New York, N.Y.
December 18, 1979

Dear Leslie,

I'm afraid this will be a short note for the moment—I'll write at great length later on. I have some bad news about myself which I nevertheless want to tell you.

I have learned that I have cancer. It is very serious, but it is not hopeless. My doctor is a good man and a highly skilled specialist, and he has assured me and Annie that the operation—radical surgery in the throat—will save my life. I will emerge from the surgery with a diminished capacity to speak, and this will create a problem, since I make a living by speaking. But there is a good chance that I will be able to continue teaching all right. The operation is supposed to take place early in the month of January. I will be recuperating here at home most of the time. Because the operation will be serious and debilitating, I have arranged to take off the spring semester from teaching.

It is a shock, of course, perhaps the most cruel shock that a middle-aged person can face. But I have found that I have a number of considerable powers to help me. I have always been happy with my marriage to Annie, for example, but I suddenly have a deeper and clearer understanding of how very strong this marriage is. Furthermore, in determining who to tell, I have considered that I want to share the worst of this news with a very few people whom I admire and value the most, and it is interesting to me that you stand very high in my mind among those—the people, I mean, who strike me as embodying in their own lives and work something—some value, some spirit—that I absolutely care about and believe in. Of course, my dear friend, over little more than a year we have become excellent friends, and I would hope always to send you happy news. But the tragic news belongs to you too. Please don't despair over my troubles. I will find my way through this difficulty somehow, and one of the best things I have is my knowledge that you exist and that you are going on living and working. I'll be in touch again soon (by the way, if you're in N.Y.C. on February 5th please do call us).

Love,
Jim

Tucson, Arizona
January 3, 1980

Dear Jim,

Your letter was waiting when I returned from Christmas in Gallup. I wanted to wait a few days to digest it in case my feelings changed, but they have not and I trust them. I feel a great deal of distress about your speaking voice because I imagine how you must be feeling about it; but myself, I have always felt that the words and the feeling they were spoken with matter most, and I sense that this is your deepest understanding too, otherwise your letter would not have been so calm. When I was a girl my grandpa on my mother's side had just the same operation. In those days they didn't have the electronic mechanisms they have now. But all my memories of him are of his expressiveness, which I did not perceive before, although I was younger before, and maybe this is the reason. He smiled and gestured a lot and like always, he would cry when he was very happy—he was often overcome with feelings, and my mother is the same, and I am too. We can be in an airport or train depot not even seeing anyone off and when they call the train or plane, we cry. I don't know what or who we cry for, but we do. Grandpa was always that way, but after the operation it always seemed to me much more a way of speaking than simply some overflow of feeling. I supposed it is because of this and because the operation was successful for him that I read your letter calmly. Perhaps I am seeing your crisis too much like a child, and perhaps this confidence that you will be here for quite some time is my way of protecting myself from pain, but I think not. I know such things immediately; the feeling hits me and I'm never able to think fast enough to create a rationalization. I feel you will be all right, that your health will be restored. You will manage the part about your voice because voice never was sound alone. Which doesn't mean that you won't feel angry sometimes—Grandpa did, but then he learned his own new language.

I know all the stories which are told at times like these—I suppose I hesitate because there is a sort of cultural context in which they exist and New York now must be even more distant from it. Or maybe not.

It seems strange how some people get far more than their fair share of illness or trouble. I suppose Spinoza would say that Existence never heard of "fair." Hugh Crooks came to Laguna in the 1920s from somewhere in the East or Midwest. He was in his early 20s and his doctors sent him to the Southwest with tuberculosis so bad they told him just to plan on spending his last months in New Mexico. He came and waited and then nothing happened so he got a job running the store for Abie Abraham there at Laguna (this was before my Grandpa Hank had the store). My dad remembers Hugh then, always in a short-sleeved shirt even when it was snowing, and always coughing, always real skinny. My dad was just a mean little kid then, and one time he set fire to the boxes of paper and trash by the back door of the store Hugh was managing for Abie. My dad hid on the big hill north of Laguna and looked down and watched Hugh carry buckets of water to put out the fire. It seemed like Hugh never got over the t.b., but the years went by, and the next thing that happened was a terrible car wreck. Hugh was driving down the old road to Los Lunas and collided with a truck. People from Laguna who happened to drive past reported that it was all over for Hugh—I remember the graphic description—they said his pelvic bones were shoved clear up to his armpits, though that sounds a lot like embroidery. But no, he recovered in time, and the years went by, and I think he liked to drink a lot. I don't remember hearing much about Hugh other than this litany which I am reciting to you, Jim, this litany of his physical disasters. I think now that there wasn't much that was remarkable about Hugh otherwise—he wasn't a mean man and he didn't cheat people, but I think he had a pretty ordinary life except for these terrible illnesses and accidents for which we have always known him. Anyway, I guess he did some drinking, though it was never the sort that led to broken screen doors or fights. He never married, and it wasn't until many many years later that my mother figured out why that might have been. Anyway, the next thing we knew, someone had been to the hospital to see Hugh, and this time it was his liver and they said Hugh won't make it this time, his liver is swollen up as big as a watermelon, and everyone went to visit him thinking that this was it. Aunt Florence went to see him, and Aunt Mary, and they both said that it was true that he had survived the t.b. and the car wreck but this time the cirrhosis had him. Well everybody said it was too bad, but after all it was lucky he had lived this long, and that it was funny too that one or two of the people who had seen him in the wreckage of his truck and pronounced him a goner—well, they were gone by this time, in one way or another. But this time . . . Hugh got out of the hospital and was back in his pickup truck driving around, still smoking, still coughing, in his short-sleeved shirts. Pretty soon he was running a bar at Swanee, which is where old U.S. 66 used to intersect the old highway to Los Lunas. Swanee is just off the Laguna reservation and near the Navajo reservation land at Cañoncito. Anyway, the bar was always busy with Lagunas and Navajos buying liquor and with passersby on U.S. 66 and the Los Lunas road. Hugh liked keeping the bar pretty well because he liked talking to people and he liked his regular customers, and I guess he liked being able to drink some himself too. I think he wasn't very ambitious and he never seemed like he had much money or cared whether he did. Anyway, one night some hold-up men passing through on 66 held up Hugh's bar (crooks traveling on Highway 66 from Chicago to L.A. or vice versa used to run out of money right around the Laguna area and then they'd break in or do a hold-up). Hugh took out a .38 he kept under the counter and shot one of the hold-up men (didn't kill him), but then the other shot Hugh in the chest with a .38. He was in critical condition for a long time, and then just when he was getting better he got pneumonia, and the doctors (doctors who knew Hugh also knew better than to say anything but these doctors didn't know and so they) said he wouldn't pull through. All Grandpa Hank would say was "I wonder if Hugh will make it this time," and he did; and it was right after this that my mom was driving to Albuquerque on Highway 66 and she saw Hugh picking up a young hitchhiker, and then coming home she saw him on the other side of the highway picking up another hitchhiker (he wasn't running the bar any more), and that was when we got some idea maybe about Hugh and his life and why he wasn't married and why he had friends like my mom and my aunts who were women, but no girl friends to speak of. Not long after this, my Grandpa Hank died and Hugh came to the funeral, and someone made the remark later that it was funny how Hugh was still going long after many of the people who had always expected Hugh to die before they did.

I don't think Grandpa Hank thought this, but a lot of others did. Aunt Florence was already gone by then too, now that I think of it, and she had been so sure that time Hugh had the liver trouble. By this time now it had become pretty clear to all of us, but when Hugh went into the hospital for cancer of the gums, Aunt Lorena and Aunt Mary saw him and reported that this absolutely was it for Hugh, and they stood their ground when Grandma Lillee and my dad reminded them of the people who said that before and who were gone. Somewhere during this time too there was some mention of Hugh's liver and cancer, so maybe that's why as Aunt Lorena was driving to Mass with her little granddaughter in Los Lunas she had a stroke and was gone. A year or so later, Aunt Mary got one of her asthma attacks and didn't recover. Hugh Crooks is almost eighty now. It's my dad's generation and mine (and a lot of my dad's generation are gone now too)—we who grew up in awe of Hugh because the adults around us were always talking about him being on his last legs—it's we now who are left, and of course time changes perspectives. We got to know something which the older people didn't because they didn't have the benefit of time. Yet beyond this simple parable level I'm not sure what this story means.

But I like the story because there's this humor in it right along and it intrigues me that there is this man who is known almost solely for the simple fact that he is alive. When I think I'm getting more than my fair share of trouble I always remember Hugh Crooks stories or Harry Marmon stories (Harry got out of the physical ones unscathed, but there were always jail and police and lawyers and fines, and still Harry is a free man). Maybe if a person can manage way more than his or her fair share of trouble, then another sort of perspective or dimension is involved, I don't know. At Laguna they say it just makes you tougher. In the old days even where there was plenty of food they'd all practice for famine—it wasn't puritanical or Calvinistic at all—it was simply practical to make yourself tough enough, because famine is inevitable.

Today, Jim, I am going to work on my garden plot. I hope to grow a few snow peas, some spinach, and some sweet peas. I will be happy just with sweet peas which do very well down here in the winter and early spring. I have chosen a place about 20 feet below the drain for the kitchen sink water and will grow these crops with dishwater. We've had no winter yet to speak of and having a garden will make me very happy.

You are a dear dear friend, Jim. In so many ways it was you who helped me through those difficult times last year. At times like these I often wish I had more to say, but somehow it comes out in a story. I hope all this does not strike you as too strange. I seem not to react like most people do at times like these. I think I sense your calm and your deep faith. I know it has to do with your wonderful writing and, more important, with the visions that emerge from it.

Love,
Leslie

Copyright © 1985 by Anne Wright. All rights reserved.