The cover story in tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine is adapted from Joan Didion’s forthcoming book, The Year of Magical Thinking. It is about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and Didion’s subsequent actions and reactions. Dunne died of a heart attack before his wife’s eyes on December 30, 2003, sitting at the dinner table in their New York home. Her description of the event — the arrival of the parameds, the trip to the hospital — seems oddly familiar, not because we have heard or witnessed this story before (some of us have) but because the trademark Didion style makes it seem familiar. She witnesses her witnessing with a sense of detachment, as usual in her reporting. As the social worker at the hospital remarks when she beats the doctor to the punch in announcing Dunne’s death, “She’s a pretty cool customer.”

What is more surprising, to reader and writer alike, is the depth of the grief that follows. She explores her grief as if it were a cave, using her intellect and her skills as a writer to illuminate the murk. They were married for almost 40 years and it is his absence as much as his presence that she devotes her narrative to.

Did I mention that their daughter was in a coma at the time of Dunne’s death?

Just last week I was reading to my students from her essay “The White Album” (1979) in which she described an ambivalent diagnosis of MS she received from a doctor — “an exclusionary diagnosis [that] meant nothing. I had at this time a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife. In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist’s office in Beverly Hills, the improbable had become probable, the norm. Things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me. I could be struck by lightning, could dare to eat a peach and be poisoned by the cyanide in the stone. The startling fact was this: my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind. ‘Lead a simple life,’ the neurologist advised. ‘Not that it makes any difference we know about.’ In other words it was another story without a narrative.”

Different story, different stranger, same knife.

I like Neil Young in all his guises — rocker, folker, confused and angry patriot, confused and angry protestor, dad, and just all around Jeremiah railing at the everything — but now that he’s become a media critic as well, I think we all have to start watching our backs. As reported in the Chicago Tribune this morning, Young lambasted the paper for a story it did on Farm Aid last week that cast aspersions on how funds from the annual benefit were distributed.

“We are not purely raising money for farmers,” he fumed at a press conference before the concert, “that’s a small part of what we do… The people at the Chicago Tribune should be held responsible for this piece of crap.”

Here the protean artist sometimes known as Shakey invoked one of his own Crazy Horse songs:

Saw it on the tube
Bought it on the phone
Now you’re home alone
It’s a piece of crap

Hey, he’s not only describing just about everything you ever bought for yourself or your kids, he’s talking about your newspaper too. Neil’s ability to be all things to all people includes the role of consumer advocate and small wonder. Seeing him in concert in Pittsburg of all places a few years ago I was struck by the range of the songs he performed — the sweet, open-hearted “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” the Homeric “I’m the Ocean” — and the motley crew he performed them for: bankers, bikers, Deadheads, regular dads with their kids. You’ve got to love a guy who can be caught screaming at the traffic one day and doing fundraisers for his kid’s school the next. At least I do.

It was odd seeing Bush standing in front of St. Louis Cathedral in an emptied out Jackson Square last night, delivering his speech to an audience of crickets (the ones that haven’t deserted the city) and Secret Servicemen. “I am speaking to you from the city of New Orleans, nearly empty, still partly under water and waiting for life and hope to return,” he said to a deafening silence. The church itself, which fronts one end of Jackson Square, looked like a prop; here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the door and where are the people?

The president himself chose his outfit from the working-man side of his wardrobe: his sleeves were rolled up, his collar was unbuttoned, he was ready to get the job done! Unfortunately he was a week or two too late, as the ever-rising bloated body count continues to remind us. Photos of Bush disembarking his helicopter earlier showed he was also wearing his work boots. He was ready to get his feet dirty, too.

Such props and costumes are the stuff of politics, of course. Kerry was mocked for wearing hunting clothes (even though he was going hunting at the time) and after Dukakis’s tank ride it’s safe to say that few presidential candidates will risk putting on a helmet again. But even while Bush has been spared the same ridicule when he goes out to cut some brush on his ranch, here in the city his administration forgot his attire seemed rather grotesque. Was he about to go digging through the mud in search of survivors? Or was it his dying presidency he hoped to revive?

Jackson Square has pleasant associations for almost anyone who has been to NO and I am no exception. I proposed to my wife there; William Faulkner lived a stone’s throw from the spot where Bush stood. To see a living locale reduced to backdrop status is sad especially when the man in the foreground so utterly failed the people who once lived there. People will return to New Orleans, of course, just as Bush will return to the White House. Whether he can get anything done there in the years to come remains to be seen. The Katrina disaster has revealed the theatrics for what they are and coast to coast, in states blue and red, a lot of people were left wondering who the hell was in charge. The city is real, it’s the man who is a facade.

While it may not rival the return of the Palestinians to the Gaza Strip, the news that John Fogerty was returning to Fantasy Records marks a reconciliation that seemed just as unlikely. It was at Fantasy in the late sixties and early seventies that Fogerty’s Creedence Clearwater Revival recorded a string of hits that seems even more remarkable today. “Bad Moon Rising,” “Hey Tonight,” “Fortunate Son,” “Green River” — most songwriters could have retired having written just one of those but on album after album they just kept on coming. (And really, you can’t blame the man for every weak-assed version of “Proud Mary” or “Lodi” you’re heard performed by troubadors everywhere from SF to Katmandu.)

Then in the mid-seventies the well seemingly went dry and in an infamous meeting with Fantasy head and CCR father figure Saul Zaentz, Fogerty threw a fit and ceded the rights to all of his songs to Fantasy just to get out of his contract with them. Even in the addled history of rock ‘n’ roll this seemed to be one of the most bone-headed moves of all time — up there, perhaps, with the Kinks similarly stupid sale of all future song rights though not quite in a league with Sam Phillips releasing Elvis to RCA for $35,000. And for the next decade Zaentz used that money to finance one Oscar-winning picture after another (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus) while Fogerty sulked, going into the studio in his home every day and coming out empty-handed.

I interviewed Zaentz for the Berkeley Monthly about twenty years ago. He was gearing up to produce Phillip Kaufman’s adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and was most agreeable on every subject — except that of John Fogerty. The singer’s dry spell finally ended with the release of a new album, Centerfield, and he opened local shows with not one but two Fuck You, Saul songs, “Zanz Can’t Danz” and “Mr. Greed.” Though John wouldn’t talk to me his brother, Tom Fogerty, wrote to say that Zaentz had always been great to him and the rest of the band and that John was the one with the problem. (Tom died a few years later of tuberculosis.) I had the sense that whatever went down in that boardroom had more to do with the surrogate father-son relationship the producer and the artist had and little to do with Fogerty’s output.

There were numerous lawsuits and counter suits. “Zanz” became “Vanz” as the result of one, and in a a truly bizarre moment, Zaentz and company tried to claim that Fogerty’s 1985 hit “The Old Man Down the Road” was a rewrite of the 1970 CCR song “Run Through the Jungle” — which Fantasy owned, accusing Fogerty in essence of plagiarizing himself. (A jury ultimately disagreed.) Whatever the psychology of the players, this had to be a low point in the art-vs-mammon world of rock business, akin to David Geffen suing Neil Young for making music with no commercial potential.

The stage for Fogerty’s return to Fantasy was set earlier this year when Zaentz sold Fantasy to a consortiium of buyers (including Norman Lear) for $80 million. In November the label will release a retrospective with an apt if stultifyingly unoriginal title: The Long Road Home. An album of orginal material is due in 2006 but don’t expect to hear any songs from it on Zaentz’s next project, a biography of Goya. Now there was an artist who knew something about suffering.

I’ve been avoiding the television and radio this morning, fearful of the onslaught of words and images that this anniversary will bring. I don’t want to see any stars and stripes, or pictures of the rubble, or yellow ribbons, or bullhorns. I don’t want to hear the language of the GOP convention repeated thoughtlessly. “On that day,” GWB reminded people endlessly in the run up to the last election, “our world changed forever.”

Well, at least until it was changed forever again. As Hurricane Katrina demonstrated once again, disasters change peoples lives, sometimes by ending them. The conclusions we draw about the meaning of those disasters and how we react in their aftermath — how we change — may be the test of our real selves. I was struck by the opening lines in Nicoloai Ouroussoff’s Critic’s Notebook yesterday: “There has been no healing, really. Four years have passed since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and the road to recovery at Ground Zero looks bleaker than ever.”

He was talking about the planned memorial, and the politicization of the process, and how likely it is that what is finally built will be an ugly, schmaltzy mess, but he could just as well have been speaking of the attacks themselves. Four years later the country has gone to its separate corners and posiitons have hardened more quickly than Ozzy Osbourne’s arteries. Those who believe that Iraq had something to do with the attacks — a position that, on the face of it, seems as laughable as Roman sandal movies I watched as a kid, in which Samson and Hercules teamed up to fight Goliath — want nothing to do with those who think our new all-war-all-the-time policy is just creating new Bin Ladens, with the speed that it takes to grow Sea Monkeys. The two sides look at each other from across a gulf, separated by flag decals and Bush Lies bumper stickers. Everyone else tunes into the next Paris Hilton news and worries about their abs, proving that Osama might be right after all, that ours is a civilization in decline. Nice tan, though.

This morning at 8:48 I was in Ft. Greene Park watching the dogs run. There was no sense of memorial, even by the trees that were planted to honor Frank De Martini, who died helping others out of the WTC. (You can read his widow’s story in “Escaped from New York,” on the Articles page.) I recalled walking up Lafayette right across from where the trees are planted that morning. People were already coming across the bridges covered in ash. There in front of me a man broke down on the sidewalk and started to weep and I stood staring at him, mute, unable even to reach out. Another couple did the same thing, all of us frozen in shock.

I’ve forgiven myself for my inaction in the years since. I still like to believe that I — all of us, really — are capable of reacting differently, with less thought and more feeling. Just this morning I got an email from my sister April, who lives in Kingwood, TX, a suburb of Houston. Refugees from New Orleans were everywhere, she said. “The KW United Methodist Church (only Red Cross station in Kingwood) actually acting like a CHURCH should act and providing comfort and a place to stay to those in need,” she wrote. “How odd. All the other zillions of churches here standing around with their thumbs up their holy butts.”

Kingwood, I should note, is as white as the NO refugees are black. We do not need to identify with people to reach out to them, or ask where the mud or the ash came from, or how it came to fall on them. We’ll all get our share in the end.