Stacy Horn

I made the title of this post “Nice to Know I Wasn’t Invisible” to help myself remember that toward the end of my life I would like to write a book with that title. I was talking on Echo about high school and said this:

“I always thought I was mostly invisible in high school. I was distracted by so many things, and not very present. My parents divorced so I left school early and went to a job, had a boyfriend who was in college. But what little feedback I’ve gotten over the years has been mostly positive. Nice to know that I wasn’t invisible.”

The picture above is of the poet Robert Hayden. One of the characters in the always amazing Friday Night Lights quoted him last week. Then, whoever did the episode write-up on Television Without Pity said that the best Robert Hayden poem was Those Winter Sundays. I had to look and sure enough, it’s an unforgettable poem, and fits very nicely into my invisible theme. (I defy any dad to read it and not cry.)

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Plus, I really LOVE this song. But I have to say, I also like a lot of the others, too. So it’s going to be an enjoyable season for me.

[Video removed because the link no longer works.]

My friend Howard got a great review in the New York Post today. This is his first novel (he’s ghost written books for others). Horror books are not really my thing, but of course I read it and it was SO CREEPY. I wish you could hide your eyes in books when it gets to the really scary parts, the way you can at movies. It’s too bad horror doesn’t get reviewed more (unless you’re Steven King or one of a small select group). I’d love to hear more reviewers opinions about it. It’s fun to read what people write about your friends.

I’m in a very good mood today, because my agent responded to the chapters I sent. She didn’t like one, but I knew she wasn’t going to, so I was already prepared for that, and aside from making some editing suggestions, she loved the rest. My biggest, biggest fear was that I hadn’t delivered what my editor wanted. My editor wanted me to weave in material outside Duke, more ghost-y stuff. I didn’t want to do what so many other writers have done when faced with writing about parapsychology — trying to make it more than it is, and trying to make it scary. Basically, exaggerating. The truth is actually more interesting.

So, I wove in lots of strange events they looked into, which are absolutely fascinating in and of themselves without trying to make them anything more than what they are, and in the process of trying to tell the truth about what did and did not happen I found some really compelling information about apparitions (and other things). I don’t want to give it away. But when I asked my agent if she thought I had delivered what my editor wanted, because she agreed with my editor that this was needed, she answered, “Totally.”

The pictures below are from the pillow fight in Union Square on Sunday. I can’t believe how awful people can be sometimes, but then they go and do something like this. Gotta love ’em.

So, the Oscars. Pretty good, I thought. Most lovely: Gwyneth Paltrow, Helen Mirren, Jennifer Hudson, Reese Witherspoon. My acquaintence won an Oscar! It was mind blowing seeing him hug some of the most famous people in the world on his way up to accept it. Then hearing them thank HIM in their speeches. He’s living on a different planet now. (But yay, him! He was always nice, and there was something endearing about him.)

I noticed that Jennifer Hudson ran off the stage, leaving George Clooney trailing behind her. I woulda slowed down and let him catch up. “Hi George. One of the greatest nights of my life began with you calling my name …” No way. I would have been just like her. A little bit out of my mind and oblivious.

One of the people I interviewed a bunch of times for this book died yesterday. Her name was Rhea White.

This whole dying business really does suck. I just had a long conversation with her a few weeks ago and she sounded better than she had sounded any other time I talked to her. It put me in such a good mood. Normally it was hard for her to breath and she always had to struggle to answer my questions (she wanted to, I wasn’t brow beating her!). But this time her voice sounded so strong. There were none of the usual pauses while she caught her breath. We had fun talking!

I asked her about having lunch with Aldous Huxley in 1954. She panicked, it turns out. She was only 23! “I read all his books and I couldn’t think of a thing to say to him,” she said. Huxley was visiting the Lab, and the task of taking him to lunch fell to young Rhea, who had just started working there. Can you imagine?? Lucky her, though. The entire lunch wasn’t spent in panic, of course.

Quotes from her are all through my book. Rhea was great at describing what people are really like, the emotional truth. I spent one interview asking her to tell me about everyone in the Lab’s sense of humor. (I think it says a lot about a person.) She was also willing to gossip, which is so, so important when trying to get a feel for what people were like (good gossip, not malicious gossip). Even though I won’t be using much of that directly, it will help me humanize people I’ve never met.

Rhea got into parapsychology because she had a near death experience in 1952. She was in a car accident, and while she lie broken on the hood of a car she heard a voice that said, “nothing that ever lived could possibly die.” She was an English major at the time, but that was that. Life changed.

She’d come back to near death experiences in 1990. From the Parapsychology Association website: “But I soon realized that they could not be viewed properly without considering them along with all the other sorts of nonordinary and anomalous experiences people have. In a vision I saw the need to study all of them as a single class of experience, which I called ‘exceptional human experience.’ I have been pursuing this aim ever since.” (There’s a website.)

That sounds kinda stiff, but that was the precise scientist talking. She was much more vivid and funny on the phone with me (even when talking science). She’d describe J.B. peering over his glasses after Louie had just teased him in a staff meeting. J.B. could be a little stiff himself and his wife would sometimes have a little fun with him to the enormous pleasure of the rest of the staff. (It’s nice to be allowed to laugh at the boss sometimes.) Rhea was a great storyteller.

I had planned to talk to her about her study of exceptional human experience, and I know it would have been the best conversation, but now that is that. Rhea helped me know other people, but we never really got to her.

It turns out, Rhea was a cat person. Did I know that? She had a bunch of cats who are going to be taken care of at a place called Angels for Animal and she asked for memorial donations to be sent there. If you decide to donate, say it’s for the Rhea White Cat Fund.

Angels for Animals
120 Croatan
New Bern, NC 28562

Thank you for all your help Rhea.