She told me she’d been brought up Episcopal, “and I stopped going to church because I hated the stories. You know the story about the Prodigal Son? I have never understood that story. I have never understood why the prodigal son should be treated any better than the other son. I have missed the point of a lot of parables. They irritate me.”

John stared at me over his reading glasses and said, “You don’t know white trash.”

Joan said she used to read Zen Mind, Beginners Mind “every night to relax when I went to bed. It was very soothing.”

They were able to start his heart and rushed him in an ambulance to the hospital, where he spent several weeks in the ICU. “Then he came home and we had a very good summer,” Joan told me later. Occasionally he would look in the mirror and say, “I look terrible. I look terrible. I’m dying.”

She shook her head. “I was conscious of John living all through the writing,” she said. “Which is why I didn’t want to finish it.

she told me something that shocked me—that the Western code was “not my code anymore.

and before removing her red fox jacket, she pointed her finger at me sternly.

“Well, yes,” she said, “but the place strikes me as sweet, it smells like flowers. It is a pink environment and it makes me feel good. All other climates strike me as hostile.”

When I met her, Joan told me she had scant interest in politics. “I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything… anything that could be called political. I thought the answers, if there were answers, were someplace in man's soul.”