Spiral Dance

Novelist Ursula K. Le Guin decries the linear perspective that dominates
modern storytelling. She says it's "like an arrow, starting here and going
straight there and THOK! hitting its mark." Furthermore, she complains,
plots are usually advanced through conflict, as if interesting action can't
possibly arise from any other catalyst.

Rob Brezny included that gem in his weekly Free Will Astrology e-mail. This week, though I'm still feeling less than myself, I did manage to teach a little bit in between serving as tech support for 85 students and coughing too much. I've got a heavy load this semester. Five different creative writing classes. We always have to teach five classes a semester, but five different ones makes for an interesting juggling act.

This week we started doing some in-class writing at last, and I began the inevitable and constant work of helping the students look inward with ruthless scrutiny and ruthless compassion. Much of what I teach is not about writing in a linear way (though I dress it up nicely so it looks like the learning outcomes) :-). Most of what I do is guide students into their lifetime journey of self-exploration. Until they look inside themselves and find themselves shocked and awed, in despair and in love with what they see, they will not be able to create believable worlds on the page.

I walk around the classroom and listen to their disclaimers of their work. Before they'll even share what they wrote, they tear it down. New work is as fragile as an antique teacup. New work must be allowed to breathe and speak before it is shaped by the craftsperson. One student mentioned that she wanted to develop a more sacred relationship to her writing. I rarely hear that during the first few weeks, but by the end of a semester with me, very few people believe writing is anything but a sacred relationship. We're off to a great start so far.

Le Guin's statement hits at the heart of my philosophy on writing. Yes, plot is a causal relationship, but the structure of a story or a book can be anything but linear and expected. This may follow that in "real life", but in narrative we have the luxury of the manipulation of time and space. But wait. Does this follow that in "real life"? Or do we just perceive that it does? Pearl S. Buck says, "One faces the future with one's past." We look ahead to what we can be and do based on where we have been and what we have done. So even "real life" is not as directly causal as it appears on the surface. This follows that because of that and that and that ... or ... because that and that and that did NOT occur, this did. It's not a line. Remove a section within a line and you've still got a line. Remove a piece of a spiral and the whole pattern changes.

I teach to the odd mix within a classroom of people who want to be writers but don't read and people who are never without a book in their hands. A mix of 18 - 80 year olds. A mix of tastes -- romance writers, mystery writers, action story writers, literary fiction, horror, young adult -- all within a single class. A different series of causal events brought each of these warriors to the page and to the classroom. They love their writing and I love them because of it. I love their struggles and their frustrations. I love their false starts and their successful lines and paragraphs. I love most of all their warrior spirits that bring them over and over and over to the page. They are why I teach. There is no greater joy to a teacher than a student who takes his or her work seriously.

Whether my students publish or not, writing a novel or a story and following it through revisions, critique sessions, self-doubts, false praise, and finally that cutting, compassionate eye from within will change them forever. The world is a better place with each story written. Every time a writer takes a risk with her or his work, they give themselves the ability to take more risks in their "regular" lives. The way they approach their writing is the way they will approach their lives. Discipline and compassion cannot be turned on and off. Once the switch is flipped, they cannot go back to the way they were before.

When I look back on my life, I do not see it as a journey from point A to point B. I see it in defining moments. I see it in overlapping memories and overlapping relationships. I see it in a merging between what happened and what I wanted to have happened and what I have subsequently told myself happened. And I hope, when I am reflecting on my life for the final time, I will see the pattern I have written.

My pattern will not be a line that stretches from birth to death. My pattern will be a series of spirals, of turning in and back and around and forward. My pattern will dance, even as I spin away.

This is my sincerest wish for my students. When you look back on your lives, may your patterns spin and twist and meander. May the ending be the only possible conclusion to the work you've done. May you close your eyes and whisper, "It is perfect," and spin away.

Hakuna Matata

According to Jon Stewart, the definition of hope has now been confirmed as a new kitten. I agree.

Here's our new kitten, Barack. He's 11 weeks old and already taking control of the house over larger, older, more experienced cats. He's mixed breed, orange and white, with big ears and even bigger paws. He's the embodiment of the melting pot of the new Feline Race. His take-no-prisoners attitude extends globally (upstairs and downstairs), and he's not afraid to talk tough and pounce on the reigning old-guard entitled cats of the house. In just a few short days, he went from being literally wet behind the ears (he needed drops for ear mites) to jumping up onto a bed that is twenty times taller than he is and assuming his rightful place in the center of it all.

Yes, hope is indeed a new kitten.

And, also according to Jon Stewart, Barack is the Lion King. (But we knew that all along, right?)

My friend Gayle Brandeis posted yesterday about a conversation she had with another friend of ours, Peggy Hong, about the state of poetry and writing in America under the Bush administration. I think she's right. There's been a great deal of self-censorship by writers, and a great deal of censorship by publishers (check out Random House's refusal to publish Jewel of Medina). Writers have often felt the need for social activism in these times has been more important than their writing.

It's time to take back our art and our voices. It's time to write what we see, what we feel, and what we hope (yes, hope) can be.

I want to draw your attention to Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin's attempts at book banning in Alaska. A Wrinkle in Time seems to always make these lists, and I can never figure out why. This book was a foundational book for me when I was growing up, along with Harriet the Spy (which I guess either makes me unpatriotic, or a member of the Bush Administration's surveillance team) and Little House on the Prairie (family values, anyone?)

I try to keep politics off this blog as much as I can, though those of you who know me know my leanings. But this election scares me. I was scared in 2004 and those fears panned out. I'm 40 now. I've written and published three books. I have two currently being shopped by my agent, and a new, young adult novel in the works. I am a writer and I am a teacher, and I am afraid, desperately afraid, that we have gone too far to come back to a place where there can be a dialogue without accusations -- a library without censorship -- a cell phone without a tap. I am too young to believe I will have to live out my days under the kind of administration we currently have. I am too young to believe that we are, in our highest moments, as self-destructive as we have behaved. I am too young to believe that we are already lost forever.

Do I think Obama can fix the world? Of course not. But this is a man who wrote of his pain living without his father. This is a man who wrote his memoir by himself, on yellow legal pads. I know what it takes to write a book. I know what it takes to be that alone with yourself. To turn the lens of self-scrutiny deep into the parts of ourselves we don't want to acknowledge are there. A person who can do that has a courage that transcends weaponry and bravado. Anyone who writes knows that writers are warriors.

I read Dreams From My Father long before there was even the possibility of an Obama presidential campaign, and I was moved and encouraged by his fortitude, his voice, and yes, his technical skill with language. Language is my art, and when it's used skillfully and with humility, it moves me. And a man who can respect language, can endure the absolute vulnerability required to put out a story about his life that is not always flattering, not always "on message", and certainly not always about politics, is a man with a chance to help us open our hearts to one another again.

Just a chance. Just a small bit of hope.

A tiny new kitten.

Please, America. We are in a fragile moment in our nation's very short life.

A tiny chance. A small bit of hope.

We must have the courage to claim that hope. We must have the courage to believe in our essential goodness and compassion. We must have the courage to take the chance that a skinny kid with big ears and a honey voice is offering.

A small bit of hope. This is more than I have felt in eight years.

Please, America.

Back to .... Everything

Been a long time gone! (There's a song there ... )

After I returned from North Carolina I got viciously sick with a fever/flu/head cold thing that is still with me. I don't have anywhere near the energy I usually do, and this week was the first week back to school with students. I've missed blogging a lot. Today, after a delightful glass or two of wine last night and after watching Barack's speech in Denver, I feel once again yes, I'll say it, hopeful.

I usually love the first week of school. I adore my students and I adore teaching. I even really like the people I work with, and my department in particular is filled with kind, intelligent, professional people. I am a lucky woman.

But.

This week, partly because I am still not 100% well, but mostly because of a new, obscene, virtual thing that I have no control over, I endured the worst first week of my fifteen year teaching career. What could this be, you say? Yes, we know about silly assessment meetings, and college strategy meetings, and governing board objectives that must be somehow put into your individual performance goals as a faculty member (I still wonder how I'm supposed to enhance facilities management ... but maybe one day I'll figure that one out). We know about making sure you fill out your office hour sheet down to the quarter hour and the challenges of parking on the first week and the lack of coffee and the lines of students who look at you with deep longing to enter your already at capacity classes ... this is to be expected.

But.

This week my institution decided to change its on-line access and student account information and passwords. Let me backtrack. I have also set as a goal (yay performance goals) to use less paper and conserve college resources. We have an on-line course component that is available in all classes, whether they are 100% on line or in the classroom. It makes ecological sense to post handouts and assignments on line and save the mass killing of yellow, blue, and pink colored trees. It makes environmental sense to post syllabi there. Contact information. Helpful hints. Then students have 24/7 access to their courses. They'll never "lose" a handout again, and there is no excuse for a late paper because they can turn it in at any time from the comfort of their own homes.

Here's an excellent example of the difference between theory and practice. I still don't see a flaw in my theory. Colleges use a LOT of paper. Most of it needless. I love trees. I'm a writer. I use a LOT of paper. I need to get my paper-karma back in balance. In practice, however, the world is vastly different.

I'm not afraid of computers. I really love them, actually. I've been a Mac girl for almost two decades. When I'm forced to use a PC (like in the classroom) I steel myself against the inevitable Windows Vista F-U messages and the fatal error messages and the overall slowness of this very clumsy operating system. My computer in my office has Leopard (fast cat!) and is just far more sexy than the PCs in the classroom. But I digress. I do believe technology can help us live more efficiently and consciously.

To a point.

My institution has reached the tipping point, where technology has moved from being a tool to being an inhibitor. We outsourced a project that we've called the "portal". Try to explain to a group of older students whose sole computer experience is maybe sending e-mail (if they don't "lose" the cursor) why they must enter this portal, how to enter this portal, and what they must do when they get there. Try to explain to a group of students how to save their files as Rich Text so that anyone can open them (gosh, are there other word processing programs than wordpad?) Try to explain to a group of students about the free Adobe Acrobat reader so they can read the .pdf files I posted in the class. Try to explain this over and over and over and over and over for the entire first week of school. To five sections. To 85 students. Assign a "test" assignment. Their mission, should they choose to accept it, was to create a text file and attach it to me as a rich text file.

Yeah. I had a handout with directions. Yeah. I believe that writers must know how to use basic technology if they expect to ever sell a book, or a story, or a poem. Everything in publishing is moving electronically. Submissions, rejections, edits, correspondence, contracts. You can't be a computer dork and be a successful writer.

But we are a rural, poor county. Many of my creative writing students are returning students. They did not grow up with computers. They don't know what their browser is. They don't always know what platform they're running. And here they are in college and they have to enter a portal. And I do mean have to. The school did not make this optional. So, here I am, newly forty, trying to explain to people in their 60s and 70s that this is the direction of education. That is isn't very difficult. Please don't be afraid.

I might have been successful with this route, except my school let me down.

Too many users caused system crashes all week. Forced changes in student passwords kept many students from being able to log in. Overloads in calls to our very sweet but relatively small staff of computer help desk employees. Forced upgrades in classrooms which were not completely done so that when instructors tried to show the students how "easy" it was, nothing worked. (Note to tech support: If you're going to install the Adobe Professional Suite, you must LAUNCH it before going away. Otherwise no one can open a PDF file until they first open Photoshop.) You try to find Photoshop on a Vista PC while your whole class is staring at you, wanting only the good old days when they could have a yellow syllabus that they could keep in a notebook. Sigh. I hear the horse and buggy trotting by as I write.

Then, my friend, my favorite browser, Firefox, let me down. You know how aggressive programs can be about downloading the new version. So, most people who use Firefox have been forced to upgrade to the new version whether they wanted to or not. The new version doesn't recognize Rich Text files until you make a change in Preferences. It's an easy change to do, if you know to go do it. The only message Firefox gives you is "unreadable file." So, you've told your classes that anybody can open Rich Text files, and then you find out it's not true. Your beloved Firefox must be fixed first. And did I mention -- about half my students didn't know what their browser was or which one they had.

So, you send group e-mails to all 85 of your students on Thursday about Firefox and how to change the preferences. You thank them for their patience. You apologize for your institution's bizarre choice to implement all these changes on the first week of school. And then half your e-mails get bounced back because something in the "portal" causes many of the e-mails to be returned as undeliverable. I know my students' e-mails are valid. I asked every student on the first week to verify. So I know it's us. I know we're supposed to communicate electronically and I know we're somehow making that impossible. I was able to send e-mails out to everyone prior to the launch of the "portal" on Monday. After Monday, group e-mails had difficulty. So I don't know who received an e-mail and who didn't.

I need more than wine.

Then, one of the "benefits" of the portal (did I mention nothing was broken before -- we could all log on, work, enjoy our days) was that we'd only have to log on once a day. I only logged on once a day before, but hey, whatever. Tech people have to have performance goals too. But now, I have to log in about every 20 minutes. There's an automatic time out that we can't adjust on the system. I'm supposed to be able to log in in the morning, have access to my on -line courses, my e-mail, my rosters, my committee groups -- everything I need to be a happy employee. Theoretically, I have no problem with this concept. Yeah. Theory and practice. Not the same.

This is not just a Laraine-gripe. Up and down the hallowed halls this week, faculty were cursing the portal. In the break rooms, no one could talk about anything else. We stormed the bastille to find out who to send nasty e-mails to. (Ever notice how these institutional changes often have no go-to person?) Students are dropping the classes. The technology is too daunting for some. There are no alternatives in Yavapai county. We are the college for the general population. Students are trying to be patient, but they're up against dial-up connections, old machines, and a lack of time to try and figure out a new system. Yes, we provide computers on campus. No, not 5000 of them. And no, everyone cannot make it to the campus to use these lovely pre-loaded computers. People are even talking about this in Albertson's. A few students told me they overheard people complaining while they were in line at the bank. Yep. It's a small town. But really, this has been a problem.

Ready for the very best -- I mean the seriously, laugh out loud, most hilariously best part of this week? Sit down.

My institution's umbrella goal for 2008-2009 is customer service.

I lift my second glass of wine.
To Customer Service.

Random Thoughts on Goin' Home

Keith and I got home on Monday after a very long travel day on Sunday. The trip to NC was so fast and furious, I had no time to write except in the airports. We were either in the car going from one place to another, or we were exhausted, or we were visiting with someone (real or ghostly). Turned out both of us were seeking some ghosts back in NC.

We landed in Raleigh/Durham in the evening on July 29. Our rental car was an extremely cute red sports car with a sunroof and a heck of a lot of kick. We got lost finding the hotel, but eventually got in, got settled, and got ready to go to Wilmington the next day. I cried as the plane landed (I'm prone to this). When I saw the tops of the miles and miles and miles of trees and the water, my body responded with water. I still believe NC is the most beautiful place I've ever seen, and if I returned with anything, it was vindication that I was not being whiny and adolescent when we moved to Phoenix in the summer of 1981. The place I left was beautiful, and the place I moved to was not. It would have undone anyone.

On Wednesday, we drove to Wilmington to stay with my aunt, my dad's sister. She's 71, and basically my last blood relative on my dad's side. We spent many summers in Wilmington, as well as Thanksgivings and Christmases. Dad, naturally, was more haunted by Wilmington than I am, but one can't help but be haunted in Wilmington. There's a historical plaque every two feet (pre-Revolutionary historical plaques). Every other house is on the historic register. My aunt and uncle are crazy-wealthy. The wealth that doesn't have to advertise. I thought of a title for a dime-store novel: Thwarted Destiny: My Life in Exile from the Southern Aristocracy. Yes, I was that close to mint juleps at Cape Fear Country Club and dining with the CEOs of everywhere and having a cotillion where everyone wears white and knows what to do with all the forks. (Imagine hand pressed to forehead now). I did my best to get us in the will, but I'm guessing she'll give everything to her children. Alas. We managed to avoid, in our two day visit, trying to explain Keith's and my situation (though she put us in separate rooms), any discussion of God and the afterlife, and any discussion of politics. Everyone did well. Once, Keith began eating before the prayer and my uncle, in his low thunder voice, said, "We will pray now." It was hard not to laugh, but we were at Cape Fear Country Club, after all, and we did have linen napkins, and everyone around us was in pearls discussing the decline that day in the market. We were not in Kansas anymore. One more day in Wilmington and we'd have likely had to venture into religion and politics -- the two threads that dad broke to move us out to AZ -- and it's just better that we avoid those things.

We did have the opportunity to go visit Grandma's house. My cousin owns it now, and he's moved it about 100 yards from its original site down closer to the woods so he can build a bigger home on the lot. It's a beautiful lot (the first picture on the top) that overlooks the inland waterway. The house was used for a time after Grandma's death as Joey's house on Dawson's Creek, and I was told when you google-earth the address, it actually says Joey's house. I haven't done that, but that's just weird. They've redone the entire inside -- very little was familiar except the door handles. It was actually a pleasant house with the windows open, air conditioning, new carpet, and cable. :-) But the fixtures still spoke. I touched all the door knobs and was jolted on my dad's door. The jolt, I think, was the next book, which I can't talk about yet -- not to be secretive, but because it isn't formed enough. Suffice to say, I felt all the suffering that took place in that room, and I felt his ghost still hanging out there, and I felt what an eight year old boy who was stricken with polio and lay in a polio ward for two years watching child after child die felt -- and a voice is coming through, a young boy's voice, which, if you know me at all, is also just weird. :-) But I'm 40 now and many things change.

Holding fast to the "visitors and fish smell in three days" mantra, we left Wilmington on the dawn of day three to go to Charlotte. I grew up in Charlotte, the Queen City, and I have to say I'd move back in a heartbeat. Breathing its air broke apart pieces in me that I'd been pretending weren't there. Seeing its streets and trees and places that were half familiar, but of course have changed in 30 years, pulled me. My contacts don't dry out in NC. I can breathe.

They've moved the road from Wilmington to Charlotte. 74 used to go directly through small town after small town. Now, it bypasses everything except Monroe. We stopped for gas outside Lumberton at a BP station where everyone, including the cashiers, was smoking. AZ has a ban on smoking in any public building, so we don't even have divided sections in restaurants anymore. I'd forgotten how quickly that smoke hurts my head. But we were out of there quickly and on to find a place to eat in Laurinburg, which had a Bojangles, a Jack in the Box, a Wendy's and a Subway. Both Keith and I had been counting the grammatical errors in signage (it's hard to not be English teachers), and Laurinburg won the misplaced apostrophe award. But I digress. We went to Subway, where even there sweet tea was the default (there is a god) and we could see the results of a diet of cheap, fast food. At Cape Fear Country Club, everyone was thin. In Laurinburg, not so much. What a nation, huh?

From Laurinburg, it was only another few hours into Charlotte. I felt like I needed to go by my old house first, so we did that. There was a big dumpster in the driveway, and it was clear someone was repainting the house. I started traipsing around, pointing things out to Keith, when one of the men from inside came out and asked if he could help us. I told him I'd lived there until 1981, and he was very excited. He and his partner had just bought the house as a HUD home and were fixing it up to resell. They invited us inside and told us what they were doing and how they were fixing everything up. I had not expected to be inside that house. I hadn't been inside since we left, and I still don't feel like I can accurately articulate what it felt like to be back in a place that has such a powerful hold on me. These two men are caring for my home, and I can't tell you how that makes me feel. The last time I saw the outside of the house, it was clearly in disrepair, and I'd been hesitant about coming through the old neighborhood at all. I didn't want to supplant my memories with the present. But memory is always shifting, and it shifted again last week. They pulled out the paneling in the den (yes, it was still there!) and took up the tile and are replacing it with sautillo tile. The hardwood floors that are in the rest of the house are still in great shape. They are redoing the bathrooms (mold, water, mildew, etc had caused a lot of damage) and they just replaced the air conditioner that we put in in 1976. The doors were the same doors, and the windows the same windows -- and -- they are repainting it the colors it used to be (beige and deep red). I have no idea where they came up with those colors, but it made being inside that much stranger and that much more comforting. I could really experience the overlapping of time and the layers of experiences that happened within those walls. The men wanted to know what the house used to look like, and they are going to e-mail me pictures when they finish it. I have to say, it's a really cute house (retro, now, I suppose). And although even if I used all three bedrooms' closets, I wouldn't be able to store all my clothes in it, I still fit. I stood in my bedroom where I wrote my first autobiography. I looked out the window where I spent many many days watching the dogwoods and the robins. I stood in the bathroom where dad bathed, and the kitchen where mom watched us playing outside. They're putting in new appliances, of course, and relandscaping, but it was my house, and I was still there, and dad was still there, and mom and my sister, and our old black cat, and it really was like my life there was only moments ago. And maybe it was. I have been emotional around it, but not sad in a debilitating way -- just awed by the passage of time, by how much things change, and by how little. I would have liked more time in the house, but the men were working, and we did have to go to our next place, but I will be forever grateful to these guys for taking care of my house, and for letting me wander back through it and touch it again. Because the house was empty, there was no one else's furniture, pictures, or memories to overlay mine. I could see it exactly as it was, and I could see that it was a happy house, and that it was going to be a happy house again. I can't tell you how grateful I am to these men.

From there, we met my first best friend, Donna, for some Carolina BBQ. She lived across the street from me, and she was the only person to come say good bye to us when we moved. (After we sold our home to a black couple, the neighborhood got nasty). She waved to us on the street, and I remember looking out the back window of the car and watching her crying and waving, and I was crying and waving, and we both knew, even though our parents were sure we'd forget about each other, that there'd never be another friend in our lives like we were for each other -- friends in childhood can't be made at any other time. We talked until almost midnight. She said, "It's so good to talk to someone who you used to roll down the hill with." And she was right. No one knows you like that person. I miss her deeply.

From Charlotte, we drove to Wake Forest, where Keith went to school, stopping along the way in Statesboro to have yet more Carolina BBQ (this week I'm cleansing with rice, beans, broccoli, detox tea ... but it was SO worth it) Wake Forest is a very beautiful school. Dad went there for two years before he transferred to UNC Chapel Hill. Keith got to wander around his classrooms and see his old dorms before the daily 3 pm storm struck. We stopped on the way back to Raleigh at 1.2 million square feet of retail space just outside of Durham (not kidding). It was a tax-free weekend for back-to-school purchases, and, well, you know me. Fortunately, we only had a few hours or I'd have had to pay to send my suitcase back on the airplane. :-)

We arrived in Phoenix late on Sunday night, and then drove back to Prescott on Monday. I turned 40 on Tuesday and now I'm just trying to put all this together somehow. Multiple books floated in front of me on the trip. Finishing Gathering Ghosts before I went back home was crucial to that. I was cleared of that baggage and could move into the next right thing in front of me, rather than behind me. I do see more ghosts in the south than the west. I do hear more voices and I do feel more authentically myself there. (Born with a magnolia in my hair!) I don't know where this will take me. I only know I need to go back more frequently, and stay longer in one place. I will look into writer's retreats and colonies in the south, or places I can go to just listen, watch the squirrels, taste the tomatoes.

Everything is different, and nothing is different. Walking in my old house freed my 7 year old ghost. I felt her move, and I have felt different since being back in Prescott. I gathered her up, and we'll make the next step in our journey together.


Pictures (from top left)
1) The view from Grandma's house in Wilmington
2) me on Wrightsville Beach
3) me and my first best friend, Donna, in front of a Carolina BBQ place (it's the vinegar in the BBQ that makes it the best food EVER) in Charlotte
4) a painting I remembered from childhood. This was inside Christ Lutheran Church, the church where I grew up. It has since become a mega church, but they had kind of a shrine to the "old" sanctuary, which is what I remember, and this painting was there. It was commissioned by the Eck family, whose son Robbie, was a few years older than me. He was killed in a car accident when he was 12. Robbie's was the first funeral I ever went to.
5) me inside the kitchen of my old house in Charlotte
6) view of Springfield Drive, the street I grew up on
7) me in front of the house in Charlotte
8) me at Wake Forest (where Keith went to school)

Goin' Home

Tomorrow I am going home. I haven't been home in many, many years. This trip feels like the first trip home I will be taking as an adult. There is no "homeplace" anymore. My aunt still owns my grandmother's house, but right now no one lives in it. My aunt and uncle don't live in the house I remember anymore. Our family's home in Charlotte has been sold many times in the twenty-seven years since we lived there. No one from the family attends Masonboro Baptist Church anymore (my dad's old church), and no one from the family attends Christ Lutheran Church anymore (my mother's church).

I understand Christ Lutheran has become a mega-church now. I remember a small chapel surrounded by cherry trees that always produced the most holy cherry blossoms every spring. I remember a kind pastor, Jacob Lackey, who only recently passed away. He helped my mother through 1979, a year I imagine was one of the most difficult ones of her life. I remember the enthusiasm my mother had for teaching Bible school classes. She loved the Bible stories, and she was a wonderful reader, so she could enthrall even the most hyperactive seven year old with her rendition of Noah's Ark. I remember the song ... "The animals, the animals, they came in by two-sy two-sies..." We'd go to Bible school in the summer, probably around this time of year, in the mornings, and then go to the pool in the afternoons in Matthews. Keith and I are staying in a hotel near that pool, and near our old house.

I wish the trip were both longer and over. I know I am going back a stranger, both to my family and to my place. I think, though we'll see when we get there, that for the first time I'm not going back hoping to find something. It feels more like going back to acknowledge something -- to acknowledge the foundation of my life. Am I capable of going back without attachment to wanting things to be different?

My dad and I went back two years after we moved to North Carolina. It was the only trip we took alone together. I remember standing in a field, all sorts of tiny bugs circling around me. I had my back to him because I didn't want him to see my crying over something as unexplainable as the earth. I felt that same reaction when I went to New York earlier this summer. Something in the dampness, the scurrying of all creatures great and small in the trees, along the creeks, within the blades of grass, still touches something primal in me. My land. My small part of the earth that my cells still recognize as being the first climate of this incarnation.

I want to go home as an adult. I want to go home without the shadow of being Glenn Jr's oldest. I want to be both a visible and invisible ghost in the places I used to know. If I see anything left of me there, I want to gather her up, wrap her carefully in a cotton blanket (because godknows it's gonna be hot), and bring her back to Prescott with me.

July 24, 1976 was the date my dad had his heart attack. This week, thirty-two years ago, was the week my sister and I were sent to Wilmington while everyone tried to figure out if dad was going to live or die. I'll be staying with my aunt, his sister, just like I did then, only I stayed in a house they owned three houses ago, and I didn't really know then what was going on. I can't claim that I know what's going on now, except this time I know I can't go home again. There is no home. There's not even a home in Phoenix. The house the four of us lived in has been sold. Everywhere I stay with family I am a guest. My "room" does not exist except in my own house in Prescott. Perhaps that's as it should be. If I'd have had a place to go back to, with a bed I remembered, posters on the walls, cassettes stacked beside an old tape player, I might never have moved forward, so attached am I to staying in one place. Better, perhaps, that there was no option for that. I'm going to see my best childhood friend in Charlotte. Our lives have taken very different paths. She's a single mother with three boys. We talked on the phone last week like I never moved away.

I went to Phoenix on Saturday for my family birthday dinner, and in the morning I stopped to see my two friends, Mike and Arvin, whom I have known since 1986. Arvin made the comment that no matter who comes into our lives at this point, no one will ever know us in the way that we know each other. It's true. I can tell people about my friendships in North Carolina, or about these two men and what we have meant to each other, but I can't go back to being 12 or 21 or anywhere in between. I am left with the idea of piecing together a home from the remnants of different homes and remnants of different people I've been.

This time, I don't feel like I'm going back looking for myself. I feel like I will walk up and down Springfield Drive with both love and detached curiosity. (A great way to approach writing, by the way!) I hope I can see the neighborhood as it is without the rose colored glasses. I hope I can see it without wanting it to be something else. I've met the ghost of my father on every trip back since he died. I'm not expecting to meet him there anymore. I don't think he needs to be there waiting for me. I think he knows now that I am OK and he can complete his arc without wondering what's going to happen to me. I don't know who I'll meet hanging in the trees or walking down the streets. Maybe the ghosts of the south are silent for me now. Maybe they'll give me permission to listen to the ghosts of the west. Or maybe not. Ghosts are quite possessive! No doubt I'll come back with stories. No doubt I'll come home with something that haunts me still. No doubt I'll come back having eaten too much pork and watermelon.

Huh. Hear what has happened? Prescott has become home. I'm planting roots here. Maybe I'll bring back a little sand from Wrightsville Beach to pack around them. Maybe I'll bring back an acorn. I am a visitor now, in a place that was once as familiar as my own body. It may well be another fifteen years before I get back to NC again. It's a long way, and the plane won't take me where I'd really like to go, so Charlotte and Wilmington become places that used to be mine. I can go back and look, but I can't touch anymore. They're not reaching back to me.

So, I'll have some sweet tea and damn fine tomatoes and corn on the cob and I'll come back to Arizona and keep working on my novel, and keep working on opening my body and my heart, and I'll try to merge my southern girl with my southwest girl and see what ghosts show up for me then. Blended families are the way of things anyway, aren't they?

Have a good week, ya'll.

This Man, This Girl, and This Boy

In 2005, I wrote this essay about Keith & his kids:

I’m in love with a man who has children. The one non-negotiable piece of my yahoo personal ad: no kids. Mounting debt, a gambling addiction, a 70-hour work week at McDonald’s, purple boils on his face – all were preferable to children.

This isn’t a new aversion. Dolls seemed like a complete waste of time to me as a girl. They weren’t real (which, now that I think about it, is a bonus), but why would you pretend they were real when you could read a book and pretend you walked through the closet door into Narnia? In high school home ec, girls carried around eggs wrapped in baby blankets for a week so they could see what motherhood would be like. I never heard of one of those eggs screaming at 3 a.m. or vomiting up the strained peas you just got down its throat all over your $75 white silk shirt. If you did drop the egg, you only broke an egg. CPS wouldn’t come. Your mother wouldn’t shame you for the next dozen years about your irresponsibility. If you forgot your egg in your locker, it would still be there in the morning, in the exact same shape as when you left it. Not like motherhood at all. At work, women would bring in their newborns and their breast pumps and expect that every female on the floor would hold the baby. I hid in the bathroom as much as possible, but if there was no escaping holding it, I held it as far away from my body as I could – this child and I staring at each other – asking each other, “Are we from the same species?”

In my mid-twenties, I stopped feeling guilty over not goo-gooing over ga-gaaing tiny people and surrendered to the inevitability that if I lived in the wild, I would be the aberration who ate her young. I would be the exception that proves the rule. I’m an English teacher, after all, so exceptions to rules are really no issue for me. I am finally old enough to where very few people expect one of those tiny creatures to come crawling out of my body. I freely admit that I don’t get it. I don’t understand the love a parent has for a child. I don’t understand why it is supposed to be superior to the love I feel for myself, my friends, my cats or my planet. I don’t think it is. But I’ve learned many clever responses over the years to the inevitable question, “When are you going to have children?” The best and most effective shut down seems to be the most honest one. I don’t like children, at which point the mother who asked the question promptly shepherds her flock of drooling sticky people out of arm’s reach, as if she thought I would devour them on the spot as a final emphasis to my comment.

It’s still true. I don’t like children. I don’t regret not experiencing childbirth, or nursing, or first days of kindergarten. But, as things go, I met this man, and he had two children, but he also had a cat, and men who prefer cats to dogs are rare enough, and Prescott is small enough that I thought he was worth talking to. We kept talking, and of course, the time came next when I had to meet the children.

I met them on a sleety Sunday in March at the Dinner Bell. They were very blonde. I had no idea what to say to them. They brought a gift of bath salts for taking care of their cat while they were away on spring break to San Diego. I’d been sick during spring break, missing this man, worrying about meeting his children. When I met the man my mother married after my father died, I was furious. How could my mother love someone else? I was 22 then. These children are 8 and 11. Maybe divorce is different. After all, they’ve still got both parents. During breakfast I watched this man with these children. I watched them hold on to him, kiss him, share their food with him. I saw them love him and I saw a side of him I hadn’t seen before.

They spit their gum out in his hands. He and the boy recited parts of Jabberwocky to each other. He and the girl worked on math problems in crayon on the children’s menu paper place mat. He wanted them to like me. I wanted them to like me. I wanted them to not be threatened by me or feel like I was going to try and be their mother.

The most intelligent thing I could think of to say was, “What was your favorite memory from San Diego?” I am a stupid adult, I thought. I suddenly realized why adults had always commented on how much I had grown or asked me what school was like – but how to explain to a grown up what middle school was like? I shuddered at the memory and swore never to let that question cross my lips. But it did, in a slightly more or less egregious way. “What is your favorite subject in school?” English for the girl. Science for the boy. Ask open ended questions. I didn’t know what to say. The girl asked if she could eat my toast. The boy asked to see my ring. The man told me they liked me. How could he tell? I knew they wanted their mom and dad back together. What kid wouldn’t? I knew I was in the way of that. I didn’t even know this man very well yet. I just knew, then, that he had something I hadn’t seen in a long time – the capacity to open his heart.

It’s been awhile now. I spent a day last summer sweating at the water park in Phoenix because the children wanted to go. I watched them wade through a creek on slippery rocks (which, had I been their mother, I’d have never let them do) until the girl found a candleholder shaped like a sunflower and brought it back to me for a gift. The girl wrote poems about me. The boy stole my sandal one night while I was in bed with the man and hid it under the sink. The boy hit me in the eye by accident with a ball he was hitting in the house. He really likes you, said the man.

So the relationship with the man became more than a relationship with him. I realized I loved his kids. One night the boy cried and told me what divorce felt like. He said it felt like the north pole became the south pole, and I didn’t know what to say, but I felt like whatever I said suddenly had infinitely more weight than anything I’d ever said before. I said his mom loved him and his dad loved him and that meeting him and the girl was one of the best things that ever happened to me. When we came out of the bedroom, the boy and I, I saw the man making nachos in the kitchen and the girl grating cheese and I saw what I never thought I’d see in my life. A family.

Last weekend all four of us crawled in bed. The boy wanted to listen to Simon & Garfunkel. His favorite was Bridge over Troubled Water. Her favorite was Scarborough Fair, although none of us could explain to her what it meant. The man and I were in the middle of the bed. The girl was holding on to me and the boy was holding on to the man.

I remembered listening to Simon & Garfunkel in high school, wearing all black with heavy kohl eyeliner and combat boots. We smoked dope and drank cheap wine coolers and lamented the decline of the intellectual. We needed an Ayn Rand for our generation. We thought the 60’s held all the answers. The 80’s were, in our words, tragic.

Two years before my father died, Simon & Garfunkel meant the end of everything, the end of my family. I sat in the circle of the other National Honor Society nerds choking on the pot smoke I never could inhale embracing embracing embracing the sorrow that was coming just around the next corner. Sorrow so close I could smell its rotten teeth.

The comfort I pretended I could have through sad folk songs worked. I didn’t forget the sorrow, but I did forget the deeper thing I was pretending until this moment. I was pretending I didn’t want a family again, pretending that when that sorrow hit that was inches inches from the door, that from that moment on it didn’t matter that I would never have a family.

The man shifted beside me, pressed his head against my neck. “I love you,” I said to the top of his head. He is the man I love in part because of these children, and I feel for the first time in my life that I can close my eyes and rest with my family: this man, this girl, and this boy.

______________________________________________________________________________________


Tonight, in July of 2008, after over three and a half years together, we told his children that we were making a commitment to each other. The girl is 14 now, starting high school in two weeks. The boy is almost 12, about to begin the adventure that is middle school. When we told them, they shrieked, leapt off the floor and hugged each other, tears forming in both kids' eyes. They went to their dad, then to me, hugging, hugging, hugging.

"I've got a new step-mom!" said the girl, (something usually not shouted with glee) and somehow everything felt much more real than it had over the weekend when Keith and I made a commitment to each other in Jerome. She immediately went to text message everybody.

"Thank you, Dad," said the boy, hugging his father. "Are you happy?"

"I am," said Keith.

I don't know what I expected. I knew they liked me. I knew I loved them. I knew I'd heard all my life it's different when you make a commitment, but I didn't really believe it -- I guess because I never have made a commitment before to anything but writing. I felt another crack separate and break off and dissolve in my heart. I would be seeing these children graduate from high school, get married (or not), go to college, have lives. I could really let myself love them.

The girl wants to make the invitations. The boy wants to play the wedding song on his new electric guitar. They want us to dance to "Jessie's Girl", the song we danced to on i-tunes on the first New Year's Eve the four of us spent together. The girl's boyfriend texts back his congratulations.

Keith and I sit outside while the girl shops for shoes on Zappos (yeah, I've been teaching her), and the boy takes a shower. We can see Jupiter from the porch. We had a bit of rain today, and the air is damp and cooler. We talk about what the ceremony will look like. We talk about what to call each other (there really is no word ... if you're not husband/wife, what are you?) We decide to be husband/wife anyway. We need to figure out what legal paperwork to draw up for power of attorney. We talk about a party. Writing things to say to each other.

When I first moved to Prescott, I went out to Goldwater Lake and walked around its edges. There's a small footbridge off to one side, and I sat there for a long time enjoying the sound of real water making noises. Phoenix had no such talking water. I sat on the bridge in January in the sun. The lake was full. Patches of snow were on the trail. And I wished for Keith. I didn't know I wished for Keith, but I told the universe that I was ready to do the work of relationship. I asked for a companion. I met Keith a few weeks later.

We think maybe we'll do the ceremony at Goldwater Lake by that footbridge. I say good-night to the boy and the girl. "We love you!" they say, and then return to their cell phones or books.

"Love you, too," I say.

And it's true. And I didn't have to go through childbirth, or diapers, or vomiting, or sleepless nights with infants. Someone else did that for me. When I met them they were already people. They could eat on their own. They could walk. They could sleep alone. Now they seem to be almost grown. They say some of the wisest things I've ever heard. I had nowhere near their depth at their age. How cool that I'm going to get to spend my life with them.

"That was weird," I say to Keith when we get to the car. I'm still working with "step-mom" in my head. I'm realizing that it's very hard to not move forward now that we've told everyone. I don't want to not move forward, but I'm realizing, yes, mom was right, it is different when you make a commitment.

"I choose you," says Keith.

"I choose you, too," I say.

And I do.

Get Up and Do It Again .... Amen

Tibetan Buddhist monks spend weeks and months creating intricate sand paintings only to brush them away at the end of their labor. The meditation is a sacred practice in non-attachment. I witnessed part of the construction of one of these mandalas at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts many years ago. Today, the images and the practice reared its multi-colored head.

Three days ago, I was working on two scenes from my novel. The writing was working. It wasn't great, but it was good draft work. Two days ago, I was working on the scene that followed those scenes when the computer froze, forcing me to do a reset, which caused (though it wasn't supposed to cause this) a loss of all my data. I had a portion of the book saved on a different computer, and though this computer freeze didn't make me jump for joy, it was only about ten hours of work and I looked at it (mostly) as an opportunity to revise and make the scenes better. I always advise my students to take their early drafts and put them in a drawer and not look at them as they move into the revision process. (Though to be clear ... I don't tell them to actually delete them). I believe, and still do, that revision is best done on a fresh piece of paper. So, I figured this was a chance for me to practice that in a little more of a boot camp fashion than I was accustomed to. I went home, wrote a quick outline of everything I'd written, taking special care to write down as many of the surprise details that came up through the process of writing. Not that big a deal.

Today, I had four hours to work this afternoon. I was able to rewrite the scenes that had been lost as well as move forward two more scenes. And yes, you guessed it, the screen froze again. What an opportunity to practice my yoga, I thought, as I wanted to throw this machine across the room. What a teacher this computer is turning out to be. What is this actually about? I've never lost data in my life, and now it's happened twice in one week. By the time I rewrite the scenes tomorrow (on a different computer), they'll be pretty darn fine scenes.

After my first thought of OH @*(#, the very next thing that popped in my head was the song lyric from The Pretender: "And when the morning light comes streaming in/ I'll get up and do it again, Amen..." which made me laugh. The next thought I had was of the Tibetan monks and their beautiful sand paintings. I remembered reading an interview about their work in which they were asked why they spent all that time making the mandalas only to destroy them. They replied, as monks are oft to do, that the making of the mandala was what mattered, not what happened to it after it was finished. But how can you work so hard to make it so beautiful knowing it will be gone in a few weeks? was the follow-up question. I'll never forget this answer.

The work is the practice. That is all there is. Everything else is an illusion. Today we make a painting. Tomorrow it is gone. This is the way of everything.

So tomorrow, when I rewrite those scenes again, and back them up on two thumb drives and e-mail them to my work e-mail, I'll approach them with that frame of mind. I can never rewrite them like I wrote them the first time. Some images are gone. The ones that matter will come back. New ones will appear. This is what always happens.

This is the way of everything. When the morning light comes streaming in, and when it doesn't.

Amen.