Stoned

I got stoned the other day.

No, not in the drug-abuse way. More like the Old Testament way.

I was reading the New York Times, and I came across a review of a new biography of writer Robert Stone (1937-2015), Child of Light, by Madison Smartt Bell. Link to review.

Stone had been a celebrated novelist—a finalist several times for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.

I read a lot of Stone—Back in the Day. Dog Soldiers (1974), A Flag for Sunrise (1981), and a few others. And in our massive set of files about writers, I was pretty sure we had a Stone file. So I clipped the article, found the file in a packed drawer, opened it, and found a surprise.

I’d actually seen Stone back in 1992!

Back then, the Cleveland Plain Dealer sponsored a series of events each year—the Book and Author Luncheons. I’d gone down there several times—sometimes taking with me some of my middle school students—to hear presentations—and meet—well-known writers. (Okay, and I got them to sign books.)

At one of them I remember an encounter with Elmore Leonard (if you haven’t read him, do so; if you haven’t read him, you may have watched the Fx series Justified, based on Leonard novels, Pronto and Riding the Rap, and starring Timothy Olyphant).

After I stood in line for about eleven years and reached the little table where Leonard was signing (I’d brought a bunch of books—some of my students were carrying some in line so that I wouldn’t look that the Pig I was), I asked him if he was going to write any more Westerns (he had written a half-dozen or so—good ones).

“Why?” he asked. “No one will read them.”

Okay.

Anyway, Robert Stone.

After I’d pulled the little program from the file, I saw that joining Stone that day were journalist Robert MacNeil and novelist Sara Paretsky (she writes mysteries featuring V. I. Warshawski).

And I saw, to my surprise, that I’d jotted down some things Paretsky and Stone had said:

PARETSKY: She’d raged about an abusive father: “Those early lessons die very hard.”

STONE: “It’s ironic that we want our lives to mean something. We want to link ourselves to a story. Only through stories can we have the beginnings of coherence.”

I remember very little about that day—even with this material. It says in the bulletin that Paretsky grew up in Kansas, and I remember I told her I was from Oklahoma. She smiled. Asked me some questions about my life in the Sooner State—and I can not remember a single thing I said.

So ...

Also in that Stone folder: the long Times obituary from January 12, 2015. Pulmonary disease (he’d been a heavy cigarette smoker).  Stone was 77. Link to that obituary.

I’m 75.

That’s not comforting.

What is comforting is that I’ve learned all those files are—as I should have suspected—a source of wonder.