Under the white big top tent, I am one of nearly one thousand people who have come this year to witness the awarding of the Edward MacDowell Medal to multi-media icon, Yoko Ono. Given since 1960, the medal is a national award presented annually to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to the culture. Prior winners include Robert Frost, Georgia O’Keeffe, Robert Motherwell and Stephen Sondheim.

At 91, Yoko is too frail to attend, but we learn she is watching a live stream of the program. There are surely ghosts here. John, of course, but more. One speaker welcomes us to Peterborough which, as he quotes, is ​“a good town to live in,” so surely Thornton Wilder is here (After all, he wrote Our Town, the masterpiece that contains this line, while a fellow at MacDowell). As new residents, we have discovered that this is true. 

And there are other ghosts, too. The library is named for James Baldwin, who no doubt haunts the grounds at night, walking, smoking and telling hard truths. There were also Leonard Bernstein, Willa Cather, Audre Lord, Studs Terkel, Meredith Monk. Our house predates them all, and I hope the wind blows some of their muses down to me in my little second story writing studio on High Street. So far, the only thing the wind has blown in has been two bats — good luck, if you believe in that sort of thing. One came in downstairs on a very hot and muggy night last summer; the other found its way into our bedroom in autumn and perched upside-down on the windowsill until we found a way to open another window and screen without scaring the hell out of it — or us — and it glided away, noiselessly, gracefully.

Love her or hate her, Yoko was an icon of the Baby Boom generation, of which I am a member. She got a lot of bad press as being ​“the woman who broke up the Beatles,” but to my mind, they were doing a fine job of that on their own. I say that as someone who thought they walked on water. Especially John. She was a force in the avant-garde tradition of John Cage, a multi-disciplinarian who tore down walls. Grapefruit — her conceptual manifesto, published 60 years ago — offers instruction and drawings on all aspects of art: Performance scripts encouraging action as opposed to speech. She considers herself a hybrid, like the grapefruit, and moves between her worlds and talents, not always without incident or bad press. I am grateful to Yoko for her artistic insights and her bravery and to MacDowell for recognizing her during her lifetime.