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Nobody Ever Died of Teerminal Weirdness

2010-03-07T07:20:00.000-08:00

This is an excerpt.
Geek. Loser. Whatever. It just happened. No matter how hard I worked to avoid it, a different arrow pointed down at me from the first day of kindergarten. In second grade I tried to leave school and start life fresh, but my mom wouldn't let me. In seventh grade I went the desperation route and played football, but my teammates asked me to sit out even though our side was three players down.
Going into the middle year of high school, I narrowed the problem down to Peer Interaction. I decided that by the end of the week, the end of the year, or the end of my life - whichever came first - I would be normal. Mr. Voleywall the vice principal would have to find someone else to reform, my friend Will would find someone else to kindly pity, the dogs would stop choosing my clean clothes to sleep on, and a girl would smile back at me. What made this only more difficult was no one in my family believed I needed changing.
I figured they were not the best ones to judge normal.
"You don't need to worry about impressing girls at your age," my mother said. "Just be yourself."
"I can't afford a big date on a social security check, and with the help you give me, that's about when it's going to happen."
"I didn't date at your age."
"Listen," I said as kindly as I could, "Growing up to be like my mother is not my top priority." I left my mother talking to the back to school shopping list, and looked up my brother, the football team captain, Honor Society president, and Boyfriend. Since he managed to avoid the family curse and actually acquire a girlfriend, I thought I could get some pointers. "This is the year," I said, standing in his doorway, "I'm going to get a girlfriend. Also get on a sports team, win over the vice principal, and be normal. Do you think you can help me out?"
"Are you still combing your hair once a year on Christmas Eve?" he asked. "You could start there."
"I hoped to make some progress before December," I answered. "But thanks anyway." My brother unfortunately considered himself a solo operator.
My father was watching the twentieth rerun of the Ice Bowl, but he swiveled from the tv to my question. "Just remember most things are a plot, and you can't really trust women to tell you if your fly is open," he admonished. "Also that you can't always get points when you need them, and sometimes neither can the other team." Since I wanted to find a female I could trust with more than basic neatness and football strategy concerns, I thanked my father and trotted back to my room.
After I locked the door, I sat down with the back to school newspaper circulars and began to plan.

memories

2010-02-07T08:04:00.001-08:00

When I think of Gran, I remember her sliding the roaster forward on the oven rack, lifting its cover to steam the kitchen, and poking the potatoes baking around a pork roast, frowning at them if they did not crumble into submission. The kitchen smelled like cooked celery, starched curtains of polished percale, and salt and pepper. The pantry, just steps away, was cold and dry: china, golden raisins, sugar and spices and string.

Grundle's Icons

2009-12-27T06:48:00.000-08:00

The books cradled her feet; the overcoat lay heavy across her arm; but it was only mid-afternoon, and the color as noise of TerraeAndrae was all about her. Food she did not need; excitement she did. The citizens clad in blue and gold and orange jostled her, the sheep pushed past her, the children ran shouting about her, and the paving stones pushed their way along her shoes. In one of the streets spoking from a trading square, she turned in a circle, looking at the panoply of images. So much movement, she thought: and just outside the gates, all was quiet and empty. Empty was not always undesirable: she could welcome a little empty now, a small space in which to think about everything that was happening. No matter what the wares, how expensive or how cheap the prices: all was mobbed, every store and every stall. Her eyes moved down the shop fronts: dyed woolskins, draped over poles and fingered by buyers… hanks of root vegetables, smelling of dirt and sun, trading hands… strings of deep blue and turquoise, ruby and maroon yellow and periwinkle beads and silk rolled into beads, caressed by seller and eager purchasers…a many-paned window empty of viewers.
Empty? It must be an empty stall – but in all the streets she had walked, she had seen no space empty of buyer and seller. Pushing the overcoat further into the corner of her arms behind the package of boots, she walked along the paving stones, looking at this unusual place.
Grundle’s Icons read a gold-leafed and blue scrolled sign over the doorway. That too was strange: most of the marketers set up bins and poles in the open air. Few had sides to their shops; very few had doors that closed. Her hand was on the door latch before her mind could do more than offer that idea.
The store was closed: the door stuck. No, the door pulled open, but tight in its frame. And she was inside. A center space where customers might stand and bicker or visit. A long counter of dark wood in front of her, that ran the width of the store, and behind it two doorways – one on each end of the wall behind the counter – to a dimmer space she could not see, though there were not curtains on the doorways. The walls on either side of her were filled with closed bins and drawers, from the large ones at the floor, big enough for her to crawl inside, to the small ones near the ceiling. Most of the drawer fronts were square, but several were rectangles, and some were circles or star-shaped, or eight-sided. Each drawer or bin had a handle, and many of them were different from the others: many square-shaped, but some shaped like flowers, or half-moons, sea creatures, trees, tiny sun shapes, and some that looked like stones.
It was dim in the building, dim and smelling of spices: orris and clove, palm heart and sawgrass, with a nose-tickling smell she could not identify.
“It’s curiosity and time,” said a grizzled man behind the counter. “Time. Time’s the main ingredient.”
“Can you hold and compound time?”
“If you know how to do it, you can.”
“Would you want to?”
The man clapped his hands sharply and bits of yellow light flew from them. “Now there’s a questions I’ve not heard in a long time. ‘Would you want to?’ You’re not from here but you’re going to upset the ones who are here if you keep opening your mouth. The Telos would like you. You might even wake him.”

A New Friend

2009-11-21T11:31:00.000-08:00

Tina, who can be depended on not only to find new authors, but to produce the new authors that other books have told be about, recently sent a packet of Josephine Tey novels. Tey writes mysteries, and she’s been billed as “the best mystery writer.” There’s a title I need to explore, I thought when I first read that claim, because I don’t condone “best” being liberally applied to anyone: I’d like to see for myself. I told Tina about my quest to locate Tey stories, and as happens when I ask Tina about books, they appeared shortly after: four Tey stories, enough of a sampling for a few nights’ reading and a conclusion.
Whoever labeled Tey “best” certainly has a point. If you are hunting for mysteries with a lot of flash-bang, a high body count, and buildings regularly set on fire, she’s not your author. If on the other hand, you would like to know about the society where problems take place, and perhaps why the problems occur, and even where we might go from those problems to forestall more of them from happening, then Tey is definitely a read for you.
It’s another world, completely furnished (just as the Jacqueline Winspear Maisie Dobbs novels are; and if you enjoy Maisie, you are likely to be just as entertained by Tey). Not for Tey the “a man walked down the dark alley, pulled out a revolver, and pumped ten rounds in to the person cowering behind trash cans.” Before the body, it’s likely we have a story, set in England. It’s not the England of rich aristocrats or jet set glamour [sic]; it’s the England of the people who go to work, who term themselves “civil servant” rather than Scotland Yard Inspector (your conversationalists are much more likely to talk). It’s the England of people who know where they live: the vagaries of the local river (Bodies dumped above the Rushmere bridge don’t surface for more than thirty years – if ever; bodies dumped below the bridge may surface in a day.) There are home crafted fishing lures, topographical maps of the land, and someone standing on the outer edges of the Scottish Islands can look across the crashing waves toward America.
Inspector Grant, that human and humane Scotland Yard civil servant shares quite a few qualities with Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey (Where my Whimsy leads me). He’s thoughtful, unorthodox, intelligent, and humane. He deduces and (like Maisie) he faces his own demons. These are not confined to England; the personality quirks and lack are also the ones that tear apart the United States in the 21st Century.
Miss Pym, another Tey character has been surprised by her own literary success, and at the importuning of her school years’ friend, is guest speaker at a girls’ college: we learn about the fields of study, we follow the collegiates’ worries and The Nut Tart’s escapades; by the end of the story we understand completely why Miss Pym makes the decisions she does, and why the murderer will never be punished. We know why Innes’ face looks the type to support nations. We feel for her.
Tey was worth four books of reading, and she’s worth quite a few more. Humor, irony, insight, character development. Reasoning. Good stories bring us not only plot, but people and national character. Thank you, Josephine Tey. Thank you, Tina.

Divots in the Yard

2009-10-06T17:15:00.000-07:00

Today I made divots in the yard: enormous wedges of dirt that turned over the ends of worms: startled out of their darkness, searching for the next bit of soul to till. Their tails (heads?) hung like looping cables. Their middles swung from the dirt molded into shovel shape. Tree rootlets came along with the dirt, in scratching tearing pieces. The shovel tore white grass roots from the soil. And all to plant some flowers.

One of the rites of spring is when one of us is busy counting clumps of flowers naturalized in the grass, and the other of us is pondering how a clandestine lawn mowing can guillotine their blossoms, leaving a level field behind. “Just another week,” I beg. “Have you seen what the lawn looks like? It’s ragged.” is the answer.

My fascination with scilla was born many years ago, when I marveled at their sky blue petals in my grandparents’ yard. Summer sky blue color, backlit by the rising sun, beaded with dew, the flowers bent over their grass-blade leaves. They come before the roses, and frolic below the heavy-belled tulips, like baby goats dancing amid cows.

Then one spring in Madison, we saw two ordinary yards, that were extraordinary for their rivers of blue: scilla packed tightly together in a tossing curling cloud of color. “That’s what I want in our yard,” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he answered.

I planted 25 bulbs, hoping to see them spread across the yard. The first year, we had a sprinkle of blooms, almost invisible in the grass. I planted 50 the next year, hoping the original 25 had multiplied, and would now greet their friends. There were blooms, but not enough. After some years, the scilla have formed clumps of flowers, nodding in the wind, making blue in the green spring grass. But not enough. And not close enough together.

“At least let me cut part of the lawn,” he said. So this afternoon, apologizing to the worms and tree roots for disturbing their existence, I planted 400 scilla bulbs in the front yard, where we can see them from the window. May they and their relations have a safe sleep and a bright spring.

Cafe Curtains

2009-09-26T08:59:00.000-07:00

Never say never, as my mother would tell us.
I’ve never wanted café curtains: if a prowler is taller than 5 feet (and what prowler isn’t), he’s going to be looking in from the dark scary night to our lighted home, anyway. Curtaining the bottom two-thirds of the window blocks sunlight and my view of what’s happening outside (a rabbit crosses the lawn, a squirrel considers hacking off a geranium head for his lunch, and decides it resembles cauliflower: don’t bother). But just lately, with the noise aspect of the house, I’m thinking café curtains are not as evil as their pseudo French origins.

They’d keep the dogs from looking out. Dogs behave on the pack mentality: you bark, I bark, we all bark. You have a treat, I want it, and of course it’s mine. We can have three dogs barking, but their combined din sounds like thirty, reverberating off the uncarpeted floor (with all those little feet tracking in dirt, who needs carpeting).
Curtains would keep the squirrels feeling safer, the grass able to blow without canine commentary, and the human lives quieter. Quiet is good.

Trimming the Size of Dreams

2009-09-19T08:16:00.000-07:00

Over the summer, we built an Arts & Crafts style bookcase: solid wood, heavy as a piano, six feet tall, and bearing that sweeping curve combined with straight lines that sing Arts & Crafts. At the same time, the family room was undergoing a facelift, with board and stile paneling. The two projects would look beautiful together. When we moved the bookcase in though, the extended stiles plus the decrease in wall width of 1.5” meant that the bookcase didn’t fit in its designated niche. We could have moved it to the center of the wall, where it could be admired (who needs a sofa anyway). We could have displaced the tv (but the sports teams would have missed us).
We moved the bookcase to another room, and said, “We’ll build another with adjusted dimensions next year.” Maybe we will; maybe we will be following another project’s lure. [Arts & Crafts style end table with a cabin underneath for the dogs.]
We could say that we muffed the project: should have, could have. We say, we built something that we enjoyed building. We’re happy it turned out as well as it did. We learned things. And we had fun.
This dream turned out to need a decrease of 6” to fit easily into the space; we chose to use another space. That’s okay. I’d rather start with a dream too big, than one too small; rather want to earn enough money that I have money to share with others, than earn just enough to pay my bills, budgeting to the penny each month.
If we have a dream that’s too large for the existing space, maybe we need to look for a larger space. Don’t dream too small. Yes, we need to ensure that the dream is right for us. We need to find a dream that we can devote our energy and time to. We need to match our dreams and our souls. But we also need to remember that when we trim the size of our dreams so they don’t require us to stretch our beings, then we are settling, not dreaming.

Gender Roles

2009-09-14T03:56:00.000-07:00

In the Women’s Lit class, we’ve been discussing (arguing through) gender roles. Each participant has her or his own concept of what those roles are, and how we should meet expectations. In between online discussion, we at home have been getting ready for dinner company.

He’s scrubbing the floor, and I track through the kitchen, an extension cord looped over my shoulder, a 3/8” variable speed drill in my arm, the metal 25’ retractable tape and the extra screw eyes in my hands. The dogs follow (one set of big footprints, many sets of small foot prints) because they harbor suspicions about the floor scrubber eating their toes. If we had framed the 40 x 60 inch poster in the garage that wouldn’t have been necessary, but the only empty space large enough was the extended dining room table. Tonight, with guests coming, we need to clear off the woodworking project and bring ourselves up to standards. [Whose standards? I ask myself. Yes, but nobody wants to eat on top of the picture, I answer.]
This morning, he made a grocery store run for milk (tonight’s dessert) and liversausage (what makes the dog world go ‘round).
While he slept, I baked a cherry pie and formed the first two layers of Millie’s Butterscotch Dessert. He will cook the meat, because he's better at it than I am. I could have gone to the store for milk; instead I did laundry and worked on the college lit class.

The bottom line is that I can run around with drill and tape measure, my hands smelling of 30 year old hardware because he makes it possible by electing to scrub the floor, and he can sleep late because I enjoy early the everything’s possible potential (and its resultant ability to get the baking finished) of early morning. It works because we want it to, because we have learned over time (and usually remembered) that gender roles exist, but they exist to serve us, not the other way ‘round. Each of us doing what we like to do best - mixed with love and compassion - result in a world turning ‘round the right way, and good things to eat for us all.

Thievery without Conscience

2009-09-07T10:27:00.001-07:00

Once or twice a summer, we have the Boy Scouts to swim: an exuberant bunch of mid-teen boys, who arrive vibrating with anticipation, and spend several hours splashing, yelling, diving, and pretty much being boys, in the pool. As part of this, we make a cookout: burgers, brats, hot dogs, and one of the things that mothers avoid: dessert to excess. We know that sugar plus male adolescence makes an even more exciting time, but we do it anyway.
This cookout, we had 15 scouts, three semi-portly scout masters, one Scout master wife, and the dogs, who could be counted on to make noise, get underfoot, and be tired enough by the end of the day to sleep deeply. We also had 5 pounds of jumbo hot dogs, 5 pounds of brats, a vat of potato chips, 7 12-packs of assorted soda, and 6 boxes of Hostess cupcakes, Twinkies, Suzy Q’s, and Zingers (chocolate and salt are an unbeatable combination), though we did include a large bottle of ketchup (lycopene?) for health.
We’d set out the cookie trays of grilled meat and refilled the largest mixing bowl (the one I use to bake bread) with potato chips. The boys descended on the food, were silent for ten minutes, swinging their water wrinkled toes at the picnic table and the patio umbrella table. Then the thrash and bustle began: back to the water, jousting, diving, jumping and thrashing with all the energy accumulated in a few minutes of quiet.. The adults sat in fat-embedded satisfaction and watched. Water sparkled, sun shone: we were mostly all happy.
Just then, we saw something we could not believe: a whisk of movement at the umbrella table. Rosemary the dachs was on the table, scrounging among the plates. Before we could reach her, she removed the remainder of a jumbo dog (more than the length of her nose) from someone’s plate, jumped from the table to the chair, to the patio, and trotted past us, the jumbo dog projecting from her mouth. Rosie and hot dog rounded the corner into the grass, where she feasted on her ill-gotten treat.

Go Klaus! Go!

2009-08-08T12:46:00.000-07:00

“Are you Klaus’s mother?” I asked the trim lady with gold earrings, a denim skirt, and a neon chartreuse t shirt.
“No, I’m Klaus’s aunt.” Klaus’s aunt proceeded to lay down money for raffle tickets (quilt), but declined to buy spit-imbued dog kisses at the rescue kissing booth, since she already had many of those via Klaus.
Klaus was running in one of the heats for the dachs races, and his dad explained the family strategy. “He loves my wife. He rushes up to her when she comes home from work. So we’re making sure he does not see her, until the race, and she’s going to be at the finish line.” So were the rest of Klaus’s extended family, wearing their t shirts: Go Klaus! Go! on the front, and another message on the back.
Klaus, bathing in the sunshine, excitement, and a cornucopia of smells, was blissful. He has a loving family, a full food dish, and a crowd of human relatives cheering for him. No matter how he places in the race, he and they know that he’s a winner.
Support the rescue of your choice. Rescue exists so more dogs have loving families, just like Klaus.

No Guarantees but Love

2009-07-26T06:26:00.000-07:00

Recently we volunteered at a festival booth, for a dog rescue. I held Buster. Most clearly, Buster’s melting acceptance held me. He resettled his head against my arm, he didn’t complain when I shifted him to make change or tear off raffle tickets; and when we sat down during the dachshund races, he lay against my shirt (Proud Owner of a Rescued Dog) without fuss and with a good deal of contentment.

Several people were interested in him, but most of them drew back when they learned his age: 9. “I want a dog that will live a long time.” “I want a dog that’s playful.”

The Make a Wish foundation is built on the dreams of the tragically and very young ill. Last night’s news had a thirty second clip on a 14 year old, shot dead at a house party. Maybe we should comment that she had 8 years on the 6 year old who was killed in a drive by shooting, or 12 years on the 2 year old who was squashed by a pet python, or 13 years on the baby who died a crib death. But those are people, you could say: what about dogs?

We could remember the loved 1 year old dog who died of reaction to a routine immunization vaccination, or the 5 year old who developed cancer, or the puppies who never survived in that dog mill – because their mom never had even the most basic care. There are no guarantees of tomorrow – for any of us, no matter what our age, financial status, social standing, or happiness level. Each day is a gift. What the people in rescue do, is accept today, and work their butts off in hope for tomorrow.

Dogs come into rescue from three major areas: overloaded shelters, owner turn ins, and mill busts. Maybe we laud the release of dogs from the hell holes of mills, and understand how a shelter built to house 50 animals now faces housing 250, but how could an owner turn in a dog?

Very heart-breakingly. The owner dies, and the family members have no space in their homes for an animal that Grandma loved. The owner goes into assisted living. The owner loses a job, moves into an apartment that won’t accept animals. The owner is going through a divorce, being deployed overseas, must get the animal away from abusive boyfriend. There are many stories of despair and loss behind the dogs who come in, dogs who are deeply loved.

Very easily. Owners have turned dogs in to rescue because, “We redecorated the living room and the dog no longer matches the furniture. Do you have any in our new color scheme?” Or, “He’s 10 years old, and we want a puppy.” Or, “My husband’s getting a sex change operation and we can’t afford both the operation and the dog.”

The dogs are heart-breakingly grateful to escape the mills, the abuse, and the chaos. But when they come into rescue through owner turn in, they’re often stunned. The world that existed for them, for 5 of 8 or 10 years has disappeared. They grieve. Eventually, most of them find love with a new family. For a long time, they remember the people they gave their lives and hearts to.

Buster was an owner turn in. He’s 9 years old – too old for many prospective adopters to seriously consider him. One lady with two children and tears in her eyes held him close to her, and he snuggled in. Maybe she is his new mom. Maybe his family will appear in two weeks or two months. In the meanwhile, he is safe in body and learning to life with his grief as he moves toward a new life: a dental, getting his vaccinations up to date, high quality food, and lots of compassion. We do what we can: we do everything we can.

There are no guarantees in life, except love. The best guarantee of all.

Space

2009-07-13T07:10:00.000-07:00

We built a wonderful new bookcase, modified Arts & Crafts, and decided we are finished buying books. Books on the shelves are wonderful; books that need to be moved from the shelf, to the shelf, to another room on the shelf, multiply. How could we have found so many books that we need? At one time and another we did, and the books, never leaving home, reflect our past and present interests. They are beguiling to read, challenging to ponder, and in toto, difficult to contemplate. Since we avoid taking them off the shelves unless we’re forced into it, when it was time to return them to order, we behaved in character.
Our first response was mutual denial. “This is your book,” extending a volume toward each other, “I was never interested in this, so you need to find a place for it on the shelves. Your shelves.”
Our second response, as predictable, was to reshelve books, sort books (discover multiple copies of some of our books), rediscover books we had enjoyed reading, wanted to reread, never got around to reading but wanted to. And realize that indeed, somehow let off the shelves, they had expanded and we had more books.
“I have a problem,” I told him.
“That sounds personal.”
Undeterred, as well as unwilling to admit personal culpability for all the books I had needed at various points in the past, I explained that though the new bookcase was full, I still had six sagging stacks of books on the floor. They were categorized, though. “The acupressure and acupuncture.”
“Well, stick it to ‘em.”
Philosophy.”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“Before I ran out of their space, most of the religion books made it on the shelf.”
“I don’t know what to believe.”
“Astronomy. Half on the shelf and half on the floor.”
Instead of telling me to find an answer in the night sky, he did one of the things that makes him endearing. “Tomorrow, let’s go out and buy you another bookcase.”

Book excerpt

2009-06-21T05:58:00.000-07:00

When I was demoted to minister of the Cigarette Depot Acts of God Bible Ministry Church, I cried.
"I want to do," I argued with the circle of whiskered and rouged faces clustered on a street corner, "not be."
"You're the best listener."
"You smile like you're sad and you never yell."
"You laugh when you talk with children, even when you're soused."
"You're getting too old to roll drunks."
"I don't care." That's what I said. What I wanted to say was, 'I want to be alive.'
Their heads shook slowly, their eyeballs rolled white under the streetlight. "No, man. You're the best we've got to offer."
"I can trust you with my girls."
"I've never seen you do a bad thing."
"That's because you haven't looked, man." I didn't want to be good. I didn't want impotence and white senility. I wanted electricity crackling from my fingertips. I wanted to be bright lightning. I wanted to be the actor, not the audience. Have you ever seen a minister man who was whole?
"You're the one we need, man."
Then Emmaline’s predictable, “You gots to be minister. A minister gots to be a man, and you is a man who knows how it goes to talk to people.”
"I don't care."
Maybe I didn’t, but they didn’t listen, either.
Puking up rotgut booze behind the dumpster is better than sitting on Emmaline's cracked steps and feeling its dampness seep into the worn seat of my trousers while Emmaline tells me how her second man beat her when she reminded him he had told her they would get married. "Maybe he forgot," I reached past myself to scratch a fingernail across the chalky paint, feeling vibrations shiver along my fingerbone.
"Maybe he got drunk," Emmaline answered, leaning on the fat roll above her hip. "I tell you, maybe he didn't never want to get married. And here I was, living with him. What's my mama going to say?" She waved her arms, then stood motionless except for the loose flesh at the backs of her arms jiggling in echoes. She frowned. Then she laughed. "So I kicked him out. What's my mama going to say about that?"
"Maybe he changed his mind."
"What do you mean by that?" Her head bent forward above her double chin like a turkey gobbler hunting for his beak.
What did I care what I meant by that? I meant nothing except anything: lifting a shot glass of amber oblivion, filching the last packet of peach jam from a table at Nellie Slimey's Restaurant, leaning back against a winter doorway in an overcoat stiff with dirt, even beating Emmaline myself: anything was better than sitting on the cement stoop listening to her go on. I'd rather be a wife beater than a woman's listening post.

Kitchen Wars

2009-06-08T10:27:00.000-07:00

We are having company for dinner. The peanut butter cookies are cooling on the table, the chopped vegetables are marinating. I am cooking milk and cream, to stir into chopped chocolate (Emilie recommends the $22.95/lb; I resist and designate Ghiradelli as chocolate-of-the-day.) It’s a new recipe, so I read it over and over, mouthing the directions to myself. ‘Whisk the first 3 ingredients…the first 3 ingredients are…the size of the bowl should be…whisk the first 3 ingredients.’
He arrives to clean up my mess: any loose pot, bowl, mixing spoon, or utensil, sometimes the one set ready for me to use. [“What’s this doing here? It should be in the cabinet.” “Where’s the spoon I had right here?”]
We’ve had many discussions about how even rinse water does deadly things to melting chocolate. We’ve discussed the necessity of having the baking soda, sea salt, baking powder (gluten free, aluminum free), and chocolate chips where I can open the cabinet door and reach them while my eyes are on the mixture blending in the bowl. “I straightened up the cabinet for you,” translates to my resultant clandestine operation: dump the chocolate bits packages back where they belong and set the baking soda, open-side-in, on the first shelf (rather then the third it had been relegated to in the sorting). A clean kitchen is a better kitchen, is his motto. A kitchen where I can find the teaspoon measure I set down thirty seconds ago is a sane kitchen, I mutter.
“This is the Maginot Line,” I said, extending my arm across the counter, to separate the may-wash from the in-use.
“The Germans flew over it. I could too.”
“Yes, you could.” I left unspoken the rest of my response, ‘But if you do, there will be war.’
He washed and dried the dishes; I dirtied more of them, talking the recipe to myself, stirring chocolate cream. It was less than a skirmish when he opened the drawer and dumped silverware as I poured hot milk into the chopped chocolate, jostled my stirring arm, and the hot white liquid splattered onto the burner and smoked into brown bits.
While I wasn’t watching, the mixer was decapitated (“If you take off the motor, it stores more easily, on two shelves”), and the beaters escaped captivity to nestle on the kitchen table, next to a box of eggs (Phil’s, cage-free). They might have kept their freedom, huddling under the page of glorious chocolate cream in a teacup (Emilie is not stingy with her portions), if he had not abandoned the tv to join in my hunt for them.
In a few hours the company will arrive, and we will greet them: tidy and organized. The chocolate chips will rustle in their squatter acreage at the back of the first shelf. Many people will make many dishes dirty, so he can wash up. And I will agree wholeheartedly with our company: it’s very special having a person who not only loves me and my foibles, but is willing to clean up after them.

We love dogs

2009-05-31T13:42:00.000-07:00

This week I was on the phone to the vet about Tickie, who had absconded with, and ingested, several Heartgard chewables not his own. “It’s okay,” the tech said, “in the trials they use 600 times the strength, with no effects.” Tickie wagged up at me, from the floor, asking for more of those tasty treats. “You are a turd,” I told him.
Last week it was Ernie, who decided to lie on the sofa, playing Dying. Clear eyes, pink gums, no wincing or complaining when I palpated his body. Ernie played Dying until that evening, when he begged vigorously for liversausage, and announced he was Happy to Be Living and Just Fine.
Squeege had an affection for books, and as a one year old, munched on volume 38 of 60 of the set (formerly mint condition, hardcover with gold stamping) and was startled at our dismay. Kibbles chewed the delicate tissue paper of sewing patterns, and stopped – nonplussed, with a critical piece dangling from her mouth, when I screeched at her.
Dogs, as everyone knows who has an acquaintance with one, have personalities, lives, and are often nicer to their families than some people or friends we could name. Dogs bring emotion, life, happiness, and yes – occasionally frustration as well as hefty vet bills – into our lives. Dogs are made of love and memories.
If we and they could communicate in terms we fragile and dull humans could understand, how much anxiety and dismay might be saved us. If we thought like dogs, how much frustration we could save ourselves.

Predictions of the end of Books

2009-05-03T15:17:00.000-07:00

In today’s mail, in a note from a friend, I received a recent Newsweek article touting the hand held readers available from amazon, which also predicted the demise of the publishing industry and books as we read, check out from the library, and buy. As my friend points out, had I “been born in 1990 you would not have the problems of stacks of books. You would read off Kindle and then erase.” He also sent a copy of a 1976 letter sent to him from the mystery writer Jonathan Latimer.
Also in the mail was a note from the owner of my favorite book shop, and a book I bought used (yes, through amazon, though I patronize alibris gladly and often).
Recently, we visited Thimbleberry, a quintessential used book store in Marshfield, WI, where (surprise!) we found books that needed come home with us, and were allowed by the resident cat to massage its ears. Cat ears have a satisfying texture under the fingers, like gentle lettuce, and this cat was gracious enough to allow its ears to be touched. In addition to smelling of old, used books, and offering us gateways to authors like Latimer (who respond to paper letters sent by their admirers), Thimbleberry possessed a wide low table, made of leather and wood, that looked like three stacked leather-bound books. I was enchanted, and desired one for my very own.

Some research on the infamous www led me to Maitland-Smith, people who make furniture that dust is afraid to sit on, and, in addition to that table [“Hand tooled Savannah Brown Leather Book Cocktail Table with Drawers”], a trunk that looks like a stack of books.
Without a computer and a line running electricity, or whatever energy telephone lines are made of, I would never had known that, just as I would never be able to order books at 6 a.m., ask my favorite store what was in stock, and obtain many interesting pieces of information (like Thimbleberry’s address). But despite Kindle’s touted easability, eras-ability, and immediacy, despite that prognosticator’s assurance, I still want to hold a book in my hand. How else could my fingers turn the same pages that were turned by hundreds of library patrons, or know that the Cornelia Funke Ink-trilogy books fit perfectly in my palms? How else would I know what time feels like? We need time, and space to read a book. That’s what Kindle forgets. Thank you no: I don’t want a plastic contraption that lights up, and allows me to read whatever, wherever (though I do admit that shutting it off is tempting). I don’t want to erase the books I have read, because I want to reread them, lend them to trustworthy friends, and refer to a sentence in them. I want the comforting weight of a volume that someone else has valued; I want the smell of glue and paper. I want the old amber color of light falling across the page, not a page that illuminates itself from the inside out. I’ll take my illumination in the ideas that transfer from book to mind.

There are those who will argue that we need to modernize: we save trees, we speed communication, we erase what we don’t want (economizing on space and brain cells). They have an ecological point. I’ll take the books I’m finished reading to a store where they will become someone’s find-of-the-day. I’ll pass along the illumination.
Where do we get our information, how do we want to receive information, and how do we want to interact with the world (as well as others)? Is time, or convenience, or the communication itself most significant? Thank you, we’ll choose cat ears to massage, paper notes in the mail, and real books.

Karmic thought

2009-04-26T11:18:00.001-07:00

Revenge may thump us (or our enemies) on the head, but karma chews away – usually for longer, and usually more annoyingly. Karma’s also the one more likely to lead us to change.

Incongruity and Coexistence

2009-04-18T17:00:00.000-07:00

The show had artifacts, books, statues, period photographs (mostly of historical figures) in gilt frames. There were buttons and portable writing desks, Victorian jewelry, and a book with a title perfect for the day: Original Revised Manual. There was also a lunch counter (pulled pork, ham and cheese, roast beef and cheese, brownies, soda) and guns. Next to the guns and the lunch table was another table where two nuns, in full-to-the-floor black nun habits and full-to-the-side nun wimples, were selling fruit breads, glazed fruit custard tarts, and coffee.
I wore my “Proud Owner of a Rescued Dog” t shirt, and several people started up conversations that began with, “I own a rescued dog,” and developed into stories about their dogs. In fact I re-met a woman who had talked with me two years ago about adopting a rescue (she found her heart dog through a different rescue group: he’s a 16 pound dog with pointed ears, a white bib and paw tips, and a wonderful disposition. They’re perfect for each other). She found her boyfriend online; they’re perfect for each other, also, she said – though she might not have described him as the perfect boyfriend before she met and talked with him, just as she never knew her perfect dog match before she saw him and knew they were meant to be together. She recognized me by the shirt.
I’ve seen the Coexist bumper sticker formed of a variety of religious symbols, and I’ve also see the Coexist bumper sticker with some of its letters formed from the crosshairs on a target finder and a skull and crossbones. But what I saw at the show was coexistence.
Life is wonderful, and beautiful, and wide, when we have enough space in it for nuns to sell their wares next to gun and artifact dealers selling their wares, and nobody is busy actively hating anyone else.

Excerpt from a novel

2009-04-12T09:03:00.000-07:00

Sleep's an intermission between car exhaust and drugs. It's the next oblivion, after liquor and sex lose their variety. 'At night all cats are grey,' the French sneer. If you don't understand that, you haven't been with enough women. Or men. Sleep is the epilogue: When there’s no juice left you sprawl like a stack of dried twigs, blanket piled around your hips. Wade claims the most fun sleep is with two broads working you over. I think the most honest sleep is with yourself.
There's been times when what I wanted most was to lie down in a convenient gutter, pull a blanket of slush over me, and go to sleep. I agreed with Sid: I could have used sleep in a cardboard box, if anyone offered some. But apparently I didn't fit any longer; there was no room at the bridge inn.
I sat still there in the dirty sunshine, maybe looking like I was asleep, listening to rat scratchings, car whines, and the low boom of railroad cars hunting for a permanent love.
"You gettin' out of here?" Sid asked. "You gonna tell that bitch to leave me alone?"
"Yeah."
"Then give me the smokes."
I threw the pack toward him. "Go to hell, Sid."
"Yeah, you too. Got any booze?"
"Not on me. For that you would kill me."
A sigh. "Yeah, you're right again, man. Tell that old fart if she shows up with a bottle I'll talk to her." He crawled into one of the boxes.
"Yeah, man," I whispered after him.
He didn't answer, but I could hear long drags from inside the box. I sat there for a while longer, smelling the warm cardboard, listening to some flies. Then I sidled along the boxes until I could angle around the bridge roots and come, blinking, into the remnants of a day.
Fifty feet behind me Sid squatted in his box blowing cancer spores into his lungs. On the other side of a concrete railing cars rushed past, hunting. A few miles away Emmaline sat, waiting for someone to bring life's news back to her. "You got to talk to my brother," she had said. "You got to bring him back. Got to save him."
I brushed my palms over my pants and ambled down the sidewalk. Stories where the beast transforms into a beauty aren't true. Beauty can't exist without a beast inside. A pack of cigarettes might entice Sid into daylight, but the sun wouldn't change him. A revival meeting, NA, six hot whores, a social worker, or love wouldn't either. Emmaline thought faith might, but either she or the faith was wrong. Remember high school physics? Two things do occupy the same place at the same time.
I dug in my pocket for the smoke. Creased and leaking tobacco shreds, lost behind Sid’s brand new rollups, but I stuck it between my teeth, scratched a match along the bridge to get a light, and started back to Emmaline's disapproval. As I walked, I watched sunshine change bits of trash and lost tin cans from pale gold to amber, rose, cinnamon, and finally a dark, rich red shadowed with royal purple.

Excerpt from Nobody Ever Died of Terminal Weirdness: The Taxi Driver

2009-04-04T06:37:00.000-07:00

My parents don't travel very often. They would argue with this statement. My father would say he travels to an aberrant reality every day he goes to work, and my mother would say that, with all the traveling she does in books, why should she pack up fifty pounds of books with whatever shirt and pants are clean in order to travel? Then she would ask about reading lights plugging into trees along the campground, and home baked granola for breakfast. The only exception to her objections was once, when we heard her say she would drive to a large Oregon bookstore to buy more books, but that was about all she would concede for voluntary travel.
"Why not fly?" my father asked, head lifting at the mention of travel. "That way you would have more time there."
"But how would I get the books home? Airlines have weight limits."
"Have the bookstore ship them."
"Listen, if I went to get books I loved, I would drive them back. If I'm going to go to Oregon to find books, I'm not going to trust the books to anyone else once they and I have found each other."
"True love is difficult," my father agreed. He turned to me. "Listen, if she starts talking to her books, then we need to worry. Right now she's just talking about her books."
"Got you."
With this attitude toward traveling in general, it was a bit unusual my parents were cruising around Madison in the evening, and it was even more unusual they were not cruising toward a grocery store, which is my father's hobby, or a bookstore, which is my mother's addiction and salvation.
They were, instead, looking for a motel where they were supposed to meet some distant relatives in town to meet each other. My parents were, as they describe it, on the happy periphery of any relationships, but my father said it was important to put in an appearance. "We don't want them to think we don't like them."
"Why not?" my mother asked. "And it's not that we don't like them; it's just that we have more important things to do."
"Like what?"
"Go to bookstores. Read the books we find at bookstores. Take the dogs for a walk."
"The dogs are safely locked up at home."
"See what I mean? Go home, read the books waiting for us, and take the dogs for a walk."
"You're just getting testy because you didn't bring a book along in the car."
"It's dark," my mother said. "I know I can't read in the dark. But I have a few books slid alongside the seat."
"And we don't know where we're going because you didn't get specific directions," my father agreed.
"They said, 'slightly south of Mineral Point Road, after the expressway.'"
"Do you know how much of the city is 'slightly south'?"
"I know the name of the hotel where they are staying. It's Roadway. Or road-something."
"We could find a Yellow Pages," I offered helpfully from the safe darkness of the back seat. I was sitting on something with an edge that might be a book, I had no access to a video game, and the sooner we paid our respectful hellos to the distant relatives, the sooner we had a chance of finding what I wanted to find: electricity and a video game.
"If we can find a phone booth that hasn't been vandalized," said my father, "we could look up this place. How many hotels do you think begin with 'Road'?"
"We could check a library, but they probably are all closed," said my mother sadly.
Suddenly my father swung the car sharply to the right and pressed hard on the accelerator. "A taxi driver," he announced. "See? Over there. Two lanes to the right and three cars ahead. Taxi drivers know where everything is. I'll get next to him and we can ask him. I'll even give him some money if he will show us the way."
"You can't ask a taxi driver," my mother protested.
"Why not?" This last was said through his teeth, because my father was trying to maneuver the car as we cruised the six lanes of busy highway. "Darn truck. Why did he have to be in my way?"
"You can't ask a taxi driver. You can't just go up to a stranger and ask how to get somewhere? What if he is a crazed killer? What if he's strange? What if he leads us to a deserted part of the city and we never see daylight again?"
"Or bookstores," I added. "You forgot bookstores."
"Or bookstores," my mother repeated obediently. "He might be ... oh you can't."
"Watch me. As soon as I get ahead of the sports car." My father pushed hard on the gas pedal, shifted his weight, and mashed the brake. We paused, like a bird braking in flight.
"Be careful! You just missed the fender of that BMW."
"He just missed me. Why doesn't he get out of my way? You just watch the taxi. Don't lose the taxi." Dad added a word or two under his breath which I stuffed into my mind to add to Ben's collection.
"The taxi driver's accelerating," mother said. Her voice sounded relieved.
"He is not. He is going to get caught by the red light up ahead."
"You never know. Taxi drivers might go through red lights. That's another reason not to trust them. Anyone who goes through red lights..."
"Anyone who drives five miles an hour under the limit like you do," my father countered. "Now, I'm going to edge in here. I want you to roll down your window."
"Me? Roll down my window?"
"I can't turn the car around so I can talk to him through mine. Which is already down so I can easily hear the comments of the other motorists. Now roll down your window."
We slowed to a heated stop only three feet from the taxi. Streetlights winkled along the cars, store lights blinked off and on in red fluorescence, the smell of hot grease and burnt sugar seeped along the black air. All about us engines idled. The air pulsed with exhaust, radios, frustration, and night.
"I don't want to talk to strange taxi drivers," my mother announced as she lowered her window.
"Why not? You have so much in common." My father leaned across the front seat. "Excuse me," he bellowed.
"Look, you already cut me off; why bother," came a retort from Dad's other side.
"Smart aleck." My father took a deep breath. "Excuse me," he shouted.
The taxi driver shifted against his open window and swiveled his head. Then the traffic light clanked to green, and around us fifteen cars let off their brakes.
"Don't let him get away," my father called.
Fifteen cars spat ozone into the Madison night. The taxi driver looked over his shoulder at Dad, waved to his passenger, and began to slide to the right.
"He's turning," screamed my father. "Catch him."
"I'm sure a good library would be able to tell us the same thing. Or maybe maps at a gas station. I'll even go in and ask for a map."
"The taxi driver is waiting for us," I announced.
With a flourish of brakes we decelerated at the next stop light. Someone three cars back honked a drumbeat, and the sound wavered between warm metal bodies.
"Excuse me," screeched my father. "We're looking for the Roadway Motel. Do you know where it is?"
"Do you mean Roadstar?" the driver asked.
"Do we mean 'Roadstar'?" my father asked my mother.
"I guess so. How many motels have 'road' in their name?"
"Yes we do," Dad called back to the taxi driver.
The cross traffic's light changed from green to amber. We shifted forward in anticipation. "I'm going there," called the driver. "It's ahead about half a mile, but it's not easy to find. Follow me."
The taxi driver executed a cloverleaf maneuver and slid in front of us. Dad edged forward to the taxi's bumper. "See?" He chortled. "'I'm going there.' How much luckier can you get? I told you to ask the taxi driver."
Mother peered through her window into the night. I memorized the taxi license plate, and then slid off into a reverie about video game car chases.
We swerved through two more intersections. We ducked under an elevated highway, threaded along a shopping center, and nipped into the middle one of three dark driveways.
"Is that a grocery store?" asked my father.
"Follow the taxi," my mother reminded him. "You want to follow the taxi."
But we no longer needed to follow the taxi. Above a rise of ground we could see a large white building, and along its side in letters one story high: Roadstar Inn.
The taxi and our car slid together into a rectangle of lemon light. Above us, the square yellow moon of the Roadstar Motel's sign shone calmly.
"See?" said my father. "You can always trust a taxi driver in a strange city." He honked the horn and waved to the taxi driver.
No one moved. We all sat silent in relief. “It turned out okay,” my mother said finally. “Even without a library.” It was a radical statement for her.
I leaned back looked again at the Roadstar sign, and considered. Maybe people could change and start fresh somewhere else. I wondered if the same precept applied to dating girls.

Nobody Ever Died of Terminal Weirdness - excerpt

2009-03-22T11:55:00.000-07:00

"I'm here about an accident," the police officer began.
"Whose accident?" asked my father. "None of us have had any accidents. Kent," he turned, "were you in an accident?"
"No sir," the police officer answered for me, "this is about witnessing an accident. I think it's your wife we need."
"What did you do this time?" my father asked my mother.
"This is pretty routine and shouldn't take more than a few minutes."
"Like the surveys in the grocery store?" I asked. "They always say that, and then it takes half an hour, but they give you some food samples at the end."
"I don't think we get any samples," my father said.
"Come in," said my mother, opening the screen door. "Would you like a cookie while we talk?"
"No thank you, ma'am. But do you have a table, like a kitchen table, where I could put my notebook down?"
We all wandered to the kitchen table. "This is about the accident this morning," the officer began.
"Were you in it?" my father asked my mother.
"I saw it," said my mother.
"No damage to our car?" my father continued.
"I saw it," my mother repeated. "The car next to me started up and gently drove into the car before it. We were all at a stoplight."
The officer's pen scribbled. "Were there any distractions, say an emergency vehicle? Was the light changing? Did the drivers say anything to each other? I mean, before the accident?"
"No, no, and no," said my mother.
"He needs more than that," said my father. "This is an official report. And a statement for the insurance companies."
"I'm sure they will all sort it out," said my mother. "Are you sure you would not like a cookie? Fresh. Chocolate chip. I baked them this evening."
"No thank you, ma'am," answered the officer. "So there was no apparent cause, like the first car did not move forward, and the second car did not think the light had changed or something?"
"Cars don't think," said my mother. "Drivers do. Or not. Sometimes I think it would be better if they let cars drive themselves; maybe cars would think better than drivers."
"Yes ma'am," murmured the police officer. "But what was the driver of the second car thinking when she let her car hit someone?"
"I knew it was a 'she,'" said my father.
"'What was she thinking?'" my mother repeated. "What do you mean, 'What was she thinking?' How am I supposed to know what she was thinking? I don’t know what goes on in people's minds. Do you know how impenetrable a mind is? Do you know how people can be thinking almost anything, that they like you, or hate you, or love you, or would like broccoli cheddar soup for supper, and none of that shows on the outside of their head?
"I don't know what my husband is thinking. I've been married to him for twenty-five years, and I have no idea what he is thinking. I never met this woman. She drove her car to the same stop light as I did. I never saw her before. How would I know what she was thinking?" My mother stopped, breathing hard.
"When they ask me, 'How long have you been married?' I say, 'Ten happy years. And out of twenty-five, that isn’t' bad,'" said my father. "Of course my wife doesn't like that answer. So I guess I should just say, 'Twenty-five years.'"
"What is truth?" asked my mother. "How do you know what truth is? Let alone know someone's thoughts."
“Of course she used to talk with me more," added my father to clarify his opinions.
"Truth is an abstract. There is a truth for each person," continued my mother. She waved her hand at Truth, somewhere beyond the ceiling.
The officer's pen remained above his paper, poised for its swan dive. "What I meant was," he interrupted, looking from one of my parents to the other, "What I meant was, did she say anything to indicate why she might have done that?"
"I don't talk to strangers," said my mother.
"She is a stranger," said my father.
The police officer capped his pen. "Thank you for your time," he said slowly, "I'll add this to the report, but I don't think the insurance company or the department will be contacting you again. It all seems pretty straightforward."

Searching for X - excerpt

2009-03-14T07:16:00.000-07:00

Recently, I remembered that I have never led a careful life. I will not begin now.

It was time to do the things he’d always wanted to see, do, be: the little things that made life. A sunset, a sunrise, a piece of pie and a cup of coffee. Watching people. If he could find enough of those little things that summed up life on the way, maybe he would also have found the right answer. If not, maybe it was what you did before you got there that counted.
The first day he didn’t drive far. He picked up some speed along the straight ways, dallied along the curves, pulled over a few time to sit watching traffic, deliberately thinking of nothing until he saw a set of tiny headlights, like hope coming toward him, become larger and brighter, and carry past him on a whish of sound. He’d blink, and go back to thinking of nothing. After a few hours on the road, always moving south, he stopped at one of the small Mississippi river towns. It wasn’t famous for the river; it was famous for the home made farm country pies. One of the things he had always wished he had done was to sit in a restaurant for hours, watching people come and go, a cup of smoking hot coffee and a piece of pie in front of him. There was never time, or the right restaurant handy. It was time to change the equation.
Farm country he would have called it, with local patrons were at their brown laminate tables, bent over the newspaper (most of them trucked in from the Twin Cities, he noted with quiet pride) or staring bleared ahead of them, forearms along the table. Their eyes were concentrating on yesterday’s news or today’s hopes. There were plenty of empty chairs and almost as many open tables. He asked politely for one at the wall, where he could see the view from across the restaurant.
“There isn’t much to see, just the street where people leave their cars,” the blonde and young waitress told him solemnly. It’s just a small town.”
She could have been one of his students, home for the day, picking up a little extra money by working her summer job, even though now it was fall.
“That’s okay. I like to lean against the wall while I sip my coffee. Just coffee, please.” And he had gotten what he wanted: a table for two, with nothing behind him except fake paneling and everything in front of him: tables, waitresses moving briskly among them, the smell of pancakes and sugar, sunrise turning the fog in the air translucent and the dust on the cars outside to pollen yellow. Time.
He came back to himself from a formless reverie about time and fog. The coffee, newspaper, breakfast group had left. The waitresses were mopping clean tables, setting out new paper mats, shifting the pies in their lighted cases. That was one reason he had turned the car here. If he was going to waste time over a piece of pie and a cup of coffee, it might as well be somewhere where they were known for their pies. Apple, apple with streusel crumb topping, banana cream, blueberry, cherry, chocolate cream, cranberry apple, currant, lemon meringue, peach, pecan, raspberry, rhubarb, strawberry. ‘Streusel crumb’ was a cheating name, for the tourists. Anyone from a German or Polish background knew that streusel was crumbs. But it was the pies, pies from generous farm kitchens, that were important. He looked up from consideration of the pie list, out the window. More cars, the early scouts for today’s stream of tourists, were moving into open spaces on the main street. Take one farm town where people knew how to cook, subtract three failed businesses factored into the reduced price of bulk milk, add the byproduct of traveler runoff from a highway, compound multiply by word of mouth. What did you have? A list of thirty-five kinds of pie (most of them indigenous) and enough rebuilt economy to keep the town’s women employed while their men either drank the coffee the women poured into restaurant cups or went back to the fields and barns, hoping for an upturn in the price of corn, wheat, milk, and beef. Pie. He studied the list, and tipped a smile toward one of the waitresses.
“And which will it be?” she asked, as she poured a coffee refill.
“Rhubarb, please.” His grandma used to make rhubarb pie in early spring, pink and green stalks bound in a yellow egg custard. Sticky, sour, and full of promise.
By the time he laid his fork across the smeared plate, the tables had refilled. The restaurant was sloshing in coffee, sugar, and noise. “Got to make Sioux Falls today.” And, “Remember Sasie, we want to see the Effinghams when we’re in Detroit.” Or, “Did you pack the camera? Do you think you could get a photo of us – maybe outside? Do you think they would let us take our plates out in front? Mehitabel would love to see this place.” “Mehitabel would love the pies. That woman never missed a meal in her life.” He sipped his coffee and watched people who didn’t know when they would run out of distance or time.
The restaurant traffic never slowed down after that. At one in the afternoon, hemmed in by the people who had been shifting their weight in the vestibule, watching for an empty table, he ordered a piece of lemon pie. “Not the meringue.”
The waitress frowned, her skirts still riding the air currents from her movements between the tables. “Not the meringue? That’s the only lemon we have.”
“Okay. How about banana cream?”
“That we can do.”
About half were round tables and the rest were square. The restaurant contains twenty-five round tables and sixteen square. If a round table seats four comfortably, as does the square, but if customers leave the square tables on the average of 2.3 minutes sooner than the round, and if the traffic flow can be assumed as constant for twelve hours of operation, with an increased 40% for the two-hour periods of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, how much of a financial advantage is it to replace the round tables with the square, assuming a 30% depreciation each year, with the initial cost of the round tables exceeding the square by 5%. Or was that .05? He frowned in concentration. Someone at a nearby table muttered about going to use the john.
There were five stalls and the requisite two urinals. On the women’s side it would be six stalls and a Kotex dispenser. Assuming a usage of 5 gallons per flush, and usage increase of 35% on the female side of the restrooms versus the male, at what point was it environmentally less costly to install porta potties, to be periodically emptied at the nearest large city, which was…Chicago? Rochester?
About three-thirty in the afternoon, when some of the tables had opened and the restaurant was quieter, he ordered a slice of apple pie (no streusel, just the regular crust, please) and a cup of tea. His stomach was wrinkled from coffee. His mind felt quieter, though. He ate the piece in tidy bites, saving its triangular point until last: the wish bite. Years ago when he had been a child, swinging his legs from a too-tall chair at the table, “I wish for another piece of pie,” was his grandfather’s line. What did he wish for? He pushed back his chair, left a generous tip for the waitress (his third, he smiled sadly: he had managed to hang on to his table through three shifts, two-thirds of a day’s traffic, and five trips to the restroom). Soon it would be the dinner group: round steak with mashed potatoes and field green beans; chicken smothered in cream gravy with baked potatoes and pickled beets. Supper meant people coming home, lights coming on in the houses, quiet before sleep. Supper meant: when are you heading home? He was close enough to the house in the Twin Cities that he could be back before midnight, far enough away it could not reach out and pull him in. He had made one decision this morning. But one decision was just the first in this chain, or the end link in the chain before. He could get out on the road and drive north for a few hours, his body jazzed with caffeine and his mind lulled by pie and memories. Or he could head south and west toward. Or he could make the decision tomorrow.

Dreams of Many Colored Glass - excerpt

2009-03-08T18:09:00.000-07:00

Authenticity, condition-condition-condition, line and color. Fritz had been doing this for a long time. I was a neophyte, but as the auctions, the books, the stories, and the pop quizzes accumulated, I could feel my Louis Comfort knowledge building. It wasn’t always the easiest feeling, but there were compensations, bits of information that just fit, like a piece of glass into its slot.
Louis Comfort found out that the most boring glass was the purest. Taking out the impurities gave you window glass: nice to look through, useful because you didn’t notice it. Like people, I guess. What made the glass wasn’t the glass ingredients: silica sand, soda ash, potash, limestone, lead oxide, borax and boric acid. It was the stuff that could have gotten into the batch by daring or design: Iron oxide, manganese oxide, copper, gold, cobalt, coal. Fritz told me more than once that the Nash men had a magic room where they puttered with their secret formulas, banks of drawers of ingredients, not a few of them labeled “poison.”
It’s what made the glass impure that made it beautiful.
This theory failed to explain the grandkids, who also turned out to be 99% less than pure. Less than desirable I already knew, from the way Fish Eyes thinned her mouth when she mentioned them. One day I managed to extract more information.
“Tell me about the grandkids. Have they always been like this?” Oblivious to germs and flour, I had slung up against the counter where Fish Eyes was turning out pumpernickel bread dough.
“I wouldn’t know.”
I didn’t believe her. Fish Eyes could have been stirring her cauldron with a fingerbone, and she would have been right in character. “So they haven’t always been despicable,” I led her on.
She slung the dough with enough force to flatten it on the counter.
“What did they do? When did you first know about them?”
“They used to squash caterpillars so they could drive the Tonka trucks to their play hospital and pretend to sue the other driver.”
“I’m sorry, but all kids are mean to bugs. Then their consciences kick in, and they grow up to be kind adults.”
“These didn’t.”
“Okay, so what did they do that was so bad?”
“The day after they graduated out of law school, they got my granddaughter convinced that if she turned her trust fund into cash and gave it to them, they could double the money in two months.”
“Oh.”
“She gave it to them.”
“Oh.”
“When she needed some of the money for a down payment on a car go to work, they said they never heard of any trust fund, any money, or any company like the one they talked to her about.”
“Oh.”
“Fritz put back the money in her account. He doubled it.”
Illegal and scam artists Fish Eyes could testify to. Vandals and unscrupulous I was going to experience by myself.

Mirror me, mirror you

2009-03-01T10:28:00.000-08:00

Mirrors are fascinating, as well as sometimes horrifying, depending on what we hope to see. Simple idea: clear glass with a reflective back. Yet we can lose ourselves in a mirror. Mirrors double the size of rooms. They are double rooms, showing us life opposite. There’s double the number of books and chairs and clutter and dust. There’s our double, too.

Mirrors change the rules: Alice fell into a mirror, and her world turned Wonderland upside down, even more than when she tumbled into that rabbit hole in her first trip. For a child, the room’s double reflected in a mirror can be a magical place where things are the same and yet not the same. The rooms we see in mirrors are mysterious, with even more hidden beyond their walls and windows.

We use the mirror to comb our hair, straighten our tie, and then suddenly one day when we look at the mirror: we see ourselves. We look into a mirror, searching for something as we reel from the shock of an event, and there in the silver rectangle confronting us, is someone who feels just the same as we do inside, someone whose look of bewilderment confirms our confusion. We look in the mirror to affirm the placement of our ego: and are instead troubled at what we see. We see what used to be us, the same image reflected back from the mirror for five or ten or twenty years, until a comment (“You’ve gone gray lately”) sends us back to the mirror with fresh eyes for another look. It’s not a coincidence that the potential scales on our eyes and the backs of mirrors both shine.

Mirrors reflect life events. How many people looked at themselves in this washroom mirror, on the way to class, to an interview, back to the school dance? How much of their experience, whether or anticipation or fear, still wriggles beneath its surface? If we could look into that experience, what the mirror has seen, what would we see and who would look back at us? Narcissus fell in love with himself; so do teenagers, when they’re not despairing at their reflections.

Mirrors let us scry, looking into the past or the future. We suspend our knowledge of what we will see, and look at what is there. The best mirrors for scrying are old ones, their silver clouded in places, perhaps splotched, maybe crazed (like the people looking into them) – but old mirrors hold old memories. Whose image has been reflected, whose image caught in the glass.

Mirrors mimic water, just as water mirrors the world: the perfect photo with trees above, and water-reflected trees at their feet. The sea and the sky are two blue plates mirroring each other, between which we live.

Like the moon, mirrors are mostly silver and reflect light. They’re not light sources, but they are the source of our frequent enlightenment.

There’s the mirror in the oven window (behind which we see bread baking or a roast simmering in juice); the mirror in the frame; the mirror which can be flat glass or beveled with that extra angle giving the reflection value and depth.

People mirror us back to ourselves, if we choose to notice. Sometimes we don’t want to see, and sometimes they don’t want to see what we project (or think we project) about them. Even so, how people treat us can be how they perceive we mirror ourselves.

There’s an awful (and awe-full) lot to find in mirrors.

Dreams of Many Colored Glass - excerpt

2009-02-21T15:46:00.000-08:00

Einstein was right. A reference book existed for reference. You didn’t need to read it, because in case you ever needed it, the book was on the shelf. Your job in life was to make sure you didn’t need it, so it could stay in its home – preferably in a library. Fritz believed the more books you were familiar with, the better chance you had to find things you wanted, to know how to get wherever the things were when you wanted, and the much better chance you had to pay the best price for the things you wanted. Since I was being paid to look at the reference books, I would drift to the beat of Metallica and let my attention wander while I was leafing over pages.
Some days we browsed and some days we researched. I liked it less when we researched. Usually, when we researched, I complained. “This is not 2004. So why do I need to check what a lamp sold for in 2004? It’s not on the market. Here, for example you’ve got a leaf and berry lamp, which doesn’t look much leaf and berry to me…looks to me more like dishpan with a sieve on the bottom setting on top of a restaurant thermal coffee pot painted with black Rust-o-leum.”
“That’s pyramidal,” said Fritz without looking up. “We want to calculate change in value.”
“Why don’t we just go out and buy the lamp, and find out?”
“It’s not for sale.”
“Then what are you worried about?”
“If you don’t calculate changes in value, then you’re going to be fleeced by one of your agents. Additionally, you won’t know what your own collection is worth.”
“Green, red, yellow, blue, purple, striated and rippled,” I continued reading, “Cripes, who’d want something like this, with fake Queen Anne’s lace pierced metal. I can’t believe the combinations he used; it must be gosh-awful ugly.”
“Check on the upstairs landing. See for yourself.”
“Two hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars…what?”
“Plus commission.”
There was silence before I tiptoed to the upstairs landing and stood at a respectful distance. “Don’t breathe on it,” Fritz called after me.
I didn’t give him the satisfaction of answering.

Romance

2009-02-14T12:29:00.000-08:00

I am skimming the book 1001 Ways to be Romantic, for my Women’s Lit class. Yes, Women’s Lit-ers are romantic and no, we are not male bashers. Also no, we do not burn our bras, though in the early years of “the movement” women did discard their aprons, a much more appropriate emblem of what they were rebelling against. [That bra burning was a plant of deliberately erroneous information. One of the protestors said it would be unsafe to burn the items women had thrown into the trash can at that Atlantic City protest; moms are concerned about safety.] Why do I plan to bring this particular book to class for enrichment? It’s another in the collection of pictures, opinions, histories, and essays that enrich our discussions. Some of us will agree with the advice, and some of us will point out parallels in our required textbook readings. Some of us will disagree with the advice, which is great because in WoLit we listen to everyone's opinion.

Inside or outside the class, Romance is what many of us want more of, apparently, especially if it’s tied to understanding. One of 1001’s suggestions is to sit “your” wife in front of the refrigerator, blindfold her, and use your fingers to feed her small and luscious bits of food: a piece of chocolate, a fresh raspberry, and so forth. Two people, one refrigerator of food, one blindfold, and sensuality: romance. [Does the tub of 50 mini éclairs count?]

What we practice in Women’s Lit, is that no matter what the topic (or question) there are many ways we can consider it. There’s the immediate reaction: Oh good, food! There’s the consequences: do I look like one of Reubens’ women, much as they are adored? Are the raspberries that you’re feeding me fresh, or are they the ones with the grey mold on the bottom? What do I need to see, in order to remain safe? In our house, there’s the safety issue: no one approaches the refrigerator unattended. The dogs are there first, waiting for the magic door to open, jostling for position, and ready to walk or crawl over anyone who is blindfolded (and therefore incapable of defending the food that’s being handed out). They are not un-romantic; they simply believe that in situations involving food there’s one adjective: mine.

So how do we keep romance in the house, and fur out of the food? Eat from the countertops; find a cheap restaurant where we can gaze into each other’s eyes, take a sip of coffee without ingesting hair, and be as romantic as it’s possible to be amid crackling burger paper and Formica countertops. Go back to Women’s Lit, where “mine” becomes “ours”: our ongoing discussion about romance, life, and how we relate the genders in our lives (without physical blindfolds, realizing we often wear emotional ones). Tell students that Women’s Lit is not about male bashing; it’s about humanism, and the rule that is enforced in this section of Women’s Lit is: You cannot bash men. We’re all in life together.

Nobody Ever Died of Terminal Weirdness - excerpt

2009-02-07T05:49:00.000-08:00

This is an excerpt from a novel.

"I need a new purse," Mother said abruptly, staring at the green beans on her fork.
"So get one," Dad answered. Dad believes in solving problems.
"You don't understand. 'Getting' a purse is not something you do everyday."
"It's something I don't do at all," I offered. "I think there are perceptions about people carrying purses."
Mother ignored me. "A purse is something you have with you all the time."
"Like a husband," Dad suggested helpfully.
"More so."
"How can anything be more so than a husband?"
Mother sighed. "I ask myself that sometimes. But I need a purse."
"How can anything be more so than a husband?" Dad asked himself. While he considered that conundrum, he tendered a solution to Mother's, "So go to the store and get one."
"What if I can't find exactly what I want?"
"Tell the clerk to find you a purse. What's so hard about a purse? You use it to carry things."
"You will never know what's waiting for you if you don't try," I added.
We considered pursing as a sport. Mother stirred her vegetable with a fork; Dad hummed a tune to himself; I tried rehearsing what I would say if anyone asked me if I planned to carry a purse. Then I thought of all the girls I had seen and what purses they carried. Mostly they had miniscule packets on long strings, or, if they were athletes, backpacks. Maybe purses were a by-product of girls turning into mothers.
"And it has to be the right color."
"Why is color important? My mother used to have fifty purses; one for every pair of shoes she owned. If she had fifty, you can have two. So buy two."
"I can't. That would be like double-dating. When I swear allegiance, I mean what I say."
"You're not marrying the sack; you're using it to haul things around."
"We need a strong connection," Mother continued, staring past Dad. "A purse means something."
"It means there better be enough money in it to pay bills."
"Just like wallets. Can wallets be black? Oh, no. Wallets are brown."
Dad and I stared at each other across the tablecloth.
"Funny," Dad observed. "I saw black wallets the last time I was in the leather goods department. In fact I think I even may have a black wallet here." He squirmed sideways in his chair and from his pants pocket produced a black wallet curved into a half moon shape, which rocked gently on his palm.
"Wallets are brown," Mother continued, staring past the half-cylinder held before her. "And purses, generally. Black purses block the flow of energy."
"They block what? What are you talking about?" Dad looked at his wallet, looked at me ("Black," I mouthed), and shoveled his wallet back into his rear pocket. He excavated his fork from his spaghetti, and analyzed it carefully.
"Once I had a black purse, and the top came off. My father fixed it by screwing in a brass bar across the top of the whole purse. 'It will never come off again,' he promised me. It didn't, but the purse was awfully heavy, especially for a shoulder purse. For six months I leant to one side and had one very strong shoulder."
"I promise I won't put metal into your purse," Dad held up one hand. "Especially round metal objects with pictures stamped on them."
"Although it's generally not possible to know what the right purse should be before you see it. There are certain requirements."
"Like what? Although I know I shouldn't be asking."
"It needs to be bigger on the inside than on the outside. Like an onion."
"Or a report card," I added.
"Like a report card," Mother repeated. "It keeps track of things."
"Big sack," Dad agreed. "We've got plenty of grocery bags underneath the sink if you want something brown and large."
"Waterproof," said Mother firmly. "Grocery bags aren't waterproof."
"I'll say. Did I ever tell you time I was carrying groceries out of the store for one of my mother’s parties? It was raining, and the bottom fell out. Artichokes bouncing along the parking lot, that funny lettuce that looks like the weeds in the lawn just lying on the asphalt, limp and flat."
"What did you do?"
"Picked up the stuff. Of course I lost one artichoke in the sewer, and got yelled at by my mother for not buying enough."
"Did she ever know?"
"Nope. I told her there was a freeze in Chile, and the price of artichokes almost doubled in a week; I didn't have enough to get all she put on the list."
"But you really just packed up the groceries and took them home?"
"Yup. The people at her dinner party never knew the difference. I remember watching them eat their salads, thinking of the parking lot, the rain, and where the car tires had been." Dad cleared his throat. "Same thing with a purse. If you need a purse, just go out and get one. Make sure it's big enough to hold all the stuff you want to carry around, and you're set. I'll even go with you. It shouldn't take more than five minutes."

Dreams of Many Colored Glass - excerpt

2009-02-01T07:04:00.000-08:00

This entry is especially for the reader in the television industry who enjoyed last week's description. Thank you, Jan.

For three months I spent most of my time there, sitting on a chair in a corner of the dim gallery, not watching the red hatted women on their luncheon tours, not listening to the people with squinty eyes discuss how much a particular item would bring. It became easy to block most of them out. The people I remember were the ones who came around the stone corridor, stopped, and gasped at their first view of the lamps, glowing with color against the dark walls.
They got their money’s worth. Gold, red, orange, blue, green: all the colors in the world. The poppy lamp could have been garish, with its red and green coloring, but it wasn’t: it was a garden of poppies in the sun. The sugar cube lamp was clear blocks, layer on layer like an Aztec pyramid of clear glass, gold glass, and bronze. If you stared at it straight on, sometimes you didn’t see the sugar cube lumps , you just fell into their quartz spaces, rimmed with a border that looked like someone was braiding lines of gold and bronze. Then you looked at the size of the lamp, and you could see the cubes, marching up the side of the lamp, evenly spaced and descending in size. There were multiple dragonfly lamps, depending on how you liked them colored, but the one I looked at when I felt cold inside was bugs at the bottom of the shade, facing down, wearing red wings with that filigree, long green bodies, and bulging red eyes, like aviators with goggles – and above them the lampshade formed of scales in flame colored orange, set with a border of glass jewels. The 18 light lily lamp looked like an orchestra section turned pearl, but one of my favorites was the pond lily, because I could imagine myself sitting on the side of a pond, waiting for the goldfish to pop the surface. White petals with enough yellow to look like the sun was shining on them, platter leaves in striped green, and the glass between looked like water in sunlight. The base on that one wasn’t bad either: a stalk twisted of old bronze.

Scene from a story

2009-01-24T11:38:00.000-08:00

This is a scene description from a story.

They passed under a gateway, with the tall gates standing wide, and she was finally inside. TerraeAndrea: inside the city, where instead of shadow flickers, she saw real movement, more movement, more smells, and more people than she had expected to exist anywhere. Paved stones took the place of packed dirt. Buildings, market stalls with their awnings, sellers, buyers, and water troughs lined the stone-flagged lanes. She sidestepped cart wheels, watched the tumbling of coins from one hand to another. She listened to conversations in languages she could not understand, and gestures she could.
The merchants were robed in brown and blue, green and grey, orange and umber, their robes swirling about their bellies, and fluttering the road dust at their feet. Sheep bleated, cows lowed, children wearing scraps of clothing chased each other through the trading stalls and were chased in their turn by the traders. The girl followed the children with her eyes, and the crowd moving slowly along the market stalls with her feet.
Walking with the pace of the crowd, following the pointed finger or the shrugged shoulder, she wound through the city of TerraeAndrea. She dodged the high-smelling sheep, and their manure that clotted the cobblestones and slid toward the gutter in the middle of the way. She skirted the cinnamon-trousered and shouting traders, their embroidered fabrics dangling from poles, their bags of roots set in high stacks, and small pouches. Leather makers displayed shoes and boots and leggings, tunics and overcoats dyed from plants and sea salts and blood. Harlequin clad players juggled copper spheres and patched thieves pilfered. At the edges of the streets were booths displaying food: trays of dried fruit and pans of stew, piles of cinnabar fruit and strings of root dried vegetables. There were bags of grain and strings of colored beads. Where the streets crossed, bins of blue and yellow flowers bloomed.
She watched the people working between the stalls and booths, sometimes moving at the pace of the shoppers, sometimes standing still at the edge of the crowd. The orange-robed merchant laid a thick finger on the side of the scale as he weighed out orris root. A thin boy darted from bag to bag, until he found one with the ties unloosened, and before he could be caught by the neck, had disappeared in the crowd – but not before he had pulled from the sack a handful of coin. Two men stood in a shadowed alleyway, one counting change into the palm of the other, who looked about for watchers. The shoppers held purses and head wraps, bags of dried seaweed and bins of cloth. They spoke in dialect and language.
“Best dried fish you’ll get, else you visit the coast.”
“My leather boots will never wear through.”
“Grain from the plains. Grain from the plains.”
“Dragon’s tooth. Retch seed. Chickleweed berries.”
“You will not find cloth better. Brought here on the boats of Catalpha.”
Much later, she stood noise-dazed and half smiling, peering inside a grey stone archway, up grey stone steps that sagged into the grey stone dimness. On one side, the street at her back was as clogged as any near the gate: this one with merchants selling long sticks with thin strips of colored cloth flying in the wind, bits of leather, feathers and small baskets of sea stones. On the other side of the street, the side where she stood, was a squared building of grey stone, no sellers squatting at its base, no walkers loitering against its walls. Lengths of dun color fabric billowed outward from openings in the walls high above her. There were no people or market stalls on that side of the road near the building, just long pieces of pale fabric, flapping in the wind.

Books and Inspiration

2009-01-17T12:23:00.000-08:00

Despite the ease of its acquisition, obtaining information on the Internet is not always the most satisfying avenue. Quick: yes. Colorful and noisy: absolutely. Entertaining: of course. Accurate: generally. Up to date: enough to cause apoplexy hysteria as the daily news streams into our monitors. No matter how enticing browsing the Internet – and we have used it, asking students to locate and evaluate online literary magazines, quickly locating a photo of chrysanthemums, checking an address – the heart of knowledge for some of us, remains books.

Books are a satisfying weight in our hands, a tactile sensation, the smell of old pages from libraries or the fresh, sharp aroma of new paper and fresh ink. Did a hundred forefingers turn this page, or am I the first? Amazon earned points in my book, when it incorporated the used book sellers. [New copy: $23.99; used copies starting at low price of .02]

When we borrow them from the library, we are honor bound to return the books. When we buy them, we not only have them when they call to us, we have stacks of them to search when we don’t quite know what we want to read. In doing so, we find the books we set aside for another day. It’s like rummaging in the refrigerator, but without the worry of finding moldering pears in the vegetable bin. We are not the only people who need to live with books.

C.S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy: the Shape of my Early Life, described his parents’ house:
“I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cistern and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books more emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass. Where all these books had been before we came to the New House is a problem that never occurred to me until I began writing this paragraph. I have no idea of the answer.”

That, as I tell my English 1 students, is a perfect example of repetition, as well as question-and-answer.

In The Little Bookroom, Eleanor Farjean describes the origin of her story ideas:
“Of all the rooms in the house, the Little Bookroom was yielded up to books as an untended garden is left to its flowers and weeds. There was no selection or sense of order here. In dining-room, study, and nursery there was choice and arrangement; but the Little Bookroom gathered to itself a motley crew of strays and vagabonds, outcasts from the ordered shelves below, the overflow of parcels bought wholesale by my father in the sales-rooms. Much trash, and more treasure. A lottery, a lucky dip for a child who had never been forbidden to handle anything between covers. That dusty bookroom, whose windows were never opened, through whose panes the summer sun struck a dingy shaft where gold specs danced and shimmered, opened magic casements for me through which I looked out on other worlds and times….
“Crammed with all sorts of reading, the narrow shelves rose halfway up the walls; their tops piled with untidy layers that almost touched the ceiling. The heaps on the floor had to be climbed over, columns of books flanked the window, toppling at a touch. You tugged at a promising binding, and left a new surge of literature underfoot; and you dropped the book that had attracted your for something that came to the surface in the upheaval. Here, in the Little Bookroom, I learned, like Charles Lamb, to read anything that can be called a book. The dust got up my nose and made my eyes smart, as I crouched on the floor or stood propped against a bookcase, physically uncomfortable, and mentally lost. I was only conscious of my awkward posture and the stifling atmosphere when I had ceased to wander in realms where fancy seemed to me more true than facts, and set sail on voyages of discovery to regions in which fact was often far more curious than fancy. If some of my frequent sore throats were due to the dust in the Little Bookroom, I cannot regret them.
“No servant ever came with duster and broom to polish the dim panes through which the sunlight danced, or sweep from the floor the dust of long-ago. The room would not have been the same without its dust: star-dust, gold-dust, fern-dust, the dust that returns to dust under the earth and comes from her lap in the shape of a hyacinth.”

--
What strikes me as I ponder those passages is the luxury of time and exploration. No one stands by with a schedule of activities, determined these children will conform to their classmates’ mold. And no one censors their books. Maybe the world has changed; maybe to protect our children we must decide what is suitable for their reading and what is not. Maybe we censor the television and not the bookshelves. If a book or a tv show is a pasting-up of only the bits to shock, then it preys on our emotions. If the bits that shock and startle are part of the characters’ stories, perhaps they are included for the plot and not for the readers’ salacious enjoyment.

But when we censor books, we state that we can form imagination according to our preconceived rules. We control ideas. Societies have done that. Those places were also unkind to thinkers, writers, children and animals, and any part of the environment that did not serve those in power. Perhaps if we wish their spirits as well as their bodies to grow, we need to be very, very careful to open our children and ourselves to the complete world of books.

Minimalist Decorating

2009-01-10T13:25:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in the books, journals, boxes and drawers of things-to-read, there is an article about a decorator whose London home was awe-inspiring in its simplicity and beauty. His entry stairs glowed with light and stairs: no pictures, no stair carpeting. Stairs. His dining room was a table and bench. No pictures on the walls, flowers on the hearth or table runner down the center board. His kitchen countertops were themselves: countertops, and when his wife prepared ten pounds of leeks for a dinner party, she had all the counter space in the kitchen to engage the leeks (since there were no flour or sugar jars, no toaster, no coffee maker or bean grinder staking territories). It was a lovely house. It was a peaceful house, easy to dust and very tidy since there was nothing to put away.

All of it was away: in drawers and closets. The decorator’s children were tidy with their toys. The decorator’s wife kept her cosmetics behind cabinet doors. Was it difficult to live in such peace and spareness, one of the magazine article writers asked. “We have a house in the country,” she answered, “where I decorate with cabbage rose prints and lots of swags and ruffles. This is a nice change, and so is that.” Very diplomatic. Instead of moving through the cycle of finding and bringing home, decorating with, and then shoving into a closet in order to reach a modicum of space, one decamps from the city to the country to enjoy the volte face of décor.

Not having the luxury of two houses, we need to decide how spare or how decorated our rooms are to be. Pictures or bare walls? Upholstered furniture with pillows or teak stools? Rugs and carpets? Bibelots - from the pot scouring mesh to the piece of colored glass on our counters? Family heirlooms on the table or put away in the drawers?

The furniture stores’ pseudo room arrangements now feature plastic glasses of plastic orange juice, a cereal bowl half-filled with plastic bran flakes never dissolving in their plastic milk. There’s a mixed drink on the sofa pull-out, and a bowl of fruit on the coffee table. Why? So we the browsers more clearly understand how the furniture would welcome us home. What is home? A place to share our food and our warmth, a place to learn, an operating room for leeks? Home is what each of us searches for: along with peace, and mother and love, it’s a word with strong connotations. Once we arrive, as we build it, what does our home say about us?

“You have an obsession with order and schedule,” someone comments, looking at the clocks in my home. True, though each of them registers a different time. “You like books,” says another visitor, stating the obvious. Books, clocks, places to read, colored glass. Dogs. Cats and children. Finds from our adventures. Photographs and pictures. Memories. Friendships. Leeks jostle the coffee maker and the breadboard where I am slicing homemade honey wheat bread. The dining room table bears school texts, a collection of pens, a jar of colored marbles. It may be cluttered, but it’s home. For some, the spare look works. We do not believe in minimalist decorating.

Betrayal

2009-01-03T13:39:00.000-08:00

The wife of the man up the street is having an affair with a co-worker. He knows this because his best friend told him so. We are discussing Othello – but as we always do, we’re talking about the ideas behind the story: the plot and its relevance to our lives and times. There’s a lot of betrayal in Othello: friendship, truth, morals. Some of it is real, and some of it is real only in the minds of those who are deceived by their best friends. My students, who approach Shakespeare with as much enthusiasm as they do beets, are no strangers to fear and betrayal. They’ve lost friends, secrets, babysitters, boy and girl-friends, spouses and marriages, jobs and cars, to circumstances, or the economy, or betrayal.

Like most of us, sometimes they have betrayed their own long-range goals for short-term satisfaction: sleeping in rather than coming to class. They’ve felt betrayed by their bosses, and sometimes the educational system, whether their conclusions are based on fact or emotion. They know betrayal. Shakespeare may sound funny, as they tell me, the costumes may look strange (more unique than multiple face piercings?), but the stories don’t change – and that’s the important reason why we need to keep reading: that, and the beauty of the language.

We need to move into story and outside our private stories to understand and accept the part of those events in our lives. As Earl points out, King Arthur was also familiar with betrayal. Othello killed his wife for it, doing his civic duty, so - as he pointed out - Desdemona would not live to betray more men.

The students already know that betrayal doesn’t just happen to someone like Othello: betrayal is a relationship they can enter or something they can pity and learn from. Our reaction can depend, as Lori and Amber and Earl argue, on how much we still love the people who betrayed us. There are no simple rules, just people in their own stories, hunting for the plot.

Betrayal is part of life. We welcome someone into our lives, our love, our families, our friendship. Sometimes that relationship strengthens and grows. Sometimes we discover that the person or company we trusted has not been true. Sometimes we only believe this: but belief becomes our reality.

Othello’s response to perceived betrayal supported grew from not only his occupation and torment, but the rights of men everywhere to ensure that wives do not trash their husbands’ public reputation. [Then it was husbands; now we’re equal opportunity.] Arthur’s response fractured his heart, his knights, and his kingdom. Fatal flaw? Maybe: If love is a fatal flaw. Depending on what we do with our beliefs and the information we are given.

Maybe out of love we choose to say nothing, do nothing. Peace. Karma. Maybe we react. Maybe we avenge. Maybe, like Othello, we attempt to serve the public good.

Maybe if we read and talk about the betrayal our fictional characters encounter, or the betrayal they believe exists, peace will come more easily to us, in the stories and plots of our lives. We can learn from the past and from the actions of others, as Amber vigorously asserts to her classmates that we do.

Symbiosis

2008-12-27T09:26:00.000-08:00

If I’m enthralled with bookstores, my significant other has a grocery store fascination. Unlike some husbands, he enjoys shopping and will agreeably spend hours in the aisles, comparing prices with or without the application of coupons, checking point of origin and size of cans. When he’s feeling low because the Packers have failed him again, we can perk him up with a trip to the grocery store.

Our family stories are twined with where we found the dinner entrée or the dessert; our road trips involve unique grocery stores and small town specialty markets. Where did we find the beef sticks? Which dairy produced that cheese?

All this creates another marvelously symbiotic part of our relationship. I don’t need to plan ahead, or even act responsibly. When I discover that I’m 10 eggs short because I’ve suddenly decided that today is the day to bake fruitcake, he will putdown the tv remote and head off to the store for a dozen (Phil’s cage free. Laid in nests). If the boys are coming to work on a building project and have lunch, he will get their favorite hot dogs (Usinger’s, all meat, ¼# each) before we assemble the cedar or the tools.

This is Wisconsin-Minnesota. We build celebrations and relationships at the table: eating, sharing stories. Listening to each other. Food is love, my grandma used to say. Guy and Julie’s visit is friendship and laughter. It is also apricot Hamantaschen, Groppi’s deli salad, marinated olives, and salami-onion-cheese cubes from Sendik’s. It is asparagus wrapped in specially cured bacon and broiled. It is pots of Berres brothers coffee and books and talk. “Try a little of this.” Tina’s visits are Greek foods; Dick and Millie’s, a choice piece of beef; Deone’s sugar cookies with fondant. There are foods for holidays, old recipes and new experiments. Gran was right: food is love. Love is also someone taking time from the middle of a football game to go to the grocery store.

Giving

2008-12-20T07:24:00.000-08:00

We move into the holidays with gifts for others; we come through the holidays with our eyes on the future and our resolutions focused on new: new times, new year, new plans: gifts for those around us, gifts to ourselves.

Teaching overflows with gifts, often comments made by students that illuminate life far beyond the required readings. During one of our discussions, Lori commented, “There’s always that tug of ‘Do what you want,’ versus responsibility, ‘Do what you gotta do.’” We nodded in acquiescence, and I used Lori’s comment at the top of the exam page, and ideas about her comment in the exam directions:
Consider the four major readings of this semester: Othello, The Metamorphosis, The Glass Menagerie, and Neighbour Rosicky. Select one character from each reading. Discuss the character’s most significant decision and its consequences – for the character, other characters in the play, the play/story, the reader. Are the decisions of these characters what they want to do, what they believe they must do, what they are forced by others to do? Explain. Support your thesis.

There were many exams (aren’t there always); from those many a few stood out. Jody’s concluding comments stayed with me:
“Rosicky is a good, honest man. Plain and simple. His decisions are based on what he wants to do. All of his decisions are based on what he should do. There is no separation of the two. He does not have a conflict this way. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all be a little more like Rosicky? Wouldn’t it be nice if we all had a Rosicky in our life? He does die at the end of the story, which is sad. However, we are all going to die someday. Rosicky makes sure everything is taken care of for everyone. He did what he had to, which is exactly what he wanted to.
“In conclusion, I believe we are defined by our actions in life. Some of the characters’ decisions were based on what they should do, while others were solely based on what they wanted to do. One was lucky enough to have both.”

During the holidays and the coming year, may our shoulds and our wants coalesce beautifully, in love and caring. May the peace of Anton Rosicky’s love for his family and his life; the selfless sacrifice and commitment of Gregor Samsa; the creativity of the Wingfield family; and the willingness to love and pursue dreams shown in the characters in Othello bless us all. Peace.

The Cigarette Depot Acts of God Bible Ministry Church - excerpt

2008-12-13T07:19:00.000-08:00

This is an excerpt from a novel....

Mary Magdalene: Sweet Reason

Everybody had a reason for being at Mo’s that December Friday night, with dark slush sifting across sidewalks and into coat collars outside, and fish and grease smells clinging to anything inside the bar.
Mine wasn’t as good as most, but after three hours of dark sidewalks with no customers, no traffic, and no halt to the snow, I hunched myself out of a doorway, and trundled into Mo’s. When you’ve forgotten to watch the weather forecast, decided to wear a leather skirt and your black patent leather shoes (recently resoled), it’s better to safeguard your investments than wait on a man who's not coming.
Cigarette haze hung pink and the speckled Hamms sun revolved eternally across blue lake and green trees. Mo had the music turned up high and the heat on medium. Dim humps leaned over their barstools. In one corner poker players slapped cards between themselves, and elbowed the beer bottles dividing them. Couples nursed drinks and grudges. The table by the door had one customer and an empty chair.
Lucky break, I thought, a dry customer. But when I slid onto the chair and tilted my head into a smile, I saw it was George.
“Oh. You.” I told him, taking back the smile.
“Hi, Toots. How’s it going?”
“Lousy. Snow, dark, cold. People have money to spend on Christmas presents, but none on me. At this rate I can’t make the rent, much less pay for my shoes.” I lifted one foot so George could see the resoling job.
“Nice. You know if you keep your leg up like that, you could get muscle cramps.”
“Yeah, well, I was hoping that maybe one of them guys would notice, and you know ... maybe.”
“Them guys at the poker game are duking it out over the cards. Have been since saaay, seven or so.”
“Maybe the ones at the bar?”
“They’re too busy drinking. You don’t want to mess with a drunk.”
Drunk men don’t pinch or bite like mean men, but their fogged clumsiness, coupled with their misplaced chuckles can be just as painful. I don’t know which are worse: mean men or drunks, but it’s probably whichever I’m with. “How drunk?”
“So drunk that even I might look good to them.” George shuddered and drew a circle on the table with his forefinger.
“That’s tough, George.”
“Yeah, I know.”
We sat quietly except for George’s offer of shared beer, and my nod of refusal. “I don’t
drink on the job.” George bent his head inside his coat collar. I tried to keep the conversation going. “So I’m not working because there’s no customers. Why aren’t you working tonight?”
He held up the hand that had been hidden in his lap. “See? I was trying to open a trunk last night and the blade slipped: cut me right across the knuckles.”
“Looks like it hurt.”
“Isn’t the first time, but I thought I would lay off for a day. Business is okay, and it’s going to pick up before Christmas.”
“What’s hot this year?”
“Easier to tell you what’s not: Slot Derby. Everybody’s getting their kid Slot Derby. So many stolen Slot Derby cassettes, they’re not worth anything. What a shame: Millions of kids all
going to grow up alike from playing the same game.” George lifted his hands in resignation, then tucked a small smile into the corner of his chin. “Game controllers are good. Purses. The darndest thing: TV runs a spot on shoplifting, so women are locking their purse in the trunk. Just take their wallet into the shopping center. Sometimes, though, they forget the wallet in the purse. You know: they’re used to taking everything, and they lock the purse in the trunk, but they forget they left the money in the purse.”
“I got it George.”
“I guess it’s because those purses are so big, you know: you lose stuff in your purse. Why do women carry such big purses anyway?”
“So we can use them to hit guys in their nuts when they get fresh.”
“Does it work?”
“I don’t do that any more, so I can’t tell you. I guess so.”
George sighed and let his slow smile slide across the tabletop. “When you do carry your big or small purse, be sure you don’t lose your purse in your car trunk.”
“I don’t have a car anymore. One of the things I gave up with my ex husband. He took that too.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s not so bad. Once you get used to it.”
“Yeah. Well. If you ever decide to get one, let me know. I can tell you about thievery and how to keep your car safe.”
“Thanks, George.”
“Hit me!” one of the card players yelled.
“Quiet over there in the corner,” Mo shouted back. “You want another round?”
The poker players hunched over their fists, ignoring us, so we could look at them. One was Hal Martin, one was Pete Tiesel, and there were three others. Pete’s okay. He’s predictable. I’ve never seen him without two-day-old whiskers, his navy cap, or his white T-shirt. His belly has the same circumference as Dolly Parton’s chest. Pete’s wife Laura, who’s built the same as Pete, wears curlers and stirrup pants to the grocery store. They got married just out of high school when Laura was pregnant. My cousin Tracy went to the wedding fifteen years ago. Now, Laura goes shopping at K Mart for excitement, and Pete comes over to Mo’s for cards. K Mart was past closed, but Pete apparently hadn’t wanted to go home. Pete’s loud, but he’s okay. Martin’s mean: his wife left him, and other than beer drinking or spitting contests, the card table was about the only place people tolerated him.
“And you’re a crook!” one of the poker players yelled, slamming his palm across the table. “I seen what you’ve been doing all night.”
“I don’t cheat.”
“I saw you cheat.”
“All this over a two dollar bet,” George murmured. “What some people do to amuse themselves.”
“Looks like it’s going to get nasty.”
The second man said something fast and low, something so dark that the first man, the shouter, rushed upward, tipping his chair with a clatter. “You son of a bitch!”
“Your mother!”
“Look out,” George mumbled, leaning closer so his words stirred my coat collar. “Here it comes.”
Three of the poker players shoved their chairs from the table, balling their fists against its edge. Tiesel leaned over the table jabbing his thumb toward Hal. “Double crossing son of a bitch liar!” he screamed. His swing overbalanced his body and for longer than it took George to pull the collar on his coat higher, Pete grabbed air.
Hal stood high and still. The Hamms light slid green across his forehead. He laughed from his belly.
“Watch it!” George snapped his head backward. A beer bottle missed Pete’s throat and slammed into the floor.
We could hear sirens, faint, but rising, whining higher. “That’s the Doppler effect,” George pointed out, leaning across the table to thrust his voice under shouts of encouragement from the other card players. “You know, just like weather radar when they show those blue and green patches on the television screen.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. You know how sirens sound different when you’re driving and the cop car passes you?”
Normally they stopped for me, but I nodded.
“It’s the same thing. You’re traveling toward them, and they’re traveling toward you and the distance is always changing, getting closer. And then both of you are right there, and you
wait, sort of hoping you don’t get seen.”
“Yeah.”
“And then the cop car goes on, and the sound changes again.” George flickered one hand triumphantly.
“Usually I’m just so happy it goes past I don’t listen to the sound.”
“Yeah. I know how that is. But if you know how the Doppler works, you can slow down just before the cop gets there. Use your reasoning. Sort of become invisible.”
Hal slammed a fist into Pete’s stomach. Pete was so surprised he bit the tongue that was sticking out the corner of his mouth that he was using to concentrate on. Blood leaked down his mouth corner, and his eyes opened wide. “Look what you made me do!” His knuckles
walloped into Hal’s stomach thudded flat, like somebody pounding meat across a cutting board.
“This isn’t going to end soon,” George said. “I think they forgot about the cops.”
“You’re saying we better get out of here.”
“Unless you want to test the invisible Doppler effect.”
“Not tonight.”
We ended up at my place, where George excavated a plate dried to tomato sauce from the sink and began scrubbing it. I grabbed one of those crocheted knot dishrags and rubbed it across the table. “Like this,” George said, taking the cloth and kneading the table. “Do you have any bleach?”
“Under the sink.”
Bleach ran colorless and pungent across the tabletop, welling in cracks and dents. “Like this,” George grunted, leaning his arm into the rag so from the wrist to the shoulder he was one straight line. “My ma taught me this. Keeps the germs out.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
I put away the clean dishes while George gave the kitchen sink his bleach treatment. Then I made a pot of tea, and we sat on chairs at the living room window with our hands around the blue flowered tea cups my former mother-in-law had given me as a wedding present, watching the snow turn to pink and grey slush under the streetlights. Other than the wandering
spit of car tires, the world was quiet.
“Nice,” said George finally. “Peaceful. No dirty car trunks. Good company.”
“Thanks, George.”
“No, it’s true.” Then he saluted me with the teacup, drank the last swallow of liquid, and washed his teacup before he walked down the stairs. His shadow in pale grey snow walked like any man’s going home from a night's work.
For a while longer I watched the snow as it sunk heavily into itself. Then I went to bed.
It was a good evening. I didn’t earn the rent money, but I didn’t have to bail myself out of jail. And I didn’t get the shoes wet or a run in my almost-new black stockings, either.

How I Write

2008-12-06T09:48:00.000-08:00

On little pieces of paper, left on the kitchen table, the dining room table, the computer table, the hallway, the breakfast bar: bits of paper which sometimes remind me of that crucial idea and sometimes are stolen and gobbled by the dog.

In segmented choices, so the flow of words is not stopped/interrupted/halted/faltering/xxxxx. It’s much easier to go back / change the words in the editing phase than it is to figure out/attempt to figure out/decide/evaluate which words are the best/most inspiring/clearest/best communicate while I am writing. Editing while creating does not work.

Stealing time. Dishes clean up better after they soak for half an hour (when I sit down at the computer to record an idea mid-way through the pots and pans). I don’t mind getting up half an hour earlier (before the rest of the house needs me) to have composing time. Accepting help from others. (Thank you for taking that burned food off the stove: who would have thought that the one minute I needed to write something down would turn into twenty, as the scene in the story grew and the rice in that pot boiled over in revenge).

Searching for inspiration, that idea which will make the writing incandescent. I want to be caught up in the ideas. I want the words to flow. I want people to “get” what I mean. I want them to feel and see the scenes I create.

In awe of what others have done. James filled notebooks with his ideas for writing; Leonardo wrote his famous notebooks; writers keep journals. Ransome wrote that he needed to write the Swallows and Amazons story. His note was, “It wrote itself.” So many words, so many ideas. So much raw material.

With editing. Judy said, “I can’t see the stairway,” when I wrote about the library of TerraeAndrae. I could – but then I can conduct complete conversations in my mind. I rewrote the stairway scene, and Judy reread: she could see the grey stone steps, lit through stained glass windows.

With humor. With attention to detail. Thinking of my audience. Being true to my vision.

With others. Researching new fields is one of the joys of writing. When I write about the cop’s experiences, I work with a cop. The story is not only more realistic, it’s better because I see the characters through his eyes. When I write about medical situations, I ask a doctor, “What do you call this injury?” or “How would you diagnose?” When my characters are insane, I go to a psychiatrist for help in diagnosing. I hunt for books and people: Tiffany lamps; guides to the stars; Calculus made Easy (it wasn’t); The Writer’s Guide to Character Traits; Will’s methods on burying a body; Greg’s science; Kent’s theories on magic.

As much as I can. The more I write, the better I am able to write. I can look at what I wrote yesterday or last year and think, ‘I can do better.’ I could not do better if I did not practice.

Hey, Cookie

2008-11-29T08:24:00.000-08:00

My first memories of baking are standing at the side of the table where I would not be in the way, watching. My mother and grandmother were center stage, moving between the counter and the kitchen table: mixing, stirring, moving in the rhythm of creamed butter and granulated sugar.

They made pressed butter cookies. No guillotine could be more ruthless. If the pressed forms were not perfect, it was scraped back into the bowl, to be reloaded into the cookie gun and pressed again. Some sheets held five cookies when the cookie gun tube was empty; the rest had turned into lumps of dough waiting for their chance to be reincarnated. One sheet of spirals sprinkled with multicolored sugar dots, one tray of stars sprinkled with yellow sugar, one sheet of poinsettias sprinkled with red sugar. One recipe of trees, colored green, sprinkled with tiny colored sugar balls and topped with a yellow spoch of sugar. We used silver dragees until grandpa began cracking his fillings. The year my sister was old enough to decorate she created a tray of butterflies with food color painted bodies and matching, color patterned wings (30 minutes to decorate one tray of cookies); that remained the standard by which 40 subsequent years of decorated butter cookies were judged.

They made Beth’s nut chocolate: ground walnuts, German sweet chocolate, powdered sugar, bonded with egg whites and topped with a candied cherry. When times were tight, mom sliced the candied cherries in half, so they went further. They made ginger snaps: soft and spicy, sparkling under their cooked sugar crust. They made refrigerator cookies: Mom’s Refrigerator Cookies came from my paternal grandmother, surviving the Great Depression. Not a fancy cookie: brown sugar, spices, nuts, and nourishing as a mother’s hug. Chocolate refrigerator, with nut chips and the siren call of melted chocolate seasoned overnight before baking.

My mother made checkerboard cookies, gauging the dough’s thickness, slicing strips with a knife, assembling with the slit-eyed concentration of a surgeon. “Mom’s doing the checkerboards,” we would whisper to each other, and stay clear. My grandmother made lebkuchen and anise cookies, set in the pantry overnight for their layers to separate.

We stored them in tins, in the unheated attic. Mother wrote the name of each cookie, in crayon, on the lid of each metal can: Holiday, Chocolate Holiday, Trees, Peanut Butter Blossoms, Mom’s, Chocolate Refrigerator. One year, in mischief and rebellion, I switched all the lids, so anyone hunting for a one-cookie snack found himself cracking the lid from tin after tin, muttering, “Where is it,” and sampling cookies along the way.

Over time we kept the canon and added varieties like turtle cookies: brown sugar base, chopped nuts in caramel, and the dark chocolate crust; M&Ms with gritty graham bits; espresso pretzels, twisted and iced; apricot rollups and cookies raised in bas relief from the carved rolling pin.

Our own mythos twined around the recipes. The year Craig ate a complete pan of unbaked ginger snaps and went on to tuck away a full supper. The year Mom’s dog seizured on baking day; she, Bob, and dog went to the vet while I stayed behind to bake. The job where I was threatened unless I produced a recipe for Beth's Nut cookies. The associate dean who spent a Sunday at my kitchen table, patiently applying colored splotches to cookies. The sibling rivalry over who hid the remaining turtle cookies.

Ten kinds, fifteen kinds, twenty-five kinds in one baking season. Days spent in the kitchen, sliding pans into and out of the oven, working as a team: one forming cookies and taking them off the pans; the other creaming the butter and sugar for the next batch. We started at eight in the morning and finished at midnight. We were back in the kitchen at eight the next day. The family knew better than to expect a hot dinner: they slunk into the kitchen for a cold meat sandwich and ate it quietly in another room. Cookie baking was our tradition. The women baked: the men delivered boxes of cookies to friends and relatives, each box containing 2 or 3 dozen, arranged to show off the variety. Our recipes survived the Great Depression and family economics. We may have scraped the money or time together, but we continued baking, through the deaths of Gran, then Mom, through the next primary baker’s two full time jobs, through happy years and the years that helped us appreciate happy years.

This year I’m getting out the mixer and taking inventory: flour, butter, brown and granulated sugar, chocolate chips, maraschino cherries, candied cherries, little colored sugars in shake jars, nuts and caramels. Cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and ginger. No exotic ingredients, just the flavors and spices of everyday life.

Yes, we don’t need the calories. But in a world illuminated by terrorist fires and divided by anger, we need the belief that things will turn out all right. We need the love and the continuity. We need the memories.

Come for Supper: Food and Books II

2008-11-22T06:52:00.000-08:00

Before we open the door to our guests, we need to make sure they have a horizontal surface on which to rest their food. Recipe sparring aside, this is the most traumatic part of cleaning for company. It’s clean here. We clean regularly: scrub floors, wash rugs, dust. But we do not move the books.

Books sit in towers on every flat surface. Two stacks have taken up residence behind the television (why waste that space?); books nest on the extra dining room chairs; books I am currently reading own the sofa-side table and books he is reading sit on the other side table. Since we have no house plants, there are four stacks of books on the microwave. We cannot move books to the bookcases until the books have been read, utilized for class, and possibly passed on to others to make room for more books. Why? We won’t know where they are.

Admittedly, there have been times when I wandered the house asking my son and husband, “Have you seen my book? I’ve lost my book,” describing its cover color size. Invariably my son replies, “Take another one, there are enough,” gesturing with his hand toward the several hundred waiting to be read.

Books are sorted, by occasion when they were found if not by topic or author. No matter how much I looked forward to them, for years having company meant moving stacks of books to the back room, from which I seemed never able to find the ones I most wanted. Time provided a solution to this problem.

Company is now graded by book-worthiness and comfort level. If you are new and a judging kind of person, we’ll offer to meet you at a neutral restaurant where the only books are menus, whisked away before the bread basket arrives. If we’re more familiar with you, we are able welcome you as we are. We don’t feel the need to move any books, though we will clear the kitchen table. And if you understand us, you know why the space for your drink is only large enough for the glass of whatever you are drinking, and that glass is set next to a pile of books.

Author Hunted - fiction

2008-11-15T06:25:00.000-08:00

A story about what might happen when characters are truly alive.

‘What are you willing to sacrifice for your own writing?’ I remember that question from the first session of my MA program in creative writing. Too many years ago. Too many course sections of being an instructor instead of a writer. Ironically, I had thought then that I had the answer.

I can tell you when it began. A laundry basket leaking underwear: the sleeve of my favorite blue shirt, striped towels; a brown paper kitchen garbage bag damp-welted and sagging; the patina of dust on my picture frames and shelves. Sunlight spilling through the spider webs in the basement. Clocks running faster than any list of chores, and that perpetual sense of not enough time. I remember I pushed aside an empty detergent bottle, thudded upstairs to fold towels, and then thumped my way back to the basement for the next load (wanting to put something in the dryer and discovering there’s an old load petulantly wrinkling inside). My mind was on seventy other things, until I reached the second last step and saw him standing next to the furnace, arms folded across his chest, chin tilted downward. Waiting for me as a hunter. Frowning just a little. But then that’s the way I always thought of him: frowning just a little, even when he smiled.
I wasn’t surprised, because all day I had had that sense of being watched, someone in the next room, someone just around the corner, someone whose breathing whispered in my ears.
I could feel his awareness, feel him scanning and listening, listening and waiting. If there were anything within half a mile (maybe a mile) he was aware of it. That’s how he had managed to stay alive.
The instant I became aware of him, he acknowledged me. He didn’t say anything, but his eyes were enough to say what he meant. He didn’t reach to touch me, or even gesture. But that, too, was Bruce.
I stood still, not breathing, holding the basket of rumpled laundry, ready to step toward him. Before I could, I woke up. My hand was folded into the palm under my pillow, but the only fingers there were mine. No stranger. I had seen him, felt him, felt him watching me, and he was more real than the pillow covering my hand of the blanket tangled around my feet. I winced: because of all the ways to end a story, ‘It was a dream,’ was perhaps the most trite; then I winced because it was a dream. He was certainly more real than anyone or anything else in the room. In my life.
I thought about Bruce while I dressed (pondering trite), and began a load of laundry (no, there was no figure next to the furnace, and besides that space was occupied with dusty cartons). I stood at the bottom of the steps, studying the place, willing him to have been there. I thought of him as I sat at the kitchen table, prepping classes, but really wondering exactly what it was all supposed to mean, since according to one writer everything in dreams means something and ‘every figure in the dreams no matter who it is should be interpreted as yourself.’ I’d like to be tall, muscled, and silent instead of short, rounded, and too often at a loss for words. I’m not sure about exchanging the female for male, but maybe in dreams that’s not significant.
I thought on Bruce’s significance (as well as his face) while I drove to class, and then, working to explain the difference between denotation and connotation to ten students who didn’t care and five who did, put people who appeared in dreams aside.
It was only when I settled into the squeaky chair in my office (a desk and chair behind a partition from someone else’s desk and chair), poured a cup of coffee from the community pot, and opened a package of cookies in my personal drawer, that the sense of everything not quite under control resurfaced. Stronger. There was nothing in or under control. I owed Mother a call; I owed the 8 a.m. section their essays papers, preferably graded; I owed mid-term grades; luckily I didn’t owe the IRS, but they were about the only ones in the black.
“Too bad,” I said aloud, rattling the cellophane under my fingers while I used one elbow to keep my place in the text book I was reviewing. “I’ve got too much to do.”
“Everybody has too much to do,” Deline answered me. “That’s why we talk to ourselves, to keep track of it all.”
“Hey.”
“Hey, there.”
“Grab a cup if you want some coffee.”
“The cookies were calling me,” dropping her books onto my desk.
“Help yourself.” Then because it was no use hiding what would eventually be wormed from me. “I saw him. Again.” I used the cookie for a bookmark and shrugged to show her it was no big deal.
“Tell me about it.”
“Typical dreams until he showed. Laundry overflowing in the ‘chute, scrambling late for work, ignoring the cleaning. Deline, I could sell the dust bunnies I’m raising. There’s got to be a market in allergy research for them if I could only find it. Or the time to find the market.
“I love all the people in my life, I love all my students this semester – yes, I do, Deline, don’t shake your head at me - and stop smiling. I love the ones who need me to stay after class every session because they missed last class and need extra help. I love the ones who can’t turn in an assignment because their third grandma died, and they had to go to a concert. I love the leaves that need to be raked from under the six trees in my yard, and the spiderwebs that need to be cleaned from my basement ceiling. I love the three faculty committees I got drafted to serve on, and the charity that wants me to go door to door to collect money for them. I love the publishing rep who keeps finding new things I should add to the anthology I’m doing to make the school look good, and the department chair who keeps agreeing with the rep. But all I wanted to do in the dream was to get away from all the wonderful people in my life, just for a little while. I guess, and this is the hokey part, to simply stand there, with him.“
“So who doesn’t want to get away? And some of those are kinky loves, if you ask me. Loving a guy is okay. Nobody enjoys serving on committees.”
I chose not to answer the second part of her statement because it was too correct. How many times did I use “love” and how many times did I mean it? “I can’t. He wasn’t like the exam you forgot to study for; he was real. It was the character, but there was also – and this is the weird part I can’t tell anyone but you – sexual angle there.”
“Honey,” Deline answered, “It’s not weird. Who else could satisfy you better than a man you made up yourself? I’ve had partners who should have taken lessons from the people I created in my stories.”
“It feels as though, each time I walk ‘round a corner, that he might be on the other side.”
“Think of him as one of your students. He’s annoying, so correct him with red pen.”
I tried to pull air into my lungs, but they refused to expand. “He won’t. He’s too intense; he doesn’t even smile, just a grimace. I didn’t make him up to be nice; I made him up to satisfy plot balance.”
“A sense of humor isn’t a non-negotiable requirement in a man.”
“Deline, be serious.”
“Amy, lighten up.”
“I’m trying. It’s just …”
“Serious,” Deline finished for me. “Okay, what do you want me to do? Maybe you shouldn’t be living alone.”
“Thanks, Mom. Finding Mr. Right is not the universal answer.” I gulped. “Mom. I need to call Mom. She’s on the list.”
“What list?”
“The list of things I should have done over the weekend.”
“It’s Wednesday.” Deline folded her arms across her chest. “You keep thinking of him because you want to finish the book. You want to work on your own writing rather than put together an anthology that will make the school look good.”
I lifted my palms in that gesture of futility. “I want to do the anthology. Sort of. It was my idea before the publishing rep and the department and a few other people began making suggestions. I want to do my own writing, for me. I can do both, actually. Just budget my time. Layers. Like paring an onion.”
“Onions make people cry.” She stared at me. “And you want to call your Mother. If you don’t, it’s going to get worse.”

Three more weeks of the eighteen-week semester. I corrected four sets of papers, listened to fifteen old excuses and one new one from students missing work, listened to my neighbor complain about the weeds in the lawn, attended two committee meetings and fell asleep in only one of them. I concentrated on the 806 deadlines in my life, and forgot about a visitor in the basement. Life continued normally until the morning I looked through the kitchen window into a grey misty morning, and met his eyes.
“I saw him last night,” I said slowly, needing to tell someone, half wishing the someone weren’t Deline. She knew too much of his history, and history made him real. “I think it was him, no, I’d bet money it was him. Damn, Deline, I know it was him. But a younger version.”
“I think you need to tell me about it.”
‘I’ve got a department chair looking for me, since I haven’t turned in mid-term grades by deadline.” Deline swallowed the last chunk of her cookie and leaned back in the chair. Some things were more important than deadlines.
“I was at home, standing in the room where I do my writing, looking out the window. There was a man in the yard, and my first impression was that he stood so still because he had a dog on a leash. I was annoyed: why was some guy letting his dog poop right there, in the yard, right outside my window. Then I noticed that he was wasn’t dressed.”
“Nude?”
“Except for a loin cloth sort of thing.” I swept a hand down my side trying to give her the right impression. “Not naked, flaunting himself, just not wearing many clothes. He didn’t care. I guess that’s almost nude. I looked at him, and he turned from whatever he was watching and stared at me.”
“How?”
“Sort of annoyed. Waiting.” I sighed again. “Waiting. As though I were slow at understanding.”
“Were you?”
“Since I was not sure what he wanted, maybe I was.”
“And you’re sure this is Bruce? Was Bruce? Not a new character, you know, some variety?”
I looked at the wall above Deline’s head and wondered if I should scream. I decided a scream would alert people I was hiding in my office. “Yes, I’m sure. But a younger one. Maybe, oh, twenty-five years old. Five years younger than he is, in the story I’m not finishing. His body wasn’t scarred up yet. Face not as lined. Strong, but not where I had him.”
“You could decide he’s a one-dimensional character. Moody, strong, dark and sensual. Flat.”
“No, that is not how he is.” But at the same time I wondered if I did know how he was. Is. I certainly hadn’t anticipated his coming to find me. Didn’t he have something more important, some one more important, to chase? Like a female lead? Some villains? Was this a plot weakness – a character preferring the author? Or just a weak in the head writer?
“Time to wake up,” Deline cajoled. “Amy back to the faculty offices. Return, Amy.” She snapped her fingers, frowning.
I reached toward a cookie. Shook my head, and drew my hand back empty. Folded my hands in my lap, decided they were clenched not folded, and carefully opened them across the fabric of my pants.
“It’s okay, Amy. What you imagine could be perfectly normal. You’re working an overload this semester, trying to finish the novel for publication, and editing that anthology.”
“I’m not finishing the novel, remember?”
“You’re stressed because you’re busy.”
“Duh. Okay, I’m busy. But maybe I’ve added ‘crazy’ to my schedule, just to amuse myself. How many people think about going off with a person they created.”
“You’re not,” Deline said sharply. “You’re just thinking about a character you made up, a long time ago, for a story you haven’t finished. That’s why he’s around: it’s your own to-do list. Face it, honey: The way you’re going, you might never finish it. Your mind is telling you what you already know.”
“That’s not how it feels.”
“You have a fantastic work ethic.” She paused, then, “Who needs another anthology, anyway? You see Bruce, but what you are actually seeing is yourself telling yourself what is important.”
“Thanks, Deline.”
“No thanks necessary. Listen, I’ve love to hear more about these men without clothes, but I have a class. If any deans come hunting for late grades, I’ll say I never saw you.”
I sat back in the chair and considered Bruce. This whole thing wasn’t about ‘men without clothes,’ it went deeper. He wasn’t mean or vindictive. Not haunting me. Or hunting me. It was a healthy relationship. If I had to put a color to it, I’d say green. Real. I sighed. That was part of my problem. What, indeed, was reality?
I played with the folders stacked in front of me. Deline was probably right. What I needed was to find a temporary boyfriend, someone who didn’t match any of Bruce’s pattern: short, pudgy, friendly, and undemanding. Talkative. Noisy enough that his babble would chuckle and gurgle its way over, under, around, and through the other man. Just like a good preposition and about as valuable to a life sentence.

I decided that since I could never hope to finish all the projects in my life, professional and personal [who needs to get along with neighbors after all, and mothers will understand], and that I did have a committee meeting in twenty-five minutes on how students could better use technical resources to develop interpersonal skills, I might as well escape the building for a short walk. Students do it all the time; why shouldn’t instructors? It was a glorious day with a cool wind. The woods bordering two sides of campus were deep, shadowy green. Sunlight made yellow freckles on the paths beneath the trees until the wood’s closed those paths in shadow. The sky was bright, and there was the smell of rain coming from far away. I sat on a bench in the sunshine at the edge of the pond, still watching the woods on its far side, baking my brains, and feeling the false peace that comes from desperately ignoring deadlines before they overwhelm. When my feet got cold, I looked down and noticed the sun had moved westward enough to put them in shadow. Checked my watch. Well, there were two wasted hours. No anthology progress. No committee meeting; wonder if they missed me. But no Bruce, either.

It didn’t feel horrible, being irresponsible. It felt sane. I decided it was safer to decamp to the library. If a fellow committee-ite were looking, he would check the faculty offices. I could work off some guilt before I was found, and the best place to do that was the library.
I scuttled furtively to a carrel in a dark corner of the library, plopped down the stack of folders. Sighed. Thought about Bruce and how his visits had lightened my days. “I don’t have time. It’s a character I created. I made him.” I held my head between my hands so my eyes had to look at the folders.
A girl in a black, V-necked sweater moved to the computer cubicles. One of the student aides squeaked past with a cart of books. Across the room, someone crumpled a piece of paper. The turnstile clicked another patron into the campus library.
My hands moved all by themselves out of my hair and into the stack of folders: class folders, notes for the next lecture, telephone messages to be returned, timeline for the anthology selections which would become a manuscript for the publisher, and then a book that would help our school look good.
If anything was insane it was the decision to work here instead of the faculty offices where it was quieter and more controlled. Or at home – no, wrong. If I were at home I’d be cleaning. I’d be figuring out which of the hundred home chores I should have finished last week. Or hoping I didn’t see him around a corner. Home was not an option if I wanted to finish anything by deadline. The offices were not an option unless I wanted to have a lovely afternoon talking with my peers. The library was not either, but it made the most sense of the trinity. I blew the stale air out of my lungs and tapped my fingers on the top folder: Alone. All grown up and afraid to be alone, was that what it had come to?
I was a target. Every time I had been a successful target, I was alone. Until the hunt was called off, I had two goals: finish the anthology / finish the semester, and not be alone. Call Mom. I might as well finish writing his story too while I was finishing off things. Maybe I could write him into exile. Or kill him. But I didn’t want to kill him. I didn’t want to exile him, either.
One of the printers began its pre-birth whine. If home was quiet, there would always be someone in the library: shuffling books, whispering study carrels, running notes through the copier. Ironically the library was where I first got the idea for him one fall afternoon. Life caught up with you. Except it wouldn’t. Going to find a nice dull person. Going to find a faculty person I hadn’t met already, someone, anyone. I’m going to do it, Bruce. Then we’ll get out our matching red pens, and edit you out.
I looked grimly around the edge of the carrel, over the short stacks, to the windows. Sloping lawns, a pond, and surrounding the campus that green belt of woods. A perfect place to lose myself. A perfect place: just me, a bunch of students, and a few thousand deadlines. And next semester it would start all over again.
I made working motions, doodling notes, shuffling papers in the ‘anthology’ folder. The afternoon slid toward later. Shadows began seeping from under the stacks, battling the fluorescent lights.
There was movement. I looked up and saw all the usual things. Across the room someone laughed at a joke. Someone ran the copy machine. A girl shoved books onto the shelves. Beyond her shoulder, in the afternoon shadows, there was deliberate movement, silent motion.
It was the eyes I noticed first: dark, dark brown that looked like black, then the rough brows under rough cut hair. Older: not the younger one who had stood in my yard, but the older. Two, three, maybe five years older than I. Hard to tell with the mileage, though. Scar, faint scar along the cheekbone. I remembered that. Needed a shave. That ironic frown that was more a looking into-the-sun squint. I stopped. Inventory was useless. Or stupid. It was apparently inevitable.
What might have been a smile of agreement tugged his mouth into a scythe and emphasized his cheekbones.
What was it I had said to Deline? ‘I’m exactly where I wanted to be five years ago.’ But time is unimportant. I’m exactly where I want to be. What could an author do? I stood and walked toward him, even before the ‘anthology’ folder had closed beneath my fingers.

Welcome Home

2008-11-08T07:57:00.000-08:00

We’re talking about prodigal child stories in class this week, not because it’s an election year, but because many of the stories in our text and our life seem to involve journeys and finding our way with the people we love (and sometimes dislike with great intensity).

Wolff’s “The Rich Brother”; Tan’s “A Pair of Tickets”; Williams’ The Glass Menagerie; Keillor’s Prodigal Son radio play; Ishiguro’s “Family Supper”; Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” and so many other tales, including our own lives: all have elements of that prodigal child.

What and where is home? I write on the board. What is the journey? How do the characters perceive and define home and their journeys?

We’re all prodigals at some time in our lives, often at many times in our lives. We leave via our bodies, or our emotions, or our minds. Even if we’re not the ones apparently leaving, we experience the prodigal child on multiple levels. There’s family relationships: Who’s Mom’s favorite? Who is not the golden child? There’s group relationships: Who’s the prodigal? How do the rest of us treat him? There’s changing roles: Sometimes I’m the prodigal and sometimes the other child. Sometimes I’m the one who journeys; and sometimes the one who stays home. Sometimes the parent; and sometimes the child.

Which role do we want to play, and what’s the meaning of it for us? Do we feel caught in a role? Being the good and responsible child gets old after a while. Is the prodigal child always the prodigal? Do we want to stop breaking the rules and start making them?

What’s at stake? Control. Limited resources: land, inheritance, love. Fear. Status. Self-identity. How much of who we are comes from inside and how much comes from asking others to give us our role and our worth?

If we’re out there, walking the byways or thumbing a lift, we’ve got the choice of going back. We can go back to be accepted. We can return to confront problems. We can be confronted in pain or anger by those we’ve left behind. We can go back to claim our rightful status, responsibility, and identity. We can claim our destiny.

Or we can refuse to return home: we can keep wandering. Maybe we’re haunted. Maybe we don’t want to accept our family or our identity; and maybe we’re busy creating a new one.

Yet if we identify prodigal with its meaning of luxuriant and abundant, we must include the father in that parable. He gives to both his children, throughout the story. He stays at home, waiting, but we need to remember that he also is wandering.

Every day we have the opportunity to go out, learn something, and come back home. We bring something back with us: sometimes a bottle of wine to share at dinner, sometimes a skill, sometimes love for the people who got dinner going and ran the washing machine. Sometimes not. Sometimes we bring back the same resentment we left with, not even airing it out on the trip.

Whoever has won, however we have voted, and wherever we come back to: welcome home

Dreams of Many Colored Glass - excerpt

2008-11-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

A man finds his life changed – against his wishes – by someone else’s dreams.

Before I got too settled, I wanted more information, so I hunted out Fish Eyes. “Doesn’t he have anyone around? And what about this Marjorie who used to be his wife? Did she have money? Is that why he married her?”
“Is that all you think about: money?” Fish Eyes dropped the wooden spoon. “You can’t trust people who think only about money. And what business is it of yours? She turned from the mixing bowl in front of her to stare at me. “Why do you want to know, anyway?”
“I like to see what makes things tick.”
“It’s more than ticking that makes things work.”
I of course had no compunction about probing further than good manners, and had richly earned my reputation of being willing to prod a vice-principal, a topic, a little sister, or a parent until it exploded. That was when I still cared.
“Did she?”
“As a matter of fact she did, not that it is any of your business.”
“So where did her money come from?”
“Her father. His family had money. Marjorie grew up used to it.”
“So that’s why he married her? So Fritz got into shady activities to get her what she wanted?”
“Who said that? The grandkids lying again?” Fish Eyes picked up a rolling pin.
“Nope. Nothing. Nada.” I held up my palms in surrender. “Haven’t met the grandkids. I was just wondering, and no one wants to tell me anything.”
“No one wants to tell you things that are none of your business.”
“So how did Fritz earn his money, if Marjorie came already equipped with it?”
Smash! The rolling pin came down on a piece of wax paper, and the brown sugar beneath that canopy shivered into tiny pieces. “Business. He was an inventor.”
“Of what?”
“Of things you can’t see.”
“Like what? Electrons? Pixie dust? Batman during the daytime?”
“Like things inside electric connections that nobody had thought of before. He was a smart man. Still is.”
“Then why doesn’t he have them here? There aren’t any electrical connection books in the library.”
Fish Eyes sighed again. “It was what he did, not what he loved. He loved Marjorie.”
“Who fell in love with a guy who made little tiny things inside electric plugs.”
“That’s it. Now maybe you can stop asking questions and go back to work, while I bake this coffee cake.”
“Why aren’t we having pie?”
“Because Fritz likes coffee cake.”
I wandered back to the office, thinking about electricity and coffee cake. If Fish Eyes was right, and Fritz’s invention hadn’t been reinvented, every time someone turned on a light a couple more pennies dropped into Fritz’s bank account. Let there be light. I wondered if God would sizzle me for the blasphemy. No, obviously not: Fritz didn’t allow frying near the lamps.
I gave the photos that Fritz had on the shelf in his office one more glance before I settled back to work. Lots of money, lots of lamps, no visitors. The answer had to be in that collection of faces, and I was going to find it.
“Tell me about the rest of Fritz’s family. Like the grandkids,” I asked Fish Eyes another day. Unfortunately she was in a less talkative mood.
“You better be careful, or you’re going to see more than you bargained for.” She pressed her lips into wrinkles and stared into the pot of soup she was cooking.
When I remembered our conversation later, I thought she had certainly been right: It was like saying Moby Dick was about more than catching fish.

Dreams of Many Colored Glass - excerpt

2008-10-25T07:08:00.000-07:00

A brilliant young man finds his life changed – against his wishes – by someone else’s dreams.

Fritz kept filling in the Grand Canyons of my education with anecdotes.
“Many years ago, Robert Koch bought his first Tiffany favrile for $4, which was a significant amount of money then.”
“I thought the Colonials traded in wampum.”
“You should respect your elders.” Fritz dipped his chin so he could look at me over his glasses.
“I do. But they need to earn the respect.”
“Koch wrote a definitive biography. He amassed a collection of Art Nouveau, including Tiffany art. Including a god-awful punch bowl that looks like it should have come from a carnival. But it’s a glorious example. His wife became a dealer instead of a teacher, so she could help him.”
The last statement seemed to come from deeper inside Fritz. I speculated what Mrs. Fritz had given up, in her husband’s pursuit of lamps.
So began my entry into the world of Tiffany, an entire ecosystem built on sand, fire, and light. There were times – coming into the breakfast room when 6 a.m. light bounced through an amber shade; seeing twilight change the sapphire and cream maze of a peacock lamp; sitting in a warm June evening when the peonies outside were almost as beautiful as the ones he created - that I caught myself from falling into the Tiffany well. I would never have admitted it to Fritz, but it would have been an easy fall. The lamps were gorgeous, if not worth the money.

Come for Supper: Food and Books

2008-10-25T07:07:00.000-07:00

“We could do pot pies,” I say hopefully. “One of each: chicken and beef. I could make that perfect pie crust recipe from my student who was a chef and a white sauce and use asparagus with the chicken.” I think of Dan who refers to it as “little trees” and revise, “or green beans.”
“We could do a rib roast,” my husband answers.
“We always do a rib roast.”
“And people always enjoy it. Why change what works?”
I think of the Forsytes’ inevitable saddle of mutton, appearing at every family dinner, varied only by geographic origin or sheep type, and push my imagination into flaky piecrust, thick pie contents steaming with carrots, potatoes, meat, green beans. Dinner rolls homemade.
“I think that’s a great idea,” he reinforces himself. “When do you want to have people over?”
Dinner with company is a time to share food with friends, a time to catch up on what’s new. Maybe what we serve should have some newness to it also.
Joe searches the Internet for recipes showcasing what’s in season and showcases the food: We’ve watched him toss heaped yellow, orange, and red peppers mushrooms and onions, over the gas flame, anticipated the broccoli soup in our bowls and held our hands out for his grilled shrimp skewers. Keith renews his engagement with the knife and gives us chop salad dense with carrots, peppers, and crunch. When we visit them for dinner, we demand what we’ve loved before. Support for Bob’s rib roast argument.
Tina spends November and December inside the magazine features on holiday food, or newspaper Entrée sections (where I found a marvelous fruitcake recipe once I modified it). I used to bake twenty-five kinds of Christmas cookies and give most of them away. [Maybe I should return to the tradition this year?] More argument supporting rib roast.
In one of my stories, the characters reminisce about great food scenes which also advance the plot. They, and I, are rebelling against the inept writing teacher who claimed that writing about meals is always boring. Handled well, food enhances stories and relationships. Handled ineptly, food preparation gives us boredom, humor, sometimes tradition (and enhances stories).
My mom’s Waterloo proved to be Shrimp Elegant (accent on the last syllable to distinguish it from ordinary shrimp). The woman who could make a perfect pie, give her company unparalleled dinners, and turn out family meals every day for years, had one set of shrimp that refused to sit up and behave. Conscienceless children that we were, we reminded her of that debacle. I think she shredded the recipe, in an era before professional shredding machines.
Reading Julie’s recipes is just like listening to Julie [“whomp the cream”; “I had a cloves disaster, but didn’t matter much”], and I know the results from her recipes will be delicious. Marinated cold vegetables glisten orange, pale green, ivory, red, chartreuse under their light oil and wine dressing [“don’t spend money on the expensive olive oil”]. Tina, Bob, and I ate our first Linzer cookies at Schreiner’s in Fond du Lac, and the woman who brought grape salad to the dog rescue reunion was extolled and hounded, until she provided the recipe. Come to think of it, I have been threatened with unpleasant consequences by coworkers if I did not share the recipe for Beth’s Nut cookies. Recently, we and our company enjoyed the chocolate espresso cake from Eat Cake.
Back to what we will serve. Rib roast, he maintains. Perhaps Marge’s Lasagna recipe? One of the desserts from my mom’s recipe collection? Tradition acknowledged, if only we are not always sitting down to saddle of mutton.

Nobody Ever Died of Terminal Weirdness - excerpt

2008-10-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

Nobody Ever Died of Terminal Weirdness is the narration by a high school student of the year that he decided to become normal (just like everyone else in his high school class). Normal meant avoiding tangles with the vice principal and track coach, but mostly normal meant having a girlfriend.

Last year my counselor signed me up for advanced chemistry. On the crest of my new resolution, I figured it offered another opportunity. Any girl in advanced chem was not exactly typical, so "weird" became just a matter of degree. The why she (like anyone else) was there fit into a limited number of slots. You might be actually gifted in chemicals and tiny number equations; your parent might be pretty persuasive about how you should be put into an advanced class so they could brag about you to their friends; the science department might believe you would do less damage in advanced chemistry playing with chemicals than in advanced biology playing with preserved pigs' feet and Mr. Green's mind; the school might be short a few slots on its minimum roster to make the class run. By the end of biology with Mr. Green, we could figure out who was going to be in advanced chemistry: we added up the laboratory emergencies, tallied the broken glass column, looked at who had the most after-school talks with Mr. Green about biological and chemical applications to the real world (like the school bathrooms), and we had have most of the ad chem list. Considering the relationship I established with Mr. Green, I figured I was a natural.

Mr. Grey the Advanced Chem teacher has leftover white hair, thick round glasses, and weathered sweaters that smell of Bunsen burners. He's also old. I know this because of the way he walks when he turns from the doorway to begin our class, and also because he scratches his head considerably. If it's not fleas starting his scratch, then it's puzzlement. We respected his age, and we vowed to do anything in our ability to add to his puzzlement.
There's a nose-biting sharpness to chemistry rooms, and the excitement of knowing that the dust particles above your head might frizzle if you hold a match aloft. The chemistry lab is the only place on school grounds where you can legally have matches. If there are girls at the next lab table who are afraid of the Bunsen burner, you can generally get their chemicals in exchange for copies of your lab results. Best of all, lurking always among all these chemicals is the possibility of blowing up a lab table, and if you're lucky, your lab partner along with it.
The main point of chemistry was messing around with whatever chemicals were stored in Mr. Grey's hundreds of glass bottles. Mr. Grey categorized his chemicals, not by alphabet, or periodic table, but by danger.

Life

2008-10-11T11:37:00.000-07:00

Life's like the tide: energy, money, sunshine, connections to others come in cycles. The tide comes in, and there's lots of water. The tide goes out and there's more beach. If we don't have a pier, then when the tide goes out we might get lost at sea.

Money

2008-10-11T11:34:00.000-07:00

Money is on our minds. It’s an election year with both candidates predicting economic disaster should I vote for the other guy; Wall Street is imitating a yo-yo; pay raises may or may not have kept pace with inflation, but they probably have not kept pace with the gasoline/heating energy/food price increases.

I’ve been thinking about money. What’s essential, what’s non-negotiable? Where do we economize and where do we blow the budget? The other morning my husband remarked, “You know I have never liked this blanket,” as he straightened the cotton woven blanket on the bed. I believe “too many books” is an implausible and impossible concept. Everybody needs to eat. It’s nice to stay warm when the thermometer registers 30 degrees. Compromise? Refusal to negotiate? I liked that sage colored cotton throw.

I found a turquoise and lime cotton stitched blanket at Target: $59.99 reduced 75% to $12.48. It was tied into a nice bundle, which felt heavy enough to be the right size. Maybe turquoise wasn’t our first color choice, but who sleeps with their eyes open? We keep bringing home books, but often they’re from thrift stores (25 cents/book) or library sales (the much higher price of $1/book). I shop the used book division of Amazon, weighing condition, shipping charges, and rationalizations (but if I spent $25 on their new books, I get free shipping from Amazon). That’s rationalization. Or survival. Or compromise.

Some of us buy in quantity – a quarter cow or industrial size bottles of soap. Some of us get movies from the library instead of Netflix. Some of us find the joys of used book stores. According to a news item, hundreds of people waited in line to get into a new Goodwill store in Connecticut. More of us are bartering. We’re thinking about where we are willing to compromise and which parts of our lives make us who we are (and are non-compromisable).

Quality food is important. We are what we eat, in more ways than the scale. What’s it worth to spend more on cage-free eggs? Better taste, better conscience, happier hens. If I’m going to eat a donut, I want it to be a toothsome donut. I’d rather turn the thermostat down, put on an extra sweater, and take that money to the grocery store. (Some people have told me this is a Midwest trait.)

Some things we cannot give up. I have a habit of finding wonderful books, and then finding additional copies to share with others. Creating Money, by Roman and Packer, has been one of those standbys, (along with Your Money or Your Life by Dominguez and Robin and You Don’t Have to go Home from Work Exhausted! By McGee-Cooper, et al).

We evoke situations (and people) by our beliefs. Money is energy. Money is a way to demonstrate ego, or a tool to help others. Money is connected with work, whether we take joy or misery from our job. Even when we’ve been given a pink slip and shown the door, that door is not a one-way trip to Hades. Sometimes we think it is – but invariably good emerges, like a phoenix rising from destruction.

The most important thing we bring to money is our attitude about it. Get out your library card and go read Creating Money and Your Money or Your Life. Remember that phoenix.

The Universal Woman

2008-10-04T12:59:00.000-07:00

Visiting Rosemary moved us out of where we were, into where we found out we wanted to be. Or, you could argue, it got us in trouble.

Judy and I went to see Rosemary-at-home, in our volunteer capacity for dog rescue. [What kind of dog would be happiest in the home? is one way of explaining it. You don’t want to place a dog with arthritis in a tri-level home with stairs to each entrance and bedrooms on the topmost level.]

Rosemary’s back hallway was one step up from the yard, so there was no arthritis factor. “Oh my, oh my,” Judy and I said to each other. “Oh, my.” What awed us was Rosemary’s matter of fact creation of everyday life. All she did was answer our off-topic comments.

“How did you get the walls to have that swirl of colors? Like light and shadow, or silk, or water color.” “Oh that?” Rosemary waved a hand at the walls, “Faux painting. I could show you how to do that in a short time: maybe half an hour. You could do that easily.” Judy and I looked at each other. I know my painting range.

We talked about dog and person happiness, but unlike other home visits, we ranged across the Home Depot/Lowe’s/Mendard’s/Big Lots/Goodwill/Ace Hardware universe. “How did you install the tile?” “Got a sledge hammer because the people who had this house before had poured a 2” layer of concrete on the kitchen floor to level it.” “Who’s the person in the photograph?” “I don’t know, but I like old pictures, the kind that would have been taken when the house was built [1914], so when I find them together, I don’t throw the photo away.” She slipped off her shoes and climbed onto the sofa to lift a photo of some people at a picnic from the wall, “And sometimes there’s inscriptions on the back. I wouldn’t want to lose those.” We looked at the penciled words in a old-style handwriting: Washington Park, June 6, 1910.

She was comfortable where she was, with all she had accomplished. We were comfortable in our role of prying questioners. “That panel of stained glass matches the colors in the kitchen.” “It should; I made it in the studio upstairs where I teach. It’s not hard.” Having spent a summer cutting shreds of stained glass, I knew that the theory was not hard; it’s the cutting line that doesn’t always run true. It’s not easy to create a panel 3 x 4 ft where all the pieces need to match their paper patterns.

“The tin tiles on the walls aren’t part of the original house?” “I bought it as a condemned property; it was there at the time I needed a house. There were holes in the walls, and mice running across the floors. It took a couple years. Pretty soon I’ll be finished inside, then I’m going to work on the yard – more flower gardens.” She paused and touched the cookbook open on her counter. She shrugged and smiled. “I like doing it. The countertop, for instance: I happened to find a company that had the right size piece of granite, to fit in the corner of the kitchen.”

One of Rosemary’s gifts was that she made things seem possible (I could go to Home Depot for materials and accomplish a similar project); another was that she didn’t promote herself; the other was that each of the projects had worked toward her goal: creating the home. And the one that won us completely over was her sense of humor, “Sorry about the little branches on the front porch. They’re doing road work in the next block, so all the squirrels that used to live there, moved here for the summer. They didn’t want to be displaced, and they’re going kind of schizophrenic, so they keep chewing off little branches.”

She had a suggestion, too, on dog motion sickness (aka turning green around the eyes and depositing their last meal on the car’s back seat) to add to our list of helpful solutions. (“Give them a tiny bit of ginger”).
I’m not faux painting, but we did go hunting for granite and old picture frames. Seeing someone else’s work toward goals can do that. We step out of our routine, take a deep breath at what our eyes see, and go back home looking around with a new perspective and belief the projects in our imagination can turn out fine, even if we’re beginning them on dreams and courage. Thank you, Rosemary.

Dreams of Many Colored Glass - excerpt

2008-09-28T08:16:00.000-07:00

A man finds his life changed – against his wishes – by someone else’s dreams.

Beauty is truth and truth is beauty, and that’s all you need to know. Until you drop and break it, when you get the bill for truth and beauty, plus the twenty-two per cent revolving interest charge, and a free speeding ticket.

Sitting in Buffalo Bill’s Fabulous Family Burgers (Buffalo, NY - in case they thought some of their customers might miss the predictability), wondering what she was going to do after she walked back to the booth, I thought about beauty and truth, life and death, breaking things and being found. I peered out the window to the parking lot for the third time. Yup. Truck was still there. Nice and tidy, angled neatly between the yellow lines. If you were an ordinary observer, you could believe Old Marsh was anybody’s truck, filled with cardboard boxes which were probably filled with deliveries. Donuts. Yeah.
I settled my back solidly against the seat cushion and watched her silent, sneaker-footed, grey-eyed advance.
“Listen, uh.”
“It’s Ran,” she said slowly.
“Ran. Right.”
“Ran. As in ‘Run, Ran, Have Run.’”
“Is ‘Ran’ short for something?”
“Yeah. It’s short for, ‘Start talking if you want me to keep listening.’”

I didn’t want her to listen at all, but she wasn’t going to give up. So what was a clean cut guy with dark circles under his eyes, an average looking jacket, size 12 nondescript sneakers, and fingertips drumming the tabletop wanting to get out of there going to do?

Ran: the woman who had been following me across the country finally had a name. Or half of one. She also looked familiar. My mind rummaged inside my brain, opening and closing file cabinets, trying to remember where I had seen here before. Flowers: she reminded me of flowers – which was pretty incongruous, since she was staring at me like someone gauging the distance from home plate to the outfield fence. I stared at her. She looked back at me. I lifted my coffee cup and gave a half-shrug.
I considered what I should say, what I could say without jeopardizing Fritz’s plan, and what would make her go away. I gave Ran a glance. She was still staring back.
I wondered how much of this was well founded suspicion, and how much was my desire to not get caught again before I finally reached where I was going, and how much was Fritz’s insistence on covering every aspect of the situation. Fritz believed that paranoia could be healthy. Fritz.
Sitting in the restaurant, my back feeling grateful for a booth instead of a truck seat, our past broke over me like an explosion of colored glass. I set down my coffee cup, looked at Ran who must have fit into this some way, and started talking.

Nobody Ever Died of Terminal Weirdness - excerpt

2008-09-24T04:02:00.000-07:00

Nobody Ever Died of Terminal Weirdness is the narration by a high school student of the year he decided to become normal (just like everyone else in his high school class). Normal meant avoiding tangles with the vice principal and the track coach, but mostly normal meant having a girlfriend.

I decided that by the end of the week, the end of the year, or the end of my life - whichever came first - I would have a steady girlfriend, and be considered normal. What made this only more difficult was no one in my family believed I needed changing.
I figured they were not the best ones to judge normal.
"You don't need to worry about impressing girls at your age," my mother said. "Just be yourself."
"I can't afford a big date on a social security check, and with the help you give me, that's about when it's going to happen."
"I didn't date at your age."
"Listen," I said as kindly as I could, "Growing up to be like my mother is not my top priority." I left my mother talking to the back to school shopping list, and looked up my brother, the football team captain, Honor Society president, and Boyfriend. Since he managed to avoid the family curse and actually acquire a girlfriend, I thought I could get some pointers. "This is the year," I said, standing in his doorway, "I'm going to get a girlfriend. Also get on a sports team, win over the vice principal, and be normal. Do you think you can help me out?"
"Are you still combing your hair once a year on Christmas Eve?" he asked. "You could start there."
"I hoped to make some progress before December," I answered. "But thanks anyway." My brother unfortunately considered himself a solo operator.
My father was watching the twentieth rerun of the Ice Bowl, but he swiveled from the tv to my question. "Just remember most things are a plot, and you can't really trust women to tell you if your fly is open," he admonished. "Also that you can't always get points when you need them, and sometimes neither can the other team." Since I wanted to find a female I could trust with more than basic neatness or football strategy concerns, I thanked my father and trotted back to my room.
After I locked the door, I began to plan.

About (of course) books

2008-09-21T11:21:00.000-07:00

Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Powells send me regular emails. Half Price Books keeps me informed of sales with their coupon cards. Polite staff at The Book Seller, housed in the main library, sell me their withdrawn books. When I need books that I didn’t know I needed – for reference and for reading - I visit Tina’s Paperback Book Exchange.

Tina knows books. She’s known books since grade school, or before. She sits at the counter looking over the cover of the book she is currently reading, to answer my questions, to direct me to books, to suggest that the book I don’t know I am looking for might be the third one down on the second shelf, to talk books.

Tina finds books I didn’t know existed. Amazon might have alerted me about them once I bought something similar, but Tina has the ability to synthesize all the parts of my interests. She’s a reading book-seller, able to anticipate what I would like and what aspect of a book is going to be important in what I’m writing.

A few months ago, as I began developing a manuscript about an astro physicist, I was at Paperback Book Exchange browsing the shelves. “I need an old book about the stars,” I said, “something that would have been kept in the attic, read by a kid years ago. A good book.”

“What about this one?” The illustrations were vaguely Art Deco, the paper thick, the dust jacket slightly chipped at the bottom of the spine, the smell of old paper, dry attics, and time. The Young Folk’s Book of the Heavens. Published in 1925. It was perfect. Up to date astronomy information I could find on the Internet. What I needed and Tina found was period information for my story’s plot and character development.

Books reach Tina in the usual ways and in some not so usual. Customers trade in their have-reads to be applied toward the price of to-be-read finds. Stock keeps changing, augmented by sources only Tina knows about. In addition to an exhaustive knowledge of what’s in the store, Tina has the ability to find what someone is looking for. “I need a book on quantum physics that I can understand,” I tell her, acknowledging that I’m requesting a specialized item geared toward a non-science bent mind. She will find it.

Tina remembers. “I’m looking for all the books Margot Benary-Isbert or Alexandra Raife or Joseph Altsheler have written,” I say. One by one, she finds them. She sets aside other books for me to look at on my next visit, books that she has unearthed at rummage sales, found in tag bins, discards, results of her regular route of discovery.

A few times I’ve accompanied Tina on book scouting expeditions. I will quickly scan the titles on the shelves and be ready to move on. She will reach to the shelf; pull out a book, and say, “Is this the one you were hunting for?” Tina found The Forsytes by Suleika Dawson, a contemporary continuation of the family story. She also found John Fisher’s The World of the Forsytes, a book about the society and customs of Galsworthy’s original Forsyte saga family. Books come to her. Books like her.

There’s a box of Free to Good Home books at the back door of the Paperback Book Exchange, but there’s a hundred thousand or more books for sale inside the store: paperback and hardcover, familiar and hard to find, all arranged by category. What’s there? Tina knows. “Do you have any mysteries by Agatha Christie?” asks a customer. “In the mystery section right around the corner in the next room, on the third shelf,” Tina answers.

Today I have time to browse: I let my hands and eyes look over who has appeared on the shelves since my last visit. A book about psychology, mentioned in something else I read. A biography of Victoria Woodhull (Notorious Victoria), the first woman to run for president, the first female Wall Street broker, one of the first women to advocate Free Love (a term Henry Thoreau coined long before the 1960s movement). Books of poetry, travel, adventure, escape, romance, mystery, philosophy, and war.

Paperback Book Exchange is more than a bookstore. There’s time to stand and talk; there’s time to ponder the character, the plot, the plausibility of what happened in a bestseller or a much loved classic. Surrounding us are thousands of books. The smell of paper and ink, turned pages and book memories fill the store. It’s better than a library, because once I buy a book, I don’t need to take it back. I can simply go there again, for talk about books and stories, and more books.

As Tina would say, “Imagine that: about books.”

Paperback Book Exchange – Neenah, WI

Excerpt from a story I am writing

2008-09-13T12:17:00.000-07:00

He could see the beginning of day: pink streaking the black sky. Far up, miles into the horizon, were blue splotches with dark grey clouds among them, a reflection of day curving from the other side of the earth.
He didn’t need to pretend any more.
A little after 5 a.m. he crested the rise and came swiftly down into the town. Convenience store lights picked out a yellow and white pattern, bright stones on dark concrete. Signs told him where he could get a drink, come opening time; where he could sleep, come night; where he could shop, if there was anything he wanted to shop for. Behind it all lay the mountains like heavy clouds holding down the horizon.
He didn’t need anything. He was back. And he was looking for whoever it was, he had to meet.

Weather as a Literary Phenomenon

2008-09-07T11:16:00.000-07:00

Today is sunny and warm. I took a break from commenting on students’ essays to sit in the sun. It’s seasonably warm (for the frozen Tundra). Even without looking at the calendar, though, I can feel fall. The quality of the sunshine is different, and so is the air.

In spring, there’s an underlying coolness to the air. We’re opening up doors, uncovering ourselves from the winter cold, emerging from blankets and layers of clothing. We’re like sheep free of their heavy wool. The ground is boggy and anything that’s growing is fighting fiercely for its bit of earth. The insects are frenzied as they lay their millions of eggs. We’re frenzied as we spray poison, plan the good weather projects, and calculate how many days of sunshine we are entitled to. In fall, there’s an underlying warmth to the air. The insects have done their work, the plants are figuring that they managed the program (leaf-bloom-seed) and can rest. The green and white plates of Queen Anne’s lace have curled into brown bird nests. We’re either still frenzied (How much squash am I supposed to make into zucchini bread?) or we’re thinking back over the summer. The air has a golden clearness, like white grape juice, or white wine.

Season, to be obvious, plays such an important part in stories. It’s much easier to send a prowler through the yards in October (dark by 6 p.m.) than in June (dark around 9:30 or so). Night to day’s ratio has increased. I can sift snow over my characters and then, if they are not showing enough fortitude or misery, ship them into January and slip a couple degrees out of the thermometer. We can feel sorry for the homeless much more easily when it’s cold, than in June when we must meet curfew and they are free to the starry nights. On the local highways and byways, we say there are two seasons: winter and road construction. Those also lend themselves to story telling.

My mom used to say that she hated fall because “everything dies.” It rests. Some of it goes underground for a while, some of it turns its face elsewhere as the planets and stars revolve above us. And some of the vegetation begins plotting its revenge of next year.
One of the things I think about doing “someday” is making a list of memorable literary events, in the seasons they occur, and considering the season-life relationship. Not every character dies in fall, though the drawing to the end of the growing season offers obvious parallels to human life spans. Not every baby is born in spring, and not every happy marriage takes place in June. [That cliché: “If you’re married in June, you’ll always be a bride. Who wants to always be a bride?] Every season offers something to the writer. No better words in the English language, Henry James commented, than summer afternoon. Maybe he was considering the warm afternoons free of visitors, free to him as he dictated his stories; maybe he was thinking of the tea table.

Different

2008-09-07T11:11:00.000-07:00

He brushes with Crest; I use Tom’s of Maine. When the thermometer hits 70, he’s pulling on a t shirt, sweatshirt, jeans and thick socks; I speed-dress in t shirt and shorts so my knees can breathe. I look forward to the swaths of tiny bright blue scilla blooming amid our spring grass; he asks when he can get out the lawnmower and guillotine them. My favorite physical presents have involved books or wood or clocks or colored glass, while his might be the 14 cu ft freezer in which he can count resources. (“We have three packages of ground chuck which I got at 30% off, one loaf of white bread, and two sirloin steaks.”) No ice cream, I comment to myself (flavor doesn’t matter, so long as it’s ice cream).

However, last fall, he was the one with the second shovel, lifting divots of lawn so we could slip 200 scilla bulbs (25 for $6 at Jung’s Plants; plant with the pointed end up) into their earth envelope, and a few days ago I was the one saying, “If you want to get another package of meat, go ahead.”

Given the opportunity to do so, I can obscure the details in the large picture (“It’s a gorgeous day”) while he keeps the details intact (“There’s a forty per cent chance of rain this afternoon, so take along your raincoat”) that maintain sanity in our lives. Weather is a system of chaos, I tell him; there’s an enormous uncertainty factor. One shift in the wind, and everything changes. “But if you have your raincoat, you’re okay,” he will answer. He’s right. I can choose to get wet, or I can pull on the raincoat and put up the hood.

Different could have become a series of antagonisms, a point of ridicule, or a set of skirmishes. Thanks to time and the financial ability to purchase two different brands of toothpaste on the same shopping trip, different is an enriching part of our lives.

Books

2008-09-03T14:47:00.000-07:00

Enough of a title in itself, some of us would argue.

I have had a long fascination with books. My son would call it a mania, as he pointed out, laughing uproariously as he read aloud the quiz from the book Bibliomania. “Are books the first thing people notice when they walk into your house?” He answered for me, “No. They are the only thing.”

For a childhood birthday party, my mom suggested to someone that she get me a copy of King of the Wind, Marguerite Henry’s story of the Godolphin Arabian, because for months my name had been the only one on the library’s check out card (back when books in the library had check out cards). And there, at the party, holding in my hands a copy of the book that I did not need to give back when its borrowing time was up, I entered the world of owning books.

That was not the only book I could call mine; I had many childhood books, the Little Golden Books, story books passed on from my mom’s childhood. But to have a book that was something I wanted to read, a book that did not reflect the interests of someone else in the family: that was new. I was hooked into books (paraphrasing the title of another book).

I can justify book ownership. Some of them I need for teaching: reference books, books about the writers we discuss in class, books illustrating how people dressed to make the descriptions in a story clearer. Some of them are reading books for winter nights, or summer afternoons, or when I need to enter a world that’s less frantic than 200 cable channels available through a series of remote-clicks. Some of them tell me how I should do things like repair a piece of furniture, and my mind thinks it understands even if my hands do not have the skills to follow the directions. Those are the books that I could validate to my son and anyone commenting that I certainly have a lot of books. (Over the years there have been a few people of that opinion.)

There’s something to be argued, though, for simply having books. Turn the page of an old library book, and your fingers feel the difference on the page where hundreds of fingers have worn the piece of paper thinner. How many people had the time, made the time, to go through the book. I will likely never meet them, but we have enjoyed the same book.

Books give us space. I enjoy the Internet. I like having quick communication. Sometimes, though, it’s nice to sit down with something that doesn’t want me to engage in noise, except for the turning of pages. And the interrupting of others when I read aloud a particularly good passage in the book. My son claims I have forever ruined one of his horror stories because at the same time I was reading Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, and insisted on sharing the hilarious sections.

Books offer solace. Sometimes I already know how the story turns out; in rereading I can appreciate the technical aspects of story development, I can attend to the background characters, I can observe the symbolism. I can simply enjoy reading a story I have read many times before: spending time with a good friend. How many times have I reread The Forsyte Saga since the summer afternoon I sat in a lawn chair, turning the pages of a library copy? I don’t know, but now (just like that birthday present book) I have a copy of my own. Opening it and reading John Galsworthy’s dedication [“To My Wife I dedicate the Forsyte Saga in its entirety, believing it to be of all my work the least unworthy of one without whose encouragement, sympathy and criticism I could never have become even such a writer as I am”], I think, Wow. I think about Galsworthy’s life, and the parallel examples of literary love (the Brownings for example, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How do I Love Thee”). I think about how The Forsyte Saga grew into quite a few books about that society, as it changed from Victorian into Edwardian times and beyond. Galsworthy’s character Soames Forsyte received an obituary [not a book review notice] in London’s newspaper, when Galsworthy sent Soames into the literary great beyond.

Books tell us about the people who wrote them. One of the things I ponder is: What’s this writer’s message? If I could condense a writer’s message into one or two sentences, what would all his/her books be about? Society forms people; or You can/can’t go home again; or Give your all and you will succeed; or good will eventually triumph. I wonder if the books we write change their message over our writing careers, or if our characters change; but our core message, no matter how the plots change and the characters vary, remains the same.

There's not much to dislike about books.

Long Term Consequences

2008-09-01T06:07:00.000-07:00

Just as Capstar works with fleas, searching the Internet for matching word patterns detects plagiarism. Both treat the immediate condition. Neither eradicates the source or prevents its recurrence.

Sometimes fleas are picturesque: the novelistic portrayals, or “flea bites,” those tiny dings in use-worn marbles. Mostly, fleas and plagiarism are less than ideal.
They’re a parasite on the host: the dog or the Internet;
They have a tendency to spread effects to the unsuspecting: members of the family, and students who did their own work;
They are socially unacceptable in certain circles and the norm in others;
One culture encourages the infestation while another wants to fumigate it out of existence, and supports an industry designed to do just that.

Even the usually revered Founding Fathers paraphrased their sources, someone could argue. Ah, but the Founding Fathers believed in working for a cause, education, and thinking.

Some of my students spend hours writing, thinking, writing, researching, and laboring over their final copy. They didn't enjoy devoting nights and weekends to the project. They committed the time because the essay was a class assignment, because they believed my comments ("With each writing you do, you will become a better writer"). They don't see the long term result yet, but they appreciate the short term satisfaction of completing an assignment and receiving positive comments when it comes back to them. They also deeply resent the people who economized on time and improved hand coordination by copy/pasting a response posted elsewhere, written by someone else. As an instructor, I've spent hours before I hand out the assignment, trying to create directions that will encourage students to do their own work, their own thinking, their own writing. I've shared rough drafts of the assignment with others, asking "How can I make it better?" Collectively, we (the students and I) resent copying: they because they want everyone to be equal, I think. I because I want everyone to think and write.

The plagiarists, confronted with "their" essay as it appeared elsewhere under someone else's name have reacted with nonchalance. They have shrugged. They have said their roommate/friend/parent was the one responsible for copying. They have said that the online source copied from them. I give my "It's about thinking" response. Sometimes they nod their heads to indicate they have heard me (or so I stop explaining). Plagiarism is being untrue to yourself as well as others. That’s one perspective I tell myself, as I return to reading a stack of essays.

We finished sealing the cedar gazebo. For weeks, our garage smelled of cedar, that wood more aromatic than pine or redwood. Cedar is less expensive than some of the other choices, it's somewhat weather-resistant even without sealing the wood, and it's beautiful. Knots and grain in the boards make each piece of wood unique.

For weeks, I would open the door, and draw a deep breath. Board by board over the summer, we moved materials from storage to construction, figuring out how the cross pieces fit into the frame, how the roof could be attached. To protect the wood more than its natural resistance offered, we wanted to waterproof it, and did. Which led eventually to my idea of decorating the patio.
“I can tell where you painted,” Bob said, pointing. “Everywhere you worked on it, you left a mess underneath. Bob is right: I am a Messy Painter.

I have a Painting Outfit: oversize t shirt with souvenirs of each project (dark green, blue, white, cream, yellow, teal, and a splotch large as a handprint on one shoulder where I thoughtlessly rested a paint-covered hand), and somewhat less paint-decorated shorts. “Everyone has specific talents,” I tell my students. “Some of you are great at Finding Jobs, or Getting a Boyfriend, or Cooking.” One of my talents is Messy Painter.

I can wash the shirt and shorts, but it’s going to be a little more difficult to remove sealant splotches from the concrete. “What if we make it artistic?” I ask. “I can drop paint of all different colors around there, and it will look nice.”
“I think it would look weird,” he says.
But maybe if I practice on an unsuspecting surface…? Random spots of color, wherever they happen to fall from the brush…play to my talent of Messy Painter?

2008-08-31T06:26:00.000-07:00

This blog is about writing, teaching, teaching about writing and literature (aka other people’s writing), dogs, food: life. I’ve taught students from kindergarten through college over the years; coached student teams; written stories, magazine feature articles, course outlines, assignments, notes, apologies, poetry, letters, and more stories which took their own mind and became novels.
So why Searching for X, also the title of one of my stories? I think we are all searching for X, in some aspect of our lives. Maybe it’s a better job, the person we’re going to fall in love with, the perfect recipe for sugar cookies. (Which I have, by the way, thanks to my friend Ina.)
We were talking about what-we-were-going-to-do-over-the-summer. “I’m going to find the perfect sugar cookie recipe,” I told her. I had it all planned: bake a batch a week, and spend the long bright days trying them. Some would be too floury: the butter taste would not come through and they’d be flat, even fresh out of the oven. Some would have too much sugar: they might have the right taste, but the consistency of a sandcake. Some might taste like the original Girl Scout cookie recipe (another goal). In between cookie batches, I’d sit in the sun, go to the Lake, watch tree leaves wave green flags against the blue sky. I might gain a pound a week (you can’t gain more than a pound per batch of cookies, right?), but by the end of the summer I’d feel relaxed and have the right sugar cookie recipe.
“I have the perfect recipe,” she said. “It melts in your mouth. Everyone loves it. I will write it out and give you a copy.” She could have baked some to go with the recipe card, but she was busy with her summer, earning an “A” in Greek 2.
When I got the recipe, I stared at it for a few days. I could have put it aside and puttered about with butter and flour, sugar and salt in the cookbooks’ Sugar Cookie suggestions. But I sighed, and faced up to her truth. It made the best sugar cookies I had tasted.
So I rode my bike, sat under the trees, watched the lake’s bands of colors, and reminded myself that I had saved putting on a few pounds.
I also needed another goal for the summer. I needed to search for X.
X is the elusive, beyond-where we are, the something that – when we reach it - we discover is Y, or Z, or NaCl, taking us into a new subject which might explode in our faces or sprinkle itself across our breakfast.
Once we have it, as my friend Tina says, we find a new X. It’s the quest toward, not the finding of, that is important.