Oh the laughter. Her enthusiastic listening. Poets felt safe with her. Dithering condoned. To write about Bernadette Mayer, her life, her work, her influence, is to write something about my life, the work, the influence on my work and life, the work being writing, motherhood, keeping house, publishing, observation. When we met I’d lived on a wooden sailboat with no engine for a year, had piles of journals filled with spewings and dreams, was commuting to study poetry at Sarah Lawrence, was superintendent of my building on East 10th Street, had apprenticed as an offset printer. She showed me how, how to pick out words with tweezers, how to be in community, what to do with what I see, have seen, would later see, dreamed. In a 1979 dream: sitting on the grass. Bernadette begins to ask me intimate questions drinking beer, and where I’ll be in July. I blurt out “France,” she gulps and understands in her own way. St. Mark’s Church, Worthington, Lake Buel (a childhood place for me), Lenox, Red Rock, East Nassau, places. In Lenox I adored those little girls Marie and Sophie (whom I called Sophia Peabody after Hawthorne’s wife). It is sad to transition to visits with Bernadette beyond the veil of this living life. Max, Sophie, Marie and Phil help.