Dear Life

husband was alive and when I was still driving the car.”
    “You have a nice car?”
    “Volvo.”
    “See? You’re sharp as a tack.”

DOLLY
    T HAT fall there had been some discussion of death. Our deaths. Franklin being eighty-three years old and myself seventy-one at the time, we had naturally made plans for our funerals (none) and for the burials (immediate) in a plot already purchased. We had decided against cremation, which was popular with our friends. It was just the actual dying that had been left out or up to chance.
    One day we were driving around in the country not too far from where we live, and we found a road we hadn’t known about. The trees, maples and oaks and others, were second growth, though of an impressive size, indicating that there had been cleared land. Farms at one time, pastures and houses and barns. But not a sign of this was left. The road was unpaved but not untravelled. It looked as if it might seeseveral vehicles a day. Maybe there were trucks that used it as a shortcut.
    This was important, Franklin said. No way did we want to be there for a day or two, or possibly a week, with no discovery. Nor did we want to leave the car empty, with the police having to tramp through the trees in search of remains that the coyotes might already have got into.
    Also, the day must not be too melancholy. No rain or early snow. The leaves turned but not many fallen. Plastered with gold, as they were on that day. But perhaps the sun would not be shining, else the gold, the glamour of the day, might make us feel like spoilers.
    We had a difference about the note. That is, about whether we should leave a note or not. I thought that we owed people an explanation. They should be told that there was no question of a fatal illness, no onset of pain that blocked out the prospect of a decent life. They should be assured that this was a clearheaded, you might almost say a lighthearted decision.
    Gone while the going is good.
    No. I retracted that. Flippancy. An insult.
    Franklin’s idea was that any explanation at all was an insult. Not to others but to ourselves. To ourselves. We belonged to ourselves and to each other and any explanation at all struck him as snivelling.
    I saw what he meant but I was still inclined to disagree.
    And that very fact—our disagreement—seemed to put the possibility out of his head.
    He said that it was rubbish. All right for him but I was too young. We could talk again when I was seventy-five.
    I said that the only thing that bothered me, a little, wasthe way there was an assumption that nothing more was going to happen in our lives. Nothing of importance to us, nothing to be managed anymore.
    He said that we had just had an argument, what more did I want?
    It was too polite, I said.
    I have never felt that I am younger than Franklin, except maybe when the war comes up in conversation—I mean the Second World War—and that seldom happens nowadays. For one thing, he does more strenuous exercise than I do. At one time he was the overseer of a stable—I mean the sort of stable where people board riding horses, not racehorses. He still goes there two or three times a week, and rides his own horse, and talks to the man in charge who occasionally wants his advice. Though mostly he says he tries to keep out of the way.
    He is in fact a poet. He is really a poet and really a horse trainer. He has held one-term jobs at various colleges, but never so far away that he can’t keep in touch with the stables. He admits to giving readings, but only as he says once in a blue moon. He doesn’t stress the poetic employment. Sometimes I am annoyed with this attitude—I call it his aw-shucks persona—but I can see the point. When you’re busy with horses people can see that you are busy, but when you’re busy at making up a poem you look as if you’re in a state of idleness and you feel a little strange or embarrassed having to explain what’s going on.
    Another problem might be that though he is a reticent sort of man, the poem that he is best known for is what peoplearound here—that is, where he grew up—are apt to call raw. Pretty raw, I have heard him say himself, not apologizing but just maybe warning somebody off. He has a feeling for the sensibilities of those people he knows who can be upset by certain things, though he is a great defender of freedom of speech in general.
    Not that there haven’t been changes around here, concerning what you can say out loud and read