Summer Endeavors

One of the benefits of living on our boat in the summer is being able to finally get to some postponed reading and catch up on local theatre either in Westport or NY and the last few weeks reminds me that so much of what we read or see in the theatre often serves as historical guideposts, snapshots of different periods of cultural change. I recently picked up John Irving’s The World According to Garp, which I first read when it was published in the late 1970’s. I’m not sure why I felt compelled to reread the novel other than I had forgotten much of it and always liked Irving’s quirky self-reflective story-telling, so much about the process of writing itself. I had forgotten how much the role of women’s rights plays in Garp, such a major issue in the 1970s. Irving playfully toys with the issue, satirizing it to a great degree, reminding me of my first business trip to Australia in the 1970’s when a Sydney taxi driver lectured me about the evils of women’s rights and, in particular, the role that Americans had in exporting those dangerous thoughts to Australia. I wonder whether Garp (or Irving) might have agreed with the accusation at the time.

Then a few weeks ago we saw Terrence McNally’s Lips Together, Teeth Apart at the Westport Country Playhouse, portraying two heterosexual couples vacationing at a home on Fire Island, in the middle of a gay community. It is a play that is constantly on an uneasy edge, the problems of the two couples acting out their aberrant behavior contrasted to the high-spirited, better adjusted gay community, off stage. But central to the play is the paranoia of how AIDS was thought to be transmitted at the time, symbolized by the couples’ dramatic fear of going into the pool (on stage) -- an obsession of twenty years ago when the play was written. Nonetheless, the play is still a compelling tragicomic drama and wonderfully staged at the beautifully restored Westport Country Playhouse.

A twenty year leap forward brings me to reading Jonathan Tropper’s Everything Changes. Here is a very contemporary novel by a thirty-something author about relationships between fathers and sons, and male female relationships. Tropper’s idiosyncratic characters (in particular, the protagonist’s father) at times reminds me a little of Richard Russo’s and Anne Tyler’s. Trooper’s writing can be very funny but sensitive at the same time. These are the two paragraphs that grab you and pull you into the novel:

Life, for the most part, inevitably becomes routine, the random confluence of timing and fortune that configures its components all but forgotten. But every so often, I catch a glimpse of my life out of the corner of my eye, and am rendered breathless by it. This is no accident. I made this happen. I had a plan.

I am about to fuck it all up in a spectacular fashion.

It was quite a contrast reading Anita Brookner’s Strangers, perhaps the most interior novel I’ve read in some time, most of it taking place in the mind of the 72 year old protagonist, a retired banker and confirmed bachelor, who feels he may be missing something not sharing his life with a woman. By chance he meets one of his old lovers (he hasn’t had many), now aged and frail, but one for whom he thinks he still has feelings. He also meets a woman on a flight to Venice, younger than he. Much of the novel is a debate (in his mind) of the advantages or disadvantages of being with one or the other or neither. Brookner’s writing is timeless, meticulously exacting, set mostly in London, but a London that seems to exist merely in some recent time. It is also about aging and finding meaning in life after a lifetime of work:

His reading now was confined to diaries, notebooks, memoirs, anything that contained a confessional element. He was in search of evidence of discomfiture, disappointment, rather than triumph over circumstances. Circumstances, he knew, would always overrule. Those great exemplars of the past, the kind he had always sought in classic novels, usually finished on a note of success, of exoneration, which was not for him. In the absence of comfort he was forced to contemplate his own failure, failure not in worldly terms but in the reality of his circumscribed life. He knew, rather more clearly than he had ever known before, that he had succeeded only at mundane tasks, that he had failed to deliver a reputation that others would acknowledge. Proof, if proof were needed, lay in the fact that his presence was no longer sought, that, deprived of the structure of the working day, he was at a loss, obliged to look for comfort in whatever he could devise for himself. His life of reading, of walking, was invisible to others: his friendships, so agreeable in past days, had dwindled, almost disappeared. Memories were of no use to him; indeed, even memory was beginning to be eroded by the absence of confirmation. As to love, that was gone for good. Whatever he managed to contrive for himself would not, could not, be construed as success.

Finally, yesterday, we saw the NYC preview performance of Stephen Sondheim’s great musical, Follies. This is a show I failed to see when it opened in 1971 or any of the revivals and have been waiting, waiting for the opportunity. Sondheim is the last surviving composer of another era. Talk about historical markers. This is Sondheim’s tribute to various eras of Broadway’s past and it has some of his best known songs, too many to mention, including one that is perhaps my very favorite, Losing My Mind.

This new Broadway production, coming via the Kennedy Center, is spectacular, the kind of show no longer written for Broadway. It was Sondheim’s first musical as both composer and lyricist and every line, every word is delicious. The Broadway production includes some of Broadway’s luminaries, Bernadette Peters, Danny Burstein, Jan Maxwell, Ron Raines, and Elaine Page. Each brings the house down with some of Sondheim’s most iconic numbers. The juxtaposition of their ghosts from eras past is particularly evocative. Here is a two and half hour production which seems to pass in minutes, portraying innocent and happier times past, lost loves, regrets and heartbreak.

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Confluence

It is interesting how things come together, seemingly haphazardly, but connected in some way. Ann and I decided to celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary by taking a cruise in the Western Caribbean, places we’ve been before so we intended to spend most days on board, relaxing and reading, donning our formal wear for our special evening but otherwise, one could find us in a bathing suit and a book in hand.

I suppose that is the value of a Kindle or an iPad, being able to take a number of “books” with you, but for one week I figured one good novel and my half finished Library of America edition of Raymond Carver’s short stories would do. So part of the fun planning the trip was selecting the novel, finally choosing one by a favorite author, Anne Tyler, her recently published Noah’s Compass.

One review commented that she “plunges us into the troubled hearts of her characters and allows us to recognize in their confusions our own riven selves.” Since at times I feel particularly riven, about the past, about my interests; I prepared to be plunged!

Tyler is a master of the tragic comedy, seeing the sadness and the humor in the minutiae of ordinary families and their relationships. The lives of Tyler’s frequently quirky characters are compelling in their own way. And Noah’s Compass is no exception to the winning Tyler formula. And as she moves into a later stage of her own life (we are about the same age), her writing reveals an increasing obsession with time, time spent (on what?) and time passing more quickly through the unrelenting hourglass.

So it is no surprise that Tyler pulled me into her novel immediately and although I am no Liam Pennywell (love her protagonist’s name) in my demeanor, I am, like Liam, struggling with my memories and in fact just reading this novel, while celebrating our 40th anniversary, sparked a discussion while on the cruise as to what exactly happened that day.

We remembered that I spent the night before in my apartment at 66 West 85th Street and Ann at hers at 33 West 63rd Street (although we were already living together on and off). We also recalled that we took a one-week trip to Puerto Rico a couple of weeks before we were married which, unknown to us at the time, was our honeymoon in advance. I was between my first job in publishing where we first met and the one I would occupy for the rest of my working career (like Tyler’s characters I kept my shoulder to the wheel). I returned to my new job in Westport and shortly after, Ann placed a call to The Ethical Culture Society’s leader, Jerome Nathanson, the man she wanted to marry us. He had only one date open in the next seven or eight months: a Sunday in April, exactly one week away. We looked at one another and said let’s take it.

Consequently, Ann began hasty wedding arrangements, including ones to fly her mother and Aunt in from California, picking out a dress for herself and mother to wear, hiring a caterer and picking out flowers. We chose the list of attendees, mostly our immediate families and closest friends, including a few colleagues from work and of course, my young son from my previous marriage. Ann’s brother and sister-in-law offered their home in Queens for the informal reception. Everything had to be done on a shoestring and obviously with a sense of urgency.

The ceremony itself was what one would expect from a humanist minister. A substantial part of the service captured our enthusiasm for the then victorious New York Knicks, with names such as Bill Bradley, Dave DeBusschere, Walt Frazier, and Willis Reed sprinkled throughout our wedding vows. Later that night we returned to my 85th Street apartment. We both had to go to work the next morning, my driving to Westport, while Ann took the subway downtown.

So the broad strokes were clearly remembered but, unlike most married couples, we do not have a wedding album to detail much of the specifics of that day. My father was a professional photographer, but my mother did not want him to be very much involved on that matter. (She did not “approve” of the wedding.) Instead, he hired a freelance photographer. I clearly remember our shock when presented with black and white contact prints a week after the wedding. This was 1970 not 1930 and my father’s business specialized in producing color prints! We refused to order enlargements and those few contact prints were filed away. Forty years later, and we had nothing more than contact prints, postage size photos, and in black and white only, a tease of the past, never to be fully viewed (except for a few color Brownie shots taken by relatives).

Fortunately, the brave new digital world offered some remedy, and I was able to scan and enlarge some of those black and white postage size contacts. It was a fine balance, getting something recognizable, not enlarging them to the point that they were not just a bunch of fuzzy digital shadows. The resulting grayish specters became our fragile wedding album of that late April 1970 day.

Liam Pennywell (back to Tyler’s novel) finds himself out of work in his early 60s, out of touch with his children and ex wife, and soon after downsizing to a smaller apartment comes the first twist in Tyler’s plot, as Pennywell is knocked unconscious by an intruder during the night and wakes up in the hospital, banged up with no memory of the incident. He is intent on remembering (and in so doing conjuring up other memories of his past life as well) by pursuing someone he thinks can serve him as a “rememberer.” This turns into a romance, something he clearly neither expected or even wanted. Liam is directionless, and explaining the Noah’s Ark parable to his grandchild says: “There was nowhere to go. He was just bobbing up and down, so he didn’t need a compass, or a rudder, or a sextant.”

Later, Liam thinks, “We live such tangled, fraught lives…but in the end we die like all the other animals and we’re buried in the ground and after a few more years we might as well not have existed.” But finally he realizes that “if the memory of his attack were handed to him today, he would just ask, Is that it? Where’s the rest? Where’s everything else I’ve forgotten: my childhood and my youth, my first marriage and my second marriage and the growing up of my daughters?” Tyler intercedes: “All along, it seemed, he had experienced only the most glancing relationship with his own life. He had dodged the tough issues, avoided the conflicts, gracefully skirted adventure.”

This wonderful story is told with Tyler’s touching sense of humor, giving her characters the attributes and failures of us everyday folks. Unfortunately for me, while on this trip, the story was so compelling, I blew through the book in the first two days and I was concerned that I would also finish the Carver short story collection I also brought. Then, I would go crazy not having anything to read!

So, before turning to the rest of the unread Carver short stories, I made a visit to the ship’s library. There I found a well-stocked library of remainders, potboilers, mostly titles I never heard of, and certainly nothing I would choose to read. Consequently I was prepared to finish the Carver short story collection and start reading them all over again!

On my way out of the library, a large book caught my eye. What a shock to see one of the titles on my “must read” list, and how serendipitous it should be Carol Sklenicka's biography, Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life. I can’t imagine why or how this magnificent work joined the pop culture potboilers that made up the ship’s “library,” but I resolved to devour its 500 pages for the remainder of the cruise.

The book reminded me of my introduction to the literary biography genre, Mark Schorer’s Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (1961), a reading experience I never forgot because of Schorer’s incredible attention to detail. And there are similarities between Lewis and Carver, their struggle with alcoholism and their keen observations of ordinary American life.

Equally impressive is the detail packed into Sklenicka's biography of Carver and her ability to integrate Carver’s life and work, a biography by someone who clearly loves her subject. I particularly appreciated Sklenicka's relating specific poems and short stories to incidents in his life. Remarkably, Carver defined his career as “writer” while he was still in high school and never looked back. He was dependent on two women in his life, his first wife Maryann Burk and his second love, the writer Tess Gallagher who he married months before his death. They saw his genius and staunchly supported him, through his alcoholism and his early death from lung cancer (Carver was a militant smoker).

His inscription to his first wife in his last work, published only months before his death, but years after they had separated and divorced, says volumes about their relationship: “To: Maryann, my oldest friend, my youthful companion in derring-do, my mid-life companion in the same, my wife and helpmate for so long, my children’s mother, this book is a token of love, and some have claimed obsession. In any event, this is with love always, no one knows, do they, just absolutely no one. Yours, Ray. May 1988”

Still, he was equally devoted to Tess Gallagher for the last years of his life and after he realized the tumors in his lungs had returned they were married in Reno in June 1988, as an expression of their mutual love and as a means of ensuring that she would manage his remaining literary rights as his survivor.

I called this entry “Confluence” as everything came together reading this biography, Sklenicka writing: “When Richard Yates came to Tucson to promote A Good School…Ray finagled the opportunity to spend most of a day with the writer who’d been his hero since he was stopped ‘dead in his tracks’ by Revolutionary Road in 1961. To mention that novel, Richard Ford writes, ‘is to invoke a sort of cultural-literary secret handshake among its devotees.’” I am one of those devotees, not to mention a devotee to the works of Richard Ford (a life-long friend of Carver’s), and John Cheever with whom Carver ran around at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. Carver and Cheever had a mutual admiration society, two of our finest short story writers who were both, at the time of their closest association, serious alcoholics.

Thinking of Sklenicka’s work, I wondered, if I were to write an autobiography, whether I could come up with the details of my own life. (Where’s everything else I’ve forgotten: my childhood and my youth?) It is a testimony to Sklenicka’s love of her subject and her prodigious research that A Writer’s Life should emerge exactly as the subtitle promises.

In Carver’s story Blackbird Pie a man’s wife has left him (this wonderful story was greatly influenced by Carver’s feelings towards his, then, ex-wife, Maryann). He’s bewildered and is trying to make sense of it all, the first person narrator concluding: “It could be said, for instance, that to take a wife is to take a history. And if that’s so, then I understand that I’m outside history now…Or you could say that my history has left me. Or that I’m having to go on without history. Or that history will now have to do without me – unless my wife writes more letters, or tells a friend who keeps a diary, say. Then, years later, someone can look back on this time, interpret it according to the record, its scraps and tirades, its silences and innuendos. That’s when it dawns on me that autobiography is the poor man’s history. And that I am saying good-bye to history. Good-bye, my darling.” Sklenicka is that “someone” who has looked back at that time and “interpreted” it according to the “record.”

And for Carver, he “took another history,” as did I, although mine can be explained only in autobiography and to the extent that memory serves.

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Irving Writes about Writing

In the corner of my home office is a “must read” shelf of novels and short stories, some are ones I want to reread, but most are either new titles or ones I just did not get to during my working career. While many of these I already owned, or buy used from Amazon’s affiliated vendors, I allow myself the luxury of acquiring new clothbound editions written by my favorite writers. Two such recent purchases were Anne Tyler’s Noah’s Compass and John Irving’s Last Night in Twisted River.

When I finished my last book, given to me by my wife for Xmas, a wonderful, informative compendium, Geniuses of the American Musical Theatre; The Composers and Lyricists by Herbert Keyser, I debated about my next book, eyeing that new Tyler and Irving title, among the others I had squirreled away for the “right moment.” Impulsively I picked up the John Irving novel. Not sure exactly why, as I really ENJOY reading Anne Tyler, even if she writes about the same flaky characters in their Baltimore environs. Sometimes I feel like I am one of them, an accidental tourist on the journey of life.

Enjoyment would not be my motivation for reading Irving; rather, I would call it a COMPULSION and perhaps that is why Twisted River, once in my hands, became the choice du jour. Irving’s characters are not ones I easily identify with so I follow them somewhat dislodged from the comfort zone I am normally within Tyler’s or Richard Russo’s worlds.

And, indeed, Twisted River has a panoply of larger than life characters and Amazonian or Rubenesque women, the latter including Injun Jane, Six-Pack Pam, Carmella Del Popolo, and Lady Sky just to name a few of the colorful names. And then there are the men, who are often generically referred to as, “the cook” or “cookie” (Dominick), “the writer” (Daniel), “the riverman” or “the river driver” or the “logger” or the “woodsman from Coos County” (Ketchum), and the “constable” or the “crazy cowboy” or the “crazy cop” (Carl). In typical Irving fashion, there are scores and scores of supporting and minor characters.

Irving makes me feel as if I am entering a nightmare; so from the opening pages of Twisted River there is that sense of foreboding. His writing makes me stop here and there to figure out relationships, or potential relationships, as if I’m moving through molasses at times, but he is such a superior storyteller that you are drawn in and the story itself takes over.

He paints a portrait of three generations over the last fifty years and in a number of places, Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, Boston, Toronto, a twisted river of American life, Irving painting one part of the picture, jumping to another part of the canvas, temporally and geographically, circling and backfilling, bringing the story back to the beginning at the very end. It is an odyssey for the characters and for the reader. As Irving and I were born in the same year, the historical background of the novel is the one we’ve both lived at the same moment of our lives. The political history of “an empire in decline” is an omnipresent part of the novel’s subliminal setting, the arrogance of power from the folly of Vietnam to the Iraqi invasion.

Many of the usual Irving themes or symbolism are here: the bears, wrestling, New England, hands (or lack of), tattoos, accidents and fate. But, of all his novels, this may be the most illuminating about Irving himself and the craft of his writing. He even describes his Cider House Rules as another work of fiction in this novel called East of Bangor.

The main character in Twisted River is Daniel Baciagalupo a.k.a. Danny Angel, his pen name for most of the novel. Danny is Irving’s voice about writing, revealing his own tricks of the trade such as the following:

Maybe this moment of speechlessness helped to make Daniel Baciagalupo become a writer. All those moments when you know you should speak, but you can’t think of what to say – as a writer, you can never give enough attention to those moments.

All writers must know how to distance themselves, to detach themselves from this and that emotional moment, and Danny could do this – even at twelve

One day, the writer would recognize the near simultaneity of connected but dissimilar momentous events – these are what move a story forward….(He was too young to know that, in any novel, with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.)

Childhood, and how it forms you – moreover, how your childhood is relived in your life as an adult – that was his subject (or his obsession), the writer Danny Angel daydreamed….

I particularly appreciated Irving’s attention to Danny’s experience at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Some of my favorite writers have taught or have been taught there, luminaries such as John Cheever, Philip Roth, Richard Yates, Raymond Carver, Kurt Vonnegut and, of course, John Irving.

One of Danny’s teachers there is Kurt Vonnegut* a kind man and a good teacher. Describing Vonnegut’s criticism of Danny’s punctuation problem gives Irving the opportunity to reveal the major influences on his (both Danny’s and Irving’s) work: Mr. Vonnegut didn’t like all the semicolons. “People will probably figure out that you went to college – you don’t have to try to prove it to them.” [B]ut semicolons came from those old-fashioned nineteenth-century novels that had made Daniel Baciagalupo want to be a writer in the first place….Danny would be at Exeter before he actually read those books, but he’d paid special attention to those authors there – Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville…And English novelist Thomas Hardy naturally appealed to [him], who – even at twenty-five – had seen his share of what looked like fate to him. Danny (and Irving), says of his former teacher: Danny like[d] Kurt Vonnegut’s writing, and he liked the man, too. Danny was lucky with teachers he had for his writing….

Ketchum (the woodsman) is an idealized alter ego of Irving, perhaps the man he sees himself as being outside the world of writing, while Danny’s father (the cook), a kindly man, protective of his son, is the idealized father who Irving never met. Irving loves these characters, and the stories of all three men are so tightly interwoven we mourn their aging in the novel as if they are one.

The reoccurring themes of Irving’s novels, the vulnerability of childhood, and the inevitable loss of innocence, Irving’s pessimistic distrust of human nature are evident here as well:

Danny Angel’s novels had much to do with what the writer feared might happen. The novels often indulged the nightmarish – namely, what every parent fears most: losing a child. There was always something or someone in a Danny Angel novel that was ominously threatening to children, or to a child. Young people were in peril – in part, because they were young!”

But what was political about [his] other five books? Dysfunctional families; damaging sexual experience; various losses of innocence, all leading to regret. These stories were small, domestic tragedies – none of them condemnations of society or government. In Danny Angel’s novels, the villain – if there was one – was more often human nature than the United States.

It is well known that Irving works from the end of a story to the beginning and so does Danny: As always, he began at the end of the story. He’d not only written what he believed was the last sentence, but Danny had a fairly evolved idea of the trajectory of the new novel.…That was just the way he’d always worked: He plotted a story from back to front; hence he conceived of the first chapter last. By the time Danny got to the first sentence – meaning to that actual moment when he wrote the first sentence down – often a couple of years or more had passed, but by then he knew the whole story. From that first sentence, the book flowed forward – or, in Danny’s case, back to where he’d begun.

And so it is with Twisted River, a work that is a mirror within a mirror as it is Danny Baciagalupo who becomes its author in the end, Irving bringing together all the themes and characters in a coda so powerful that I found myself emotionally choked as I concluded the novel, especially relating to one of Irving’s culminating thoughts: Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly – as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth – the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives. It left me bewildered as to how I could have been so unprepared for such a reaction, other than being in awe of Irving’s gifts and the knowledge that we are all bobbing along on a twisted river, a circle of life.

* In my working days we had published The Vonnegut Encyclopedia, subtitled An Authorized Compendium as it had the full cooperation of the great writer himself. I had asked Vonnegut whether he might inscribe a copy to my son who was in high school at the time and already an admirer of Vonnegut’s writings. I was both deeply moved and amused by his inscription:



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“Business” Relationships

During my 35-year working career, I had just two jobs, the first for nearly six years and the last for thirty. Loyalty to the employer and visa a versa was more typical then. But, more importantly to me, was loyalty to the people, co-workers and vendors alike. In fact, these relationships frequently evolved into deep friendships. And, I think that made the difference between “having” to work and loving work.

I was also fortunate to find the profession that found me. I think of the idiosyncratic title of Anne Tyler’s novel, Accidental Tourist, as I was the accidental publisher. As many others of my generation, I married early. At 21 my first wife became pregnant, erasing plans of going to graduate school. Instead, it was off to work I had to go.

At the time my wife happened to have a summer job at Dell Publishing and her boss agreed to give me a one-hour education in the basics of production as a back door into the publishing industry. Knowing the difference between a point and a pica was invaluable lingo to get a job, but, finally, it was nothing more than my typing skills that prevailed in my job search. In 1964 I began work as a production assistant at the Johnson Reprint Corporation, a division of Academic Press.

Publishing became a continuous postgraduate education, providing an opportunity to work with brilliant authors, skilled vendors, and wonderful staff. And treating business vendors as partners – typesetters, printers, and distributors -- made for relationships that spanned an entire working career.

I was particularly fond of our overseas distribution partners who were expert in markets where different conventions and languages made it difficult for a US publisher to compete. We established long-standing relationships in Europe, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. While contracts governed the major terms of these arrangements, a handshake sometime covered the nuances. We shared budgets, forward plans, openly and honestly back and forth.

Over the course of time, I became close to the principals of these businesses, as well as their families. None were closer than ties to Peter G. who was the founder of a U.K. company that covered the European markets. He was a brilliant and articulate businessperson with savoir-faire.

Although Peter was thirteen years older than I, we met and joined forces when our respective businesses were in their formative stages. We supported each other in our separate but similar endeavors. We spent time together in our respective Westport and London offices as well as the Frankfurt Bookfair, strategizing, sometimes agonizing, and always laughing. I can still see that glint in his eye as he ruminated about an iconoclastic approach to marketing our publishing list in Europe.

In the early 1990’s Peter was diagnosed with cancer. His illness never brought his spirits down, at least in his dealings with me. Hearing this troubling news, Ann and I visited with he and his wife and we went out on the town instead of moping.

Peter died at the age of 63, fifteen years ago last month. Just days after his death I received an extraordinary letter, emblematic of the man and our relationship. “If there is a lesson to be learned here….”

Printed Directly from PG’s Personal Disc
Date as Postmark

Dear Bob & Ann:

Although we have not spoken of it much, you will know, Bob, that I have always valued our very special relationship. Few colleagues in publishing have ever shared such a close understanding of each other’s achievements in the face of, and most usually in spite of, frequent adversity, abiding uncertainty, and the constant fear of failure.

I like to think, on the other hand, that we made good use of such time as we could spend together, helping buttress each other throughout the years. Would that we could have seen the next step through together. But, then, there is always yet another step!

Happily, you have inherited relationships (albethey quite different from ours) with both [my sons]. Thus, there promises to be continuity, as indeed there should. However, it now behooves you to play the father figure! The King is dead; long live the King!

I shall remain ever grateful to my surgeon, whose honest and accurate estimates enabled [my wife] and me to crowd our residual quality time together with joyous and memorable events. And, most of all, to [my wife] whose energy, strength and courage have made all things possible. God could not have blessed me with a more loving, caring, and supportive wife.

I want you both to know that I go in peace and with only the happiest of memories fresh in mind. If there is a lesson to be learned here, it is surely that each and everyone of us should value every day along the way – for, certainly, nary a one is given back to do over!

With much love,
Peter