I saw a truth the other day:

Two schoolchildren kneel in prayer at the gate to a cemetery. The older one, a boy not yet 11, clenches a bouquet of icy flowers between his reverent hands. His sister, a younger girl who quivers in the wind, peeks at him from the corner of her eye, unsure of things and her place in them.

Who waits for them in an overheated Chevy? A father who nuzzles the bottle in his coat and sighs in foolishness? A grandmother who never loved her but is obsessed with "the right thing", though she does not know its name? Or did they, disobedient yet righteous, tramp alone through the late snow drifts in their matching blue parkas and drop mutely into the delusions of adults learning to pay homage?

Who is this God that keeps them from sharing hands in grief? Will this boy, when a grown man, still pick flowers intead of words?

Remember this: I did not interrupt to reach for that struggling girl's shoulder as her brother grappled with his token.

That is the poorest quality of the writer, I think, the detached necessity to note everything in the context of its place and proper importance. Ironically, those moments of failed humanity become the most lurid gifts to the reader, for fiction always claws its way back to reality.

There is a thing called art, and it revels in those dark prizes. The still poetry of a photograph and the stirring completion of a story steal from the willing mind a rope which thrums to the songs of childhood and beyond. And without such petty thievery, we have no chains to bind the pages of a magazine or book together in a finality the author is embarrassed to understand. For if he were aware, he would be destroyed by the knowledge of the things he has done, the chances he has missed, yes, the people he has hurt. And he would inevitably turn to the more suitable profession of plumber or banker or solicitor and life would be grand and somehow empty.

So think of the lives behind these tales--not just of the creators, but of the inspirations. I tell you a story of children and I wonder, in twenty years will a young woman turn from her lover's hand blind and unstrung because a stranger--though then no more so than a brother or father or that to which she prayed--chose prose over passion?

Stories and pictures, and behind them, moments and illusions crystalized into truths so real we must call them fictions.

Best Wishes,

Katherine