WHERE HAVE WE BEEN? WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?

My Candle

Five years ago, I was on the phone, gossiping with a friend about a co-worker's transgressions on the job. We had a lot to say about nothing. My caller ID beeped several times--friends and family
members trying to tell me what had happened.

For a whole hour, I didn't pick up. At that moment, it seemed that nothing could be more important than our petty grudges.

Five years later, the big questions on the news shows seems to be: Have we learned anything? Are we safer now?

I don't know about our country or our leaders, but I hope I learned that some things just don't matter. And that time is too precious to waste on them.

On September 11th, 2006, I, like millions of others, remember those who died in the towers and on the planes. And I also remember those around the globe who live with the horrors of war every day.

Tonight I will light my little candle for peace in all nations and I will set it in the window. It is a small, insignificant act, but it's all I can do. Join me?

The answer is SEX

The Exceptional X / Book of Objects
Originally uploaded by magic fly paula.

And the question? Well, that's easy: What's the one thing you would never write about?

Why?

--Because my kids still think I'm a virgin.

--My mom, too.

--Because it's most often done badly--the writing, that is, not the sex. (From what I hear, that's frequently done rather well.)

--Because even some of our great literary minds have gushed in embarrassing shades of purple, producing scenes that sounded like bad porn when they tried.

There are exceptions though. Two literary sex scenes in particular come to mind:

In Sula, Toni Morrison writes a scene so charged and visceral that the hair on your arms will rise.

The second one is the famous scene in Gone With the Wind when a drunken Rhett sweeps Scarlett up the stairs. But wait, you say. That's where the scene ended. One of the most memorable and powerful sex scenes in my reading life had no actual, um, sex?

My point exactly. (Aren't you proud of me, Mom?)

Anyone else have a favorite literary sex scene? Or one that made you laugh out loud it was so bad?

THIS COULD BE THE DAY...

I had thought of doing something more elaborate to mark the occasion., originally uploaded by diastema.

Yep. I really could do it.

Really could come home at around two tomorrow morning and tell you all, I finally got the guts. Or the belief in myself. Or the willingness to let go. Whatever it takes to finally quit waitressing my job.

As you all know, I rather like the work. Not on all days or with all the people I serve, but on most.

But it's all about the TIME. Today I'm scheduled to be in at 3, and the wedding isn't over till midnight. Then we have to clean up and set chairs for a ceremony in the morning. In other words, I'm looking at an eleven hour day. A hard eleven.

Which would be okay. If there weren't so many things I WON'T be doing while I'm lifting and hauling and smiling. So many things, that it seems increasingly unwise to put off. My real work, for one thing.

If I were a bumper sticker person, I'd be slapping a variation of the most popular one on my car right now: I'D RATHER BE WRITING, it would say.

Maybe I should listen. Maybe I should stop talking about it on the blog and do it.

This could be the day...

The forein affairs correspondent was PRETTIER?

Katie Couric 2001, originally uploaded by BILLBINNS.

When it comes to Katie Couric, I'm pretty much neutral. I never watched The Today Show enough ( at all?) to become a fan. Nor do I have any opinion or knowledge of her qualifications to become a news anchor.

Thus, I've been fairly oblivious to reports about the money she was paid, what she was planning to wear for her debut, and whether or not she recently had Restylane injections--though obviously more news of Katie than I need to know has crossed my radar screen.

But when a female writer for the New York Times critiqued her first night on the job by saying she was upstaged by a pretty war correspondent in a black chador, I admit it: I was a little annoyed.

I mean, seriously, how many times was it implied that Tom Brokaw might have a problem because (uh-oh!) the foreign correspondent looked better in his Chanel glasses?

WHO READS YOUR BLOG?

Sometimes I think the reason I became a writer is because I'm so damn inarticulate.

A writer who can't express herself in her native language? Not a very auspicious sign, you probably say. Better take up welding. Or witchcraft. Or maybe waitressing...Can I bring anyone a beverage to start?

No, I'm not always good at the pithy remark, the sharp rejoinder, the on-the-spot insight. But give me time to pace around my study, blasting loud music to loosen the thoughts in my head, and I can cough up words till I choke--or until my weary fingers curl up like claws.

Anyway, there I was at lunch with my agent and some lovely people from my publisher's office when I was asked a simple question: Who reads your blog?

Well, um, all kinds of people.

Where are they from?

Uh, lots of of them are American. But lots of them...aren't. Err, I guess you could say people from all over the world.

Men? Women?

Hmm...lots of women. And men, too. Lots of men. Men and women, that's who reads my blog. Men and women from all over the world. (Oh, I was doing good! I was nailing these questions!)

But who are they? How did they find you? What kind of books do they read?

Maybe it was the triple question that flustered me. Maybe it was the impossibility of categorizing such a diverse and wonderful group of people. Maybe I just don't know how you found me, or I found you, or why. Maybe it's a process as mysterious as finding a friend or a mate or a poet who makes you stand up and recite their words out loud in your room late at night--as I've been tempted to do with some of your posts.

But whatever the reason, my inarticulate self spoke up and this is what she said:

Earthy crunchy people!

That's right; let the stoning begin. I called you earthy crunchy people--a term that hasn't been in common usage since, I don't know--the seventies?

Since everyone at the table was younger than I am, they all looked a bit mystified--and relieved to focus on their food. Earthy crunchy people, huh? How interesting. End of discussion.

So now that I'm back in my office with my music playing in the background and all my pictures around me,I can give a much better answer. In fact, I can tell you exactly who reads my blog:

Women and men.
People from places I've visited and even lived, and people from places
I've never been and may never see or know except through your words and photographs.
Artists and writers.
Naturalists.
Christians.
Buddhists.
People who are just beginning to dream their careers.
People who've left the work force and now have time to reflect and be.
Mothers and fathers.
People who see the world through a wide lens.
People who understand the importance of the tiniest detail.
Waitresses!
Lawyers.
Sons and daughters.
A rabbi or two.
Musicians.
People who heal.
People who work at jobs they love.
People who don't.
People who embrace solitude.
People who live amid the trial and joy of family.
People with passionate opinions.
People with open minds and hearts.
People who teach me things, and expand my vision every day.

Is it any wonder I couldn't come up with a simple concise answer? But seriously,earthy crunchy people? I still have no idea where that one came from.

********************************************

And speaking of my blog friends, I was thrilled to discover these ladies when I was shopping at Faces in Northampton. So thrilled, in fact, that I had to pull out my camera and take a picture.



My friend Laini made these! I said, when the clerk looked at me askance as I photographed the merchandise. And of course, I had to buy a couple of them on the spot. One now blesses my dining room table as she swings from the light, and another one hangs right here in my office, bearing this motto:

WHAT WOULD YOU ATTEMPT IF YOU KNEW YOU WOULD NOT FAIL?

What indeed.

STANDING IN THE RIVER

I have been on a long journey, most of it not measured in miles.

It began with a train ride to New York City. Facing me in the quiet car, a young woman was heading back to school at NYU. She wore a pale blue t-shirt emblazoned with the words LOVE ONE ANOTHER and the miracle of her own youth and beauty with equal ease. While we traveled she studied a thick stack of fashion magazines as if they contained a secret she desperately needed to know.

Her mother was across the aisle. In her jeans and tank top, she had the kind of bright open face that made me wish we had been friends. Every now and then the daughter found something so important in her magazines that she crouched in the aisle to share it with her mother.

Though they spoke in hushed voices, the conductor warned them to be quiet. His tone was disproportionately harsh. Apparently, their shared excitement about life created too much *noise* for his sensibilities.

When I glanced at the mother, she rolled her eyes and whispered, "The man's got problems." We both smiled.

But people like the conductor could not touch this mother and daughter on the way to New York City. And they couldn't touch me either. As we approached the city, I felt a growing sense of exhilaration.

The first day Ted and I met an old friend we hadn't seen in nineteen years. We traipsed around Manhattan, talking as if the years had no weight at all. Finally, we ended up in a little trattoria in Soho where the food was tastier--and cheaper--than a similar meal would have been at home. From where we sit, we could look through the potted plants and see the fascinating circus of life passing by.

While we ate, our friend Paula told us how she had escaped from the 105th floor of the second tower on 9/11. Her story, obviously recounted many times, began this way: It was a beautiful day and I had just sat down with my iced coffee...

The next day was a business day. From my hotel, I walked to the elegant brownstone where so many of my hopes and dreams had, through a mysterious alchemy, been transmuted to reality by my wizard of an agent, Alice Tasman. Meeting a person I knew so well as a voice on the phone, but had never met, was an amazing experience. For the first hour or so, I grinned at her like a dope. It's really you!

From there, we headed over to Dutton, and then off to a wonderful lunch at LUPA with my editor, the publicity director, and the marketing director. Over the best gnocchi I've had outside of Bologna, I heard their exciting plans for my novel. I also met three interesting people, who like the woman on the train, I could easily see as friends.

After leaving New York, Ted and I stopped at home long enough to pick up Lexi and Emma and then headed to Northampton, the small town where I spent ten years of my life, and the place where I've probably felt more at home than anywhere else on earth.

I met a friend who had been a true sister to me. For at least twenty years, we had never gone a day without talking. But somehow we too had been separated by time and distance. Reunited, we talked, we ranted, we hugged; and more than once I felt myself about to weep by some of the things life had demanded of us.

Later, we went by the apartment where I had once been intensely happy and stood staring at number on the door as if it could tell us the secret of that happiness. We walked the short distance to the elementary school where my oldest sons had walked across the lawn to attend kindergarten, their Superman lunchboxes in hand, and begun the process of leaving home.

We sat on the grass. We stared into the woods where we had buried our cat, Rainbow. We walked down the street where I had jogged hundreds of miles, inventing stories in my head as I ran; we passed the restaurant where I worked, the place where Ted and I first met.

We went to the church where we had been married, but the doors were locked. That's when I realized that all the doors had been locked. Neither the old apartment or the happiness we had felt there would readmit us. We could look into the past all we wanted, but it remained impenetrable.

That night I couldn't sleep. Around two I got up and sat in a chair in our hotel suite, listening for the sound of the train for a long time. After it passed, I went back and again tried to sleep. Failing, I got up and sat by the window where I'd listened for the train and wrote a poem. Whether it was the poem or the sound of the train that released me, I'm not sure, but when I was finished, I was finally ready to rest.

The next day we went to the river, and put our feet in the icy water and listened to its sounds the way I had listened to the train the night before. There in that chilly current, I made peace with all the things that had troubled and excited and agitated me on my long journey: the way life eventually slams all its doors on you, and separates you from people you love, the inescapable loneliness of a train's whistle late at night, the sobering truth that even on a beautiful day, when you set out with your iced coffee in hand, you might be asked to surrender your life.

I suppose the reason I couldn't sleep, the reason I took out my notebook and searched for a poem as dawn approached was because I thought there was an answer to those things. And I thought it was my job to find it. But listening to the sound of the water, I realized there was only this: standing in the river and feeling the cold water, the sun, and the wind as it all flowed past.

GOT MY RED SHOES ON...

Grand Street: Texting, originally uploaded by moriza.

and I'm headed to New York for a few days.

See you all when I get back!

PERFECT JOY

St. Francis claimed that perfect joy was accepting humiliation with equanimity. Though few of us would actively seek that kind of joy, it demonstrates the power of attitude and belief in how we experience events.

For me, perfect joy is a capricious and unexpected moment; it's a wriggling puppy that never performs on command. Like my purse and various other objects that constantly go missing at our house, it is rarely where I thought I left it.

One such capricious moment occurred last week at my waitressing job. We were in the clearing phase of a wedding in the tent and had set up our usual breakdown station behind the bar. While a couple of my co-workers cleared the room, another waitress and I worked the station, scraping, sorting, stacking, and then carrying trays and glass racks up to the kitchen. Scraping garbage and hoisting heavy trays hardly sounds like an occasion for joy--but there it was. Who was I to argue?

The band was playing the old Donna Summer tune, "On the Radio" and moonlight bedazzled the ocean outside the tent. But music and beauty are regulars where I work, and joy, as I said, is an unpredictable guest.

For at least an hour, we worked in synch, in almost balletic labor, perfectly attuned to one another's movements and to the task at hand. Focused on our common goal, we used our bones and sinews, our efficiency, our cooperation to get the job done. It felt good and satisfying. And then a breeze came up off the water and the Donna Summer song started, and joy, perfect joy, danced in.

Much is made of the state of "flow" that artists or runners enter when they lose themselves in their activity, but physical work, when its going well, also generates flow.

I don't waitress much now--one day a week or less, and soon, very soon, I will not do it at all. For many years, I talked about this, waited for this, dreamed of this. But that night, feeling the end of the season in a particular way, I lingered in the dark tent when the clean-up was done. After all the tables had been rolled out, I sat on a folding chair, and contemplated the stars, the black ocean, the empty space that had so recently been filled with celebration; and I wondered where joy will find me now.

On Jonbenet...and Judgment

No photographs today. The images were driven deep into our collective consciousness long ago. Images of a beautiful child, dressed up and flashing crimson lipstick like Marilyn Monroe. Images of innocent green eyes and a trusting smile behind a mask of adult glamour. I've often thought those images were the first crime that was committed against this child.

But what do I know? I'm just a dumb human--more often wrong about things large and small than I am right. I thought the parents did it.

There is so much that seemed lurid about Jonbenet's case. Not just the ghastly manner of her death, but the gaze of a child beauty queen, who spent so much of her abbreviated life preening and strutting. Even much of our fascination with the case, our seemingly insatiable appetite for those images had a lurid, intrusive quality to it. While the blond, made-up images of Jonbenet continued to appear on the cover of the tabloids years after her death, how many children had been forgotten?

But what do I know? I'm just a dumb human, probably more often wrong about things both large and small than I am right. I thought the parents did it.

I heard people talking on TV and decided that the parents had been handled with unusual lenience and restraint because of their money and influence. I heard people talking on TV and decided that they were clearly hiding something.

I knew nothing, but like all people armed with second-hand opinions, I was eager to spew my thoughts whenever the subject came up.

I like to think that my reckless, ill-informed belief had no effect on the Ramsays, a couple who now appear to have been burdened not only with a devastating loss, but with the almost inconceivable weight of their perceived guilt. But maybe every person who judged them was a small pebble in the sack of injustice they were forced to carry--Patsy Ramsay, to her very death. I can only hope not. I can only hope that the only victim of rash judgment is the one who judges.

Yesterday, like many of the people who had convicted the parents in their own mind, I listened to experts talking on TV, and I took up a whole new set of opinions and rationalizations: Yes, parents kill, but not in such a sadistic manner, I said, parroting the psychologists, at dinner. (Actually, I'm not sure if that's true. Haven't parents burned their children repeatedly with cigarettes, locked them in closets, methodically starved them and denied them medical attention?)

But what do I know? I'm just a dumb human--probably more often wrong about things both large and small than I am right. I thought the parents did it.

Even my judgments about the child beauty pagents are probably faulty. Maybe it's a cultural thing. Maybe it's something I just don't understand. After all, I'm just a dumb human...

Interestingly enough, the wisest words spoken yesterday were issued by John Ramsay, who warned against a rush to judgment toward the man who had confessed to the crime.

Today, at least for an hour or two, I'm judging nothing and no one.

A PIE, A SPELL...AND LITERARY MAGIC

Susan, her books, and her pie

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
--Henry David Thoreau

Around here blueberry season is awaited with particularly joyful expectaion. The plump little berry is not just gorgeous, succulent, and loaded with anti-oxidants, it's also reputed to be a favorite of muses everywhere. And anyone who's ever sat before a keyboard or a notebook trying to coax a story from a recalcitrant muse can tell you how just how finicky they can be.

Thus my friend Susan Messer and I began an August tradition. Every summer when the heat abates enough to turn on the oven and the blueberries appear in mesmerizing clusters, we bake a pie for our muses.

Like all traditions, this one has a history. The inspiration for this pie came from none other than Marilynne Robinson, who served me a similar concoction when I was was invited to her home for dinner. (The story of that, err, rather embarrassing, meal is here: SIMPLY WAIT: MY DINNER WITH A PULITZER PRIZE WINNER.)

Last year, we invited writers and creative people everywhere to join us as we attempted to spoil, delight and honor our muses with Susan's delectable pie recipe. As far as I know, no one did, but Susan and I baked with purpose and zest anyway.

Whether or not you believe in a little white magic, the results were startling. Last August, I was a an unpublished waitress, tempering my wild dreams as I polished the novel my agent planned to circulate in the fall. This August I'm holding the beautiful advanced review copy in my hand. (Is it just a coincidence that the cover is blue?)



Susan, too, had a remarkable year as a writer.

"Even I am impressed when I look back and see what's happened to me writing-wise this year ("this year" meaning July 2005 [post-pie baking, or ppb] through July 2006). I had a story come out in Glimmer Train (after years of submissions), an essay accepted by Fourth Genre, and a piece of creative nonfiction published in an anthology called Vacations: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I won second place in the Guild Complex creative nonfiction competition (judged by Alex Kotlowitz) and first place in the Moment magazine short fiction competition (judged by Judy Budnitz). As part of that prize, Moment flew me to Washington DC (where the mag is published) to read at an awards ceremony. An important sidelight: the winning story is the basis of the novel I am now working on. Other wonderful experiences included being interviewed on WBEZ (Chicago public radio) and WYEP (in Pittsburgh) about my writing, and being photographed as a writer (the portrait of me behind the pie) for a photography project. With all this in mind, I was more than anxious to see the blueberries come in this year at my local farmers' market, and once they appeared and I had them safely in my kitchen, I worked with special concentration on the pate brisee, cutting it and sprinkling it and tossing it and rolling it with far more than flour, salt, butter, vegetable shortening, and ice water."

If anyone would like to join us this year, please do--and make sure you post a picture and leave a comment so I can link to it.

The official literary blues recipe is here: SIMPLY WAIT: BAKE A PIE FOR YOUR MUSE.

And the spell is a fairly simple one, as magic goes (no bat wings or rabbit hearts necessary).

1. Ask your muse for three things--the answer to a tricky plot question, perhaps or insight into a character. (Don't ask me why there has to be three, but that seems to be a rule when it comes to magic..)

2. Listen intently for the answers.

3. Pay particular heed to your dreams.

Oh yes, and make sure you share the pie with someone you love. One thing I've learned from fairy tales is that magic never works if you don't share it.

THE ZEN OF HULA HOOPING

New hat and a hula hoop, originally uploaded by fd.

Okay, I wrote a book that I'm pretty proud of and I make it a point to brag about my kids at least once a day. But my real claim to fame is that when I was ten, I was the hula hoop champion of Brockton, Massachusetts. Or at least, the East Side of the city. All right, maybe it was just my street (a dead end with three houses on it). But it's not the title that matters, right? It's how I felt when I got that baby spinning around my hips: like a master.

And who says you can't learn about life from standing in your back yard painting circles through the air with the motion of your hips? One thing I discovered is that as soon as you start worrying about who's watching or how silly you look or who's doing it better, it's all over.

I have a post up on the Killer Year Blog on the subject. It deals with writing, but the message applies to any kind of hula hoop you're trying to keep in the air.

THE BIRTHDAY RULES

One with nature, originally uploaded by Santosh Korthiwada.

1. BE HAPPY. It's practically a law. Even the most wretched person on earth is required to take a day off from the pursuit of misery on their birthday. Not only will your family and friends feel compelled to remind you of your duty to the gods of happiness, but even perfect strangers will get into the act. On catching sight of your birthdate, clerks will stop everything and order you to be happy! Now! And if you find yourself in a restaurant, don't be surprise if a coven of otherwise normal wait people surround you, holding a tiny flame in their hands, and singing an ode to your happiness.

2. BE WISE because happiness is a capricious thing; and if you're not a little bit wise, you probably won't be all that happy either. Sure, it's YOUR day and you're supposed to enjoy it, but if you expect Happiness to behave in a certain way, it will squirm out of your arms as quickly as a recalcitrant two year old. In the end, the happiness paradox is the same on your birthday as it is on every day: If you want it, you've got to give it to someone else. Yep--even on your birthday.

3. BE GRATEFUL for the gifts you got, and even more so for the ones you didn't need to get. Be grateful for the people who remembered your birthday, and love the ones who forgot. If you're old, take time to be grateful and amazed by all the lives you contain. Celebrate the entwined mysteries of fragility and strength. And if you're young, go outside and shout down the stars. It's your world.

But above all, be grateful for your happiness, however worn and misshapen and imperfect it might be. It is yours. When it appears at the door in its artful disguise, take care never to turn it away.

I got this quote in my inbox yesterday. It seemed like the perfect birthday reminder.

“You are younger today than you will ever be again. Make use of it for the sake of tomorrow.”

– Norman Cousins

MY TWO CENTS

Barry's Bar, originally uploaded by .Zickie..

If there's anything better than a neighborhood bar in the Carribean, it's a backyard bar on Cape Cod. Laura and Jake's backyard bar to be specific.

Arrive when it's still light and you can explore a backyard that is a world in itself. There's an endless variety of herbs and plants which Laura cultivates in her sprawling, expansive gardens, a couple of old boats that Jake is working on, and an above ground pool the couple scored at a yard sale a few years ago. In the summer, friends and neighbors who stop by the bar bring their bathing suits and float a while.

At Laura and Jake's, you can float alone and contemplate the trees above your head or the meaning of existence, or you can float with friends, and jumpstart the conversation that will take place at the bar later.

In season, Jake comes home with buckets full of Wellfleet oysters; and Laura is an avid clam digger. If that's not enough to lure you over, Jake has served up some of the finest wines I've ever had at that bar, and Laura is a gourmet cook.

But this wasn't supposed to be a post about Laura and Jake and their fabulous backyard bar. It was supposed to be a post about opinions. The proverbial "my two cents"
which the Sunday Scribblers tackled this week.

Opinions and bars are natural companions--whether it's a homey back yard bar like Laura and Jake's, a Dublin pub, or the dank "old man's bars" that T.C. Boyle described so well in TALK TALK. It's not always a felicitous pairing.

So anyway, a group of us had gathered at Laura and Jake's last week and it was starting to get late when the talk turned to politics. Religion. The Middle East. Within minutes, the bar was littered with pennies as everyone anted up their two cents.

Voices rose. Laura, ever a peacemaker, begged for quiet, a change of subject. (Jake had to work in the morning, and was trying to sleep!) But like war itself, once ignited, the surge of opinions was not so easily quelled.

And then Ryan, still looking serene from his hour of floating, spoke up quietly. "I'm sure there's a lot I don't understand, but I think..."

And immediately, the tenor of the conversation changed. Because no matter what we think, or how passionate our beliefs are, Ryan Is right: there's a lot we don't understand. We see, as always, through a glass darkly.

A glass darkened by our fears.
Our personal experiences and prejudices.
The fact that our knowledge and understanding, however vast it might be, is always limited.

Am I advocating that we stop voicing our opinons or passionately engaging with the world around us? Hell, no! (And here MY voice is rising.) What I am advocating is that we speak them in a way that seeks to expand understanding--both our own, and those with whom we're conversing--rather than suppressing it.

It doesn't take much. A quiet tone. A humble acknowledgment that there's much we don't know. A willingness to listen. It's one thing--maybe the only thing-- that we can do for peace. We can live it.

And that, friends, is my two cents. See you at the neighborhood bar.

SINGING THE WORLD INTO EXISTENCE

Speak softly ..., originally uploaded by punkassbitch.

Once a week, I get a newsletter in my in-box from Rob Brezhny, the poet astrologer. Rob never predicts that we're going to fall in love. Or come into a fortune. His forecasts are more ephemeral than that. He is, as I said, a poet.

More than once, I've printed one up and taped it into my notebook. This one was so lovely, I thought I'd tape it here.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Travel writer Bruce Chatwin walked around
Australia as he researched and meditated on the indigenous people's
beliefs about what the land was like in the ancient past. He wrote:
"Aboriginal creation myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who
wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path--birds, animals, plants, rocks,
waterholes--and so singing the world into existence." Given the fact that you're now primed to create a new domain or two, Leo, may I suggest the aborigines' approach? You'll infuse everything with extra beauty if you play around with *singing* it into existence.



*Addendum: I am not accustomed to censoring myself for being too joyful. But I did today. In this post. I excised the final paragraph because it was simply too exultant in a world and on a day when I am well aware of the sorrows taking place elsewhere. But I did not delete the photograph of the child singing. We need to be hold this in our minds and hearts: this is what childhood should be like.

THIS IS NOT AN ADVERTISEMENT

paquete amazon
Originally uploaded by jmerelo.

This is not an advertisement.

SIMPLY WAIT is not a blog that was created to promote me or my book.

Indeed, the book didn't even exist when SIMPLY WAIT began.

Since the sale that changed my life, the blog has remained pretty much the same.

I like that.

It's a place where I talk to some very interesting people. And amazingly, they talk back.

Sometimes, they--no YOU--agree with me, and that is delightful.

Sometimes YOU don't. Also delightful.

Frequently YOU make me question myself, think wider deeper thoughts, challenge myself.

THAT remains the raison d'etre for SIMPLY WAIT.

I have not written about the day to day developments in my writing career.

And I won't.

BUT...

A couple of weeks ago, an astute blog reader e-mailed to say that my novel was up on Amazon. (Thank you, J.F.)

Oh, I was excited!

And tempted to post a link...

But I didn't.

Because this is not an advertisement.

And because the subject matter listed on Amazon was: 1) Judaism 2) Religion 3) Psychological fiction.

While #s 1 and 2 are fascinating topics, they have nothing to do with my novel.

THE LIAR'S DIARY is about 1) family dynamics 2) psychological suspense 3) friendship.

The novel will not be out till February 1st, but if YOU want to, you can pre-order.

No one has done so yet.

Not even me.

The sales number is a perfect 0.

You could change that.

It's a risk.You might hate the book and be out fifteen bucks plus S & H.

Then again, it might change your life. Probably won't, but it might.

My one guarantee? This novel will hold your interest to the end.

So pre-order.

Or don't. (I will still love you.)

Damn.

Maybe this is an advertisement.

THEFT

when a bike is stolen a fairy dies
Originally uploaded by knautia.

“There is one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. Do you understand that? When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father.When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. Do you see?”

--from THE KITE RUNNER by Khaled Hosseini

I was maybe six or seven, and I was playing at my cousin’s house. For the first time, I noticed that she had more than I did. She had three sisters who filled the house with their shouts and squabbles and games and I was an only child. The only sounds that erupted in my house were made by my parents: laughing, scheming their lives as adults do, quite frequently quarreling. There was no one to huddle with me in another room and talk about what it all meant. I often felt lonely.

My cousin had a huge room with capacious windows that looked out on an oval-shaped pool, and sprawling green lawns; there was a real live horse in the barn. My room was the size of a large closet attached to my parents room. My father laughed when I told him I wanted a horse. “If you’re not married when you’re twenty-three, I’ll buy you one,” he promised on more than one occasion. I vowed to wait to the wizened old age of forty if that was what it took, but never even made it to the twenty-three-year-old deadline. Which was okay. I didn’t want a horse by then anyway--a fact my crafty father was surely betting on.

But most significantly of all, my cousin had many more dolls and doll accessories than I did. My eye was particularly attracted by a pair of red checked underpants for her baby doll. When my cousin left the room, I jammed them in my pocket. They seemed to represent everything I thought I didn’t have.

But even before I got home, the thrill of possession was spoiled for me. In the weeks that followed, I was beseiged by guilt and fear of punishment that were worthy of a character from Dostoyevsky. Now when my mother asked me if I wanted to visit my cousin, I feigned illness. What if she knew? What if she’d told her family? I burned with shame.

My doll never wore the red checked underpants. They weren’t the thing I wanted anyway. How had I ever been tricked into thinking they were? I hid them in a cigar box and buried them in the woods near my house. I can still remember digging the hole with my hands. Clawing, it was.

Years later, my cousin and I laughed about the incident, about the months I’d spent refusing to walk past the police station for fear I’d be arrested. If she ever noticed the underpants were missing, she’d long forgotten it, teaching me one thing for certain: however much theft hurts the victim, it hurts the thief more. If you don’t believe me, think of those soul-dead minions who steal Peace, who steal the Air we breathe, who would steal the Future itself in exchange for something as deceptive and illusory as the red doll undies.

In the end, the thing that tormented me most was the way my theft dishonored the life I did have. Coveting the pool outside my cousin’s window seemed like the basest ingratitude for the amazing tree outside my own. Longing for the sounds of my cousin’s house, I didn’t hear the sacred noise inside mine: the laughing and whispering and shouting that signalled my parents’ passionate engagement with each other, with me, and with their world.

Now even the arguments seem like something worth honoring. For fifty-two years, my parents wrestled some powerful personal demons together and they never gave up. That the struggle created some clatter and boom no longer surprises or disturbs me; in fact, I admire it. And in the end, I can say conclusiviely that the laughter won; the love won. What greater legacy is there than that?
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For a truly delightful take on Theft and a link to many more visit the divine Laini.

Meanwhile, Qarrtsiluni is publishing a series of shorts. The challenge is to encapsulate and intensify in pieces of 100 words or less. Several of my favorite bloggers more than meet it. The waitress in me particularly relished "Petey's" by Leslee of Third House.

For those who can't get enough of the short short, I discovered 400 Words via Sarah Salway. There's a veritable feast to be found there--not to mention lots of ideas for blog posts, if anyone feels the tank runnning low.

THE FINE ART OF LOITERING

No Loitering
Originally uploaded by Cam B..

One of the best things about being a college student is that you have permission to loiter. On campus, you can sit for hours in coffee shops, wander the stacks of the library with no apparent purpose, perusing whatever volume catches your eye. Or you can find a green spot and simply sit on the earth. There, in the green patch you've claimed as your own, you can take out a sketchbook or a writing pad and reinvent the world or you can be still and allow it to pass through you as it is--in all its serenity and tumult. You can loiter with friends or you can do it in perfect solitude.

When I was a student, I was a world class loiterer. In fact, it was my undeclared, major. I loitered in all the ways and places listed above. But my favorite place to pass the time was in the horse barn. I spent so many hours marvelling over the grace and power of the animals that they came to know me.

When I entered, Flintlock, the haughty stallion I most admired always turned his back. I imagined him saying, "Oh, it's only her again."

And the pale horse who always came to greet me would have been forced to explain my strange, human behavior. "Leave her alone. She's working toward a degree in the fine art of loitering."

It's something animals understand well.

Sometime, toward the end of my time at the University, I felt myself growing impatient for the grit and challenge of life off-campus. It was, I suppose, a healthy impulse, a preparation for the change ahead.

And most of the time, I rather enjoy life in the so-called real world. The only problem is that it offers little opportunity to use my "degree". In my town, loiterers are frowned upon. Those who walk the streets for hours with no purpose, stop to sit on public grasses, or even spend too much time in the town library are suspected of being indigent, drug-addled, dangerous. To be fair, sometimes they are.

This week, however, has been an exceptional one for my inner-loiterer. On Tuesday night, I spent seven hours in a local cafe talking to a writer friend who was visiting from Canada. Time passed, the waitresses changed shift, and we continued to talk.
We had entered the place in bright sunshine, the streets filled with tourists eating ice-cream; and by the time, we left those same streets had become transformed into a dark and lonely place.

The following day I visited a small college town a couple of hours away. It is one of the most affluent, educated communities on the East coast, a place where there was no fear of loiterers. In fact, lingering and contemplating is encouraged by the design and attitudes of the town. Local employees took their lunch on the grass. No one looked askance when I found a tree, and set up camp with my lemonade and my notebook. There were comfortable chairs and footstools in every corner of the magnificent library.

Like Goldilocks, I tried every one. In one corner, I found some excellent books about Japan. In another, I lost a couple hours to the poetry collection. (When I discovered two volumes by Paul Zweig, I immediately reached for them, thinking of Dave who introduced me to him.) Then I went outside took in the bright colors of the world. No one seemed to question what I was doing. Loitering was the task of the day, and it was a day well spent.

Of course, we can't spend all our days wandering and thinking and reading poetry. Books would not be written; crops would wither in the fields; the gas bill would never be paid. And in the end, like a college student on the verge of graduation, we hunger for the demands and challenges of work--whatever that word entails for us. But if we never loiter, if we construct our towns from designs and attitudes that subtly or not so subtly prevent or condemn it, we lose something essential. Something that even horses innately understand.

HOTEL

Fairy Tales by Eugenio Recuenco
Originally uploaded by www.weloveyoureally.com.

I worked in a hotel for five years. I still remember my orientation. The trainer told us that it was our job to make people forget that the pillows on which they rested their heads, or the cups that held their morning coffee had been used by hundreds of other people before them. Maybe even thousands.

One caked fork or a frayed bath towel could destroy the illusion and break the spell. Thus, the silver was always to be polished meticulously; the table linen needed to be crisp and unsullied.

It reminded me of the the similar spell that governs much of our lives. We forget how brief and temporary our tenancy is here. We can't use or touch anything that doesn't bear the unseen mark of those who came before; we can't walk anywhere without treading on a world that millions of others once believed was their own.

And yet as soon as we arrive, we start to claim things: my cup, my pillow, my key to my room. Those who came before become a distant rumor. We grow restive if we're reminded of them.

After the orientation, we took a tour of the hotel; and by the time I left, I knew I was going to love working there. It was, as the trainer unknowingly intimated, a world in itself.

Most of the workers had been there for many years, and within weeks, I had friends all over the building. I loved to sit in the kitchen late at night and talk to James, the erudite dishwasher, who had traveled all over the country with his blues band. I liked it when Maureen, the cranky chef who howled when she caught us filching a roll, let her guard down, and talked about the abusive boyfriend she couldn't bring herself to leave.

Mark, one of the groundskeepers brought his border collie to work every day, and visiting Tilly became a pleasant part of the day's routine. When one day, a heartbroken Mark showed up alone, we all mourned the loss of Tilly.

A trip to the laundry for linen was like traveling below the equator to a country where exotic languages were spoken, and the heat and humidity immediately induced torpor. Whenever I went there, I brought a few smuggled sodas. If I had time, I'd sit on a pile of clean linen and sip one with my co-workers south of the border.

For five years, I thought of the place as my hotel, just like the guests thought of the bed they had rented for only a night was theirs. I forgot the people who'd done my job before me, and those who would do it after I was gone.

Recently, I stopped in for a visit. The carpet was the same, the smell of the place--a mixture of chlorine and coffee-- was the same, but when I ran up to the break room to see my old friends, it was filled with mostly unfamiliar faces.

"Can I help you?" a young woman asked, looking me up and down, and seeing an interloper.

How could I tell her that this was once my hotel, that she was drinking from my cup, and sitting on my chair? How could I tell her that she'd broken the spell by reminding me once again, that I'm just passing through?

DESPERATELY SEEKING GREAT STORIES WELL TOLD

The Sherlock Holmes Pub, Northumberland Street
Originally uploaded by ANiceCupofTea.

Seventy-six years ago today, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle encountered the darkness that fascinated and drove, terrified and challenged his great creation, Sherlock Holmes. In Conan Doyle's tales, death was sometimes a setting, sometimes a character itself. It was both mundane and exotic, and it was always a story.

I wonder how Conan Doyle was classified in his lifetime: Was he literary or commercial? Noir? A thriller writer or was his work labeled psychological suspense? Did he care, or did he just set out to write the best story he had in him to tell, seen through the eyes of one of the most intriguing characters ever created?

Did those who bequeathed literary prizes honor him, or did they scorn him for his popularity? The answers are surely available (probably as close as Wikipedia), but I don't intend to look them up. Why? Because seventy-six years later, it doesn't matter.

What matters is Sherlock Holmes. What matters is the stories.

In my constant quest for great stories, well told, I've ordered the books on my summer reading list. The box containing those already released arrived last week. A few titles are not available yet. Today seemed like the perfect date to share my list:

1. TRIANGLE by Katharine Weber

2. THEFT: A LOVE STORY by Peter Carey

3. THE MEMORY KEEPER'S DAUGHTER by Kim Edwards

4. CAGE OF STARS by Jacquelyn Mitchard

5. TALK, TALK by T.C. Boyle

6. RAVEN BLACK BY Ann Cleeves (an award winning suspense novel, not yet available in the U.S.!)

7.

8.

That's six titles and since I'm determined to read a book a week this summer, I've still got a couple of vacant slots on the list. If anyone can suggest a great story, well told, I would love to hear it.

THE FRONT PORCH VS. THE BACK DECK

Ted on the front porch of the house where he grew up

The first house we owned was located in a small town in Western Massachusetts. It was built around 1900 and had a breakfast nook, built in book shelves, a stained glass window--and a wide front porch. From that porch you could see the mountains, or you could hit the sidewalk and be downtown in five minutes. I loved that house so much I wanted to live forever so I would never have to leave it.

In the summer, we put some second hand wicker furniture on the porch and hung pots full of red and orange flowers. After supper we would sit out in our thrift store chairs and greet the people passing by on the sidewalk. I was expecting a baby on September 3rd and by the end of August, everyone in the neighborhood was excited about the coming event.

"You still here?" they'd say when they saw me sitting on the porch in mid-September.

"Still here," I'd say, stroking my belly as pregnant women have done throughout the ages.

Then they'd linger for a chat, or to pet our dog, Sadie.

The first day I failed to appear on the porch, Ted said the doorbell rang constantly.
One neighbor brought pink balloons to hang from the porch; another made lasagna. Everyone was eager to see the baby.

A couple of years later we moved to the town where we now live. Our new house was built in the seventies. Though it didn't have the character of the place we left, it had a big back yard, lots of privacy, and a deck. In the summer, I would drift out there with my coffee and a notebook. The thick foliage provided such a good screen that I didn't even have to get out of my pajamas if I didn't feel like it.

Over the years, I've watched the kids cooking imaginary dinners from dirt, playing in their vinyl pool, whacking wiffle balls, and celebrating birthdays. I've listened to symphonies of birds, and drunk wine with friends, and written a novel long hand--all sitting on that deck. I've laughed a lot. For me, there is no sight more beautiful than the light that comes through the trees at the back of the property around dusk.

And yet, in eighteen years, I've never come to know my neighbors the way I did in the house with the front porch. The only times I see them in front of their houses is when they climb into their cars to go to work. Otherwise, they, too, are cossetted inside or on their own back decks. We wave to one another from our vehicles or over the roar of the lawn mower.

Maybe this is just me and my neighborhood, but I don't think so. In many ways to our detriment, we have become a "back deck" society. An article I read in the Sunday paper said that Americans are now lonelier and more isolated than ever. Though scientists tell us that the number of friends we have is an indicator of how long we will live, many of us have increasingly few.

And yet, I think the human spirit has a way of getting what it needs. Through the web, I've shared my days and my thoughts with passersby from all parts of the globe; and I've come to care deeply about people I've never seen. Maybe this, the virtual community we create for ourselves, is the new front porch.