My parents, Bob and Mary (Stow) Caldwell, met when working as reporters at the Bergen Evening Record in Hackensack, New Jersey and were married in 1934. Mary then left the BER to work for another New Jersey paper and by 1938, when she became pregnant with my sister Cathy, she was, she has told me, the highest paid woman reporter in the State. She resigned, and said a few years ago that she has never regretted sacrificing her newspaper career to having a family. She had earlier, in her sixties, come to notice it odd that it had been her and Bob’s--it seemed everyone’s--unthinking assumption that she, not he, should be the one to leave the BER when they married, but her assertion that our family brought her intense joy and lasting satisfaction was I think no less than true. While having and raising us, she also (among other things) wrote two mysteries and a children’s book, all three now lost; helped bring Family Counseling to Ridgewood before such services were fashionable; served on the local School Board; and taught school. I was born in 1941, my brother Bob in 1944, and my brother Dan in 1949. All four of us children went through the Ridgewood school system, as had Mary--my father grew up in Hasbrouck Heights, a few miles away--, and my brothers and I, like him, graduated from Columbia College. Cathy finished her sophomore year at Ridgewood High and went directly to Oberlin College on a Ford Scholarship. She graduated from Oberlin in 1958, when she nineteen. (Mary was a graduate of Mount Holyoke.)

My college career ended with my graduation in May 1963, when the picture of me as a 21-year-old that appears at the top of my homepage was taken; I planned to begin working as a reporter in the fall. Instead, three months after Columbia, I broke my neck and was paralyzed. After I was hurt I thought that I would be working for a newspaper in about a year, and for the next seven years, increasingly facetiously toward the end, I continued to expect it; then I didn’t.

In June of 1964 I moved from rehab at Columbia Presbyterian in New York City to my parents’ handsome Victorian house in Ridgewood, and until October 1970 I lived in the two large rooms comprising half the ground floor of 226 Prospect Street. I used a manual wheelchair I could barely push, slept in a hospital bed and, except for upwards of a dozen trips to and from and stays in one hospital or another, was out of doors fewer than a half-dozen times a year. My mother stopped teaching elementary school and was almost my only nurse until 1968; she was my primary care-giver deep into 1970. When in my wheelchair, I sometimes sat in front of my Selectric typewriter at my desk, more usually at a card table. Next to me, (almost) always, was a coffeepot full of very weak tea. (Nothing is more important with an in-dwelling catheter than consuming copious quantities of fluid.) I read a lot and wrote some, including more than a hundred reviews for The Record’s weekend book review, The Record the new name of the Bergen Evening Record. I also had two reviews in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, one in Psychology Today, and one in The Saturday Review of Literature, and had a handful of poems accepted and published in little magazines

In 1965 I started playing poker in a game that usually included my mother and my brother Dan. My brother Bob also played infrequently and most of the other players were friends and acquaintances of Bob’s and Dan’s. On most Friday nights a group met in my rooms to smoke, drink, and, most important, talk. Participants were my aunt and uncle (William A. Caldwell would receive a Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for Simeon Stylites, the 6-day-a-week column he had been writing since the 1930s in the BER and then The Record), their daughter Toni, my mother and father (my father had left the BER after World War II and from 1948 to 1961 was Managing Editor of the Bayonne Times; he returned to The Record in 1961 as Night Managing Editor), and usually one or more of my parents’ friends and one or more of my Columbia classmates. The talk was very good.

In late 1968 my brother Dan succeeded in getting me to smoke cannabis and it changed my life dramatically; I smoked it almost every day into 1984. I thought (and think) that the change was for the better and that most of the country’s drug laws, most of which remain in force today, were cruel and foolish. The Friday night gatherings were gradually discontinued and by 1970 had ended; the conversation did not, though I was now often the oldest instead of the youngest talker and the usual mind-altering substance used was not alcohol but marijuana. I still stayed indoors at 226 drinking my weak tea at my card table or desk, but a pile of typescript that I intended to be a novel had begun to accumulate beside my Selectric.

In 1970 my friends and I started a commune we called Better Farm in Redwood, N.Y. (90 miles about due north of Syracuse, ten miles from the St. Lawrence River and Canada) and I moved there in October, thinking I would live there permanently. It proved otherwise, and I was back and forth between Ridgewood and Redwood until, in 1973, I first wintered in Tucson. From 1973 until the early 1980s I split my time between Ridgewood, Redwood, and Tucson, and after that, except for six months in Santa Cruz, California in 1984, between Redwood and Tucson. From May 1997 to October 2006 I was always in Redwood, but the past three years I’ve been about six months a year in Tucson. I’m an unusually old and active quadriplegic and the increasing complexity of my medical condition leads me to believe that soon I’ll decide to stay year-round in Tucson, where I have a relatively deep pool of support that includes a set of excellent doctors and near-by hospitals.

I am radically agnostic and for me suspension of disbelief is a useful, even necessary, exercise. I began The Healing late in 1977 after a séance at which I was told by a spirit doctor in whom I had no faith but in whom I tried hard not just to disbelieve that I would be walking in ninety days. Unlike many of my closest friends, I thought the proposition a bad even-money bet, but I recognized almost immediately that whether or not I walked again, I could write about the ninety days. I had until then failed to sustain any long piece of writing and now I had been given a beginning and an end I could not refuse, regardless of the medium’s or messenger’s nature. In 2005 I finished the most recent rewrite of the book that emerged.

In 1987 I began trying to write Love Note but didn’t finish its first draft, more than 340 pages, until 1994. It was 164 pages (a bit under 325,000 words) after I last rewrote it in 2006. My hope was that by writing about a particular and unexpected stage of one quadriplegic’s sex life, my own, I would be led into writing what I wished about everything. Responses to the book have varied from “none of the characters interests me” through “it’s pornography” to wonder and gratitude. I myself like the book, am pleased it is so much what I hoped it might become--though that opinion is likely to change if I read it yet again, at which point I will yet again, it seems, feel I must rewrite it. One of the experiences that humans share is failure, and among the ways I deal with it is by writing about it. At the end of Love Note Arthur, the narrator, who is very much (though of course also not) me, at last succeeds in talking about his current love life to the woman most deeply involved in it, and that the book exists in its present form is, I promise you, the result of prolonged and dedicated (if arguably futile) effort.