Years ago, the writer and translator Coleman Barks & I met up in Rome, Georgia, a town that had once been the home of his grandmother, to eat Chinese food with friends. He drove us to the restaurant. I was on a nine-day poetry tour of Georgia, filling in for someone who had cancelled at the last moment. The sheriff of Macon had attended my reading & told me his real dream was to be a writer. The Branch Davidians in Waco had just burned up. I was lugging my canvas poetry bag stuffed with books & papers into the restaurant.
Coleman said, Why drag that? Leave it in the car! It will be safe!
No, I said. Everything I need is in this bag. I keep it right next to me.
That is ridiculous, he said. No one will take a bag of books.
We ate a delicious dinner & upon returning to the car, discovered it had been broken into & Coleman’s own bag taken—which contained his books, personal journal, plane ticket to Turkey for the next week, passport, drawings by his granddaughter—many treasures.
He was shocked. He said something about my worry having attracted negative attention to the vehicle. He wasn’t blaming, just musing. I said I wasn’t worried, really—I always lugged my bag.
Coleman called the police. They looked around vaguely & loaned us a giant flashlight, saying we could return it to the police station the next day.
A whirl of awkward searching through weedy ditches & smelly Dumpsters turned up nothing. We kept looking & hoping, in case the thieves had ransacked Coleman’s bag for money, then thrown the rest of it away.
We searched into the night.
I got angrier on Coleman’s behalf as the search went on, but he grew calmer. How can people take what isn’t theirs? I thought about refugees, my father, women who are attacked unexpectedly, then have to accommodate that brutal shock into the future, too many things. Coleman apparently kept his mind on the bag.
Around midnight, he said, “How long does one stay robbed, after being robbed? I think I’m over it.”
He drove me back to the house where I was spending the night. My friendly host, artist and writer Susan Gilbert Harvey, was still awake. She thought we might have been abducted. I told her what had happened & what Coleman said, which caused us to suspend our search. Susan burst into tears.
She said, “That’s it. That’s it exactly. That’s what I’ve been needing to hear. Such a gift!”