Touch of Gray - April / May 2005

Voices - Why Do You Write
Margaret Hays

Voices - Why Do You Write
   Asking writers “Why do you write?” may bring incredulous stares (was that “Why do you breathe?”) or considered answers like those given by some Carolina Meadows residents who in their careers exercised their writing skills as editors or engineers to further programs or projects, or as ministers and professors concerned with the Word and with words. What they all had in common was a firm grasp of what Aristotle said in his Rhetoric: The orator or writer must project a credible character, must have a good sense of occasion, and must know how to engage the sympathetic interest of the audience – principles articulated by many commentators since. The well-constructed speech or article or book was designed to instruct by persuasion.

   But what do such capable writers do in retirement, when there is no compelling need to persuade or instruct? Consider the case of two professors, historian Sam Baron, who continued to produce scholarly studies, and sociologist Amos Hawley, who did not. At age 82 Baron decided that he was through with history, but missing the exhilaration of writing he embarked on a series of memoirs (history of a sort, at that). When Hawley concluded that his many important population studies were “less than entertaining,” he turned abruptly to writing fiction, mainly to entertain himself. “If what I write entertains others, that for me is a bonus,” he says. “I like to play with words to create characters and then move them through plots to problematic conclusions.” An example of the story “Brief Encounters”: a young man and a young woman who have been acutely aware of one another since grade school go separate ways for long periods and thereby experience changes in their relationship; why can’t they really get together as the reader may hope?

   Hawley’s statement recalls the insight of Francis Bacon, who early in the seventeenth century noted the power of the imagination to “submit the shows of things to the desires of the mind.” The writer, in short, can create a world in which things are as they may be wished for – the end is not persuasion but pleasure, beginning with the writer’s own. John M. Ryan, an economist, speaks in the same vein about turning to fiction. “At first, I enjoyed being a deity” creating life, destroying it at will, putting people into unimaginably difficult situations, extricating them if I felt like it. It wasn’t long, however, before I discovered that this demigod business isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I could create as many characters as I wished on paper, but as soon as I create one it develops a mind of its own and I lose control.” When he starts writing a story he doesn’t know where it is going, but he has the satisfaction that he will be the first to know how it ends.

   For some residents the question “Why do you write?” is one that can be answered only indirectly. Writing is something that Joe Patterson has always done. He has published several books of poetry, a serious theological work, and an account of his experiences as a battlefield surgeon in World War II and Korea. He looks back on a period when “the writing was quite effortless. Among the results was self-expression although this was not intended. I was not ‘driven’ to write. It was a natural thing for me to do.” Another resident, Betty McMahan, would probably find the question somewhat puzzling, for she is almost too busy to consider it seriously – the evidence is there: she is a writer and artist who shares her gifts generously. Her witty cartoons in the monthly newsletter, THE MEADOWLARK, constitute an excellent running commentary on life at Carolina Meadows, where she is the artist in residence actually if not officially. She has written and illustrated a series of books directed chiefly to her nieces and nephews, detailing her aspirations of adventures as a scientist; her work as an entomologist has taken her far a field and has been the subject of BCC programs.

   Many of Carolina Meadows retired writers find a creative outlet in the literary magazine, Voices. Voices is a publication of short stories, poems and literary works by authors at Carolina Meadows. What do the residents write about? Almost anything will serve, as the entries in Voices 2005 show. As is to be expected, writers in their senior years are aware of the swift passage of time and the sustaining power of precious memories. Past and present can merge unexpectedly as in Eleanor Kilgour’s “Dawn Swimmers,” in which a sudden gleam of sunlight makes three swimmers who are “Companioned but solitary/cordoned by float lines” seem like a memory of three porpoises moving up an inlet. In works of fiction the play of time and memory can produce pictures of the examined life in early and late phases. Virginia Sampson’s “From the Memories” is a portrait of the artist as a young girl who is about to abandon the fantasy of becoming a writer. In another Sampson story a widow is paging through catalogues of clothing remembers that some fine things in her closet she will never wear again in a fancy restaurant – she will settle this evening for fast food with two friends wearing their warm-up suits: “Walking into one of these busy pizza places and trying to feel right in a baggy gym suit, that’s what took all ones courage riding out these days.”

   Whether in story or essay, people the writers have known well or observed from a distance figure importantly. In the short story “Lena” Floyd A. Fried presents the thoughts of a nurse who feels under appreciated for her long years of service and ignored by doctors whom she introduced to routine duties when they were young interns; unaware of her own limitations, she resents the less experienced nurses who have been promoted above her. It is realistic, not sentimental, yet touched with irony and pity. Other stores and memoirs touch on how family members or chance acquaintances have affected the course of ones life. When Ed Mammen’s Regiment was station in Vienna during the 1945 occupation, the regimental band performed in an enlisted men’s nightclub. Austrians curious about American big band music gathered outside to listen, and during intermission Ed, who played the drums, got acquainted with Willi Dirtl, a fourteen-year-old ballet dancer with the State Opera. Willi Dirtl introduced him to the prima ballerina, who in turn invited Ed and a band buddy to several performances; Ed became an opera fan. Two essays remind the reader that World War II changed the lives of some women very strikingly. In “the Kennet and Avon Canal,” Margaret Wharton writes about a waterway she knew before coming to the United States as a war bride, and in “Kimono Ambassador,” Shio Northup recalls how a favorite doll of her childhood, a blue-eyed one that her father brought home from a business trip to London, made her curious about the World beyond Japan, a world she determined she would sometime see. Now here she is, living at Carolina Meadows but frequently returning to Japan in pursuit of her works as a fabric artist.

   Thirty-two stories, essays, and poems by twenty-six authors in Voices 2005 range from the serious to the appropriately titled “Strictly Nonsense” by Joe Patterson. Any resident may submit work to be considered for publication in the magazine, which is managed by the Writing Group; John Ryan is the editor. Assistant editors are Herb Bailey, who was for forty years editor and director of the Princeton University Press, Carol Klein, who worked as a news reporter and magazine editor, award winning poet Nan Melcher, and Ruth Morrow, a short story writer with an eye for social comedy. The editors are aided by a corps of reviewers who read submissions and write anonymous critiques that are passed on to the authors, sometimes with suggestions for revision. The writing group has been meeting for a number of years in weekly two-hour sessions to test efforts and ideas for poems, stories, and essays. The guiding spirit of the Group has been Virginia Sampson, whose dedication to writing is well known.

   Samuel Johnson once famously said “Nobody but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” That was the exasperated outburst of a man without a patron or an institutional connection; one who has had to supply what was wanted by the booksellers – the publishers of his day. Voices contributors, no blockheads, write for love of their craft.

   A final response to the question, “Why do you write?” Dorothy Ferster, the last editor of MEADOWSCRIPTS (which preceded Voices) has considered all the answers given in many forms over a long time. She says the answer “that silences all the rest ‘Because I must.’ That is the inexorable pressure that pushes the writers among us – the good and great ones – to give us the means to share in the human experience in a way that cannot be had otherwise.” -- Vincent Freimarck

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Margaret Hays
    On the campus of North Central Texas College, a two-year institution in Gainesville, students, staff and friends of the college will gather on Thursday (May 6) this week, to honor and name a residence hall for Margaret Parx Hays, a graduate of the college, alumna booster and former Gainesville civic activist, and now a resident of Carolina Meadows. In her years away from Gainesville, Margaret enjoyed a 23-year career in the foreign service of the United States, serving in posts as distant from each other as Manila, Buenos Aires, and Washington, DC.
 
    Margaret was born in Gainesville in 1912; her father, a realtor, and her mother, a teacher, were blessed with more brains and ambition for their three daughters than money. At a time when women were a small minority on most college campuses, Margaret and her older sisters all excelled as students. Margaret graduated from high school in 1929, and by taking college level courses in high school and later in summer school, graduated from what was then known as Gainesville Junior College only a year after high school. The next four years she attended North Texas State Teachers College (now North Texas University). After graduation, she took a job as secretary to the dean and as a guidance counselor to students at North Texas. There her boss, Dean B. B. Harris, was known to joke that “Margaret is supporting five people—myself, Mrs. Harris, our two children and herself.” In breaks from her campus job, Margaret found time to earn an M.A. in Education at the University of Michigan.
 
    After eleven years of dealing with campus problems, Margaret sought a more wide-ranging career, and won appointment as a coding clerk in the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires. That was in 1943, with World War II in full cry, and in Argentina whose leader, Juan Peron, was more than suspected of harboring Nazi sympathies and German agents. Margaret recalls a morning when a colleague at the Embassy called her at home to warn her that women staffers should not report for work that day. Peron’s followers had scheduled a demonstration before the Embassy, and identifiable Americans might be at risk.
 
    Margaret recalls: “I stayed with my colleague’s wife. We got reports all day about Peron coming in. My colleague, who had been working all day, came in that night after he had worked for 24 hours. I went to the code room and I worked for 24 hours straight. That was the way we did things then.”
 
    Back in Washington after her Buenos Aires tour, with no permanent appointment in the State Department and no immediate job prospects, Margaret was advised to check in with the Department’s Personnel office. “They wound up offering me a position as vice consul,” she recalls. “I knew that if I got a position as vice consul I would get responsible work. So I wound up as a vice consul in Bogotá, Colombia.” After five years of service, Margaret was eligible to take an oral examination for appointment as a Foreign Service Officer. “It was worth shooting for,” she says, “so I tried for it and managed to take an oral examination and become a Foreign Service Officer.”
 
    Nearing the end of her Bogotá assignment, she received a phone call from a political officer in the Embassy. “Margaret, you are going to Rio,” he announced, “and you are going to arrive speaking Portuguese because I am going to teach you.” For the rest of her time in Bogotá, the friend took 30 minutes of his lunchtime each day to tutor Margaret in Portuguese, and she landed in Rio with some elements of the new language in her repertoire.
 
    There was one hitch in her career. In an era when Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy was spreading fear with his warnings of Communist infiltration in the State Department, an anonymous informant planted a warning in her personnel record alleging that she was a Communist sympathizer. Margaret met the charge head on with a denial of its truth. She felt that the existence of the charge may have delayed her getting a security clearance—essential for any responsible foreign assignment—but otherwise did not impede her career. After Rio, her next assignment was in Manila.
 
    Margaret had long nurtured an interest in the 12th-century Buddhist ruins at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and on leave from her duties in Manila, she flew to Cambodia and traveled on to Angkor Wat. “The only hotel facility was a wooden house, dusty as it could be,” she recalls. I wasn’t going to sit around that dusty hotel, so I went out and found a fellow pulling a rickshaw. I loved it. He pulled me all over town.” She still treasures the boxes of photographs (now on slides) that she made at Angkor Wat and at other way stations she visited.
 
    In another break from her official duties in Manila, Margaret joined a group of American women who embarked in two cars for a tour of Northern Luzon, a wild region where Westerners were seldom seen. She heard rumors that young men of the tribes were required to produce the head of a Christian before being allowed to marry.
 
    At their destination the women found some of the horror stories confirmed when a shop displayed a picture of a tribesman brandishing a severed human head. They also encountered an elderly American anthropologist wearing “the dirtiest pajamas I ever saw,” who had made a life work of observing and writing about the culture of the Filipino tribes of the region. The women soon forgot their host’s unconventional attire as he provided them with a learned and fascinating overview of the region and its people. In her Carolina Meadows apartment, Margaret picks up a sharpened stone scoop; her host in the Philippines had told her it was a tool for hollowing out a log to make a dugout canoe.
 
    To Margaret, her assignment in Hong Kong (1962-64) was most notable for the small apartment she found, with a balcony and a magnificent view of the harbor. Her Irish terrier Cricket had to be quarantined for six months under Hong Kong law. Margaret stored Cricket’s traveling crate in her apartment, and a few days before she was to leave Hong Kong, Cricket, apparently sensing that change was imminent, voluntarily entered the crate, for the first time since his arrival.
 
    For Margaret, retirement from the State Department in 1966 was only the beginning of her third career. From 1972 to 1977, she was the first director of the Cooke County Mental Health Center. In 1980 she defeated two men who had been her high school classmates to win election to a term as mayor of Gainesville. With a passion for history and a skilled touch at writing grant applications, she raised funds to create an historical museum, which she directed in its infancy. Perhaps her most spectacular feat in civic activism was inspiring and helping to finance the restoration of Gainesville’s old Santa Fe railroad station, and the creation of a replica of a famed Harvey House restaurant, which used to provide good meals for travelers whose trains waited out their mealtimes.
 
    In 1992, Margaret’s sister, Estelle Wallace, moved to Carolina Meadows to be near her son, Dr. Wes Wallace, who teaches emergency medicine at UNC, and Dr. Wallace’s wife, Raine Lee, who practices law in Chapel Hill. In 2002, Margaret arrived at Carolina Meadows, and immediately became a familiar figure in the group activities among the many residents with distinguished histories and fascinating life stories. -- Bob Parker, Resident

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