The Palace Storeroom: A Memory from After the Fall

Summer rerun: a post from March 25, 2005, about a memorable day in 2001, not long after the fall of the twin towers.

Now and then somebody finds this needle in the haystack--hours with Howard Bahr and Randy Cross, plus airplanes and bomb scares--and sends me an email. The post is from the very first month of The Palace at 2:00 a.m., when time had not yet solidified, and it was sometimes afternoon or evening or even Giacometti's The Palace at 4:00 a.m., and the Palace itself was less than a house of cards.

The "last news post" refers to two stories Howard and I wrote as an interlocking pair, later published in one of the MacAdam/Cage Blue Moon anthologies. Mine was too much like his, seen through another lens, but it was an interesting thing to do and seemed to say how very different women and men are.

It all seems so very long ago. The world and the land of letters and the kingdom of publishing have changed irrevocably since that weekend in 2001. But here, the hours are e-retrievable.

6 July 2006

***
After the last news post, Howard Bahr was on my brain, and I dug up a diaryish note about my expedition to Southern Festival of the Book in 2001. I had gone there to read from The Wolf Pit, a book of mine that won The Michael Shaara Award despite the misfortune of coming out just after 9-11 (and, for that matter, not long after The Corrections, a book that killed off Oprah's book club and overshadowed everything else on the FSG list that fall--and, for jolly good measure, just after my editor had left the house as well.) Sometimes Lady Luck rules the realm of books. It's curious to look back and see the start of airport mania; I remember that Elizabeth Spencer told me that she had tweezers in her purse but that what she carried "wasn't any of their business," so she didn't 'fess up.

* * * * *
Nashville bulletin, including a notable encounter with a writer and one of his characters:

I arrived after many repetitions of my mantra ("Turbulence never killed anybody; turbulence never killed anybody...") and restrained myself from kissing the Tennessee earth. Alas, I missed the person named Zan holding a sign, and she missed me, and she answered no page. Not an auspicious start. And it was drooling rain.

More rain the next morning, and my breakfast arrived three hours late. Then I finally scooted off to theHermitage Hotel to meet various folk; there I bumped into Elizabeth Spencer, who promptly sat down to chat, and then came over to hear me read. Which was a perfectly lovely thing to do and just like her. And I did read with Karen Essex a.k.a. "Kleopatra"--quite nice--then signed in the colonnade, a.k.a. Rain and Wind Tunnel of Tennessee. Signed the new book, the prior one, posters, and innumerable rain-specked copies ofMichael McFee's This is Where We Live anthology from UNC. And I saw writer Bill Starr--I met him years ago in Chapel Hill--we yacked a bit, and he said that he'd do a review in the Columbia paper.

Earlier Howard Bahr had arrived mid-reading with his friend Randy Cross--a model for one of his characters--and after the signing, they whirled me off to Franklin. (On the way I glimpsed the enormous and memorably bad silver and gold equestrian statue ofGeneral Nathan Bedford Forrest.) We tromped around the Confederate cemetery and mansion next door, plus the Carter house, complete with hundreds of bullet holes and one distracted chicken; then they took me out to dinner. The sky drizzled and mizzled and wept and poured the whole time, but I won't forget that hilarious and grand afternoon. It is a very curious thing to be shown about a place by a person who has written a book about it--and by one of his characters! In fact, the afternoon was so special that I don't want to tell any more about it, for fear the magic might evaporate. That evening I waded through small lakes to reach the library, dripping my way through the party, but I saw almost no one I knew from North Carolina, alas, thoughI'd hoped to see lots of people--talked to Elizabeth Spencer a bit more, and I met Michael Parker and had a talk with him. Then I went back to the Sheraton and saw that a white powder had been found on a U.S. Airways plane, so I promptly shut off the television, went to bed, and missed the bomb scare--evidently a huge pajama-clad contingent from the Renaissance Hotel trooped up to the Sheraton and hung out in the lobby downstairs for a good portion of the night. Next morning it was still raining, although by the time U.S. Airways bucked and bumped its way into the sky the sun was out. I was not terribly impressed with airport security--I expected my suitcase to be ravaged and my fountain pen inspected by hordes of beret-capped soldiers, but it never happened. Anyway, I read most of the Psalms (my other air habit), and I met lots of talkative and nervous flyers. And drove home to Cooperstown through the hills and red and yellow trees, all luminous on a cloudy afternoon. And that was that, a pellmell but memorable occasion.

* * *
That was the day that led to the Secret Chicken Pact with Howard . . .