What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [27]
By the beginning of summer Harry finished a third book, The Golden Willow. In it, he tells about his unforeseen adventures after turning ninety. Like the previous two books, it took him less than a year to write—remarkable considering that he claims to be a lazy writer. Part of what allowed him to work quickly, he said, was that he no longer felt any pressure when he wrote. “I spent so many years when I had to write thirty or forty pages in a day, writing treatments for the movie studios. So if I don’t feel like writing now, I don’t. I have only one luxury when I write: I write when I damn well feel like it.” He had also honed his method of writing. “I won’t sit down to write unless I have a hunk of material—a chapter’s worth or as much as a short story. If the raw material is good, I won’t make any mistakes. Never sit down to write anything unless you can hold the story in your hand like a ball. And whatever you do, be sure you finish what you have started. It’s like building a house. Don’t stop until you can put a chimney on it.”
Disconcertingly, Harry struggled to put the final bricks in place for The Golden Willow’s chimney. For a while, he was nagged by the fear that he would have to rewrite a chunk of the book and that he had perhaps run out of things to say. Still, he was not about to add pages just to make the brief book longer. “One thing I don’t do, I don’t pad.”
After suffering a few anxious weeks, his agent notified him that Ballantine Books had accepted his manuscript and agreed to pay a $175,000 advance. The Golden Willow was published during the same week that Harry celebrated his ninety-ninth birthday. By then, because he had received so many letters asking him what ever happened to her, he was sketching out a fourth book based on the character of his sister Rose, who once had fancied herself royalty.
In late October 2008, Harry was set to undergo surgery to clean out a severely blocked carotid artery, an operation that, at his age, carried a significant risk. But without surgery, his risk of having a fatal stroke was very high. The day before the operation, he was supposed to take a limousine from New Jersey and meet his daughter at New York Medical Center. Late in the day she phoned him from the hospital to see where he was. She informed him that his bed was ready and that the staff was waiting to get preoperative testing under way. Harry was a little peeved by the call. He was in the midst of work for his publisher, he told Adraenne, and as far as he was concerned, it couldn’t wait. The hospital bed could.
“I’m supposed to be getting ready to die,” he told me that night, when I visited him at the hospital. “But these have been the most productive years of my life. You live in a sort of dream most of your life. Your dreams are wishful thinking of what you want to be and want to have. It’s not until you face the harsh reality of yourself that you can do or say anything intelligent. Write what you know, they say. Well, it sure took me a long time to get that, didn’t it?” A week later, Harry was back at his desk, pounding out some more of what he knows.
DANA DAKIN
One Woman, Two Villages
“This is the kind of love I want.”
It might have been otherwise for Dana Dakin if her romance with a billionaire had worked out. But then if the romance had worked out, Dana would not have moved to Wilmot Flat, New Hampshire. And if she had never moved to Wilmot Flat, she might never have ventured to Pokuase—and it would then have also been otherwise for thousands of women in Ghana.
For twenty-five years, Dana, a tall, vibrant woman whose stature and styled white hair often make her look like an advertisement for an Eileen Fisher store, had been running her own consulting business for institutional