The bond between author and assistant is often close. But in Donald Hall’s case, his decades-long relationship with his assistant proved to be a lifeline that extended his writing career.

DONALD HALL IN 2014. PHOTO: HENRI COLE.

When Donald Hall interviewed Kendel Currier for the part-time job of typing his correspondence in August of 1994, one of the first things he asked was, “Will you type curse words?” His earlier hire for the position, a woman active in a local church, backed out when she discovered curse words in a letter, and he wanted to make sure Currier wouldn’t quit, too.

Hall found Currier’s response reassuring: She would type whatever he dictated, she told him, and keep a dictionary nearby in case she was uncertain of a spelling. She was thirty-six at the time and, by her own description, a stay-at-home mom and housewife. But she’d done secretarial work in the past, and Hall—not quite twice Currier’s age at sixty-six—was impressed by her professionalism. So, he hired her on the spot, and turned up the next day at her house in Andover, New Hampshire, with a canvas bag that contained a model letter, a stack of stationery, and a transcriber for playing back the dictation on his tapes. “It was as if the universe offered me a gift,” Currier later said, “and I was smart enough to accept it.”

Currier obtained the typewriter she used, an IBM Selectric III, from Hall’s previous typist, Lois Fierro. Lois also offered Currier a couple of tips: Hall insisted on the British spelling “cheque” for a bank check, and spelled “anymore” as two words.

Soon Hall and his amanuensis fell into their daily rhythm: he drove ten miles to her home in Andover to drop off the tape she was to transcribe with a guide sheet, and she typed up letters for the next day, when he brought her another tape. Because they used two briefcases for their transactions, the two rarely spoke. She would leave her briefcase with its finished work between her storm and front doors, where he could easily exchange it with his briefcase containing new work. Hall came early in the morning, and often, when Currier opened the door, he’d have already come and gone. In a way, she says, “we took up our own correspondence, I typing notes to him, and he answering me on the daily tape.”

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Luis Egidio Meléndez, Still Life with Salmon, Lemon and Three Vessels, 1772, oil on canvas, 16 x 24 1/2″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Oranges require orange to be. They are a color expectation. If an orange is not orange, it is no orange.

Oranges originated in China, where they were crossbred from a mandarin and a pomelo as early as 314 B.C. From there, oranges passed from Sanskrit नारङ्ग (nāran˙ga) through Persian نارنگ (nārang) and its Arabic derivative نارنج (nāranj). Traveling to continental Europe with the Moors, naranjas soon dotted al-Andalus and Sicily. Oranges arrived in England from France in the fourteenth century, their bright skins holding a taste of a color that became popular in markets, on palates, and, eventually, in tongue.

For centuries, oranges were orange and, still, orange was not a color—it was called yellow-red. It took another two hundred years for the color to earn its name, to become a form that could give itself to others—to be ascribed to flowers, stones, minerals, and the setting sun.

To the west, oranges followed the path of Spanish missionaries and lent their name to Orange County and the Orange State. In California, the fruit fed the miners of the gold rush who passed through mission towns. In Florida, there were so many groves that, by 1893, the state was producing five million boxes of fruit each year. In this tropical climate—nights too humid and too hot—oranges would ripen too quickly: they were ready to be eaten while still green. And so, from the twentieth century onward, green oranges have been synthetically dyed orange, coated to match consumer expectations. Orange reveals that humans cannot imagine a species detached from its color, even when we are the ones who detach it. Read More