John Gould's first column appeared in The Christian Science Monitor in 1942. So he was already a veteran columnist by the time I found him at eight or nine. I'd been invited to a meeting of a kids' club in Atlanta, where I grew up. Once a month, this fairly polite (on the surface, anyway) composite of Southern schoolchildren convened to divvy up the Monitor, and then to sit down and talk about it with the adults. I wasn't too interested in the hard news ("I think your bent is more literary," one kindly newspaper editor told me years later to guide me away from a job), so I riffled through the pages till I got to The Home Forum. Poems! Essays! Art! Now here was the spot for me. And here, too, was my first John Gould column, "Dispatch from the Farm." I've been reading him ever since.
So last March, I sent this venerable New England humorist an e-mail, asking for an interview. Back came the familiar ping of my computer. "Dear Gail," his wife Dorothy wrote, "John and I feel honored that you would like to come to Bartlett Woods and visit with us. Please advise when you plan to arrive. I am sorry we are unable to offer you any accommodations. Of course, this is all weather permitting. As ever, Dottie G."
My husband, David, and I took the drive north to Rockland, the weather brisk but bright. Rockland is one town over from Lisbon Falls, and the constable's office by the stoplight told us exactly where to find Bartlett Woods, a rather newly constructed assisted-care facility with lots of tall glass windows and spacious grounds. A few daffodils were already poking up through the soil.
