Men! When will they ever "get in touch with" their damned feelings?!
The Wisest Man in the Universe (you know, Dad) said this day would come.
"Those boys of yours will have a hell of a time finding wives," he said. "They won't be able to find one that measures up to their mother, and that's what they'll be looking for, you know."
I think he was alluding to my compulsion to prove myself on the IronMom circuit...You know, the marathon competition where you bake chocolate chip cookies every day, serve meals made from food products that are not pre-packaged, chauffeur the kids to school and soccer practice, all while serving as mentor, guide and concierge.
Well, the day has arrived. Adam has his first real, true girlfriend...and they are so disgustingly in looooove...They call each other "My Pooh."
Someone, quick, gag me!
I was prepared to hate her. I mean, for pity's sake, she's a blonde...while also managing to be super smart, wicked funny, and undaunted by adults and ferocious snapping schnauzers.
What's not to love?
All right, I'll tell you what's not to love...Amanda got my rock-faced, iron-willed son to express his true emotions! Do you realize I have been trying to do this for lo these seventeen, almost eighteen years and have yet to crack the little bastard?!
When Adam was seven, the dentist said he wanted to pull the rest of Adam's baby teeth. He wanted to allow the adult teeth space to grow in. Well, my boy wasn't having that, not one bit of it! He pitched a little fit and as we drove home in the van told me he was not going to have his teeth pulled.
I glanced at him in the rearview mirror and saw stone. No contorted kid grimace. Stone.
I know the kid is terrified. This dentist wants to give him a cup of juice with knock-out drops in it a la Jonestown. Then, while Adam's sleeping, the guy intends to commit mayhem inside the kid's mouth. There will be blood. There will be pain. There will be ice cream at the end of the rainbow, I announce.
Stone. "I'm not doing it!"
I sigh. It's one of those "teachable moments."
I pull into the driveway, unbuckle my seatbelt and prepare to get to the root of the problem. Adam needs to face his fear. Only then will he feel less overwhelmed and see the logic of the situation.
I walk back to the rear captain's chair and face down my surly child. "Let's talk about this, honey," I say in my best therapist-y tone. "Are you scared?"
"No," he says. "I'm just not doing it, that's all!"
"Well, now, honey, the dentist is trying to make room for your big teeth. If the little baby ones are still stuck in place, the big ones will have to come in around them. They'll be crooked."
No reaction...Just a steely-eyed glare.
I try and I try to get the kid to talk about it, but no. We are trapped in the stuffy van, locked in mortal combat, daring the other to blink first.
And that was my undoing.
Instead of thinking it through. Instead of giving it a little time. Instead of following the tiny voice in my gut that said...Hey, there's something wrong with a dentist who routinely gives little kids cups of Kool-Aid in the waiting room and then waits for them to drop like flies into the waiting attendant's arms...Maybe it's okay to keep your baby teeth. Maybe that's why God invented orthodontics... I just bulldoze on through and finally lose control of the one little shred of dignity I have left.
I find myself towering over my young son, my arms gripping each side of his chair, looking the seven-year-old mountain right in the eyes.
"You have to tell me what you're feeling!" I demand. "I'm a therapist. This is what I do for a living!"
There is one long moment of complete and total silence. My entire parental life flashes before my eyes, culminating with the realization that I have just reached my all-time parenting low.
Our eyes remain locked together but our souls react as one...We both bust out laughing! Gut-holding, tear-shedding, loud, hiccuping gasps of laughter.
I collapse onto the floor beside him, pull him into my arms and hug him tight.
"You know what?" I say. "You're right. If you don't want to have your baby teeth pulled, we won't do it. We already know you're gonna have braces. What's a few more months?"
His little body relaxes against me and I am forgiven.
But Stoneface doesn't crack like this often.
Many's the big battle where we've gone head-to-head, toe-to-toe, forcing me to bully my way into doing what is hard but also right. Many's the time I've seen the anger, hurt or fear building up like a thundercloud only to drift away without expression.
I have learned to ride it out with him. To sit by his side in silence until he is ready...or not. To bear witness to his pain instead of trying to erase it with denial or easy kindnesses.
We have worked out a way to work through the feelings...Even if he doesn't want to express them like I do.
But now SHE is on the scene. There is nothing SHE can't conquer.
My father is mentor, best friend, and true companion to both my boys. He has been a constant safe harbor in their lives. When their parents fail them, Grandaddy will not.
Adam brought Amanda to meet Grandaddy a few weeks ago...And I knew it was to receive his blessing upon this tender, fragile shoot of new love.
Of course, The Wisest Man in the Known Universe is the font of all unconditional love and approval, so the girl had a cakewalk to his okay.
She liked him, likes him, and he likes her.
In the past year, I have watched my boys skate slowly around the edges of their grandfather's impending departure. I have seen them blow off the opportunities he has given them to say goodbye, or to talk about his leaving. I have watched their two little stone faces and it has killed me to know what agony must lie just beneath the surface.
But SHE tapped the keg.
When Adam told her he might need to leave school for New Bern because Grandaddy was probably dying, SHE lost it. She cried and wailed and showed every single piece of her anguish to him...
And in doing so turned the magic key and released his own imprisoned pain.
He came home, slightly after curfew, eyes swollen, nose plugged and collapsed at the foot of my bed amongst the dogs and my friend, Martha who is Vice Mom in my absence.
And he talked about his feelings.
Just a little bit.
When I called minutes later I said, "How you doin'?"
"Fine."
"You don't sound fine," I said.
"It's a cold. I'm catching a cold."
"Asshole," I said...my pet name for him.
"Turd," he said, chuckling- then "Amanda was crying about Grandaddy and when I saw her, I just lost it..."
Thank you, Amanda. Thank you for giving him the gift of expressing what he feels inside and then showing him it's okay to let others know. Thank you for being his first gentle love.
And don't forget, little girl...I can still whip your ass at Tribond, so you're not the Queen yet!
9/13/2006
Thanking the Sponsors
Dad had only been sleeping for a short while when he opened his eyes, rose slightly onto one elbow and said, "I think we've reached the end of what we can do."
I had been doing nursing home paperwork. Reams of paper were littered at my feet in scattered, messy piles. I had been swearing under my breath about miscodes and missed faxes. But the tone of his voice, the frightened child-like look on his face stopped all that.
When these episodes happen and the world is abruptly upside down, I plaster a set, everything-is-copasetic half-smile onto my face. My brain goes into hyperdrive, whirring through the emergency To-Do list.
Is the oxygen line kinked? No. Okay, take a slow, shallow breath.
Does he need Ativan? No. We did that an hour ago.
Morphine? I gave him a shot twenty minutes ago. .75ml.
It's not working.
Check the line again...check the indicator on the oxygen machine...It's at the appropriate 7 lpm. Air blasts out of the cannula against my finger.
I angle the fan to blow cool air on him, as instructed by his hospice nurse, Sharon. In case of emergency, do these things..."It probably won't help," she'd said. "It's more psychological than anything. So he won't panic."
I've done everything. Worked my way through The List. All I have left is my calm, We're-good-Big-Mon attitude.
"Would you like me to..."
"Call Sharon," he says.
She is right in the building. She is walking through the hallway and I am pathetic in my relief to hear her say this.
She arrives, hooking up the pulse oximeter, listening to the tiny shard of lung he has left, feeling the pulses in his extremities.
I look at his feet. They are not blue, not like she said they'd begin to be when his body shut down. They are waxen and pale.
Her face has not changed but I can read her. She is worried.
She gives him another hefty dose of morphine. "This is going to gork you a little," she says. "But I figure better to gork you than to have you feeling distressed."
I am sitting at the foot of his bed, watching. A lump has risen in my throat and it is all that keeps my sanity and grief from blowing my head off. I cannot speak, I think. But somehow when I need to, I still manage.
"He said he thought we'd done all we could do for his breathlessness," I say softly.
Sharon looks to him for confirmation.
His eyes are wide. He is trying to appear calm and casual about this, but I see he is scared. He is protecting me.
"Aw, Sharon," he says. "You've done such a good job, you really have, but I think it's time. I'm ready to go."
She nods, just like we've all been trained to do in care-taker school but her cheeks redden. Her eyes brighten suspiciously. She is fighting it.
"Well, nine times out of ten, when my patients say 'This is it,' it usually is," she tells him calmly. "You've been up and down before though...but this time it seems like a slower decline. I think maybe you're right. I think this is it."
She is writing something in her notes and I know what it is, confirmed later when her back is turned and I read her notes, "Pt. states he is ready to go."
I look at the pulse oximeter. Heart rate is down from 90 to 80. O2 sats are up to 98. She looks too. "Feeling better?" she asks. "Your sats were in the 70s when I came in but they're back up now."
Dad nods, but he's not having any of it. "Now, I want you to remember something we talked about," he says to her. My father is giving the nurse instructions! Is this not just like him? To control his very death by monitoring his caregivers?
"I don't want the actual process of my death to be traumatizing to Elise, Nancy or Becky."
Sharon appears to miss his meaning, asks instead, "What do you want me to do, smack 'em? I might get away with slapping Becky, but this one," she says nodding in my direction. "I've seen her get mad. She might hurt me!"
I smile. "True that," I say.
"You know," he says, a bulldog clinging to the bone. "They've got to work and this is taking up so much time and..."
My voice returns, bringing the wit I hold like a shield every time I am scared.
"So, what're you saying, Dad? You're gonna be the martyr and die to make our lives easier? So, like, you'll leave me with the big guilt trip? I caused my father's death because he was inconvenient.." I let the word inconvenient break up into stretchy syllables...in-connn-veee-nee-ent, just like Dana Carvey doing The Church Lady on Saturday Night Live. "Can you say, Satan?" I think.
He smiles, looks at Sharon. "Or else I might die just to get away from this one!"
He says, "It's been a good ride but it's time."
And then he lays back against the pillows, like, okay, he's cued the cameras and "Action!"
Sharon squats down beside the bed, pats his arm and smiles gently.
"Well, you know, if you had brain cancer I'd say, yeah, okay, you're going today. But you've got a lung disease and they're different. It's gonna take a little while. It's not going to be today."
Oh he is pissed then!
His furry, white eyebrows arch. "What do you mean? I said I'm ready to go!"
She tells him he will probably stabilize on morphine very 4 hours instead of every six. That later it will go to three hours apart, then two. "And then you'll be in this drifty, dreamy kind of place. You'll wake up every now and then and see our ugly faces and think what am I still doing here? And then you'll just go to sleep and not wake up."
She says this like we're going to our first day of middle school, or to McDonalds, or to the bank to open our first account. She says this as if it were normal. Which in reality, it is.
But he is still ticked off about it. "Well," he huffs. "I guess I'm not in charge of that either, huh?!"
She lets it go. She says, "Besides, next week, I'll be down to only five patients. I'll have all the time in the world to hang around here. You won't be able to get rid of me."
I say, "Dad, even if there were some cataclysmic event and Sharon wasn't here and you were in distress, I am trained. I can handle this. You will not traumatize me...even if you seize up and foam at the mouth!"
But I am his girl, so he isn't buying this either.
"She can do it, you know," Sharon adds. "Look, she's got the fan going."
Dad scowls at the fan, realizing it has never before been turned on. "Is that what that was for?" he asks, looking from her face to mine.
We nod.
Minutes later he is stable enough for Sharon to leave. I know, down the hall, another patient is dying. I overheard her talking. Dad lays back, his eyes closed but not sleeping.
I think I need to call Becky. I need to call the priest. If Dad wants to die today, he might do it just to show Sharon up.
But I don't get a chance to call the priest. He's standing in the doorway, like a God-ordered pizza...which totally freaks me out.
He is tall, quite distinguished with his silver-shot hair. At first I thought he had a stick up his ass, but in the same breath I realized a fellow introvert. He is shy, trying to come off as quasi-regal, imposing, anything but shy.
I am so freaked that he has come that I say, "I was just going to call you!" I usher him in, spin around and mouth "it's not a good day," and say louder, "I've got to make a call. I'll be right back."
I make a mad dash for the parking lot, praying I will make it before I lose my shit and cry like a scared baby. I sink down beside the car and call my sister, leave her a voice mail, then text everyone else because I need the lump in my throat. I can't lose it now.
God makes me feel guilty...or I allow Her to...I know the priest will do communion. I know Dad will want me there, especially if he intends for it to be the last one.
So I drag-ass back inside. The receptionist is standing in the foyer, eyes wide behind her red-framed glasses. "A priest was looking for you!" she says...like the guy is God incarnate.
I nod. "Yeah, I figured. I was trying to get my act together before I had to face him," I say.
She giggles and nods. "Yeah, I know what that's like," she says.
I smile to myself. Well, well, well...does she have secrets or what?
They are in the middle of the prayer of Confession when I return. I pick up, staring at the leaflet, hearing the words come out with rote precision..."We have sinned against thee by thought, word and deed."
Well, I think, that's certainly true for me, I think. But what has Dad ever done to deserve this, to apologize for?
We do the deed. The thin wafer sticks like toilet paper to my dry tongue. The wine is only enough to make the wretched thing slide down my throat.
And then, God develops a sense of humor.
The priest goes to rinse out the chalice, trips over the trash basket, and before he can stop himself says, "Oh, I kicked the bucket!"
I adore this.
Dad is doing the same "Thank you for all you've done" routine he did with Sharon and me. The priest says, "I'll see you Thursday." He says it like three times, despite Dad's non-verbal "Yeah, but I might not be here" look. Finally Dad gives up and just nods. "See you Thursday," he says.
Kind of like..."Over my dead body!"
A few moments later I am in the parking lot...in time to see the priest drive away in a souped up, maroon Mustang GT. "BlaaaaVoom!" The exhaust manifold throbs as he cuts out on to the street, roaring up the road like a teenaged hot-rodder.
I walk back in, pause at the foot of the bed and say, "I suppose you know about the maroon Mustang GT, with, I think dual Hemi headers?"
Dad nods.
"Well, I say, I guess he has to blow it out somehow!"
Dad nods. He's got a little, been-there-done-that-t-shirt smile working the corners of his lips. "And he's got a lot to blow, too!" my father says.
The afternoon wears on. Dad's feeling better and better. I say, "Listen, I can understand if you're tired and you want to go on. I can respect that, Dad. But don't die because you think we're burdened. Don't you get it yet? We've waited all our lives to give back. We are the same children who used to fight for the opportunity to ride up to the hospital with you while you visited the sick, just to have the twenty minutes on either side of the two hour wait. You are giving me the greatest gift in the world by letting me be here with you. But if you want to go because you don't want to be here anymore, don't worry. I'll be fine."
I am squatting down beside him and he is rubbing circles across my back. "I know you will," he says. He tells me how great my boys are. I tell him it's because he's been in their lives. I tell him every single time I can off-hand remember him saying something momentous...like "You can't grow up to be like your mother, you have half my DNA."
It is tender and sweet.
I say, "How are you feeling? I want to talk about how you are."
He tries to tell me about how he's breathing much better but I cut him off. "No, Dad. How are you feel-ing, inside, emotionally. Are you scared?"
The eyebrows go up, he looks into my face. "Well, no. Not scared. A little apprehensive maybe. Because I've never...well, you know."
And then he says, "But it's been a great life. It's been so full. What a ride!"
I tell him about this sign I saw in a catalog that says something about not showing up at Heaven's gates with a well-preserved body. Instead showing up battered, worn out, out of gas, coasting on empty and totally used up.
We agree this is the way to show up.
I stay. I watch over him until late that night before I am able to move from my spot in the chair by his side.
I leave. I drive out across the bridge studying the brilliant full moon, half-hidden by clouds. The waters of the Trent sparkle and shimmer as the moon lights up a path to the Milky Way.
I think about my father and his full life.
At some point I realize the lump in my throat is gone. The feelings sealed safely away.
And only when I replay the day here on cyber-paper do the tears begin to fall.
I had been doing nursing home paperwork. Reams of paper were littered at my feet in scattered, messy piles. I had been swearing under my breath about miscodes and missed faxes. But the tone of his voice, the frightened child-like look on his face stopped all that.
When these episodes happen and the world is abruptly upside down, I plaster a set, everything-is-copasetic half-smile onto my face. My brain goes into hyperdrive, whirring through the emergency To-Do list.
Is the oxygen line kinked? No. Okay, take a slow, shallow breath.
Does he need Ativan? No. We did that an hour ago.
Morphine? I gave him a shot twenty minutes ago. .75ml.
It's not working.
Check the line again...check the indicator on the oxygen machine...It's at the appropriate 7 lpm. Air blasts out of the cannula against my finger.
I angle the fan to blow cool air on him, as instructed by his hospice nurse, Sharon. In case of emergency, do these things..."It probably won't help," she'd said. "It's more psychological than anything. So he won't panic."
I've done everything. Worked my way through The List. All I have left is my calm, We're-good-Big-Mon attitude.
"Would you like me to..."
"Call Sharon," he says.
She is right in the building. She is walking through the hallway and I am pathetic in my relief to hear her say this.
She arrives, hooking up the pulse oximeter, listening to the tiny shard of lung he has left, feeling the pulses in his extremities.
I look at his feet. They are not blue, not like she said they'd begin to be when his body shut down. They are waxen and pale.
Her face has not changed but I can read her. She is worried.
She gives him another hefty dose of morphine. "This is going to gork you a little," she says. "But I figure better to gork you than to have you feeling distressed."
I am sitting at the foot of his bed, watching. A lump has risen in my throat and it is all that keeps my sanity and grief from blowing my head off. I cannot speak, I think. But somehow when I need to, I still manage.
"He said he thought we'd done all we could do for his breathlessness," I say softly.
Sharon looks to him for confirmation.
His eyes are wide. He is trying to appear calm and casual about this, but I see he is scared. He is protecting me.
"Aw, Sharon," he says. "You've done such a good job, you really have, but I think it's time. I'm ready to go."
She nods, just like we've all been trained to do in care-taker school but her cheeks redden. Her eyes brighten suspiciously. She is fighting it.
"Well, nine times out of ten, when my patients say 'This is it,' it usually is," she tells him calmly. "You've been up and down before though...but this time it seems like a slower decline. I think maybe you're right. I think this is it."
She is writing something in her notes and I know what it is, confirmed later when her back is turned and I read her notes, "Pt. states he is ready to go."
I look at the pulse oximeter. Heart rate is down from 90 to 80. O2 sats are up to 98. She looks too. "Feeling better?" she asks. "Your sats were in the 70s when I came in but they're back up now."
Dad nods, but he's not having any of it. "Now, I want you to remember something we talked about," he says to her. My father is giving the nurse instructions! Is this not just like him? To control his very death by monitoring his caregivers?
"I don't want the actual process of my death to be traumatizing to Elise, Nancy or Becky."
Sharon appears to miss his meaning, asks instead, "What do you want me to do, smack 'em? I might get away with slapping Becky, but this one," she says nodding in my direction. "I've seen her get mad. She might hurt me!"
I smile. "True that," I say.
"You know," he says, a bulldog clinging to the bone. "They've got to work and this is taking up so much time and..."
My voice returns, bringing the wit I hold like a shield every time I am scared.
"So, what're you saying, Dad? You're gonna be the martyr and die to make our lives easier? So, like, you'll leave me with the big guilt trip? I caused my father's death because he was inconvenient.." I let the word inconvenient break up into stretchy syllables...in-connn-veee-nee-ent, just like Dana Carvey doing The Church Lady on Saturday Night Live. "Can you say, Satan?" I think.
He smiles, looks at Sharon. "Or else I might die just to get away from this one!"
He says, "It's been a good ride but it's time."
And then he lays back against the pillows, like, okay, he's cued the cameras and "Action!"
Sharon squats down beside the bed, pats his arm and smiles gently.
"Well, you know, if you had brain cancer I'd say, yeah, okay, you're going today. But you've got a lung disease and they're different. It's gonna take a little while. It's not going to be today."
Oh he is pissed then!
His furry, white eyebrows arch. "What do you mean? I said I'm ready to go!"
She tells him he will probably stabilize on morphine very 4 hours instead of every six. That later it will go to three hours apart, then two. "And then you'll be in this drifty, dreamy kind of place. You'll wake up every now and then and see our ugly faces and think what am I still doing here? And then you'll just go to sleep and not wake up."
She says this like we're going to our first day of middle school, or to McDonalds, or to the bank to open our first account. She says this as if it were normal. Which in reality, it is.
But he is still ticked off about it. "Well," he huffs. "I guess I'm not in charge of that either, huh?!"
She lets it go. She says, "Besides, next week, I'll be down to only five patients. I'll have all the time in the world to hang around here. You won't be able to get rid of me."
I say, "Dad, even if there were some cataclysmic event and Sharon wasn't here and you were in distress, I am trained. I can handle this. You will not traumatize me...even if you seize up and foam at the mouth!"
But I am his girl, so he isn't buying this either.
"She can do it, you know," Sharon adds. "Look, she's got the fan going."
Dad scowls at the fan, realizing it has never before been turned on. "Is that what that was for?" he asks, looking from her face to mine.
We nod.
Minutes later he is stable enough for Sharon to leave. I know, down the hall, another patient is dying. I overheard her talking. Dad lays back, his eyes closed but not sleeping.
I think I need to call Becky. I need to call the priest. If Dad wants to die today, he might do it just to show Sharon up.
But I don't get a chance to call the priest. He's standing in the doorway, like a God-ordered pizza...which totally freaks me out.
He is tall, quite distinguished with his silver-shot hair. At first I thought he had a stick up his ass, but in the same breath I realized a fellow introvert. He is shy, trying to come off as quasi-regal, imposing, anything but shy.
I am so freaked that he has come that I say, "I was just going to call you!" I usher him in, spin around and mouth "it's not a good day," and say louder, "I've got to make a call. I'll be right back."
I make a mad dash for the parking lot, praying I will make it before I lose my shit and cry like a scared baby. I sink down beside the car and call my sister, leave her a voice mail, then text everyone else because I need the lump in my throat. I can't lose it now.
God makes me feel guilty...or I allow Her to...I know the priest will do communion. I know Dad will want me there, especially if he intends for it to be the last one.
So I drag-ass back inside. The receptionist is standing in the foyer, eyes wide behind her red-framed glasses. "A priest was looking for you!" she says...like the guy is God incarnate.
I nod. "Yeah, I figured. I was trying to get my act together before I had to face him," I say.
She giggles and nods. "Yeah, I know what that's like," she says.
I smile to myself. Well, well, well...does she have secrets or what?
They are in the middle of the prayer of Confession when I return. I pick up, staring at the leaflet, hearing the words come out with rote precision..."We have sinned against thee by thought, word and deed."
Well, I think, that's certainly true for me, I think. But what has Dad ever done to deserve this, to apologize for?
We do the deed. The thin wafer sticks like toilet paper to my dry tongue. The wine is only enough to make the wretched thing slide down my throat.
And then, God develops a sense of humor.
The priest goes to rinse out the chalice, trips over the trash basket, and before he can stop himself says, "Oh, I kicked the bucket!"
I adore this.
Dad is doing the same "Thank you for all you've done" routine he did with Sharon and me. The priest says, "I'll see you Thursday." He says it like three times, despite Dad's non-verbal "Yeah, but I might not be here" look. Finally Dad gives up and just nods. "See you Thursday," he says.
Kind of like..."Over my dead body!"
A few moments later I am in the parking lot...in time to see the priest drive away in a souped up, maroon Mustang GT. "BlaaaaVoom!" The exhaust manifold throbs as he cuts out on to the street, roaring up the road like a teenaged hot-rodder.
I walk back in, pause at the foot of the bed and say, "I suppose you know about the maroon Mustang GT, with, I think dual Hemi headers?"
Dad nods.
"Well, I say, I guess he has to blow it out somehow!"
Dad nods. He's got a little, been-there-done-that-t-shirt smile working the corners of his lips. "And he's got a lot to blow, too!" my father says.
The afternoon wears on. Dad's feeling better and better. I say, "Listen, I can understand if you're tired and you want to go on. I can respect that, Dad. But don't die because you think we're burdened. Don't you get it yet? We've waited all our lives to give back. We are the same children who used to fight for the opportunity to ride up to the hospital with you while you visited the sick, just to have the twenty minutes on either side of the two hour wait. You are giving me the greatest gift in the world by letting me be here with you. But if you want to go because you don't want to be here anymore, don't worry. I'll be fine."
I am squatting down beside him and he is rubbing circles across my back. "I know you will," he says. He tells me how great my boys are. I tell him it's because he's been in their lives. I tell him every single time I can off-hand remember him saying something momentous...like "You can't grow up to be like your mother, you have half my DNA."
It is tender and sweet.
I say, "How are you feeling? I want to talk about how you are."
He tries to tell me about how he's breathing much better but I cut him off. "No, Dad. How are you feel-ing, inside, emotionally. Are you scared?"
The eyebrows go up, he looks into my face. "Well, no. Not scared. A little apprehensive maybe. Because I've never...well, you know."
And then he says, "But it's been a great life. It's been so full. What a ride!"
I tell him about this sign I saw in a catalog that says something about not showing up at Heaven's gates with a well-preserved body. Instead showing up battered, worn out, out of gas, coasting on empty and totally used up.
We agree this is the way to show up.
I stay. I watch over him until late that night before I am able to move from my spot in the chair by his side.
I leave. I drive out across the bridge studying the brilliant full moon, half-hidden by clouds. The waters of the Trent sparkle and shimmer as the moon lights up a path to the Milky Way.
I think about my father and his full life.
At some point I realize the lump in my throat is gone. The feelings sealed safely away.
And only when I replay the day here on cyber-paper do the tears begin to fall.
9/12/2006
What It All Comes Down To...
My attic is full of crap...
Clothes we all know I'll never wear again. Baby pajamas that in some delusional state I saved thinking one day my boys might want to dress their own children in them...But truthfully, I I saved them because I didn't want to let go of my babies, or the scent that reminded me of those fleeting, fragile moments.
Of course, now the tiny bits of fabric smell like stale, soured milk but still I save them.
I have furniture, life jackets Dad asked me to keep for a "little while," old lamps, all the receipts from every single purchase I've ever made just in case the IRS wants to audit me and asks to see them...Although now they are in such a chaotic jumble of years, months and items that I feel certain even an IRS auditor would feel swamped and overcome.
I have all the pictures I have ever taken, all my old patient charts, and all my favorite toys from the boys' childhood. Saved for the grandchildren yet to come, or because I thought one day they'd be collectible...Or because really they were my favorites. They remind me of days spent lying on the kitchen floor making "Varooom" sounds as our Batman figures careened across the tiles and my babies screamed their delight.
My attic is full of treasures and trash.
The closets downstairs are just as full. Boxes of winter sweaters are crammed beneath the bed. The kitchen cabinets are overflowing. The yard is crowded with flowers and shrubs. The trunk of my car is even loaded...
I carry only the essentials of my commuter lifestyle...Two small suitcases of clothing, a backpack of nursing home paperwork, paperbacks I've read but intend to trade in for other, unread paperbacks...My filebox of greeting cards, kept on hand in case I remember someone's birthday, or want to send a written thank you to the legion of people who have made it possible for me to be here with Dad because they help out at home.
Lately I cannot bring anything new into my home without realizing it, thinking about it, and wondering "Do I really need this Thing?"
This train of thought began when my parents moved to the independent living facility and had to downsize.
I felt it again whenever I walked into a patient's room in the nursing home and saw how few "things" remained from their former lives. There are always photographs, at least one or two, and perhaps a trinket or favorite sweater. But half a room is not much. Two single drawers and an armoire will not hold every single thing we want to carry along with us...Much is winnowed away.
Dad is down to one room.
It is cluttered with the things he wanted to bring...Important pictures, meaningful books, CDs, papers...But as his world slows down and closes in on him, as the lack of oxygen affects his short term memory, I have noticed something.
Dad's world is now contained in a single overstuffed shoebox.
It sits beside him on the bed-always within reach.
It holds his current favorite book, "Leaving Church," crossword puzzles in varying levels of difficulty, stationary, pens, pencils, the pad where he tracks which medication he's taken at which time, the "black bag" he carried long before "man bags" were in, his daytimer, the TV schedule and of course, the remote controls to every electronic device in the room.
Yesterday, in an attempt to help him organize and find his things easily, I brought him a tote. It was the kind used for carrying cleaning tools from one room to the next. I went to the dollar store to find it, and while I was there, my best friend, Marti, called.
When I told her what I was doing, she was completely silent for a long minute.
"Nance," she said finally, in a small, choked voice. "That's what my Daddy did before he died. He kept his treasures in a shoe box."
I felt my heart squeeze as I took in the reality of what she was saying. I remembered her father's battle with Alzheimers and realized once again, with an awful clarity- my father is dying. His life is ending.
I realized all of this in a nanosecond before rejecting her words. But it was too late. The arrow of reality shot home piercing my armor of denial.
"Well," I said, my tone light and cavalier. "That just goes to show you. We were twins separated at birth!"
I wouldn't let myself go where her words led me. I couldn't.
Not then. Not in that brightly lit store where everything is only a dollar and where are so many things and possibilities to consider. I had to stay in the moment.
Right then I needed to help my father organize his "things." I did not need to accept the meaning of this further distillation of his essential life.
Because she is my best friend, Marti let me get away with it... But she knew.
Today as I sit across from him, I feel the reality of her words. I feel the truth cut down to the bone and shatter my heart.
My father is dying and nothing will stop this tide from running out.
I brought the organizer back to his room and sat down on the bed beside him to explain my great idea...I showed him the small bathtub stopper I intended to use to keep an ocean of life from running out on my wonderful, wonderful friend.
He listened, paying rapt attention as he always does...But I knew, even as the words dropped from my lips and rained down around us on the bed, he would never use the plastic tote.
Sure enough, he kept it on the bed, but more as a token of his appreciation and love for me. He even stuck a few pens in the holes along the carrier's side.
But next to it on the flowered quilt, sits the navy blue, cardboard box.
It is still nestled close by his side and my father is still dying.
Clothes we all know I'll never wear again. Baby pajamas that in some delusional state I saved thinking one day my boys might want to dress their own children in them...But truthfully, I I saved them because I didn't want to let go of my babies, or the scent that reminded me of those fleeting, fragile moments.
Of course, now the tiny bits of fabric smell like stale, soured milk but still I save them.
I have furniture, life jackets Dad asked me to keep for a "little while," old lamps, all the receipts from every single purchase I've ever made just in case the IRS wants to audit me and asks to see them...Although now they are in such a chaotic jumble of years, months and items that I feel certain even an IRS auditor would feel swamped and overcome.
I have all the pictures I have ever taken, all my old patient charts, and all my favorite toys from the boys' childhood. Saved for the grandchildren yet to come, or because I thought one day they'd be collectible...Or because really they were my favorites. They remind me of days spent lying on the kitchen floor making "Varooom" sounds as our Batman figures careened across the tiles and my babies screamed their delight.
My attic is full of treasures and trash.
The closets downstairs are just as full. Boxes of winter sweaters are crammed beneath the bed. The kitchen cabinets are overflowing. The yard is crowded with flowers and shrubs. The trunk of my car is even loaded...
I carry only the essentials of my commuter lifestyle...Two small suitcases of clothing, a backpack of nursing home paperwork, paperbacks I've read but intend to trade in for other, unread paperbacks...My filebox of greeting cards, kept on hand in case I remember someone's birthday, or want to send a written thank you to the legion of people who have made it possible for me to be here with Dad because they help out at home.
Lately I cannot bring anything new into my home without realizing it, thinking about it, and wondering "Do I really need this Thing?"
This train of thought began when my parents moved to the independent living facility and had to downsize.
I felt it again whenever I walked into a patient's room in the nursing home and saw how few "things" remained from their former lives. There are always photographs, at least one or two, and perhaps a trinket or favorite sweater. But half a room is not much. Two single drawers and an armoire will not hold every single thing we want to carry along with us...Much is winnowed away.
Dad is down to one room.
It is cluttered with the things he wanted to bring...Important pictures, meaningful books, CDs, papers...But as his world slows down and closes in on him, as the lack of oxygen affects his short term memory, I have noticed something.
Dad's world is now contained in a single overstuffed shoebox.
It sits beside him on the bed-always within reach.
It holds his current favorite book, "Leaving Church," crossword puzzles in varying levels of difficulty, stationary, pens, pencils, the pad where he tracks which medication he's taken at which time, the "black bag" he carried long before "man bags" were in, his daytimer, the TV schedule and of course, the remote controls to every electronic device in the room.
Yesterday, in an attempt to help him organize and find his things easily, I brought him a tote. It was the kind used for carrying cleaning tools from one room to the next. I went to the dollar store to find it, and while I was there, my best friend, Marti, called.
When I told her what I was doing, she was completely silent for a long minute.
"Nance," she said finally, in a small, choked voice. "That's what my Daddy did before he died. He kept his treasures in a shoe box."
I felt my heart squeeze as I took in the reality of what she was saying. I remembered her father's battle with Alzheimers and realized once again, with an awful clarity- my father is dying. His life is ending.
I realized all of this in a nanosecond before rejecting her words. But it was too late. The arrow of reality shot home piercing my armor of denial.
"Well," I said, my tone light and cavalier. "That just goes to show you. We were twins separated at birth!"
I wouldn't let myself go where her words led me. I couldn't.
Not then. Not in that brightly lit store where everything is only a dollar and where are so many things and possibilities to consider. I had to stay in the moment.
Right then I needed to help my father organize his "things." I did not need to accept the meaning of this further distillation of his essential life.
Because she is my best friend, Marti let me get away with it... But she knew.
Today as I sit across from him, I feel the reality of her words. I feel the truth cut down to the bone and shatter my heart.
My father is dying and nothing will stop this tide from running out.
I brought the organizer back to his room and sat down on the bed beside him to explain my great idea...I showed him the small bathtub stopper I intended to use to keep an ocean of life from running out on my wonderful, wonderful friend.
He listened, paying rapt attention as he always does...But I knew, even as the words dropped from my lips and rained down around us on the bed, he would never use the plastic tote.
Sure enough, he kept it on the bed, but more as a token of his appreciation and love for me. He even stuck a few pens in the holes along the carrier's side.
But next to it on the flowered quilt, sits the navy blue, cardboard box.
It is still nestled close by his side and my father is still dying.
9/08/2006
Boyz2Men...Almost
I live amongst wily teenagers...Boys who sail boats and scale brick walls...Boys who drive cars and wear pictures of dead revolutionaries on their shirts...
9/07/2006
Incognito
They Might've Been Little Once, But They Were Always Too Cool For Words!
The boys and their cousin, incognito, "back in the day."
The boys and their cousin, incognito, "back in the day."
My Dirty Little Secret...
Okay, I have absolutely got to tell you my dirty, little secret.
I mean, this is the place to do it, right? In my online "diary"? That is what blogs are for, right?
Okay, not always...Like in my case, I'm an author, hoping to intrigue people who've never read my work into buying one of my books. For the people who already read my books and wonder how anyone could come up with such deranged ideas, this blog should be attempting to answer those questions. Hence, the blog is alleged promotion.
Too bad I can't stick to that notion. Instead I wind up telling you all about my life- the ups and downs, the insanity and the little quirks that a sensible author would probably keep to herself!
Not me. Not the big mouth.
But tonight, I'm gonna give it my best shot. I'm going to tell you the dirty little secret that drove me to write books.
Before I tell you the absolute worst, let me set the scene a little.
When I started writing, for the first time since college that is, my boys were toddlers. We lived in what I euphemistically called "The Golden Ghetto" of Atlanta, the northern suburbs of the city, a good 45 minute commute from the downtown area, in a subdivision where every house looks the same and every lot occupies no more than a tenth of an acre.
The other women who lived in my subdivision scared the hell out of me.
They were the perfect "supermoms." Their houses were immaculate, their children well-dressed, albeit obnoxious, and their husbands brought home pots of money and never wanted their wives to work "outside" the home. It was the perfect melding of Soccermom and Stepford Wife.
They had the toddler mom social scene scoped out and they did it to a fare-thee-well, too. Playgroups, Pampered Chef parties, Cookie Exchanges at Christmas. Oh. My. God! What daunting rolemodels...Especially to an imposter trying to pass muster, hoping these superwomen never found out the real truth and exposed me to the world for the sham I was.
I must've been absent the day they taught Soccer Mom 101 because I didn't have a clue! I was a former hippy disguised as a regular mom and I wanted desperately to fit in. I wanted to do the right thing because I by-God knew if I didn't my boys would grow up to be drug-addicted reprobates.
I absolutely believed that if they didn't play sports, they'd become junkies overnight. If they weren't in the same preschool the others attended, they'd become social pariahs. It was my total nightmare! My children, abnormal...Just like their mother!
So, I tried. I went to all the playgroups. I mimicked the Supermoms every move...If they packed Ritz crackers and juice boxes for snack at the pool, so did I. If their children wore polo shirts and Nike soccer shorts, so did mine...kind of. Except I would keep veering off, lured by the scent of leather and the feel of fake sheepskin over to the baby biker jackets and tiny high-topped construction worker boots. I'd buy the faded jeans and flannel shirts of my youth because they were just too cute when they were made in a size 2T.
I envisioned myself cruising around town with my boys, the three of us wearing matching aviator sunglasses, as they scoped out the local "chicks."
Oh, God, I was such a miserable failure at being a social chameleon!
I knew something was wrong the day I scrubbed the no-wax finish off my vinyl floor with a toothbrush and Clorox...combined with a little ammonia.
In addition to producing a gas toxic enough to compromise the health and well-being of metropolitan Atlanta, I ruined the brand new floor forever and had a contact high that would've induced brain damage in a lesser person.
I knew then that something was terribly wrong. I just didn't have a clue what it was! And had I known, I wouldn't have been able to figure out what to do about it. No, I hadn't hit my emotional "bottom," as they say in AA. I still had to sink to a further low. I needed a little more misery before, like an oyster irritated by a grain of sand, I produced a pearl of insight.
I needed...Billy Two-Feathers.
Every day, as part of my perfect-mom ritual, we watched Sesame Street followed by Thomas the Tank Engine...all on PBS. I drew the line at Barney. I didn't care what kind of low-achievers my boys turned out to be, we were just not going to sink to the depths of despair that it would've taken for me to turn to a purple dinosaur who's best friend is named "Baby Bop." Sorry, even a people-pleaser like me has to draw the proverbial line in the sand and Barney was it. Barney was like sprinkling Sweet and Low over sugar. He was insipid, patronizing and he had a voice that sounded like fingernails on a blackboard to me.
But Thomas the Tank Engine...Now there was a show I could get behind.
As long as there was Thomas, the world of toddlerdom had hope. Maybe Good could triumph over Evil when the Conductor was played by none other than George Carlin and later, Ringo Starr.
I mean, Rock is not dead as long as Ringo and George draw breath, am I right? We can still march on Washington and demonstrate with George Carlin as our fearless conductor, can't we? The sixties and seventies aren't dead until Ringo checks out, correct? Can I get an Amen in the back there, Sisters?
Would that I were that altruistic...
I finally had to confront the dreadful truth of my existence the day I realized I was not watching Thomas the Tank Engine because George Carlin was leading my little guys into an authentic, truthful childhood.
I was watching Thomas the Tank Engine because the Conductor's faithful sidekick, in a quirk of public television marketing brilliance, was the most stone-gorgeous, washboard ab-ed, hunk of burning American Indian love I have ever personally experienced.
I was sitting on the end of my four-poster, early American-reproduction bed, drooling over Billy Two-Feathers.
Had I no pride? Had I absolutely no sense of self-worth? Had it come to this- my sexual fantasy life was peopled by a guy who played the Conductor's sidekick on a toddler t.v show?!
This insanity had to stop.
I had to get a life. A real breathing, smoking-mighty-Jesus life. Not one of those two-dimensional, Calgon-Take-Me-Away lives based on conjecture and innuendo. It had to be mine...my passion, my drive, my...self.
And that, my dear readers, is the stinking, awful truth of how I came into the world of writing.
There was just no other place to go.
I was out of options. Desperate. My life had become an unmanageable hoax and creating a deeper, more intense fantasy life peopled by characters I created and loved was my only road to personal salvation.
I thought long and hard about it. And when that didn't work, I allowed my then-husband to hold an emotional gun to my head.
"Your writing is an obsession," he intoned one night. "You have a private practice. You can make a lot more money seeing patients than you can fooling around with this silly hobby of yours. You need to work more. You need to bring in more money."
And so I took a deep breath and made a deal with the devil.
I told him there was a writing conference in his favorite city, Ft. Lauderdale, and that the conference sponsored a short story contest for new writers. "Let's go," I said. "It'll be like a second honeymoon. I'll enter that contest and if I don't place in the top ten, I'll quit and focus on being the best little social worker in the whole wide world!"
That is how I wound up three months later, sitting in front of a blank computer screen on the eve of the contest deadline, praying for inspiration.
It is also how I learned that your children will be who they are regardless of what environmental obstacles you throw in their paths.
I sat in front of that blank screen in the cold, dank basement, drinking cup after cup of coffee until finally my youngest boy, then three or four, wandered downstairs with a box in his hand.
"What you doin', Mama?" he asked with the world's cutest lisp.
He looked up at me with huge brown, trusting eyes and I wanted to say "Writing the Great American Novel," but instead only said, "Writing a story, baby."
He looked at the blank screen. "It don't look like you writin', Mama. It look like you just sittin dere and if you just sittin' dere maybe you could put this Weeder Wabbit game on the computer cause I'm gonna learn to weed."
I thought, what the hell, it's not like I'm getting anywhere. I'd written one so-so story and I knew it was going to take a better effort than that to place in the contest. I felt defeated and uncertain and lost.
"Okay, baby," I said, giving up. "Let me see the box."
It was one of those magical moments that happen only a few times in your life.
Ben extended the box that held the reading program toward me. I reached for it with caffeine-induced, trembling hands; fumbled and sent the box flying into the air.
It came crashing to the floor, spilling open, the papers and discs scattering. I leaned down, sighing with just-my-damned-luck self-pity and saw a piece of paper.
"Sierra Reveals All," it said, describing the Sierra Software companies many educational programs.
I froze, my fingers clasping the shiny white paper. "Sierra Reveals All," I murmured. "Now that would be a great title for a story. I wonder who would reveal all?"
And then I heard her voice...The voice all authors mention when they talk about their inspirational muse...Only I didn't get the F. Scott Fitzgerald muse...Nope, I got Sierra Lavotini, the wise-cracking blonde bombshell, exotic dancer and amateur sleuth.
The rest, as they say, is history...
I found myself. Ben taught himself to read and I won first place in the contest. Six months later I finished, The Miracle Strip...Six months and 27 rejections later, I had an agent. Five months after that, less than 12 hours after my spouse again said I was going to have to fish or see patients for a living, my agent sold my first born daughter, Sierra, in a two book deal to a wonderful editor at St. Martin's Press.
I finally had a life...A juicy, real-deal, authentic life of my very own.
Somewhere I have a picture from my first book signing. Adam and Ben flank me, their arms folded, clearly "body-guarding" their Mama from her fans.
In that photo, we are all three grinning like maniacs.
Maniacs with their very own, rich and breathing lives.
This isn't the picture from the booksigning, but it was taken the day my first book arrived.
I mean, this is the place to do it, right? In my online "diary"? That is what blogs are for, right?
Okay, not always...Like in my case, I'm an author, hoping to intrigue people who've never read my work into buying one of my books. For the people who already read my books and wonder how anyone could come up with such deranged ideas, this blog should be attempting to answer those questions. Hence, the blog is alleged promotion.
Too bad I can't stick to that notion. Instead I wind up telling you all about my life- the ups and downs, the insanity and the little quirks that a sensible author would probably keep to herself!
Not me. Not the big mouth.
But tonight, I'm gonna give it my best shot. I'm going to tell you the dirty little secret that drove me to write books.
Before I tell you the absolute worst, let me set the scene a little.
When I started writing, for the first time since college that is, my boys were toddlers. We lived in what I euphemistically called "The Golden Ghetto" of Atlanta, the northern suburbs of the city, a good 45 minute commute from the downtown area, in a subdivision where every house looks the same and every lot occupies no more than a tenth of an acre.
The other women who lived in my subdivision scared the hell out of me.
They were the perfect "supermoms." Their houses were immaculate, their children well-dressed, albeit obnoxious, and their husbands brought home pots of money and never wanted their wives to work "outside" the home. It was the perfect melding of Soccermom and Stepford Wife.
They had the toddler mom social scene scoped out and they did it to a fare-thee-well, too. Playgroups, Pampered Chef parties, Cookie Exchanges at Christmas. Oh. My. God! What daunting rolemodels...Especially to an imposter trying to pass muster, hoping these superwomen never found out the real truth and exposed me to the world for the sham I was.
I must've been absent the day they taught Soccer Mom 101 because I didn't have a clue! I was a former hippy disguised as a regular mom and I wanted desperately to fit in. I wanted to do the right thing because I by-God knew if I didn't my boys would grow up to be drug-addicted reprobates.
I absolutely believed that if they didn't play sports, they'd become junkies overnight. If they weren't in the same preschool the others attended, they'd become social pariahs. It was my total nightmare! My children, abnormal...Just like their mother!
So, I tried. I went to all the playgroups. I mimicked the Supermoms every move...If they packed Ritz crackers and juice boxes for snack at the pool, so did I. If their children wore polo shirts and Nike soccer shorts, so did mine...kind of. Except I would keep veering off, lured by the scent of leather and the feel of fake sheepskin over to the baby biker jackets and tiny high-topped construction worker boots. I'd buy the faded jeans and flannel shirts of my youth because they were just too cute when they were made in a size 2T.
I envisioned myself cruising around town with my boys, the three of us wearing matching aviator sunglasses, as they scoped out the local "chicks."
Oh, God, I was such a miserable failure at being a social chameleon!
I knew something was wrong the day I scrubbed the no-wax finish off my vinyl floor with a toothbrush and Clorox...combined with a little ammonia.
In addition to producing a gas toxic enough to compromise the health and well-being of metropolitan Atlanta, I ruined the brand new floor forever and had a contact high that would've induced brain damage in a lesser person.
I knew then that something was terribly wrong. I just didn't have a clue what it was! And had I known, I wouldn't have been able to figure out what to do about it. No, I hadn't hit my emotional "bottom," as they say in AA. I still had to sink to a further low. I needed a little more misery before, like an oyster irritated by a grain of sand, I produced a pearl of insight.
I needed...Billy Two-Feathers.
Every day, as part of my perfect-mom ritual, we watched Sesame Street followed by Thomas the Tank Engine...all on PBS. I drew the line at Barney. I didn't care what kind of low-achievers my boys turned out to be, we were just not going to sink to the depths of despair that it would've taken for me to turn to a purple dinosaur who's best friend is named "Baby Bop." Sorry, even a people-pleaser like me has to draw the proverbial line in the sand and Barney was it. Barney was like sprinkling Sweet and Low over sugar. He was insipid, patronizing and he had a voice that sounded like fingernails on a blackboard to me.
But Thomas the Tank Engine...Now there was a show I could get behind.
As long as there was Thomas, the world of toddlerdom had hope. Maybe Good could triumph over Evil when the Conductor was played by none other than George Carlin and later, Ringo Starr.
I mean, Rock is not dead as long as Ringo and George draw breath, am I right? We can still march on Washington and demonstrate with George Carlin as our fearless conductor, can't we? The sixties and seventies aren't dead until Ringo checks out, correct? Can I get an Amen in the back there, Sisters?
Would that I were that altruistic...
I finally had to confront the dreadful truth of my existence the day I realized I was not watching Thomas the Tank Engine because George Carlin was leading my little guys into an authentic, truthful childhood.
I was watching Thomas the Tank Engine because the Conductor's faithful sidekick, in a quirk of public television marketing brilliance, was the most stone-gorgeous, washboard ab-ed, hunk of burning American Indian love I have ever personally experienced.
I was sitting on the end of my four-poster, early American-reproduction bed, drooling over Billy Two-Feathers.
Had I no pride? Had I absolutely no sense of self-worth? Had it come to this- my sexual fantasy life was peopled by a guy who played the Conductor's sidekick on a toddler t.v show?!
This insanity had to stop.
I had to get a life. A real breathing, smoking-mighty-Jesus life. Not one of those two-dimensional, Calgon-Take-Me-Away lives based on conjecture and innuendo. It had to be mine...my passion, my drive, my...self.
And that, my dear readers, is the stinking, awful truth of how I came into the world of writing.
There was just no other place to go.
I was out of options. Desperate. My life had become an unmanageable hoax and creating a deeper, more intense fantasy life peopled by characters I created and loved was my only road to personal salvation.
I thought long and hard about it. And when that didn't work, I allowed my then-husband to hold an emotional gun to my head.
"Your writing is an obsession," he intoned one night. "You have a private practice. You can make a lot more money seeing patients than you can fooling around with this silly hobby of yours. You need to work more. You need to bring in more money."
And so I took a deep breath and made a deal with the devil.
I told him there was a writing conference in his favorite city, Ft. Lauderdale, and that the conference sponsored a short story contest for new writers. "Let's go," I said. "It'll be like a second honeymoon. I'll enter that contest and if I don't place in the top ten, I'll quit and focus on being the best little social worker in the whole wide world!"
That is how I wound up three months later, sitting in front of a blank computer screen on the eve of the contest deadline, praying for inspiration.
It is also how I learned that your children will be who they are regardless of what environmental obstacles you throw in their paths.
I sat in front of that blank screen in the cold, dank basement, drinking cup after cup of coffee until finally my youngest boy, then three or four, wandered downstairs with a box in his hand.
"What you doin', Mama?" he asked with the world's cutest lisp.
He looked up at me with huge brown, trusting eyes and I wanted to say "Writing the Great American Novel," but instead only said, "Writing a story, baby."
He looked at the blank screen. "It don't look like you writin', Mama. It look like you just sittin dere and if you just sittin' dere maybe you could put this Weeder Wabbit game on the computer cause I'm gonna learn to weed."
I thought, what the hell, it's not like I'm getting anywhere. I'd written one so-so story and I knew it was going to take a better effort than that to place in the contest. I felt defeated and uncertain and lost.
"Okay, baby," I said, giving up. "Let me see the box."
It was one of those magical moments that happen only a few times in your life.
Ben extended the box that held the reading program toward me. I reached for it with caffeine-induced, trembling hands; fumbled and sent the box flying into the air.
It came crashing to the floor, spilling open, the papers and discs scattering. I leaned down, sighing with just-my-damned-luck self-pity and saw a piece of paper.
"Sierra Reveals All," it said, describing the Sierra Software companies many educational programs.
I froze, my fingers clasping the shiny white paper. "Sierra Reveals All," I murmured. "Now that would be a great title for a story. I wonder who would reveal all?"
And then I heard her voice...The voice all authors mention when they talk about their inspirational muse...Only I didn't get the F. Scott Fitzgerald muse...Nope, I got Sierra Lavotini, the wise-cracking blonde bombshell, exotic dancer and amateur sleuth.
The rest, as they say, is history...
I found myself. Ben taught himself to read and I won first place in the contest. Six months later I finished, The Miracle Strip...Six months and 27 rejections later, I had an agent. Five months after that, less than 12 hours after my spouse again said I was going to have to fish or see patients for a living, my agent sold my first born daughter, Sierra, in a two book deal to a wonderful editor at St. Martin's Press.
I finally had a life...A juicy, real-deal, authentic life of my very own.
Somewhere I have a picture from my first book signing. Adam and Ben flank me, their arms folded, clearly "body-guarding" their Mama from her fans.
In that photo, we are all three grinning like maniacs.
Maniacs with their very own, rich and breathing lives.
This isn't the picture from the booksigning, but it was taken the day my first book arrived.
9/06/2006
For Dad's Fan Club...
So...I've had a request for Dad's picture...
I put three pictures up from the days before we really "got" that he was sick. These were taken on his birthday...also referred to as The Year Of The Naked Guy (See 3/18/05- More Than They'll Ever Know) He was channeling Willie Nelson and nothing could hurt him.
Every year we celebrate Dad's birthday with much gusto and fanfare. This year was no different but I suppose it was actually very, very different. We all knew it would be his last birthday.
Dad's a sailor. He's always had a boat, and as a family we spent the month of July sailing North from the Chesapeake Bay to Rhode Island.
We hated it.
We were bored, seasick and restless. We wanted a "normal" vacation. Where was the Grand Canyon? Where was Disney World? Why on earth would anyone in their right mind cram five people into a 25' sailboat for a month and call it fun?!
And let's not mention the family secret...only revealed a few months ago by my sister...During the month of July, Dad quit smoking. We didn't even know he still smoked! We thought we'd taken care of that one windless, sticky July when we'd cornered him in the galley and cried until he promised he'd quit.
And no, that's not why he's dying now. They haven't found a link between smoking and pulmonary fibrosis...but who believes that? Even if it's been over forty years since his last cigarette...
So there we were, every summer...the freaks, the poor abnormal children forced to row in to the beach instead of sitting in traffic, following the crowd of weekend commuters to the Jersey Shore. There we were, sailing past the Statue of Liberty and up the East River, passing the United Nations building. There we were, forced to sail into historic Mystic seaport. There we were, slipping into Marblehead, Mass., to go to one of the trendy new "coffee houses" so we could listen to folksingers. There we were...
It was terrible...Huge waves hurled us across the cabin during fierce thunderstorms. The wind died down without fail throughout most of July along the Eastern seaboard and it was so hot. We were so seasick...
But then...there we were, sitting astride the bow, clinging tightly to the stantions as we bounded through the wake of passing motorboats, screaming as the waves washed up over our legs. There we were, snug in the harbor, the wafting evening breeze cooling our berths, the gentle lap, lap, lap of the tiny wavelets kissing the side of the boat, whispering in our ears as we rocked to sleep. There we were...
Isn't it funny that every time we are together, without fail, we kids taunt Dad with tales of our tortured summers aboard the Doxy? Isn't it funny how we remember the outrageous tales of things that just never happened to "normal" kids on their staid, summer vacations?
We sailed into Port Judith harbor in fog so thick Mom was stationed on the bow with a boat hook in case another boat suddenly loomed up through the mist too close to miss. We ran out of gas in the smack middle of New York harbor and when the Coast Guard came along and asked if we needed help, Dad said, "Oh, no! Thanks! We're fine! We've got it!"
They followed us at a distance, not quite believing we were sailing up the East River.
Dad suddenly called to Mom, "Quick, take the tiller. I need to use the head."
Mom was horrified. Here we were, amidst tugboats, ferries, freighters and Dad picks that moment to use the bathroom?!
"It's all in your head!" she yelled.
"Yeah, and it'll be all down my leg in a minute if you don't take the helm!"
We made it. Somehow.
And you know, we never for a second doubted that we would. We never knew danger when in its presence. We rode out every storm with our hero. The three of us kids would sacrifice everything for one blessed month with our dad...away from his busy parrish, away from the constantly ringing phone, the crisis-ridden burdens that come with a small town church...As bad as it was, our time with him was worth our "sacrifice."
We just didn't get it. Not then.
Family vacations are supposed to be endured...how else would we have such a rich vein of memories to mine? How else would we regale our own offspring with harrowing tales of our childhood adventures and the "agonies" we suffered at the hands of our crazy parents?
I put three pictures up from the days before we really "got" that he was sick. These were taken on his birthday...also referred to as The Year Of The Naked Guy (See 3/18/05- More Than They'll Ever Know) He was channeling Willie Nelson and nothing could hurt him.
Every year we celebrate Dad's birthday with much gusto and fanfare. This year was no different but I suppose it was actually very, very different. We all knew it would be his last birthday.
Dad's a sailor. He's always had a boat, and as a family we spent the month of July sailing North from the Chesapeake Bay to Rhode Island.
We hated it.
We were bored, seasick and restless. We wanted a "normal" vacation. Where was the Grand Canyon? Where was Disney World? Why on earth would anyone in their right mind cram five people into a 25' sailboat for a month and call it fun?!
And let's not mention the family secret...only revealed a few months ago by my sister...During the month of July, Dad quit smoking. We didn't even know he still smoked! We thought we'd taken care of that one windless, sticky July when we'd cornered him in the galley and cried until he promised he'd quit.
And no, that's not why he's dying now. They haven't found a link between smoking and pulmonary fibrosis...but who believes that? Even if it's been over forty years since his last cigarette...
So there we were, every summer...the freaks, the poor abnormal children forced to row in to the beach instead of sitting in traffic, following the crowd of weekend commuters to the Jersey Shore. There we were, sailing past the Statue of Liberty and up the East River, passing the United Nations building. There we were, forced to sail into historic Mystic seaport. There we were, slipping into Marblehead, Mass., to go to one of the trendy new "coffee houses" so we could listen to folksingers. There we were...
It was terrible...Huge waves hurled us across the cabin during fierce thunderstorms. The wind died down without fail throughout most of July along the Eastern seaboard and it was so hot. We were so seasick...
But then...there we were, sitting astride the bow, clinging tightly to the stantions as we bounded through the wake of passing motorboats, screaming as the waves washed up over our legs. There we were, snug in the harbor, the wafting evening breeze cooling our berths, the gentle lap, lap, lap of the tiny wavelets kissing the side of the boat, whispering in our ears as we rocked to sleep. There we were...
Isn't it funny that every time we are together, without fail, we kids taunt Dad with tales of our tortured summers aboard the Doxy? Isn't it funny how we remember the outrageous tales of things that just never happened to "normal" kids on their staid, summer vacations?
We sailed into Port Judith harbor in fog so thick Mom was stationed on the bow with a boat hook in case another boat suddenly loomed up through the mist too close to miss. We ran out of gas in the smack middle of New York harbor and when the Coast Guard came along and asked if we needed help, Dad said, "Oh, no! Thanks! We're fine! We've got it!"
They followed us at a distance, not quite believing we were sailing up the East River.
Dad suddenly called to Mom, "Quick, take the tiller. I need to use the head."
Mom was horrified. Here we were, amidst tugboats, ferries, freighters and Dad picks that moment to use the bathroom?!
"It's all in your head!" she yelled.
"Yeah, and it'll be all down my leg in a minute if you don't take the helm!"
We made it. Somehow.
And you know, we never for a second doubted that we would. We never knew danger when in its presence. We rode out every storm with our hero. The three of us kids would sacrifice everything for one blessed month with our dad...away from his busy parrish, away from the constantly ringing phone, the crisis-ridden burdens that come with a small town church...As bad as it was, our time with him was worth our "sacrifice."
We just didn't get it. Not then.
Family vacations are supposed to be endured...how else would we have such a rich vein of memories to mine? How else would we regale our own offspring with harrowing tales of our childhood adventures and the "agonies" we suffered at the hands of our crazy parents?
9/04/2006
Topless in Tornadoes...
MY BEST FRIEND, MARTII worry sometimes that my life has become staid, mundane and boring. And then I have an evening with my buddy, Marti.
It is five o'clock on a Friday afternoon when Marti and I leave the assisted living facility where I have been sitting with my dying father. We walk out onto the porch where the old folks congregate to watch the weather and find them all standing at the edge of the porch, staring up at a lowering sky. Thick gray and black clouds hang so low to the ground that I can almost feel the impending tornadoes. The air sweats moisture. The sky's light is an eerie greenish-yellow.
My favorite old lady, Ora, stands next to us, staring up at the clouds, leaning on her cane and studying the sky much as she studies everything, with detached interest, as these earthly events are no longer of any consequence to her. She's seen it all for exactly what it is.
The sky reminds me of the only other time I have been in the presence of tornadoes. That time, in Alabama, a small twister cut through the gas station parking lot where I waited inside a van while my best friend called her mother. When the tornado touched down, Kim shrieked into the phone, "Oh my God, we're going to be killed!" Dropped the receiver and ran for the open bay of the station.
In the furor of the moment, we never remembered to call her mother back and let her know we were alive. She was a understandably hysterical when we finally arrived in Battle Creek that night.
But I digress...
Ora's watching the clouds as I say, "Looks like a tornado sky."
"Yep," she agrees. "I'm one to know, too. Grew up in Alabama. We had a plenty of 'em there!"
Marti looks at me, wide-eyed. "Should we go back inside?"
It has been a long, slow day. We are looking forward to a glass of wine and a long evening of laughter and talking.
"Nah," I reply. "I think the mall would be safer. That way, if the tornado touches down there's only a fifty-fifty chance it'll wipe out my entire family."
This is not a callous lack of concern on my part. It is denial. I don't truly believe a tornado will come to town, not with life already about as awful as I can imagine. My karma couldn't be that bad.
So we run for the car and drive, top down in my convertible, to the mall. As we run inside, we are sure the sky is about to open up and release all manner of hell on the parking lot.
The mall here is dying, too.
There are maybe six stores left; but it is at this moment, the best other option we can come up with. We have decided to treat ourselves to manicures and pedicures in the small nail salon. But on our way we stop by a display of outrageous flip-flops, considering the merits of rhinetones over fake turquoise.
We are there when the lights go out. The store is plunged into an inky darkness that prevents any movement. When they flicker back to life a moment later, Marti is freaked. The flip-flops have lost all appeal and she's ready to run.
I say, "We can't leave the mall now. It's too late."
We wander toward the nearest exit to survey the sky and encounter a clerk. She has obviously unnatural red, short, spiky hair and black cat's eye glasses.
"Tornadoes are coming! We're going to get five inches of rain in the next 25 minutes! The parking lot will flood, it always does! Our cars will be ruined! It's happened before! I've seen it!"
Marti tenses.
"That's the back lot she's talking about," I say in an undertone. "The front lot where we are is on higher ground."
"Should we run for it?" Marti asks.
"Nah," I say, attempting to affect a casual, unworried attitude. "Let's just go out into the mall, away from these windows." Away from flying glass, I think.
"You sure?"
"Oh, yeah. The infrastructure is better in the center of the mall."
I do not tell Marti I have no idea what infrastructure is.
We leave Belks. In the stepdown seating area just outside the store, about 20 old guys are standing around playing guitars, mandolins and fiddles...Some wear ball caps, one sports a Fedora, and all wear the hallmark of elderly males- calf-high socks and old guy shoes...They're playing bluegrass!
More old people rim the circle, sitting in gaily colored, folding lawn chairs, the kind with drink holders in the armrests.
Marti gives me "The Look," which reminds me I'd told her about the chance we'd see the Friday night pick-up session.
"I told you we should've brought our clogging shoes in with us," she says.
She relaxes, forgetting the storm and enjoys the music. I look around and then I look up. Above us is a huge, domed skylight...Total glass. I know sooner or later, Marti will look up too, so I decide to take the bull by the horns.
I nudge her and point upward. Before she can react or say anything, I cut in. "Hey, look at it this way...If the tornado hits, we'll be sucked up to Jesus while the band plays "I'll Fly Away!"
That does it. Once again we are the fearless duo. Batwoman and Catwoman. Thelma and Louise.
We are undaunted when we see the manicurists are booked up with fat women in polyester. We cruise the shops, decide not to sit in the curtained photo booth and eventually come to the conclusion that if the tornado hasn't taken us yet, if the hail and rain have still not arrived, we can risk the run to the car.
We put the top down because we are invincible.
We go to a grocery store, buy wine, cream cheese, jalapeno pepper jelly, crackers and, because we've earned it, we grab a Pepperidge Farm coconut cake.
We drive back to my one room efficiency, top down, defying the storm that seems to blow just ahead of us. My black convertible crosses the Trent and Neuse rivers in the fierce pink, red and purple of sunset.
We sit on my bed, eating and drinking, laughing and talking until, miraculously, a bottle of wine has disappeared.
I take the cake out of the minifridge. With the careless abandon of my alcohol-induced euphoria, I open the box and plop the cake and 2 forks into the middle of the my antique quilt-covered bed.
Marti and I own the universe. Death cannot defeat us. The woes of married life leave us unbent and unscarred. Our children are well taken care of and happy...But not with us.
Life is not at all bad, we think.
And then, like all intoxicated idiots, we think...What can we do next?
There is nothing on TV. Cellphones don't work, but for some reason, text paging does.
During the second bottle of wine, we decide it would be a marvelous idea to text page our friend, Martha The Cop.
"Tell her we got stopped by the police on that long road out here," Marti instructs. We giggle hysterically.
"Guess what?" I text. "We got pulled on Broad Creek Road!"
30 seconds later my cell beeps. "What?! What for! What happened?"
She took the bait.
"Speeding," I reply. "Don't worry! You know that Marti. Talked us out of the ticket!"
"How fast were you going?!"
Marti is a brilliant genius of inspiration. "Tell her we were topless!"
Oh, now this is good. This is wonderful!
"We were topless! Thank God he let us off!"
"Oh my God!" Martha texts back. "Which department?"
I can see her, glasses sliding down to rest on the tip of her nose as she texts furiously. She will want to call the chief of whatever local station we say captured us and present some excuse, like "They were grief-stricken and overly stressed..."
We are eating all the good parts of the coconut cake, the corners, licking up thick swipes of the creamy white confection and laughing like the maniacs we are.
"Local New Bern cop," I reply. "Marti invited him back for a drink. He is cute as a bug's ear!"
Marti and I high-five each other. We collapse back against the headrest, weak and spent with laughter.
And then there is no response.
After five minutes I begin to watch the clock. "You don't think she called them, do you?" I ask.
Marti's eyebrows rise into little umbrellas of uncertainty. Eleven minutes. "Text her back," she says.
"Hey Martha," I type. "Don't worry! We invited the aliens we met too! Gotcha!!"
30 seconds later my phone beeps..."Oh. My. God!" Martha's text screams. "You so had me!!"
We laugh and laugh. It isn't until the next day, after we learn that her pager delayed sending her response, that we realize we could've kept stringing Martha along all night!
"Of course I believed you," Martha assures us later. "It just sounded like something the two of you would do!"
Marti returns to her home and real life. I go back to the assisted living facility to confront the reality of my father's impending death all over again. And it isn't until the next day that the thought occurs to me...
I call Marti and when she doesn't answer, leave a message, despite the fact I am reasonably sure her husband will hear it first and totally wonder...
"Hey Marti," I say. "I've been wondering this all day. Why didn't we take our tops off? I mean, if it's so like us, how come we didn't do it? I think next time you come down that's exactly what we should do! Love ya!" I end my message with a long, conspiratorial giggle.
Let him wonder, I think. Let 'em all wonder.
Why didn't we?!
9/02/2006
Short Attention Span Theater...
People Who Probably Shouldn't Be Left To Their Own Devices:
People Who are Short on Oxygen and therefore short on short term memory and Women Approaching Menopause, therefore losing what little was left of their minds.
We are a pair, Dad and I.
Yesterday I gave him 2 doses of morphine a mere 90 mins. apart. As a result, he went to bed early and slept until the alarm went off at 3 a.m to take more morphine. It was the blind leading the blind...He couldn't remember the med schedule and I didn't remember my sister's instructions about the new med schedule. Oh well, he is still alive and we're back at it today.
Today we couldn't tell the cable customer service rep our phone number because he couldn't remember it and I didn't know it! Then we called the wrong cable company for tech support because...Well, you know...
We were going to watch a movie, but couldn't decide on which of the four I'd rented, so we're doing a crossword puzzle...At least until my short attention span presents him with another option and we drift off onto that project.
It's amazing how well we manage here in the attention deficit disordered, short attention span theater.
We take our frustrations out on the stupid cable guys...One actually had the nerve to tell us we didn't even know our own address! Wrong. That was the one thing we could remember!
It's catching, too. Everyone who comes to visit winds up confused.
Go figure!
People Who are Short on Oxygen and therefore short on short term memory and Women Approaching Menopause, therefore losing what little was left of their minds.
We are a pair, Dad and I.
Yesterday I gave him 2 doses of morphine a mere 90 mins. apart. As a result, he went to bed early and slept until the alarm went off at 3 a.m to take more morphine. It was the blind leading the blind...He couldn't remember the med schedule and I didn't remember my sister's instructions about the new med schedule. Oh well, he is still alive and we're back at it today.
Today we couldn't tell the cable customer service rep our phone number because he couldn't remember it and I didn't know it! Then we called the wrong cable company for tech support because...Well, you know...
We were going to watch a movie, but couldn't decide on which of the four I'd rented, so we're doing a crossword puzzle...At least until my short attention span presents him with another option and we drift off onto that project.
It's amazing how well we manage here in the attention deficit disordered, short attention span theater.
We take our frustrations out on the stupid cable guys...One actually had the nerve to tell us we didn't even know our own address! Wrong. That was the one thing we could remember!
It's catching, too. Everyone who comes to visit winds up confused.
Go figure!
8/25/2006
My Best Friend Is Denial
Denial is such a wonderful thing.
Dad's been doing so well the past few weeks...Even better since we'd discovered the allure of the fragrant crockpot. He was eating. He was alert. We could even leave for an hour or so without worrying that he'd have a crisis.
And then came August 24th.
Back in March, Dad told Mom he thought Aug. 24th would be a good day to die as it was St. Bartholomew's Day. But, he added, he didn't think he'd last that long.
As the day grew closer, none of us could quite forget what he'd said...But he was doing so well.
I told him the boys went back to school on the 25th and for some unknown reason, he penciled that in his appointment book. That scared me.
But on the evening of the 22nd he was doing so well. I didn't feel bad about leaving him to return to Greensboro for three days. After all, my sister would be with him.
Becky called me the next afternoon...Ironically, just as I was about to see a new patient whose mother was dying.
"His heartrate's up to 105. He's very, very weak. The hospice nurse doesn't think he'll pull out," she said. I could hear the slight crack in her voice and feel the fear radiating through the phone line.
He got on the phone. "I'm fine, really, I'm getting better. There's no need for you to come."
That cinched it. I was going.
Becky said, "Wait til we get the 4:30 report from the nurse. You know, he's done this before and we've been wrong. Besides," she added. "It's only the 23rd."
So I finished out the day. I went to the nursing home and saw my people. Cookie said "This is a different day. It's not like any other. I don't know what's going on."
As I held her hand and reassured her, I thought, me either.
I stopped at the house, threw some clothes into a suitcase and made an early dinner for the guys. Part of me feels guilty at not being able to be in two places at once. I miss them...But I miss him too.
When I reached New Bern, there he was, sitting up in bed watching a CNN special. But he was different, weaker, his voice almost a whisper, his skin a blanched white against the beige sheets.
I stopped by in the morning and he was even better. So I drove back to Greensboro to prepare a Last Night Before School Starts dinner. We all laughed and carried on. The boys were hilarious. It seems Adam had noticed a new ice cream sandwich, a huge thing called "Fat Boys."
He and his brother spent dinner coming up with new, politically and tastefully incorrect ad slogans, pitching them to Adam's girl, Amanda, competing unconsciously for the best laugh.
I called to check on Dad. "I decided the 24th wasn't such a good day to die after all," he said. "I'm gonna wait for Santa Claus."
"I'm trying to convince him to wait until March," Becky added. "So he'd be 80."
"Hell, I'm pulling for the Easter Bunny...Or maybe the Second Coming," I said.
I hopped in the car this morning, drove the long trip back to New Bern and arrived to find him so soundly asleep I had to check to see if he was still breathing.
He was...But he's weaker now. He's lost a little ground.
He tells me now he was having terrible dreams about needing to divide his house into thirds and having poor help from the carpenters...All while bad bugs swarmed around them. "We were trying to get it done so we could go swimming," he said.
There are three of us kids. Jesus was a carpenter. Illnesses are sometimes called bugs, and swimming symbolizes rebirth or transformation. Was he having another pre-death dream?
Nah, I'm just over-analyzing things again, huh?
Dad's been doing so well the past few weeks...Even better since we'd discovered the allure of the fragrant crockpot. He was eating. He was alert. We could even leave for an hour or so without worrying that he'd have a crisis.
And then came August 24th.
Back in March, Dad told Mom he thought Aug. 24th would be a good day to die as it was St. Bartholomew's Day. But, he added, he didn't think he'd last that long.
As the day grew closer, none of us could quite forget what he'd said...But he was doing so well.
I told him the boys went back to school on the 25th and for some unknown reason, he penciled that in his appointment book. That scared me.
But on the evening of the 22nd he was doing so well. I didn't feel bad about leaving him to return to Greensboro for three days. After all, my sister would be with him.
Becky called me the next afternoon...Ironically, just as I was about to see a new patient whose mother was dying.
"His heartrate's up to 105. He's very, very weak. The hospice nurse doesn't think he'll pull out," she said. I could hear the slight crack in her voice and feel the fear radiating through the phone line.
He got on the phone. "I'm fine, really, I'm getting better. There's no need for you to come."
That cinched it. I was going.
Becky said, "Wait til we get the 4:30 report from the nurse. You know, he's done this before and we've been wrong. Besides," she added. "It's only the 23rd."
So I finished out the day. I went to the nursing home and saw my people. Cookie said "This is a different day. It's not like any other. I don't know what's going on."
As I held her hand and reassured her, I thought, me either.
I stopped at the house, threw some clothes into a suitcase and made an early dinner for the guys. Part of me feels guilty at not being able to be in two places at once. I miss them...But I miss him too.
When I reached New Bern, there he was, sitting up in bed watching a CNN special. But he was different, weaker, his voice almost a whisper, his skin a blanched white against the beige sheets.
I stopped by in the morning and he was even better. So I drove back to Greensboro to prepare a Last Night Before School Starts dinner. We all laughed and carried on. The boys were hilarious. It seems Adam had noticed a new ice cream sandwich, a huge thing called "Fat Boys."
He and his brother spent dinner coming up with new, politically and tastefully incorrect ad slogans, pitching them to Adam's girl, Amanda, competing unconsciously for the best laugh.
I called to check on Dad. "I decided the 24th wasn't such a good day to die after all," he said. "I'm gonna wait for Santa Claus."
"I'm trying to convince him to wait until March," Becky added. "So he'd be 80."
"Hell, I'm pulling for the Easter Bunny...Or maybe the Second Coming," I said.
I hopped in the car this morning, drove the long trip back to New Bern and arrived to find him so soundly asleep I had to check to see if he was still breathing.
He was...But he's weaker now. He's lost a little ground.
He tells me now he was having terrible dreams about needing to divide his house into thirds and having poor help from the carpenters...All while bad bugs swarmed around them. "We were trying to get it done so we could go swimming," he said.
There are three of us kids. Jesus was a carpenter. Illnesses are sometimes called bugs, and swimming symbolizes rebirth or transformation. Was he having another pre-death dream?
Nah, I'm just over-analyzing things again, huh?
A "Matronly" Rant...
Okay, I am not jetlagged, more like car-lagged. I have made the trip between Greensboro and New Bern 4 times in the past 48 hours, so maybe I'm just dazed and confused...But here goes anyway...
I am 51 and I am not dead.
Neither am I "matronly."
Or immune to trendy fashion and low-cut jeans.
I like my hair wild and my music alternative.
I don't delude myself- I have put away some things as juvenile or "too young," but on the whole, I do consider myself somewhat hip...
Which brings me to another thorn in my side...
While I live south of the Mason-Dixon Line, I am not walking down dirt roads in my bare feet. I don't live in a trailer or shop at the Piggly Wiggly. I don't "lunch" at the club and feign shock at the goings-on of my scandalous neighbors.
So why then are so many of the books I've read lately stereotyping 50-ish, Southern women as practically ancient, over the hill, dummies who long for a good man to take care of them or to take care of?
I would name names, but that's really not the point...
The point is...Whose delusion is this? Whose reality?
Are the editors in New York all 20-something? Are they too Yankee to realize we in the South have attended school and have the same level of education and sophistication?
I just sick of finding myself stuck on the long drive through the middle of nowhere listening to books about women who are round, dowdy, boring and completely asexual.
Am I stuck in adolescence, unable to move forward and fall in step with the march of time?
I would think so were it not for my friends...They're not dead either! We listen to Led Zeppelin, sure, but we're just as ready to switch our i-Pods over to Patty Griffin or Lucinda Williams. We work our asses off, but we play every bit as hard.
Don't get me wrong...I do not want to go back in time and become a teenager again. I've come too far for that foolishness. I love the wisdom and depth age has given me. But damn, if I read one more book in which ladies of my age wear elasticized pants and red hats, I'll just...Well, I will really just...
I'll just write my own damn book and fill it with ripe, juicy, bawdy, savvy, smart,sexy women who may not wear four-inch Manolo Blahnik pumps but who can still take charge and kick ass, on the job or in the bedroom! Even in the middle of damned Walmart...
Yeah, that's the ticket...
I'll just go write my own damned book!
You just hide and watch!
I am 51 and I am not dead.
Neither am I "matronly."
Or immune to trendy fashion and low-cut jeans.
I like my hair wild and my music alternative.
I don't delude myself- I have put away some things as juvenile or "too young," but on the whole, I do consider myself somewhat hip...
Which brings me to another thorn in my side...
While I live south of the Mason-Dixon Line, I am not walking down dirt roads in my bare feet. I don't live in a trailer or shop at the Piggly Wiggly. I don't "lunch" at the club and feign shock at the goings-on of my scandalous neighbors.
So why then are so many of the books I've read lately stereotyping 50-ish, Southern women as practically ancient, over the hill, dummies who long for a good man to take care of them or to take care of?
I would name names, but that's really not the point...
The point is...Whose delusion is this? Whose reality?
Are the editors in New York all 20-something? Are they too Yankee to realize we in the South have attended school and have the same level of education and sophistication?
I just sick of finding myself stuck on the long drive through the middle of nowhere listening to books about women who are round, dowdy, boring and completely asexual.
Am I stuck in adolescence, unable to move forward and fall in step with the march of time?
I would think so were it not for my friends...They're not dead either! We listen to Led Zeppelin, sure, but we're just as ready to switch our i-Pods over to Patty Griffin or Lucinda Williams. We work our asses off, but we play every bit as hard.
Don't get me wrong...I do not want to go back in time and become a teenager again. I've come too far for that foolishness. I love the wisdom and depth age has given me. But damn, if I read one more book in which ladies of my age wear elasticized pants and red hats, I'll just...Well, I will really just...
I'll just write my own damn book and fill it with ripe, juicy, bawdy, savvy, smart,sexy women who may not wear four-inch Manolo Blahnik pumps but who can still take charge and kick ass, on the job or in the bedroom! Even in the middle of damned Walmart...
Yeah, that's the ticket...
I'll just go write my own damned book!
You just hide and watch!
8/20/2006
Recipes for Happiness
You know, it's true...We really are about as happy as we make up our minds to be...
I'm settling into a routine here in New Bern with Dad. Four or five days a week I spend 12 to 14 hours with him in the assisted living facility. Basically, we live in one room. But oh, the triumphs and victories we have here!
Last night I made apricot-glazed pork tenderloin and carrots, peas, brown rice and homemade cornbread. The cornbread was baked in the traditional cast iron skillet and was probably the best batch I've ever made! Tonight it'll be chicken thighs in a mushroom-cheddar sauce with rice, peas, and crescent rolls. I made beef stew and fricassed chicken last week. And all I have to work with is a toaster oven, a crockpot, a microwave, an iron skillet and two corningware bowls! The sink is a tiny bar sink. The refrigerator is an under-the-counter dorm room fridge. And I bake on the bathroom sink.
And this makes me very, very happy.
Dad hasn't had an appetite. He's wasting away and the food in this place is criminally bad...Okay, maybe not criminally...But mystery meat is no stranger here. Anyway, the smell of food slowly simmering for hours has had the effect of making him almost ravenous. He eats everything on his plate and is happy to have had it. It's a tiny miracle.
It's one little victory I can have in this war against Dad's Pulmonary Fibrosis. I can give him a good meal. I can see the color return to his ashen cheeks. I can joke and kid and laugh because he's strong enough to be able to take a good dose of his full-strength, wide-open daughter...Although like his meals, the portion of hijinks and carrying on is kept fairly small. Dad doesn't have a lot of energy, even with a good meal in him.
Living such a scaled down existence has reminded me again of how resourceful we humans must be in creating our own happiness...And how very little it takes to create and maintain that happiness.
Dad's been a little restless lately. My thought on the matter is that it's taking longer than he'd planned to die and this is giving him more time to worry about it. We've talked about it any number of times, but you can't out-talk or out-think a big experience you've never had. Dad's just a little anxious, so finding entertainment, other than movies or crossword puzzles, has been a bit of a challenge. But when my boys came down with Adam's girlfriend, Amanda in tow, she brought out a deck of cards and suddenly we had an instant party!
Dad trounced them! Even when Adam inadvertently sat on his oxygen tube and cut off Dad's airflow- he still managed to beat all of them in a landslide Hearts victory that we will all treasure as one of the "good time" memories.
The Hearts game reminded me of my old college card playing days and how we all loved Pinochle. Pinochle is Bridge-lite and probably just about the level of distraction Dad could handle without having to concentrate too hard. (After all, he is taking huge amounts of morphine and ativan...And yes, he still runs circles around the rest of us intellectually and emotionally) So I think we'll try Pinochle this week, ( that is, if I can re-learn it through the miracle of the internet and a good website.)
My sister has the night shift. She arrives around 8pm and the three of us watch movies, or old episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs. Around 10 or 11pm, I walk out to the parking lot, lower the top on my convertible and decompress on the 12 mile drive out to my "place in the country."
My route takes me over the long bridge that spans the Trent and Neuse rivers. At night you can see the lights of the marina and the distant lit-up houses along the shoreline. I drive with the wind in my hair, singing "The Tracks of My Tears, " along with Patti Griffin.
Across the bridge, I turn down a six mile-long road that is largely unpopulated except for deer and other nighttime critters. Broadcreek Road has no streetlights, all the better for star-gazing. JoDee Messina and I sing "Bring On the Rain," as I pass the golf course and turn into the retirement community where I've rented a room.
That's when I miss my boys the very most.
I crawl up in my lumpy bed and turn on The Daily Show and wish like hell I was home, laughing with Ben and Adam. This has been a special summer, one that will never be repeated and they are good about knowing that. Oddly enough, my absence seems to make their adolescent hearts grow fonder. On Wednesday night I will make them an elaborate dinner, dirtying every pot in the kitchen, preparing every vegetable I can think of, and concocting fruit salads and desserts.
Afterward, I plan on teaching them how to play Pinochle. There will be much shouting and laughing, as there always is when we play games.
That night before we fall asleep, there will be hugs. Confidences will be whispered, friendly insults exchanged and life will continue to be good.
Very, very good.
Here's the recipe for the Pork and Carrots:
Line your crockpot with one of those new disposable liners. Throw in some carrots cut up in chunks (Don't use the little ones, they're flavorless! Bite the bullet and peel the big guys.) Add a pork loin roast and a jar of apricot preserves. Turn the pot on and come back 8 or 10 hours later.
I bought the heat and serve brown rice, and don't give me a hard time about it...Desperate times call for already prepared rice at times!
The Cornbread was from a mix too, on account of I can con the facility kitchen out of a carton of milk but not a raw egg...I use the Martha Lily mix that says "Just add milk." I actually use 2 bags of the mix, add chipped up pieces of butter right before I pour it into the prepared iron skillet (melt about a tablespoon of butter in the pan while it preheats in the toaster oven to 400.) and add a little honey to the mix. When you pour the batter into the skillet, drizzle a little honey across the top.
Yep, life's about as good as you make it, alright!
I'm settling into a routine here in New Bern with Dad. Four or five days a week I spend 12 to 14 hours with him in the assisted living facility. Basically, we live in one room. But oh, the triumphs and victories we have here!
Last night I made apricot-glazed pork tenderloin and carrots, peas, brown rice and homemade cornbread. The cornbread was baked in the traditional cast iron skillet and was probably the best batch I've ever made! Tonight it'll be chicken thighs in a mushroom-cheddar sauce with rice, peas, and crescent rolls. I made beef stew and fricassed chicken last week. And all I have to work with is a toaster oven, a crockpot, a microwave, an iron skillet and two corningware bowls! The sink is a tiny bar sink. The refrigerator is an under-the-counter dorm room fridge. And I bake on the bathroom sink.
And this makes me very, very happy.
Dad hasn't had an appetite. He's wasting away and the food in this place is criminally bad...Okay, maybe not criminally...But mystery meat is no stranger here. Anyway, the smell of food slowly simmering for hours has had the effect of making him almost ravenous. He eats everything on his plate and is happy to have had it. It's a tiny miracle.
It's one little victory I can have in this war against Dad's Pulmonary Fibrosis. I can give him a good meal. I can see the color return to his ashen cheeks. I can joke and kid and laugh because he's strong enough to be able to take a good dose of his full-strength, wide-open daughter...Although like his meals, the portion of hijinks and carrying on is kept fairly small. Dad doesn't have a lot of energy, even with a good meal in him.
Living such a scaled down existence has reminded me again of how resourceful we humans must be in creating our own happiness...And how very little it takes to create and maintain that happiness.
Dad's been a little restless lately. My thought on the matter is that it's taking longer than he'd planned to die and this is giving him more time to worry about it. We've talked about it any number of times, but you can't out-talk or out-think a big experience you've never had. Dad's just a little anxious, so finding entertainment, other than movies or crossword puzzles, has been a bit of a challenge. But when my boys came down with Adam's girlfriend, Amanda in tow, she brought out a deck of cards and suddenly we had an instant party!
Dad trounced them! Even when Adam inadvertently sat on his oxygen tube and cut off Dad's airflow- he still managed to beat all of them in a landslide Hearts victory that we will all treasure as one of the "good time" memories.
The Hearts game reminded me of my old college card playing days and how we all loved Pinochle. Pinochle is Bridge-lite and probably just about the level of distraction Dad could handle without having to concentrate too hard. (After all, he is taking huge amounts of morphine and ativan...And yes, he still runs circles around the rest of us intellectually and emotionally) So I think we'll try Pinochle this week, ( that is, if I can re-learn it through the miracle of the internet and a good website.)
My sister has the night shift. She arrives around 8pm and the three of us watch movies, or old episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs. Around 10 or 11pm, I walk out to the parking lot, lower the top on my convertible and decompress on the 12 mile drive out to my "place in the country."
My route takes me over the long bridge that spans the Trent and Neuse rivers. At night you can see the lights of the marina and the distant lit-up houses along the shoreline. I drive with the wind in my hair, singing "The Tracks of My Tears, " along with Patti Griffin.
Across the bridge, I turn down a six mile-long road that is largely unpopulated except for deer and other nighttime critters. Broadcreek Road has no streetlights, all the better for star-gazing. JoDee Messina and I sing "Bring On the Rain," as I pass the golf course and turn into the retirement community where I've rented a room.
That's when I miss my boys the very most.
I crawl up in my lumpy bed and turn on The Daily Show and wish like hell I was home, laughing with Ben and Adam. This has been a special summer, one that will never be repeated and they are good about knowing that. Oddly enough, my absence seems to make their adolescent hearts grow fonder. On Wednesday night I will make them an elaborate dinner, dirtying every pot in the kitchen, preparing every vegetable I can think of, and concocting fruit salads and desserts.
Afterward, I plan on teaching them how to play Pinochle. There will be much shouting and laughing, as there always is when we play games.
That night before we fall asleep, there will be hugs. Confidences will be whispered, friendly insults exchanged and life will continue to be good.
Very, very good.
Here's the recipe for the Pork and Carrots:
Line your crockpot with one of those new disposable liners. Throw in some carrots cut up in chunks (Don't use the little ones, they're flavorless! Bite the bullet and peel the big guys.) Add a pork loin roast and a jar of apricot preserves. Turn the pot on and come back 8 or 10 hours later.
I bought the heat and serve brown rice, and don't give me a hard time about it...Desperate times call for already prepared rice at times!
The Cornbread was from a mix too, on account of I can con the facility kitchen out of a carton of milk but not a raw egg...I use the Martha Lily mix that says "Just add milk." I actually use 2 bags of the mix, add chipped up pieces of butter right before I pour it into the prepared iron skillet (melt about a tablespoon of butter in the pan while it preheats in the toaster oven to 400.) and add a little honey to the mix. When you pour the batter into the skillet, drizzle a little honey across the top.
Yep, life's about as good as you make it, alright!
8/18/2006
Be All That You Can Be
Marti and I are not ones to let grass grow under our feet. We are tuned in, plugged in, wired up, linked and text-paged to every new idea and trend that comes out...at least, as up as you can be while living in a moderately small southern town.
So when the new Pan-Asian restaurant opened in the not-even-finished-park-amongst-the-construction-vehicles Friendly Shopping Center, we decided it was time to hop on down and see what all the fuss was about.
While we are ever the trendsetters, Marti and I are not followers. We waited a discrete two months before venturing forth. I mean, one doesn't like to appear anxious.
Anyway, the revolving front door is flanked by two huge concrete stallions. I don't want to be the one to say anything, but I think it takes away some from the appetizing appeal of a place to have horse butts positioned in such a way as to make one think of what would happen to them if said concrete steeds had been the genuine article.
But I digress.
We step inside, out of the bright sunlight, into a dark cavern of a room where all the waitstaff is wearing black and the tables have lit candles on them. We are led to one of those tables out in the middle...You know, the ones that make you think you must not count for much because all the other people are sitting in booths? What do they think we are, stupid?
I said, "We'd like a booth please."
The little girl in black blinked, then led us to a horseshoe-shaped booth that would've seated eight of us.
We took our poster-sized menus and perused them long enough for me to realize there were no lunch menu prices and Dear God, we're going to pay $15 for lunch in a chain restaurant! Our waitress must've thought she had to make up for ripping us off by yapping on and on about the items on the menu. She continued even after we'd ordered and were deep into catching up on what had been going on for the past week.
Couldn't she see we were in the middle of an important discussion?
Apparently not. At one point she started futzing around with the condiment tray, making up some concoction that looked more like a biology class experiment gone wrong than a hand-mixed seasoning for our lunches. Looking back on it, I realize now she was only trying to join in. I mean, who in their right mind wouldn't? There we were in all our glory- two hot, passionate, vibrant, interesting women with real damn lives! Puh-leeze, if you don't want to be one of us, what else could you be? That's right, your other choices are Nuts or Boring.
I know, I get carried away. It's just sometimes I forget how wonderful it is to eat lunch with my best friend. It's like going on vacation without having to pack or pay for it.
So, our food arrives and it's a good thing the waitress had blended the special seasoning for us because that high dollar food was just regular Chinese food dressed up and called Pan Asian Cuisine. I guess that's how they justified charging big money and printing their names on matchbooks.
But you can plop old Marti and me down anywhere and the results will always be the same...We will solve the problems of our own universe no matter what environmental obstacles we have to overcome.
Sometimes Marti and I get bogged down in the day-to-day frustrations of being the two hottest living mothers in the universe and forget to channel our inner wonderfulness. In short, we get cranky. We take it out on other, perhaps not-so-innocent bystanders. We completely forget the only destinies we really control are our own.
So, in light of all our renewed determination to be the best women we can be- without causing a nuclear holocaust at home or elsewhere- we have adopted a new motto and will be having appropriate T-shirts made up so we can clue the rest of the world in...
"Be the Woman You Are, Not the Bitch You've Become!"
I think it has a certain ring to it, don't you?
So when the new Pan-Asian restaurant opened in the not-even-finished-park-amongst-the-construction-vehicles Friendly Shopping Center, we decided it was time to hop on down and see what all the fuss was about.
While we are ever the trendsetters, Marti and I are not followers. We waited a discrete two months before venturing forth. I mean, one doesn't like to appear anxious.
Anyway, the revolving front door is flanked by two huge concrete stallions. I don't want to be the one to say anything, but I think it takes away some from the appetizing appeal of a place to have horse butts positioned in such a way as to make one think of what would happen to them if said concrete steeds had been the genuine article.
But I digress.
We step inside, out of the bright sunlight, into a dark cavern of a room where all the waitstaff is wearing black and the tables have lit candles on them. We are led to one of those tables out in the middle...You know, the ones that make you think you must not count for much because all the other people are sitting in booths? What do they think we are, stupid?
I said, "We'd like a booth please."
The little girl in black blinked, then led us to a horseshoe-shaped booth that would've seated eight of us.
We took our poster-sized menus and perused them long enough for me to realize there were no lunch menu prices and Dear God, we're going to pay $15 for lunch in a chain restaurant! Our waitress must've thought she had to make up for ripping us off by yapping on and on about the items on the menu. She continued even after we'd ordered and were deep into catching up on what had been going on for the past week.
Couldn't she see we were in the middle of an important discussion?
Apparently not. At one point she started futzing around with the condiment tray, making up some concoction that looked more like a biology class experiment gone wrong than a hand-mixed seasoning for our lunches. Looking back on it, I realize now she was only trying to join in. I mean, who in their right mind wouldn't? There we were in all our glory- two hot, passionate, vibrant, interesting women with real damn lives! Puh-leeze, if you don't want to be one of us, what else could you be? That's right, your other choices are Nuts or Boring.
I know, I get carried away. It's just sometimes I forget how wonderful it is to eat lunch with my best friend. It's like going on vacation without having to pack or pay for it.
So, our food arrives and it's a good thing the waitress had blended the special seasoning for us because that high dollar food was just regular Chinese food dressed up and called Pan Asian Cuisine. I guess that's how they justified charging big money and printing their names on matchbooks.
But you can plop old Marti and me down anywhere and the results will always be the same...We will solve the problems of our own universe no matter what environmental obstacles we have to overcome.
Sometimes Marti and I get bogged down in the day-to-day frustrations of being the two hottest living mothers in the universe and forget to channel our inner wonderfulness. In short, we get cranky. We take it out on other, perhaps not-so-innocent bystanders. We completely forget the only destinies we really control are our own.
So, in light of all our renewed determination to be the best women we can be- without causing a nuclear holocaust at home or elsewhere- we have adopted a new motto and will be having appropriate T-shirts made up so we can clue the rest of the world in...
"Be the Woman You Are, Not the Bitch You've Become!"
I think it has a certain ring to it, don't you?
8/10/2006
Further Proof of My Father's Brilliance
You do know I live in a nursing home, right?
I mean, I spend 5 days a week with my dad in the assisted living facility and 1 or 2 days a week working in three nursing homes.
I am one with the old people.
I am even more forgetful than usual.
Last week I arrived at Dad's without the power cord to my laptop. This week, when I reminded him to write down the meds he'd just taken, he looked up at me and said, "At least I didn't forget the cord to my laptop!"
Smartass!
Of course, as I've said before, he is the smartest man in the universe. Want further proof?
My birthday was this week and we were talking about the different decades and how it felt to be in our 20s, 30s and 40s. So I asked him, "Dad, what did you do in your fifties?"
"Quit shaking," he said, and smiled.
I mean, I spend 5 days a week with my dad in the assisted living facility and 1 or 2 days a week working in three nursing homes.
I am one with the old people.
I am even more forgetful than usual.
Last week I arrived at Dad's without the power cord to my laptop. This week, when I reminded him to write down the meds he'd just taken, he looked up at me and said, "At least I didn't forget the cord to my laptop!"
Smartass!
Of course, as I've said before, he is the smartest man in the universe. Want further proof?
My birthday was this week and we were talking about the different decades and how it felt to be in our 20s, 30s and 40s. So I asked him, "Dad, what did you do in your fifties?"
"Quit shaking," he said, and smiled.
7/11/2006
Lunching With The Ladies
I played tea party today at the nursing home.
I walked in to the dining room and there sat Cookie at a table with another little old lady who wore a pink housedress with a wide pink, Peter Pan collar. Cookie smiles up at me, looks at her companion, then back at me and says, “There you are! I was wondering where you’d got off to!” She turns to her friend and says, “She’s my friend. I just love her!”
Her friend says, “I just loved the salad you made for lunch, dear.”
I smiled and said, “Why, thank you,” because by now I know better than to try and re-orient people to the misery that is the nursing home.
“I can’t remember names,” Cookie says, “but she,” indicating her new buddy, “helps me to eat more.”
Cookie was wearing her smile like Fourth of July bunting. So different from the last few weeks when Cookie’s cried and clung to my hand as if she were drowning and asked, “If I have no memories, am I still here?”
“I’m Helen Dolores,” the pink lady says. She looks like she wishes I were her friend, too, so of course, I am. “What was your name again?”
“Oh, we can’t remember names at all!” Cookie says. “Why I know her as good as I know my own face but I can’t recall her name to save my soul! She just helps me eat more, you know.”
I smile and say of course I know. I take a seat at the table and stare out the wide plate glass window, across the busy street to the parking lot of a medical building and a fancy restaurant.
“What is that place?” they ask, pointing.
“They x-ray you there,” I say, thinking they mean the medical building.
“Funny,” Cookie muses, “I thought that’s where Mike used to eat…Oh well, maybe it was somewhere else.”
“No, no, Cookie, you’re right,” I say. She remembers! Suddenly, it’s there, maybe just for the moment, or the day, but there they are- her precious memories, the son’s name she can never remember. It is all there.
We chat like we are old friends lady-lunching, until a Fed Ex truck pulls up in front of the building.
“Fexux,” Helen says. “Now what in the world is that?”
I tell them it’s a service that brings packages extra fast, overnight, “If it just absolutely, positively has to be there,” I add.
This puzzles my friends. Why on earth would something absolutely, positively have to be anywhere in such a short amount of time? What could possibly be so important?
We watch the man in brown carry a long, slender brown box into the building.
“Well,” says Cookie, turning away to focus back on me, “There you are! This is my friend,” she says, turning to Helen. “She helps me to eat more, or so they say, maybe.”
Helen smiles expectantly.
I grin, settle my elbows down on the table, lay my hands flat on the blue tablecloth before me and begin all over again.
“Well, hello,” I say. “I’m just terrible with names, you know? But you can call me Nancy.”
Cookie smiles. “I can’t remember a name to save my soul but I know your face as well as I know my own.”
And she does, just as I know hers. It is plastered all across my heart.
I walked in to the dining room and there sat Cookie at a table with another little old lady who wore a pink housedress with a wide pink, Peter Pan collar. Cookie smiles up at me, looks at her companion, then back at me and says, “There you are! I was wondering where you’d got off to!” She turns to her friend and says, “She’s my friend. I just love her!”
Her friend says, “I just loved the salad you made for lunch, dear.”
I smiled and said, “Why, thank you,” because by now I know better than to try and re-orient people to the misery that is the nursing home.
“I can’t remember names,” Cookie says, “but she,” indicating her new buddy, “helps me to eat more.”
Cookie was wearing her smile like Fourth of July bunting. So different from the last few weeks when Cookie’s cried and clung to my hand as if she were drowning and asked, “If I have no memories, am I still here?”
“I’m Helen Dolores,” the pink lady says. She looks like she wishes I were her friend, too, so of course, I am. “What was your name again?”
“Oh, we can’t remember names at all!” Cookie says. “Why I know her as good as I know my own face but I can’t recall her name to save my soul! She just helps me eat more, you know.”
I smile and say of course I know. I take a seat at the table and stare out the wide plate glass window, across the busy street to the parking lot of a medical building and a fancy restaurant.
“What is that place?” they ask, pointing.
“They x-ray you there,” I say, thinking they mean the medical building.
“Funny,” Cookie muses, “I thought that’s where Mike used to eat…Oh well, maybe it was somewhere else.”
“No, no, Cookie, you’re right,” I say. She remembers! Suddenly, it’s there, maybe just for the moment, or the day, but there they are- her precious memories, the son’s name she can never remember. It is all there.
We chat like we are old friends lady-lunching, until a Fed Ex truck pulls up in front of the building.
“Fexux,” Helen says. “Now what in the world is that?”
I tell them it’s a service that brings packages extra fast, overnight, “If it just absolutely, positively has to be there,” I add.
This puzzles my friends. Why on earth would something absolutely, positively have to be anywhere in such a short amount of time? What could possibly be so important?
We watch the man in brown carry a long, slender brown box into the building.
“Well,” says Cookie, turning away to focus back on me, “There you are! This is my friend,” she says, turning to Helen. “She helps me to eat more, or so they say, maybe.”
Helen smiles expectantly.
I grin, settle my elbows down on the table, lay my hands flat on the blue tablecloth before me and begin all over again.
“Well, hello,” I say. “I’m just terrible with names, you know? But you can call me Nancy.”
Cookie smiles. “I can’t remember a name to save my soul but I know your face as well as I know my own.”
And she does, just as I know hers. It is plastered all across my heart.
7/03/2006
The Wisest Man in the Universe
My dad is the wisest man in the universe and he's dying. He says the good thing about knowing you're dying is that you get to look back over your life. For us kids, it's meant we have a chance to say goodbye. But as he's the wisest man in the universe, I feel like there's just so much I need to learn from him before he goes. I feel like the remedial student, always trying to "Get it." I never quite "get it," at least not all of it. I could never hope to get "it" all with Dad. There's just too much. He is rich with wisdom.
My brother asked him what was the meaning of life...(I'm telling you, we honestly think he knows!) And Dad said life is all about compassion and learning to be kind. He says we need to learn to be kinder to one another if this planet's going to survive.
In his last homily he said compassion was like amber. Thousands of years ago when a pine tree was wounded it produced sap to cover the wound and thirty to ninety million years later, that sap becomes the gem, amber.
One night, late, I said I didn't know how it was he could spend just a little time with a person and yet seem to know them so completely. "You just seem to 'get' everyone! I wish I knew how to do that!"
He was tucked under his covers, pale and looking very weak, but suddenly he became more animated. "You really want to know?"
I dropped my purse and keys on the floor and sat down on the edge of the bed. "Yeah, Dad, I really want to know."
"Don't listen to the answers people give you, listen to the questions they ask. That's what's important."
He went on to say that peoples' questions indicate what they're interested in. He said, "Think of it like a big tree. The answers are the limbs. The stuff they already have answers to, those are the dead limbs. They know the answers to those questions. But over there, where you see the leaves turning green, that's where they're growing, those are the questions. Always go with the questions."
Dad's world seems to be getting smaller as his life ebbs away. He's lost so much weight. When I hug him, I feel as if my arms are holding fragile bird bones. When he speaks his voice is softer, sometimes only a whisper. And this week, for the first time, he seems a little forgetful or confused.
I read somewhere that American Indians say of those who are dying, "Their spirit is light to the ground."
Last night my friend, Martha, dreamed that she was in a huge colliseum, filled with people. Dad sat next to her wearing his vestments, with a large gold crown on his head. She said another man in white vestments appeared, with a smaller crown, and was almost sheepish as he began to address the crowd, as if he knew he didn't belong where he was.
Martha, noting that Dad's crown was far larger, turned to him.
"Shouldn't you be the one to do this?" she asked Dad.
"Oh, that's all right," Dad answered, "They just don't know I'm here yet."
Oh, but they will.
My brother asked him what was the meaning of life...(I'm telling you, we honestly think he knows!) And Dad said life is all about compassion and learning to be kind. He says we need to learn to be kinder to one another if this planet's going to survive.
In his last homily he said compassion was like amber. Thousands of years ago when a pine tree was wounded it produced sap to cover the wound and thirty to ninety million years later, that sap becomes the gem, amber.
One night, late, I said I didn't know how it was he could spend just a little time with a person and yet seem to know them so completely. "You just seem to 'get' everyone! I wish I knew how to do that!"
He was tucked under his covers, pale and looking very weak, but suddenly he became more animated. "You really want to know?"
I dropped my purse and keys on the floor and sat down on the edge of the bed. "Yeah, Dad, I really want to know."
"Don't listen to the answers people give you, listen to the questions they ask. That's what's important."
He went on to say that peoples' questions indicate what they're interested in. He said, "Think of it like a big tree. The answers are the limbs. The stuff they already have answers to, those are the dead limbs. They know the answers to those questions. But over there, where you see the leaves turning green, that's where they're growing, those are the questions. Always go with the questions."
Dad's world seems to be getting smaller as his life ebbs away. He's lost so much weight. When I hug him, I feel as if my arms are holding fragile bird bones. When he speaks his voice is softer, sometimes only a whisper. And this week, for the first time, he seems a little forgetful or confused.
I read somewhere that American Indians say of those who are dying, "Their spirit is light to the ground."
Last night my friend, Martha, dreamed that she was in a huge colliseum, filled with people. Dad sat next to her wearing his vestments, with a large gold crown on his head. She said another man in white vestments appeared, with a smaller crown, and was almost sheepish as he began to address the crowd, as if he knew he didn't belong where he was.
Martha, noting that Dad's crown was far larger, turned to him.
"Shouldn't you be the one to do this?" she asked Dad.
"Oh, that's all right," Dad answered, "They just don't know I'm here yet."
Oh, but they will.
4/27/2006
The Writing Life...It Ain't All It's Cracked Up To Be- But It Is Cracked!
Okay, I'm a writer. This is my blog. Authors are "supposed" to be writing about their work. Who knew?! All this time I've been writing about my life...which sometimes includes my work but most often winds up being a stream-of-consciousness rant about whatever happens to be going on at the time.
Today I will be responsible. I will write about my work.
http://www.dinermuseum.org/dinersforsale/diner30/dinerforsale30.php
There it is...up there...what I'm working on. I've fallen in love with diner life.
What is wrong with me?
They request a proposal for a ghost hunter and what do I get? A diner!
I wander around the house thinking...hummmm....ghost hunter...what up with that?!
I eat some of the Easter candy that I've carefully stashed in the freezer so I won't eat it and voila! I come up with a diner.
The candy, in particular the malted milk ball eggs, is a magnificent help because next I come up with a memory of a man in the laundramat when I was in college. He had a tin foil triangle on his head and was speaking from the payphone to his mother.
"You gotta help me out here, Ma! The CIA is closing in. They know I'm in contact with the aliens."
Okay, now I've got a diner and a crazy guy with a tin foil triangle on his head.
Then I get a retro, shell pink, nubby fabric-ed Coco Channel suit and a pillbox hat...and a blonde. Tall. Leggy. And Geeze...she's got her masters in Social Work. And she lives in Philly where she has, of all things, a talk show.
Where are the freaking ghosts I ask you?
Next I get the Chicken Lady. She's wearing the tin foil hat and holding a chicken.
I keep eating Easter candy. I think there's a connection between the malted milk ball eggs and the chicken sitting in the crazy lady's lap.
And this is literally how I work. I walk around and now and then I look at one of the kids and say..."What if...?" And they do their best to answer me, even though they're thinking I'm nuts. Thank God, my son Ben is an expert on aliens, technology and Mormans (Go figure!) He tells me a lot of alien theory.
My other son just rolls his eyes and says, "Everybody writes about tin foil triangles, Mother! It's been done...a lot!"
Where was I and what exactly has he been reading?!
And then there's the diner...and a ghost named Abe who has hemmoroids. This is not my choice, he just pops into my head and asks for a small walk-on part...actually, he demands a small walk on part. As does the Marilyn Monroe/Gwen Steffani wanna-be ghost and the VW van.
But I can't write. Not yet. Not until someone starts talking to me and gives me the first line. Then the picture will start to roll, the "flash-forwards" as I call them will begin to fall into place, and I will sit back and enjoy the movie.
So, I guess you can see why I don't write much about my writing. Who would believe me?!
P.S Lately I've been reading the stats about where my blog readers come from and now I'm curious...Who are you guys? It would be wonderful to know. Maybe you could post a comment or drop me a line as I have no clue how to attach a guest book to this thing!
Today I will be responsible. I will write about my work.
http://www.dinermuseum.org/dinersforsale/diner30/dinerforsale30.php
There it is...up there...what I'm working on. I've fallen in love with diner life.
What is wrong with me?
They request a proposal for a ghost hunter and what do I get? A diner!
I wander around the house thinking...hummmm....ghost hunter...what up with that?!
I eat some of the Easter candy that I've carefully stashed in the freezer so I won't eat it and voila! I come up with a diner.
The candy, in particular the malted milk ball eggs, is a magnificent help because next I come up with a memory of a man in the laundramat when I was in college. He had a tin foil triangle on his head and was speaking from the payphone to his mother.
"You gotta help me out here, Ma! The CIA is closing in. They know I'm in contact with the aliens."
Okay, now I've got a diner and a crazy guy with a tin foil triangle on his head.
Then I get a retro, shell pink, nubby fabric-ed Coco Channel suit and a pillbox hat...and a blonde. Tall. Leggy. And Geeze...she's got her masters in Social Work. And she lives in Philly where she has, of all things, a talk show.
Where are the freaking ghosts I ask you?
Next I get the Chicken Lady. She's wearing the tin foil hat and holding a chicken.
I keep eating Easter candy. I think there's a connection between the malted milk ball eggs and the chicken sitting in the crazy lady's lap.
And this is literally how I work. I walk around and now and then I look at one of the kids and say..."What if...?" And they do their best to answer me, even though they're thinking I'm nuts. Thank God, my son Ben is an expert on aliens, technology and Mormans (Go figure!) He tells me a lot of alien theory.
My other son just rolls his eyes and says, "Everybody writes about tin foil triangles, Mother! It's been done...a lot!"
Where was I and what exactly has he been reading?!
And then there's the diner...and a ghost named Abe who has hemmoroids. This is not my choice, he just pops into my head and asks for a small walk-on part...actually, he demands a small walk on part. As does the Marilyn Monroe/Gwen Steffani wanna-be ghost and the VW van.
But I can't write. Not yet. Not until someone starts talking to me and gives me the first line. Then the picture will start to roll, the "flash-forwards" as I call them will begin to fall into place, and I will sit back and enjoy the movie.
So, I guess you can see why I don't write much about my writing. Who would believe me?!
P.S Lately I've been reading the stats about where my blog readers come from and now I'm curious...Who are you guys? It would be wonderful to know. Maybe you could post a comment or drop me a line as I have no clue how to attach a guest book to this thing!
3/07/2006
Insiders
I spend a couple of days a week consulting in two nursing homes. They're terrible. Pits. When you think about the worst kind of hell to go to in your old age, that's where I work. It's not so bad for me...I get to leave. My friends who live there can't leave.
I do everything I can to drag my "outside" friends over to visit my "inside" friends...but it's slow going. I guess at our age it's a little too close to the bone. And my outside friends say "It's so depressing! How can you stand it?!"
Oh, they are so missing out! I can walk through those doors having the worst day in the world and 20 minutes later, I'm a thousand miles away from my problems. My inside friends give me far more than I can ever hope to give them.
But...I digress!
Marti is my true best friend. She agreed to come hang with the Insiders one morning a week. She reads to Laura.
Two weeks ago, I introduced her to Cookie. Sweet little white-haired old lady with a ready smile and a great sense of humor. But lately, Cookie can't remember where she is, or what we're doing. Most days it's a struggle to form enough words to complete a sentence. It is painful for both of us because Cookie knows she's been slipping and she and I both miss "her."
We're working on it though. We're waiting for the new meds to kick in. I think she'll be back.
I know this because 2 weeks ago she met Marti. Then, last week, Marti who doesn't know Cookie's lost, stops by her room.
"Have you seen Nancy?" Marti asks. (Now, I don't even think Cookie knows my name!)
Cookie says, "She went upstairs to a meeting I think." (Which was true!!!)
Then Cookie frowns at Marti. "You don't think she's in trouble do you?" She asks Marti.
Marti smiles, shakes her head, "Oh, I really don't think so! Not Nancy!"
Cookie shakes her head. "You know," she says to Marti. "I just think they ought to go ahead and move her down here with us. I just think she'd fit in a lot better!"
Marti bites her tongue and manages to agree with Cookie.
When she finds me, she can't wait to tell me Cookie thinks I'm a resident, not staff!
I laugh with her and then I realize the most awesome thing of all...Cookie has just paid me the highest compliment. In a place where the staff is seen as harsh and busy, apart from the rest, Cookie has decided I can't be one of those people. I'm one of Them, the Insiders.
Life is good.
Very, very good.
I do everything I can to drag my "outside" friends over to visit my "inside" friends...but it's slow going. I guess at our age it's a little too close to the bone. And my outside friends say "It's so depressing! How can you stand it?!"
Oh, they are so missing out! I can walk through those doors having the worst day in the world and 20 minutes later, I'm a thousand miles away from my problems. My inside friends give me far more than I can ever hope to give them.
But...I digress!
Marti is my true best friend. She agreed to come hang with the Insiders one morning a week. She reads to Laura.
Two weeks ago, I introduced her to Cookie. Sweet little white-haired old lady with a ready smile and a great sense of humor. But lately, Cookie can't remember where she is, or what we're doing. Most days it's a struggle to form enough words to complete a sentence. It is painful for both of us because Cookie knows she's been slipping and she and I both miss "her."
We're working on it though. We're waiting for the new meds to kick in. I think she'll be back.
I know this because 2 weeks ago she met Marti. Then, last week, Marti who doesn't know Cookie's lost, stops by her room.
"Have you seen Nancy?" Marti asks. (Now, I don't even think Cookie knows my name!)
Cookie says, "She went upstairs to a meeting I think." (Which was true!!!)
Then Cookie frowns at Marti. "You don't think she's in trouble do you?" She asks Marti.
Marti smiles, shakes her head, "Oh, I really don't think so! Not Nancy!"
Cookie shakes her head. "You know," she says to Marti. "I just think they ought to go ahead and move her down here with us. I just think she'd fit in a lot better!"
Marti bites her tongue and manages to agree with Cookie.
When she finds me, she can't wait to tell me Cookie thinks I'm a resident, not staff!
I laugh with her and then I realize the most awesome thing of all...Cookie has just paid me the highest compliment. In a place where the staff is seen as harsh and busy, apart from the rest, Cookie has decided I can't be one of those people. I'm one of Them, the Insiders.
Life is good.
Very, very good.
2/21/2006
Where Does the Time Go?
Where Does the Time Go?!
How can it be…it feels like I just wrote a blog yesterday and yet, here I am in late February! Somebody whip me with a wet noodle! Okay, maybe just the cuffs…Maybe just sneak up on me and…
Never mind! As usual, I digress!
I am working, again, as always, on this new book idea…still!!! And I have now written the opening scene maybe a million times! Okay, at least 65! I’ve read some of the openings aloud, at signings or workshops, and everyone seems to love them, but they “don’t have legs.” They just won’t go any further!
Fifty versions began with “I used to be normal.” Finally, this last version began with the truth… “Who am I kidding? I have never been normal!”
Maybe now I’m getting somewhere.
I have this theory about my writing. Sometimes I just have to plod along and write until I get to know my characters, until they take on lives and voices of their own and go for it. The subplot characters were doing fine…Lucy and Modean knew who they were and what they wanted. It was just old Molly, Mollie, Kate, Isabel who couldn’t even pick a name and stick to it! Even the dog finally picked his name, Mr. Greenjeans. Once the dog speaks, you’ve got to keep writing!
So I’m trying.
In the meantime, Christmas came and went, my Dad got very, very ill and is getting worse, my mom broke her pelvis, and Ben’s not doing too well with Algebra. Such is life in the Sandwich Generation.
I did, however, get to go to Holden Beach this past weekend to write and it was awesome…When we left it was raining…little spritzes of snow intermingling with the raindrops, the gray fog just lifting over the matching gray ocean, a lone seagull, dark against the gloomy horizon. What a perfect weekend for writing!
I went to my writing partner’s house. Wendy is a quiet, delightful woman who exudes peace and well-being. We got up every morning, had simple breakfasts and then wrote (well, she painted this time.) Broke for lunch, wrote after lunch, made very low-key suppers and then read or revised until early bedtimes. Boring? Maybe but heaven sent for me. I can’t remember the last weekend without the backdrop of a TV or telephone ringing.
And then it was back to reality and the crunch of re-entry. Dirty laundry, “What’s for supper?” Missed orthodontist appointment. Sick kid. Ah, life in the fast lane!
How can it be…it feels like I just wrote a blog yesterday and yet, here I am in late February! Somebody whip me with a wet noodle! Okay, maybe just the cuffs…Maybe just sneak up on me and…
Never mind! As usual, I digress!
I am working, again, as always, on this new book idea…still!!! And I have now written the opening scene maybe a million times! Okay, at least 65! I’ve read some of the openings aloud, at signings or workshops, and everyone seems to love them, but they “don’t have legs.” They just won’t go any further!
Fifty versions began with “I used to be normal.” Finally, this last version began with the truth… “Who am I kidding? I have never been normal!”
Maybe now I’m getting somewhere.
I have this theory about my writing. Sometimes I just have to plod along and write until I get to know my characters, until they take on lives and voices of their own and go for it. The subplot characters were doing fine…Lucy and Modean knew who they were and what they wanted. It was just old Molly, Mollie, Kate, Isabel who couldn’t even pick a name and stick to it! Even the dog finally picked his name, Mr. Greenjeans. Once the dog speaks, you’ve got to keep writing!
So I’m trying.
In the meantime, Christmas came and went, my Dad got very, very ill and is getting worse, my mom broke her pelvis, and Ben’s not doing too well with Algebra. Such is life in the Sandwich Generation.
I did, however, get to go to Holden Beach this past weekend to write and it was awesome…When we left it was raining…little spritzes of snow intermingling with the raindrops, the gray fog just lifting over the matching gray ocean, a lone seagull, dark against the gloomy horizon. What a perfect weekend for writing!
I went to my writing partner’s house. Wendy is a quiet, delightful woman who exudes peace and well-being. We got up every morning, had simple breakfasts and then wrote (well, she painted this time.) Broke for lunch, wrote after lunch, made very low-key suppers and then read or revised until early bedtimes. Boring? Maybe but heaven sent for me. I can’t remember the last weekend without the backdrop of a TV or telephone ringing.
And then it was back to reality and the crunch of re-entry. Dirty laundry, “What’s for supper?” Missed orthodontist appointment. Sick kid. Ah, life in the fast lane!
11/27/2005
It's That Time....
Well, Turkey Day's a done deal and it's That Time Of Year again...
Time to drag down half of the attic and make the house into a winter wonderland, all while Ho-ho-ho-ing happily around the house.
You know how long that lasts, right?
Until I go outside, duct-tape yet another ailing reindeer into position, plug it in and find that it's suffered a stroke and only half it's dang lights work! Until I attempt neuro-surgery on the piece of wasted metal and realize that while I know how to check the fuses and bulbs, some unknown, mystery condition has afflicted my flock and it has nothing to do with anything the lighting sages have written in Chinese on the back of the box!
Ho-ho-ho my ass!
So I start working inside...
Where the same virus has infected the remaining fifty thousand lights. Where boxes, bubble wrap and tiny bits of long ago decorations litter every available surface like confetti and I can't find the one danged cookie jar I really wanted to put in the kitchen because we've moved and replaced the heating and air system, so everything's upside down...
On the upside, I did find the miniature cheesecake pans.
But then I remember,
I don't really like cheesecake. I just make it because I liked the picture on the cover of the 1998 December Bon Appetit...and who knows where the hell that is!
And then the biggest boy get sick. 102.3 degree fever sick.
There goes my workforce.
And there is nothing more pitiful than an adolescent boy with a fever and a cold.
Three days later, when he is lying in the same clothes in the same small room, playing video games, I realize there is nothing more stinky than adolescent boy who hasn't had a shower in 4 days, unless it's his small, enclosed room.
And if left unattended, Christmas decorations multiply.
So I decide to take the biggest boxes of artificial trees, animals, and decorations outside where they belong. We have lots of trees in the new front yard, so I'm envisioning a winter wonderland of half-lit, stroke victim animals...but I'm optimistic...at least they'll be outside, providing entertainment for the neighbors...
So, I put on my overalls, fling open the front door and...
it's raining!
And I do not mean drizzling!
So, I shove the boxes back inside and use them to barricade myself inside the house because I know and you should know by now that I am only using the Christmas decorations as a way to procrastinate against having to face down the story I've been trying (and need I add, failing) to write for six months about this group of women who drink one too many margaritas and solve mysteries...
Of course, I can't settle down to write in a cluttered environment, so I at least get my office into some semblance of ho-ho-ho-dom. (See the pictures)
And then I hear the dulcid tones of my oldest...
"Hey Mom, how come the hot water won't shut off? I turned it as hard as I can but it won't stop...Come look! Man, that's wierd, huh?"
Yeah, that's one word for it.
So, like, Ho Ho Ho, Y'all!
Time to drag down half of the attic and make the house into a winter wonderland, all while Ho-ho-ho-ing happily around the house.
You know how long that lasts, right?
Until I go outside, duct-tape yet another ailing reindeer into position, plug it in and find that it's suffered a stroke and only half it's dang lights work! Until I attempt neuro-surgery on the piece of wasted metal and realize that while I know how to check the fuses and bulbs, some unknown, mystery condition has afflicted my flock and it has nothing to do with anything the lighting sages have written in Chinese on the back of the box!
Ho-ho-ho my ass!
So I start working inside...
Where the same virus has infected the remaining fifty thousand lights. Where boxes, bubble wrap and tiny bits of long ago decorations litter every available surface like confetti and I can't find the one danged cookie jar I really wanted to put in the kitchen because we've moved and replaced the heating and air system, so everything's upside down...
On the upside, I did find the miniature cheesecake pans.
But then I remember,
I don't really like cheesecake. I just make it because I liked the picture on the cover of the 1998 December Bon Appetit...and who knows where the hell that is!
And then the biggest boy get sick. 102.3 degree fever sick.
There goes my workforce.
And there is nothing more pitiful than an adolescent boy with a fever and a cold.
Three days later, when he is lying in the same clothes in the same small room, playing video games, I realize there is nothing more stinky than adolescent boy who hasn't had a shower in 4 days, unless it's his small, enclosed room.
And if left unattended, Christmas decorations multiply.
So I decide to take the biggest boxes of artificial trees, animals, and decorations outside where they belong. We have lots of trees in the new front yard, so I'm envisioning a winter wonderland of half-lit, stroke victim animals...but I'm optimistic...at least they'll be outside, providing entertainment for the neighbors...
So, I put on my overalls, fling open the front door and...
it's raining!
And I do not mean drizzling!
So, I shove the boxes back inside and use them to barricade myself inside the house because I know and you should know by now that I am only using the Christmas decorations as a way to procrastinate against having to face down the story I've been trying (and need I add, failing) to write for six months about this group of women who drink one too many margaritas and solve mysteries...
Of course, I can't settle down to write in a cluttered environment, so I at least get my office into some semblance of ho-ho-ho-dom. (See the pictures)
And then I hear the dulcid tones of my oldest...
"Hey Mom, how come the hot water won't shut off? I turned it as hard as I can but it won't stop...Come look! Man, that's wierd, huh?"
Yeah, that's one word for it.
So, like, Ho Ho Ho, Y'all!
10/11/2005
True Friends Bare It All
I am so sweating this new effort of mine! I am so...pregnant with it!!! That's how books come to me...I start accumulating thoughts, then they grow inside my unconscious until at last, I'm thinking consciously...little snippets of ideas and pieces of characters...but I can't write until I hear their voices.
Sounds psychotic, doesn't it?
Well, this...thing...I'm working on now is about to drive me crazy...that is, if you accept the premise that I'm not nuts now! (Which if you ask my kids is an even up bet!) Anyway, I want to tell the story of this character and she just won't speak to me yet!!!
It is sooo frustrating when you want to write a book and she is refusing to tell the damned story!!!
Anyway...I tried again this week...for the 5th time. I wrote the first 20 pages AGAIN and took it to my friend, Marti, who reads every rough draft and puts her two cents worth in.
She read it while she was getting her nails done. Should that tell me something?
Anyway...she meets me at Starbucks and she says "It's nice, Nance. It's good."
She delivers this with all the enthusiasm of a warm fart.
It is the kiss of death.
"Nice," she says...."Good."
Finally she says...."It's just not there yet. I don't know your main character."
Well, her and me both!!!! I say, "Look, I've had it with that Molly! She just won't come out and tell me a thing about herself....She's just been dumped by her husband, furthermore, he's running off to California and not paying her any child support and her lawyer says he hates it for her but it'll be months before he can get the courts to catch up with him and well, that's all he can do."
"And what, Molly just accepts that?" Marti says. "I don't like women who just lie down and take it. That's not like one of your characters."
"No," I say. "That's just the problem. See, she's been home for 15 years, sweating the small stuff and "taking it" without getting mad. She does the same thing, over and over in life, and each time she expects the results to be different, but how can they be when she just does the same old thing. She doesn't feel she deserves any better because she blames herself for not seeing the divorce coming and ruining her kids' lives."
Marti yawns and who could blame her?
"But she won't let her kids grow up and she's so busy trying to fix everything for everyone else, she forgets that this ain't no dress rehearsal and her life is passing her by. So when the lawyer says he can't wave his magic wand and make the world just and right, Molly gets mad...and then she gets a life. She decides she has to recreate herself into someone who goes out and gets what she needs."
Marti's staring at me. "I thought you didn't know her?" she says. "Sounds like all you have to do is piss her off and you'll have a book."
Well, damn. Why didn't I think of that?
Well, I guess I did.
And then we walk out to go home and Marti starts off toward her truck, stops, and walks back over to my truck and opens the passenger side door. I figure she's got another pearl of wisdom to drop on me and I'm right, only it's not about writing.
She looks back over her shoulder at the kids sitting outside Starbucks smoking, then looks back at me. "They're going to think I'm nuts," she says, "but oh, hell!" AND SHE STARTS UNBUTTONING HER SHIRT!
"Look at this bra," she says. "I mean, I'm wearing a black bra with a white shirt but who cares? This is the most comfortable bra in the world!"
Marti is looking like one of those undercover, caught-on-video-surveillance, sex-for-hire tapes you see on TV shows like COPS...Her shirt's unbuttoned and there she is in her 38D black lace bra, doing a commercial for Victoria's Secret!
"They're 40% off," she says, like the general public will excuse her for this because it was on sale and who wouldn't strip to show off a deal like this?!
"You have just got to go get one!!" she says.
Do I say, "Marti, those kids can't see you but the rest of the shopping center can so button your shirt?"
I do not! Instead I say, "That lacy and good support, too?"
"Oh, yeah, the best! See? They're called Sexy something or others. They're in a bin."
She steps back and appraises my chest. "36B, right?"
I nod wondering if it's somehow printed on my forehead or if she's just that good at sizing up her friends. I mean, judging my cup size when I'm in a camisole and buttoned up cardigan is no small feat.
"They've got plenty of those," she says. "There was only one 38D in the whole store, but you won't have any trouble!"
Now she's taking my small breasts and turning them into a retail bonanza!
I look at Marti, half-undressed in front of God and everybody, just so she can clue me in on a deal, and think, this is a true friend. In fact, this is true friendship. I'd always heard true friends bared all, I just never really understood the depth of that statement before today.
On the other hand, maybe I did, unconsciously, because I was the one who gave her the sign that read "A friend will bail you out when you're arrested, but a true friend will sit next to you in the jail cell, laughing and saying "Damn that was fun!"
That's me and Marti.
Sounds psychotic, doesn't it?
Well, this...thing...I'm working on now is about to drive me crazy...that is, if you accept the premise that I'm not nuts now! (Which if you ask my kids is an even up bet!) Anyway, I want to tell the story of this character and she just won't speak to me yet!!!
It is sooo frustrating when you want to write a book and she is refusing to tell the damned story!!!
Anyway...I tried again this week...for the 5th time. I wrote the first 20 pages AGAIN and took it to my friend, Marti, who reads every rough draft and puts her two cents worth in.
She read it while she was getting her nails done. Should that tell me something?
Anyway...she meets me at Starbucks and she says "It's nice, Nance. It's good."
She delivers this with all the enthusiasm of a warm fart.
It is the kiss of death.
"Nice," she says...."Good."
Finally she says...."It's just not there yet. I don't know your main character."
Well, her and me both!!!! I say, "Look, I've had it with that Molly! She just won't come out and tell me a thing about herself....She's just been dumped by her husband, furthermore, he's running off to California and not paying her any child support and her lawyer says he hates it for her but it'll be months before he can get the courts to catch up with him and well, that's all he can do."
"And what, Molly just accepts that?" Marti says. "I don't like women who just lie down and take it. That's not like one of your characters."
"No," I say. "That's just the problem. See, she's been home for 15 years, sweating the small stuff and "taking it" without getting mad. She does the same thing, over and over in life, and each time she expects the results to be different, but how can they be when she just does the same old thing. She doesn't feel she deserves any better because she blames herself for not seeing the divorce coming and ruining her kids' lives."
Marti yawns and who could blame her?
"But she won't let her kids grow up and she's so busy trying to fix everything for everyone else, she forgets that this ain't no dress rehearsal and her life is passing her by. So when the lawyer says he can't wave his magic wand and make the world just and right, Molly gets mad...and then she gets a life. She decides she has to recreate herself into someone who goes out and gets what she needs."
Marti's staring at me. "I thought you didn't know her?" she says. "Sounds like all you have to do is piss her off and you'll have a book."
Well, damn. Why didn't I think of that?
Well, I guess I did.
And then we walk out to go home and Marti starts off toward her truck, stops, and walks back over to my truck and opens the passenger side door. I figure she's got another pearl of wisdom to drop on me and I'm right, only it's not about writing.
She looks back over her shoulder at the kids sitting outside Starbucks smoking, then looks back at me. "They're going to think I'm nuts," she says, "but oh, hell!" AND SHE STARTS UNBUTTONING HER SHIRT!
"Look at this bra," she says. "I mean, I'm wearing a black bra with a white shirt but who cares? This is the most comfortable bra in the world!"
Marti is looking like one of those undercover, caught-on-video-surveillance, sex-for-hire tapes you see on TV shows like COPS...Her shirt's unbuttoned and there she is in her 38D black lace bra, doing a commercial for Victoria's Secret!
"They're 40% off," she says, like the general public will excuse her for this because it was on sale and who wouldn't strip to show off a deal like this?!
"You have just got to go get one!!" she says.
Do I say, "Marti, those kids can't see you but the rest of the shopping center can so button your shirt?"
I do not! Instead I say, "That lacy and good support, too?"
"Oh, yeah, the best! See? They're called Sexy something or others. They're in a bin."
She steps back and appraises my chest. "36B, right?"
I nod wondering if it's somehow printed on my forehead or if she's just that good at sizing up her friends. I mean, judging my cup size when I'm in a camisole and buttoned up cardigan is no small feat.
"They've got plenty of those," she says. "There was only one 38D in the whole store, but you won't have any trouble!"
Now she's taking my small breasts and turning them into a retail bonanza!
I look at Marti, half-undressed in front of God and everybody, just so she can clue me in on a deal, and think, this is a true friend. In fact, this is true friendship. I'd always heard true friends bared all, I just never really understood the depth of that statement before today.
On the other hand, maybe I did, unconsciously, because I was the one who gave her the sign that read "A friend will bail you out when you're arrested, but a true friend will sit next to you in the jail cell, laughing and saying "Damn that was fun!"
That's me and Marti.
8/11/2005
Excuses Satisfy Only Those Who Make Them...and other vagaries of catching up
Okay, so I haven't been writing. And yes, I know, excuses only satisfy those who make them...but I'll just tell you anyway...I was on my way to write you, when I moved. And yes, it was only 4 houses down from the old house, but all my STUFF came with me, even the kids and the dogs!
These things take time! And then there was the urge to nest.
Heaven help us, I am after all, human and a woman. We nest when we move. We like things in their new places and everything cozy and well...I was getting settled.
And then everything in the new house broke...including the potty! And something's dripping under the house and there's mold (don't worry too much, it's white.) And everybody's got an opinion about what to do...and they want you to pay them before they tell you how to fix it...But they're not going to come and fix it TODAY..no, you have to get on the schedule for that! (Of course the schedule varies between When Hell Freezes Over and The Twelveth of Never.)
And then I remembered the next book is due in like 2 weeks or a month (I'm not going to look at the contract and find out I only have two weeks! I'm just trying to recall without having to unpack the entire house to find the piece of paper...I'm writing like it's due in two weeks. And I'm just a little over halfway through...Can you say...PANIC?)
Sigh.
Then I turned 5-0, 50.
Surprisingly, this does not bother me.
But there were celebrations and coconut cake and key lime pie to eat...so I didn't write here.
Not enough of the excusing yet?
Okay, the nursing home folks have been busy. Cookie lost a pair of her white shoes, and even though I told her she was wearing them, she couldn't quite get the concept...so I had to convince her that I was on the case and was sure they'd turn up when she went to bed...because then they'll be back in the closet.
Dorothy didn't like her roommate because of her skin color...so we had a little chat about the true meaning of Christianity (Hey, I was a minister's daughter...Sure, I cut Sunday school as often as possible and had to have a tutor for communion, but I can talk the talk when I need to! And hating someone for their skin color is just plain wrong!) So, that took up a little time.
And then Mary got confused because she thought the pimento cheese sandwhich the aide brought her was a shit sandwhich and this made her come out into the hallway and threaten to fart on someone's face if they didn't do something about it...And I was the someone elected to either fix the situation or face Mary's personal Firing Squad...
So, it's been a little hectic around here.
Did I mention the children? Yep, I need to spend time with them before they leave for college.
And in answer to the question...Will there be another Sierra book? I wish I could say yes, but I don't know. Maybe it'll help if I post the first chapter of the next book when and if someone wants to publish it!
So....that's where I've been and I promise to do better about this blogging stuff.
In the meantime, or in addition to reading my stuff...go check out Jennifer Crusie's website and blog....She's my personal idol as an author and writing coach. And, I hear she's a pretty good kid to boot.
These things take time! And then there was the urge to nest.
Heaven help us, I am after all, human and a woman. We nest when we move. We like things in their new places and everything cozy and well...I was getting settled.
And then everything in the new house broke...including the potty! And something's dripping under the house and there's mold (don't worry too much, it's white.) And everybody's got an opinion about what to do...and they want you to pay them before they tell you how to fix it...But they're not going to come and fix it TODAY..no, you have to get on the schedule for that! (Of course the schedule varies between When Hell Freezes Over and The Twelveth of Never.)
And then I remembered the next book is due in like 2 weeks or a month (I'm not going to look at the contract and find out I only have two weeks! I'm just trying to recall without having to unpack the entire house to find the piece of paper...I'm writing like it's due in two weeks. And I'm just a little over halfway through...Can you say...PANIC?)
Sigh.
Then I turned 5-0, 50.
Surprisingly, this does not bother me.
But there were celebrations and coconut cake and key lime pie to eat...so I didn't write here.
Not enough of the excusing yet?
Okay, the nursing home folks have been busy. Cookie lost a pair of her white shoes, and even though I told her she was wearing them, she couldn't quite get the concept...so I had to convince her that I was on the case and was sure they'd turn up when she went to bed...because then they'll be back in the closet.
Dorothy didn't like her roommate because of her skin color...so we had a little chat about the true meaning of Christianity (Hey, I was a minister's daughter...Sure, I cut Sunday school as often as possible and had to have a tutor for communion, but I can talk the talk when I need to! And hating someone for their skin color is just plain wrong!) So, that took up a little time.
And then Mary got confused because she thought the pimento cheese sandwhich the aide brought her was a shit sandwhich and this made her come out into the hallway and threaten to fart on someone's face if they didn't do something about it...And I was the someone elected to either fix the situation or face Mary's personal Firing Squad...
So, it's been a little hectic around here.
Did I mention the children? Yep, I need to spend time with them before they leave for college.
And in answer to the question...Will there be another Sierra book? I wish I could say yes, but I don't know. Maybe it'll help if I post the first chapter of the next book when and if someone wants to publish it!
So....that's where I've been and I promise to do better about this blogging stuff.
In the meantime, or in addition to reading my stuff...go check out Jennifer Crusie's website and blog....She's my personal idol as an author and writing coach. And, I hear she's a pretty good kid to boot.
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