You and I are able to track each other in words to perfection. I guess that’s what love is between writers. Or perhaps what love is—period.
—Saul Bellow, March 30, 1990
My mother, the writer Bette Howland, kept among her possessions an old postcard with a photo of stained glass from Canterbury Cathedral. The 13th-century “Miracle Glass” shows men carrying shovels and digging into the ground. “WILLIAM OF GLOUCESTER buried beneath a fall of earth, is dug up alive,” the card’s legend explains. William had been excavating an aqueduct when the accident occurred; St. Thomas of Canterbury appeared in a woman’s dream to tell her that he still lived. Bearing a Southampton postmark of July 8, 1968, the card is inscribed as follows:
There are always
some who have
to be dug out
S.B.
At the time she received that postcard, Bette was occupied with her own fruitless digging.
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