It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

The Other Side

I am a child of the 70s, a child of equal rights, of feminism, of the era of sensitive males.  I grew up believing that anything boys could do, girls could do better, that women could compete with men, toe-to-toe and head-to-head, but that men still were supposed to open doors and that boys couldn’t hit girls.

My sister and I were the only children and the only grandchildren.  We learned (with varying degrees of success) to cook, clean, sew, shoot, whittle, fish, sail, row, woodwork, and dig really deep holes in really hard clay (ask about the swimming pool debacle of 1990 sometime.)  There was no “men’s work” or “women’s work” in our childhood home; there was just work.  There were chores to be done and whoever was best suited or was free at the time did them.  We played with dolls and with Tonka trucks, had tea parties and waged battle in forts.  In our day, there was still a term for girls who “played like boys” – tomboy.

I married a man who could cook and clean, who would be an equal partner in child-rearing, not (as I told my mother-in-law early on) because I was lucky, but because in my mind, these things were required.  I entered a profession, once dominated by men, at a time when the pendulum was swinging the other direction.  Today, roughly 90% of graduating veterinarians in the U.S. are female.

This trend in veterinary medicine mirrors educational trends throughout the country – more and more women are holding higher and higher degrees.

In general, I applaud all of these societal shifts.  I’m female.  I have never had any desire to be defined by my gender or my reproductive capacity.  Yet, I can’t help wondering – as our societal expectations for men and women have evolved, what are we leaving behind.

For those of you who are parents, think of your children’s classes for a moment.  What is the gender breakdown of kids who are considered “difficult,” “challenging,” or “hyperactive?”  I’d be willing to bet that the percentages skew heavily toward the boys.  Now think back to your own childhood.  How many of the men among you (or brothers, neighbors, or cousins of the women) played with toy guns, owned a BB gun, set things on fire, or played with illicit explosives?  Come on, don’t be shy.  Raise your hands. 

I’ve been taking the same informal poll for the past 20+ years, and so far the results have been unanimous.  Ever adult man of any generation I have questioned has admitted to lighting something on fire or blowing something up as a kid.  Most of them played army or war.  Many admit to “near misses” and “close calls” – brushes with mortality of which they still hope their mothers are unaware.  Many report getting in the odd fist-fight or two – over name calling, a toy, a girl.

Now, jump back into the present.

How often do kids roam the neighborhood in packs – on foot, bicycle, or skateboard?  We tether them to electronic leashes (cell phones) or shuttle them from one supervised activity to another.  Homemade explosives of any sort tend to attract the attention of federal law enforcement.  Kids are helmeted, padded, and sunscreened to the extent that they may as well be placed in plastic hamster balls.

Historically, the classroom setting – despite the complaints of my generation that teachers “favored boys” – has had a female bias.  Since the late 1800s, teaching has been one of the more feminine professions, and the virtues of the classroom (sit still, wait to speak, focus on one task at a time) tend (though not always) to come more easily to the girl-child than the boy.  But, boys had recess.

Again, think back.  Who dominated your childhood playground?  Where did the exuberance and aggression of youth happen?

My kids are fortunate – their classroom setting provides opportunities for active as well as passive learning.  Boys and girls alike are taught skill such as handwork, cooking, gardening, and woodworking.  They are allowed to wrestle and to climb trees.

Yet, I see a trend that troubles me.  Increasingly, parents are demanding a crackdown on “aggressive play” on the playground – a banning of sticks as “weapons,” a ban on “war games.”  Ok, so I don’t want kids whacking each other with sticks, and I’m generally opposed to war and killing in real life.  But, when did we become so afraid of our innate aggressions that we grew terrified to let our children playact?

I’ve heard people say that kids can’t distinguish between the world of imagination and that of reality.  This may be true for the 3-4 year old, but for the grade-schooler, I call Bullshit.  I’ve seen young kids, immersed in a fantasy world, look derisively at a parent who attempts to join in.  “It’s just make-believe, Mom,” they say.  “Duuuuhhh.”

It isn’t PC nowadays to say it, but men and women are not the same.  Equal is not alike.  Boys and girls have different parts, different hormonal influences, and different evolutionary drives.  Yes, nurture impacts nature.  But we dismiss our nature at our peril.

I’m reading an advance copy of a terrific non-fiction book called Zoobiquity.  This book, written by a human cardiologist, looks at the correlations between diseases and conditions across species.  One chapter is devoted to adolescents and adolescent risk.  Across many species, one demographic stands out in the fields of risk-taking and aggression.  You guessed it: the young male.

Think about it from an evolutionary standpoint.  Which males are most likely to survive and to reproduce their genetics?  Sorry, not the sweet, sensitive, cautious ones.

No, I’m not advocating a return to the era of the cave man or even to disco.  But I do worry that we are systematically stripping away behaviors, mores, and character traits associated with masculinity without replacing these traits.  We have created a world in which women and girls expand well beyond traditional or evolutionary roles, while at the same time narrowing the world of men.  You can nurture, we tell our men – but most primary caregivers are still female.  We honor your service, we tell our soldiers, but we chide our sons for playing army.  Even in the bedroom, we women have taken an increasingly assertive role (and I say yay), but what have we left as “appropriate” for masculine sexual expression?  (I’m only qualified to speak to heterosexual interactions.)

My son turned ten yesterday.  I worry about him sometimes – sandwiched between two sisters, raised by a mother with no brothers and a father who never knew his own dad.  I wonder if we are giving him enough of a sense of his own identity and place, as a male and as a person.  I don’t want him to grow up “masculine” in the misogynistic, hyper-aggressive, insecure-hiding-behind-macho sense, but I do want him to have a strong identity and a place of his own in the world.  I don’t want him to grow up afraid of his own strength, of his darknesses, and of his power.  I don’t want that for him, or for any of his generation.

Right now, Aidan knows who he is.  He will shake his hips to Lady Gaga or wield a Nerf Gun with the best of them.  He’s fine playing “Pretty Pretty Princess” with Sierra (with the indulgent sighs of an older brother humoring his baby sister) or with leading her on an armed assault against an unknown enemy.  He will cuddle into our laps for snuggles or try to burp the alphabet. 

It should (though in deference to the black and white nature of modern society and the internet, I’ll say it anyway) go without saying that I’m not a fan of fighting, war, sexual violence, objectification of women, arson, or risk-taking-induced injuries.  But, the fact that I don’t like these things doesn’t eliminate them from the species.  I wonder what we are losing when we consistently strip away opportunities to test boundaries and to find identity.  Thanks to modern agriculture, technology, and medical advances, we no longer need men to fill the roles of hunter or protector.  But what are we giving our boys in return?

Amazonian fantasies aside, no good will come of a society of ill-educated, insecure, or submissive men.  We need to either find new ways for our boys to test and challenge themselves or to loosen the reins of political correctness and fear.  Shifting the pendulum to a female-centric society will do no more good than a history of patriarchy has done.  Women lose when they are denied the opportunities to work with, compete against, and partner with men equally.  When we are denied the chances to work through our darkness, how are we supposed to fully develop our light?

 

Consistently Inconsistent

“But I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel.  It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.”

“Yes,” said Harriet, “but I am one of them.  I disconcert myself very much.  I never know what I do feel.”

“I don’t think that matters, provided one doesn’t try to persuade one’s self into inappropriate feelings.”

--Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night

 

“Weird.” “Strange.”  “Inconsistent.” “Wishy-washy.” “Cold.” “Heartless.” “Hypocritical.”

How many of us have heard ourselves called these things, either by others, or by the voices rattling around the chambers of our own skulls?  Maybe we got lucky.  Maybe no one ever said the words.  But, I’m betting, most of us have heard the message loud and clear.  There is a certain way of being, a type of person you are supposed to be.  And you aren’t measuring up.  Perhaps the message didn’t come in name calling.  Perhaps it was more insidious.  “That isn’t like you.”  “I know you don’t really feel that way.”  “That’s so out of character for you.” 

Or, maybe the message wasn’t addressed directly to you, but you chose to accept it, to open the envelope, read it, and take it as yours anyway.  Perhaps it came in the form of a criticism of people ‘like’ you – people who eat meat, or shun gluten, or are divorced, or who have multiple children, or have chosen no children; people who home school, who invest in private schools, who send their children to public schools; people who love more than once, people who love differently from the speaker, people between relationships; people who are creative, people who are outgoing, people who are shy…The list of ways of being that we learn are not okay is nearly endless.

And pointless.

No one knows who you are.  Not always.  No one knows who I am.  Sometimes not even me.  Why?  Because, the person I am – the person you are – is an ever shifting tangle of feelings, traits, experiences, and inconsistencies.  Forget layers.  We are kaleidoscopes.  We are shifting fragments of color, light, and shadow.  Our patterns change with movement, with experience, and they change depending on who is holding us.

The person writing this blog right now is not the person who will be on the phone interviewing a source in an hour.  Nor is she the person who went to bed last night.

So, is there a core person in there somewhere?  Yes.  Of course.  I may be shaped by my experiences. Certain traits may leap to the fore depending on my company, the conversation, my level of physical well-being, and a host of other factors.  But, somewhere underneath, below the shifting patterns, I’m still there.

Sadly, most of us get to be pretty good at hiding the core person.  We’re social animals, and we mirror the cues of others for acceptance.  Give me about 15 minutes, and your accent will begin to creep into my voice.  Also, we live in a world that is remarkably intolerant of all things unique or inconsistent.  Have you ever lived in a subdivision with that house on the block?  You know, the one that was painted some color off of the earth-tone section of the wheel?  Or where the owners tinkered with their car in the driveway, even though everyone else on the block parked in the garage?  Do you remember that kid in school?  The one who never listened to the music everyone else was singing?  The one who talked about weird books and didn’t have a clue about the hottest TV shows?

Even societies that pride themselves on iconoclasm expect a certain level of conformity.  Try living in certain “liberal” communities as someone who eats meat, refuses to attempt to bake gluten-free anything, and lets the kids watch Die Hard as a Christmas movie.  No one will say it, not outright, but it is easy to get a sense that something about your way of being is not okay.

When it comes to feelings things get even more tricky.  How many of us try to talk ourselves into the things we should feel?  How often do we deny our own points of inconsistency – with society or with ourselves?  Okay, I’m coming out of the inconsistent closet here.  Feel free to add your own contradictions, quirks, foibles, etc. in the comments.  Please.

• I have devoted my adult life to the preservation of animal welfare, but I eat meat and believe in the humane slaughter of horses.
• I have three children whom I adore, feel passionate about child development, and have absolutely no interest in kids I don’t know.
• I don’t really find newborn babies adorable.
• I would be fine with kicking our TV to the curb, but I’m the first one to turn it on after the kids go to bed.
• I state a preference for being alone, yet I’m the one who usually suggests hosting a party.
• I’m inherently shy, but refuse to dress in a way that lets me fade into the background.
• I like to climb trees, dig in the dirt, and wear stilettos.
• I believe in a divine power, but chances are I won’t discuss it with you, nor am I comfortable hearing about your beliefs – most of the time.
• I hate Hallmark cards, but their commercials make me cry.
• I consider myself the equal of any man, almost any time, but I still like it when a guy makes me feel delicate.
• I’m big on balanced nutrition and seasonal produce, but I won’t take vitamin supplements and I think most “natural” remedies are for suckers.  However, I only buy ginger to offset nausea or motion sickness.

The list could go on for pages, and I’m sure anyone who knows me well can think of two or three or fifteen points to add to the list.  However, the point isn’t the individual paradoxes.  The point is learning to accept what we really do feel.  And perhaps, learning to be a bit more accepting of those things in others which strike us as “off.”

Introverts Among You

Today I’d like to tell you a story of four people, two girls and two women.  Like all stories, this one speaks of more than the characters or events around them.  But, it speaks quietly, and you’ll only hear it if you listen.

The first girl grew up in an era of Saturday morning cartoons, of city-sponsored sports leagues, and of herds of children roaming the suburban plains.  She was tall and usually thin for her age.  She wore coke bottle glasses and usually seemed to be looking somewhere else – somewhere that didn’t exist.  She was the girl who was always picked last in PE, for any sport, even though she wasn’t nearly the worst at some, and was even pretty good at things like floor hockey.  She enjoyed sleepovers with one or two friends, but at a slumber party, she would crawl deep into her sleeping bag with her pillow over her head, wishing for a light to read by, and praying that the ghost stories would stop.  Whenever the teacher assigned a group project, she would sit quietly, barely participating, even though her report card held more A’s than anyone else’s.  She didn’t hear her classmates make the wrong choices or assumptions.  She didn’t hear whether they had good ideas.  She couldn’t hear anything over the roaring in her own ears.

By all accounts, the red-haired woman was fearless.  Tall and athletic, she could handle just about any horse, and would go toe-to-toe with the most cantankerous rancher.  “She’s pretty tough.”  “You wouldn’t want to get in her way,” people said.  She organized educational seminars for horse owners, spoke to groups, and quickly became the public face for her clinic.

The second woman slunk into parties behind her husband, even though, in heels, she was several inches taller than he.  Often low cut, always form-fitting, never frumpy, her clothes didn’t match her demeanor.  You’d find her standing in a corner, clutching a drink, eyes watching the room, like a gazelle at a watering hole, waiting for someone to notice her.   Eventually she would peel away from the wall, smile, and find a group of one or two sympathetic souls where she would stand at the edge, waiting for someone to let her in.  She would talk and laugh with the others, maybe even share a story or two, but only in response to a direct question.  She never asked questions of anyone else.  She knew it made her look cold, like she didn’t care, but she didn’t want to pry, to ask something that might make it look like she wanted them to reveal too much.  She figured that if someone wanted her to know something, they would tell her.  After a couple of hours, she would grow quiet again, excuse herself to the bathroom, mention to her husband that it was getting late and maybe they should be leaving soon, or that she was so sorry but she was starting to get a headache.

The second girl is, like the first, tall and wiry, though more developed at the same age.  She has a solemn face that can light into a dimpled grin.  She was early to talk, and can wax eloquent on subjects that interest her, though the one word used by every teacher at the school is “quiet.”  Sometimes they add “responsible” and “kind” and “maybe a little shy.”  “She’s not like her brother, is she?” they ask.  No, she isn’t.  Her brother bounds through life, never meeting a stranger.  Social isolation, even to do homework alone in his room, is physically painful for him.  The girl, on the other hand, keeps her bedroom like a cave, door closed and curtains drawn.  She gets good grades, and will sometimes surprise her teachers and peers with her passion on certain subjects, but most of the time, she complains that the teacher never notices her, and that the other girls never include her.  She doesn’t try to join the groups or find areas of common interest.  She waits, at the edges of a group, waiting to be invited.  Outsiders are surprised when they see how fearless she is, climbing to the highest branches of a tree, or when they see her burly, outgoing brother defer to her instantly, or when, in a low voice, she rebukes or corrects a classmate and the other child listens.  Parents and teachers comment in amazed voices at her performance after she holds the stage in a class play.  They don’t see her as a performer, or as a leader.  Because she stays at the edges, they assume she is passive, a follower.  They don’t see the steel.

Maybe you’ve guessed it by now.  The first girl and the two women are me.  The second girl is my oldest daughter.  We are introverts.  Yes, even the red-headed veterinarian.  There are more of us out there.  In her book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain writes that one third to one half of the population are introverts.  Yet, we live in a world that treats the introvert as an exception, an anomaly, or – most damaging – and oddball.

Cain does a far better job than I ever could of explaining the world of the introvert.  Her book is impeccably researched, readable, and filled with insights that brought me to tears more than once.  In fact, I probably could have met the needs of this blog post by simply typing – “Read this book.”  Unfortunately, though, the people most likely to read Quiet are the introverts.  And while it is a tremendous gift to read a book that helps you to understand that the things that you have always thought made you “not okay” are actually normal, introverts largely know who we are.  Introspection is in our nature, wired so deeply into us that an introvert will often look confused when someone remarks on their level of self-awareness.  Like most people, introverts tend to assume that there is nothing particularly different about our way of thinking.

This is where everyone needs to read Quiet.  While we may understand, intellectually, that everyone’s brain works differently, and that our experience may not be that of someone else, we live in a world that wants to whittle every peg until it fits in the same sized hole.

You would think that for an introvert, raising an introverted child would be the easiest thing in the world.  You’d be wrong. 

The girl with the glasses got contact lenses, grew up, found people to whom she could relate, and learned to put on the superhero costume of an outgoing expert in professional settings.  But, as a mother, she still sees the girl standing at the edges of the playground as a failure.  She wishes that the awkward adolescent with the pale blonde hair had figured out earlier that she was just as entitled to be a part of the group as anyone else.  She wishes that she had learned to fake enthusiasm, to master the code of “small talk”.  She feels that she would have escaped a lot of pain if she’d learned these things when she was younger.  She believes the message of her childhood and of the adult world, that to be quiet is to be passive, to prefer solitude is to be anti-social, to have a low tolerance for noise and crowds is to be shy.  She believes, in short, that there is something “wrong” with her.

She sees her daughter – bright, eloquent, confident, and fearless at home or with one or two friends – hover at the edges of her peer group, wandering off with a book while the rest of the class chats or plays basketball.  She sees this, and the little girl inside the woman cringes.  ‘Look what you’ve done,’ the voice in her head chides.  ‘She’s turning out just like you.  You have to help her come out of her shell.  You have to help her be more a part of the group.  If she’d just join in more, they’d see how amazing she is.’  And so, in the name of tough love, I have pushed my daughter to join clubs or teams.  Pushed her -- with the tight, angry voice that should tell me that this is about my fears and not about her at all – to sit with and practice with, and be a part of her basketball team rather than taking a few moments before the game to sit alone with her book.  I have brought home pamphlets for theater groups, pushed her into activities because, “You know you’ll enjoy it once you get there, and you can’t stay home all the time.”  Pushed her because I know that the real world eats introverts for lunch.

Fortunately, my daughter is far more stubborn and much less docile than I was as a child.  While I was a shy introvert, living in fear of making waves or disappointing anyone, or – heaven forbid! – being “bad,” she knows exactly who she is, and has no problem being that person.  What she does have a problem with, is people expecting her to be someone other than who she is.  She honestly does not understand why girls who chatter about makeup and clothes, who bounce and flirt, are considered “bright” or “leaders.”  She doesn’t see why the outgoing should get the prime roles in class plays even though they sometime have trouble memorizing their lines.  She doesn’t understand why they are picked as group leaders, or why when group assignments are made, she is always placed with the kids who have trouble focusing or who don’t care about the assignment.  In her head, thought is as important as action or words, and she doesn’t see why people should be expected to cluster in pods or all do the same thing.

She is right.  And she’s wrong – I may need to buy her a book on understanding extroverts.  At almost 13, she doesn’t understand that people can’t know your gifts if you never show them.  She doesn’t see that it is impossible for her teachers or peers to know the depth of her knowledge or enthusiasm if she never lets any of it out.

But, she has grasped something that it takes many introverts decades to realize.  She understands that she functions best alone or with one or two other people.  She knows that when large groups begin talking, particularly all at once, her brain shuts down – overwhelmed by the stimulation.  She already can verbalize the experience, common to introverts and unknown to most extroverts, of being drained by large groups, of feeling as though your energy is being sucked into the room and converted into all of that bubbling enthusiasm.  She knows that she needs to be alone sometimes, that her only way to be herself is to wander away with a book.  And she’s sick and tired of living in a world where the message is clear: ‘there’s something wrong with that.’

She loses by not making some adaptations to the social order of her class, yes.  But the world also loses by not accepting the gifts of introverts when offered. 

I have a bumper sticker, given by a friend who knows me well.  It says:

Introvert*

*insufficient energy for small talk

Most introverts have had the following experience.  (I used to think it was just me.)  We find ourselves in a conversation with someone who seems sympathetic.  We relax just enough.  The other person asks us a question that happens to be about something interesting to us.  We answer.  In depth.  In detail.  In lots of detail.  This is a thing to which we have devoted hours of thought and or research.  The other person looks interested, for a minute or two, but then we notice something.  We notice the eyes glazing over, the scanning of the room.  We see it coming.  Sure enough, the other person excuses him or herself and wanders away.

Both parties have lost.  The introvert has just received yet another message that his or her way of being is not okay.  And the extrovert has missed out on the insights and the opportunity for a deeper conversation.  Yet, this happens all the time: at schools, in the workplace, at parties.  We are living in a ten-second soundbite world that is not overly sympathetic to the documentary.  And we all lose.

Okay, I’ve taken up a lot of your time with this post, and the introvert in me is squirming at my self-indulgence, but if you are still here, this video is from a TED talk given by Susan Cain.  Listen.  There are introverts among you.  

Shakespeare *and* Love

“Shakespeare is boring.”  I’ve heard the declaration throughout my life – from the agonized cries of my classmates in high school English to my peers (and even husband!) as an adult.  Shakespeare is boring and hard to understand.  Shakespeare is for intellectual snobs.

I’ve never gotten that.  For me, Shakespeare wrote life – the entire range of human emotion and experience in gloriously shaded pictures of words.  The man is called “the Bard” for a reason.  He wrote language that sings, not to professors in dim lecture halls, not to the elite in paneled libraries, but to everyone.  This week, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the actor giving us a backstage tour of the theaters in Ashland mentioned that it is estimated that in Shakespeare’s time, some 80% of London’s population crossed the Thames to see his plays.  Can you imagine Hollywood’s glee if 80% of a city, any city, made their way into a theater for the latest blockbuster?

But movies, for all of their polish and effects, lack one element that pulses from the stage in a good production and binds the audience.  Love. 

It is possible – we do it every day – to be moved to laughter, tears, or thought by a movie – but, moviegoers will never feel the connection to the work and to the actors and to each other that comes from seeing a play performed.  In Shakespeare’s time, people packed into cities in ways that made Manhattan look like an example of suburban sprawl.  You could literally reach out your window and shake hands with the neighbor across the street.  Today we fence off quarter acre lots in order to have privacy from our neighbors.  We connect via boxes rather than face to face or hand to hand.  Our entertainment is computer-generated, polished, censored, rated, and scrubbed.  Sure, barring an extreme disaster, most residents of developed cities are unlikely to be felled by cholera, but we are often left trying to purchase connection, trying to fill an inner craving for which we lack the words.

I love Shakespeare, and I love my daughter’s 7^th grade class.  Still, I’ll admit, I had some misgivings about viewing Romeo and Juliet with a horde of 12 and 13 year olds, particularly when the viewing involved herding them back into cars for a 40 minute drive after they had suffered through the 7 hour, technology-deprived caravan from Davis to Oregon.  As we took our seats in a matinee theater packed with junior high and high school students, I looked at the playbill and saw that the running time was over three hours.  I regretted not bringing duct tape.

I was wrong.  The production, set in the haciendas of 1840s California newly under U.S. rule, had the audience from the first breaths.  Caitlin explained it best last night at dinner.  “I was sitting next to Collin, and I looked over and he was just like this.” She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and her mouth slightly agape.

Mike asked, “You mean because he was bored, or enthralled.”

“Enthralled.”

It didn’t hurt, of course, that these actors knew their audience.  I’ll admit it.  I love the bawdy parts of Shakespeare’s plays.  I love the raw sensuality of the double entendres that wink but are never coy.  I love the language that shows us just how prurient our modern notions of decorum are.  I love the sense, whether accurate or not, that there was a time when sex was considered as natural and complete a part of life as jealousy, anger, romantic love, or filial love.  For all of our modern fuss and bother about birth control, movie ratings, sexting, pornography, sexual orientation, etc., we have lost sight somewhere along the line of the fact that our minds and spirits are tied to our bodies, and that the enjoyment of the bodies is as important to our experience as the enlightenment of the mine.  Sorry, but it’s true.

But, “the play’s the thing.” (Yes, I’m mixing my quotational metaphors; deal with it.)  This production ramped up the bawd – in word, expression, and gesture – to so perfectly balance the equal power of the tragedy, that the audience of teens and preteens was left nearly breathless from laughter (and yes) a few tears.  For the parents, any brief hopes of the sort we experience when accidentally taking our young to a movie with more “adult” scenes than we would like, hopes that “maybe they won’t get it,” were quickly dashed.  Elizabethan language or not, there was no question that the kids “got it.”

Something happened in that theater, though.  Sure there were a few gasps and nudges and winks, but pretty soon, Benvolio, Mercutio, the Nurse, et al. had so caught the kids in the story, that the titillation of the forbidden gave way to honest enjoyment.  And the “grown ups” gave up decorum and laughed along with the kids.  And when Tybalt’s sword ran through Mercutio, we all gasped together.

Afterward, one of the boys – a kid who struggles with reading and language, and sometimes with the emotions not only of his peers but of himself – told me and one of the other chaperones, “I kind of almost cried.  When that guy, the funny one with the whip…” (Mercutio carried a bullwhip coiled at his hip.)

“Mercutio?” I asked.

“Yeah, he was funny.  I was sad when he died.  I really liked him.”

“It’s okay,” I said.  “I was right there with you.  I did cry. Mercutio and Benvolio have always been my favorite characters in Romeo and Juliet.”  He looked a little surprised – those were not the scenes that a grownup, a mom, was supposed to like.

That’s the thing about Shakespeare, and about theater in general.  It frees us from the “supposed tos” and gives us liberty to think, feel, and love.  Each of the plays that our group experience this week showed the range of lengths humans will go to in order to experience love – from the tragic (Romeo and Juliet) to the miraculous (the Chinese legend of The White Snake) to the madcap (the Marx Brothers vaudeville play Animal Crackers.)

And as we walked the sidewalks of downtown Ashland in the grey wind, rain, and snow, as we clustered in the wood-fired buildings of the farm, and as we drove from farm to theater and back, I watched my daughter and her classmates and saw the weird and wonderful ways in which they love.

Love is a loaded word for that age – a word of whispers and painful self-consciousness.  Love is a word they have almost outgrown telling their parents, and a word they are nowhere near ready to say to their peers.  But it’s there nonetheless. 

When a few of the boys emerged from the cars, after seven hours, speaking in British accents that they refused to lose over a four-day period and were not strangled, but were instead embraced, by their classmates, that was love.  As they raced each other, heedless of coolness and their usual social order, up and down the grassy hills on the farm, burning the pent up energy of that first long car ride, that was love.  Love showed in the off-beat, from the mixture of chagrin, irritation, and pleasure on the face of a kid hit in the face by a snowball from one of his classmates to the tattling for infractions such as climbing too high in a tree or the failure to brush teeth or wear jackets, to the silent and almost oblivious pairing off of introverts seeking a moment of solace from the mayhem.

There won’t be many more snowball fights for these kids as a group.  Next year will be their last together as a class.  There are only a few moments left before they begin to explore the more conventional definitions of love.  As parents, we only have a few breaths to go before we have to hold our breaths, wondering exactly how much of Shakespeare’s double entendres they truly understand and whether that understanding has a practical foundation.  The kids whose snow battles yesterday reminded me so much of their first snow trip together in second grade will soon find themselves increasingly bound by the constraints of society and expectation.  But, for now, they are more real in their connections to each other than many adults. 

We limit ourselves when we try to tidy the human experience.  Adult life is often constrained by definitions of love, friendship, sex, pain, and joy.  We use words that bind our emotions into tidy boxes – appropriate, inappropriate.  And, in doing so, we cut ourselves off from that connection with our humanity.  Shakespeare had it right – the human experience is a giant, sloppy mud pie of love, hatred, sexual tension, misunderstanding, laughter, and tears.  We can roll around in the language and emotion, laugh, cry, and get dirty, or we can stay clean and safe and watch life roll by on a silver screen.

Good? Bad? But Never Indifferent: My Take on Modern Parenting

Maybe parenting has always been this hard, this fraught with judgment and dogma.  Maybe mothers in the caves of southern France said to one another, “Did you see her with her kid?  Doesn’t she know that you should never turn the sabertooth pelt fur-side against the skin?  Her baby is going to have such a rash…” Or, perhaps not.

Certainly there are literary and historical examples of poor parenting:  No one would give Medea mother-of-the year, and regardless of divine command, I’m not sure that a willingness to slaughter your kid based on the voices in your head is a great illustration of fatherhood.  But, most examples of ‘bad parenting’ from previous centuries and generations seemed to focus on the disastrous extremes.  Nowhere in the Little House books does anyone come up to Ma Ingalls and say, “Do you really want Laura playing with that pig’s bladder?  Little Johnny in the next town over did that last fall and you know how sick he was all winter!”

Yet, for my generation of parents, every choice – from brand of baby food (or homemade baby food) to when, how, or if to let children play – seems to have a rating system attached.  But, nobody seems to agree on the scale.  How are we measuring these things?  Do I get bonus points for letting Caitlin climb our tree in the front lawn, thus empowering her to take risks and improving her muscle tone, connection with nature, and sense of balance?  Or should I be reported to CPS and flogged in the public square for risking so much as one of her precious epithelial cells?  Am I a bad mother for allowing Aidan to possess a NERF arsenal that is the envy of the neighborhood boys, tacitly okaying the casual acceptance of violence pervasive in modern culture?  Or am I good for allowing him to accept and learn to regulate his natural aggression?  Will watching a documentary forever alter the biochemical functioning of Sierra’s brain, or will it give her a better insight into some aspect of our world?  Whose research should I believe?

Caitin in our tree 12/2010 w/ Sierra on the swing watching

And do I even care?

Obviously I care, or I wouldn’t be wasting the word-processor time.  But,(and go ahead and start lobbing stones for this) I don’t care as much about the implications of these studies, opinions and dogma to the children as I do about the scars each one leaves on the parents.  Ok, more specifically on the mothers.  What the hell are we doing to each other and allowing to be done to ourselves?  What weird line have we crossed when an intelligent, educated mother (and I heard this recently) agonizes over the morality of allowing her son to pick up a stick and say ‘Bang. Bang.’?

I hate to say this but I think this intensive maternal navel-gazing (and, to be honest, most of us ‘good mothers’ who nursed our children can’t even find our navels unless we’re wearing killer push-up bras) is at least in part a function of the unprecedented number of educated and career driven women in my generation.  What did society expect? 

I suspect that motherhood was less questioned in previous generations because it was simply something one did.  Like cooking, cleaning, (and a number of other life skills that seem to have been either lost or over-analyzed), parenting was just a part of life.  Parents fed, clothed, and housed their kids, provided them with the type and level of education that seemed appropriate, toys that matched the household budget, and went on with the rest of their lives.  If you had to make every loaf of bread from scratch, or wash all of your laundry by hand, your kids were going to either play outside and do their own thing or they would be pressed into service for chores.  Few households had the luxury of worrying about whether play was age-appropriate or ‘too risky.’  Parents were just glad to get the kids out from underfoot, and they certainly didn’t have time to make modeling dough by hand or to lead elaborate needle-felting projects.

Yet, my generation (particularly of women) is a bit different.  Many of us in the middle and upper-middle classes were raised by the first generation of more broadly educated women, the first women to truly have a shot at a life beyond kitchen, hearth, and child.  And we were raised with expectations.  C’mon, say it with me: “Anything boys can do, girls can do better!”  We were going to take over business, politics, and generally kick the patriarchy’s butt.  My generation (good old generation X) was the first where women equaled (and have now surpassed) the numbers of men in higher education.  We truly can do anything men can do.  But, we can also do the one thing men can’t do – carry a fetus, give birth, and lactate.  Oops.

Sooner or later (often later, and I think that, too is an issue contributing to our current parenting protocol obsession), many of us realized that there probably needed to be a next generation, and that our uteri were going to need to provide the early housing facilities.  And, so, we wound up with a generation of goal-oriented mothers trained to research, to interpret scientific papers, to absorb data like the fibers of the Brawny towels so lovingly advertised to our mothers, to achieve (and over-achieve).  And yet, the mothers of my generation and socio-economic class found that children had not evolved along with the ideals of our society.  Children still need to be fed, housed, and clothed, to learn to walk and talk, and to be educated and to be provided with playthings.

At that point, a generation of women with a veritable alphabet soup of letters after our names lost our collective minds.  Realizing that we would, in fact, be forced to compromise our career trajectory to one extent or another, we decided to channel all of our ambitions, energies, and training into something that humans have done for thousands of years.  But, we would do it better.

This brings me to the personal part of my rant.  No one who has read this blog can possibly doubt that I have some strong views on parenting.  Nor should they doubt that my views are more in line with those of my parents and grandparents than many of my peers.  I believe kids should play – with minimal adult supervision and interference.  I believe that children need scary stories with dark consequences for bad behavior.  I believe children need to learn that the stove really is hot by burning themselves while learning to cook.  I believe (and our house has proven) that a six-year old is capable of preparing his or her own breakfast and lunch.  I believe that a child who ignores instructions to ‘take a jacket’ and is subsequently cold will better remember the jacket next time than the child whose parent rushes back to school with the jacket.  I believe that kids need to deal with teasing, shunning, and name-calling on their own as much as possible and that these experiences (allowing exceptions for what I consider true bullying) make them stronger.  I believe that kids need to fall (physically or metaphorically) and that by doing so they learn to take risks and to pick themselves back up.  I believe that kids need unconditional snuggles and that they need to be corrected when they’ve screwed up.  I don’t believe ever in ‘letting a child win’ to ‘boost self-esteem.’  I don’t believe in empty praise.  I believe in giving kids more respect than that.  I believe in giving them the pride of earned praise.  I believe that the process is more important than the result; that the act of learning is more important than the grade. 

And I believe that kids need to learn to fight their own battles – the real, the pretend, the physical, and the verbal.  I let my kids have (pretend) guns and swords and give them rules that they need to follow to use those: you may not ‘shoot’ anyone who is unarmed or who doesn’t want to play.  You may not whack your sibling with a sword under any circumstances.  If an accidental whacking does occur, you must apologize.  Dragons live in your bedroom or the hallway, not in the kitchen, dining room or hallway.  No firing NERF guns in the house.  A gun, any gun, even a toy is to be pointed at the target or at the ground.

                                                            A well-armed Aidan. 12/2010

Do I believe in violence as a solution – generally no.  However, in self-defense, absolutely.  I have taken self-defense classes (many), my oldest daughter has, and I will insist that my son and youngest daughter do so.  Do I believe in war – generally no.  But I do recognize that while most wars are a useless waste of life and exploitation of our young, that some circumstances are so hideous that they can only be solved through force (the Nazi empire, for example).  Do I believe that humans are inherently aggressive?  Of course.  I fail to see how any person with half a brain can look at human history and say otherwise.  Humans are animals, and phenotypically, we are predators.  Do I believe that humans are also inherently cooperative, social, and capable of independent thought, kindness, and creativity?  Hell, yes.  Again, look at history, and look around.

Back to the personal.  My beliefs are my own.  You may notice that I have not cited a single study, article, or research paper in this piece.  That omission is deliberate.  For every study that substantiates a parenting or sociologic, or even physiologic theory, an opposing body of research can be found.  Statistics lie and all liars are statisticians – I plagiarize freely here, but the truism holds.  Parenting theories are just that – theory.  And they will be neither proven nor debunked until most of us are long gone. 

So, you don’t have to parent your kids my way, but don’t you dare demand that I parent my children your way.  Our classrooms, society, and species have enough room for many ways, and there’s probably a bit of truth everywhere.

Holding On and Letting Go -- In Three Acts

The first time I went back to my alma mater to do some research in the Health Sciences Library, my heart pounded against my chest, my mouth dried out, and my legs felt like overdone pasta.  I was nervous – terrified.  Ridiculous, I told myself.  Why on earth should a 40-something, qualified veterinarian be nervous about looking up a few articles in the veterinary school library?  Why duck her head apologetically around the students – students, for God’s sake, nearly young enough to be my kids! 

But, here’s the thing.  I spent the entirety of 1992-96 waiting for it to happen.  I kept waiting for someone, a secretary, or maybe the dean himself to tap me on the shoulder and say, “I’m sorry, but there’s been a mistake.  You don’t belong here.”  You see, in my heart, I knew that I didn’t belong.  I was a decent student, but not the sort of platinum over-achiever that gets admitted into a highly competitive professional school.  My required-sciences GPA was just above the minimum.  Obviously, there had been some mistake.  It didn’t help that during the first year or so of veterinary school, I was dealing with a rejection at a personal level that made me believe that I really didn’t belong anywhere, but the upshot was that I entered my chosen profession convinced that I was an imposter.

The odd thing about my current parallel career is that it is forcing me to accept my place in the veterinary field.  For magazine articles, I’ve been forced to interview some of the top experts in their fields.  In my new job, many of my veterinary colleagues are highly qualified, specialty-boarded, and well-recognized veterinarians.  Yet, I’m forced with the measly three letters following my name, to interact with them as equals.  And I should.

I’m learning to hold on to something that is rightfully mine, and something that is mine to keep.  Today’s blog post, however, is about the opposite.  I may have been influenced by the Ira Glass parody sex tape, but today we present, in three acts, stories about people letting go of, or holding on too long to something that no longer belongs to them, or perhaps never did.

Act I – Letting Go Gracefully

It’s every high-achiever’s worst nightmare.  You get a phone call (or a letter, or an e-mail) informing you that you have been nominated for one of the highest honors in your art or profession.  You have just long enough to let the euphoria set it when you receive another notice: Oops!  Sorry, it was a mistake.  We didn’t mean you.  Sorry about that.

The short-list for the National Book Awards had an unprecedented two entries listed in the Young Adult section this year.  Why?  Someone goofed.  By mistake, Lauren Myracle was entered for her book Shine.  The intended entry had been Franny Billingsley’s Chime.  Personally, I’m trying to see how that could have happened – are the National Book Awards nominations typically composed by someone talking on a bad cell phone?  But, regardless, for a while, even after it had been publicly announced that there was a screw-up, both books were on the list.  The theory here was apparently that since Shine is an excellent book in its own right, they would just have two books short-listed for the category in order to make amends for the error.  That’s kind of like the hostess getting caught dividing the soup into an extra bowl to make room for an uninvited guest; it just looks bad no matter what.

But, then the story gets worse.  After all of this, Myracle received another call from Harold Augenbraum, the executive director of the National Book Foundation saying that “the position was being changed and that people wanted Shine off the list.”  Myracle describes her ordeal in the interview with Vanity Fair from which the above quote is taken. 

The final scene in this act is the scene of true grace.  “I felt gutted. I felt embarrassed, and ashamed that I had the gall to believe that this book was worthy. So over the weekend came the question of, Do I withdraw, or do I let them strip it from me? I first thought: They made the mistake; they can clean it up. Then I realized that I had a chance to either be classy or be seen as someone gripping with white knuckles to something they didn’t want me to have. And I was going to be taken off the list regardless.”  Classy indeed: Myracle withdrew her name from consideration, instead asking the National Book Foundation to make a donation to the Matthew Shepard Foundation.

Act II – When the gyre unwinds

The end is rarely pretty.  And it seems that endings happen more frequently in the middle of life than we are conditioned to expect.  The cliché of the mid-life crisis really doesn’t do justice to the pain of waking up one morning – or, more commonly, over a series of mornings – to the realization that the life you thought you lived, the life you expected to keep living is no longer the right life for you.  It no longer belongs to you. 

It must be something about the 40s, but it seems that my circle of acquaintance has been filled in recent years with career and marriage upheaval.  People living lives that seemed to be right only to find that the plan suddenly no longer fit, was broken, or was suddenly destroyed.

Most of the people I know have handled the pain of job loss, home loss, or divorce with extraordinary grace – keeping the bonds of family even through pain and uncertainty.  They have been adults, and have faced the situations with adult grace – letting go of that which can no longer be salvaged, holding their sense of self and self-worth, and starting again with dignity.

Then, there’s the other side of the coin.  I’ve watched a (fortunately small) minority of one or two unravel under the pain and anger, spewing public venom, ignoring obligations, and generally burying themselves so deeply in their desire to cling to something that no longer exists that they risk losing that which is rightfully theirs.

Everything ends.  Everything that we have and are has a finite lifespan.  Jobs, relationships, people – one day, it stops.  The pain of that ending, the pain of waking up and realizing that something you thought was a part of your life is no longer yours (or, maybe never was) is an amputation.  But, we aren’t given control over the endings.  We are only given control over what we take away.

We can either face loss with the grace of Lauren Myracle or we can go for the nuclear option of our next act.

Act III – “And what rough beast”

In Zanesville, OH today, law-enforcement are attempting to round up wild animals that escaped from a private farm.  Not a few animals, and not just zebras and such.  We’re talking lions, (not sure about tigers), and bears – oh my! 

Most disturbingly, the owner of the aforementioned preserve was found dead on his property, with all of the enclosures opened.  The circumstances are still sketchy; as of this writing, there is some suggestion by law enforcement that the man may have released the animals and then killed himself.

Regardless, this is an example of the extreme of holding on or letting go of that which does not belong.  Large predators do not belong in private ownership.  They barely belong in institutionalized captivity.  News reports suggest that the man in question had legal and personal problems.  If so, the picture is beginning to emerge of someone holding onto things that should not have been his, and letting go in the absence of grace.

 

Ultimately, I guess this post is about both letting go and holding on.  It is about finding what is ours, what belongs most deeply within us, and it is about knowing how to hold that part of ourselves so that we can let go of the things which no longer fit, the things that cannot stay, the things that, perhaps, were never ours to begin with.

Why Dragons Don't Make Good Pets

playgroundsMichaelmas was last week.  For a more in-depth review of this somewhat obscure holiday and its meaning in the Waldorf schools, check out this post from last year.  Short version: on (or near) September 29, the feast of St. Michael, Waldorf schools host a Michaelmas pageant which tells the story of St. George and the Dragon.  At our school for the past two years – and much to the disgust of my children – St. George has tamed rather than, slain the dragon.  I think that my children are disappointed in the dragon for failing to live up to their expectation.  They prefer epic battles and generally feel that evil shouldn’t just roll over like a remorseful puppy.

St Michael and the Dragon -- Aidan Minamiji, age 9

Now, I haven’t talked to any of the faculty about this, so I don’t have any idea why the dragon has had a change of heart or why St. George is suddenly imitating Caesar Milan, but I know that my kids, at least, view the shift as part of a larger adult conspiracy to protect children from that which is scary and violent, and they aren’t happy about it.  And, I can’t say that I blame them…

Like I said, I don’t know anything about the circumstances of the school play, but I do know that elsewhere, there seems to be a trend toward protecting our children from things that are violent, unsettling, complicated, frightening, challenging, or dangerous.   Yet, strangely, while we are dumbing down fairytales so that the step-sisters turn nice in the sequel (Don’t get me started on Cinderella II), complaining about “darkness” in young adult literature, and making playgrounds so safe that they are one step up from padded cells for challenge-value, kids spend huge amounts of time indoors, playing first-person shooter games.  Huh?

I would submit that much of this child-protective movement speaks more to the fears of adults than it does to the risk of frightening children.  We all have different methods of coping with the fears that live deepest within us.  Certain fears also seem to make some of the biggest dragons: relationship/rejection, children, and status/finance issues tend to be such huge triggers that we aren’t even aware of the weird ways in which we face these dragons until the fire has scorched our eyebrows.  Continuing with our dragon metaphor, these are some of the methods I see (and have used, myself):

• Human Sacrifice – In the story, the villagers are offering up a maiden to the dragon in hopes of appeasing it when St. George rides in to the rescue.  This always seemed like a self-defeating plot point to me.  Who really thinks that one skinny girl is going to fill an entire dragon?  At best, it seems like she’d just be an appetizer for the village main-course.  Yet, we do this same thing every day.  And usually, the humans we sacrifice are ourselves.  Do any of these sound familiar?
  • “I’m going to give up my yoga classes; they’re taking too much time away from my family.” Translation: My spouse/partner doesn’t like me spending evenings out, and I’m afraid I will lose him/her, but I don’t want to discuss it.
  • “I’d like to have dinner, but I need to go on my child’s class trip.  She isn’t ready to be away from home yet.”  Translation: I am terrified that something may happen to my child if I am not there.  I am terrified that he/she may be frightened or homesick and need me.  I am terrified that he/she won’t need me.
  • “I can’t make the soccer game this weekend.  We have a big project at work and I can’t take the time away.” Translation: I need to be perceived as indispensible to the project.  I’m also afraid that I may not actually be necessary every minute.
  • Pitchforks, Torches, Mob – Sometimes, we tell ourselves that we aren’t afraid of the dragon, that we are angry, and righteous (or at least justified) in our anger.  We rally the village, stir up the countryside, and attack the dragon.  Unfortunately, since the attack is generally chaotic, and often not directed at the real problem, it usually fails and everyone limps home with battle scars.  For real world examples, think of “flame wars” in internet chat rooms; snarky, passive-aggressive social media status posts, the clique gossip that should have stayed in high school but somehow managed to cling to the heels of adulthood for many of us; workplace alliances and backstabbing – the list goes on.  No one wins – except the dragon.
  • Dragon Whisperer – This may be the trickiest fear-related coping mechanism to understand, probably because it seems the most sane.  Instead of running from or battling our dragons, we take them home, and train them.  Unfortunately, we often simply wind up nurturing the dragon, and in the safety of our homes, and with unlimited food, it grows fat and becomes all too real.  This brings me to the title of this post Dragons Don’t Make Good Pets.  Often, in trying to manage our fears, to prevent the circumstances that we most dread, we create those very circumstances.  Again, anything here sound familiar?
    • We fear that our spouse will stray.  Do we discuss our fears?  Do we bring the hidden insecurities out into the light?  Often no, we manage schedules, micromanage emotional interactions, even monitor our partner’s communications.  Why?  Because some part of us thinks that we can control the dragon.  And if we have control, the thing we fear won’t happen.  Well, we’ve all seen this made-for-TV movie…
    • We fear that our children won’t succeed in life.  Again, control becomes the means of coping with the dragon.  We arrange activities, sports, tutoring, lessons.  We check homework, draft schedules, and micromanage until two things happen:
      • Our children have no ability to discipline themselves.
      • Any joy they may have once taken in the task has been destroyed.
      • (For the record, I’m currently undergoing a reformation on this point.  My daughter and I have a pact this year – as long as she gives her schoolwork her best effort, I will give staying off her back my best effort.  So far so good, by all reports, she is much more focused in class.)
• We fear that harm may come to our children.  They may be physically injured.  They may experience rejection.  They may get their hearts broken.  They may face failure.  Guess what?  They will.  This is one of the hardest dragons to face: the knowledge that we cannot protect our children from life.  Nor should we.  I cringe every time I hear an adult say that they don’t want children to feel “disappointed” or to be “frightened” or to risk getting hurt.  If our children do not face these risks and learn to handle the fairly small wounds of childhood, what kind of adults will they become?
• Being St. George – This is the most difficult and most lonely way of handling the dragon.  And ultimately, I believe, is the only way that will work.  Gather the light from within and without, let that light of honesty, acceptance, and self-worth shine through oneself, and with one’s own strength and sword, ride out to face the dragon – seeing the beast for what it is, and slaying it (or, at least banishing it back to its cave.)

 

 

 

Letting Mama Bear Hibernate

For all that popular culture and literature like to extol the protective instincts of the “Mama Bear,” the mother who will move Heaven and Hell for her child, I think my greatest parenting joy comes from the moments when I can let my maternal bear hibernate in her cave and watch my children fight their own battles – whether their foes come from without or from within.

No one ever told me how vividly the memories of my own school days would stick to my brain, and to my soul.  As a kid, I assumed that adults had their brains wiped somewhere in their 20s.  That was the only logical explanation for the obtuse refusal of the grownups to fix or to even understand the social catastrophes of my life.  Nothing else could explain why my parents seemed so insouciant about the fact that everyone hated me, that so-and-so had stolen my best friend, and that it was obvious that the whole class was laughing at me.  And nothing but a mind-wipe could possibly render parents clueless enough to suggest that their socially awkward daughter stand up for a classmate who was truly being bullied.

I was committed to evading the amnesia of adulthood.  I would remember my childhood so that I could make sure that my kids never had to deal with pain, discomfort, humiliation, or unpopularity.  I would have the magic words to fix everything for them, to make schoolwork easy and classmates congenial.

Ok, so I’m not sure where I was planning to get the magic wand, but plans forged in adolescence aren’t always heavy on concrete details.  Still, it was with a jolt of betrayal toward the 13-year-old within, that I heard the adult line come out of my own mouth when my kids began to come home with the same litany of complaints and angst.

Did I immediately telephone the teacher that my daughter accused of “favoring the popular kids?”  No.  Ignoring the ‘how-could-you’s’ of my interior teenager, I found myself commenting that teachers tended to focus on the students who put forth the best work as examples and on the students who need the most help, and that if she wanted the teacher’s attention, perhaps she could do more to make her work shine.  “Way to be supportive, Mom.”

When my kids complained that some children were teasing another child, did I call the school demanding intervention?  No.  I said to my own children, “Well, where were you?  Did you tell them that they were being mean?”  My comment quoting the maxim “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is that good men stand by and do nothing,” was met with eyerolls.

Those are the days when I question my non-interference policy, and I wonder if my children’s lives wouldn’t really be a bit easier if I were the sort of mom who regulated their social and academic interactions, who leapt to their defense rather than saying, “Well, maybe we should talk about ways you could handle that next time.”

I actually broke down and polled Caitlin and Aidan one day during a period of grammar school unrest (historians and sociologists should spend more time in elementary schools if they want to understand social upheaval).  “Would you prefer for me to talk to your teachers or to other parents when you’re having problems with other kids or in class, or do you want me and Dad to stay the heck out of it?”

“Stay the heck out of it!”  The response was horrified and unanimous.

Ok, good enough for me.  And yet, the Mama Bear sometimes growls in the back of her cave, lumbering toward the entrance.

Two things happened this week, small things, but enough to shove her back into hibernation for a while:

Sierra came home from school commenting that a couple of the boys from her class were teasing a friend of hers in aftercare.  “They told him he wasn’t saying his words right,” she said indignantly.  I steeled myself for the ‘teachable moment’ conversation, wondering if I was going to have to break my rule and intervene in the class social dynamic.   Before I could breathe, Sierra went on, “I told him that he should just ignore them and not play with them or talk around them if they were going to be mean.”

Oh.  “And did you say anything to them,” I asked.  Bigger and tougher kids than my 40 lb sprite have bowed to peer pressure before now. 

“I told them that people say their words their own way and that they shouldn’t pick on people about how they talk.”

Ok, then.  Loyalties and friendships of six-year-olds shift like clouds blown across the sky, so I’m not really worried that any of the parties involved will be scarred for life, or that some irretrievable social order is being set in 1^st grade.  But, Sierra wasn’t just telling me a story; she was telling me loud-and-clear that she could fight her own battles.

 

The second episode is a little more convoluted, and a little more subtle.  As referenced earlier, Caitlin struggles with the concepts of work and achievement.  Bright, creative, and reasonably talented in art, music, and academics, she’s used to things coming easily.  She’s never really had to struggle to achieve an acceptable level of competence, and being forced to put effort, discipline, or practice into a project annoys her.  Actually, it infuriates her.

As she  teachers (and parents) have begun to expect higher levels of effort in schoolwork, music, etc., Caitlin’s mature front has started to crack and we’ve seen some signs of adolescent victimhood.  Just as I was beginning to wonder if she really would find her own way out of this, and was considering breaking my only 2-week-old pact to not bug her about her work as long as she promised to put full effort into it, she made a comment that changed everything.  “Where is the poem book?  I’ve decided to memorize ‘If’.”  I’ll leave it to you to determine the connection.  Enjoy…

  

 

Beeswax Crayons and Recorders

At the beginning of this week, over on Facebook, I promised a back-to-school blog post.  Well, it’s now Friday, and I’ve been a little busy, well, getting the kids back to school.  This post may ramble somewhat as I ponder the evolution of that phrase in my own life.  Our kids have been in a Waldorf school long enough now that I no longer experience the  autumn new-erasers-and-Pee-chee-folders-so-sharp-they-cut-your-finger sensations that are the residue of my own education.

My kids mark the start of the school year with new or up-sized cellos, new rain pants and jackets, and the perennial ‘where did you put your sun-hat’ question.  It sounds weird to say that no, I don’t buy notebooks or pencil cases, that we don’t troll the Back-to-school ads for the best deal on reams of college rule paper.  “Their supplies are included in the tuition,” is the easy phrase.  And the explanation works well until someone asks: “which supplies?”  “Ummm, beeswax crayons and a recorder…”

By the time the kids reach the upper grades, I no longer feel compelled to defend our weird back-to-school routine.  Caitlin does have binders, pencils, and pens -- they just happen to be provided by the teacher.   And, no one who listens to her rattle off the conditions leading to the fall of the Roman Empire or watches her juggle fractions like beanbags is going to question her academic credentials.  Well, they can, but she’ll just quote Shakespeare at them.

And even Aidan, now in 4^th grade, can hold his own against any pedagogical inspection.  He multiplies double digit numbers in his head.  (I don’t know if that’s considered impressive or not, but I have a doctorate, and I can’t do it!)  And, though penmanship may be considered a dying art, his is truly art.  Perhaps he can find a job illuminating manuscripts with some monks…

However, it is in the 1^st and 2^nd grade years that parents find themselves stuttering and hedging at cocktail parties and family reunions.  As Sierra came home this week announcing that in her first days of 1^st grade they had practiced “drawing straight lines and wiggly lines” during Main Lesson, I wondered what some of the new parents in the class were feeling as their children made similar revelations.  I’m past the defensive evasion of the Waldorf parent.  I will say it aloud.  Yes, Sierra is six.  No, she can’t read.  No, we aren’t worried.  No, she doesn’t have any learning difficulty.  She will read when she is ready and that probably won’t be for another year or so, and that is just how it is meant to be.

Veteran Waldorf parents can translate “straight lines and wiggly lines.”  “Oh, so you’re doing form drawing,” my husband replied without missing a beat.  In 1^st grade, the symmetric, repeating forms give the children a feel for the shapes (lines and curves) that make our letters.  The form drawings also build a sense of symmetry and scale.  On a more esoteric level, the form drawings help the children to use and integrate both sides of the brain.  As the kids get older, the forms become more and more complex – by 4^th grade, the interlocking forms take on the shape and intricacy of Celtic knots.

“Great,” someone usually says about here “but what about reading?”  The kids will progress from the form block into the beginning of the alphabet blocks (side note: Not wooden blocks with painted letters.  Waldorf schools begin the day with a roughly two hour Main Lesson.  During that time period, one subject is focused on for a block of several weeks.)  Confident in their abilities to draw (what did you think writing was?) symmetrical lines and curves, the children will begin to use their ability to make letters.  The letters take on forms that represent the sounds in a way that makes sense to  the children.  A ‘D’ may be also drawn as a dragon; an 'S' becomes a swan.  As they progress through the year, 1^st graders learn not only how to draw and

recognize their letters, not only the sounds made by the letters, but also how those letters interact to form the sounds that we recognize as words.

 

 

Caitlin attended a parochial school for kindergarten and 1^st grade.  She began reading in kindergarten.  At the end of 1^st grade, she declared, “I hate reading.  Reading is stupid.”  I’m the daughter of a school librarian.  When we move, among the first things Mike and I unpack are the boxes (and boxes and boxes) of books.  Long story short: I cried, wrote a polite but irritated e-mail to the school principal, received a ‘this is how we do it; nothing is going to change’ response, and Caitlin switched schools.  Midway through 2^nd grade, she had inhaled the first 5 books of the Harry Potter series and never looked back.  The change?  Many of her classmates were still learning to read; there was no pressure to regurgitate the dry bones of plot points; and every lesson – from reading to math – contained a story.  Caitlin learned to love the story.

Children are individuals.  I do think some kids will learn best in a more traditional school setting.  Some learn by repetition, others by experience.  But the one thing I do know, and, looking back on it, have known since my own childhood – the age of reading onset does not determine the reader.  I picked up, and spontaneously read, The Cat in the Hat the Christmas before I turned four.  My younger sister, like Caitlin, rejected the notion of learning something “because you’re supposed to” and did not read fluently until she was eight or nine.  The title before both of our names  -- Dr.

The weird thing about parenting is that despite the volumes of books, magazine articles, lectures, and blog posts, there is no handbook.  This thing that humans have done for thousands of years is still entirely experimental.  Beyond some general guidelines such as: feed, water, clothe, clean occasionally, do not submerge for prolonged periods, do not leave near open flame, there is little about parenting that is hard and fast.  None of us has any way of knowing the value of the childhood we provide to our offspring.  Sometimes, we just have to trust the process and go with what feels right. 

Sierra (middle) with her 8th grade buddy.

For me, that ‘right’ feeling involves not hearing “I don’t want to go to school.”  It means shedding more than a couple of tears as I watch Sierra receive a red rose from her 8^th grade buddy as she makes her entrance into the school as a 1^st grader.  It means shedding another tear or two as I realize that next September, Caitlin (who is now never without a book) will hand a rose to some lucky 1^st grader and lead her new charge on a tour of a campus that has become a home.

Once upon a time, back-to-school meant, for me, the anxiety of purchasing the perfect supplies and outfits, the have-I-made-the –right-decision angst as I watched the classroom  swallow my kids, the worry about how other parents would view me, my family, our parenting, or even our car.  This week, back-to-school meant writing a newspaper article about the 25^th anniversary of a school my children love.  It meant reuniting with people I call friends after a summer apart.  It meant sewing placemats and crayon holders for the 1^st grade, organizing a camping trip for the 4^th, and critiquing an essay for the 7^th grader.  And, it meant hearing as I dropped my kids off in the morning, from Sierra, “You can drop us off here, Mommy.  I don’t need anyone to walk me to class.  I know my own way.”  Of course she does.  This is her  school.                                                

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finding the Thread -- Fear in the News

Readers of this blog may have noticed that I’ve never attempted the sort of “weekly round-up” posts seen in other, more focused blogs.  This is a technique that works great for blogs that cover one topic or niche, but since this blog is essentially a reflection of my brain (scattered), I’ve generally felt that trying to tie up bits of news from the week that stuck out for me would be like trying to string a bunch of random beads into a pattern.

Yet, there are weeks when certain news items stick to the brain, and it seems as though there should be a thread that joins them.  Perhaps this is simply a reflection of my current thoughts, but it seems as though I may have found a thread for the events and issues that have stood out for me this week.

Here are my “beads” of news, in no particular order.

1. The debt ceiling talks collapsed (again.) In other words, the president and Congress began tattling on each other and John Boehner took his ball and went home.
2. Though we are having a mild summer in CA, worry about friends, family, and colleagues has me following the heat wave in the Midwest and East.
3. The bombing and shooting tragedy in Norway is made even more horrific by the age of so many of the victims and the choice of disguise of the murderer.
4. A breastfeeding doll popular in Europe causes some controversy in the U.S.
5. School board members decide to un-ban a book after they actually read it.
6. A study indicates that modern playground safety modifications may actually be detrimental to children.

There they are, snippets of world events from catastrophic to idiotic.  What is the thread that ties these things together?  Here’s a clue.  When I took the above picture this morning, I was afraid to use it.  The beads are kind of blurry, and the whole photo is shadowed weirdly.  Then it hit me – those are the aspects that make the picture perfect for this post.  My beads, these bits of news, stood out from the media storm randomly and kind of blurry.  But, the whole picture is tainted by something unpleasant and shadowy.  Fear.

Yesterday, I posted about fear on the personal level.  Today, societal fear seems to be the thread that connects these issues – at least in my mind. 

Wait.  What about the heat wave? Fear didn’t cause summer heat.  Yeah, I hear you.  Inserting the heat wave into the list reminds me of the old Sesame Street game, “Which of these things is not like the others?”

The thread of fear is pretty obviously strung through some of these events.  This morning, I found it interesting to note that NPR, not generally an alarmist news outlet, used the words “fear” and “afraid” in the blog post on the debt-ceiling crisis.  Should the public be afraid?  Probably.  The potential global economic impact of a failure to raise the debt-ceiling is pretty awful.  But, what struck me is how fear is affecting the process.  Why do politicians lock into a “my way or the highway” mindset?  Fear.  For humans, the loss of ability to compromise, to be flexible, indicates a loss of our higher brain functions.  The more we are driven by fear (fear of losing power, fear of losing face, fear of losing money, elections, etc) the more rigid we become.  Posturing to show “strength” is the human equivalent of puffing up our feathers or spines to look bigger to the predator.

“Terror” was prominent in the headlines referencing the bombing and shooting in Norway.  An apt adjective, for sure.  While the bombing in Oslo is horrific enough, I can’t imagine anything more terrifying than what the kids at that summer camp must have endured.  The thought of them seeing someone they believed to be a police officer – a person sent to keep them safe—open fire on them is nauseating.  But here, fear seems to be not only the result of the murderer’s actions, but the cause as well.  News reports refer to the suspect as an extremist who believes that immigration, multi-culturalism, and particularly Islam are destroying Norway.  A man acting from fear creates fear.

Now we drop into the seemingly banal.  However, in my mind at least, fear breeds fear.  The more we close our minds, bodies, and hearts, in self-protection, the more we make room for the truly dark things. 

Playgrounds – remember metal slides?  Do you remember the really tall ones, with their tight corkscrews and rickety ladders?  Do you remember how the metal burned your legs below the hem of your shorts on a summer day?  Do you remember the metal merry-go-rounds?  Do you remember trying to keep your legs moving as fast as those of the older kids, until you screwed up the courage for that jump and then landed on the spinning platform?  Do you remember the pit of fear in your stomach just before you took that leap?  My kids won’t.  And if you are a member of my generation or those that follow, neither will your kids.  As parents, we have clamored for freedom from fear for our children.  We have smoothed the edges, lowered the peaks, and softened the landings for our kids.  We are one step away from bubble-wrapping them into incompetence.  And, in our desire to protect our children from the scrapes and fractures of life, we have taught them that life is to be feared.  We are creating adults who will not have the skills to stand against the darkness of fear.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie is on my to-read list, so I’ll admit that I am not yet qualified to speak intelligently about it.  (There are those who would say that I’m not qualified to speak intelligently about a number of things, but why let fear stop me?)  However, I was intrigued by the news that the Richland, WA school board had reversed a decision to ban Mr. Alexie’s book after two of the members originally voting for the ban decided to actually read the book.  The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian tends to spark controversy due to the “dark” nature of its subject matter.  The semi-autobiographical story of a boy raised in poverty on a Native American reservation attending a mostly-white high school deals with themes that middle class parents often fear exposing their children to.  The book was one of those listed in the recent rant against YA fiction in the Wall Street Journal.  I’ve already written my thoughts on the article and its implications, but for anyone uncertain as to my views on book banning, here they are:

1. If you don’t want your kids to read a book, fine, tell them.  However, your fears do not get to dictate what books my children can find in their bookstore, classroom, or library.
2. If you fear a book, read it.  Don’t make judgments based on hearsay and supposition.  Know what you fear.
3. The most famous book censor in history was Hitler.  Talk about a guy with fear issues.

I have to applaud the members of the Richland school board for having the courage to revisit their decision, and to look societal fears in the face.  Good job, guys!

Now we move on to what is, to me, the weirdest item on the list.  Sure, you say: “Breastfeeding doll, pretty darn weird.”  Nope, don’t misunderstand me.  I don’t think the doll is weird at all.  I think it’s weird to object to a doll that gives children a more accurate picture of the way babies are meant to be fed.  I think it’s weird that we began by making dolls that nursed out of plastic bottles.  I think it’s weird that modern society (and particularly American society) has such a dysfunctional, fear-based relationship with the bodily function that defines us as mammals.  What sort of self-loathing drives us to reject a fundamental aspect of our humanity?

My youngest child is now six, but I’ve never really gotten over some of the strange incidents that stuck out over a collective 6-7 years of breastfeeding my children.  (The breastfeeding resume extends over three kids; do the math before you freak out.) 

• My mom urging me to “go to the ladies’ lounge” to nurse Caitlin while we were in a mall restaurant.  “And do what,” I asked.  “Sit on the sink counter?”  Let’s face it, modern restrooms distinctly lack a space for actual “rest.”  But, more critically, I never could understand the logic behind socially isolating a woman who was feeding her baby the way it was meant to be fed.  No one would tell a woman with a bottle to go into seclusion to feed her infant.  I like intelligent lunchtime discourse.  Babies may be cute, but they are not great conversationalists.
• The same elderly women in a shopping mall who had cooed over Caitlin in her stroller giving me dirty looks a short while later as I sat on one of the padded benches nursing her.  For the record no “private parts” of my anatomy were on public display.  But, judging by the reactions of these women, you’d have thought I was doing a pole dance in a nursery school.
• The confused and paranoid responses of TSA agents to my breastpump as I prepared to board a flight to a conference.  Really, what’s the tricky concept here?  How are basic medical devices not a part of their training?
• The couple who pulled back the folds of my baby sling to see the “adorable baby” and who recoiled with horror as they realized that “the adorable baby” was having lunch while I pushed my cart through Costco.  Now, I think they should have been embarrassed for assuming that it was okay to touch me or anything on my person without my permission.  However, I wasn’t the least embarrassed about feeding my kid.   A screaming baby in the middle of a big-box store would have been more disturbing to me.

Our societal views on gender, sexuality, and reproduction are so fear-ridden as to be nearly completely dysfunctional.  It’s amazing that the American middle-class hasn’t become an endangered species.  Why do we refuse to talk to our children about reproduction until they are so deeply confused by their hormones that they are incapable of listening?  Why do we assign euphemisms to some body parts but not others?  How confusing must it be for children to hear a penis called “pee-pee” or “wiener”, but to know that an elbow is always an elbow?  Why do we permit our children to watch cartoons and play with toys that emphasize costumes sexualizing the female breast, but freak out at the concept of a doll who uses the breast for its intended purpose?

Fear.  Fear drives us.  Fear limits us.  Fear was meant to help us survive in a harsh, unpredictable natural world.   When the lion leaps from the grass, fear is a pretty good response.  This brings me to the last, and rather oddly shaped, bead.  How does extreme summer heat fit onto our fear necklace?

Two thoughts come to mind here:

1. Fear for the safety of the people and animals affected by abnormal or extreme climate conditions.  This is probably a ‘healthy’ fear as long as it doesn’t become incapacitating.  Fear of natural disaster can inspire us to plan and prepare; concern for others can pull us out of ourselves into a greater good.
2. Climate change.  The science is solid.  Climate change is real.  We are experiencing its effects, and will continue to do so.  Without action, we could really have something to fear.  However, an issue of fact continues to be a subject for debate, with substantial numbers of people denying the evidence.  Why?  Fear.  Humans don’t like to contemplate a reality that forces change.  We fear the unknown.  We fear loss of comfort, jobs, convenience.  We fear change.

Like climate change, the cycle of fear is real and prevalent.  And as with climate change, until we learn to look fear in the face and recognize it for what it is, it will continue to grow.  A friend posted a link to a podcast by author Tara Brach in the comments section to yesterday’s post.  Ms. Brach’s book Radical Acceptance (recommended to me a few years back by another friend) is one of my favorite tools for identifying and processing the fears that cripple me, and the podcast has some wonderful insights.

Closing with some of the best words ever on the subject.  Enjoy!

 

When Darkness Enlightens

Annnd, we're back.  It seems that every year or two, someone launches a discussion of the 'degeneration' of books for children and teens -- especially teens.  In the June 4 Wall Street Journal, Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote an "article"(my apologies for the sarcastic quotes; you'll see why in a moment) entitled "Darkness Too Visible," bemoaning the "damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds."  Seriously?  An op-ed, I can see, but the WSJ actually seems to depict this piece as a news article.  Nice, objective descriptors, Ms. Gurdon.  Despite my biases regarding censorship or anything that smacks of it, the article has any number of flaws, not the least of which being that neither the author nor the mother portrayed in the lede anecdote appears to have spent any time in the young adult section of a bookstore or with teenagers, for that matter.

 

    Amy Freeman, a 46-year-old mother of three, stood recently in the young-adult section of her     local Barnes & Noble, in Bethesda, Md., feeling thwarted and disheartened.

    She had popped into the bookstore to pick up a welcome-home gift for her 13-year-old, who had     been away. Hundreds of lurid and dramatic covers stood on the racks before her, and there            was, she felt, "nothing, not a thing, that I could imagine giving my daughter. It was all vampires     and suicide and self-mutilation, this dark, dark stuff." She left the store empty-handed.

Nothing?  Really?  If I get out of a bookstore having spent less than $50 on books for my 12-year-old daughter, I count myself fortunate.  Now, I'll grant you that Caitlin's tastes run more toward middle-grade fantasy right now than to YA, but I've spent a fair amount of time in the YA shelves myself, and while, yes, there are any number of "dark" novels (and a fair amount of cotton-candy tripe), there are also books I can't wait to buy for her, or for myself.

Regarding the topic of "darkness" in literature: it's always been there, always will be.  But, besides the persistence of this debate, modern parents need to pull our collective heads out of the sand.  (I was going to say that we need to pull our heads out of somewhere else, but this is a family blog.)  Anyone who thinks that sheltering a teen from topics such as drug use, suicide, cutting, or rape will somehow prevent these things from ever touching the child's world wins the Ostrich of the Year award.  Ms. Gurdon claims that teen literature delves deeper into these topics than the books of 30 or 40 years ago.  I'm sure she's correct.  And, I say GOOD.

"If books show us the world, teen fiction can be like a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is. There are of course exceptions, but a careless young reader—or one who seeks out depravity—will find himself surrounded by images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds."  As the mother of a pending teen, and with two more children trailing in her wake, I hate to face this, but adolescence is a "hideously distorted [portrayal] of what life is."

25 years ago, I shied away from the darker books.  I read The Outsiders and Lord of the Flies in school, but at home I gravitated toward Anne of Green Gables, Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Whimsey, and a rather deplorable series of historical romances.  At school, there were gang fights, drug use, teen pregnancy, bomb threats, and bullying.  My junior year, one of my best friends attempted suicide.  She called me immediately after swallowing the pills.  A year or two later, the brother of another friend succeded in his suicide attempt -- bullets are more decisive.  My point?  Exposure or lack thereof to "dark" topics didn't change my adolescent interactions with the real world.  But, reading about misfits and loners made me feel less alone.

While the WSJ piece shies away from actually advocating censorship (though some of the wording terrifyingly echoes 1950s purity standards), it seems to suggest that a movement should be made by parents to push for the writing of enlightening work.  Ok, here is my message to every author, editor, bookseller, and librarian.  Give my children the truth.  Give them words that speak to their hopes and to their fears.  Give them fodder for their minds and their imaginations.  Give them insight into lives completely foreign to their experiences and give them insight into their own hearts.  Give them books that comfort them, and give them books that terrify them, opening the dark places of their hearts and letting out the decay.  I don't care what words you write, just write the truth and let them decide what to do with it.

Regarding censorship, and for those who wonder whether I really am ready to put my money where my mouth is, the piece below was written by me in 2010 and originally posted at http://www.blogcritics.org:

 

 

Sexual situations involving minors, vulgar language, murder, violence, drug use, rebellion against parental authority, suicide.  What sort of rating would this work garner, and how can parents protect their children from such obscenity?

In case I slurred around the tongue firmly adhered to the lining of my cheek, the work in question is William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  I have recently read several online discussions regarding a trend toward a purportedly excessive use of realism in children’s and young adult literature. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1101971/Childrens-books-violent-need-health- warning.html http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/specials/edinburgh/article6808533.ece

 http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2009/09/you-tell-me-should-childrens-books-be.html

 Imagine a world with content advisories or ratings listed on the backs of middle grade and YA books.

            The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton – gang violence, language

A Ring of Endless Light, Madeline L’Engle – death, discussions of sexual situations, partial nudity

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E.L. Konigsburg -- runaway children, theft, nudity

The list could continue ad infinitum.  I recognize the concerns involved in the exposure of children to the grittier side of reality.  I recognize that a time and place exists for discussions of death, sex, violence, substance abuse, etc.  However, as a mother of three, I am painfully aware that we do not always get to choose the time and place for such discussions.

Our children dwell in an imperfect world.  We cannot and should not protect them from the knowledge of the darker sides of life.  Death and violence will confront them regardless of whether they have been prepared.  As they enter adolescence, sexual feelings and confusion will swamp them despite our careful censorship of their media exposure.  The drug dealer on the corner or in the schoolyard does not care that we prohibited the book depicting substance abuse.

My oldest child is a frighteningly precocious ten-year old.  She reads at the level of a high school sophomore.  Discussions of appropriate content are not an abstract argument in our household.  At the deepest levels of maternal terror and concern, I want my children to never have to face the darkness of violence, loss, or addiction.  I’d prefer also for them to exist in a sexual vacuum until they are well gone from my house.  However, this choice is not mine.  My husband and I have instead made the decision to discuss rather than censor content with our children. 

Have media ratings http://www.mpaa.org/FlmRat lessened the problems of sexual promiscuity, violence, and substance abuse in children and teens?  I have been unable to find any data that suggests that these instances have declined since 1968.  Personally, I would prefer my children to watch a movie depicting intelligent themes that spark meaningful discussion, even if that film contains scenes of sex or violence, than to have them watch some of the blather that passes for children’s programming.  Given the choice between showing them Joss Whedon’s Serenity and Sponge Bob Square Pants, I’m going to stick with Joss.  There may be moments in which I experience discomfort, but at least I won’t have to watch the grey matter ooze from my children’s ears.

In a world that has become increasingly sanitized, polarized, and consequently unreal, books are one of the last havens of intelligent discourse and truly free speech.  To have children’s authors constrained by arbitrary standards of “decency” would be a travesty.  Should an author shy away from writing a book that deals with difficult topics such as drug use, rape, depression, or discrimination in a meaningful way for fear of being saddled with a “Mature” rating and thus becoming unmarketable for a publisher?

Discussions of book censorship are far from new.  http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/Speech/libraries/topic.aspx?topic=banned_books  Notions of content censorship date back to the ancient Greeks. From the advent of the printing press, various groups have attempted to control the spread and content of the written word.  In my opinion, placing content warnings or ratings on books would facilitate the descent into censorship. 

It has become far too easy, and tragically common for parents to relinquish the responsibility of rearing their children.  Warnings, Ratings, Parental Control devices and software have enabled parents to avoid looking critically at the exposure of their children to outside influences.  Rather than look to outside sources to tell us what our children “should” or “shouldn’t” read, as parents, we need to accept responsibility.  Books can be incredible jumping-off points for frank and necessary discussions.  Classic literature is rife with examples of phrases and scenarios which many would consider unacceptable in modern society.  Rather than avoiding a book or skimming over an inappropriate slur when reading to children, why not use the opportunity to discuss the changes in social ideals?  A YA novel may contain discussions of sexuality or sexual situations that a parent considers inappropriate.  Rather than forbidding the novel (which the child will then read in secret), the parent could have a frank discussion with the child about their family’s sexual mores.

The value of the written word lies in its ability to stimulate imagination and critical thought.  If we seek to shelter our children from the richness of literature, we do them a grave disservice.  Life the predator is not tamed simply because we choose to ignore the fangs.  Let us send our children into the arena armed with the wisdom of storytellers.

Co-Creating

“All things by immortal power,/Near or far,/Hiddenly,/To each other linked are,/That thou canst not stir a flower/Without troubling of a star.” – Francis Thompson

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;” – John Donne

“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” – Newton’s Third Law

I could go on with the quotes, but I think you get the point.  We are all connected.  No action exists in a vacuum.  No choice, no word is without consequence.  We know this.  We see with incredible clarity the effects of the choices of others upon our lives.  But how often do we own our own actions and the ramifications of those actions, for good or ill?

In this era of instant connectivity, we need more than ever to be aware of the so-called “butterfly effect,” that gem of chaos theory.  The butterfly effect is a metaphor stating that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in South America can change the weather in Central Park.  It was used in reference to the predictability (or lack thereof) of long term weather patterns, referencing the incredibly complex equations upon which these patterns rest.  In life, the metaphor can be stretched a bit further.  Small, seemingly localized actions can take on tremendous consequence.  Sometimes these events are benign or amusing: a video of a laughing baby goes “viral,” a snake goes missing and within a few days has over 200,000 followers on Twitter.  Yet, other choices speak to a darker side of humanity. 

Speech is good.  I’m a writer; by default, I am a huge fan of open communication.  As a recovering, conflict-avoidant introvert, I also recognize the danger of keeping words buried within.  Yet, words have power.  The effect of language to inspire, wound, and persist is evident throughout documented history.  Through the internet, and particularly social media, we have developed a 10 second attention span (perhaps less, did you just blink?  Oh look, a kitty!) and an infinite presence.  The words that we publish with a single click last.  Forever?  Until the machines take over?  I don’t know, but they are out there.  Google yourself.  Go on, I dare you, just this once.  That comment you posted on a forum last year, it’s there.  It may even be on multiple sites.  You can’t undo it – no takebacks. 

In the 90’s, there was a great animated series called The Animaniacs.  This deliciously snarky show had a recurring short feature called “Good Idea, Bad Idea.”  The premise was simple.  A skeleton in a bowler hat enacted two similar sounding, yet disastrously different concepts.  “Good idea – climbing a mountain.  Bad idea – climbing a mountain lion.”  There are days when looking through Facebook, Twitter, etc, leads me to believe that either many people did not watch enough 90’s television, or that we integrated the wrong lessons. 

Good idea – posting a well-thought-out comment, correction, or critique below an article.  Bad idea – indiscriminately bashing the author for his views, choices, lifestyle, and hair color.

Good idea – honestly discussing an argument, misunderstanding, or other pain with a friend, spouse, etc.  Bad idea – trashing that person on your Facebook wall, their wall, or the walls of unsuspecting friends or strangers.

Good idea – posting a single correction to an error in a review of your book.  (Better idea, privately communicating that correction to the author; or just leaving well-enough alone.)  Bad idea – posting a nuclear meltdown series of rants on the reviewer’s blog.

Good idea – engaging members of other faiths in discussion about the similarities and differences of your religion.  Talking about fears, concerns, and hopes.  Bad idea (Tragically disastrous idea) – burning the holy text of another faith.

The examples could go on almost as long as these words will bounce around whatever electronic trampoline the internet provides, but I think you get the point.  Recently, I interviewed a life coach for an article I was writing.  In our discussion, she said something that stuck.  She mentioned the importance of recognizing that we “co-create” our circumstances.  This concept is fundamental.  It goes back to childhood.  Come on, say it with me… “It takes two to start a fight.”  Indulging in a culture of victimhood serves no one.  Occasionally, as with certain violent crimes, we may be true victims of circumstance.  However, we choose our circumstances more often than they choose us, and failure to acknowledge our ownership of our lives denigrates not only ourselves but humanity as a whole.

When we speak, we choose to release words that others may not want to hear.  Just as it is our right and choice to speak our “truth,” it is the right of others to disagree with or to be offended by that truth.  When I write, I force myself to pretend that I am writing in an impenetrable bubble.  I can’t put my thoughts into words if I imagine a world looking over my shoulders and being hurt or offended.  But, before I seal the envelope or hit send, I must imagine every one of those people, and admit to myself that even my most benign words may give pain or offense.  When the comments come, I have to be prepared for the reality that I will be misunderstood, that I will be judged.  Here I have choices:  lash out in pain; retreat into my hole and never type another word; or look again at my words, making corrections or accepting that my truth may not be the truth of others.

With the evolution of the ever-present, but somewhat ersatz support network of social media, it is easy to succumb to the lure of airing every emotion publicly in our search for understanding.  I’ve done it. I bet you have too.  But, how much do we have the right to share?  When it is no longer just our pain, but that of another person, does the dirty laundry get to go out on the line?  Speaking of lines, where is that line?  What is the distinction between venting about a rough day with my unruly children and exposing the growing pains of my kids to the world?  Where is the line between bitching with the girlfriends about “men” and releasing a private beef with one’s spouse to all?  And, do you really want to put that argument out there?  How long will it be before others see your role?  Can you look in that mirror?

All of these things pale before the horror of religious warfare.  Even I can’t blame modern culture for this one.  Humans have destroyed one another in the name of God or of gods for millennia.  But I was struck by the words of one of the pastors responsible for the Quran burning in Florida.  “Wayne Sapp, a pastor at the church, called the events "tragic," but said he did not regret the actions of his church.

"I in no way feel like our church is responsible for what happened," Sapp said in a telephone interview on Friday.” – NPR

If you feel strongly enough about another faith to burn its holiest text, shouldn’t you own your view enough to accept that members of that faith may have a violent or outraged reaction to your act?

One last quote to close:

“Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.” Max Ehrmann, “Desiderata”

 

 

 

Tasting the Fruits

The last bite of the carrot salad lingers on my tongue – tart and crisp with the yogurt, and brightly sweet with a hidden warmth that spreads from the spoonful of chutney I stirred in.   A final sip of lemon water washes away the salad, and with it goes the tensions of the last month. 

Forgive the food references this morning; I’ve been re-reading M.F.K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me after reading an intriguing new biography of Fisher, An Extravagant Hunger by Anne Zimmerman.  My first journey through The Gastronomical Me took place nearly three years ago.  I picked it up in a San Francisco bookstore while alone in the City for a conference.  Fisher’s exploration of her growth and her sensual enjoyment of the world through her experiences with food seemed to perfectly mirror my solitary week exploring the culinary delights of that foggy city.  Just as I dressed in a black skirt and pearl necklace for a four-course dinner alone with my book, delighting as much in watching the people around me as in the feel of pate in my mouth, she wrote of crossing the Atlantic on her own, of solitary meals in France, and of discovering herself through her enjoyment of food.  The quote in the book’s preface spoke to me at a time when I felt that I was at last reaching an understanding of my adult self.  “To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.” –Santayana

That was not my first business trip alone, and I had been an adult for two decades, but for whatever reason, that was the week that I first began to ‘take the measure of [my] powers.’  It was one of the first times that I saw myself as directing my own life rather than living for the approval and pleasure of others. 

This most recent encounter with M.F.K. Fisher comes at the end of a couple of months in which my meals have too often consisted of such staples as: two Bao from Costco, microwaved and eaten over the counter with a handful of cashews and a couple of dates; or a grilled cheese sandwich on white sandwich bread, accompanied by a clump of chips.  My energies have been directed goal-ward with little left for inward maintenance.  Even the things which normally center me have this month gone toward other purposes: painting – auction, decorating – auction and Sierra’s party, writing – money or business building, cooking – sustenance only.

What I hadn’t realized, until Fisher’s loving descriptions of meals, friends, and family once more penetrated the fog of my mind, was that I have been living – and eating – therapeutically rather than preventatively.  I know better, of course.  I know the benefits, to myself, and to those around me, of living with intent, of seeking the foods, people, and activities that will make me feel good, rather than seeking out palliatives once I feel bad.  Instead of taking care of myself, eating light, flavorful meals that will sustain me through the chaos, I have waited until monsters were gnawing at my stomach lining and emotions, and then downed too-large portions of the sweet, salty, and doughy foods that make me ‘feel better.’  Even though I no longer have a job that mandates short nails and tears up my hands, my nails remain unpolished and have scarcely seen a file in 60 days.  The extra glass of wine with dinner tastes good and dulls the stress, but it also packs in the calories and leaves me feeling heavy and slow well into the next morning.

It is past time for me to stop, breathe, and focus on eating the foods and doing the things that help keep me from “feeling bad” in the first place.  It is time to run because it clears my head, centers, and energizes me, not because I want to lose weight.  It is time to prepare even meals I will eat alone lovingly, with consideration for myself and for those I feed.  It is time to be aware of, and to take pleasure in, each bite, and to stop when the bites become automatic or the food tastes of sawdust.  It is time to take moments in the day to breathe, to focus on my place in the world, and to give myself enough respite during the day so that I don’t reach the end wrung out, capable only of flopping into a pool of Jello on the couch.  As life presses me with new challenges, it is time to embrace the biggest challenge of all – to live.

Madness. Sense. Expectations.

Much Madness is divinest Sense --

To a discerning Eye --

Much Sense -- the starkest Madness --

'Tis the Majority

In this, as All, prevail --

Assent -- and you are sane --

Demur -- you're straightway dangerous --

And handled with a Chain --

--Emily Dickinson

 

Shhh….I’m going to tell you a secret.   Try not to be too shocked.  Ok, are you ready?  Here it is: Our society has different expectations for women than for men.  Oh, goodness, are you okay?  I didn’t mean to just spring it on you like that.  I’m sorry.  I know what you’re thinking: ‘Really?  We haven’t figured it out by now?  Suffrage?  Women’s lib?’  No, sorry, the car has not pulled into the parking place.  The ignition hasn’t been turned off.  We’re not there yet.

I realize that you’re still reeling from the first blow, but sit down -- I have another one for you.  Art, of any kind, is a hobby, not a career.  Adults are supposed to have a practical plan, a secure career.  Then, in a well regulated fashion, they may indulge these dangerous whims.

The preceding paragraphs do have a unifying element – other than sarcasm.  Emily Dickinson had it right.  Humans take comfort in conformity.  We like the expected.  We label, identify, and categorize.  If we can label a thing, we must therefore know its nature, and thus, it is safe. 

Children are permitted to dream.  We tell our children, “You can grow up to be anything you want.”  We encourage them to ‘reach for the stars,’ to have heroes, to pursue their passions.  And, then we expect the dream to stop. 

Somewhere, 4^th, 5^th grade, perhaps, we begin to shift our children’s focus from the stars to more serious pursuits.  We no longer encourage them to believe that they can become astronauts, dancers, actors, painters, and star athletes.  After all, those shining spots in the firmament belong to a select few.  The rest of us toil in the earth.

We tell our girls, “You can have it all.  You can grow up to do anything a boy can do.”  We tell them the lie we want to believe.  While letting our daughters play with Barbies and discouraging them from joining the boys in their climbing, muddy war games, we tell them that they can compete with men on an equal footing – so long as they look pretty, and don’t act too pushy.  We tell them, “You can have a career, family, or both.  You are lucky.  Your generation can have whatever it wants.”  We don’t throw the switch until later, until a woman enters her 30s.  Then we begin the delicate (and not so delicate) probing into her reproductive plans.  I have yet to meet a childless woman over the age of 30 who has not been subjected to a battery of questions and comments regarding her lack of motherhood.  We tell our daughters that they can have a successful career and be good mothers.  At least, we tell them that until the baby crowns.  Once the sheets flood with amniotic fluid, the conversation shifts to the importance of maternal bonding, to the risks of working mothers to every facet of a child’s physical, emotional, and mental well-being. 

In the late 1980s-early90s, science was the career choice.  Those lucky enough to possess a decent aptitude for the sciences or for finance were assured the golden ticket – a safe, lucrative, permanent career.  Those who chose a liberal arts degree were guaranteed a position in food-services as a fried-potato engineer.  Being a good girl, and being blessed with an adequate, if only barely adequate, scientific mind, I chose the sensible path.  Writing was for dreamers, but veterinary medicine was a career.  Don’t get me wrong: I love animals, I love working with people, and I have been blessed to have a magnificently challenging and rewarding career for a number of years.  However, I have come to believe that while nothing worthwhile is easy, fighting to squish oneself into a shape that fits a mold is a sure sign that the mold is not the correct one.

Like the stepsisters in Cinderella, throughout vet school, I bound, stretched, and lopped off parts of myself in order to make the role of ‘vet student’ fit.  My stories and poems retreated from paper back into my skull while I memorized nerve pathways and formulae I have never used in practice.  Yet, like the blood seeping out of the glass slipper, the writer in my head had a way of oozing into my life.  Need a flyer?  I’ll write it.  Newsletter?  Ask Christy.  Educational handout?  I’m on it. 

When I began working in large animal medicine 10 years ago, the questions from clients said everything one needed to know about gender expectation.  “How long is this one going to last,” the ranch wife asked my technician after pointedly appraising me.  “Oh, is that the woman?  There’s no one else available?” was always my favorite telephone call.  “They sent you to pull that calf?”  The elderly dairyman wasn’t about to pull any punches.  As I proved myself willing to dig in, working through first one, then a second pregnancy, the gender comments diminished over the years.  Diminished, but didn’t evaporate completely.  

I think the award for all-time best I-can’t-believe-he-actually-said-that goes to a horse breeder of a certain age.  He and I were discussing an associate that had just started with the practice.  The man looked thoughtful after I assured him that the new doctor was a wonderful vet, and said, “Well, at least Tom hired a man this time.” (!)

Gender image is generally a bit more subtle than this.  I saw it most commonly when returning from maternity leave.  “Oh, we’re so glad to have you back!”  Then, in almost the same breath, “Wait.  Where’s your baby?”  Paradox: a veterinarian should be practicing; a new mother belonged with her baby.  The fact that both occupied the same body seemed to create a quandary.  Note that not one person ever asked my husband following the birth of any of our children, “why aren’t you with your baby?”

These sets of societal expectations have converged in my mind recently as I bid farewell to long term clients.  Naturally, the clients whose animals I have treated for so many years want to know where I will be going, what I will be doing once the practice closes.  My admission that I lack the resources to set out in practice for myself tends to be met with understanding nods.  Any delusions people once had about the wealth of veterinarians have cracked in the past year or two.  But the nods turn to looks of condescension or consternation when I explain that I have been freelance writing part time and intend to turn that into a full-time career.  Writing is an oddball ‘hobby’ for a vet, and it seems incomprehensible that someone would jettison a “practical” career for a risky venture like writing.  Then I say the magic words and relief sweeps across the other person’s face.  “Well, I’ve spent a huge chunk of my children’s lives on call and away from home, and as they get older, they probably deserve to have me around more.”  One sentence shifted me from flighty dreamer to good mother.

Madness: I am changing careers.  I am quitting private practice and starting a freelance writing business.  Sense: I am losing my job due to the economy, taking some time to be with my children, and doing some writing. 

Madness.  Sense.  I guess it all depends upon the discernment of one’s eye.  But, I know this:  the other day when Aidan said something about his future as a pro-football player, I opened my mouth to remark on the slim odds for becoming a professional athlete.  Then, I looked into a mirror.  My sensible path has turned out to be as much illusion as any dream.  I closed my mouth, smiled, and said, “That’s great, Bud!”

To Be Missed... And Lessons Learned

In Friday’s post, I touched on some of the less, shall we say, savory aspects of veterinary medicine, the things I will not miss (at least not while they happen.)  That was the bitter; today I give you the sweet.  I’ll try to stay to the edge of cloying.

I will miss the colors of the sunset shifting between the naked branches of valley oaks as I head back to the clinic after my last call.  I will miss the egrets rising out of the rice stubble in the wetlands as I head across the causeway in the morning, letting my coffee warm my hand as the heater kicks in.

I will miss the smell of fresh shavings, of golden straw, of slightly dusty horse.  I will miss the smell of silage on the dairies.  And yes, I’ll even miss the manure smells.

I will miss the incredible frustration of waiting for a foal to take its first drink of colostrum.  I’ll miss the urge to grab the wobbly head and stick it onto the mare’s teat.  I’ll miss the softening of a mare’s eyes as she turns to her new baby.

I will miss the endorphin surge from accomplishments gained only after forcing “heart and nerve and sinew to serve their turn long after they have gone.”  The feeling of pulling a calf or foal, of placing the last sutures in the skin after a successful surgery – those are senses of accomplishment that will never leave me.  Nor will the joy of watching a horse that I’ve monitored on fluids through the night eat its first bites of grass with gusto.

I will miss the feel of hair, hide, or wool beneath my palm, the beat of a heart through the tubes of my stethoscope.  I will miss soft lips wibbling my hand, hay-breath blown into my nostrils.

And most of all, I will miss the people.  I will miss the offers to “stop by the house when you’re in the area.”  I have had clients offer the use of kitchen and bathroom while I’m on my rounds.  “Don’t worry if we’re not home,” they say.  “Just come in the back way.”  I’ve never taken anyone up on this; I guess I’m not really a country girl, but I will miss that sense of hospitality.  I will miss the obvious things like the cookies and breads, the ornaments at Christmas, the thank-you cards and pictures.  But, I will also miss the things more obscure: the circled ‘C’ in the upper left hand corner of an appointment that says that the client requested me; the less orthodox gifts such as the packet of lamb chops pressed into my hand after euthanizing a goat, or the children’s book about a pig with the same name as the pig I had just euthanized; the bag of tomatoes and fresh eggs on the front seat of my truck. 

I will miss the delicious and unexpected details of my clients’ lives: the taciturn dairyman I overheard telling his herdsman that his favorite place was the café of a chain bookstore because he liked to watch the people while he drank his coffee and read; or the bear-like, ‘good ol boy’ cowboy talking about playing golf with the grin on his face that said he knew perfectly well our brains were tying themselves in knots picturing him on the links.  I’ll miss the leather-faced, no-nonsense reining trainer who paints and reads fantasy novels in her spare time.  I’ll miss the tiny, bent, apple-faced woman who has spent a lifetime raising kids of both kinds – goats and over a hundred foster children.

I will miss the clients who, when I first drove onto their ranches, looked askance at the new “lady vet” and wondered “how long’s this one going to last,” but who now never fail to ask about my children.  Along the way, my kids became the practice’s kids.  Aidan and Sierra were both born while I was working here.  For a while I was known as “the vet who’s always pregnant.”  Caitlin used to ride with me during school vacations.  She has held a sheep’s prolapsed uterus while I stitched a tear, she has lost boots to the mud, and wiped a newly delivered calf with a towel.  I will miss sharing with my children that sense that real work involves blood, dirt, and sweat, life and death, that work is more than words on a page or numbers in a spreadsheet. 

This has been more than a job; it has been work – grueling, exhausting, frightening, exhilarating work.  My quote earlier in this post comes from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If.”  “If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve their turn long after they are gone, and so hold on when there is nothing in you, except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’…”  Like most of the writing of the era of British colonialism, the poem as a whole is a testament to a bygone time, with a typically male chauvinistic conclusion.  Yet, despite this, or perhaps because of it, “If” is a fitting testament to work that has historically been male in a region where a way of life is fast disappearing.  I will miss those who taught me the lessons of this poem through the lives that they live every day.  There is no effort that goes more unsung in our society than that of those who raise the crops and animals that become our food.  For your reading pleasure, here is the poem in its entirety. 

If

By Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

 

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;

If you can think -- and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken

And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

 

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

 

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Onions and a Novel

My alarm went off at 4:00 this morning.  Did I pull myself out of my turkey hangover and stumble into my car for a morning of mercantile mayhem?  Nope.  For one thing, last night we had home-made cream of tomato soup and grilled cheddar on baguette sandwiches; our turkey feast will take place tomorrow.  As far as Black Friday goes, I had a different set of numbers in mind.  I donned the navy blue bathrobe that predates three children and even my marriage. (It took some verbal gymnastics to explain to my mother on the morning of the first Christmas Mike and I shared how he knew I needed a robe.)  I brewed my tea (Peets’ Winter Solstice), made my breakfast, read the paper and deliberately repressed the urge to break routine and race to my computer.  But when I sat down to the keyboard, it was with a sense of delicious urgency.  This morning I reached the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words.  In the interests of literary integrity, I’ll refrain from putting the abundance of exclamation points and emoticons in my head onto paper.

Tomorrow is our family Thanksgiving.  This oddball tradition-nouveau of holding our celebration the Saturday following the fourth Thursday of November dates back several years to my first Thanksgiving on call.  Through the years, our family has discovered that moving our dinner to Saturday enables my sister and her husband to join his family on Thursday and to celebrate with us on Saturday.  This system is great for familial harmony, but a bit hard on Steph and Mike and their digestion – particularly since I’m not sure that my sister even likes turkey.

I spent yesterday chopping, slicing, boiling, sautéing, and baking.  Total production: candied yams – 1 pan, cranberry relish – 2 varieties, apple pie – 1, mince tarts – 11, bourbon-laced pumpkin cheesecake –1.  Also bringing olives, cheese, and a loaf of pumpkin bread from my freezer.  With all of this bounty, and with the anticipation of my father’s famous BBQ’d turkey, it may seem strange to note the one dish that calls to me every year.  The dish for which I accept no substitution or omissions.  Stuffing?  No.  Yams?  Nope.  And, no, not the bird.  I can’t comprehend Thanksgiving without creamed onions.

This is not something other people understand.  Even within our family circle, I think there are only four or five of us who like this dish.  Outside of the family, well, let’s just say that claiming that creamed onions are your favorite part of Thanksgiving, does not raise you in the estimation of the general public.  In addition to being pretty much devoid of nutritional value, this is a humble dish – our family’s equivalent of the hoary green-bean-casserole (btw, a favorite of my husband’s family and now the only green vegetable all of my children will eat.)  Here’s the basic recipe.

Pearl onions – frozen, 1 package

Bechemel sauce

Mix together in casserole dish.  Top with dried breadcrumbs, and place under broiler until breadcrumbs are golden and sauce bubbles. 

This is usually cooked and sometimes (depending on how tired Mom and I are) even served in Mom’s most humble casserole dish – a square, blue-flowered, Corning-ware pan that may be older than I.

As a family, ours tends toward culinary and intellectual elitism.  (My husband would say snobbery.)  My sister and I were raised with foods like calamari, fennel, and sorrel decades before they were trendy.  We once spent the better part of a summer scouring the foothills of the gold country in my father’s legendary quest for a sausage-stuffer.  When it comes to pop-culture trivia, we are abysmal failures, but references to politics, history, literature, and classical music wander into our daily conversation.  I am by far the worst offender, and the one crowned “snob” by my husband.  I hate fart jokes, buddy comedies, McDonalds, and Wal-Mart.  Peeps fill me with horror, and I am more likely to bring risotto stuffed baby bell peppers than chips-and-dip to a potluck.  I’ve been known to quote Shakespeare or Donne while sewing up a horse, and I believe that we should never elect politicians unable to properly pronounce the word “nuclear.”  If these things make me a snob, I’m okay with it.

For several years now, I’ve been struggling with the written version of haute cuisine, the literary short story.  As a self-designated over-achieving elitist, I felt it incumbent upon me to strive to produce exquisite works of Literature. (Note the capital ‘L.’)  Here’s the problem. I wasn’t having any fun, and it showed.  I read and review literary fiction, subscribe to several journals, and generally admire and even wallow in the works of great writers.  But, when I want to read for fun, where do I go?  Do I call upon Updike, Oates, or Franzen?  Nah?  I visit my friends: Rowling, L’Engle, Riordan, and Alexander .  I will say it.  Children’s literature, particularly middle-grade fantasy, is my fictional creamed onions.

So, when I decided to embark upon NaNoWriMo (an undertaking often excoriated in the halls of serious literature and publishing), I threw pretense to the winds.  This month, my characters have fallen through cupboards and into swamps, met a gnome, battled a dragon, suffered heat stroke, been kidnapped by a donkey, and followed a spontaneously combusting mountain goat.  There’s also a magic sword, a mysterious cape, and an enchanted necklace.  What a blast!  The novel itself is nowhere near done, but in honor of reaching my word goal, here’s an entire chapter.  Enjoy!  I’m going to go pack, and then it’s off to my creamed onions.

Chapter 17

Follow that Donkey!

Dylan’s first thought was that she was sitting in an oven, being eaten by a furry giant with a long, ugly face.  She jumped to her feet, but the oven door didn’t open, and no one turned down the temperature.  Dylan rubbed her hands across her eyes, pushing the tears back inside, and looked around.  The oven opened before her as a vast ocean of sand and beige rock, reaching almost as far as she could see, revealing itself to be a desert.  The ugly giant turned out to be a shaggy grey donkey.  Dylan scratched at her head.  The donkey must have mistaken her hair for a crop of carrots.  “Gross!  Donkey spit.”

“Is that your idea of some new bad word or something?”  Richard raised himself on one elbow, his free hand checking for his glasses, which had miraculously stayed on his face.  He looked at his sister.  “Oh, I see.  Hi, Donkey.”

“Do you think it’s going to answer?”  Sylvia sat up, pulling her robe, now no longer white, around her ankles and hugging her knees.

“The way things have gone lately?”  Richard squinted at her.  “Doesn’t seem too impossible, now does it?”

“Improbable, maybe,” Sylvia muttered, but she looked closely at the donkey.  So far, however, it showed no signs of turning into anything other than an ordinary if somewhat randomly appearing beast of burden.

“The ass will not speak.”  Abbletrotkin clutched the base of his razron as though fearing that it would separate from his head.  “Magic is not strong in this world.  Not that sort of magic, at any rate.  Here, you will find that the animals are merely animals.  The men, however…”  He shook his head.

“What about the men?”  Sylvia said.  She bent over Dylan, checking her arms and legs.  “I think you scraped your knee again, but that looks like the only damage.”

Dylan shook her head.  “No, that was from falling out of the tree at school yesterday.  Was it yesterday?  I can’t remember; it seems so far away.”

“I know.”  Sylvia wrapped her arms around Dylan’s shoulders.  “It’s going to be okay.  I wish we had a band-aid for that scrape, though.  It wouldn’t be good for it to get infected out here.”

“Maybe there’s something in the pack that George threw at us,” Richard said.  “Do you still have it, Syl, or did it get sucked into the ground in the earthquake?”

Sylvia looked around until she spotted something dark brown behind a pale rock.  “Here it is.  Do you really think there’s going to be a first-aid kit in here or something?  We just came from a world with a dragon infestation, where women die in childbirth, for pity’s sake.”  Shaking her head, she bent nonetheless to untie the leather thong that secured the neck of the bundle.  She cleared a flat spot in the sand and began to lay out the items one by one, inventorying them aloud as she unpacked.  “Looks like some bread, a couple of loaves.  Something squishy, looks like it’s filled with liquid; could it be the medieval version of a water bottle?”  She paused and Abbletrotkin nodded.  “Ok, water then, I hope.  Oh good, four of those.”  She handed around the water bottles.  “Tuck them into your tunics or whatever.  Each of us should carry our own.  But don’t,” she glared at her siblings, “drink it all right away.  Who knows when we’ll find any more.  Ok, what else?  Some…moss?”

“Poultice,” said Abbletrotkin.

“I guess that’ll work.  Here, Dylan, let me have your knee.  I wonder if there’s something I can use to tie it on.  What’s this yellowish thing?”  Like a magician performing a scarf trick, Sylvia pulled an increasing length of glistening fabric from the pack.

“Whoa!”  Richard blinked.  “That’s no band-aid.   What is that?  A cape?  Is it gold?”

Sylvia ran the fabric between her fingers.  “It feels like really heavy silk.  The threads kind of look gold.”  She looked at Abbletrotkin.  “I didn’t see anything like this in the village.  Is this one of those things that you know something about but we don’t?”

He shook his head.  “I am as bemused by this object as you.  I can tell you that it has great value, and is very old.”

“How are we defining old, these days?” Richard asked.  “Old from our time – world, whatever – or old from George’s time, or yours?  What is your time, for that matter?”

“Time is a construct, Richard.  You humans seem to look at time as a straight line, along which one can move only forward.”

“Well, yeahhh.” Dylan shook her head.  “Time is like a story, it goes from start to finish.”

“What if, instead of a line, you look at time as a tree, with many branches, some of which touch and cross each other?  Could you not move along the branches, passing between them at will?”

Sylvia dropped the cloak into her lap and stared at the gnome.  “The garden.  The designs in the garden at the castle.  They have something to do with time, don’t they?”

Abbletrotkin nodded.  “As I told you, the garden tells our story.  Did Dylan not just say that time is like a story?”

Richard shook his head in disgust.  “And that’s all you’re going to tell us, isn’t it?”

“For now, yes.”

“That’s a bad habit, you have, Abbletrotkin, this keeping stuff from us unless we weasel it out of you, or you think you need to know.  Not to mention distracting us.  Back to the cape.  What did you mean it was old?”

“Simply that the knowledge required to turn gold into cloth has been lost for centuries – in any of the worlds, as far as I know.”

“Can’t somebody just climb back to that branch and get it,” Dylan asked. 

Abbletrotkin chuckled.  “Trust you to make a complex problem seem simple.   Well, Dylan, given that the garment is here, it appears that perhaps someone did just that.”

Sylvia found a strip of cotton in the pack and bound the poultice to Dylan’s knee.  She stood up, stretching and took in their surroundings for the first time.  “It’s getting hotter.  It must still have been early when we landed.  We really need to find some shade, and do something about water.  Desert dwellers try to stay out of the sun in the middle of the day, and so should we.”  She looked critically at her brother.  “Richard, you’re going to burn like a lobster, come here.”  She rummaged through the pack again.  “Well, old and valuable or no, this is going to have to do.”  She fashioned the gold cloak into a sort of head covering for her pale-skinned brother, ignoring Abbletrotkin’s shudder.  Precious artifacts were all well and good, but if Richard died from exposure in the desert, what good would the cloak do any of them?

The heavy silk felt like an anchor dragging at Richard’s head and shoulders, but he knew better than to argue with Sylvia when she’d been having a bad day.  Since the day looked like it was turning into the better part of a week, Richard figured he’d just keep his mouth shut.  “I think that the most effective course of action would be to head for those palm trees over there.  There can’t be trees without water, can there?”

“I wouldn’t think so…” Sylvia looked at Abbletrotkin who shrugged.

“My people are miners.  Boldarkin is the only one of us so obsessed with trees and plants.  But, I suspect you are right.  At any rate, the trees may provide some relief from the sun.”  He picked up Dylan, setting her on the donkey’s back over Sylvia’s protests.

Dylan grinned from her perch.  “What do you think is going to happen to me up here?  It’s not like the donkey is going to take off or anything.”

That sentence seemed to Sylvia to be tempting fate.  She grabbed for her sister – a moment too late.  Right on cue, the donkey bolted into a rapid, bone jarring trot into the horizon.

“Well, at least he’s heading the right way,” Richard said.  He took the hand of his shaking sister.  “Come on.  He’ll stop eventually.  Let’s go follow.”

Sylvia thought her body would shatter from the shaking.  As she spun to scream at Richard, she caught the eye of the gnome, and realized that her brother was right.  Of the terrifying things that had happened this week, a donkey trotting away with Dylan across a flat, empty desert ranked pretty low.  There were no trucks, no cliffs, and, as far as Sylvia could see, no wildlife or people of any sort.  She sighed; she was getting tired of freaking out constantly, and she didn’t at all care for the fact that, on this adventure, Richard was turning out to be the one who had it together.  “Ok, follow that donkey!”

They soon realized that donkey tracking was easy.  The desert was like a giant sand table; the tracks of Dylan’s donkey were the only feature for miles.  On the downside, the tracks of Dylan’s donkey were the only feature for miles.  There was literally nothing to see beyond each other’s faces and a world divided almost equally in half – completely blue sky, and completely beige ground.  After an hour in the blinding sun, Richard would have given his arm or leg, or at least a couple of toes, to see a tree, or a house, or even a good sized pebble.  The only things that kept him moving forward were the string of hoofprints, Sylvia’s glare between his shoulder blades, and the faint promise of trees at the distant seam between blue and beige.  Even the trees seemed like a cruel joke.  “Do you think it’s just a mirage?” he asked, sipping a bit of water from his container and trying not to think about the fact that it tasted a little like medieval goat.

“Do I think what’s a mirage?”  Sylvia barely looked up from the line of hoofmarks.  Her feet had not broken stride since they had set out after Dylan.  If she was hot, tired, or thirsty, it didn’t show.  Nothing showed except a robotic determination to find the donkey and their sister.

“The trees.  Are we just heading toward something that isn’t real?  I mean what if there’s no point?  What if desert is all there is?”

“The point is to find Dylan.  Even if the trees are just a mirage, the donkey went that way, so we go that way.  Richard,” Sylvia stopped, and cupped her hand under his chin.  “Whatever else is going on here, we stick together.  We need each other, and the only way to figure out how to get home is together.  I know you’re scared and hot and tired and bored.  So am I, but we don’t stop until we find our baby sister, ok?”

“It is not a mirage.”  Abbletrotkin’s voice sounded like glass being ground over gravel, but his step was firm, and he looked like he could walk forever.  “If we are, as I suspect, in the World of the Book, there are oases in this world.  You should know that as well.  You know the stories, do you not?  You knew of my kind, and of St. George, and the archangel Michael.”

“Which Book?”  An idea was slowly unfurling in Sylvia’s mind.

“I do not know its name in your world.  It holds many stories of the balance.  The tale of the cloak of the colors, the story of the one who turned back the sea, the man whose wife turned into mineral for her faithlessness.  There are more, but these I remember.”

“Lot’s wife!”  Richard jumped in place.  “And Moses!”

“And Joseph and the coat of many colors.”  Sylvia looked at Abbletrotkin.  “We call it the Old Testament of the Bible, but there are other names for it in our world, too.”  She stared at the line of donkey tracks and back at the gnome.  “So, you’re saying that we are in the world of the Old Testament stories?”

“It would appear so.”

The two children looked at each other. “Gnomes and elves in one world,” said Sylvia.

“St. George and the Dragon.”  Richard nodded.

“And now we’re in the Old Testament.  Do you get the feeling that we’re moving through the grades?  Each of these worlds is like something from Main Lessons.”

“Ok, but why?  Is this some sort of test that no one told us about?  I’ve never heard any of the kids talk about it, and besides if it’s a graduation test for you, what are Dylan and I doing here?”

“I don’t think so.”  Sylvia shook her head slowly.  “I mean it is a test, or a challenge or something, but not a school test.  I think we’re looking at it backwards.  I don’t think the worlds are based on school.  I think school was teaching us about the nine worlds.”  She looked at Abbletrotkin.  “That’s it, isn’t it?  Our school is some sort of training ground or something.  For what?  What are we supposed to do?  And why us?”  She grimaced.  “Yeah, I know, that’s the question the heroes always ask.  But, seriously, why us?  We aren’t heroes.  We’re three kids with a screwed up home, from a screwed up world, who can’t even get stuff from an old classroom without it blowing up.  That’s not heroic, that’s accident-prone.”

Abbletrotkin trudged ahead, leaving Sylvia and Richard staring at his back.  For a moment, it seemed as though he would refuse to answer.  Then, his voice floated back to them.  “You are correct about your school.  The Guardians have always known that the ultimate battle for the Balance would take place in your world, the world in which Ahriman is most likely to manifest, where he has the strongest hold.  Thus, it was determined that those who would provide the final defense of the Balance must also be of your world.  And so, a system of schools was begun with the purpose of training those who would restore the Balance.”

“Okay, but Sylvia’s right, why us?”  Richard stopped walking.  “Don’t tell me this is where you say ominously, ‘There have been others,’ and allude to the terrible fates of other schoolers.  Or, no, wait – you said something before about a Prophecy.  Let me guess, it said ‘Lo and a Bossy girl with black curls, a super-evolved but near-sighted boy, and an annoying brat with carrot-salad hair will restore the Balance, and you all thought of us.”

Sylvia punched her brother on the arm as Abbletrotkin answered seriously.  “No, I know of no others.  Any terrible fate must be your own.”

“Gee, that’s comforting,” Richard muttered.

“And, as for Prophecy.  Yes, the Prophecy exists, but insofar as I am aware, you are not mentioned.”

“Insofar as you are aware?  What does that mean?” Richard asked.

“The actual wording of the Prophecy was lost generations ago.  What little knowledge we Guardians possess of the text has been passed between the Guardians of the words over time.”

“Your time or ours?  Never mind.”  Richard disavowed his own question.  “The time thing still makes my brain hurt.  Ok, so some idiot in one of the time arcs put the Prophecy ‘in a safe place,’ and now it and the Balance are missing.  Nifty.”

“Ok, but if we’re not the heroes of the Prophecy, what are we doing here?  Why did the stupid cupboard eat us?  Why didn’t it suck up the right kids?”  Sylvia twisted her hair up into a knot.  Sweat trickled down the back of her neck, and the donkey footprints seemed to go on forever.  “But really, could the cupboard be in the wrong school or something?  I can’t see any of the kids saving the world, or worlds, or whatever.  I mean most of us are lucky if we remember our homework and lunches.  Some of my class can still barely tie their shoes.”

Richard nodded.  “Yeah, as schools go, we’re not really a heroic bunch.  I mean, Josh can throw a basketball ok, and Amanda in Sylvia’s class plays a mean violin, but as far as world-saving skills, not so much.”

Abbletrotkin turned to face them.  “What makes you think that there are designated heroes?”

They stared.  “There’s always a hero,” Richard said.  “That’s how the stories go.  The guy or girl or whatever with the special destiny has all of fate resting on his hands, or hers.  There’s always a chosen one.”

Sylvia nodded.

Abbletrotkin shook his head.  “No destiny.  No chosen one.  What we know of the Prophecy speaks of the loss of the Balance and the rise of Ahriman in your world.  Our stories allude to a human child, but the allusion is general.  The decision to create your schools was one of prudence rather than a bow to destiny.”

“But then why did we fall through the cupboard?  And why did all of our teachers send us to that room at the same time?  And why has Mom seemed so worried lately?  And why did Mr. Loupe appear in the room if it wasn’t something to do with us?”  Sylvia’s head felt like it was spinning, and the tracks in the sand began to blur.

“I cannot speak for your teachers or your mother.  From what you say, I presume that your Mr. Loupe is one of the Guardians of your world, and I can only guess that he was drawn by the energies surrounding the Balance.  He may have been as surprised to find you in that room as you, yourselves were.  As for your trip through the cupboard, you were simply the ones who were present when the cupboard opened.  Nothing more sinister nor more grand.”

Richard felt like a fish with his jaw flapping.  So, all this craziness had nothing to do with some pre-ordained Fate; they were simply the victims of bad luck?  His head felt a little woozy trying to process.  So, the fate of the universe could have rested in the hands of Larry in seventh grade or corkscrew-curled Emilia in Dylan’s class.  Wow!  He looked over at Sylvia to see how she was taking the news of their insignificance, and bolted to catch her as she turned white and fell.   “Abbletrotkin!  A little help here!”  He lowered his sister on to the sand.  Sylvia didn’t look it, but she was heavy!

The gnome knelt by Sylvia’s head.  “I believe that the heat is affecting your sister.”  He joggled Sylvia’s full waterskin and shook his head.  “We see this in the mines with new workers who wish to prove themselves to their elders.  They neglect their own care in their eagerness.  Your sister has not stopped to drink or to rest, and now her body pays the price.  We must stop here, and provide her shade and water.”

Richard touched Sylvia’s clammy forehead and looked at the endless trail that led Dylan away from them.  “We can’t stop.  Dylan’s just a little kid, and she’s out there all by herself.  What if something happens to her?”  He started to shake, suddenly understanding the pressures Sylvia felt every day.  He was responsible for his sisters, and he had no idea how he could take care of both of them.

“If your sister does not rest and cool her body, she will die.”  Abbletrotkin’s face twisted as though someone had punched him.  “I am concerned about Dylan as well.  The little one should not be alone, but I fear that we have little choice.  If we continue to seek her at this pace, Sylvia will not survive.  I have seen that as well in the mines.  The body can be pushed beyond endurance.  When that happens, the spirit leaves.”

Richard stared at the distant, shadowy trees that seemed no nearer despite the passing hours.  “Okay.  Well, I guess this fancy cape might make a decent tent.”  He dribbled some water into Sylvia’s mouth and soaked a strip of cotton from the pack, placing it on her forehead.

“Wet her wrists as well,” Abbletrotkin said as he fashioned a low canopy from the golden cloak.  “There should be enough room in the shade for the two of us as well, if we remain prone.”

Richard groaned as he crept under the cape.  “Good thing we aren’t foreordained heroes.”

Abbletrotkin looked at him in question.

“When Syl wakes up, she’s gonna kill me.”

 

 

NaNo 0.5

“If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.”  --Max Ehrmann, “Desiderata”

Those lines hold one of the many reasons that poem occupies a large chunk of landscape on my hallway wall.  For someone who was never athletic – yes, I was the kid no one wanted on their kickball team – I am intensely competitive.  At physical therapy, I push against my own numbers; improvement is the only acceptable outcome.  When I missed the valedictorian spot in high school by three hundredths of a grade point, I railed at my mom for months for not letting me compete in Academic Decathlon which would have added an extra grade point to my average.  My narrow-minded parents had strangely thought that eight periods a day were enough for a high school senior.  I don’t like to fail, and there is a hard-edged, prickly, shadowy place within me that defines failure as anything other than being the best.

This is, of course, where reality crashes into ego.  “Best” is indefinable, and regardless of definition, my abilities at pretty much anything fall more into the range of “okay.”  Reality can really mess with one’s head.  For most of my life, the nagging of my ego turned things inside out – if I’m not the best, then I’m probably not any good at all.  I even managed to wrap a shroud of inadequacy around my ambitions.  It’s conceited, after all, to worry about being better than other people, and conceited isn’t nice, and I wanted to be the nicest person possible, and…

And round-and-round it goes.  I’m betting that I’m not the only person stuck on the merry-go-round of ambition and insecurity, and that is, one of the best things about the uncertainty of adulthood.  There are so many things that none of our schooling, lessons, training, or reading prepare us for, that the playing field is essentially level. 

At work, we joke that “it’s better to be lucky than good any day of the week.”  In a field where biology and fate trump knowledge and skill daily, one learns quickly to abandon ego, and simply to gratefully accept whatever tools come one’s way – if a brilliant insight comes from within, great; if someone else saves your patient, be happy that it was saved.

Parenting teaches me humility daily.  What makes a “good” parent?  Which philosophies, techniques, theories are best?  Not a clue.  What works with one kid one day may backfire with epic pyrotechnics with a sibling the next.

If I’m paying more attention to the world than to my own fears and pride, I realize that I only have to turn to the news to see how futile comparisons are.  “Expert” scientists – the best and brightest in each field—are contradicted by the work of their colleagues on a regular basis.  One critic’s great American novelist is another reader’s over-rated hack.  The financial crisis – well, regardless of politics and persuasion, we can pretty much all agree that those who were considered the luminaries of the world of money fell off a rather large cliff.

So, where was I going with all this?  Oh yeah, balance, and comparing myself to the person I want to be rather than to some external benchmark.  On a smaller, less grandiose level, today is November 15, the halfway point of NaNoWriMo.  If I compare myself with others, I may become vain or bitter. In the forums, there are writers who have already crossed the 50K word line, and there are others far behind my 27(something)K.  I haven’t read their work, and I have no way of comparing their words with my own.  So, I must be content with the fact that I’m right on track with the goal I set for myself at the beginning of the month.  Sometimes it is no bad thing to be happy with what is.

Here’s an excerpt.  But, you may only read it if you promise not to compare it with others!

Instead, Mr. Loupe’s face was serious, and old – that was the weirdest thing in this whole freaky afternoon.  Mr. Loupe was the youngest teacher at the school, just out of college.  Most of the time, he didn’t even look like a grownup.  But, when Sylvia mentioned the glowing cupboard, it was as though all of the light had been sucked from him as well.  Lines crossed his forehead and cheeks where none had been before, his eyes seemed to recede into his skull, and in the faded and flickering afternoon light, he appeared shrunken and stooped.  “I was afraid of that.  The Balance truly has gone, then.  And so,” He turned, as though speaking to an invisible presence in the room.  “And so, it is time then.  I was wrong.”

He gathered the children toward him and leaned forward.  “I had hoped that we had more time, that this would be unnecessary, that I could give you a better explanation.  But,” The wind banged louder against the window, and the whole room trembled.  “But, there is no time.  This is it.  Just remember,” and he raised his voice into the howling gale as the room darkened and threatened to fly apart around them, “everything you need, you have within you.  Sylvia, you have learned all that you need to know, but you will forget.  Listen to your brother and sister.  They remember what you have lost.  Richard, use your words.  Remember St. George.  Remember that you have been a knight of Michael.  Dylan, everything you believe is true.  Keep the stories within you.  And Dylan,” he seemed to fade before them, swallowed in a vortex of wind and darkness, “the cold is the key.”

The wind roared as the room pulsed, ready to fly apart.  “The floor is tilting,” Richard yelled.

“Don’t be stupid, the floor is always like this.”  Dylan tried to look scornful, but the dark pulled at her.  She grabbed for Sylvia’s hand.

“Richard’s right.  We’re sliding!  Hold on to something!”  Sylvia grabbed her brother and sister, searching the twisting room for a firm hold.  “Richard, grab that rod.”

The room bucked and tipped, pouring them toward the cupboard, now glowing again.  The cupboard mouth seemed to yawn wider, waiting to swallow them.  Richard thrust out a desperate arm, and his hand closed around a smooth, round, piece of wood.  It burned his hand and he almost let go, but clenched his fingers tighter, trying to stop their plummet.  The floor heaved again, and they fell, tumbling like grains of sand into the burning gold light.

Looping

 The Foundational Theory of Chronodiegetics: Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.-- from  How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe  by Charles Yu

The leaves are morphing and falling around my time machine.  The swishing of bicycle tires through damp leaves and the smell of wet asphalt pull across two decades. Driving down Covell Boulevard in Davis yesterday, on my way to collect the children parented by my present self, I realized that the city of Davis, itself, is in a way my time capsule.  I last lived in Davis between the ages of 18 and 26.  So regrets, yeah, I have a few.  If there is anyone who has managed to travel that expanse of early adulthood without regret, I take off my non-existent hat to him/her/it.  However, in my time machine, the memory drive is the stronger engine.

This set of musings came about while I was contemplating my forthcoming write-up of an interview with the terrific Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and searching for a lede.  The lede still eludes me, hence this rambling blog post of procrastination.  Part of my problem in writing up the interview resembles the same difficulty I had in reviewing the book as much as I loved it.  Yu, drat him, hits too close to home with his wry insights. 

Of course a person would choose to revisit the worst day of his life if given time travel.  That might not be the first destination, but it would make the top five, easy.  That’s what we do with our past – pick it apart, unravel it, looking for patterns, missteps, course-corrections.  We “what if.”  What if I had studied more?  What if I had changed my major?  What if I had thought before saying that?  What if I had stayed home that night?  On and on, we analyze and recriminate, until we find ourselves looping through what Yu calls the “Present Indefinite.”  Unable to move forward, we revisit our past, continually mining it for clues to illuminate the people we have become and the messy lives we inhabit.

Memory and regret drive our time machines.  They influence the choices we make and the things/places/people/situations we avoid.  Before we moved back to Davis, when I came into town, I would visit my old haunts – walk through campus, the Arboretum, past my old apartments.  I wallowed in memory.  Yet, since we returned here in September, I find myself confining my wanderings in town to areas that have been more a part of my life as wife and mother than as student: home to school, grocery store, Farmer’s Market, the occasional restaurant (not generally one that existed in the old days).  I wandered onto campus once to do some research in the Health Sciences Library (at the western fringe of the University); I jogged once past the house where I lived in vet school; and I have rarely driven by any of my old abodes.  I think, like the protagonist in How to Live Safely, I sense some danger inherent to mingling my past and present lives.  I don’t think that my past self is likely to shoot her future (my present), at least not literally, but some part of me seems reluctant to let the two play together.

Perhaps that is for the best.  Memory and regret are good teachers, but at some point, it is necessary to graduate into one’s own future.

Note: I still have no idea how I’m going to write the interview, but perhaps my future self will come up with something in a day or so.

I Have a Title!

You may call me “Supreme Graciousness, Empress of…” oh, wait, not that title.  I have a title for the NaNo WIP (that’s Work in Progress – see my grasp on all this writerly jargon?).  Ok, so that title is: The Nine World Balance: Sword of Michael.  As those in the know, know, the colon indicates a subtitle, hinting at the possibility of further volumes.  Subtle, eh?

Anyway, at the moment, my fevered imagination pictures this creation going beyond the 50,000 words and in fact beyond a normal middle-grade novel length.  That’s right, folks, I envision a trilogy.  Of course, I remain undaunted by the fact that said trilogy may well never be read by anyone other than my long-suffering family and in bits by the long-suffering readers of this blog.  Onward!  Working subtitles for the as-yet-non-existent-in-this-universe-but-well-received-in-the-Christy-verse volumes two and three are, respectively: The Fall of Lucifer, and Ahriman Rising.  (More on the origins of this wackiness in the next post.)

For now, enjoy a bit of Chapter 3.

“I have some puppets stored in the old Strings room, and there’s a puppet stage in there, too.  I thought that it would be nice to do a puppet play next week when we learned about The Seven Swans.  Can you help me move the things to our class room?”

“Sure!”  Dylan grinned and wiped her cheeks.  She liked fairy tales.  She didn’t care what Richard and Sylvia said, fairy tales were cool – with their magic and witches and gnomes!  Dylan really wanted to meet a gnome, but no matter how quiet she was, and how carefully she peeked around dark corners or behind bushes, she never even saw so much as the tip of a pointy hat.  But puppet plays were pretty cool, too, and she loved the old Strings room.  It was dark, and just a little spooky with a cool slanty floor that you could slide on if there weren’t any teachers around to catch you taking off your shoes, and there were neat shadows from the tree outside the window.  Sometimes, in the Strings room, Dylan almost thought that she heard the whispering of gnomes, and she might have seen the triangular shadow of a hat.

“All right, let’s head back to the class room, shall we?  Would you like to ring the bell?”

Ms. Joy was pretty cool, Dylan thought as she picked up the bell, feeling the smooth, cool weight of the metal against her palm.  The clapper clanged, calling her classmates to the room.  Dylan felt important as she watched them scramble into line.  ‘Serves them right,’ she thought.  Then she frowned again, wondering if the boys really did think she was too weird.  But, then Gabriel poked her as he walked past.

“Lucky!  How come you get to ring the bell?  And where were you at recess?  We got creamed by the second grade!”

“Tell you later.”  Dylan kept her mouth closed as she forced the whisper past her grinning teeth.

The afternoon, in the manner of all good times, flew where the morning had dragged reluctant feet.  Mr. Loupe came in to help them with art while Ms. Joy went to a meeting.

Dylan whistled softly, mimicking the red-winged blackbird on the trellis outside as she dipped her brush into the red paint.  She swooped the brush upward on the paper, bringing the streak of scarlet to a point.

“Nice work, Dylan.”  Mr. Loupe laid a hand on the corner of her desk.  “Is that a gnome hat I see?”

“Yep.”  Dylan nodded.  “He’s hiding behind these bushes.  But the watercolor’s all smeary, so you can’t really see it.  It just looks like one big smudge.”

“I can tell that he’s a gnome.  It’s hard to get a lot of detail in wet-on-wet watercoloring.  You’re using your colors well, though.  That’s good.  It’s important to pay attention to balance.”  His voice dropped.  “Remember that, Dylan.  Balance is the key.”

Dylan paused her hand and looked up at Mr. Loupe.  His voice had sounded funny, and his eyes weren’t crinkled at the edges.  But as she opened her mouth, he moved on to Lina’s desk.  “Nice work, Lina,” she heard him say.  A splodge of red dropped into the middle of the green mounds of shrubbery on her paper.  She quickly turned it into a flower, and added a few more.  Rosebushes were good.  As long as you didn’t grab a thorn. 

Dylan waited for Ms. Joy to finish shaking hands with the last kid in line, skinny little Armin Ring, before she walked over to the teacher.

“Oh, good, Dylan, I’m glad you could stay.  Now, do you mind running over to the old Strings room and bringing back the swan puppets?  Oh, and we’ll need a prince and princess, too.  And a witch.”  Ms. Joy looked at Dylan’s face.  “You aren’t scared, are you?  I know some kids think that room is a little spooky.”  She lifted Dylan’s chin a little.  “Are you brave, enough, Dylan?”

Dylan shook her face free and nodded.  “The old Strings room doesn’t scare me.  I like it!”

Shivers marched along Dylan’s spine as she pushed past the giant rosemary bush growing across the walkway to the old temporary building.  Since the new wing had been built, the rooms were mostly used for storage and the gardeners seemed to forget that the old building was back here, huddling like an old man under a brown overcoat.  A tiny spider dropped from the eves on an invisible thread and landed on her arm.  Dylan lifted the spider gently and set it on the rosemary.  “Let the creatures be,” her kindergarten teacher had always said, and Dylan couldn’t see why people smashed spiders.  Spiders were good: they built cool webs, and ate the bad bugs.  Sylvia said that spiderwebs displayed “geometric precision”.  Dylan wasn’t sure what that meant, but it seemed to be a good thing, too. 

The butterfly necklace felt cold under her shirt.  She rubbed her palm across her chest.  She never took off that necklace.  Not ever.  The door moaned as she pulled it open.

 

NaNoWriMo: Day 1

Day 1:

NaNoWriMo officially began at 12:01 am.  As predicted by my husband, I caved and went to bed last night by nine.  So, my novel writing month began this morning at 5:00.  Pretty good so far, I’m a little over a thousand words into my middle-grade fantasy novel.  The plot is starting to take shape (in my head at least) and I’m beginning to be able to “see” my characters.  Only 48,000+ words to go!

Here are a few paragraphs from page 1.  Let me know what you think: the good, the bad, AND the ugly!

Thundering feet trampled the grass into the damp earth.  Smoke billowed from the creature’s nostrils.  The villagers cowered, shoving their sacrifice toward the beast.  With her cloak fluttering in the autumn breeze, the princess strode forward into her doom.  The dragon swung its scaled head from side-to-side as though pondering which bit of the maiden to bite into first.  As the gathered crowd hushed, trembling, a figure strode forward, pushing between the villagers.  The sun pried apart the clouds and fell onto the knight’s golden cape.  His sword held aloft, George challenged the dragon, stepping between the beast and its prey as he invoked the name of St. Michael.

The assembled throngs cheered as the first drops of rain began to fall upon the furled wings of the giant lizard as it slunk back to its cave.  The crowd dissipated, teachers herding their classes back into the earthen buildings.  Richard sighed.  The sixth grade’s dragon had been decent, though he was sure that in two years, his class would create a monster that would render the villagers catatonic.  Richard liked the word catatonic; he liked the rhythm, the bounce of the syllables.  Sylvia mocked him for reading the dictionary, but he figured that if you’re smaller than everyone else in your class and you have floppy blond hair and round glasses, a big vocabulary couldn’t be a bad tool.  Besides, his way with words had landed him the part of St. George two years ago.  Sylvia was just jealous because she had been stuck in the middle of the dragon’s tale behind Billy Langdon and his body odor.

Richard sighed again.  To tell the truth, he kind of wished that Sylvia had been at the head of the dragon that year.  It would have been nice to beat his big sister at something, even if only symbolically.  Symbolically was another good word; he filed it away to use at dinner.  His parents were sure to want to talk about the Michaelmas pageant.  Mom and Dad were “schoolers” and were kind of rabid about their refusal to educate their children in the pods. They seemed to feel that the best way to make up for their lack of conformity was to go as far over the top in enthusiasm about their children’s schooling as possible.  Richard looked toward the ring of oaks that had formed the “stage”.  Yep, there was Mom, unclipping the silk cloths from the line.  He shook his head. Even a cheap holo, the kind you get at the grocery store, would have made a better backdrop than green and brown silks.  Who was going to buy squares of cloth as a village?  Richard enjoyed school okay, though he sometimes suspected there would be advantages to the pods – no chance of making a fool of himself in Games and imagine the amount of information he could get in a dump.  But, he thought sometimes that School took the “minimal reliance upon technology” thing a little too far.  Not only did it seem cheesy to use homemade scene settings when there were perfectly good holograms available, Richard worried that the school might get into trouble with the Party.

 

NaNoWriMo. Or, Getting Unstuck

I’ve gotten used to the writing roller coaster over the past couple of years.  The highs are often followed by plunges into self-doubt.  I’ve accumulated enough rejections to paper a wall or two – thank goodness for e-mail, and I’ve had a few pieces published.   The essay and non-fiction articles seem to be rolling along, but the fiction and long-form train is stuck.  I want to write fiction.  In my head, I’m a novelist, a short story writer.  Thus far, editors and one agent disagree. Even those who love me have reluctantly confessed (after the professionals broke the trail) that they prefer my essays to my stories. Now, this isn’t the first time that my internal self-image has crashed into reality.  In my head, I’m also well travelled and adventurous.  My passport hasn’t been valid since 1984.

I’m also stubborn to the point of delusion when it comes to clinging to my world view.  I want to write stories, damnit! I want to write a book.  At the moment, I have four short stories in various stages of completion/revision, several stories that have been rejected enough times to tell me that they need to go back to the factory, a draft of a novel that even I know isn’t going anywhere at the moment, and a hodgepodge of essays attempting to be a memoir but lacking anything resembling structure.  I have a couple of choices: pick something, finish it, and get serious about submission, or do something completely different.

Since the multiple partial projects are colluding with my latent ADD to drive a complete lack of productivity, I’ve decided to check out door number two.  NaNoWriMo is coming.  NaNoWriMo may look like a Disney (circa 1950) version of a Native American name, but it is actually, National Novel Writing Month.  This is a world-wide project in which the literarily insane (or the very stuck) work to produce 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November.  Now, I don’t think a bona fide, ready to read novel can be churned out in a month – certainly not by me.  However, I’m hoping that forcing myself into the discipline of working on one project every day for 30 days will shove me back onto the track of inspiration.

So, here I go: as of November 1, I will begin work on a middle-grade fantasy/sci-fi novel.  And, I’m looking for support.  Bug me about it.   When you see me, ask me how the novel is going.  I’ll post excerpts periodically.  Comment, critique, be mean -- it’s okay, I need it.  Hold me to this project, but forgive me if I don’t hang around to chat.  I’ve got a book to write.

Moving Parts

Today we move.  Move forward, move back.  When I was a child, the phrase “moving day” had a ring of triumph, of excitement tinged with the fear of the unknown.  Today, the phrases that run through my head come from the books I have read to my own children in this house. 

“In the great green room…goodnight house…goodnight mouse.” Ok, so I won’t miss the mouse or his thousands of friends and family.

“In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines…”  Our lives have never been lived in straight lines, two or otherwise, but Madeline is stuck in my head.  What would Madeline do, if forced to leave that house?  The girl who “was not afraid of mice [who] loved winter, snow, and ice” would probably see the opportunities for new adventure.  When I raised the possibility of adventure to Caitlin (whom, by the way, I wanted to name Madeline) she said, “I’m like Lucy Ann (a character in Enid Blyton’s Adventure series).  I don’t really like adventures while I’m in them.”

That’s the thing with adventures, even fictional ones.  When the characters, even those who dream of daring exploits, find themselves in the midst of said exploit, all they really want is to return home.  “And the ceiling was hung with vines, and the walls became the world all around, and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max.”  Yet, though Max was made king of all the wild things, what he wanted in the end was to be “where somebody loved him best.”  And in the end, his boat returned him to his room where “supper was waiting for him.  And it was still hot.”

‘I want to go home’ has been a mantra of mine for decades – when stressed, embarrassed, worried, or frightened, I hear my mouth say “I want to go home.”  On occasion, I have said this while standing in my own shower or lying in my own bed.  Home.  This house has been home for twelve years, and yet, it hasn’t.  This town, this region has never been ours.  We have no close neighbors, all of the interactive portions of our lives: work, school, shopping, friends, family happen elsewhere.  In a sense, by moving to Davis, I do feel as though I am returning home.

I was raised in Merced.  But, I grew up in Davis.  Twenty-two years ago this month, I spread my comforter across my dorm bed, and unpacked my belongings for the first time under a roof that did not belong to my parents.  I paid my first phone bill in Davis; got in my first car accident; wrote my first checks; bounced my first checks; had my first kiss; failed my first exam; fell in love for the first time; had my heart broken for the first time; took my first drinks; had my first sexual experiences; bought my first groceries; filed my first taxes; marched in my first rallies.  And, in Davis, for the first time, I found myself.

That was two decades ago.  Davis has changed; I have changed.  We have both expanded.  We both have a few more sags and wrinkles.  We have evolved.  I haven’t yet decided if I feel as though I am a warrior returning home after an adventure, or if I am an adult child crawling back home after failure.  Can I choose both?

As my thoughts turn away from this house, and toward our new home, the lines that run through my head come from a deeper past, a past that is pre-children, nearly pre-adulthood.  “Homeward bound/ I wish I was/ Homeward Bound.” 

Note: Quotes in this essay are from Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown, Madeline, by Ludwig Bemelmans, Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak, and song lyrics performed by Simon and Garfunkel.  All of my books and CD’s are packed, and so I quote from memory, accepting all responsibility for any errors.

Interview with Diana Joseph, Author of I'm Sorry You Feel That Way

I promised the interview with Diana Joseph, and here it is.  This interview was a blast; I really feel that the part about the valentines says it all.  This piece first posted on http://blogcritics.org.

I hadn’t laughed so much since, well, since reading <a href='http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-im-sorry-you-feel/'>Diana Joseph’s memoir <i>I'm Sorry You Feel That Way: The Astonishing But True Story of a Daughter, Sister, Slut, Wife, Mother, and Friend to Man and Dog</i> </a>.  The bio at the back of <i>I’m Sorry You Feel That Way</i> says that “Diana Joseph teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato.”  True, but inadequate.  Go to Joseph’s website, and you learn that she “has worked as a waitress, a short order cook, a typist, and a teacher…”  Also true.  Delve a bit further into her website and you begin to get a feel for Diana Joseph – her answers to the FAQ are well worth the read.  However, nowhere could I find anything that said that if you call Joseph for an interview, you will laugh and chat about motherhood -- including cheating at Candyland (she did, I didn’t), and cutting entire paragraphs from classic children’s books to shorten storytime at night (I did, she didn’t;) social awkwardness; the gullibility of men; and pets for a full ten minutes before the interview can actually begin.

Joseph warned me at the outset, “you have to keep me on track; I’m terrible.  I’m capable of going off on tangents forever, and you may not get what you want.”  Personally, tangents happen to be some of my favorite things, nonetheless, I had an interview to conduct.

<strong>  So, having read <i>I’m Sorry You Feel That Way</i> I would guess that you aren’t often found haunting Hallmark stores?</strong>

Hallmark stores, no… I made my own Valentines’ Day cards this year.  This is what I mean by a tangent.  I love to craft – I have the skills of an incompetent third grader, but I basically like to glue pieces of paper to other pieces of paper. 

I had an idea that it could be really funny to make these Valentines’ cards that were really pretty on the outside, but when you opened them up, they had pictures of Herpes.  <i>I forgot to ask if she meant pictures of the clinical disease or of the virus itself, but after our interview, I would be willing to bet the former.</i>

Clayton, my son [“the boy” in <i>I’m Sorry You Feel That Way</i>] walked into the room as I was Google imaging Herpes.  He asked “what are you doing?”  When I told him, he asked “who are you sending these cards to?”  “My friends.”  “Well, do any of your friends have Herpes?”  “No, no of course not.”  He looked at me and said, “Mom, thousands of people have Herpes.  How would you know?  I just think that if I had Herpes and I got one of these cards, I would feel really bad.”

He was right.  So I went to the porn store and bought a magazine…I came home and cut out penises.  I made these little accordions and glued the penises to them inside the card, so that when you opened them, the penises popped out at you.

So, no, Hallmark’s not really me.

<strong>  Just out of curiosity, in your experience, do boys <i>ever</i> start voluntarily wearing clean socks?</strong>

I think boys don’t start wearing clean socks until some girl tells them to.  When boys discover girls, they get very clean…I just thought of that.  When they’re little, like right now your son…how old is he?  <i>Almost 8</i>.  Right now his mind is pure and good, but his body is dirty.  When they hit a certain age, their bodies get clean but their minds get <i>very</i> dirty. <i> No italics can possibly capture the ominous chuckle in that “very.” </i>

<strong>How is the Boy?</strong>

He’s going to be eighteen; he’s graduating from high school this year.  He’s so fantastic.  He’s going to live at home when he goes to college.  This was his idea.  My university gives a tuition waiver for dependents, so he decided he could go there for his four years of undergraduate and live at home and not have to take out any student loans.  I don’t know many eighteen year olds that think that way.

He’s a smart, wise kid.  He went through a pretty crappy stage around age 15 or so…adolescent misery…But once he got through that, he’s been so lovely and pleasant.

He treats me like I’m a very cute, well-intentioned fuckup…Maybe I am…

<i>Diana went on to tell the stories of her son coping with both the cell-phone salesman, and the cable repairman for her.</i>

He does take care of all of the computer-related things.  It’s so nice, I can’t handle those things at all.  He does indulge me and keep me from having to handle them.

<strong><i>I’m Sorry You Feel That Way</i> ends on a poignant, and very hopeful note.  How has life been since the book was written/published.  Any thing new to share?</strong>

Well, the marriage to Al didn’t work out…

<i>(Pause)</i> <strong>Oh, I’m…sorry.  Ugh, this is why I hate asking personal questions.</strong>

It’s okay.  I know it’s going to happen.  I know I’m going to be doing readings and people are going to ask “How’s Al?”  “Where’s Al?”  It’s one of those things. 

I’m going to be 40.  I didn’t expect to be single, but I’m single anyway.  In fact … you probably have one of those ‘what are you working on now questions,’ don’t you?

<strong>Yes, I have it listed as the annoying, yet unavoidable question.</strong>

I’m working on another set of essays, these are more about what it means to be a woman, things like what do you do when your kid moves out or you find yourself unexpectedly single.  I didn’t expect a second failed marriage.  I didn’t expect to find myself here.

There’s an essay, it will probably be the first or second piece in the collection that’s being published by the literary magazine <i>Willow Springs</i>; it’s in the current issue.

I do want to give a plug for this magazine.  Literary magazines are dying.  They’re so important; they’re where emerging authors can get their start.  I think this is a great magazine; it’s put out by Eastern Washington University.

<strong><i>I’m Sorry You Feel that Way</i> is striking in its candor.  How was the book’s publication received by those around you; particularly the men in your life?</strong>

There’s no anger; there’s no hostility.  It’s been well received.  I don’t think anybody finds it surprising that I’d write a book that’s emotional, or emotionally vulnerable.  Whatever the DNA is that let’s a person self-censor, it skipped me.  I don’t have it.

My son was the person I was worried about most.  He knew I was writing the book, but he was about 14 at the time, so he wasn’t interested.  He thought it was weird that people would be interested in that stuff.  It wasn’t until he read a review in <i>Entertainment Weekly</i> that he became interested and wanted to read it.

What worried me most – I wasn’t worried about embarrassing him…I think I was pretty clear and honest about how I feel about him.  I worried about how he’d respond to the less positive stuff about me.  I was worried that he’d be embarrassed by me, or judgmental, or not thinking well of me.  I underestimated him.

There’s this version of your parents that they give to you as a kid.  Then you get to know them as the people they are when you become an adult.  Clayton got a stronger picture of me as the person I am earlier than most of us do.

But, do you know what he said?  He read it and said “there’s some stuff about your sex life that I didn’t need to know, but otherwise I thought it was pretty good.”  And he bought me a fondue pot.

<strong>I was particularly struck by the scene early in the book depicting your interactions with the T-ball mothers, and its similarity to the much later scene of the “cat-talkers” party.  Do you feel that there is an unwritten code or cult of womanhood, particularly for mothers?</strong>

Oh, this is going to involve some gender stereotyping, I hate that, but in my experience, and this is totally unscientific…Those rules went straight over my head.  It took me a long time to navigate those social circles, particularly with other mothers.  I had trouble figuring out how to talk with a group of women – what’s funny and what’s not…

I think it depends on the circumstances… If you have a personality that is strange or different or not traditionally female, if you laugh too loud, or your jokes are too dirty…it may be frowned upon…I used to be very direct, if I didn’t like something, or if something hurt my feelings…with men that was okay, but I learned with women you can’t always do that.

It’s interesting, with the responses to the book – some of the strongest negative responses have been from women; I haven’t had any hate mail from men.

<strong>You’ve gotten hate mail, really?</strong>

Oh yeah.  It’s usually things about being a bad mother, because I didn’t like T-ball or whatnot, or that I’m anti-feminist, or anti-female because there are so many men in the book.  I don’t have responses to those things, but to say “No, I’m not.  No, I’m not…”

The bad mother thing … I think we live in a very child-centric culture.  Especially if you don’t have a child-centered life…I have a child, and he is great, but I have my own life.  I think of the Toni Morrison novel <i>Beloved</i>, and at the end, this mother who is full of grief says of her child “she was my best thing,” and another character says to her “no, you are your best thing.”

I went to this dinner party, and I don’t know if it was a penance for eating dinner or what, but afterward, we were supposed to all sit down and watch the children perform a puppet show.

I teach at a college; I’ve seen the self-esteem movement.  I ask the kids in my class how many of them have trophies for 10^th place – hands go up.  I ask how many have certificates of participation – hands go up.  They want to be graded on effort, not always on outcome.  I don’t think it’s good for kids…

They have so many playdates… <i> She went on to discuss a Michael Chabon essay on the structured lives of children.</i>  They get to the class room and so many struggle with independent thought; they want to be told what to do. 

I don’t know, I think kids should sneak out.  I think they should learn to do these things.  We work so hard to keep them safe that they don’t know how to get out of trouble.

<strong> I loved the book’s subtitle (<i>The Astonishing But True Story of a Daughter, Sister, Slut, Wife, Mother, and Friend to Man & Dog</i>).  Was it your creation, or did it come about during the publishing process?  It just seems so apt for so many of us.</strong>

I did that.  I remember exactly how it came about.  I was sitting in my office at school trying to come up with titles.  I kept doing male stuff, titles that indicated my relations with men.  It wasn’t working, then I twisted it around and made each descriptor about me.

…The word “slut,” most people respond to that. 

I have been all of those things, and some of them overlap.  I think you can have all of those parts of your identity.  Some mothers forget who they are – as lovers or wives or friends or just women…

<strong>What is the funniest thing in the world?</strong>

The funniest thing?  To me?

<strong> Yes, to you</strong>

I have pugs.  I think lots of things are funny – like when a man puts a paper bag over his head, and then draws a face on his stomach, especially if he has a big gut – that’s hysterical.

But, pets are pretty hilarious.  I give animals these personalities…what’s the word, anthropomorphasize?  I have a cat; I imagine she’s a heroin junkie who steals out of my purse and would like to slit my throat while sleeping.

I have two dogs, shelter dogs.  The pug, lab cross…my vet says he’s grossly obese…I do not understand why he’s so fat…he groans and grunts… I have the big pug and the little pug – they have some type of homoerotic thing going on; they tongue kiss and take turns humping each other.

What I like best about dogs is when they gloat…

I commissioned an oil painting of the big pug from a friend.  I told Clayton that he has to hang it in his house after I’m dead.  I imagine my son with this wife who really hates that painting…

 

<strong>One aspect of the book that stands out is your vivid use of the sorts of details that most of us miss.  Are you a detail oriented person in your daily life as well as in your writing?</strong>

Yes and no.  I’m not eensy, not a control freak… I like noticing things.  You what I especially like, I like people.  I like noticing things about people – noticing the difference between what people are saying and what they are wearing or doing. 

I think that sort of vigilance comes from growing up with a father with a temper.  You develop an awareness…I think a lot of those people do become artists and writers…

<strong>Is your life as male dominated as it seems based on your book?</strong>

No, no not at all.  I even have textual evidence to support that.  I have an essay in the March issue of <i>Marie Claire</i> about my best friend and our relationship.  I’m crazy about my son’s girlfriend.  My best friend from childhood – we’ve been friends for 35 years.  But, I wanted the book to have a single center or focus.

You know, I don’t have a big female group, not a gaggle.  My women friendships tend to be one on one.  I’ve always been Elaine [from <i>Seinfeld</i>], the girl tagging along with a bunch of guys.  I have groups of guys but lots of one on one female friendships.

My female friendships are also with women who to really like guys.  I tend to think guys are pretty hilarious.  This is just an observation, but when a female friend and I are hanging out with our guy friends gossiping about people we know, and we ask the guys “do you think she’s pretty?” “Yeah.”  “Well, do you think she’s pretty?”  “Yeah.”  “How about her, is she pretty?”  “Yeah.”  It turns out they think everybody’s pretty because they’re all girls… Women tend to get a little more critical or picky…

…Women dress for other women…I don’t think guys care so much.  They seem so much easier to please.

<strong> <i>I’m Sorry You Feel That Way</i> reads as an assortment of individual essays.  I understand that you have also published a short story collection.  Do you see yourself primarily as a short-form writer, or do you also work in longer formats?</strong>

I think I’m a short form writer.  I don’t even read a lot of novels.  I like what a masterful short story writer can do with that compressed form.  A story comes closer to poetry…

<strong>There is such a sense of energy, of neurons firing rapidly, in <i>I’m Sorry You Feel That Way</i>.  What is your writing process like?</strong>

I know exactly how I did that essay collection.  I got my MFA at Syracuse.  I had a teacher there, an amazing mentor, Melanie Rae Thon.  I finished the program in ’96.  Melanie’s kind of a technophobe, so she hand wrote letters.  We’ve kept up this handwritten correspondence.  What you see in the book is my letter writing voice.

When I sat down to write a piece, I’d often write ‘Dear Melanie’ at the top.  She’s such an empathetic reader.  I know that she loves me unconditionally.  I felt very safe while writing.

She once wrote the kindest thing anyone’s ever said to me.  I was engaging in some behaviors that she wasn’t crazy about… She wrote “I understand the impulse, but I wouldn’t want you to do that.”  That “I understand the impulse” – it was just so generous.

<i>Diana Joseph learned generosity from a master, then.  Not only is she generous with her own vulnerabilities in her memoir, but she was generous with her time, humor, opinions and advice during our interview.  We were still chatting as I backed my truck out of the driveway, late to get the kids from school, and as I hung up the phone, the cab was unbearably silent.  I wanted one more joke, one more quip.  I guess I’ll have to wait for her next essay collection…</i>

Book Review: I'm Sorry You Feel That Way, by Diana Joseph

This review was previously posted on http://blogcritics.org.  This memoir is hysterical, even my non-memoir-ish husband loved it.  An hilarious (for me)  interview with Diana Joseph will be forthcoming. 

Perfect people are boring.  Fortunately, by her own admission, Diana Joseph is far from perfect.  However, her memoir <i>I’m Sorry You Feel That Way</i> approaches narrative perfection in that it is anything but boring.  By turns smart, snarky, laugh-out-loud funny (I did, several times), and wrenchingly poignant, without sentiment or artifice, <i>I’m Sorry You Feel That Way</i> is intensely human.

An ideal memoir treads the knife edge between honesty and generosity.  A slip too far in either direction tips the narrative into the chasms of spite or of sentiment.  Joseph deftly avoids losing her balance in this collection of essays. 

<blockquote>And when my son is born, all I can see is my brother Mitchell.  Those two look a lot alike.  Oh, those long eyelashes wasted on a boy.  Oh, that sweet smile and those pink cheeks, and what a dreamy, starry-eyed boy.  Sometimes my son is just standing there, he’s gazing at the heavens, he’s studying the stars, there’s a beam of sunshine casting its golden light on him and him alone, and a chorus of angels sings a single holy note, and even though the boy is minding his own business, he’s thinking his own thoughts, when I look at him and see my brother, I am almost overwhelmed by the urge to reach out and give that kid a hard shove.  I don’t, of course, but the impulse is still there.</blockquote>

Funny, funny, funny, funny.  Ok, some people -- the faint of heart and collectors of pastel porcelain figurines, perhaps -- might be offended.  Those people should not read this book.  If you just love any variety of Chicken Soup for the Soul, or firmly believe that children should never, ever watch R rated movies, or feel that an admission of previous drug use shows a deep and abiding immorality, you should not read this book.  If, however, you tend to look back on your own life with a wry grin, have been known to show up to the school bake sale with brownies still in the supermarket plastic clamshell, or simply find perfection boring, read on.

<i> I’m Sorry You Feel That Way</i> is subtitled: <i>The Astonishing But True Story of a Daughter, Sister, Slut, Wife, Mother, and Friend to Man & Dog.</i>  I’m not sure about the astonishing part – Joseph doesn’t fly, or turn ordinary materials into gold, or anything, but the rest fits perfectly.  In a collection of casually voiced, intelligently written essays, Joseph lays out the details of her relationships with father, brothers, son, ex-boyfriends, ex-husband, common-law husband, male friends, and dog.

<blockquote> “Now, look,” my father said.  “when a girl goes with this one, and then with that one, and then with that one over there, and with who knows how many others, what happens is people start to talk.  People will always hear all about what she did, see, and when they do, they’ll talk about it.  They’ll say that girl is a pig.”

The Lucky dangled from my father’s lips and his eyes were squinty from the smoke.  He raised his eyebrows.  He was jabbing his finger at me.  Moving only half his mouth, my father said, “Don’t be a pig.”

That was the first time my father ever talked to me about sex.  It would be his final word on the matter.  Neither he nor I would ever speak of it again.  </blockquote>

Joseph begins her memoir with a set of essays that depict her imperfect, and therefore human, relationship with her father.  By her own account, “when I was growing up, my father seemed unapproachable and unpredictable…It’s easy to remember the mean things my father did…Growing up the daughter of such a man, it’s easy to fixate on those things, to hold a grudge.  Letting go of the grudge is much more difficult.”  Plainly, Joseph ultimately wishes to let go of the grudge.  “So when I think about my father, I try to keep in mind the other things I know about him, the things I know for sure.”

There are a lot of things that Joseph knows for sure.  Her essays are replete with the sorts of details that most of us brush off in the everyday race that is life, but Joseph seems to know that these details <i>are</i> life.  “I will always admire the things Karl Bennet knows: how to skin a buck, break a horse, sew a button.  He knows that duct tape, WD-40, and Neosporin are the only emergency supplies you’ll ever need.  He knew that when his father died, he wouldn’t have much to say, and that when his mother died, he’d weep.”  In those sentences that balance the commonplace WD-40 and duct tape with the death of parents, Joseph paints an acute picture of her ex-husband.  We see exactly the sort of man he is through the “things [he] knows.”

Similarly we see her son and their relationship through the everyday details of trench foot: “Though this boy has a dresser full of clean socks…he one day decided he’d wear again the pair he’d already been wearing…If you ask the boy why, why would you do such a thing, he’ll shrug.  He’ll smile.  He’ll say he doesn’t know.”  And of T-ball: “What you don’t know is when T-ball season ended, the boy was bellyaching again.  What surprised me was why.  He was sad it was over.  He liked T-ball.  He liked his name in white letters across the back of his shirt.  He liked how the players lined up to slap hands with the other team.  He liked how everyone was nice, saying way to go, good job, good game.”

The closing scene with the man she calls “the man who would become, according to Colorado state law, my common-law husband” fills the eyes and heart with details that overwhelm.  “Al and I were sitting on the floor in the basement, piles of dirty laundry all around us, while a boy we loved was alive, safe, playing video games in his room, and a cat was purring, flicking her tail and weaving herself between our bodies.  All and I had been together ten years.  I wanted us to be together at least ten million more.”

If some authors strike the reader as inhabitants of the ivory tower, lyrical in their prose, lofty in their thoughts, Diana Joseph hangs out in the living room.  She is the friend you’d invite over for coffee or a beer after a bad week, because you know she’d have a funny story about how her week was screwed up, too.  She’s the friend who says the things you think, but would never have the guts to say.  And this is one thing I know; we can all use a friend like that.

I Hate Temporal Mechanics

“All you ever do is write!”  My computer denies this accusation from my son.  I’m having trouble remembering my last short story submission; doesn’t matter, I’m expecting another round of rejections soon.  I’m afraid to look at the “last modified” date on my novel – poor thing, can novels die of neglect?  My poor blog has been suffering from pathetic re-posts of articles first published elsewhere.  Watch out, I’m about to do it again.  And my dining room table is currently covered in a canvas desert island – backdrop for the school auction. 

I’m not sure what I’m spending my time doing, but it doesn’t seem to be writing.  Is an hour a day, an hour carved from the pre-dawn remainder of the night, an hour in which everyone else is sleeping really inordinate?  Or, is he objecting to the moments on weekends or after school when I attempt to polish a paragraph, send off and e-mail, or do a quick internet search between loads of laundry, glasses of milk, finding paper towels for spilled milk, and refereeing generalized living room warfare?

On the other hand, he may have a point.  It’s not as though my writing is neglected because I’m such a wonderful housekeeper – how long has that load been in the wash?  I’m pretty sure I haven’t sent a follow-up e-mail on the status of the second grade auction project.  The children seem to be well fed, but this week is flying by without a menu plan or shopping list.  I’d like to claim a lack of productivity in my personal life due to the overwhelming demands of work, but I’m not sure that yesterday’s 4 goats and a horse were really all that burdensome.  Where does the time go?

I’m going with the Star Trek theory – obviously, I am the victim of an insidious wormhole-parallel universe-evil alien mastermind-supreme intelligence-matter/antimatter convergence-plot.  It’s really the only explanation.

So, since I don’t seem to be getting anything done, enjoy this  interview with Sascha Rothchild, previously posted on Blogcritics.org.  See, I warned you.  Blame the Romulans!

Lessons from a Master

Last week I had the opportunity to

<a href='http://blogcritics.org/books/article/conversation-with-a-master-an-interview/'>interview</a>

 Newbery Honor author Gary Paulsen about his new book

<a href='http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-woods-runner-by-gary/'> <i>Woods Runner</i></a>.

I was terrified.  This guy has won Newbery Honors for three books, has nearly 200 books in print, has run the Iditarod multiple times, sailed to Fiji, and generally done everything.  He must be sick to death of professional press let alone one veterinarian/writer with exactly one other phone interview under her belt.

Boy, did I learn a lot.  I learned that great storytellers write and talk because they have stories to tell, things to say, that it is a compulsion.  I learned that, contrary to my upbringing, it's okay sometimes to ask questions, that people have stories that they want heard.  And, I learned, yet again, that pushing myself out of my comfort zone is the only way to connect with the world around me.  Sometimes reticence isn't a becoming shyness, sometimes it's a narcissistic shell.

I don't know why physical risk comes so easy, and emotional risk so hard.  Why is it so much simpler to risk physical danger than embarrassment?  I still don't know, but, I am looking forward to my next interview.  People have stories to tell, and I want to hear them...

Maybe I'm Stupid, But...

...I just don't get it.  I've heard all of the arguments, seen all of the presumptive Biblical support, and -- nope, I don't get  it.  What on earth does it matter whom, or if, another person loves?  Does the presence or absence of a relationship change one's talents, personality, intelligence, or gifts?  I suppose one could argue that love has a reputation for enhancing some and diminishing others of these traits, but I don't think the intrinsic traits are changed.  Priorities shift, yes, but the person is the same.

I recently reviewed a gorgeous novel (please note: novel, as in fiction) for Blogcritics.org. http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-the-marien-revelation-by/

. The Marien Revelation, by Miguel Santana is a beautiful piece of writing. It is primarily the tale of two parallel lives: that of a modern Mexican-American woman named Marien, and that of a young Jewish girl of two thousand years ago named -- you guessed it -- Mary.

Now, in Santana's story, he touches on the premise that Jesus had a lover, the disciple referred to in the Gospels as "the one whom Jesus loved." Now, while judging by Santana's Facebook page and blog, he does appear to be a gay rights advocate, this particular subplot is a minor component of the book. I think this was clear in my review. In the only two comments on the review, what did people get agitated about? Yep, Jesus' sexuality.

First, The Marien Revelation is a work of fiction! Neither I, nor the book's author had actually contended that Jesus was gay. Second, what would it matter? Ignore the dogma for a moment: what would change if Jesus had had a lover -- male or female? Would his good deeds be somehow lessened? Would miracles (for believers) suddenly be non-miraculous? Would the teachings of the Gospels be void?

This is the same logic that confuses me so badly in the modern debate over gay marriage. Opponents of gay marriage use the argument that they are protecting the institution of marriage. Huh? Is my marriage somehow jeopardized by the fact that my children have classmates with two moms or two dads?

Now, there are plenty of factors that can put marriages at risk. I would argue that most of these factors arise from inside the marriage. However, I'll concede that external forces can play a role in the disintegration of a marriage. But, I fail to comprehend how the marriage of two other consenting adults can possibly diminish or threaten an existing union.

Will I somehow forget to kiss my husband goodbye if I see matching bands on the hands of a gay couple? Will he decide that he doesn't need to come home at night if two men are permitted to marry? Will we separate because one of our kids has a playdate at the home of a lesbian couple? Nope, I still don't get it.

I don't get the use of a string of nonsense and meaningless dogma to heighten fear and deprive people of what should be a pretty basic civil right. But, maybe I'm stupid...

Book Review: Hot Springs, by Geoffrey Becker (First Published on http://blogcritics.org)

‘Kind of gritty,’ was the first thought that registered after several pages of Geoffrey Becker’s <i>Hot Springs</i>.  The opening line of the prologue sets the stinging tone: “Bernice was ten when her mother walked around the block naked.”  Like the first dip into the searing mineral soup for which the book is named, the first pages of <i>Hot Springs</i> shock and lure.  Like much of the best contemporary fiction, <i>Hot Springs</i> is rhythmic, musical in its use of language, but the rhythm is initially staccato.  “Just north of Truth or Consequences, Landis heard the unmistakable bang of metal punching through metal deep inside the engine.”  The sense of desolation, of the harsh edges of unreliable metal failing in the middle of nowhere, emerges immediately from that sentence.  The onomatopoetic “bang” and “punching” jolt the reader out of the lull produced by gazing too long at the soothing aqua and pastel cover.  If this novel is a dream, it is the plunge down the rabbit hole rather than the sleepy, flowing fantasy of Shakespeare. 

The syncopation of the novel’s language echoes the unreliable shifts of the protagonist’s mind.  Abandoned in her teen years by an unpredictable artist mother, Bernice is prone to bouts of erratic behavior.  In an attempt to establish long-elusive domestic stability, Bernice decides to reclaim – kidnap – the child she relinquished to adoptive parents at birth.  As Bernice and the infatuated Landis flee Colorado Springs with Emily, the reader is pulled along into the tense and uncertain world of Bernice’s mind. 

A broken down car in a “<i>last</i> resort” town; a kidnapped child with a high fever; an unstable relationship between a drifter and a woman whose reasons for taking the child are never clearly stated – these factors twist the cords of tension, filling the early pages of <i> Hot Springs</i> with a sense of dread. 

<blockquote> Landis knocked, entered the bathroom, and found Bernice staring into the mirror over the sink.  “I’ve ruined everything,” she said.  ‘I’m an unfit mother.”

“Shhh.  Nothing’s done that can’t be undone.”

“It isn’t?  Do you know what you are saying?  Are you even in the same movie as me?  Because mine is a bad gangster one, and it ends in a hail of bullets.” </blockquote>

This is Bernice, caught between her impulsive plan to save the daughter she bore from conservative Christian parents who are “brain-washing her,” and the sense that she, like her mother, is incapable of raising a child.  Bernice appears to have a deep resentment toward the religious life of Emily’s adoptive parents.  “They bought my daughter from me because they couldn’t have one of their own, and now they are killing her mind, one day at a time.  If there is a God, I think it’s pretty clear that he did <i>not</i> mean for these people to have children.”  Bernice not only resents Emily’s religious upbringing, she is outright hostile toward the child’s parroting of Christian tenets. 

The reader who prefers clean psychology and a linear explanation of the actions of characters will be disappointed in <i> Hot Springs</i>.  Becker’s novel is true to the erratic mentality of his protagonist.  Bernice and Emily drop Landis at a bus stop so that he can return to Colorado Springs to tidy up loose ends; Bernice decides that he has abandoned them.  She and her friend Gillian take Emily on an inexplicable day trip into Mexico.  Contacting her estranged father is one of the few actions by Bernice that seems to tie into her need for a home.  Yet, even this move has the feel of a random ricochet of a pinball against a bumper.

As Bernice bounces from place to place, landing eventually in her childhood home, we retrieve glimpses of her relationships with her mother and with her mother’s lover.  Gradually, the fragments begin to coalesce, and the initial shock of <i> Hot Springs</i> becomes first bearable then healing.

Meanwhile, Landis’ return to Colorado Springs is imbued with the aimlessness of his drifter personality.  “He enjoyed public transportation.  He liked how it was this system that was always there, always in motion – man-made, certainly, but even so, more like a tide or a wind -- to which you could attach yourself for the price of a ticket and magically get shot out someplace entirely different.”  A forty-two year old sound engineer who lives in a trailer park, Landis is not goal driven.  He had accumulated “catalogs from Pottery Barn and Banana Republic that only proved to him that those people had no idea who he was or where he lived.”  Landis is emotionally stable, but irresolute.  Other people make his decisions.  While Bernice -- though erratic -- is decisive, Landis will continue drifting sedately through space until bumped into by another object.  Without the propulsion of Bernice, he wanders: from his trailer, to her apartment, to a game of pool with an AWOL soldier, to a party with a bartender/dental assistant.

It is the connection with Robin, a bartender with more than her own share of emotional dysfunction, that connects Landis and thus Bernice to Tessa and David Harding, Emily’s adoptive parents.  This link is necessary to join the storylines of the two families, yet smacks somewhat of <i> deus ex machina</i>.  I found it difficult to suspend disbelief long enough to accept that, in a city the size of Colorado Springs, Landis would hook up with, and confide in, the one woman who could connect him to the Hardings.

Tied to Bernice through Emily, Tessa Harding is Bernice’s antithesis.  Her façade is perfect: wife, mother, pillar of the church, married to a successful business owner.  She lives in the ideal suburban home, dresses conservatively and appropriately.  Yet, where Bernice, though severely flawed, is entirely herself, Tessa belongs to other people.  Like many women, she has shaped her life to fit the mold others have created.  “When she was with David, she thought one way, by herself, another.  He was a cheating bastard – she understood this.  But he was <i>her</i> bastard.  She’d promised God, she’d promised Jesus, she’d promised her parents, she’d promised herself.  Her marriage wasn’t just some part of her life, her marriage <i>was</i> her life.”

Once the characters cease rocketing about the country and settle into a common location, the novel settles thematically.  As one grows used to the emotional temperature of <i> Hot Springs</i> the need for the initial shock and sense of disjointedness becomes apparent.  As the main characters come together geographically, their motivations and actions deepen and coalesce; it is as though each of them requires the others for completeness.

Ultimately, <i> Hot Springs</i> is a beautifully crafted novel with a tightly woven, yet unconventional storyline.  Literary novels are commonly referred to as “character driven” rather than the more “plot driven” style of commercial fiction.  In <i> Hot Springs</i> the characters shape and propel the plot, yet eventually, that plot allows for the full development of the characters themselves.

Book Review: An African Tale, by Enna Neru (First published on http://blogcritics.org)

As a introduction to this review, I'd just like to note that it is a thrill to receive an envelope covered in stamps from Botswana!

We live in a time of explanations, data, and reason.  We don’t see a lot of fairy tales these days – not true fairy tales, where meaning trumps reason, where characters represent attributes, where evil balances good, and magic is both dark and inexplicable.  The original European fairy tales were not the watercolor, bright fancies of Disney animation; they were darker, tales told on winter nights by the fire, allegories that captured the threat of a strange and hostile world beyond the flames.  Most cultures possess a tradition of these folk tales.  Flat characters, non-linear story telling, talking creatures, magical objects, magic that exists without explanation – these elements are common to folk tales around the globe.  Yet, in modern society, elements of the fairy tale are hidden; they do not fit with our need for data, linearity, and sense.  Even in the fantasy genre, we see realistic character sketches, explained magic, stories that progress from A to Z.

Enna Neru’s <i>An African Tale</i> is a throwback to the earlier times of storytelling.  Although the book is listed as a work of children’s fiction, it is not told for children accustomed to the brightly painted cartoon fantasies of our video era.  In <i> An African Tale</i>, violence is not hidden, protagonists make dreadful mistakes, families fracture, and evil and tribulation are needed to balance good.  Also, there are no pictures or song-and-dance routines.

Enna Neru, a pseudonym for the white South African writer Anna Uren, who lives at the edge of the Okavango Delta in Botswana.  In <i> An African Tale</i> Neru uses her experiences and knowledge of the region to craft a powerful cautionary tale about man’s misuse of and interference with nature’s resources.

“At the beginning of human time, which is longer than long, long ago but not as long as time before humans, there was a large freshwater lake in the middle of the southern part of the continent now known as Africa.”  With this opening line, Neru sets the stage for her fairytale.  In the mythical beginnings of human time, there was a god named Molemo who controlled the water.  For many years, humans lived in balance with water, and thus with the creatures around them.  But, “as always happens with humans, the easier things became the more restless, discontented, and selfish they became.”  Expansion of the human settlements led to overfishing, over-irrigation, and depletion and pollution of the lake.  Molemo sent warning storms, and for “a short time…the survivors were very humble.  They knew that Molemo was angry with them and why, and used their resources with care.  But then as always happens when things go well for a while, people forget and they slipped back into their old bad, selfish habits, assuming they were superior to all living creatures and that they could control the elements.”

Eventually, Molemo gives up and destroys the village and lake with a monstrous tornado.  The few survivors are forced to use what little water remains responsibly.  Enter Ledimo, the son of an ambitious man who takes credit for Ledimo’s skills at finding water in order to enhance his own position in the community.  Though justifiably angry at his exploitation by his father, Ledimo is not a particularly estimable young man.  In a rage as his father describes his plans to marry the girl Ledimo desires, Ledimo kills his father then feeds the remains to the hyenas.  Rid of his father, Ledimo reveals his own skills at water finding to the village and wins the hand of Bontle, the girl he wished to marry.  One day, however, Ledimo finds a magic stone that allows the bearer to control water.  Ledimo is given a choice by the voice of Molemo: “eternal life or death.”  Of course, Ledimo chooses immortality without realizing the consequences.  He is to be the keeper of the stone, responsible for maintaining the balance of water in the region.  Yet, he must never marry.  In true fairytale fashion, Ledimo attempts to circumvent his destiny by marrying Bontle anyway.  In doing so, he prompts the destruction of bride and village, dooming himself to centuries of solitude.  Eventually he fulfills his obligations to Molemo and is promised that he can become mortal, marry, and have children.  It is foretold that his two great-grandchildren will come into the world at a time when water is “greatly needed.”  These two children will jointly be the bearers of the stone, and will only be able to evoke its powers if they work in tandem.  Inevitably, “trouble comes if they are influenced by older, more devious minds.”

And so the stage is set, Ledimo’s wife gives birth to one of the staples of fairytale – twin sons.  After the tragic death of their mother, courtesy once again of a failure to heed the gods, the boys are raised in the village.  “Lorato was soft and kind, too kind.  People took advantage of him at every turn.  Kilo on the other hand was a little monster.”  Though unable to control water, Lorato and Kilo display traits that brand them as out of the ordinary.  “When they stared at anything or anyone for a while [their eyes] became like dark whirlpools; nobody could look into them for long without the feeling that they were going to get sucked up by some strange force.”  Lorato possesses an unusual affinity for animals, Kilo for reptiles.  Kilo is banished from the village for his cruelty and departs to seek his fortune in the city. 

Eventually, grandsons are born to both Kilo and Lorato.  In the same instant, Lotobo and Lesedi are born, their mothers are killed, and Ledimo dies.   <i> An African Tale</i> is primarily the story of Lesedi, grandson of Lorato.  Raised in the bush, far from the modern conveniences of electricity, television and cell phones that complement the life of his urban cousin, Lesedi is at home in his environment, fishing and befriending a talking gecko. 

On his tenth birthday, Lesedi is given an Ivory Palm Nut by his grandfather in the greatest secrecy.  Aware in his boyish way that the nut is important, he stows it in a bird’s nest, as any small boy would squirrel away a treasure.  The nut is stolen and Lesedi and his grandfather must embark upon a quest to reclaim it.

Lesedi’s quest is rich with the fanciful storytelling, fearsome creatures, and magical tricks that make up a good fairytale.  Children will recognize the familiar theme of a young boy seeking to reclaim a magical object with the guidance of an older man and the assistance of magical creatures.  Even along the path of Lesedi’s travels, Neru never loses sight of the theme of her parable.  Humans need the balance of good and bad, flood and drought in order to maintain equilibrium with nature.

<i>An African Tale</i> ends abruptly, without really incorporating Lotobo or the final destiny of the stone.  I find myself hoping that Neru plans a sequel.  As a stand alone story, <i> An African Tale</i> is drastically incomplete, as part one of a series, it would be the beginning of a sensational saga.

Book Review: Altar of Eden by James Rollins (First posted on http://blogcritics.org)

As scientific progress has hurtled through the past century, the question of possible vs. right has posed an increasingly demanding quandary.  In the field of medicine, in particular, practitioners and researchers are confronted daily with the choice between what <i>can</i> be done and what <i>should</i> be done.  The specter of possibility threatens the sleep of every medical doctor.  Salvation, torture, healing, abomination:  the paradoxes we have created are very present and very real.  Biologists with a literary bent have explored this theme for several decades now.  Medical doctor Michael Crichton is best known for his thrillers that hinge upon the abuse of scientific manipulation.  And now, with <i>Altar of Eden</i> veterinarian James Rollins has entered the fray.

Though he has produced a copious body of work, <i>Altar of Eden</i> is Rollins’ first novel that employs his knowledge and experience as a veterinarian.  Having been confronted with the same question many times myself, I appreciate Rollins’ answer to the question that sparked the writing of <i>Altar of Eden</i>.  The answer to “why haven’t you ever written about a vet, something like James Herriot’s <i>All Creatures Great and Small</i>” was “because not enough people die in those Herriot novels.”  His serious answer is the one to which I can relate: “…I was working fourteen to sixteen hours a day as a vet, and I didn’t want to go home at night and write about one.”  So true.  Yet, I had been curious about Rollins’ work for a while now, and when I learned that he had written a new book that tied veterinary science into a thriller, I leapt at the chance to review it.

With the creation of his <i>Altar of Eden</i> protagonist, Rollins is true to the demographics of the veterinary profession.  The era of James Herriot is over. Currently, nearly 90% of all veterinary school graduates in the United States are women.  Dr. Lorna Polk is an engaging heroine.  Staff veterinarian at ACRES -- the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species, a real facility affiliated with the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans – Dr. Polk displays all of the requisite traits of a modern action heroine: intelligence, vivacity, courage, stubbornness, inventiveness, and  (of course) sexiness.  In a nod to humanity, Polk also possesses the secret of a flawed youth.

<i>Altar of Eden</i> draws heavily from the stock cast of thriller characters: darkly intense and moderately maverick hero, aforementioned plucky heroine, damaged and ruthless villain, misguidedly obsessed mastermind/financier, and quirky and/or exposition oriented secondary characters.  While Rollins’ protagonists are likeable and his villains appropriately despicable and/or tortured, the novel is decidedly propelled by plot rather than character.

The novel is framed by scenes set in the post-invasion Baghdad zoo.  The violent prologue sets the stage with the introduction of an unspeakable creature. 

<blockquote> Makeen knew what he had seen.

The beast known as <i>Shaitan</i> in the Koran – he who was born of God’s fire and cursed for not bowing down to Adam.

Makeen knew the truth.

At long last, the devil had come to Baghdad. </blockquote>

Rollins’ short-paragraphed, rapid-fire prose sets the pace for a rocketing novel.  Lorna barely has time to drive to her laboratory to check on the status of her cryogenic tanks in the wake of a hurricane before she is collected by a government helicopter from the Department of Homeland Security’s Border Patrol to investigate a bizarre animal smuggling case – the adjective applying to both the case and the animals.

The agent in charge of the case is Jack Menard.  We discover almost immediately that a secret from the past binds Jack and Lorna.  Both protagonists are native to New Orleans, but from very different backgrounds.  Lorna and her brother are the last descendants of a line of wealthy, educated plantation owners.  Jack was raised in a large Cajun family in the bayou.  The tragedy that they shared in the past has shaped the separate careers of each.

“Jack turned and shone his flashlight into the nearest cage. 

She stared inside – and knew she was wrong about everything.”

The smuggling operation is no routinely illicit transport of exotic animals across a porous border.  The animals discovered in the fishing trawler display a mutual genetic trait that distinguishes them from other members of their species. 

<blockquote> “It looks like a severe form of atavism,” Lorna said.

“And that would be what in English?”

She offered him a small apologetic smile.  “Ataism is where a genetic trait, lost for generations, reappears in an individual.”

“A genetic throwback?”

“Exactly.  In this case, a throwback to a time before snakes lost theirlimbs.”

“That’s a mighty long <i>throw</i>, isn’t it?”

She shrugged and moved on.  “Most atavism is caused by the accidental recombination of genes.  But I don’t think it was <i>accidental</i> here, not with these many cases.”

“So you’re saying someone bred them this way on purpose.  Is that even possible?”

“I can’t rule it out.  Genetic science has come a long way and continues to push boundaries…”</blockquote>

Here we encounter the question of <i>can</i> vs. <i>should</i>.  Though stretched to its fictional limits, Rollins’ science, and speculation regarding the possibilities of genetic technology, is sound.  However, the pacing does fall victim to the hazard of the well-researched novel; it lags during expository scenes.  Unfortunately for Rollins, the biotechnology involved is so complex, that there is almost no way to avoid slowing the momentum of plot with detail.  He gets through these passages as quickly as possible, and as the action builds speed, the drag forces of exposition are overcome.

One of the animals that has escaped from the hurricane-wrecked trawler is a feline of epic proportions.  Based on the physiology of the cub left behind, Lorna deduces that not only is this cat a member of the genus <i>Panthera</i>, but likely displays traits of atavism dating back to the saber-toothed tiger. 

Through the suspenseful search for the cat and the discovery of a mysterious extra chromosomal pair common to all of the confiscated animals, Rollins leads the readers to a sinister plot to create genetically enhanced and mentally linked creatures that can be used as bioweapons.

Rollins’ strengths as writer lie in his pacing, plot, and setting.  His descriptions of the Louisiana bayous are lush and richly detailed.  One gets a sense of the dark and twisting waterways and vegetation that have shaped the complex history and culture of the region.  The sense of things hidden, twisted, and secret is echoed in the scenery.

Rollins does rely on many of the stock elements of the thriller.  The sinister island laboratory and its wealthy, misguided, and avuncular backer are strongly reminiscent of <i>Jurassic Park</i>.  The arrogant, misogynistic redneck who is also linked to Lorna’s past gets his due, and the shadowy corporation’s head of security is predictably cold and ruthless. 

However, despite some clichés of prose and predictability of plot, <i>Altar of Eden</i>remains a thrilling, fun, and informative read and a provocative exploration of the possibilities and hazards of human intellect.

Book Review: The Piano Teacher, by Janice Y.K. Lee

This book review originally posted on http://blogcritics.org

“It started as an accident.”  This first sentence from <i>The Piano Teacher</i> by Janice Y. K. Lee lands squarely on my list of best opening lines.  With the exquisite intricacy of carved jade, <i>The Piano Teacher</i> entwines the stories of two timelines.  As the story folds in toward the past, the first line of the earlier timeline echoes that of the more present.  “It begins like that.”

Set in the post-war Hong Kong of 1952, the story of Claire Pendleton is told in the conventional, literary past tense.  As the novel curves in upon itself, the earlier, war-time story of Trudy Liang unwinds in a telling and captivating present tense.  Linking the two timelines is Will Truesdale.  As the stories unfold, it becomes apparent that the story of Trudy is locked in Will’s memory, inextricably present for him.

A debut novel, <i>The Piano Teacher</i> uses language with elegance and precision.  Lee avoids confusion and digression while navigating two timelines with grace.  Every line in the novel appears to be chosen with care.  Even the names of many characters can only be deliberate – either in aptness or in irony.  Claire initially stumbles myopically through the, to her, alien new world of Hong Kong.  Will remains true to a memory, the memory to which he has forfeited his will.  Trudy’s “real name is Prudence.  ‘Trudy’ came later, when it became apparent that her given name was wholly unsuitable for the little sprite who terrorized her amahs and charmed all the waiters into bringing her forbidden fizzy drinks and sugar cubes.”  And, surely, it is no coincidence that a child is named for a pendant that contains a picture – a memory.

Arriving as a new bride from England in post WWII Hong Kong, Claire harbors no real illusions about her marriage.

<i>She had accepted Martin’s proposal to escape the dark interior of her house, her bitter mother railing against everything, getting worse, it seemed, with her advancing age, and an uninspiring job as a filing girl at an insurance company.  Martin was older, in his forties, and had never had luck with women.  The first time he kissed her, she had to stifle the urge to wipe her mouth.  He was like a cow, slow and steady.  And kind.  She knew this.  She was grateful for it. </i>

Her bigoted, parochial mother has prepared Claire to detest Hong Kong; her upbringing has informed her with unquestioned notions of British Imperialism, even as the Empire lies dying.  To Claire’s surprise, she discovers a seed of openness within herself.  “But this was the thing: she, herself, had changed in Hong Kong. Something about the tropical clime had ripened her appearance, brought everything into harmony.”  Yet, to Claire, the world becomes topsy-turvy when she finds herself taking a job as a piano teacher for Locket Chen, the daughter of a wealthy Chinese couple. 

<i>…what had been eye-opening was the sight of the affluent Chinese, the ones who seemed English in all but their skin color.  It had been quite something to see a Chinese step out of a Rolls-Royce, as she had one day when she was waiting on the steps of the Gloucester Hotel, or in business suits, eating lunch with other Englishmen who talked to them as if they were the same.  She hadn’t known that such worlds existed.  And then with Locket, she was thrust into their world.</i>

Lee does not shy away from the ugly implications of race and caste in mid-century Hong Kong.  Claire’s Hong Kong is a diversely populated world for which her village upbringing had failed to prepare her.  “The Indians had been brought over by the British, of course.  Pakistanis ran carpet stores, Portuguese were doctors, and Jews ran the dairy farms and other large businesses.  There were English businessmen and American bankers, White Russian aristocrat, and Peruvian entrepreneurs…and, of course, there were the Chinese, quite different in Hong Kong from the ones in China, she was told.”  While the upper-class society of Hong Kong arranges itself by caste rather than race, ethnic distinctions slink beneath the surface.  Note that it is acceptable for the European expatriates to socialize with the wealthier Chinese because they are “quite different from the ones in China.”  Yet, through Lee’s narration, we find that no ethnic group is exempt from prejudice.  Trudy’s cousin Dominick “is one of those queer Chinese who are more English than the English, yet has no great love for them.  Educated in the most precious way in England, he has come back to Hong Kong and is affronted by everything that is in the least bit crass, which is to say, everything – the swill on the streets, the expectorating, illiterate throngs of coolies and fishmongers.  A hothouse flower, he thrives only in the rarest of society circles, around damask napkins, and clear, ringing crystal.”  Trudy herself is the daughter of a Portuguese mother and Chinese father.  Conversation between Will and an English friend shortly after Will’s meeting with Trudy is revealing.

<i> “She’s Eurasian, isn’t she?” Simonds says.  “Watch out there.  It’s not as bad as dating a Chinese, but the higher-ups don’t like it if you fraternize too much with the locals.”

“That is an outrageous statement,” Will says.  He had liked Simonds up to that point.

“You know how it is,” Simonds says.  “At Hong Kong Bank, you get asked to leave if you marry a Chinese.  But this girl sounds different, she sounds rather more than a local girl.  It’s not like she’s running a noodle shop.” </i>

Into this turbulent colonial mélange, the Japanese invasion thrust another spear of ethnic discord.  Japanese propaganda flyers emphasize the ethnic bond between Chinese and Japanese, yet, enmity between the two countries goes back for generations.  As the invasion and conquest of Hong Kong progress, allegiances blur and shift.

The mystery of the Crown Collection is woven throughout both timelines.  Priceless Chinese artifacts were collected by the British government in Hong Kong and housed in the Governor’s mansion.  When invasion becomes inevitable, the collection is “hidden away and the location would be divulged to three people in three very different situations so that no matter what happened, at least one would survive.”  Of course, this partitioning of knowledge fuels the fire of conflicted loyalties and betrayal; the repercussions echo through the decade of the novel.

In the post-war period, Claire’s own accumulation of pilfered small treasures echoes the acquisition of the Crown Collection.  As Claire leaves behind the stunted English village girl, she begins to acquire a new identity.  The first layers of the person she will become are stolen from Melody Chen, Locket’s mother.  Yet, the plot creases again.  Many of Claire’s pilfered belongings are European in origin; in effect, Claire is stealing her own heritage.

Claire’s evolution is erratic and stumbling.  She has exchanged the stifling safety of her parents’ home for an equally stunted marriage.  “And then going home to Martin.  With him, the private was mundane, a chore, some heavy breathing and shoving, not at all pleasurable or romantic.”  In this light, it is almost inevitable that she should begin an affair with Will.  An older man with a mysterious past, Will is an experienced colonial; his life encapsulates the world that Claire still finds exotic.  Yet, he is so interior that their affair is virtually one sided.  “She was out of context with him.  She was a new person.  Sometimes she felt that she was more in love with that new person she could be, that this affair was an affair with a new Claire, and that Will was just the enabler.”

Given the depth and growth (or collapse) of the main characters, it is odd that Lee leaves several of the minor characters quite flat.  Otsubo, the head of the Japanese gendarmerie, is a rather two-dimensional, predictably lecherous villain.  Victor Chen, as well, has the potential, given the plot, to be revealed as more complex than he is written.

However, these are the rare missteps in an otherwise lovely and multi-faceted novel.  <i>The Piano Teacher</i> is intensely readable, yet possesses the complexity and depth necessary for a satisfying literary meal.

Writing in Wonderland

The light from my headlamp bounced back from a pair of eyes.  My brain processed the data: close set orbs=eyes in front of head=predator, eyes approximately German Shepherd height from the ground=large predator.  The sky lightened slightly behind the silhouette; round head, short ears = cat.  Big cat.  Maybe the morning jog wasn’t such a good idea after all.  My feline friend and I reflected the light between us as we both wavered in indecision.  What is this thing?  Stand my ground?  Leave?  My head shifted to the left.  Uphill and slightly behind the first set of eyes, glowed a second pair.  Two cats.  Nice kitties.  I could see the headline now:  Veterinarian Eaten by Mountain Lions at Writers’ Workshop.  Darwin awards, here I come!

I had known that going to Tomales Bay would mean confronting some fears, but I hadn’t planned on those fears taking a physical form.  Flyers regarding the Tomales Bay Writers’ Workshops run through the UC Davis Extension had popped into my consciousness over the last couple of years.  Wow!  Five days of writing on the coast.  Maybe someday.  In the last year, I’ve made a promise to myself to embrace “someday” whenever possible.  On a whim, I downloaded the application.  Ten page manuscript.  Ok, one short story.  There was only one problem: while I had been working sporadically on a novel for the past four or five years, I hadn’t written a short story since college.  I stared at my journal; the pages stared back.  As I rolled the pen between my fingers, the memory of a long-distance train trip taken a couple of years ago surfaced.  I recalled the disembodied sensation of long hours in my sleeping compartment, the feeling that I was being carried along without my own volition.  What if someone had gotten on a train and left everything without consciously meaning to?  The story began to take shape.  Overcoming the first hurdle, I placed the story in a mailer and sent it off with the deposit.  “Don’t worry,” I reassured my husband.  “They’ll probably just laugh and say ‘sorry.’”  I still have the acceptance e-mail saved on my Blackberry.

Selecting the manuscript to submit for the workshop opened a new packet of insecurities.  The novel was about half way through a re-write, and I knew that it was time to get some feedback.  10-15 pages:  Should I just do another short story?  The author leading the workshop was a novelist; this would be a great opportunity to have a bit of the story critiqued.  It won’t make any sense as an excerpt.  Finally, I told the squirrels in my head to be quiet, and printed the pages and sealed them in the mailer.  Done.  Well, almost done.  While fairly naïve about the writing process, I am aware that writing critique exists on multiple levels.  Friends and family, while delightful, are nearly useless.  They are generally unable to separate the writer from the writing, and are completely uncritical.  The workshop would provide valuable insights and critique, but I did remember enough from my college days to be aware that the writing workshop is a pretty supportive space.  Writers are acutely aware of the fragility of the process and of the ego, and even criticisms tend to be softened a bit.  I needed someone who just didn’t care if my feelings were hurt.  I needed a professional.  Editors, agents, and publishers read thousands of manuscripts a year, and while I’m sure most are lovely people, I felt that I could count on one of this breed to be brutally honest.  I wrote the check for the publishing consultation and printed out chapter one with a mild sense of nausea.

The emotional stew that comprised the morning of my departure for Tomales Bay was far more terrifying than any feline encounter.  Anxiety, guilt, homesickness, inadequacy – you name it, it was there.  The month had been far from smooth already.  Due to a combination of work and personal commitments, I had been home one Sunday in the past 3 weekends, my father had had a heart-attack less than 10 days before, the previous weekend had involved an overnight campout with my daughter’s Girl Scout troop, and I had taken several extra on-call nights at work to cover for a vacationing colleague.  Then there was the expense.  Work has been slow this year.  What was I doing?  How could I justify spending money we don’t have so that I could spend five days away from my family, leaving my husband alone with the kids?  This was a ridiculous investment in a hobby that has, to date, provided no income whatsoever.  Between crying jags, I managed to finish packing and get on the road.  As I pulled out of the driveway, I had a sense that I was bidding something farewell.  I turned on the radio; thank God for NPR.

A couple of hours and a Swiss Milk Chocolate shake later, I felt better.  As my truck wound through the hills between Novato and the coast, I imagined a character in my next novel making her home in one of the barns that dotted the hillside.  ‘I can do this.’ Maybe if I repeated this mantra enough times, I would believe it.  As the car hit Highway 1, light fragmented on the blue waters of Tomales Bay.  I had never seen a place that looked so exactly like the pictures.  Tucked away on its hillside above Highway 1, The Marconi Conference Center is a world unto itself.  Historic buildings tuck with new friends among the redwoods.  The landscaping blends with the forest and is redolent with sage, rosemary, and lavender.  Deer, wild turkeys, ravens, and huge jackrabbits (oh, and large cats) populate the woods.  One of my classmates commented that he expected the rabbits to be wearing little vests, “and carrying pocket watches?” I asked.

            “Yeah, have I said that already?”

            He hadn’t.  But, it is that kind of place.  The workshops, too, are that kind of place.  From the moment one sets foot on the grounds, one is a writer.  The written word infuses everything.  The experience is by turns terrifying, exhilarating, frustrating, uplifting, and exhausting.  At first, I chalked the overwhelming sensations up to my distance from academia.  I hadn’t sat in any sort of  liberal arts class in over 15 years, let alone one that asked me to contribute.  Yet, the graduate students in my seminar seemed to feel the same way.  More than one person commented that the workshops were “intense.”  For five days, we existed in a space outside of the time and geography of the mundane.

            Ultimately, I believe my mantra to be true.  “I can do this.”  I went to Tomales Bay to see if I could write, to see if I could recognize successful writing, and to learn to do both better.  Lightning didn’t strike.  No one proclaimed my genius.  If I had a great epiphany, besides the minor revelation that I like oysters, it was that writing is something I must do.  I don’t do it as well as I would like, but better than I had feared.  More importantly, the path ahead is a bit clearer.  Oh, and the cats and I went our separate ways.

Words, Words, Words...

Last week was occupied with words. I'm going to attempt to write a post that adequately describes my fabulous experience at the Tomales Bay Writers' Workshops, but in the meantime, here are two book reviews that I originally posted on Blog Critics. The first is a review of a book of collected poems. Poetry exposes itself to the interpretation of the audience. More than any other written form, the poem turns itself inside out, deriving meaning and value through the reading rather than the writing. Through the specific, the personal, poetry seeks the universal. A successful poem pulls the reader from his own experience into the personal truth of the poet and then expels the reader into the universe to become part of a greater truth. The successful poet, therefore, must write from the intensely personal space of self without a consciousness of that self. In his New and Selected Poems/ 1975-2005, Robert Ronnow’s greatest successes in the achievement of the universal lie in his most specific details. In “Sub-atomic Particles,” he says it himself: “Mustache, cowboy hat/ horse whisperer, gulag master/ Odysseus, King Lear/ salvation in the details.” Much of Ronnow’s work finds “salvation in the details.” Reading through New and Selected Poems/ 1975-2005 one gets a sense of the evolution of Ronnow as an artist and as a man. His early poems, while specific and vivid in their imagery, are undermined by the sense that the creator of those pieces is a young man very conscious of himself and his place in the world. The sense of outside influence is also more perceptible early in the book. Stanzas from the first poem “Janie Huzzie Bows” practically scream e.e. cummings. everybody looks. Janie Huzzie’s dressed in white. naturally the crowd glowers i pipe up winking in every direction i slither away mostly virtuously. The consciousness of self intrudes upon the more sensual passages in Ronnow’s poetry as well. While his language is frank and earthy, certain passages left me with the sense, not of a celebration of the sexual act, but with the sense of a man bragging of conquest. Though in “The Canopy of Stars,” Ronnow confesses that “Women are not inspired to love me”, he then comments that “This /must be an oversight on the creator’s part./ Even in my beard I’m built handsomely as other men.” The juxtaposition of this commentary on loneliness against the next poem “Absolutely Mustard” in which he “remember[s] passionate nights with some of the women/ I’ve known” jars. Though both poems reveal the writer’s solitude of the time, the sense that the poet feels somehow entitled to the company of multiple women carries through both poems. Yet, the salvation is in the details. “Absolutely Smooth Mustard” begins with the delightful lines “There is absolutely nothing to do. Some people/ fall in love. I go have a cheese sandwich./ with mustard…” The banality of the cheese sandwich as an alternative to love is taken over the top into absurdity as the throwaway “with mustard” is tacked onto the third line. Ronnow reserves his most lyrical and compelling lines for his descriptions of nature. In these stanzas, he paints with a fine brush, expanding the poems into the universal with minute details. The crows have been in conference, again. A jay, blue, pokes a hole through reality. There I find the sumacs fruiting and the male sex organs of the Queen Anne’s lace. These lines from “Under-sky sleeping, bone keeping” ground the reader in place. The specific sense of place – senses of place, rather, the stanzas are rich with sound and texture – allows the reader to feel with the poet that “…these mountains/ are my grave. A good grave/ to go to.” Details ground the poems in the universal when Ronnow strays into the realm of the general. His explorations of death, love, and politics have the feel of someone striving toward a larger truth, but falling into the trap of general proselytizing. In “The Rwandan dead” the specific wrenching details of the “Rwandan dead/ bobbing naked at the base of waterfall…” are lost in subsequent lines that proclaim “…Peace/ is a great blessing. Fools/ worship war.” He resumes contact with the specific and saves the poem with the stanza The Rwandan dead had dalliances and alliances. It is the indignity of their exposure and the decay of their former lives. How disposable, mere mulch, fertilizer for wild vegetation. I preferred his exploration of the human condition through the descriptions of the canyon dwelling Anasazi in “Blackbrush.” fish canyons then, shallower, dinosaur swamps now, dry, rock gardens. Explain the human history with water: did the Anasazi visit neighbors along the canyon rims and deep within… Explaining the human history with water takes a detail seemingly specific to an indigenous, desert-dwelling people, and expands into the much larger reliance of history on basic human needs. Ultimately, New and Selected Poems/ 1975-2005 deepens and grows more interestingly rich as it progresses, and one is left with the feeling that Ronnow’s development as both a poet and a man is ongoing. May this be said of all of us. The second review is of Pop, a young adult novel by one of my favorite kids authors, Gordon Korman. Bodies collide on a green field. Even in a still photograph, the impact is audible; the mind fills in the shock waves. Marketers have used it for decades – the primal lure of the full body impact of dueling males – American football. The compulsive lure of combat appeals to something deep within even the most passive or intellectual. Despite mounting evidence pointing toward the long-term physical and mental damage caused by football injuries, despite the voices that decry the violence and culture of machismo, the popularity of football is undeniable. What drives us to support a sport so destructive of its participants? What drives players to overcome the pain of impact, to ignore the possibility of an infirm future? How does the culture of combat affect the boys and young men whose worth becomes synonymous with a game? In his new young adult novel, Pop, Gordan Korman explores the culture of football from within the framework of a small town high school team. Wrapped in the story of a young man’s transition into a new town and new football team lies the darker tale of a middle aged athlete’s decline into premature dementia and the toll his past takes upon his family. If Marcus Jordan had to move to a new town in the dead of summer, at least he was moving to a high school with a first class football team. However, he hadn’t counted on the insular team’s reluctance to accept a newcomer even to tryouts or on the outright hostility of Troy Popovich, the starring quarterback. Marcus’ transition into his new home is further complicated by the advances of Troy’s on-and-off girlfriend Alyssa and by his hard hitting practice sessions with an enigmatic middle-aged man named Charlie. Charlie may be the most incredible athlete Marcus has ever known, yet there is something odd about a grown man who runs away from a broken windshield, and who can never show up when he is expected. Marcus soon discovers that Charlie is Charlie Popovich, former NFL linebacker and Troy’s father. The disparate jigsaw pieces of the puzzle that is Charlie fall into place as Marcus begins to realize the extent of the damage Charlie sustained during his football career. In his depiction of the three athletes: Marcus, Charlie, and Troy, Korman unravels the dangers, fears, and lure of football. Charlie, “The King of Pop,” pays for his fearless career on the gridiron with the loss of his present. Unable to distinguish between his past as a high school prankster and his present as a middle-aged father, Charlie hangs in the limbo of Alzheimer’s. Gifted with a brilliant throwing arm, but hampered by a fear of contact, Marcus must confront his demons in order to pursue his football dreams. Will Charlie’s lessons in accepting and even loving the “pop” override the evidence of damage caused by the sport they both love? In many ways, Troy, though a minor character, has the most compelling story. His conflicts between his love for his father and the sport and his loathing for and fear of what his father has become drive Troy’s actions. Having grown up with Gordon Korman’s lighthearted MacDonald Hall series, I found myself drawn in and taken aback by Pop. While the voice is vintage Korman: casual with a hint of smart-aleck, the characters of Pop are confronted with the very real consequences of their actions in a way that his early characters never were. Wisps of Korman’s early creations mingle in the characters of Pop. The pranks played by Marcus and Charlie evoked memories of Bruno and Boots, Alyssa’s voice could be that of a post-adolescent Cathy. Like those of us who remember Gordon Korman’s early books, and like Korman himself, his characters have grown up and entered the real world. The plot of Pop never lags. Korman transitions from one entertaining or tense twist to the next without letting up. A fast, compelling read, Pop kept even this non football fan engrossed from start to finish. Pop is suggested for ages 12 and up. While the book contained nothing that I would be uncomfortable having my 10 year old daughter read, its focus on high school sports and adolescent dilemmas would likely be beyond the interest of a younger child. Personally, I look forward to handing Pop to my son when he is a few years older. Pre-teen and teenage boys seem to be largely overlooked by the marketers of young adult fiction; Pop fills this gap with gusto. Both of these books were enjoyable in very different ways. Stay tuned for more words!

Recent Article at Blog Critics

I have a new article posted at Blog Critics Rated E — for Everyone . My thoughts on limiting/placing warnings on content in children's books. Check it out; give me your thoughts!

In Praise of Print

Will no one speak for the book?  Since the release of Amazon’s Kindle, I have followed discussions of features, e-book pricing, piracy, and the Orwellian weirdness saga.  Yet, I have seen nothing that touches on my primary concern.  Books – I love books.  I love the feel, the smell, the sound of pages flipping, the thump of a closed cover.  I like to hold them, to feel the comforting heft of a hardcover or the breezy frivolity of a paperback. 

From a rational standpoint, I would be the ideal Kindle owner.  I read compulsively, eclectically, and with disturbing speed.  My purse doesn’t leave the house without a journal, pen, and a book.  (My wallet has been known to remain at home on the desk under a book.)  A landscape without trees is pointless; I have been known to literally hug a tree.  I recycle everything, yet every flat surface in our house holds a potential avalanche of paper-wasting books.  I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Granted, packing for trips or even a “me time” run into the City would no longer require the use of a pack donkey or llama.  (At least I could carry a smaller purse.)  And, I would no longer be forced to cart home kilos of “absolutely necessary” volumes.  Though, this isn’t as much of a problem as it used to be.  What happened to Stacey’s books??

But, I love books and bookstores.  Shelves of books intoxicate me in a way that on-line catalogues never will.  How can I know what titles attract me without picking them up, fondling them a bit, taking them out for that first drink?  Selecting a book electronically has all of the romance of picking a hooker out of a database.  (No, I do not speak from personal experience here.  Hyperbole, people, hyperbole.)  Amazon gets my business only when searches of mainstream, independent, and used bookstores fail.

We live in a world where the use of our senses is becoming increasingly (and to my mind dangerously) obsolete.  Once, children played with Legos as basic sets.  You remember -- the little interlocking bricks that could be made into castles, airplanes, boats, or dragons.  Then, the sets became specialized; yes, my children can make a realistic Millennium Falcon, but heaven forbid one piece crawls beneath the bookcase, or the pre-schooler colors on the instructions.  The next, and apparently obvious step, was the invention of Lego video games -- all of the joy of Legos without the hassle of those little pieces.  Right.  This is where I step off of the ride; I don’t understand the attraction of moving Lego shaped characters around a video screen.  My techno-geek, gamer husband points out that the fun of Lego video games has nothing to do with construction.  I counter with the notion that since we used to build the Legos and then play with them, a vital step is being lost.  Where is the satisfying click of assembly?  Where, for that matter, is the pride of assembly?  Where is the cooperative search for the long, skinny blue piece?  I can’t help wondering if books are going the way of Legos. 

A Google search of the effects of electronic media on the brain produced 1,520,000 hits.  Most of these hits involved visual media such as movies and television, and the effects on the developing brain.  I was unable to find (in a short time and with a lap inhabited by a 4 year old) a perfect reference to support this point, but I think the mind interprets words differently on screen than on paper.  I know that I cannot adequately edit my own work without printing it out in hard copy.  If truly stuck, I will shut down the computer and break out the pen and paper.  I know that I read the news in more depth in a print form than from an online version of the same periodical.  I can’t put aside the feeling that the electronic format robs us of the essence of the book experience.  We are not all visual learners.  Personally, I tend to be a kinesthetic learner.  My brain processes information better when I use my hands as well as my eyes.  What provides the more complete kinesthetic experience:  flipping through pages or scrolling?

I may be a victim of early conditioning.  My mother was a school librarian.  Thanks to her frequent trips to author signings and sales events, I treasure autographed copies of books by Avi, Beverly Cleary, Gordan Korman, and others.  How can an author sign a Kindle?

The internet may house the definition of every word ever coined, but when dinner table linguistic debates arise, we trek to the living room and heave the appropriate volume of the out of date OED from its case, and delightedly break out the magnifying glass.  The sense of treasure hunt through the OED’s irritatingly miniscule type cannot be replaced with a quick electronic search.

I will be the first to admit that my relationship with books is messy and imperfect.  I leave them on tables, chairs, desks, bed, and floor.  They overflow the shelves and block the entrance to my closet.  Bookmarks in my house disappear into the void that houses paperclips, matching socks, and pens.  As a result, books in my care are often dog-eared and occasionally (don’t tell my mom) propped open face down.  I post-it note, highlight, underline, and write intermittent notes.  Pages of my favorite books are smeared with samples of my favorite foods.  I am a book slob.  Yet, I wouldn’t trade my messy, imperfect house for a sterile white-walled, stainless steel habitat.  I wouldn’t trade my messy, imperfect family for a Stepford husband and children.  We may be dysfunctional, but my family and my books understand and love me.

So, I’ll leave it to others to debate e-book pricing and sales, to agonize over privacy and copyright implications.  I’m going to the bookstore.  And when I finally fill the house with books, well, I’m sure we can find somewhere to put the kids.  They like their grandparents.

Respite

A brief break from the ranting today.  Triple digit weather, a case of shingles http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/shingles/dis-faqs.htm, and an on-call weekend punctuated with oddball emergencies have conspired to suck the indignation (not to mention the inspiration) from my soul.  Needless to say, the tick of the clock to 8:00 this morning filled me with joy as it signaled a day off.  Freedom!  Air-conditioning!  The shingles was, alas, still present but was rendered far less annoying by the previously mentioned circumstances.

Summer evokes childhood -- swimming, ice-cream, watermelon, flopping on a couch with a book, mosquito bitten games of hide-and-seek, and movies.  In the pre-video, pre-megaplex days of my childhood, the downtown movie theater played one movie at a time, and lines snaked along the baking sidewalk for blocks.  Around mid-July, doubtless sick of the cries of “I’m bored,” parents would load 5 or 6 of us into a van and drive us downtown.  Admission money carefully safety-pinned into change purses, and illicit brown bags of popcorn smuggled into pockets and backpacks, we were ready.  The oldest member of the group always had a dime for the pay phone, just in case.  The downtown theater in Merced looms grandly in my childhood memory.  The orange top of the white tower stood out for blocks.  I felt very grownup as I handed my money to the teller encased behind the sweeping curve of glass and stepped into the lovely cool of the lobby.  In those days, there was one screen that seemed impossibly huge, a grand staircase that led upstairs to a painted balcony that made me think of Cinderella’s castle.  Smells of popcorn, dust, and an obscure stickiness known only to movie theaters filled the air.  Movies on that screen seemed so real that I would look back to the light from the projector during the scary parts just to reassure myself that it was only make-believe.  The outside world vanished for a couple of hours into the cool, fantasy-laden darkness.  When the doors opened to the blaring heat and light, we would stand, blinking moles, on the sidewalk until a double-parked parent honked and waved us back to reality.

My heart broke when that theater was renovated and split into four smaller screens.  But, by then the VCR was common, and it had become increasingly difficult to convince our parents to shell out the time and money for a downtown movie excursion.  New digital technology and the mandatory blockbuster action scenes have somewhat revived the movie, but my children will never have the same feeling of movie-ness that permeated my childhood and that of previous generations.  Theaters are clean, well ordered, and completely generic.  Bag searches make greasy brown bags of home-popped popcorn impossible.  I may drop them off at a theater, someday – when they’re 15?

Today, however, I reclaimed a bit of my lost past.  I decided to celebrate freedom (and distract myself from the hideous rash on my shoulder) by taking myself to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/harrypotterandthehalf-bloodprince/.  I nibbled on my popcorn through the endless previews, unimpressed.  Then, it happened.  The mist rolled in, carrying the Warner Brother’s logo.  The movie was starting!  In that instant the whole sense of movie-ness, of being a solitary adventurer swept over me. 

Watching the adolescent forays into first love increased my sense of nostalgia.  The chairs grew smaller; I was old again.  That sense of uncertain excitement fled dimly into my past.  As the summer heat burst through the exit door, my feet stumbled mournfully away from youth.

I consoled myself with lunch at Tucos in Davis http://daviswiki.org/Tucos_Wine_Market_and_Cafe.  Between tiny spoonfuls of a dancing cucumber melon gazpacho, I sipped my wine, read The Language of Bees http://www.laurierking.com/, and lounged in the shade of an olive tree and green umbrella.  By the time the beef Carpaccio watercress salad had arrived, my consolation was complete.  Nibbling on the cheese course and sipping a glass of port, I realized that, perhaps, adulthood isn’t so bad after all.

My books, my friends

“Why on earth are you reading the Berenstain Bears?”  Before anyone takes offense, I’d like to clarify something.  I have no problem with the Berenstain Bear books; they’re great – for my 4 year old.  The reader in question was Caitlin – 9 years old, with a high school reading level.  The kid who breezed through Tolkien sat curled on her bed reading The Berenstain Bears and the Messy Room. 

“I don’t have anything else to read.”  Her bookcase consistently overflows onto the floor.  I picked up a paperback from under the dollhouse.  A Newberry Medal blazed from the cover. 

“You haven’t read Island of the Blue Dolphins yet.”  I looked around.  “Or Nancy Drew?  The Four Story Mistake?”

“Mom!  I mean, I don’t know what I want to start next.  I don’t know if I’ll like any of those.  So, I’m reading this while I decide.”  At this point I realize that I am standing in a glass house clutching a stone.  I have no room to talk.

A few days ago, on NPR’s You Must Read This series, Andrew Sean Greer commented that “some books inspire one to read, and some books inspire one to write; for selfish reasons, I’m always looking for the latter.”  While I agree with this statement, I would add that for me, and apparently for my daughter, books are more like relationships with as many types of books as there are people.

On my bookcase, dresser, end table, and in my purse, one can find at least 3 or 4 books in progress, pages dog-eared (apologies to my librarian mother) waiting for our next conversation.  My husband has been known to ask how I can keep track of multiple books at a time.  I’ve refrained from pointing out that I rarely confuse him with our children, my friends, or my coworkers.  I am drawn to different people depending on my circumstances and frame of mind. 

There are the safe, warm blanket relationships – my husband, kids, immediate family.  These relationships are precious, but generally predictable.  We know each other’s patterns, quirks, raw edges.  Occasionally something new pops up, but generally these are the people to whom I turn when the world is just a bit too complex and scary.  I have literary friends that fall into this category; these are the warm cocoa and down blanket on a grey day books.  Anne of Green Gables, Pride and Prejudice (really, most Jane Austen), the Harry Potter books, Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Winnie-the-Pooh. 

 

Then there are the books that get me.  We hit it off right away. They challenge and compel me. Our senses of humor mesh.  But, I have to approach these books from the proper frame of mind.  As with their human counterparts, these friends possess the ability to burrow under my defenses.  And as with their human counterparts, a conversation with them can leave me feeling exalted or emotionally exposed and exhausted.  Yet, when I come to these relationships with a sense of adventure, and openness, secure in myself, these become lifelong friends.  With the gentling of time and familiarity, many of these cross into the warm blanket category, but they speak to a new part of me with every reading.  Dorothy Sayers, M.F.K. Fischer, Mark Twain, Madeleine L’Engle, John Donne, William Shakespeare – the literary children of these authors stimulate my brain and fill my soul.  Like their human analogs, these are the books that “inspire [me] to write.”  They make me want to expand, to be better than myself.

Sometimes there is nothing better than sitting down for coffee or lunch with an old friend.  We may not have seen each other for a year or more, but we know each other well.  We can trust that neither will betray the trust of the other, and it is great to catch up on our lives and adventures.  A new installment in a favorite series fits this scenario.  Walking into a bookstore and finding a new title by Elizabeth Peters, Robert B. Parker, Cara Black, Dick Francis, or Laurie King gives me simple joy.  I leap into these books without hesitation.  I don’t fear unpleasant surprises or a deeper emotional confrontation than I can handle.  They won’t ask much of me beyond a few hours of pleasant conversation.

Book recommendations – by a friend or a reviewer – can be a bit unnerving.  This is the literary equivalent of a party where I know only the host.  The evening may provide scintillating conversation, or I may find myself hiding in the bathroom.  I approach these books warily, and in small doses.  They may become my best friends, or we may never move beyond cautious small talk.  These books require me to be at my most brave, my most outgoing.  A few of these acquaintances – A Crooked Little Heart by Anne Lamott, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing – patiently await our party.  I’ll show up soon; I promise.

As much as I hate to admit it, some books, and some people, are simply much smarter than I.  My ego can only cope with these individuals in small doses.  Too prolonged an acquaintance leaves me feeling as though my brain has been upended and shaken --  leaving keys, wallet, the uncapped and half melted lip-stick, the tampon I really forgot was in there, and the wad of receipts in a pile on the table with the used Kleenex and lint.  These conversations require a good night’s sleep and coffee.  Literary magazines fall into this category for me.  I occasionally feel guilty; as someone who loves to write, I should seek out the short stories in volumes like The New Yorker, Tin House, Glimmer Train, etc.  When my brain is calm, alert, and inquisitive, I devour these stories.  Other days, they have the ability to reduce my ego to a puddle of melted Jello.  Some non-fiction has the same effect.  The Drunkard’s Walk – How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow is dog-eared about half way through.  It’s taken me over two weeks to get through 107 pages.  I didn’t realize there would be so many statistics.  His premise is fascinating, but after ten minutes, my brain starts to hurt and I begin to crave reality TV.

I love humanity, but I’ll admit that I don’t like every person I meet.  As a devoted bibliophile, I would like to claim to enjoy all books, but I don’t.  Sometimes our personalities are incompatible.  Often, I can tell right away that these are acquaintances that I do not wish to pursue.   As with people, excessive sweetness leaves me feeling hollow, jittery, and nauseous; you won’t often find me in the Romance section.  And just as some people’s negativity creates an emotional black hole, some books are dark enough that I can’t be bothered.  I love mysteries, won’t read horror; don’t bother trying to convert me.  Life is too short. These types of books I avoid without guilt.  There are, however, the failed relationships that bother me.  We’ve been introduced by mutual friends, we really should like each other, but we go out of our way to avoid bumping into each other.  Sometimes I find these books boring, pretentious, hopeless, or condescending.  I’m sure that they believe me to be a frivolous, shallow snob.  The Stand, Silas Marner, most novels by Charles Dickens, The Lord of the Flies all fall into this group.  We speak well of each other in public (editor’s note:  no she doesn’t) , but avoid meeting.  Then, there are the books that I want to like but can’t.  Like friendships that have begun brilliantly but faltered, these books leave me with the bitter taste of failure.  Often, these are books in a genre or by an author that I genuinely enjoy.  I can’t give a good reason why we’ve drifted apart, but it just doesn’t work out and soon, I stop calling.  I’m ashamed to say that I have had to divorce Tolkien, the last several books in the Chronicles of Narnia, the third book in His Dark Materials. We have irreconcilable differences.

As I grow, my relationships with these books blend from one category to the next.  Just as my husband can still surprise and seduce me after 15 years, I can still become enchanted by an ‘old-favorite.’  I know that the friends who most challenge me will be there for me when the chips are down, so, too, will Shakespeare, Donne, and the rest.  New acquaintances may progress quickly from cocktail party chat to lifelong friendship.  Who knows-- perhaps someday I will even learn to appreciate Silas Marner.  Ok, maybe not.

 

So, what am I reading right now?  I just finished Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.  While I think that her books will end up in the “best friend” category, I’m holding off on A Crooked Little Heart for a bit.  In the meantime, I’m curling up with my equivalent of the Berenstain Bears, Dorothy Sayers’ Busman’s Honeymoon.  I’m going to need a new copy soon.