by Richard Stern

I flew back to Chicago yesterday after a weekend in Sacramento where on Friday I gave a reading at the California State University there and spent the rest of the 50 odd hours with my youngest son, his wife, and my four-and-a-half-year-old grandson. In its way, a perfect weekend. Moving around was always a stimulant to write, and though more and more the moving is difficult, apparently that's still the case. I probably could write 25,000 words on the Sacramento hours but I'll just zero in on a few things. The first came yesterday in the plane. My seatmate was a 52-year-old woman, small, dark, good featured, energetic, high-spirited, her fingers and neck festooned with silver necklaces and rings. She's lived in Sacramento for years, has a daughter, perhaps a second husband and was going to Washington D.C. to deal with federal funding of child welfare cases. Like her seatmate, a woman of about the same age, she took a thick paperback book of popular fiction from her bag, but within a minute the books were laid aside, the women talked with each other about their homes, their families, their origins, their hometowns, their children and husbands. Often, peals of laughter burst from them. From being their eavesdropper, I became their admirer, the admiration almost generic, the object of it the way in which two fluent women of--and this was my perhaps overly snobbish judgment--limited education and culture were able not only to sustain a constant exchange of views about many things but actually to begin what might become a real friendship. (They copied down each other's names and addresses. May I add that they were extremely courteous and friendly to me?) As for Sacramento, I learned a bit about the university from a 24-year-old fellow behind me in the Super-Shuttle from the airport. He told me that he was a third-year student majoring in kinesiology and about to take a few courses in radiology after which he hoped to get a job in sports medicine. He'd been a "street kid" in southwest L.A. One evening he and his friends were jumped by a gang. He was stabbed six times, the blade just missing his lungs, heart, and kidneys. He woke in a hospital where for weeks he was cared for by doctors whom he then decided were models. "Otherwise I'd probably just be hanging around the street," he said. "I came up here to get away from things down there." "So in a way, your life was saved twice," I said. "That's right." "Did they ever get the guy who stabbed you" "No. The detective spent about ten minutes with me. Never saw him again." We said goodbye wishing each other lots of luck. Two hours later, I was in a small auditorium, reading to about 40 people, most of them writers in the class of Doug Rice, my host, a few others people who'd read something I'd written. It was, I thought, an especially attentive and responsive audience. After the reading itself--the story was about a Chicago bus driver on his fiftieth birthday which his wife has ignored--