Today we threw tuberoses—Jane bought them in Cambridge yesterday—onto the granite bench and drove home, where I returned to my poem and an essay almost finished and a letter recommending a poet to a prize panel. Meantime, Jane in her study upstairs worked on her own poems. After an hour, I was ready to begin Life Work. Every day I will write a few pages on the subject. I will write about my own work and the sensibilities I derive from, my parents and my grandparents. Oh, I have many notions about work. I would: Whatever I write about—when I write an essay or a children’s book, when I write about the ox-cart man or Dock Ellis or Henry Moore; when I try putting everything I know into a poem—always I write about work. When I talked with Dylan Thomas in my early twenties I asked how he worked; now if I meet a twenty-three year old with talent, I determine how she works.

That’s enough for today. Work is my obsession but it is also my devotion. Jack Jensen loved to work and it was one of the bonds between us. Work is not redemptive—God’s work—but it is or it can be devoted.

My Connecticut father’s father was Henry Hall, who married Augusta Wuestefeld, whose father Andreas was a cabinetmaker and emigrant from Hanover (the family had lived ina house, I was told, where the poet Heine had lived) to Orange Street in New Haven. I have a children’s toybox he knocked together for my father. The five children of Dorothea and Andreas knew no idle hours: Work was holy; work was the daily text of the life lived. For recreation the brothers and sisters Wuestefeld played bridge and teased each other heavily. My grandmother Augusta was witty, seeing through all surfaces to the greedy bone. When she was a young wife—with Henry Hall’s dairy business thriving—she handled the books with a shrewd, exact, and scrupulous eye.

My great-grandfather Charlie Hall, Henry’s father, worked hard but played harder. A working man, he labored building New Haven’s reservoir (off Armory Street in Hamden) in 1860, with a wife and two children at home in a cottage near the icehouses by Lake Whitney, and one day at noon walked off the job without telling his boss or his wife, walked four miles to the Green in New Haven and enlisted for a year in the war for Union, the war against slaveowners and rebels. I preserve the combination knife-fork-spoon he ate with, fighting in the West, and the bugle he blew. After his one year he came home, taking no pleasure in the work of war; later when he was drafted he bought a substitute rather than fight—even though as a laborer he needed to borrow the money.

This purchase never impeded his later expressions of patriotism, as on the Fourth of July through the eighties and nineties he led Charlie Hall’s Fife and Drum Corps in Hamden parades. Maybe nothing much bothered him. Rumors suggest he took pleasure in alcohol. When he died of a stroke, not young, family stories tell that his widow stood by the head of his coffin, weeping, as two strange women glared at each other across the foot.