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Chautauqua 2007
Closing Remarks
Chautauqua Stories
This week at Chautauqua has been so wonderful! So incredible! So . . . fantastic.
So . . . .
No, I can’t describe the week without describing the place—Chautauqua. Chautauqua is such a beautiful place. I’ve—
No. That’s not quite enough either. I need to bring in the people to describe the place. All of you! You are the nicest group of people one could ever spend time with. I mean, I’ve never met people so nice . . .
[Sigh.]
That’s not quite what I meant to say. Let me try again—
Chautauqua is
sunrise on a bowtie lake
dividing the water like Moses—
silver blue on one side, flamingo pink on the other.
Chautauqua is
a grand curving staircase,
its wooden banister polished smooth
by hand after hand after hand,
one hundred twenty-six years of hands,
smoothing . . . smoothing.
It is green-white hydrangeas
bowing their heads toward the Earth
as if in prayer.
It is Peter Jacobi’s voice
melting over you
like honey on a hot waffle.
Chautauqua is moose tracks ice cream,
spinach salad sweetened with plump blueberries and sliced strawberries,
hazelnut-vanilla lattes (1/4 squirt of each, please).
Chautauqua is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—
one moment a soprano’s throaty song echoing in your head,
the next the smell of mildew
seeping from linoleum
faded to the color of urine.
And, of course, Chautauqua is
bats-bats-bats twirling,
night dancers
pouring from attic windows
as the sun dwindles.
No—Chautauqua is not beautiful.
And you—you’re not nice people.
You are—
a woman who once was a girl
growing up in Tuscany,
squishing grapes between your toes to make wine.
You carry the latest technology
to help you write through the pain.
When I say “I’m off to the Starbucks,” you—and only you—
say “Oh, yeah. The Mother Ship calls.”
You tell me of the day the creek ran so high beside your son’s house in Oklahoma
you began to make plans to flee to higher ground with the grandbabies.
You know that a bar of dark chocolate
can plow through the ice of a new experience
better than a Coast Guard cutter.
You grew up on a lake just like this.
Your eyes mist when you tell me
that all you could think of when you were young
was moving away.
You give me a frog made of shiny beads;
I feel the heat of Mexican sun in your fingertips.
You buy a blanket impregnated with twenty years of Joy Cowley’s molecules.
I see you wrapping it around you,
becoming one with New Zealand’s most renowned storyteller.
You try to get the waitress to leave a bottle of Shiraz on the table—
night after night after night.
You are relentless, generous, quirky, sensuous, spiritual, shy.
You are not nice people.
You are a bunch of characters!
And for that, I am grateful.
Chautauqua—this experience—is not mushy and nondescript like congealed oatmeal. Chautauqua is visceral. You may not know it, but you have absorbed Chautauqua in through your pores. It’s in your blood, in your cells—it’s making your fingers twitch, making you want to pick up your pen or boot up your computer, making you salivate to write.
And not something abstract. No, you have moved beyond clouds floating in the sky. Chautauqua is in your bones. It won’t allow beautiful, wonderful, nice stories. It will demand stories your readers can see, smell, bite into—stories that shoot lemon juice into their eyes and make them blink. Stories they can wrap around them until they feel the soft fur of an ox’s belly. Stories only you can tell.
And those, my Chautauqua friends, are the only stories worth telling.
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