Out and Back

More story

Here's some more of the story I started a couple of months ago. I posted the first part here.

The smell of mildew and god-knows-what-else was starting to bug me, so I walked outside into the early autumn sunshine and took a few deep breaths. As I looked around the almost-deserted street, I was surprised to see my father tottering down the block, leaning on the beechwood cane that had become his regular companion in recent years. He was nattily dressed in olive slacks, a crisp white shirt, and a tweed blazer that I knew was ancient but still looked brand-new. His only concession to age was a more comfortable pair of shoes: comfort mocs from L.L. Bean instead of the Chelsea-style boots he'd always worn when I was a kid. His bifocals were smudge-free, as usual, and a gray wool cabby cap covered what was left of his white hair. On his face, he wore his usual grouchy expression.

"Dad!" I strode toward him, my voice a mix of pleasure and irritation. "I'd have picked you up if you wanted to come down here! Why didn't you call me?" I gestured toward my car, a mid-80s Chevy El Camino that I really only used for hauling stuff. I paid more to garage it than I did to maintain it, but I couldn't make myself sell it. Besides, it came in handy from time to time.

He waved his hand, dismissively. "I took the bus," he rumbled, clearing his throat. "I'm not totally helpless, you know."

I knew better than to argue with him. Still, the thought of him on the 68 bus made me chuckle to myself.

"Is this it?" he asked, looking at my building like it was radioactive.

"Yep."

"You paid money for this piece of shit?"

Every so often, my father dispensed with the professorial comportment and cursed like a sailor.

"Hey!" I replied, sharply. "I told you that the only way you could have anything to do with this undertaking was if you kept your opinions to yourself." I smiled, sweetly. "Don't start talking shit about my building."

"Stella Gail!" he admonished me. "I wish you wouldn't use language like that."

"Like father, like daughter," I retorted.

He bade a verbal retreat from our little confrontation with a pointed harrumph and a sulky expression.

"Come on," I murmured, dragging the metal shutter down over the window. "Let's get a hot dog."

"Heartburn, Stella…." He warned.

"Oh, quit fussing. If you didn't insist on loading it up with sauerkraut it might not be so bad."

He gave an exasperated sigh and began following me slowly up the block. Once we got to Nathan's, he opted for clam strips and onion rings and I got a hot dog, sprucing it up with my condiments of choice: ketchup and chopped onions. We carried our food up Henderson walk to the boardwalk and found a bench. I balanced my beer on the bench beside me as I settled myself, slouching into my favored half-sitting, half-reclining position with my feet propped on the railing opposite us.

I took a big bite of my lunch and noticed my father staring at me with a somewhat baffled expression on his face.

"What?" My mouth was full of hot dog, so the word came out sounding fatter and lower than usual, a greasy syllable punctuated only by the sound of a seagull crying out as it passed.

"Don't talk with your mouth full."

Honestly, I thought to myself as I chewed. Am I always going to be six years old to him? A tiny dribble of ketchup landed on the napkin I'd spread across my lap.

"Careful, don't spill your food. I really don't know why you insist on sitting that way."

"Dad, this is the only way to eat a hot dog," I replied. "The best part about the meal is the seating and the view." I gestured toward the ocean that rippled in the distance. "Where else can you put your feet up and eat a hot dog?"

Dad didn't say anything.

"Look around, Pop," I prodded. "This is our living room!"

The boardwalk was more or less deserted. Earlier, I'd heard the unmistakable sound of an NYPD cruiser rumbling over its perpetually feeble surface, and a few elderly power walkers were out, but that was it save for a couple of tiny human-shaped dots at the end of the pier that I assumed were people fishing. It was a beautiful autumn day – cool, but still sunny. To a casual observer, it could have passed for just another summer day at Coney Island, save for the fact that the Wonder Wheel had been stripped of its cars for the season and most of the rest of the amusements were similarly shuttered.

The faintest trace of a grin appeared on my father's face.

"You really love it here." It was a statement, not a question.

"You know I do," I replied, chewing my way through a few more inches of my hot dog and washing the food down with a swig of beer. "Don't you?"

I should mention that when I saved this section in plain text format (for ease of posting) I just went with the default file name, taken from the first sentence: "The smell of mildew and god." Might not be a bad title for the whole story....

My life wasn't always like this

Back in June, on a flight from Miami to Charlotte, the title of this post -- and the start of the fictional story below -- got stuck in my head.  I pulled out my laptop and started writing.  Here's a snippet:

My life wasn’t always like this.

That thought looped around and around in my brain, like the rickety carnival rides that were still surviving just up the street from where I now stood.  Every day during the summer, at least two or three people got sick from the Breakdancer, one of the more brutal ones.  I’d ridden it once, years ago.  I barely escaped with my lunch still in my stomach.  The operator would let it run for the standard amount of time, at the standard speed.  Then he would stop it and let anyone who was feeling queasy disembark, and treat the stalwarts who remained aboard to another spin.  The second time, though, he sped the fool thing up and let it run a little longer.  If the first go-round didn’t make you sick, the encore was bound to.  Sadistic bastard.

Idly, I wondered how many queasy people per day would stop by my shop once I opened for business… queasy people desperate for ginger ale or cola after one too many trips on the Breakdancer or the Cyclone.  I was already planning to sell both, along with mint and ginger tea.  If nothing else, my own uncooperative digestive system had made me an expert on quick remedies for an upset stomach.

I wasn’t sure when I would open for business, but I was hoping it would be in time for opening weekend in April.  My beloved Coney Island had been getting a lot of attention in the press due to some of the unsavory developers who had been threatening to demolish what was left of the amusement zone, so I guessed a lot of people would show up to see what all the fuss was about.  I wanted to be there to sell them a good, cheap cup of coffee.  At the height of summer, people weren’t going to be much for hot coffee, so my plan was to have cold drinks on hand, too, along with the standard coffee shop fare like bagels, pastries, and sandwiches.

Unless the aforementioned unsavory developers got their way, I had a feeling a certain national (and mediocre, in my opinion) coffee shop chain wouldn’t deign to open a store in Coney Island, so I figured I was safe from competition for the time being.  My little storefront was squished in between a couple of mangled, run-down buildings on Surf Avenue.  That morning, I had signed the papers and officially taken ownership of my own little piece of Coney.  The building was a wreck.  The roof leaked, it was drafty, and it smelled horrible.  One of those decrepit metal shutters rolled down over the entire front entrance, and the graffiti tags covering it reminded me, oddly, of a Jackson Pollock painting.  I was certain, too, that the electrical was shot to hell, despite the fact that the lights still came on about 90% of the time when I flipped the switch.

I had put down more money than I cared to think about for the privilege of owning this diminutive disaster area.  As I stood in the middle of the space, gazing dispiritedly around and thinking about all that I needed to do to get ready for April and about how much money I was going to have to spend in the process, I wondered, for the millionth time, if I hadn’t just made the biggest mistake of my life.

My life wasn’t always like this.

I was born a suburbanite, on the west coast.  My father was a university professor and my mother had been a nurse.  Both worked for the same university, my father in the sociology department and my mother in administration at the student health center.  Until my mother passed away, my parents had lived in the same house I had grown up in, a split-entry 60s era house in one of Seattle’s many bedroom communities.  After Mom died, Dad didn’t know what to do with himself.  He was in his early 80s, and although his body was starting to fail him, he hadn’t done much other than slow down a bit.  His mental acuity was still thoroughly amazing.  He still talked like a professor.  But without my mother, his life was more or less meaningless.  So I brought him to Brooklyn to live with me.

There's more, but it's on my other laptop.

Obsession

I stayed up far too late last night doing research on a building located on Surf Avenue in Coney Island.  It's not a fabulous architectural gem like the Child's building or the Shore Theatre, but I noticed it as I was hunting through books and satellite photos, looking for a visual on a suitable building I could use as a "model" in the work of fiction I've been trying to write since last fall.  My husband agreed that I had found a good specimen of beat-up, run-down, re-muddled Coney Island architecture.  Last night, over whipped-up ice cream at Spill the Beans (a local ice cream parlor/coffee joint not too far from our home) I asked my resident architectural conservation expert all kinds of hypothetical questions about my hypothetical building in the name of research.  Our conversation went something like this:

"Say the building's been abandoned for ten years.  What would be wrong with it?"

"The roof would be leaking, badly," he replied. "And there would be plaster all over the floor.  It would fall from the ceiling wherever the water leaked through."

"Keep going."

"On the third floor, you'd probably be able to see sky through the holes that had started to form, and there would be some pretty serious dry rot in the floor, too.  Especially if the roof sloped down from the front of the building to the back."

"Anything else?"

"Your electric would have been shut off, most likely, and you'd have to get the building back up to code before the utility company would turn it back on for you.  Oh, and there would be pigeon shit everywhere."

"Seagulls," I corrected him.  This was Coney Island we were talking about, after all.

"Maybe, but pigeons, too."

"Sounds like a mess.  Why in hell would someone buy a building like that?"

"You tell me," he replied.

"Oh!" I exclaimed.  "Don't forget the mildew."

Probing questions

Colleen at Loose Leaf Notes tempted me with this excellent interview meme.  She posted the answers to five questions she was asked on her blog and then asked for anyone who was interested in being interviewed by her to leave a comment.  I've been desperate for some good questions to think/write about, so I bit, and yesterday morning Colleen emailed me five great questions... here goes!

1. If you could change three things about yourself, what would they be and why?  Only three?  (Ha ha!)  First off, I would like to rid myself of the crippling self-doubt that still rears its ugly head inside of me every now and then.  I bought myself a cool sign that says "What would you do if you knew you could not fail?" and it hangs by my desk in my office.  I try to remember those words whenever I'm feeling unsure of myself.  A second thing I would change would be my rotten allergies... I am allergic to all kinds of things: multiple tree and grass pollens, my kitties, and dust mites, among others.  I've cycled through almost every major prescription and over-the-counter antihistamine, and most of them either make me drowsy or stop working after a while.  I've had years of allergy shots, too, and while those have helped, I am still allergic to dust mites because my sensitivity to them is so strong that I can't tolerate being injected with them past a certain concentration.  I would love to be able to walk outside in the height of spring and not be irritated by pollens and to dust without feeling like I should be wearing a haz-mat suit.  When I was a kid, my allergies were so bad that I had an almost-constant stuffy nose and as a result I had to breathe through my mouth.  Other kids made fun of me because of it, and to this day I am self-conscious about having to breathe deeply or be winded in front of other people.... having a clear, unobstructed upper respiratory tract would be a wonderful thing.  The third thing I would like to do is break myself of the habit of coloring my hair all the time.  It's a double-edged sword: if I color it myself, it never lasts as long or looks as good as a salon job, so I spend money and time touching it up and buying shampoo designed to help the color stick around longer.  If I have it done in a salon, it costs a small fortune and then I am obligated to return to the salon for root touch ups and such, because I've never been able to reproduce salon-quality color by using a box from CVS Pharmacy.  It's been so long since I had my natural color that I can't even remember precisely what it is.  While I love the novelty of changing my hair color, now that I have to travel a lot for work I want a 'do that is low-maintenance... no more visible roots, no more browns slowly turning brassy orange, no more blondes going from blonde to dingy brown to green, and no more fried, brittle hair.  As Mario Cantone says in those Sunsilk shampoo ads, I guess I need to "get hairapy."

2.  Can you write a short poem or limerick about a girl named Jeanne and her shoes?  Sorry to disappoint, but limericks generally drive me nuts because when I was little my parents used to constantly recite a limerick about a girl named "Jeannie" (my childhood nickname) who wore an "outrageous bikini."  I think I suffer from post-traumatic limerick disorder.  I can write a short poem, though.  When I think of a short poem, I think of a haiku, so that's what I wrote:

shoes wait in darkness
jeanne digs through the closet
found the perfect pair

3. What do you believe in?  How do you explain the nature of reality and your role in it?  I believe in karma and in things happening for a reason (although I don't believe in fate -- I have to believe that I can control my life's direction.)  I believe that spirituality, religion, or whatever you want to call it should be a private thing between ourselves and our higher power... I feel very strongly about that.  For example, when someone I don't know very well invites me to their church or asks me if I've accepted Jesus, to me it's as if they're asking me about my sex life or something like that.  In addition, I believe in love, cheeseburgers, existentialism, old houses, roller coasters, baseball, milkshakes, and the Rolling Stones.  As for the nature of reality, most of the time I completely forget that it's there and that I'm alive, and then I'll be in the middle of something totally mundane, like bathing or driving to the grocery store and all of a sudden the realization will hit me out of nowhere: "Oh crap, I'm alive!  This is all really happening!"  So I suppose you could say I am in an almost-constant state of "shock and awe" about reality and the part I play in it.  Either that or I'm just really good at staying in the moment.

4. You and I are going to spend the day in Seattle.  Where would we go, what would we do, and what would we eat?  I would have to take you to the Seattle Center and show you where I rode my first roller coaster. (The roller coaster itself isn't there anymore, but at least I could show you its replacement.)  We could visit my favorite vintage clothing store - Rudy's - on 1st and Pine, near the Pike Place Market.  We might hang out at the Woodland Park Zoo or the Seattle Aquariaum, two of my favorite elementary school field trip destinations.  I'd probably have to show you around the Fremont neighborhood, too, which is more or less Seattle's answer to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco (or Seattle's Left Bank, as Fremontians refer to their 'hood.)  It's full of colorful people and interesting shops, and there's even a troll, a rocket, and a statue of Lenin.  I would also have to take you to Archie McPhee, where you will discover all kinds of things you didn't know you needed but suddenly can't live without.  For lunch, we can grab fish and chips at Ivar's seafood bar at Pier 54 and maybe take a ferry ride, and for dinner we'll go to the Italian Spaghetti House in Lake City (since my favorite Seattle restaurant, Labuznik, has been out of business since the late 90s.)  Finally, I have to point out where we would not go: Starbucks.  I'm more of a Tully's fan.

5. Who would play you in a movie?  What would the plot be?  Would it be a comedy or drama or other?  I did a face recognition analysis of myself at MyHeritage, and apparently the actresses I most resemble are Scarlett Johansson and Christina Ricci.  I think they are both stunningly beautiful and phenomenal actresses, but I'm not sure I would choose either one of them to play me in a movie.  I envision someone like Drew Barrymore or Kate Winslet portraying me.  I think either of them could tap into my wackiness and also capture my vulnerabilities better than the other two (and even though Kate is English, she plays American really well - I loved her as Bitsey Bloom in The Life of David Gale: "Mike Wallace with PMS.")  Plus, they're both closer to my age than Scarlett and Christina, which I think lends a little more realism and credibility.  As for the plot, I'm not sure... my real life is kind of boring, so maybe it will be a story about the things that could have happened in my life. (I've often said that given the chance to live my life over again, I would go back and at every point where I made a major decision, I would do the opposite just to see if things turned out any differently.  It sounds like a good movie plot, doesn't it?)  Like my real life, though, the movie would be full of comedy and drama and a healthy dose of romance.... hmmm, who should play my leading man, I wonder?  Finally, many scenes would have to take place in Coney Island because that is the place where I feel most alive and at home.

Thanks for the questions, Colleen!

Want to play?  Here's what to do:
1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview Me."
2. I will respond by asking you five questions.  I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your weblog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

So cool

I just found out that Stephen Graham Jones, one of my favorite writers, has a blog.  Even better, my favorite of his short stories, Screentime, is posted there for your reading pleasure.

I attended a reading that he gave at Southeast Missouri State University back in 2001 or 2002 and it pretty much changed my life.  (So I guess there was some good to come out of the two years I spent living in the hellhole that is Cape Girardeau, Missouri.)

His incredible way with words both inspires and intimidates me.

Too sick to write

A while back, I was hit with a truly "novel" idea -- an actual idea for a novel.  Well, the seed of one, anyway.  I still really like my idea and I've been batting it around in various incarnations for the past couple of months or so, but I don't have a lot of actual words on the page yet.  (I have some, just not many, and they're all disjointed.  My pattern so far is to write whatever scene I feel like writing.... I figure I'll piece them together later.)

I'm also researching, doing writing exercises, and thinking.  (It is amazing how little actual writing is involved in the writing process at times.)  Lately, though, between my stomach complaints and this recently-acquired chest cold, I haven't felt like doing anything related to the telling of my story.   (And now I'm so deep into the avoidance maze that I'm blogging about the fact that I'm not writing.  As Charlie Brown would say, "Good grief!")

Maybe I'll work on fleshing out all of the characters.... I have them all in mind but I need to sit down and figure out who they really are, from the color of their eyes to their personality quirks to what they do for a living.  That sounds manageable.

I found my story

Now I just have to write it down.

I was driving to Wal-Mart today when the germ of a story landed in my head.  It was a synthesis, really, of some other ideas I had been having, so I guess you could say what landed was the appropriate angle from which to approach telling the story.  Nevertheless, I am excited to have found a direction.  Woo-hoo!

My direction was reinforced by this lovely little passage I read in The Portable MFA in Creative Writing this evening:

I think that starting with a story that makes you laugh is a good idea.  Starting with your parents is even better.

Double woo-hoo!

(My shrink would be so proud of me.)

So where's MY PhD?

I've been in South Carolina a little over a week now, and I've already proofed two papers for my husband.  I see a pattern developing here.  I have a feeling that I will be his number one editor on the big dissertation.  It's a good thing I don't charge for my services.  I've learned a lot about landscape architecture theory in the past week, that's for sure.

Fortunately, he's a decent writer, but sometimes his sentences get convoluted.  That's where I come in.  I try to decipher what he's trying to say, and then I trim down the sentence to express the idea more economically.  I have crossed out more words and phrases in his papers than I can count.  Sometimes less really is more.

My own writing is less exciting at the moment.  I find myself running out of words, running out of steam at the most inopportune times.  Perhaps my expectations are skewed, though.  Maybe just a few lines of prose and dialogue for a few minutes in the evenings is enough.  If I work the muscle, it will get stronger.

Right?

The start of a story

The sun was beginning to set as the Q train approached the Stillwell Avenue subway station.  Stella gazed out the window as the train slid slowly along the last few yards of track.  Before her was Coney Island, in all its run-down, faded glory.  The colored cars on the Wonder Wheel swung unpredictably, as if they yearned to fly over the beach toward the Verrazano-Narrows bridge but couldn’t quite work up the courage to break free.

The setting sun reflected off the waters of the Atlantic, illuminating the amusement area with an otherworldly gold light.  Stella was momentarily blinded as it glinted off the window of a nearby building, but then the train rumbled into the station and she could see again.  The doors of the subway car whooshed open and Stella hopped out of her seat and onto the platform.  She made her way down the steps and out of the station, pausing on the corner of Surf and Stillwell to decide where to go first.

Coney Island’s kaleidoscope of sights, sounds, and smells overwhelmed her senses for a moment.  She could hear people speaking in a variety of languages as they passed her... Russian, English, Spanish.  The Cyclone rumbled in the distance, its baritone clatter punctuated by the high-pitched screams of the riders as the train raced down one of the coaster’s nine hills.  Rome had seven hills, but the Cyclone has nine, Stella thought to herself with a smile.  The unmistakable scent of hot dogs wafted into her nose, shaking her out of her trance and she crossed Surf, heading up Henderson Walk toward the boardwalk.  The white noise of the waves hitting the beach grew more prevalent as she drew closer.

Once she reached the boardwalk, Stella turned left, shuffling slowly behind a thicket of people, dogs on leashes, and strollers that had formed in front of her.  Snatches of music poured out of the various food stands, bars, arcades, and souvenir shops that fronted the boardwalk, a cacophony that made Stella feel like her brain was being pulled in ten different directions at once.  There were so many people around her that she could hardly see where she was going, but she knew where she wanted to be: Ruby’s.  Ruby’s Bar had everything... food, alcohol, and chocolate and vanilla soft serve.  What more could a person want?  Stella decided she would get a nice dark beer, sit on a bench, and watch the sun go down and the crowd go by.  It was hot and a cold beer would taste good.  She felt a bead of sweat trickle down between her shoulder blades as she walked.

The crowd started to thin out as she got closer to Ruby’s and the air shimmered from the heat, as if the setting sun was trying to remind all the beachgoers that even though it might be setting, it was still in charge.  Everything seemed to have a gold aura.  Stella inhaled a deep breath of the salty, humid air and looked out toward the ocean.  That was when she saw him.  He was standing beside the boardwalk railing, watching her approach. When she looked his way, the hopeful expression on his face changed to an affectionate smile of recognition.  Instinctively, Stella rubbed her eyes.  This had to be a hallucination. She looked again and he was walking right toward her.  She squinted, wondering, again, if the light from the setting sun was fooling her.  It wasn’t.  He was here.  For the first time ever.

Stella watched him approach, her eyes taking in his gait, his new glasses, the pattern of his shirt.  She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.  I ought to say something cute, she thought to herself, over and over, but the words wouldn’t come.  The light caught the face of his watch, and the transitory flash drew her attention from his eyes.  Then his arms were around her, his face buried in her hair.  Stella’s breath caught in her throat and tears of relief trickled from the corners of her eyes as she hugged him back.

Crowds passed, parting around them like the ocean.  The noises of Coney Island grew distant.  Behind them, the lights on the old Parachute Jump tower came on as the last of the sunlight disappeared into the western sky.

The 3 a.m. epiphany

I borrowed the title of this post from the title of a book I'm reading.  It's called The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises That Transform Your Fiction, and I'm really liking it so far.  I have to admit the title grabbed me as soon as I saw it on the shelf at the bookstore, because it reminded me of something F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Crack-Up:

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always 3 o'clock in the morning.

Those words were powerful the first time I heard them (in the context of one of the many commencement speeches I've listened to over the years) and they are words that have stayed with me ever since.  3 a.m. and I have a long history together... when I think of my sojourn through the land of insomnia in my early 20s, the countless late-night phone calls, the eggs eaten at all hours in the divey diner near my first apartment, I always think of 3 a.m.  There are even two songs I like called 3 a.m., one by Edwin McCain and one by Matchbox 20.

As I mentioned previously, I'm trying to write again.  It's a slow process.  I'm trying to fuel the "writing tank" by reading.  I'm messing around with The 3 a.m. Epiphany and I'm also reading the new biography of Harper Lee, called Mockingbird.  Harper Lee has always been something of a touchstone for me, for several reasons.  The first is that my mother was inspired to name me Jeanne Louise (at least partly) by Lee's protagonist in To Kill a Mockingbird.  (No one ever called me "Scout" when I was a kid, though.)  Another reason I look up to Ms. Lee is because of the fact that she only wrote one book.  I like to think that one book is a reasonable goal.  Maybe, like Harper Lee, I can write one book that will move people.  The author of Mockingbird, Charles J. Shieds, speculates about Harper Lee's lone novel in the introduction:

I have come to believe that Harper Lee was inspired by love to create her great novel -- love for the world of the South, for her little town, for her father and her family, and for the values she found among the people she most admired.  She was lucky enough to have captured many of the things she most wanted to replicate her first time out.  Many writers have done much less after many books.  Maybe she was, in some sense, satisfied.  Maybe her deed was done.

I hope to be as lucky one day.

I like to think of my writing-related activities right now as something akin to unlocking the workshop, flipping on the lights, and dusting off the typewriter in my head that used to be so prolific.  The keys stick, the ribbon's gone bad, and the thing is a total mess.  So I've got to clean it up a little before I feel like I can start again.

Plagiarism, or why I want to smack Kaavya Viswanathan upside the head

I've blogged about plagiarism before.  As a writer, it's something I think about.  I believe I first heard the word plagiarism from my fourth grade teacher, who explained solemnly to the class that copying someone else's work and passing it off as your own was VERY BAD.  In high school, teachers reiterated this message, even giving us some tips to avoid accidentally plagiarizing another source when doing research papers, projects, etc.  As college freshmen, my classmates and I all had to sign a little "contract" stating that we had read and agreed to abide by the College's policy on academic honesty, which clearly outlined the actions that would be taken if a student was caught plagiarizing.

When I first heard about the accusations of plagiarism that had been leveled at Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore who precociously penned the novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, I was a little skeptical.  Viswanathan was accused of lifting text from a couple of books by Megan McCafferty, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, but the news media reported that Viswanathan admitted right away that she had read McCafferty when she was younger and "internalized" some of her language and that it had unintentionally resurfaced in her own novel.

100 Nouns

Colleen over at Loose Leaf Notes had a great post on Saturday... she came up with 100 nouns (no adverbs, no adjectives) to describe herself.  I left a comment on her blog with a few nouns for myself, and she left a comment on my blog saying, "If I read [your list] and didn't know you, I would want to meet you."  So I'm inspired now to finish my list.  Here it is:

cat
culture
shoes
fire
coffee

opera
ocean
downtown
light
outside

bagel
pizza
cookie
canyon
garden

dust
beach
ferris wheel
dachshund
blues

politics
film
college
intelligence
flower

tv
house
gas
bubble gum
fountain

garlic
wine
cheese
paint
tools

disco
magazine
lipstick
manicure
starfish

wife
activist
friend
sister
headache

titanium
earrings
shopping mall
beer
balcony

beach ball
hairbrush
seahorse
canary
karaoke

comedy
broadway
subway
leather
speed

freeway
rock-n-roll
night
komodo dragon
pen

sweater
boot
boss
sugar
headphones

mail
yogurt
donut
razor
cross-stitch

crystal
parsnip
turnip
melon
stairwell

email
blog
bookmark
clutter
wristwatch

chapstick
sunscreen
asthma
alarm clock
diamond

siren
headphones
noise
keychain
broom

computer
gratitude
notes
mug
roller coaster

I should have been a writer

Today I met a truly fabulous woman for lunch.  She is a PR professional with her own firm, and she does a bit of work here and there for the place where I work.  We decided to get together because I'm working on a small section of a publication that she is going to be handling for us.

We had a marvelous meeting of the minds over two gourmet chef salads and a decadent brownie sundae.  We spent all of ten minutes talking about the publication itself, and the rest of the time gabbing to one another about our lives and histories.  I'm from Seattle but now live in Central Allentown, her sister used to live in Seattle, I went to Whitman College, she did some work a few years back for the non-profit I am currently VP of, she started her PR firm in between Master's degrees, I have a season pass to Dorney Park, etc., etc., etc.  It was a natural back and forth and the conversation was delightful.

There was a moment as we were talking when she mentioned that she started out as a writer, and her PR firm grew out of an interest in marketing that germinated from her love of writing.  I barely had to think before I responded, "Yeah, writing.  I should have been a writer, too."  No sooner had the words left my mouth when I realized that I am a writer.  My job involves a great deal of writing, usually in different voices and styles.  I've been writing a lot in the past year, even more so since I started this blog.  So why does, "I should have been a writer," echo in my head?

When I was in high school, I spent the summer between my junior and senior years working in a movie theatre.  There was this guy named Jim who also worked at the theatre, and we spent many a Sunday night serving popcorn behind the snack bar and BSing with each other during the slower moments.  He was older than me -- 19 to my 17 -- and I had a massive crush on him.  He went to Evergreen, a radical liberal arts college down in Olympia, and he was the first person I knew in my life who openly admitted to smoking weed.  He seemed so sophisticated to me then, and I was desperate to impress him.  There was this other girl who worked with us who was trying to be a model (she brought her portfolio to show us one night) and I think she liked Jim too.  She stayed thin by chain smoking and (probably) ramming her fingers down her throat after every meal.  But I was smart and could talk to Jim about Pearl S. Buck and Charles Dickens, so I got most of his attention, much to model-girl's chagrin.

At any rate, we were talking one night and I revealed to Jim that I liked to write.  "Everyone writes," he replied, dismissively handing me a stack of popcorn tubs from the cabinet under the counter.  Oddly, I wasn't hurt or upset by his comment because I knew he was right.  I just changed the subject and he started trying to convince me that the world and everything in it was just a figment of his imagination, just his lucid dream.  It was an unwinnable argument.

His comment about writing has stuck with me all these years.  I'd like to tell him so.  It's made me push a little more to make my writing better.  It also explains, at least in part, my writing lapses over the years... I had nothing important/authentic/interesting to say, so I didn't say it.  And it makes the compliments I receive on my written words mean that much more.

Writing about writing and the road not taken

I've made an effort over the past week to post something to this blog every day.  I know that some of the stuff is a little weak, but I have been trying as hard as I can to write a little each day, just so I can get back in the habit.  I wrote prolifically at one time in my life.  Most of it was poetry, but there was some short fiction and some personal essay/journal-y type stuff in the mix as well.

In the spring of 2000, I was accepted into the University of San Francisco's M.A. program in Creative Writing.  For about two or three weeks, I agonized about whether or not to go.  One of the department chairs actually called me personally to give me the news that I had been accepted, and there was some merit money involved, too.  It was a very tempting offer, but I was in love with the man who became my husband later that same year, and his plans were going to take him to Missouri at the end of the summer.  I was torn, to put it mildly.  My then-future husband hadn't even proposed to me yet.  In fact, we had had several tearful conversations about what to do with our relationship when he moved and we hadn't yet reached any firm conclusions.  It was during those days of struggling with the decision that I came to really understand Robert Frost's famous poem, The Road Not Taken:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Ultimately, I decided to defer my admission to the program for a year, to give myself time to see what would happen.  If my relationship fell apart, I could pick up and head to San Francisco the following year.  If we stayed together, we'd be together and pulling up stakes for California would no longer be feasible (or desirable?)  I think it was a good choice to make given the circumstances.  Ironically, though, when we got married, I stopped writing almost completely, with the exception of a few letters to the editor and a guest opinion column in the local paper.  Everything just sort of dried up.  I don't necessarily think my marriage killed my need or desire to write... I think that the priorities just needed to shift for awhile.  I was getting used to an entirely new way of living life, and now five years hence I suppose I've gotten the hang of it enough to where the writing gears can start to grind again.

I've only had one other "writing breakdown" in my life -- a two year span from 1995 to 1997.  I had mono during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, and after I got better I found that I lacked both the energy and the inspiration to do any creative writing.  The muse came roaring back in the summer and fall of 1997, though, and I rode that wave until sometime between USF's offer of admission and my hubby's marriage proposal.

Every now and then, I pause and think about how my life might be different if I had taken the other path and headed to San Francisco.  I think about a zillion possible scenarios, from the mundane (would I still be driving my '98 Honda Civic? would I have found awesome roommates through one of San Fran's many excellent roommate/housing referral services?) to the more intense (would I have gotten back together with my ex in Modesto, or at least slept with him a few more times?)  I wonder, too, what I would be doing on the first day of the summer of 2005  had I gone to San Francisco instead of Missouri.

I know that life is full of those watershed moments when you have to make a choice.  Some of those moments are murkier than others, and I guess what sets this choice apart for me is the way it stands out in high relief against the pattern of my life.  I know deep down that my life would be very, very different now if I had decided to go to the bay area and get that Master's degree.  It wouldn't necessarily be better or worse than it is now... just different.  Ribald curiosity, more than anything, makes me wish for a crystal ball just so I can see how things might have turned out.  I've often said that if I had my life to live over again, I would review every major decision I made the first time around and this time choose the alternative, just to see what happens.

I can feel a discussion of fate versus free will coming on.  That's something I don't think I ever want to know the truth about.  I can never accept that our lives are predetermined from the get-go.  I like to think that we can blaze our own trails and create our own destiny.  At the same time, though, I believe very fervently in the idea of karma and also that the events and people that come into and out of our lives do so for a reason.  They have lessons to teach us, some of which we might have trouble figuring out.  I relish the sense of accomplishment and peace that I feel when I sort out a given lesson that I have been wrestling with.  It's only been within the past couple of years that I even figured out what that ex of mine in Modesto had to teach me: it's that loving someone does not mean "fixing" them.  Love can't work unless you love someone for the way they are -- rather than the way you would like them to be.

Maybe I had already learned that lesson on Father's Day of 2000, when my now-husband called to tell me he didn't want to go to Missouri without me and to ask me to consider becoming his wife.  In that moment, my "yes" seemed like the only possible response.  And when I really pause to think about it now, it still does.