I reset my watch when I arrived in Dallas on Tuesday, and took a taxi to the beautiful old Adolphus Hotel, where I was scheduled to meet Michelle, of the Dallas Museum of Art, at 5:30 PM to drive to the museum, where Madeline Miller, the author of Circe, and I would join people for a Greek meal before taking turns talking and reading from our respective books. I had been readimg Circe on the plane, and it gave me some ideas, so I sat down to work on my talk. At 4:30, I got up to get ready for the event–change clothes and beautify myself, a process I give fifteen minutes–after which I’d still have forty-five minutes to get someone at the hotel to print out the talk and run through it a few times. I was about to brush my teeth when my cell phone rang out: it was Michelle, saying that she and Madeline were downstairs in the car.
Wait, what? I’d been confused because all my devices and the digital clock on the bedside table told a different time, but now I knew for sure that it was not 4:35 but 5:35 PM Texas time, and I was late.
Ten minutes later, I was out the door, having powdered my nose, changed into my gala outfit, and emailed my talk to myself in the hope that someone at the museum would print it out. We had a sound check, looked in the greenroom, then wound through the museum to the dinner party. It was a gorgeous day in Dallas–89 degrees, with a scent of fresh grass (the lawn variety). The food, which had a Greek theme, was delicious: souvlaki with zucchini and roasted potatoes, a salad, baklava with a bite of fresh fig on top, and even a Greek dessert wine. I knew better than to have more than a sip of that before heading back to the greenroom to look for the printout of my talk. Thank you, whoever you are in the office at the DMA.
The only good thing about having set my watch for the wrong time zone was that I had no time to be nervous. I would deliver my talk in the spirit of one who was eager to hear what Madeline Miller would say. Madeline grew up with tales from Homer retold by her mother as bedtime stories. She started reading Homer in Greek when she was in high school. Since then, her knowledge of and fondness for epic poetry has grown and grown. Circe, which has been a fabulous success, is a prose epic about Circe, daughter of Helios, hardworking witch exiled on Aiaia, in which her relationship with Odysseus (you may remember that she turned his men into pigs) is but one episode in a life as full of incident as that of Odysseus himself. What struck me is that while Madeline Miller takes mythology and weaves detail into a thick and satisfying work of fiction, I do the opposite, starting with a real-life detail (nonfiction) and letting it blossom into mythology. So we complemented each other, in our books and in our talks.
Thank you to Carolyn Bess and Michelle Witcher (pictured here, left to right) of the Dallas Museum of Art for a lovely evening. I wish I could have stayed in Dallas longer.