laura my dear

I felt like a farmer with a shotgun in one hand a plug of tobacco buck teeth and a straw in my mouth. I was such a fool then, and now too I suppose.

Now Laura Miner on the other hand was fine boned and delicate.  She was also troublesome smart. Certainly she was something I had never seen nor even imagined being able to see before.  Just graduated from Berkeley and on her way to the Sorbonne, she  was truly ambitious and had an intelligence like I had never quite imagined and couldn't imagine existed.  I'd say she was the first first and finest of this type I have ever encountered.

But this was all belied by her gentle beauty, endless empathy, consideration, and kindness.  And her conversational skills!  I had never heard anyone talk like that, ever.  It was like taking a warm bath while taking speed and jumping out to do frenetic exercise, plugging in the guitar and playing real loud, diving back in the tub and jabbing a needle in your head for direct knowledge enhancement, while taking merge (thanks Rudy).

There used to be a phrase whip-smart.  I only heard it on tv, but she was it.

But what I want to talk about is her helpfulness.  I was I think just graduating and I had a long long paper I had done, ah but it was kind of sloppy, as usual for me, and I had never bothered to tighten it edit it anything like that.  But she was visiting us and volunteered to type it for me.

And she did, all 64 pages of it and my god could she type!  She was fast and accurate.  Now she said she didn't know anything about my subject (literature) and she didn't, but about three pages in she started asking questions, real penetrating questions, and I started thinking, it was queer, I think I wrote that entire thing without a thought.  And this paper began to grow at last in my mind, and I would walk around actually thinking, and she kept asking questions and I couldn't always find an answer.

Suddenly we started blowing holes in the paper, straightening it out, by god she had stepped on the gas It now had a theme, a philosophy. She had found some brilliant literate theme, and we were driving down that road. I was shocked, dizzy, wild.  --and then, she decided to retype it, change the title, the entire thing, I was thrilled,  I could barely take it, but she sat there, for days, working on it, now we were adding to our trumped up new theme, just brilliant, and finally it was done.

And she said well, here is your graduate thesis.  And she was right.

Now you might think I'm done.  But I was listening to Martha My Dear and trying to play it on my piano and she said Do you want to learn it? and yea I want to.  Well she didn't play piano but she had perfect pitch and didn't forget things she'd heard, so she went over and picked it out and taught it to me, the entire song in all its detail.

And one day she met me at the Guggenheim. Laura knows art and artists.  Inside and out.  It was a miracle, for she changed every single thing in the place.  What I had once found boring along  with being drilled and filled. Now all the artists were exciting, all the struggles were changed into an adventure and a quest.  And I was changed.

I was no longer useless.  I had found a calling I could follow.

That girl changed my life.