James Latimore
BookWoman is about Rosemary Latimore, a woman who loved books, and had a bookstore in Charlotte, North Carolina. Once upon a time there was a Poplar Street Books. Perhaps it was more than a bookstore. A salon? That's what the writer Dannye Romine called it. And for good reason. Rosemary knew how to reach people, especially writers and artists, and knew how to make them feel inspired. Singing a song beyond us, the poet Chuck Sullivan said later.
Rosemary and her Poplar Street Books came along at the right time in Charlotte, just when the city was growing like a teenager and was looking for its identity. And in the right place, too--a historic house in the old Fourth Ward, a house once occupied by a family related to Stonewall Jackson.
But the book is also about what it was like losing her. We hear much about a war on cancer. This is more like the war cancer wages on us. And surviving that war. But in the end, it's not really about war. More about coming to terms with the universe through the kindness of grief. At first there was a searing of flesh and crushing of bone in the aftermath of death, and witnessing the little spirit linger for a while, then become one with a universal spirit of some kind. At least, that's the way it seemed.
I didn't grasp the nature of love until I had nothing to grasp. After making inquiries into the nature of love, and working backwards from the grief I was feeling, I could see that love is an addiction. The release of chemicals like oxytocin and dopamine are the same as you get from using cocaine. When deprived of it, you're in withdrawal, an addict in need of a fix.
Certain books are good for grief. Proust, for example. There's a lot of Proust here. If you've read Remembrance of Things Past, you'll see why, and want to throw your arms around your own Albertine, so strong will be your affection for her and her mysterious ways.
The author earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from the City University of New York, and taught in North Carolina for many years, first at the University of North Caroline Charlotte,and than at Livingstone College in Salisbury.
His most recent book published was Children of Light, a study of a small millenarian and pacifistic sect found only in North and South Carolina. He is presently working on two other books. One (Language of the Erotic) is a study of the language that gives erotic literature its charge. The other (Towards a General Theory of Dreams, Their Evanescence, and the Cold Steel of Crusades) is an analysis of the 'long crusade" against socialism in the West and some of the consequences thereof.
He is active in Veterans For Peace, is an elected official on the Woodfin Water Board, and is married to the tempestuous Kasha Baxter.
This is a “little biography” of a lesser life—lesser by comparison with the megastars—and may be the beginning of a new literary form, a sociology of lesser cities not on the map of cultural capitals and the people who inhabit them, people who are sorely missed in those cities when they are gone, and who have often exhibited moral qualities of such a superior nature that Mother Teresa herself would applaud.
It’s not a how-to-grieve book… This is a journal of dying, about the day by day progression of cancer and it’s …a book about addiction and withdrawal.
Running the bookstore was not an easy life. The hours were unbelievably long, with many details... But she loved it … the Bloomsday celebration, drinking Jamison’s Whiskey and reading from Joyce into the early hours…the Thomas Wolfe dinner that night when we were snowbound and everything seemed magical.
We had the scene to play. He [Dr. Jervis] was breaking the news… She looked like one of the great actresses…. Then Jervis went to get the X-rays from the CT scan. … They are quite beautiful, in a way. … Views of the aorta from the top.
We go abruptly from one routine that’s complicated enough (selling the house, packing, closing the bookstore) to another that includes the diagnosis and possible treatment for cancer. When we got into bed last night, she was crying a little. “I want to do the right thing,” she said; “I will try to be brave.” The part sob, part sigh when I hold her at night. How many nights are there? In the morning, she said,“ All my dreams....,”then left the sentence unfinished.
Undated Poem
We met in fingertips
Touching
Above a hero,
His life unwinding
On the Spindle,
I breathing you in,
Your heart,
Your artful flesh
The thing of my desire.
We lay in rust
On the fender of
A jeep,
Deep
In grasses running swiftly to sea.
Wading birds watched
Like jewelers cool
In their appraisal of lust.
We wade in dreams of
Absolution;
Inquire about the season’s change;
Nod in anticipation of
Affirmatives.
I am patient,
Waiting for you to reach the peak of your bloom.
… it is spring and I am beginning the trip back to Illinois…Lilac blooming perennial…though unlike Whitman, actually bearing her body, what remains of it, returning her to the land from which she sprang and from which lilacs spring… and where I met her… and her I loved and still love in the way we love the dead who were an inward part of us.
In the months that followed, what I missed more than anything was the chance to tell her goodbye forever. We both knew she was dying but we didn’t talk much about dying because it would have been an admission of the finality of her condition, and so I didn’t give myself the chance to say in so many words how I loved her and how I would miss her and how we could not stop the long deep goodbye that was coming.
When it was all over and I had had some time to suffer and to recover from suffering, I collected all the bills and the Medicare documents and the Blue Cross statements and added up the unduplicated charges. The total was $53,144.81, …
It seemed quite a large amount, with not much to show for it. Doctors who seemed to have little understanding of cancer, how it spreads from one part of the body to another. Machines unable to detect cancer in the early stages. Brutal assaults on the body with chemicals and radiation
