George Blecher

Charlotte Strandgaard (1943-2021) was my best friend. During the past 20 years or so, we spoke to each other on Skype, exchanged emails—or gabbed each other’s heads off in Amager or Roneklint-- nearly every day. We were never lovers. We never lived together. But we stretched the concept of friendship to its very limits. I knew Charlotte had many friends. In the last few years when she couldn’t get around very well, they came to visit her. Young writers and young editors came for advice and inspiration. We all needed her. What exactly did we get from her? Certainly not delicious meals or sumptuous surroundings—she may have been the world’s worst cook and housekeeper. What we got—what I got—was talk. A particular kind of talk. Not erudition exactly, though we talked about books and the writing process, which we compared to fishing: be patient when you feel the bite of an idea, but don’t start writing until you’re sure you’ve set the hook. Not exactly political talk either, though she was passionately concerned about the state of the world. It was talk about feelings. All manner of feelings. Endless worry about our kids, hurt, disappointment, fear, satisfaction, delight in each other’s successes, delight in good weather or a perfectly cooked roedspaette. We shared two phrases in English: YDI, You Deserve It, whenever something good happened to either of us. The other phrase was the wish Not To Get Fucked Over. We spent a large amount of time trying to protect each other, not always with great success, from Being Fucked Over. So there was a huge range of feelings that we explored together and shared with each other; we never ran out of things to say. I knew there were some things that she didn’t tell me—what she’d been like as a young mother, her various drug dependencies that she finally wrote about in her last book—but I didn’t pry. We could say anything to each other, which also meant that we respected each other’s privacy. What I will selfishly miss most of all is that we were each other’s support, each other’s pillow to fall back on. Even though we critiqued each other’s work or choice of lovers, it was always in the interest of not wanting to see the other get hurt. We were both plenty hurt, as all people are. We could express that hurt to each other. Whom will I tell the hurt to now? Just a few hours before she died, thanks to her daughter Helene I was able to speak to Charlotte via the 21st century technology that we both were intimidated by. Instead of talking about what she must have known was coming, she told me how good I looked with the new haircut I’d gotten the day before, how beautiful my daughter was, how beautiful my coming granddaughter was going to be. And then she wished me a nice weekend. Wonderful last words. Couldn’t be better. Charlotte, RIP.

The only land that D.H. Lawrence ever owned was a small ranch in the mountains of Northern New Mexico. He was given the ranch by Mabel Dodge Luhan, a rich American woman, and lived there on and off during the 1920s. This video provides views that Lawrence may have seen from his cabin window, and features a reading from St. Mawr, a short novel that partly takes place in those same Sangre de Cristo mountains.