When an Interview Can Make You Cry

For the past few months - really since I left camp but especially since I got to Israel - I've been catching up on Fresh Air episodes from early last year. I'm currently listening to the late-April ones and have been treated to Terri Gross's intellectual curiosity opening up conversations with Helen Hunt, Dr. Dan Gottlieb (best-selling author of Letters to Sam and a pretty impressive therapist), Kyle Chandler (of Early Edition and Friday Night Lights), Bishop Eugene Robinson (the gay Episcopalian), and many, many more. It is one of the things that makes the interminable commute back-and-forth to Hebrew U. a bit more tolerable.

Today, two things caught my mind/eye:

1. In an interview about the late Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, with Fresh Air classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz (who bears an uncanny family resemblance) who was a close friend of Bishop's and has written about her, they discussed Bishop's poem "Breakfast Song." Both Terri (I use Terri's first name because she feels to me like something of an old-family friend as I grew up listening to her interviews in the car with my dad, whenever we weren't listening to the Grateful Dead, Nanci Griffith, or other crazy classic rock/folk music) and Schwartz, who rescued the poem from oblivion before Bishop died (that's another fascinating story on its own), take the poem as referring explicitly to one of Bishop's lovers. I disagree. Instead, I think the poem is really about her love affair with what I imagine to be a blue mug that holds her morning coffee. This would explain both the title of the poem, and Bishop's use of such peculiar phrasing as "I kiss your funny face/ your coffee-flavored mouth" and "awfully blue/ early and instant blue" as well as a less peculiar image of "easy breath" and "nightlong, limblong warmth" that embrace Bishop. I've e-mailed Fresh Air; we'll see if I get a response.

2. In a second interview, with Marine Colonel Steve Beck and journalist Jim Sheeler, we hear of the haunting and moving task that Beck performs for the Marine Core: informing next-of-kin (usually wives or parents) of the death of their loved one in Iraq. I found myself, ricocheting around uncomfortably on the slow-moving and chareidi-filled 4-aleph bus this afternoon, crying as I heard about one particularly powerful story, of a pregnant woman who had lost her husband. As Sheeler describes (in my paraphrase), the following anecdote was all he needed to know about the late Marine: "The night before he left for Iraq, he slept with a baby blanket his wife had knitted for the baby, knowing that he would no be back in time for the baby's birth. But he wanted the baby to know from its first days how its father smelled." I am tempted to transcribe the entire interview that so moved me today.

Sheeler wrote a book about Beck's work; the podcast and book should be must-buys.