A Journalist Asks Questions
The journalist's name was Ingrid Paz. She wrote for one of the New York magazines that you can still buy in paper form at airports, and she had been assigned, the editor told me by email, a nine-thousand-word piece on *the Vermont phenomenon.* She asked politely and she gave me two weeks' notice and she sent, in advance, three of her previous pieces, so that I could read them and decide what kind of writer she was before I agreed to sit in a room with her. I read all three. The first was about a chain of assisted-living facilities in Florida, and was devastating. The second was about an actress I had never heard of, and was affectionate and precise. The third was about a pastor in Louisiana whose congregation had fallen apart, and was neither kind nor cruel, and was, in its steady unflustered way, the best piece of prose I had read that year.
I knew, reading it, that I was going to talk to Ingrid Paz, and also that I was going to try very hard to be boring.
She came up on a Thursday in the second week of June. She drove herself, in a rented small grey car, from the airport in Burlington, and she arrived at ten past ten in the morning, and she knocked on my door, which I appreciated, because by then very few people knocked. She was about forty-three. She was shorter than I had expected, and her hair was the kind of hair that has decided, permanently, to do one thing, and she