The life of a magazine writer is a patchwork of mundane and thrilling, solitary and sociable. It requires Rube Goldberg ingenuity to schedule interviews and meticulous travel planning that you hope, as a believer in spontaneity, will go awry. It involves demystifying the mysterious and transforming work-a-day into evocative. It also generates some big surprises. Though my stock-in-trade is humor and travel writing, there have been times when I've had an opportunity to write profiles about famous and less-than-famous people. Usually, after I complete an interview I leave my work 'at the office.' In other words, the information will be transcribed, decoded and turned into some kind of intriguing narrative during my prescribed work hours. I can leave what is said and how it is said for the page. But then there are those times when what is said, how it was said, and perhaps more importantly what was not said has such a profound influence on me that it breaches the constructs of my writing life. Sometimes it's hard to untangle my life from my subject's. Which is precisely what happened after I interviewed Bobby Kennedy, Jr. Not too long ago, I needed to get inside the minds of individuals who were instrumental in the cleanup of the Hudson River. This led to some surreal moments; discussing floating dead bodies with Hudson Riverkeeper, Alex Matthiessen. Singing 'Where Have All the Flowers Gone' with Pete Seeger around his dining room table. And sweating it out through an interview with Bobby Kennedy, Jr. When I say 'sweating' - I mean it in the literal sense. Never have I spent an hour in conversation with someone and left so soaked with perspiration. It was, in all ways, a tough interview, and not only because I tried to venture into places where he was loath to go. His personal armor was so thick, so weighty, it took up most of the space in his tiny, unpretentious Pace University Environmental Litigation Clinic office where he and his co-chair preside over ten idealistic environmental attorneys-in-training. I have tremendous respect for what Kennedy does. As an environmentalist myself, I feel he fights the good fight - and it feels groovy to have an agitator on the side you feel is the right one. My perspective didn't seem to soften him, though. The paradox of BK, Jr. is that in order to promote his cause - which is to bring environmental polluters to justice and thus clean up our planet - he must constantly stay in the public eye. At the same time, he is an intensely private person - and this private side is what he does everything to protect. I was unprepared for his striking resemblance to his father - and his eyes, which looked like the earth as seen from space; bottomless blue, complex and searing. He mentioned that he had little time- and had forgotten he had an interview that morning. He hastily ushered me to the only other chair in his office. I sat down as he picked up the phone to make a call. He read a newsletter. He called for his assistant. All this while I attempted to ask questions - to engage him in conversation. I identified his voice - a scorched-earth, prep-school gravel, born of extreme wealth, haute privilege and inhaled smoke - as one I'd heard hundreds of times from my back-country neighbors; my home town being Greenwich, CT. This pretentious vocalization , coupled with a general wariness of journalists who have hungrily followed the ups and downs of his life since birth, added another layer of protective shield around him. Things clicked along just fine as long as I kept my inquiries to his passion, his work. At one point, though, I posed a personal question. 'What was the greatest gift your father ever gave you?' It was, I thought, a question he could answer in relation to his work. He responded with a blistering stare - a look that momentarily derailed me. 'I told you I wouldn't talk about my family,' he glowered. And as he said this, I could see his eyes welling - an involuntary response that seemed to tap deeply into a past hurt. I quickly moved on to the next impersonal question and finished the interview without further infraction. But the whole experience shook me in a way that no other interview has. That night I had a dream of Bobby at 14, the current age of my oldest son, Ben. I never take my dreams lightly. They are an outlet for my anxieties, of course, as any student of Freud can tell you. But I also learn from them - at least the ones I remember. And this one I remember for its vividness and urgency. In it, Bobby, Jr. Is a wild, belligerent teen. He and his father verbally thrust and parry about public image and Jr.'s drug use and expectations about what a presidential family should look like. The argument escalates until father screams to son, 'you are a huge disappointment' and son shouts back, 'I wish you were dead'. Those were the last words, in my dream, that Bobby, Jr. ever said to his father who was killed the next day by an assassin's bullet. I woke up crying for that 14 year old who would never be given the chance to make things right - no matter how altruistic his life, no matter how devoted a father he is to his own kids, no matter how much he cleans up the planet. Now I don't know if that remotely corresponds to Bobby, Jr.'s life. For all I know he could have had the closest, most understanding relationship with his father to the very end.

But I do know that belligerence is my own son's middle name these days, and that there are times that I can hardly look him in the eye and think kind thoughts. My interview with Kennedy sparked a cautionary tale - a tale told between the synapses of my nighttime brain, based on a momentary glance - that has impelled me to go easy on my 14 year old. I don't know how much longer I have on this earth, but I'd hate to leave behind unspanable chasms, the kind that trigger tears of regret years down the line. Sometimes in the life of a magazine writer, without even being aware of it, you can learn an invaluable lesson in the blink of an eye.

Bio: Malerie Yolen-Cohen is a contributing writer to Offshore and Westchester
Magazines.  Her work has appeared in Ladies Home Journal, Sierra, Paddler
and dozens of other publications.