed. I sat next to my mother in the front. It was snowing. We couldn't see anything except snowflakes in the headlights and a tiny bit of the road ahead. I thought the snowflakes looked like notes and signatures falling and swirling over the little stave of road we could see in front of us. One measure of music. My mother told me she would tap the brake slightly to see if it was still icy. And before I could stop her, we had spun out of control and landed upside down in a ditch. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.