December 9, 2009
Wednesday

Yesterday I mentioned Listography, a book designed to help you assemble an autobiography by dividing your life into some common and some rather whimsical categories and listing the things in your life that fall therein. I happened to open to the book at random to “List your character flaws.” The illustration, of a car parked over a Handicap Parking symbol, triggered my guilt about my use of a parking space that my supermarket of choice wants reserved for pregnant women, and that gave me a focus for my piece.

I noted that the book offers twenty lines for listing one’s character flaws, and that I had used two for just this one. Actually, the book offers twenty lines for the list in each category. For some lists, such as “the countries you’ve visited,” I won’t need the whole page, unless I start some very serious gallivanting soon. (Besides the United States, I’ve been to Canada, Scotland, and Ireland, and England if you count waiting in Heatherow for a connecting flight to Glasgow.) For “List your favorite books” I’ll need to use some of the unlabeled pages at the back.

Today I opened the book to “List famous people you’ve encountered.”

I thought about that, about what might be meant by “famous” and “encountered.” I’ve met or worked with or even developed genuine friendships with people who are famous in their own fields, such as Emily Dickinson scholars or classical operatic basses. I’ve met, or at least been able to stand near and even shakes hands with, very famous people, such as Bill Clinton or Frankie Avalon, at events where they were scheduled to appear.

I decided to start developing a list of famous people I have encountered accidentally, because I was shopping in the same store or attending a service at the same church. An early writing workshop leader called such encounters a “Brush with Fame.” She herself had once sat next to Meryl Streep on a plane.

The first such encounter that came to my mind was the time in 2005 when I found myself standing beside Veronica Hamel in the bookstore at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

I’ve written about the trip I took in February of 2005, but I didn’t write about it until December of that year, for Holidailies. As I noted in that piece, “If my notebooks for January [of 2005] reveal someone fretting about loss and change, the pages for February indicate that I had become overwhelmed almost to the breaking point. I didn’t post a single piece to The Silken Tent, and my [private] paper journal is page after page (although only eight of them) of random thoughts and sighing.”

By February 21, when I had lunch with a friend, I was sullen, depressed, out of shape, and unhealthy. Nevertheless, I accepted an invitation to go along on a trip to New York to see The Gates, an installation of orange flags mounted in Central Park by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Everything about the trip — the exhibition, the women I went with, my solitary exploration of the Metropolitan Musem — changed my head and, in a way, my life. It’s the day I decided to go to Wyoming for the first time.

The encounter with Veronica Hamel came near the end of day. I was in the bookstore/gift shop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art buying orange things, including the exhibition catalog and postcards showing The Gates. There was a double line of people being served, and it was my turn. I put my things on the counter, and the clerk began to ring them up.

In the line beside me, a woman was showing that clerk her receipt from purchases she’d made earlier in the day. “I think whoever waited on me forgot to give me my member’s discount,” she said. The voice sounded familiar. I stole a look at her.

Veronica Hamel, who played Joyce Davenport in Hill Street Blues, a television series I was devoted to that had gone off the air nearly twenty years before. I’d seen her from time to time since then, particularly on Third Watch, another of my favorite Ten O’Clock Dramas. I had always like her, liked her long dark hair with its widow’s peak, liked her brisk and clipped speech with the very faintest Pennsylvania accent, liked the authority she brought to the characters she portrayed.

Standing beside her, I could see that she’s not a lot taller than I am, although from her appearance on Hill Street I would have guessed that she was. She’s only a few years older than I am, and in fact on that day was just past 61. She was wearing very little makeup, and had her hair pulled back and tied loosely. As the clerk made the adjustment to her sale, I noticed that Veronica Hamel was using the same kind of credit card I was, a platinum account from a famous bank.

I pictured her as she must be in her private life — a woman of culture and intelligence who probably has memberships at several museums in the city. She’d taken a Friday to visit an art museum, draw inspiration or solace or a change of spirit from the things she could see there. Maybe, like me, she’d visited The Gates, had a sandwich at the cafeteria, even gone upstairs to visit a favorite painting, as I had. She was just like me.

We were both concluding our business and turning away from the sales counter at the same time. On a whim, I caught her eye. “Hello, Miss Hamel,” I said. “I’ve been a fan for a long time, and have always enjoyed your work. Hill Street Blues, of course, but also Sessions and even Klute, when I saw it again after I knew who you were.” I tried not to sound gushy, as I had when I told Margaret Atwood that we had the same name and I wanted to be a writer, too.

Veronica Hamel looked at me. She raised one of those perfect eyebrows, smiled a broader smile than any I’d ever seen her display in a role. “Thank you,” she said. “And thank you for telling me.” She put out her hand, I took it briefly, the way women do, and then we went our separate ways.

There is no deep insight nor touching truth to be derived from this story. It’s just an account of a chance meeting with someone who, as an actress with a body of work captured forever on film, has fans in numbers she can’t determine and who remain largely anonymous to her. Visiting a museum, though, she’s just a woman enjoying an afternoon by herself, gracious enough to thank an admirer who intruded on her solitude.

From the Archives
December 9, 2004 — Gratuities: Last week I read a short story in the Fall 2004 issue of Ploughshares, the literary magazine published by Emerson College. Jessica Treadway’s “Shirley Wants Her Nickel Back” concerns a young woman whose husband has lost his job because of a fatal accident he caused while driving drunk. To help support herself, her husband, and their son, she takes a paper route, working from four in the morning until just after eight. . . . I read the story three times in a single morning, twice for the sheer beauty of it and once with an eye to its structure.

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