If you use your laptop on your lap, or leave it plugged in all the time, you may well be cruising for what some experts call Picnic (Problem in Chair Not in Computer) or ID-10t (idiot) errors — computer problems caused by clueless users. Technical support professionals say these errors are responsible for at least half of all computer repairs.

“You’d be surprised how many people unknowingly damage their computers,” said Derek Meister, a technician for the Geek Squad, Best Buy’s repair and on-line support service. A classic mistake, Mr. Meister said, is using a laptop on your lap. Despite the name, a laptop should be operated on a flat and firm surface so that it rests on the four little nubs usually found on the base. A lap desk or even a large enough book will suffice. The point is to allow air to circulate around the machine.

Letting a laptop rest on your thighs — or worse, sink into a cushy comforter — prevents internal heat from radiating outward and can block air intake vents. This causes overheating, a major cause of component failure in computers. Using a laptop on a less-than-flat surface can also put the hard drive at an awkward angle, which can also cause damage.

Speaking of the hard drive, don’t walk around with your laptop while the hard drive is active, because its actuator arm, which skitters over the surface reading or saving data, could bump into the drive’s fragile and finicky magnetic memory material. Many modern laptops have gyroscopes that shut down the hard drive when they sense movement, but that sometimes doesn’t happen fast enough to prevent harm.

“A lot of people close the lid on their laptop and throw it in their case without making sure the hard drive has shut down completely,” said Chris Kramer, director of technical support for Micro Center, a chain of 23 computer and electronics stores that has its headquarters in Hilliard, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus.

Mr. Kramer recommends manually putting a laptop in “sleep” or “hibernate” mode before closing the lid, instead of assuming that the hard drive will shut down automatically. Then wait a beat, because computers need a second or two to do the internal housekeeping necessary to obey the command.

Even then, it’s a good idea to listen for the hard drive to stop spinning before moving a laptop. Also look at the computer’s lights to look for an indication that the laptop is dormant. Depending on the brand of computer, the lights may be a green, amber or red, or there could be no light. In Apple computers, it’s a white light pulsating in a rhythm reminiscent of the slow, steady breath of peaceful sleep.

Owners of a computer with a solid-state drive, which is standard in the MacBook Air, don’t have to worry about damage from jostling. But they too, want to make sure their laptops are in sleep mode before zipping them up in carrying cases. Otherwise, the drive could remain engaged and eventually overheat the machine.

Another common user error is leaving a laptop plugged in all the time.

“A lot of people use their laptops as a desktop,” said Kevin Dane, executive director of product quality and reliability for Dell, the computer manufacturer. “Leaving it plugged in all the time diminishes the battery life and degrades its performance.” Batteries, like muscles, atrophy if not exercised. Unplugging your laptop once in a while, say two to three times per week, is enough to keep the battery fit.

It’s also not a good idea to drain your battery completely and not recharge it for extended periods.

Leaving a battery uncharged for a long time can cause a degradation of its chemicals, said M. Stanley Whittingham, professor of chemistry and materials science at State University of New York at Binghamton. “If you treat batteries nicely by using them and not exposing them to extreme temperatures, they can last forever.”

When transitioning from the grid to battery power, computer manufacturers and repair professionals suggest pulling out the power cord by the end piece, not by the line. Tugging the line can stress both the cord’s wiring and the pinlike contact points within the computer. And, of course, make sure the laptop is unplugged before dashing off with it to the next room or to a meeting.

“I see damaged power plugs all the time,” said Tollie Williams, a computer consultant in Decatur, Ala., who repairs both laptops and desktops. “Users jerk them out tripping over them or stress them by trying to get them to reach a power plug a little too far away or bend them at a hard angle trying to fit computers into tight spaces.”

Sometimes, misuse can cause the power cord to no longer fit snugly in the housing. When the connection is compromised, laptops may take a longer time to charge, if they charge at all.

Dust can also cause problems, though that is a bigger concern for stationary desktops, particularly if they are kept in areas with pets, smokers and carpeting. “I took the case off a Mac Pro recently that my co-worker complained was slowing down and freezing up and found about a half inch of dust inside,” Mr. Williams said.

The problem was that the machine was near a paper shredder. “I guess it was really adding to the dust load in a room,” said Mr. Williams, who removed the dust with a hose attached to a standard vacuum cleaner. “It worked fine after that.”

Experts recommend cleaning out desktop and laptop computers at least once a year (every six months if the machine is in a really dusty environment) by taking them into repair centers for a thorough cleaning or by removing the outer case and using a gentle vacuum, compressed air, tweezers or cotton swabs to remove dust bunnies.

“It should be like cleaning your ears,” said Mr. Meister of Geek Squad. “You don’t want to jam anything in there.”

Never use standard household cleaners on or even near computers. The chemicals — and even the fumes — can seep into crevices and cause corrosion.

Picnic error can happen with software as well. While most people know not to download anything from a suspect source, repair technicians say that people frequently install an antivirus program on new computers when one has been already loaded, usually by the manufacturer.

“So you’ve got two programs trying to do the same task running in the background,” said Mr. Kramer from the Micro Center. “The computer slows down and gets jerky and can even freeze up.”

Finally, most experts advise shutting down computers every few days to clear out the cache and short-term memory, set off routine system maintenance chores, and install and update software that might have been downloaded while the computer was in use.

Moreover, restarting a computer often fixes mysterious glitches. “There’s a reason it’s the first thing they tell you to do when you call technical support,” said Mr. Williams, the consultant in Decatur. “It works.”

By STEVEN HELLER

The interactive subway diagram that was designed by Massimo Vignelli, Beatriz Cifuentes and Yoshiki Waterhouse for The Weekender Web site of the M.T.A. offers riders information — driven and updated by live data — on planned weekend work projects that will affect subway service. At any point, the diagram can be clicked, zoomed, panned or expanded to full screen. In this screen, the B and 5 lines are shaded to indicate a weekend service interruption.

In 1972, Massimo Vignelli designed a diagrammatic map for the New York City subway. It was a radical departure. He replaced the serpentine maze of geographically accurate train routes with simple, bold bands of color that turned at 45- and 90-degree angles. Each route was color-coded, its stops indicated by black dots. Its abstract representation of the routes was elegant but flawed. To make the map function effectively, a few geographic liberties were taken, something that didn’t sit well with New Yorkers.

For instance, the new map showed Central Park as a square; Vignelli reasoned that for people riding underground, the park’s rectangular proportions were irrelevant. Along Central Park West there are fewer stops than in Midtown, so logic dictated that less map space was required. Vignelli was absolutely right, but New Yorkers did not care about such nuances. They wanted their rectangle back, and other geographical details too. Dissatisfaction was palpable, and in 1979 the map was replaced.

Still, the Vignelli map refused to vanish. It was included in the design collection of the Museum of Modern Art, featured in exhibitions and analyzed in history books. In 2008, Vignelli was even asked to create a limited-edition version, which sold out almost immediately. Then last year, Jay Walder, the head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (who is leaving his post at the end of the year), asked Vignelli to revise his 1972 map for the M.T.A.’s The Weekender Web site, which informs the public of weekend service changes caused by maintenance projects. How sweet the irony!

In fact, the 1972 map was ahead of its time. As a vindicated Vignelli told me, the map was “created in B.C. (before computer) for the A.C. (after computer) era.” He’s right again. His original, economical format is perfect for Web accessibility. The new digital iteration is the result of the combined efforts of Vignelli and two of his associates, Beatriz Cifuentes and Yoshiki Waterhouse. One of their first acts was to rename the map. It is now a diagram, which actually makes sense as it is not a literal representation, but a semantic one. They also agreed to add supplementary neighborhood map options — online versions of the proprietary maps already used in M.T.A. stations.

For The Weekender, the team rebuilt the diagram geometry from scratch using a new primary grid for Midtown. This grid is essentially a square bound by 14th and 59th Streets, and Park and Eighth Avenues, with Broadway running diagonally from corner to corner. Intervals between major cross streets like 14th or 42nd were placed equidistantly along the grid, with more minor stops, like 18th and 28th, placed in between. And, Waterhouse adds, “We introduced a hollow dot to represent stops, which were sometimes passed, depending on schedule, known as a ‘sometimes-stop.’”

Waterhouse explains that all critiques of the 1972 map — which had been dutifully retained by the M.T.A. — were addressed. But Vignelli’s biggest bugaboo was showing the parks. He believed that including them — particularly Central Park — was the downfall of the 1972 map, so the new iteration eliminates all parks. Issues of type size and legibility were addressed, and line colors, station names and connections were all updated.

In addition to temporary closures for maintenance, certain lines (such as the B train) do not run on weekends. Yet rather than eliminate the line from The Weekender map altogether, Waterhouse explained, “We reasoned that it was better to leave it in the diagram to be more consistent with the signage, only in a ghosted shade of the same color. For working lines, we created a series of line-specific animated flashing dots to designate stops undergoing planned work. Thus users can swiftly see if their stop is affected without parsing through the laundry list of text for each line, or referencing which trains stop where.”

On The Weekender Web site, the diagram can be panned and zoomed, and as you mouse over it, the adjacent dots that make up each station light up to indicate a link, allowing users to navigate the system graphically. Alternatively, the system can be searched by station, line or borough. Lastly, every view of the diagram is complemented by a geographic neighborhood map, essentially giving riders a means of navigating the system both above and below ground.

Pitchfork.com: of Montreal's Kevin Barnes Talks New Album, Cassette Box Set, His Career 

By Larry Fitzmaurice September 14, 2011 8 a.m. CT

On October 25, Joyful Noise will release a cassette box set of psychedelic-pop mainstays of Montreal's entire catalog-- all ten albums, from 1997's Cherry Peel to last year's False Priest. The whole thing comes packaged in a wooden box (above) with screen-printed original artwork by bandleader Kevin Barnes' brother, David (who's done the cover artwork for all the band's albums in the past, too).

The retrospective package provides an opportunity to look back at of Montreal's career, from the band's lo-fi, 1960s psych-pop-worshipping beginnings to their zany, colorful, avant present. Rather than getting nostalgic, though, Kevin Barnes is looking forward-- he's currently putting the finishing touches on of Montreal's eleventh album, Paralytic Stalks, which is due early next year. Read on for our interview with Barnes, which touches on the new album, the return of cassettes in indie culture, and his feelings about his band's legacy as part of Athens' seminal Elephant 6 collective.

"The new of Montreal album is bit more esoteric, and it’s probably not something everybody’s going to like. The songs are way more intimate and confessional."

Pitchfork: Do you have a personal history with cassettes?

Kevin Barnes: When I first started recording, I used a four-track and I’ve got an incredible collection of cassettes in boxes that I don’t want to get rid of-- especially from when I was living at my parents’ house and doing nothing but recording songs. I have tons of early recordings that I haven’t listened to in forever. At some point, I’ll pull them out and listen to them and cringe. I think that could be really cool to release them at some point, though. There’s so much there. It would only be for the biggest fans in the world. All ten of them.

Pitchfork: Recently, cassettes have come back in vogue with certain, nostalgia-obsessed sects of indie culture. When agreeing to release this box set, were you taking that into consideration?

KB: I can understand the cassette thing, but I don’t really feel that connected to it. Its like the CD for me-- I don’t really like that tactile quality. Plastic just annoys me. It's easy to romanticize the past. That sort of goes hand in hand with vinyl as well. Having a connection to a physical object is really cool. At some point, people will be nostalgic about CDs, too. It's just human nature.

Pitchfork: What about those buyers who are purchasing things like your box sets for collector's purposes, rather than for the material that's inside?

KB: Whenever anybody's giving a shit about music on any level it's a good thing. It’s not like [collecting] guitars. I know people who just collect guitars and don’t even play them-- that's a different matter.

AllFacebook.com: How To Stop Spamming Your Facebook Friends From Spotify

Posted by David Cohen on September 26th, 2011 4:55 PM

The addition of Spotify to the music dashboard that Facebook launched last week created a side-effect addition of its own: Users who listen to a lot of music throughout the day are also unintentionally notification-bombing their friends.

Like our sibling blog Inside Facebook pointed out:

Users have begun to receive notifications when a friend sees a story about their listening activity and clicks a play button on of the songs. These notifications direct users to an activity section of the music dashboard, which encourages them to comment in order to start a conversation about a song them and a friend both listened to.

Now, picture that process repeating several times daily — at least.

Fortunately, for those Facebook users who are considerate of their friends’ newsfeeds, there is a solution within Spotify: In the Facebook panel, under settings, uncheck the box that says, “Get personal recommendations by sending music you play to Facebook’s Open Graph.”

Readers: Have you found yourselves dealing with any extra posts on your walls or news feeds since Facebook introduced several changes last week?

These are reasons why, Lauryn, we still love you, even if you do hate openly hate white people.

Among other challenges, the missing are difficult to single out. “They all look alike,” said Curt Younker, the sheriff." 

From Midwest Farmers Are on Alert Against Pig Thieves

I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables.
I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.

I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know.

All the coverage around Troy Davis and his impending execution this evening is so sad. It reminds me of this interview on Fresh Air I listened to last year, and it still haunts me. 

NPR.org: 20 Years Of Defending Death Row Inmates

February 8, 2010 

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, David Dow, has represented more than 100 death row inmates, mostly in Texas, over the last 20 years. Most of his clients were guilty, and he knew it. Some of them were guilty of monstrous crimes, and he's won only a few cases.

We're going to talk about why, in spite of all that, he continues to represent men on death row and what impact this work has on his life and on his family.

Dow has written a new memoir called "The Autobiography of an Execution." He's a distinguished professor at the University of Houston Law Center and the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit, legal-aid corporation that represents death row inmates.

David Dow, welcome to FRESH AIR. Your book is a memoir, and one of the things that you write about is the difficulty of making the transition back and forth between working on death row and coming home and trying to be in the world inhabited by your young son and having your son say things to you like: Hi, dad, did you have a good day on death row? Tell us a little bit about what those problems are going back and forth between death row and your son.

Professor DAVID DOW (Author, "The Autobiography of an Execution"; Litigation Director, Texas Defender Service): Yes, it's a very difficult transition. I think that it's still a difficult transition for me, even though I've been doing it now for nine years, which is how old our son is.

I spend a lot of time at death row, which is located in Livingston, Texas, and the visits range from okay to terrible. I don't think that I've ever really had a visit on death row that I would call good. Maybe there's been one or two where I'm reporting to an inmate that we've won and that I don't think that there's any chance that that victory is going to be taken away from us. I suppose you could call that a good visit, except that it's still a case where there has been a murder in the background, and I've spent all day at death row.

And then I come home, and I see my son, and he's been at school. He's now in third grade. But in the stories that I'm telling in the book, a lot of the times he was in kindergarten or first grade, and it's just a very difficult transition. He wants to talk to me about that he did well on the spelling test or that he got all of the state capitals right, and then he says, you know, how was your day? And it's just a difficult conversation to have.

I think that I've gotten better at those transitions and conversations over the years. But I would say that for a while, they were difficult for me.

GROSS: What do you tell him about your work?

Prof. DOW: Well, from the time that he was old enough to ask me what I do, I would tell him honestly. Now, we obviously haven't told him about the details of what the people I represent have done. He knows that I represent people who have done bad things. He knows that I represent people who have killed somebody, and he knows that I represent people that the state wants to punish by executing them.

As I say, he doesn't know the details of the murders. He doesn't know details of how executions are carried out. But from the time that he's been old enough to ask what I do and why I do it, I've told him honestly. I haven't really felt that there was any way that I could think of to hide that from him in a way that wasn't misleading or dishonest.

GROSS: You write that when you come home, you shower, and then you wash your clothing in a separate load from the rest of the family's. Are you trying to wash out, like, the grime and dirt from the prison, or is it something more existential you're trying to wash out?

Prof. DOW: Well, I'm sure that a psychologist would say that there's something existential that I'm trying to wash out. I just really feel that I don't want death row hanging over me when I'm in my house.

The prison itself obviously is not filthy. It's not a prison environment like you might think if you've seen "Midnight Express" or something like that. It's a fairly sterile environment, and they have linoleum floors, and there isn't trash on the floor and that sort of thing. But there's just an aura about the place that at least I personally, I find that it clings to me. And I don't want it to cling to me.

And so, I've just had a habit for the last 15 years of feeling so dirty when I get home from the prison that I just feel like I want to wash it off of me. And to this day, the first thing that I do when I get home from spending a day at death row is walk up to the shower and get in the shower and carry my clothes and put them in the washing machine. And my our son is, he's an environmentalist. And so, he tells me that I'm not being earth-friendly when I throw the clothes in a washing machine. Oh, by the way, so I no longer turn on the machine.

Now I just throw them in the machine, and we don't actually turn on the machine until we have a fuller load. So as a result of pressure from him, I've backed off from my previous policy of washing the clothes right away. But I still, to this day, feel like I need to wash the prison off of me.

GROSS: One more thing about your son before we get deeper into your work representing people on death row. You write that your son started getting night terrors at the age of two, and you say: I knew they weren't my fault and that they were. What was happening in your life when those night terrors started?

Prof. DOW: It was 2004 and 2005 that I remember becoming aware of the link between my life and his night terrors. It was a very bad year for me professionally, and I remember coming home one day from the prison, and it had been a particularly difficult day for me. I had had a visit where I had told a client of mine, who was going to be executed the next week, that he was almost certainly going to be executed, that there was really nothing left for us to do, and it was a client who I cared about.

I don't care about all of my clients deeply, but I did about this one. And it was difficult for me. And I remember walking into the kitchen at the end of that day, and my wife and son were sitting at the kitchen table. Lincoln was eating his dinner, and Katya and he were reading a book together, and I walked over, and I kissed them, and Lincoln said: Dada, you seem really glum.

And I thought to myself, I don't really want the first thing that my says to me to be dada, you seem glum. And so, I decided at that moment that I wasn't going to be glum in front of him. And two weeks after that, it was another bad day for me at the office. And I came home, and I finished listening to the song on the CD that I was listening to in the car before I came inside, and the song finished, then I steeled myself. I plastered a smile onto my face. I put a little lightness into my step, and I walked into the house faking it.

And of course, Katya, my wife, could tell that I was faking it, but I thought this was a pretty good act, and Lincoln, he wasn't going to be able to tell. And I walked over, and I kissed them both again, and Lincoln said: Dada, you seem glum.

And then that evening, after we put him to sleep, I was talking to Katya and telling her that I was trying my hardest to not communicate what I was feeling professionally to Lincoln when I came home. And literally, in the middle of that conversation, he started wailing upstairs.

And so, I became I just became deeply aware of the way that I was bringing a certain sadness or heaviness or weightfulness, if there's such a word, into the house, and that I was burdening him, or at least I felt like I was burdening him with that. And I wanted to do something to try to take that weight away.

GROSS: My guest is David Dow. He's been representing death row clients in Texas for about 20 years. He's written a memoir called "The Autobiography of an Execution." Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is David Dow, and he's written a new book called "The Autobiography of an Execution." It's a memoir about his work as a death row lawyer, defending death row clients, and the book has just been published.

You write that murder is perhaps the ugliest crime, and that's why it's so shocking to you that murderers, most murderers are so ordinary in appearance. Did you start this work expecting to meet monsters and end up meeting people instead?

Prof. DOW: That's exactly what happened. I think that the first time that I went to death row, I expected it to be full of Hannibal-Lector-like characters, people who gave you the creeps just to be sitting in front of them. And, in fact, exactly the opposite happened.

When I first started representing death row inmates, most of the people who I was representing were probably a few years older than I was. And now, of course, I've been doing it 20 years, and most of them are younger than I am. But I had a client, for example, who was executed last November, November of 2009, and I remember the first time I went to see him, being struck by how completely ordinary he looked.

The first thing I thought when I was talking to him was that I simply could not picture this kid he was 30 years old, but he still looked like a kid to me I simply could not picture this kid doing what he had done. And I think that one of the really striking things about meeting people on death row and talking to people on death row is that, almost without exception, they don't look like what you expect them to look like.

There are a few, obviously, who have ticks and mannerisms, and you can tell that they're not normal in the sense that they have some apparent mental illness, but almost all of them aren't like that. Almost all of them look like people who you might have sat next to at the bar, where you were watching the ball game the night before.

GROSS: The people who you defend aren't monsters, but some of them have committed, most of them have committed crimes that are monstrous. Can you give us an example of somebody who you defended who you were pretty sure was, in fact, guilty and who committed an especially monstrous crime?

Prof. DOW: Yes. I had another client who was executed in March of last year. His name was Willie Pondexter. And Pondexter had grown up in this vast, sprawling, broken family. One of the things that the lawyers in my office do is we try to construct family trees of all of our clients, and it's not just for curiosity that we do that, but one of the things that we're looking for when we do that are signs of mental illness because mental illness tends to run in families. And the only way you can know whether mental illness is running in a family is to construct a family tree. And so, we routinely construct family trees.

The family tree that we tried to construct for Pondexter looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. I mean, it had so many triangles and squares and circles veering off into all kinds of different directions that it was impossible to follow.

And that was the environment where he grew up. He grew up in an environment where he had no father. His brother, the only full brother that he had that he was close to committed suicide when Pondexter was 10 years old. His mother was placed in mental hospitals four, five or six different times, and he ended up finding a family, which was a gang.

And as a result of that membership in a gang, he participated in a crime that included the murder of an elderly woman by the name of Martha Lennox. They killed her and then stole her car, and there isn't any doubt that Pondexter participated in that crime. I'm not sure that he would have initiated it, but he participated in it voluntarily. And Martha Lennox was shot and killed inside her house in a suburb of Dallas.

By the time Pondexter was executed, more than 10 years after this crime had been committed, he was simply not remotely the same person he had been at the time the crime occurred. He had completely grown up. He had matured. There were guards on death row who approached me and told me that they didn't think that he should be executed. Several of them signed affidavits that we submitted to the Board of Pardons and Paroles on his behalf to try to have his death sentence converted into a life sentence.

He is somebody who, at the time that he was executed, I would have had no hesitation, none, asking him to babysit for our son. He was simply not dangerous anymore. He had been rehabilitated. As a society, we've mostly given up on rehabilitation, but Pondexter had been rehabilitated.

GROSS: Is this an example of one of the reasons why you do death row work, because there are people who are going to be killed for a crime in their past, and they've since been transformed in some way?

Prof. DOW: Yes, I think that that's certainly one of the factors that pulls me to the work. Were executing people who did something unspeakably terrible at some point in their lives, and yet by the time we execute them, many of these people I'm tempted to say most would not ever commit such a crime again.

I had another client who was executed just this past November who was executed because he and three others went out looking for a house to burglarize. And they broke into a house because they thought it was empty. They picked it because they thought it was vacant.

And sure enough, it was vacant. There were four of them. Two stayed in the car, and two broke in. And while the two were inside - one of them was my client, whose name was Christian Oliver and while Christian was inside the house, the owner of the house, a man by the name of Joe Collins, he returned home.

And Joe Collins happened to be a gun collector and a marksman as well. And so, he picked up one of his own guns and started to chase the two boys through the house. They had broken into his house after all, and he was unhappy to come home and see these two kids burglarizing his house.

And the two kids - Christian and the other one - ran to the back of the house to try to escape through the back. And unfortunately for them, the back door was locked. It was padlocked shut from the outside. And so, the two took refuge in a bedroom in the rear of the house, and Mr.�Collins cornered them there and started shooting into the room. And then my client, Christian Oliver, shot back and killed Mr.�Collins.

Christian Oliver had been involved in other burglaries before this crime. He's never been involved in a violent crime. He'd never even shot at anybody, much less killed somebody. And so, here you have this I call him a kid. By the time he was executed, he wasn't a kid anymore, but he was only 19 at the time this happened.

You have this young man, and he participated in a crime that should never have happened. He should never have participated in it. But the crime itself spun out of control in a way that he certainly didn't plan and probably nobody could have predicted. And by the time he was executed, 11, 12 years after this happened, I feel confident in saying that there was no way that was ever going to happen again.

GROSS: So when you are defending somebody who's already been convicted of murder, they're on death row, and you're trying to appeal their case, on what grounds can you appeal? You think they are guilty most of the time, not all the time, but most of the time. So the question isnt whether or not they did the crime usually. So what is the case about then?

Prof. DOW: In death penalty jurisprudence, there's this very peculiar concept, and the concept is being innocent of the sentence. So the person isn't innocent of the crime. There's not an argument that the person didn't commit the crime. The argument is that the person is innocent of the sentence.

And what that means is that the person should have been sentenced to life in prison rather than death. So most of the time, what I'm doing as an appellate lawyer in these cases is trying to construct the argument to persuade a court that my client, even though he did something horrible, even though he committed a murder, should have been sentenced to life in prison rather than death.

And then there are a variety of argumentative strategies that we use to try to persuade the court that the person should have a life sentence rather than a death sentence.

GROSS: And which court are you appealing to?

Prof. DOW: Well, I personally, and my office generally, work in both the state courts, as well as the federal courts so that the first layer of appeals in death penalty cases go through the state courts. And then after you exhaust all of your opportunities in the state courts, you have an opportunity to go into federal court.

GROSS: And sometimes you've appealed directly to the Supreme Court.

Prof. DOW: Almost invariably, we try to take the case all the way up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, unlike the other courts, has to give you permission to appeal to it. So we are allowed to file an appeal in the lowest federal court, the federal district court, and then if we lose there, we're permitted to appeal that loss to the intermediate court of appeals.

If we lose there, we almost always ask the Supreme Court to review the case, but the Supreme Court rarely does. They only hear these appeals in a handful of cases.

GROSS: David Dow will be back in the second half of the show. His new memoir is called "The Autobiography of an Execution." He's a distinguished professor at the University of Houston Law Center and the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Im Terry Gross back with appellate lawyer David Dow author of the new memoir "The Autobiography of an Execution." Over the past 20 years, he's represented more than 100 death row inmates, mostly in Texas and he continues to do the work although he knows most of his clients are guilty. His goal with guilty clients is to prevent them from being executed and change their sentence to life in prison. He opposes the death penalty. Dow is a distinguished professor at the University of Houston Law Center and the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service.

Weve talked about cases where you were convinced that your client was guilty of murder but that they shouldnt be executed. There is one example in your book of a case you took on where you came to believe that your client actually did not do the murder - did not commit the murder - murders that he was accused of. Can you tell us briefly what the charges were against the person who you give the name of Quaker in the book? Youve changed the names in the book.

Prof. DOW: I have changed the names. The story that I tell about Henry Quaker is a story involving one of my clients who was convicted of killing his wife and his two children. And over the course of my work on that case, I came to be convinced that he didnt actually commit the crime. Of all the cases that I've worked on over the years - more than a hundred cases - there've been only seven or eight where I reach the conclusion that my client didnt commit the crime that he was sent to death row for.

One of the erroneous beliefs that people have about death row inmates is that they all claim to be innocent. In my experience, very few of them claim to be innocent. And what that means, if youre a death penalty lawyer, is that when somebody claims to be innocent, you pay attention to that claim and you pay attention to it because it isn't all that common for people to claim to be innocent.

In the Henry Quaker case, Henry Quaker told me he was innocent and I didnt believe him at first. I didnt disbelieve him. I simply didnt form an opinion; I tried not to form an opinion. But the more deeply we looked at the case the more I became convinced that all of the evidence that had been used to support Quaker's conviction had problems with it and at the end of the day, none of it in my judgment really established his guilt. And that, coupled with the shear fact that I believed him when he told me he didnt do it combined to convince me that he was innocent.

GROSS: But you lost the case anyways.

Prof. DOW: We did lose the case, anyways. Of the six, or seven, or eight cases that I've mentioned where I said I think that I've been representing somebody who's innocent, the truth is that I've lost most of those cases. I think that that's one of the reasons that it's harder to represent somebody who you believe to be innocent than somebody who you believe to be guilty. Because as a death penalty lawyer youre going to lose most of the cases - almost all of the cases, and if youre going to lose almost all of the cases, this sounds odd to say, but it's less devastating to lose a case where youre representing somebody who actually committed the crime that he's being executed for committing.

GROSS: So, for Quaker, whose innocence you believed in, did you witness his execution?

Prof. DOW: Yeah, I did witness Quaker's execution. They're...

GROSS: Why was it important for you to be there?

Prof. DOW: There's a lawyer in my office who was asked to witness an execution at the end of last year and she asked me whether she should. And I'm going to tell you what I told her. What I told her was that it is something you will never get over, that you have nightmares about it for weeks, months, maybe years. And so, what you have to decide when youre making the decision about whether youre going to witness your client's execution, is whether the suffering that youre going to have for watching it is greater or lesser than how much your client needs you to be there.

I watch executions only if my clients ask me to. And if they ask me to, I watch because if they ask me to I feel that it is more important to them that I be there than it is to me that I not be there. In addition, one of the things that I talk about when I'm talking about the Quaker case is that in almost all of our cases we're actually litigating the case up until the very end. I had a conversation with one of my clients last week and I was telling him that he could put me on the witness list to witness his execution if he wanted to, but that I thought it was really more important that I be in my office working on the case if we were still working up until the end.

So I think that one reason that many death row inmates dont put their lawyers on the list of people to witness their execution is that their lawyers tell them they'd really like to be working on the case up until the very end. That's certainly true in my case. I tell my clients that Ill be there if they want me to, but that I'd rather be at my office so that I can try to keep working on the case if there's anything left to do.

GROSS: Did you ever get one of those last minutes stays of execution?

Prof. DOW: Oh sure. We get last minute stays of execution; I'm tempted to say a lot. It's not a lot compared to the number of executions, but in 2009, for example, we had six or seven last minute stays of execution. So it happens about every other month or so for us.

GROSS: That's a lot. So when you are witnessing an execution, do you try to make eye contact with your client when they're strapped to the chair?

Prof. DOW: The people who are being executed can't see...

GROSS: It's really a gurney, isn't it? It's not a chair anymore.

Prof. DOW: It's...

GROSS: In Texas its a gurney and it's - what's it called? Like an IV. What's the word for it?

Prof. DOW: Right. It's lethal injection.

GROSS: Lethal injection. Yeah. Yeah. So you can't make eye contact because they're in a prone position.

Prof. DOW: Well, you could - you would be able to make eye contact if they could see you because you are standing at a level that is above them, so that youre essentially looking down at the person who's strapped to the gurney. And what typically happens is that there are three different rooms that witnesses are in. There's one room that is reserved for members of the press; there's a second room that is reserved for members of the - family members of the murder victim, and then there's a third room that is reserved for people who have been asked to witness the execution by the person whos being executed.

And they're those three different rooms and one of those rooms is essentially at the feet of the person's who's being executed and if the person who's being executed turns his head to the left - and I say his head because most people who are executed are in fact men - if he turns his head to the left he would be looking into the room where the family members of the murder victim are. And then if he turns his head to the right he would be looking into the room where his own witnesses are. But all of those windows are one-way glass so that the witnesses can see into the execution chamber but you can't see into any of the other rooms where witnesses are.

And so, by the same token, the person who's being executed can turn his head and look towards the family members of the murder victim. He can look toward his own witnesses but he doesnt actually see them because he's looking at a piece of one-way glass. So, I guess in answer to your question, it's possible for the witnesses to make eye contact with the execution victim but it's a sort of one-way eye contact. Youre looking at the person whos being executed but he's not seeing you.

GROSS: Its hard to single out not being able to make eye contact as the thing that's unfair about execution, but it does seem like okay, so youre executing the person, shouldnt they at least be allowed to make eye contact with family or friends? Is there like a reason why it's one-way glass and they're not allowed to see you?

Prof. DOW: The reason that it's one-way glass is simply because if it weren't the witnesses would be able to see into the other witness rooms and I...

GROSS: Oh, I see so - Mm-hmm.

Prof. DOW: Yeah. And so I think the idea is that they dont want, for example, the relatives of the person who's being executed to be able to look into the room and observe the family members of the murder victim and vice-versa. They dont want the family members of the murder victim to be able to look into the room where the relatives of the person who's being executed are located. So I think that's just the practical reason that they do it. But the truth is that it goes beyond not being able to make eye contact.

When people arrive on death row they lose their opportunity to have contact visits with anyone. In some cases the lawyers can have contact visits with their clients but they're not permitted, any longer, to have contact visits with their family members. So when somebody gets executed, he has to tell his family goodbye by talking to them on a telephone. I was talking earlier, about my client Christian Oliver who was executed last November.

His execution was witnessed by four members of his family - his mom, his dad, his brother and his sister - and he had to tell them goodbye by essentially talking to them on a microphone. He wasnt permitted to hug them; he wasnt permitted to kiss them. I think that that aspect of the way that we carry out executions in the U.S., and in Texas, in particular, is an aspect of these executions that has been particularly bothersome to me.

GROSS: My guest is David Dow, an appellate lawyer who represents death row inmates. His new memoir is called "The Autobiography of an Execution."

We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If youre just joining us, my guest is David Dow and he's the author of a new memoir about his work as a defense attorney for death row clients and the book is called "The Autobiography of an Execution." He's been representing death row clients under appeals in Texas for about 20 years.

Now youve spent your 20 years working on death row in Texas, which is famous, for among other things, for having a lot of executions. So what's unique about working with death row clients in Texas?

Prof. DOW: I have a few cases that I work on in other states and one of the facts that always strikes me when I go to those other states is how different death penalty lawyers are in other states. Even other states that have substantial death row populations, like Florida. Death penalty lawyers in other states are not constantly representing clients who are on the verge of execution. In other states it's a busy year in the execution chamber if you have five or six executions. In Texas, we might have five or six executions in a month or two.

What makes being a death penalty lawyer in Texas different from being a death penalty lawyer anywhere else, is just the shear volume of executions that we confront. And that volume of executions has an impact on the lawyers who do the work. There's never really a period of time where you have a breather where you can relax from the constant pressure of having clients who are just days or weeks away from being executed. I think that that's the singular factor about Texas that makes it different from other places from the standpoint of a death penalty lawyer.

GROSS: You know, I found it really interesting in your book that you often warn your death row clients that if they appeal they're probably not going to win. And if they lose they might be executed very shortly after they lose and they're not going to have time to prepare for their death. Why do you tell your clients that?

Prof. DOW: I was talking earlier about how, in most cases, we are litigating up until the very end; we're trying to find something else that we can file, something else that we can do. But at the same time, even if we find something, I know we're going to lose. And so I think that it's incumbent on me as a lawyer to tell the clients that we're going to lose. And I do that for two reasons: one of them is altruistic and one of them isn't. The altruistic reason is that I believe in being honest with my clients. I dont want to tell them that I think that we're going to win if I dont think that we're going to win. I dont want to mislead them. I dont want them to put off doing things that people who know the date that they're going to die might want to do. I dont want them not to write goodbye letters to people they want to write letters to. I dont want them not to say goodbye to their loved ones. I dont want them not to make plans for disposing of their body if that's important to them. So, one of the reasons that I'm honest is just so that my clients can tie up the loose ends the way many people would want to. The second reason is that I'm the one who has to call them after our final appeals have been turned down by the Supreme Court and that typically happens at 5:30 in the afternoon or 20 to 6:00 and the execution is scheduled for 6 o'clock.

GROSS: Wow.

Prof. DOW: And I pick up a telephone and I call the prison where they're going to be executed at that time. My clients are still in a holding cell, which is immediately adjacent to the execution chamber and I identify myself to the warden's assistant who answers the phone, although I think she knows my voice by now, and then she patches my call through to the telephone that's right next to the holding cell. And a guard picks it up and I identify myself to the guard. I think he knows my voice as well by now, and then I talk to my client. And I tell him that we lost.

Sometimes the conversations are very very short; sometimes they're a little bit longer. One of the reasons that I'm so clear when I tell them that this is the way the cases are probably going to develop, is that I have in fact had the experience of calling someone who was not prepared to die. And I called him and told him that we had lost and he started crying the crying turned into something that was close to hysteria and he was begging me to do something else, to file something else, to think of something else to try to do for him. And those are horrible conversations to have. They're terrible for the inmate, of course, but it was also, frankly, terrible for me and I dont want to have anymore conversations like that.

GROSS: Now, you write in your book that the people you meet on death row, they're not monsters; they're people and often they're transformed people 'cause the crime that they committed - the monstrous crime they may have committed - was years ago and they often change between the time of the crime and the time of the execution. Yet, at the same time, you write in your book: I believe in evil. When you use the word evil and say that you believe in it, what do you mean?

Prof. DOW: I do believe in evil. I believe that there are some people who are just bad and they're never going to be made good. And I think I say in the book, I hope I say in the book, that I dont know how they got to be that way. I dont know whether they were born that way or whether they were broken at such a young age that that's how they came to be that way, but from the point of view of society it doesnt really matter. It doesnt really matter why a person is inveterately bad. And I think that there are people like that. I dont think that we need to be executing them. But I do believe that they're people in prison who can not possibly be made good - who can not possibly be rehabilitated.

GROSS: And what's your role as a defense attorney when youre representing somebody who you not only believe is guilty but who you believe is evil?

Prof. DOW: My role as a defense lawyer is to try to persuade the court - the judges - that my client should've been sentenced to life rather than death. And I will say this, that even in those some number of cases where I've been representing somebody who I really believe is or was an evil person, even in those cases, there were appalling constitutional violations. And one of the things that I noticed about those cases is that the fact that my client seems to be evil, seems to make it easier for the judges to ignore the fact that there were constitutional violations. They just dont care about it. They say, here we have a bad person; this is a bad person. There's no way this person is ever going to be fixed or better or rehabilitated. Let's just be done with him. And I represent those people because I dont accept that analysis. I dont think that that's the United States legal system is supposed to work. Even my bad evil clients are human beings who are entitled to have their rights protected.

GROSS: David Dow, thanks so much for talking with us.

Prof. DOW: It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

GROSS: David Dow's new memoir is called "The Autobiography of an Execution." He's a distinguished professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center and the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service. You can read an excerpt of his memoir on our Web site freshair.npr.org.

Coming up, jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews a new CD of music inspired by Eric Dolphy. It's by the British band Empirical.

This is FRESH AIR.

NYT gives a shout out to my home from age 1 to 5. 

By JILL P. CAPUZZO

WHEN asked what they like best about living in South Orange, residents almost invariably cite three attributes: the rich and varied architecture, the demographic diversity, and the easy commute into Manhattan. The latter two have a lot to do with the fact that New York City is the point of origin for a high percentage of South Orange’s residents.

“It’s like getting a city, with a backyard,” said Cherre Schwartz of Weichert Realtors in Maplewood, noting that most of her clients come from New York or the more urban parts of North Jersey, and that many work in the city.

Byron and Timicka Anderson are just such a couple. After living in Brooklyn for five years, they started a family and began looking for a suburb with an easy commute to New York. Friends directed them to South Orange, in Essex County around 18 miles west of Manhattan.

“We were assured we’d fit right in, that everyone would have their Brooklyn or Hoboken story,” said Mr. Anderson, who with his wife and three sons now lives in a 3,000-square-foot ranch on a quarter acre that they bought for $637,000 in 2008.

A designer of retail space in Manhattan, Mr. Anderson, 39, commutes daily, using the New Jersey Transit Midtown Direct line into Pennsylvania Station. Ever since its inauguration in 1996, this line has been direct in more ways than one, providing an obvious boost to housing values in this town of about 16,200.

Marc Loeb, a former resident of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, also takes advantage of the 30-minute train ride into the city each day, having moved to the Montrose Park section of South Orange last year with his husband, Wolf Ehrblatt. For this couple, who nine months ago had a daughter through surrogacy, diversity is South Orange’s most appealing quality. Citing the mixed-race and same-sex couples who are neighbors, Mr. Loeb described Montrose Park as a “great cross section of society,” adding that “we’ve made more friends in one year in South Orange than in our 10 years in New York,” and that his daughter was “going to be exposed to all sorts of humanity, and that’s important to me.”

¶Adam and Debbie Altamore, who have lived in town since 2000, like it so much that they decided to stay when recently trading up to a larger house. “When we moved into the house, people came over with baked goods, and introduced their kids to our kids,” Mr. Altamore said. “It’s a sort of community feeling that has been mostly lost. I wasn’t so much like that myself, but they made me feel like I belonged.”

¶According to a recent census breakdown, 60 percent of residents are white, 31 percent are African-American, 5 percent are Hispanic and 4 percent are Asian. By comparison, the population of Millburn, another upscale Essex County town, is 89 percent white, 8 percent Asian and 1 percent African-American.

Yet even as residents cite village diversity as an asset, there have been times when it evoked very public ambivalence. One was about 10 years ago, when there was a move to change the village’s name to South Mountain, to distance it from the other Oranges, which are more diverse and less prosperous. The measure was too contentious to come up for a vote, but “we thought it made sense not to have Orange in the name,” said Roy Scott, a broker with Re/Max Village Square. “The street signs, the Yellow Pages all say ‘the Oranges.’ We never get defined as South Orange. There was too much negativity attached to it on the news,” he said of the measure, “but a huge number of residents wanted it.”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

South Orange is often linked to Maplewood, the equally diverse neighbor with which it shares a high school and some public services. But South Orange has larger lots and more notable architecture. Caroline Farnsworth, an agent with Keller Williams Midtown Direct, estimates that 85 percent of its houses were built from the late 1800s to the 1930s. “There’s a lot of charm and character here,” she said. “It’s not your cookie-cutter kind of place.”

Some of the most magnificent houses can be found in Montrose Park, an area listed on the federal and state Registries of Historic Places since 1997. Grand Colonial Revivals, Tudors and Victorians occupy deep, heavily landscaped properties, along streets lighted with gas lanterns. (South Orange lays claim to having more operating gas lights than any other city in the country.)

A number of the town’s public buildings are also on the historic register, as well as houses in a second, smaller historic district around Prospect Street, in the southwest corner. Smaller early 20th-century houses can be found in the southeastern Tuxedo Park neighborhood, which borders Newark and backs up to Seton Hall University, with its 58-acre campus serving 9,700 students. Near the center of town are condominiums and rental apartments, including the Church Street Commons luxury apartments near the train station.

The town occupies 2.8 square miles on the eastern slope of South Mountain. On the hills climbing up the mountain are some of the more modern houses, some of which have stunning views of the Manhattan skyline. This neighborhood, known as Newstead, is primarily a mix of ranches and contemporaries.

The newest homes — and the only new construction in recent years in South Orange — are on the site of a quarry in a mid-2000s Pulte Homes development called the Manors at South Mountain, which has 62 luxury town houses and 6 detached homes. Five years ago, Sherry and Stephen Weintraub sold their colonial on Harding Street and moved into the Manors. “It’s like living on top of a mountain,” said Mrs. Weintraub, 66. “You think you’re in Vermont.”

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

In early September, there were 103 houses on the market in South Orange, ranging from an 1890 three-bedroom fixer-upper, listed at $164,900, to a six-bedroom custom-built house on 0.75 acres with a lagoon-style pool, listed at $1.299 million. Neither reflects the typical market here. According to the Garden State Multiple Listing Service, 109 houses sold from January to the end of August, at a median price of $524,900, up from $507,000 for the 116 homes sold in the same period in 2010. Mr. Scott of Re/Max ascribes this rise to the fact that sellers are finally getting realistic about pricing. Still, he notes, “you get a lot of house for your money here.

“The huge majority of houses in South Orange were built in the time frame when there was the best construction in America,” Mr. Scott said.

This is how Mr. Loeb views the 1942 brick colonial on 0.25 acres that he and Mr. Ehrblatt bought last summer for $610,000, before it was officially listed. Mr. Altamore, too, feels he got a great buy on his center-hall colonial on an acre. Built in the 1920s, the 6,000-square-foot house has a green tile roof, and a three-car carriage house with a legally deeded apartment, and cost the Altamores $1.1 million in July 2010.

“I have friends paying that for an apartment in the city,” Mr. Altamore said. “For that, maybe they get an extra half bath or a couple of extra closets. Then they come out here and see this and say, ‘Where do I sign?’ ”

THE SCHOOLS

South Orange has two elementary schools: Marshall, serving 450 students in prekindergarten through Grade 2, and South Mountain, serving 628 students in kindergarten through Grade 5. The South Orange Middle School has 674 students in Grades 6 through 8. Columbia Senior High School, in Maplewood, has 1,854 students from the two towns. SAT averages last year were 540 in math, 528 in reading and 524 in writing, versus 520, 496 and 494 statewide.

WHAT TO DO

Opened in 2006, the ultramodern South Orange Performing Arts Center offers live performances in its 415-seat auditorium, as well as a five-screen movie theater. Outdoor activities include: a community pool that charges residents just $20 a year to join; the Orange Lawn Tennis Club, which was founded in 1880 and has 10 grass and 10 artificial-turf courts; and hiking and biking trails in the South Mountain Reservation, a 2,000-acre preserve that also has a dog park run by the county.

The town center has a mix of eclectic restaurants and one-of-a-kind stores. Also, the recent addition of an upscale grocery store, Eden Gourmet, has quelled some grumblings over the slow redevelopment of a site that once housed a ShopRite supermarket.

THE COMMUTE

South Orange is served by two New Jersey Transit train stations on the Morristown line; the trip to Penn Station takes 30 to 40 minutes and costs $6.75 per ride. For residents of outlying neighborhoods, there is jitney service to the train station. The 107 New Jersey Transit bus line also provides direct service into the city, taking 48 minutes to get to the Port Authority and costing $6.50 per ride. During noncommuting hours, the drive into the city, via Route 280, can take as little as 25 minutes.

THE HISTORY

The village of South Orange was included in a tract that Newark’s founder, Robert Treat, bought from the Lenape Indians in 1666. It was part of Maplewood until 1904. Although its government structure makes it one of only four municipalities in New Jersey run as a village rather than a township, it was officially accorded township status in 1981 so it could qualify for federal aid.

By SU MECK

I’m not your typical undergraduate. I am a 46-year-old wife and mother with three adult children. Depending on how you count, I may be twice as old as the traditional students or essentially the same age as they are. After all, my life as I know it began 23 years ago, when, in a freakish accident, I was hit in the head by a ceiling fan in our home in Fort Worth, Tex. At that moment, everything and everyone I ever knew, and all I had ever learned, was erased completely from my mind.

I woke up after the accident in the hospital not knowing who or where I was. I couldn’t tie my own shoes. I couldn’t read or write, add or subtract, tell time or sit properly in a chair. Everyone thought for sure that my amnesia would be temporary. In the meantime, therapists taught me to walk, to hold a fork and spoon and eventually how to ride a bike. Others taught me letters and numbers. I learned how to make tuna fish. I learned a few table manners. I learned that I had parents and a lot of brothers and sisters. I learned that I had a husband named Jim and two babies, Benjamin and Patrick, and I was reintroduced to them nearly every day.

I know that all of this happened while I was in the hospital because I have been told about it, but I don’t have actual memories of that time. I can’t remember exactly when I began to form “new” memories, but it was many months, maybe even a year or more after the accident. And even then, I tended to forget stuff and ask the same questions over and over.

For the next 20 years, I set about learning everything I could. When Benjamin learned how to tie his shoes in preschool, he came home and taught me. When he and Patrick began elementary school, I learned reading, spelling, counting, addition, subtraction and handwriting right along with them. Five years after my accident, our daughter, Kassidy, was born, and I learned the pain of childbirth all over again. Later, I learned to mimic people all around me and act as they did, whether it was in church, at a party, with my family or at the kids’ school. I learned how to teach aerobics and spinning classes and became an instructor at several health clubs.

As the kids all progressed through school, so did I. By the time Benjamin got to middle school, I could read short novels, and by the time Kassidy got through third grade, I had learned almost all of my multiplication tables. I learned to be a parent, but I am certain that I was extremely inconsistent. Benjamin, Patrick and Kassidy had a very unconventional upbringing. There were many times when it was unclear who was the parent and who was the child.

In the spring of 2007, I lost my job teaching aerobics. I was not quite sure what to do with myself until an aunt and uncle suggested I take some classes at Montgomery College in Rockville, Md., where they both taught. The idea seemed laughable. I couldn’t even remember being a student in a classroom, let alone writing papers, taking tests, getting grades. But that fall I enrolled.

At Montgomery College, I learned to speak up and participate in class discussions without feeling stupid. I learned to advocate for myself with my professors, and I gained confidence with each passing semester. It took me three years, but I graduated last May with an associate’s degree in music.

Now here I am at Smith College in Massachusetts, working toward a bachelor’s degree. Although my skill set has clearly expanded, it feels a little bit like when I first got home from the hospital back in Texas. What am I supposed to do now? What is expected of me? There was a moment recently on the way to Amherst to visit the Emily Dickinson Museum with all of the other new students when I felt really out of place. I knew basically nothing about Emily Dickinson. I thought to myself: What the hell am I doing at this school? All of these women are so smart. What’s going to happen when they find out I have never read an Emily Dickinson poem?

My fears were unfounded. The woman who gave our tour was so full of great stories that I was sad when it ended. I just wanted to hear more and more about Emily Dickinson, her family, her poetry, her life. And I realized that — despite everything — I have been given a gift, the gift of inquisitiveness. And that would get me through.

Su Meck attends Smith College in Massachusetts as an Ada Comstock scholar. She is working on a memoir.

Parked in front of my place. Buy that man a steak dinner!

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