One night last week we had a bad moment. One of the guests—she’s new—has the same name as a wellknown actress. Chatty began to tell a story about the actress and as soon as she said the woman’s name, she glanced at the one in the Hostility Suite with us and said, “I mean the real Anne Bancroft.”

Our Anne Bancroft is not so crazy she didn’t recognize an insult. She sat up straight in her lounger, and then she left the room.

That is not a bad way to handle an insult if you don’t have a ready comeback. I learned my lesson in a foreign country. I was visiting a friend in Paris. We were riding to the Louvre in a cab. I insisted my friend let me handle the transaction, though I knew I didn’t know enough French. By accident I undertipped the driver. He turned on me, an American touriste. I recognized the word putain—the driver had called me a whore. I remember that I tried for a French hauteur, and said, “Je suis, suis-je!” I realized that what I was saying was English with French clothes on, and slunk away in defeat. (A saleswoman at a pet store later neutralized the cabbie. I went to a fancy shop on the Rue de Trop Cher to buy a friend’s dog a collar. The saleswoman, before she would show me the collars, asked, “What kind of dog is he?” I said, “He’s a beagle,” and the saleswoman said, “No, no—I mean, what’s he like?”)

The first time I walked one of the nearby shelter dogs, I broke into futile tears. I said to one of the counselors, “There are twelve million others in this country alone that I am not able to help!” And she said, “It doesn’t have to be complete, your help. The goal is not to erase the problem. You do it to make the choice, to give and get joy in this life.”

And I said to her, still in tears, “But it is not enough!” And then I asked her, “What is enough? Enough energy, attention, effort, et cetera.” She said, “The answer lies in the practice. In balance with what comes naturally.” I said, “How can I, a six, help anyone else until I am better?” And she said, “Helping someone else can make you better.”

In large part, we are meant to heal each other. The garden is a metaphor. Seeding, tending, weeding, watering—all leading up to the harvest. Although leave it to Warren to point out these words that are synonymous with “plant”: hide, secrete, conceal, bury, entomb.

Warren says, of the place he was before this, “My counselor was a moron, and he helped me.”

There is one counselor here we suspect of being something more. She gives such encouraging and optimistic guidance that one day I asked if I could tape her. We set a time to meet for a talk on the patio off the parlor. I turned on my pocket-sized tape recorder and showed her where to speak into the mike. She delivered a kind of pep talk, one I could now replay and refer to as the need arose.