The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter

Why I Told My Daughter to Quit Her Job

2012-01-17T17:06:00.000-08:00

My daughter called me last night to celebrate her news. “I got the job!” she said. “I'm going to be decorating cupcakes!”

I cheered. My daughter earned an honors degree in Natural Resources from a major university this past May. This is the happiest I've heard her sound in months.

You think that you know where this blog post is going: oh, no, another parent bemoaning the fact that our nation's newly minted college graduates can't find decent jobs! And why wouldn't you think that? New books like Slouching Toward Adulthood: Observations from the Not-So-Empty Nest are rolling off the presses daily to explain the “shocking truth” behind the fact that 5.9 million people between the ages of 25 and 35 are now living with their parents.

But you would be wrong. This is a very different rant.

My daughter is the poster child for why college matters. She went to a decent suburban high school, finished in the top quarter of her class, played varsity sports. Attending a State university allowed her to continue expanding her intellectual and social horizons. She worked closely with researchers in Natural Resources, learned Spanish, studied and worked abroad, explored electives that enriched her perspective. She continually added to her resume, too, always building toward her post-graduation dream of working as a scientist.

She did everything right, and lo and behold, the system worked. She landed a job with a West Coast environmental engineering company that paid her more money than she had ever dreamed of making right out of college. Hurray!

Slowly, though, things unraveled. My daughter loved living near San Francisco, but even on her hefty salary, she could only afford an apartment in a dire section of Oakland, which led to her being caught in the middle of a mini gang shootout. (She has a nasty bullet wound on her car to prove it.) Meanwhile, her spiffy new job bored her, and her bosses were often negative, even mean-spirited.

For months, she stuck it out. Her student loans were about to kick in and this job paid double what any of her friends were making, plus benefits. As time passed, though, my sunny girl grew more despondent. Every day, she dragged herself into work. And, every day, things didn't get better.

She started looking for work. In California, the unemployment rate is dire—11.3 percent, compared to 8.6 percent nationwide as of November 2011. One of her job interviews for a coffee company required four different interviews, plus test taking. My daughter got the job and was thrilled, especially because the position includes health benefits. But the pay was abysmal: minimum wage.

Did she really want to leave her posh job for minimum wage? How could she—a driven student, a hard worker, a young woman who had always set goals and reached them--possibly justify making that leap?

There wasn't any rational reason for her to quit. But there was every emotional reason to do so.

“Life is too short to be miserable for money,” I told her finally. “Just quit. Take the barista job and figure out something else while you're making lattes.”

I can hear the gasps of horror from most parents out there. How could I advise my daughter to join the ranks of the marginally employed, after our family invested so much into her college degree?

Easily. College, you see, is not really about preparing you for the job market. It's about gaining the knowledge and skills you need to seize opportunities—and that includes knowing when to walk away from something that makes you unhappy.

There's a lot of talk these days—well, all days, I suppose—about what good it is to get a liberal arts degree, what majors are most likely to lead to the best-paid and most stable careers, and the importance of building your resume while you're in school so that you have an edge when it's time to enter the almighty job race.

That's all true, mostly. Obviously, you have to eat. But maybe the goal of college shouldn't be so closely linked to employment. Actual life isn't that different from the game of Life, in the sense that there's a point where at the start we all have to choose the college path or the career path. You can earn the same money either way, and the same good (or bad) spins on the dial can send you into a tailspin of debt or misery: illness, accidents, divorce, tornadoes taking your house. College is no guarantee that you'll be rich, or even middle class. In fact, there are some arguments that suggest technical training is a better bang for the buck.

(A handy example: my younger brother never finished his four-year college degree, yet he makes ten times more money than my other brother and I do, and we both have master's degrees.)

College, if you're lucky enough to get there, is really about figuring out your friends and your values as well as your dreams for the future. Nobody—well, almost nobody—finds a top-paying position right out of college. Most of us have to pay our dues and climb a dozen different career ladders before we find one that has rungs we can reach--and a place at the top with a view that suits us. If you land that seemingly “perfect” job with a salary worth boasting about, but then you hate it and are afraid to quit, your wings are clipped. That “safe” job will kill your creativity, drown your enthusiasm, and smother your ability to get up in the morning with a bounce in your step. Why stay?

The answer most people give is “fear.” We've all heard the unemployment statistics.

But let's turn those around. The unemployment rate is high—even upwards of 12 percent in certain U.S. cities. But that means that 88 percent of people have jobs. Can they make a living on their wages? That depends on how you define a “living.” Maybe you don't need a new car, or a car at all. Maybe you can find a seasonal rental or roommates.

Jobs are like college courses. Each one you take teaches you a set of new skills and offers a fresh perspective on life. They aren't meant to be permanent, most of them. They are only stepping stones.

In my daughter's case, the barista job led her to have enough free hours to do what she really loves: draw comics. She's thinking about publishing her comics online. In her free time, she also happened to stop by a new gourmet cupcake store, where she chatted with the enthusiastic owner and was hired to decorate cupcakes and work the counter. Again, it's not much money, but combined with the coffee place, it's enough for her to scrape by. Meanwhile, she has moved out of Oakland and into an affordable room in a house near the beach in Santa Cruz. She's happily experimenting with cupcake flavors and thinking about helping this new business owner with social media and marketing. She is learning something new every day. Life is good.

When you quit a job, any job, it can be terrifying. But it's also exhilarating, as you open yourself to new possibilities. So go ahead. Take the risk. Quit that job, if you hate it. You might surprise yourself.

Did I Hammer a Nail into My Bookstore's Coffin?

2012-01-09T09:48:00.000-08:00

I gave myself a book for my birthday this year: my own novel.

It's still tough to admit that I'm self-published, despite the fact that the publishing world is now a Wild West of rogue indie presses and bowlegged cocky ebook publishers firing their Twitterfeeds in every direction.

Perhaps it's tough to admit because I've been a writer for such a long time, always with the goal of having an editor and publishing house to call my very own. In fact, three years ago, I achieved that goal when my first book, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter: A Memoir, was published by a division of Random House. It was a great experience. I had a savvy, smart editor; a darling and energetic publicist; and great reviews in all the right places.

After twenty-five years of working in the trenches as a journalist, essayist, fiction writer, and humorist, I had finally succeeded. My career as an author was launched! Hooray for me!

I didn't get a huge advance, but a reasonable one. Apparently, though, the publishing house paid me too much. I still haven't earned back a penny on that advance, despite selling more books than I ever dreamed possible. That was okay, though. I figured I could build my platform from there and do better with the next book.

No, no, Nanette. Publishing doesn't work that way anymore. These days, if your first book doesn't earn out, that's probably the end of your career—unless you come up with a Really Big Idea, and hardly anybody knows what this is, except that it probably sucks blood.

Over the next three years, I wrote a series of nonfiction book proposals and two novels. Everything was rejected.

One novel came close, however: Sleeping Tigers is an upmarket women's novel that my agent and I hoped would appeal to readers of Eat, Pray, Love. The book tells the story of a woman who starts her life over after a breast cancer scare. She decides to join her wildest childhood friend in San Francisco and track down her drifter brother, who harbors secrets of his own. And, when her brother flees the country, she follows him to Nepal, determined to bring him home.

This was a book with both plot and emotion. It had to make it, right?

Nope. After rejections from editors who were enthusiastic about many aspects of the novel, but “not getting enough support here to make an offer,” I put that book in a drawer. A really deep drawer: in despair over one particular rejection, I actually deleted the entire book from my laptop after consuming half a bottle of Grand Marnier and a box of dark chocolate truffles while watching that creepy movie, Moulin Rouge.

Unlike my other “epic fails,” as my skateboarding son would call them, however, this novel refused to lie quietly in the dark. I suppose that's because this novel had so much of “me” in it.

Like the main character, I survived early stage breast cancer and felt, as my narrator does, that I carried a sleeping tiger inside me that could, at any moment, wake up and use its claws to tear my life apart. I had lived in San Francisco when I finished graduate school and am still enamored of that city, so I sent the main character there to begin her spiritual and emotional healing. And, because I have two brothers and love them dearly, and because I once spent several months trekking in Nepal, I gave my character a brother and took her on an adventure in Nepal that would change her life forever.

When I reexamined Sleeping Tigers, enough time had passed for me to see it in a cold-blooded, critical way. I understood why the editors had turned it down. There were places where the plot dragged or became derailed by side characters who really had nothing to do with the story. There was some strained, self-conscious writing. Some of the images weren't as fresh or funny as I wanted them to be.

Decades ago, editors might have taken a chance on this book and bought it, then worked with me to rewrite it. That hardly ever happens anymore. Now publishing houses are short-staffed, editors are harried, and money is tight.

After tearing apart the novel and rewriting it, I had to figure out what to do with my new draft. Take it back to my agent? He's currently sending another novel of mine around to publishers, plus I have a third novel nearly complete that I'd like him to send out as well. I didn't want to overload the poor guy.

Plus, having been through the traditional publishing process before, I knew that it would take two or three years after the book was accepted for it to be published. Did I really want to wait that long? No.

Finally, a good friend of mine, Terri Giuliano Long, who self-published her well-received novel, In Leah's Wake—a book that falls into the same basic category of commercial women's fiction as Sleeping Tigers—convinced me to be brave and do the same.

I went on the CreateSpace web site, saw that designing and publishing the book on my own could cost less than taking a class at the local community college, and clicked the necessary buttons. If nothing else, I thought that doing this would be tantamount to giving myself a crash course in digital publishing, social media, and publicity—a course that could be valuable no matter how I publish more books in the future. The reality is that every writer now has to be her own publicist.

Publishing Sleeping Tigers through CreateSpace was easy, cheap, and efficient. The staff was remarkably helpful and willing to stay on the phone for as long as I had questions. The process was as user-friendly as sitting in your friend's living room and drinking tea. Or maybe even Merlot.

Still, when my first box of books arrived—a scant seven weeks after starting the process--I immediately got cold feet. Who am I to think that my novel is good enough to be published? Am I now as pathetic as those street poets I used to see in Berkeley, peddling their sappy, mistake-laden chapbooks for a dollar a copy? And how the hell does a writer act as her own publicist?

To make matters worse, it wasn't until after clicking on CreateSpace that I started to think about my good friend here in town, who owns Jabberwocky, one of my favorite independent bookstores. She held the book launch for my memoir, and it was as grand a party as I could have hoped for; she does an incredible job of hand-selling authors she likes. For many years, Jabberwocky has provided a lively space for readers and writers like me to enjoy each other's company, but Amazon has hit her hard. CreateSpace is an Amazon company.

On my web site, I offer people a button that will take them to the independent bookstore of their choice if they want to buy my book locally. Still, I worry that, by publishing Sleeping Tigers with an Amazon company, I've hammered yet another nail into the coffin of my favorite indie bookstores.

At the same time, I'm thrilled to have this option. The characters in Sleeping Tigers refused to die because they had a story to tell—a story I love, and one that I hope readers will love, too. And, in the end, that's why writers write, isn't it? Not for money or glory—admittedly nice perks--but for this simple reason: we want to share our stories.

Saying Goodbye to a Good Dog

2011-12-28T12:34:00.000-08:00

McDuff, my Cairn terrier, looks more like a pot-bellied pig every day. His swollen abdomen is low-slung and his short legs bow out at the elbows—symptoms of Cushing's Disease. Recently we had to put up a baby gate to keep him from going upstairs; the last time McDuff tried to follow us up to bed, he slipped and went bumping down to the bottom of the staircase, his front legs useless as toothpicks against the pull of his massive weight.

He's an old man, our McDuff. Fifteen. Whenever he goes outside to relieve himself, he stands in one spot for a good five minutes, squinting a little, then turns right around and heads back inside. At this point, his medication costs half as much as our groceries. I don't know what we'll do when it snows. Shovel a path for him, I guess.

Or not. We have been debating, lately, about how and when to play God with our beloved pet. McDuff isn't in extreme pain, and he still wags his tail when I call his name. That's something, right?

But is it enough for a good dog's life? Or is it time to say goodbye?

I grew up on a farm where we had nearly as many dogs as we had horses. They were rescue dogs, mostly. These included one shepherd mix that loved to chase cars and always smelled of skunk; a feisty Yorkie mix; and an Afghan hound that bit anything gray, including our coats. I moved away from home before any of these dogs died or had to be put down; coming home and finding one less dog under the table was a source of brief sadness but not much more.

This is different. I can't stand the thought of losing McDuff.

As an adult, I've had to put just one dog to sleep. Ben was an American Eskimo mix that we adopted from a shelter. A frothy, white, joyful dog, Ben used to race around us in circles whenever we uttered his mantra: “Go Ben go!”

When my husband and I were married in our back yard (a second marriage that combined our four young children), Ben wore a burgundy bow to match my dress. As we repeated our vows in front of a small gathering of friends and family, Ben wandered up and sat down between our children, so that he would be included in the minister's blessing.

At age thirteen, Ben's heart and liver gave out. Making the decision to put him down was easier because he was in such pain that he cried out in his sleep. Still, the kids and I all wept: it was the first time that I fully realized a dog isn't just a dog, but a carrier of family history.

Saying goodbye to a dog you've had for years means shutting the door on an era. In our case, Ben's death earmarked the years between our wedding and the year our oldest son set off for college. Shortly after Ben's death, we moved out of our big family home and into a smaller one; my memories of Ben therefore carry complex emotions: joy and love and grief and loss, rolled into one white ball of fur.

McDuff started his life with us just as Ben was ending his. I got him in the worst way possible—on impulse, in a mall pet store—but for a good reason: I was with my stepdaughter, the youngest in our blended family and the one who always felt left out by our other three children. She was newly aggrieved by the arrival of our fifth and youngest child, who immediately displaced her as the baby in the family. Choosing this dog made her feel, for once, that she was in charge.

As a puppy, McDuff was scarcely bigger than the palm of my hand. Like most terriers, he was stubborn, territorial, and ferociously protective. We put a dog door in our basement so that he could come and go at will. His greatest joy was patrolling our yard and barking at any deer, squirrels, or wild turkeys that dared to infiltrate his space.

McDuff became a member of our family a few weeks after our youngest child was born. He has been through a lot since then: older kids graduating from high school and college, family trips to Canada and Wisconsin, youngest child moving through elementary school and into high school, job layoffs and career successes, the celebration of our fifteenth wedding anniversary. Saying goodbye to him means saying goodbye to boisterous family dinners, birthday parties with balloons and water slides, Christmases with so many presents under the tree that you couldn't walk around it, the death of my grandmother and my father, buying a second house in Canada, and the realization that nothing lasts forever.
Not even a very good dog, who still lifts his head whenever I call his name.

How Much Is a Book Worth?

2011-12-19T10:22:00.000-08:00

Recently, I was nosing around a local bookstore in search of a perfect Christmas read for my father-in-law. He's a history buff; last year I gave him the stellar book Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. He's still raving about it. What can I possibly give him this year to top that?

As I shopped, I was distracted by prices. I'm still trying to claw my way out of debt incurred over the past few years through a tricky combo of college tuition bills and my husband's various layoffs. I often save money by borrowing books from the library. I frequent used bookstores and treasure hunt through the lonely remaindered books at Barnes & Noble. If a book isn't free, it's rare for me to pay more than $5 for it.

Except, that is, when I love a certain author—then I go hog wild and get the hardcover—or when I feel guilty. My guilt is brought on by the fact that I am a writer who sells words for a living. Over the past few years, I have been the book doctor or ghost writer for several celebrity memoirs. I have also published a memoir of my own through a division of Random House. I would love to have people buy the books I write, so that I can keep doing what I love. Therefore, I feel compelled to buy books by other writers.

But which books are worth buying? And how much should you pay for them?
These are increasingly complex questions in this Wild West of self-publishing and ebooks. The Kindle and Nook are arm-wrestling for our attention. Without editors acting as gatekeepers for many books, and with the demise of book review sections in our newspapers—hell, what newspapers?--it's hard to know what's worth our precious time, never mind our money.

When my husband gave me a Kindle for my birthday, I immediately went for the deals. For instance, I paid $2.99 for Toby Neal's Blood Orchids, which I read on the train to New York, along with various other books by authors I hadn't tried before, simply because they bore that ever-popular promotional price tag of $.99. Heck, I can't even purchase a pack of gum for that money!

Several of my editor friends feel strongly that the self-publishing wave is one more example of civilization marching over a cliff. Lemming-like readers, they say, can't anticipate the plunge into bad writing, so they end up in the choppy, cruel waters of mean metaphors and sharp-toothed punctuation gaffes.

Um, was that a mixed metaphor?

It's true that there are a lot of bad (and badly edited) books out there. It's also true that publishers have helped bring this on themselves by giving million-dollar (or more) advances to certain writers or celebrities, and spending their advertising budgets to back up those advances, then acting surprised when the books don't earn out.

It's no news flash that traditional publishers, which once gave writers time to build their reputations, now expect a writer to earn back an advance immediately, if not sooner. If that doesn't happen, the writer is kicked right out of the stable, off to find another publishing home—or to roam the Wild West with the other raggedy Mustangs.

One writer friend of mine, who has been nominated for the National Book Award and has earned a flotilla of other literary prizes, has published seven books. Despite the high praise consistently coming her way from every literary quarter, and despite modest advances, she has earned royalties on only one novel. She works full-time as a university professor to support herself and her three children, grabbing what writing hours she can on weekends, summers, and, if she has the energy, at night.

Another writer friend, who has authored parenting books and popular chick lit titles under two different names for the past twenty years, told me recently that she used to hate seeing that quarterly royalties statement from her publisher in the mailbox.

“You know the one I mean,” she said, “that piece of paper that shows how many books you've sold, and then gives you that negative number under your advance, because you still owe the publisher money?”

I do, indeed, know all about that awful reckoning, having received my own royalty statements for my memoir, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter. That book was considered a success by many at Random House, in the sense that the book earned positive reviews and was even showcased in several magazines, including the issue of People magazine with Michael Jackson on the cover soon after his death. I earned a modest advance for that book, but I have yet to see a royalty check two years later.

My friend had to change her name because her third novel did so badly. The publisher wanted to give her a fresh start as a debut novelist. The gamble paid off: recently, she got a statement for her last novel, a fun romantic read that was picked up by a major book club. “I opened the envelope at the mailbox, thinking I'd toss it into the recycling bin before I even got into the kitchen,” she said. “But then a check for $11,000 fell out!”

She had to lie down. So did I, when she told me that story, if only out of envy.

There are, of course, a handful of writers who must be living quite comfortably on royalties and movie deals. I'm sure you can name them as well as I can. But, for most writers, earning a living is a scramble. A fun scramble, but still. Making that next mortgage payment can be a challenge if there's no benefactor or spouse whose job includes health benefits.

In the end, I've decided to canter through the tumbleweeds into the sunset. My first novel, Sleeping Tigers, will be available just before Christmas. (Yes, this blog post is shameless self-promotion.) I'm self-publishing it—a novel vetted by my agent and several writer friends—and I think it's a good book. But how much is my novel worth?

I have to decide, since I'm the one in charge here, and it's tough. I earned an MFA in creative writing and I've been working as a writer for over twenty years. My previous book earned great reviews. I've won awards for my short stories. But does any of that really matter, when you're suffering the stigma of the self-published?

I have to charge a certain amount—a bit over $10—for the paperback to make back production costs plus a dollar for me, since it's print-on-demand. But what about the ebook? Should I go for that whopping price of $2.99, like Toby Neal?

Or would it be better, as my son urges, “to just charge $.99 for your ebook, Mom, because anybody will spend that much money. And you don't care if they read it. You just want people to buy your book.”

Well, as a matter of fact, I do care if people read my book. Does $2.99 say that I'm worth reading? Or am I still better off charging less than a dollar and letting people find that out for themselves? What does any of that matter, anyway, since I obviously don't write novels to pay the mortgage?

Meanwhile, back to Christmas shopping. If I buy my father-in-law a hardcover, it'll cost upwards of $20 even with my friendly independent bookstore discount. If I go online and read book reviews, I'll end up surfing various book blogger sites and reading Amazon customer reviews, checking out all of the writers vying for attention with book trailers and giveaways and Twitter feeds and blogs of their own, crying, “Look at me! Look what I can do! How much is my book worth?”

Which, when you're a writer with a writer's ego (this I know, being one myself), translates into: “How much am I worth? Do you love me? Please love me!”

My own memoir, for the record, has been out in paperback for a year. You can order it through your local bookstore for $14 (a price set by the publisher) or buy it for your Kindle for $9.99 (a price also set by the publisher). Now come on. Who would do that, with so many books out there for $.99?

But wait! On Amazon, you can also buy my book in paperback, new, for just $.94 plus shipping—or used for $.01! Now that's what I call a bargain basement read!

So tell me. How much is any book worth?

And what does the price of a book say about the author who wrote it?

Upstairs, Downstairs: Torn Between My Books and My Kindle

2011-12-12T11:43:00.000-08:00

My husband gave me a Kindle for my birthday. (Forgive him, O Indie booksellers. He is an engineer who knows not what he does.)

At first I protested. As a writer, avid reader, and patron of indie bookstores with cats curled on floral armchairs, what did I want with this devilish contraption?
“Give it a try,” my husband suggested. “A lot of the books are free.”

Did he say free? As the daughter of a Do-It-Yourself-Or-Die-Trying gerbil farmer, “free” is my middle name, whether I'm surfing for curbside antiques or checking out sample cheeses at Market Basket. How could I resist?

Of course, like any addiction, that first hit lures you down the slippery slope of, “Oh, hell, just one more can't hurt.” Soon I was downloading books by the dozen, bemused and freaked by the fact that the Magic Hand of Amazon could find me even in bed. It could even find me in the White Mountains or riding the subway in New York City. Need a book? Press a button!

The thing is, I started to love my Kindle. But I couldn't give up my obsessive fondling and purchasing of books. I also worried that my books—waiting so patiently in their pretty bright book cover dresses on my bookshelf, or climbing over each other on my nightstand in their zeal to be read—might be hurt by my disloyalty. Alternatively, I worried that my smart-mouthed, quick-on-the-draw Kindle would know I was cheating on her with her plumper, more beautiful cousins.

I agonized for weeks over which was better: digital books or “real.” At first, reading the Kindle was downright confusing. For one thing, what to do with that free hand flapping around while you hold such a slim rectangle and touch buttons to flip pages? (And why didn't I have a Kindle while I was breastfeeding my kids?)

How do you pretend not to notice an annoying neighbor if you can't hide your face behind an actual book? How do you loan your books to friends on a Kindle? What do you put on your bookshelves if you stop buying books? (Either wine glasses or my son's Lego collection, in our case.) And how do you stop ordering books on Amazon once you've seen how easy it is to get a fix?

Gradually, though, things smoothed out. My house has become like that popular British TV series, Upstairs, Downstairs: my supposedly more refined (though not necessarily more entertaining or informative) books reside upstairs, on the table next to my bed, where I contentedly read for an hour or so every night before I go to sleep. My Kindle stays downstairs with the dogs.

At the moment, my upstairs book is Island, a collection of lilting, atmospheric stories by the brilliant Canadian Alistair MacLeod. Reading his textured, elegant, emotional prose, it is impossible not to imagine that Cape Breton's misty cliffs loom just outside your window.

For instance, MacLeod's description of rain in the title story goes like this: “Sometimes it slanted against her window with a pinging sound, which meant it was close to hail, and then it was visible as tiny pellets for a moment on the pane before the pellets vanished and rolled quietly down the glass, each drop leaving its own delicate trickle. At other times it fell straight down, hardly touching the window at all, but still there beyond the glass, like a delicate, beaded curtain at the entrance to another room.”

Downstairs, meanwhile, my Kindle seems best suited to books by comics or mystery writers, as well as indie authors like Darcie Chan, whose books were never published by traditional publishers because they weren't deemed “good enough.” (Many of those authors, like Chan, have gone on to sell thousands of copies. Go figure.)

Digital books accompany me throughout the day, because they are so easily stowed in my purse or coat pocket. My Kindle does its work during doctors' visits, in the car while waiting for kids to leave sports practices, or on business trips that would otherwise require an extra piece of luggage for my paperbacks.

On my Kindle, at the moment I'm reading Holidays in Hell by the conservative but consistently hilarious P.J. O'Rourke—somebody whose books I never wanted to pay full price for because of his politics. Check out his description of General Omar Torrijos of Panama: “Torrijos was a half-baked socialist and a blow-hard, but he was lovable and good-looking...He had genuine feeling for the poor, started some only moderately useless social programs and maintained a modest style of life, keeping no more than two or three mistresses on the side.”

I once read that Hemingway used to write his dialogue on a typewriter because it sounded more like people talking, but chose to write his descriptions in longhand. As a writer, I also go to different places and use different tools, depending on what I'm trying to work on. I often write in a journal when I'm collecting ideas, flesh them out at my laptop, and then edit on paper, standing up in the kitchen with a cup of tea at my elbow, I suppose because then it seems like my work is by a different writer and I can be more objective about revisions. For me, reading has become like that: I choose a book's delivery mode based on what kind of reading experience I anticipate.

So my books reside upstairs and my Kindle is downstairs. Different rhythms, different lives, different sensibilities lead me to choose whether I read fiction or nonfiction, short stories or poetry, ebooks or paper. The important thing is that, for every mood and moment, there is a story to treasure, no matter where I am—or in what form I read it.

Staying Whole in a Fractured World

2011-12-07T16:21:00.000-08:00

You know that panicky feeling you get when you drop your briefcase or purse and everything spills out in public? That's how I used to feel every day: embarrassed, furious, and anxious because I couldn't keep up with my life.
The last straw may have been my new gym membership. I wanted to feel virtuous about working out four times a week without breaking the bank, so I chose the Wal-Mart of fitness factories, a place where pop music blares and the cardio machines all face TV screens. Insert headphones, work up a sweat, and pick your letters: ABC, CBS, CNN, ESPN, Fox, whatever. Get your news and culture fix here.
I'm a radio junkie, so watching TV news was a novelty for me. At first I enjoyed channel surfing. Or rather, plunging. That's what it felt like, since TV shows give you about two seconds of substance punctuated by noisy, whirling ad tsunamis.
Before long, though, I was feeling rattled and nervous. Despite the fact that the news was being delivered by beautiful couples who joked and flirted like Match.com dates, I learned that we apparently live in a world where pedophiles, robbers, muggers, drunk drivers, crooked politicians, and murderers frequent my local supermarket and shoe store.
But maybe the gym wasn't the last straw. Maybe it was my new phone. Selected by my husband, an engineer who gets free upgrades and knows how to use them, this device easily outsmarts me. It can access restaurant reviews and movie times, deliver my email, play music, take pictures, and remind me that it's my mother's birthday. If I try to control it, the tiny keys play hide-and-seek. I might as well be wearing mittens.
I dutifully started carrying this Mini Me everywhere, sticking it in my bra like an extra heartbeat if I didn't have a pocket. Now I could read my email at Market Basket, among the common criminals, or phone clients while walking the dogs. My husband and children could call me any time, for any reason. I was always on tap, talking or tweeting instead of thinking.
Come to think of it, though, the final straw may have been my son's new laptop, which his high school required us to buy. He has textbooks on it—no more lugging that Western Civ tome around!--and homework assignments, too. He can make flashcards online, thanks to Quizlet, and Skype about video games with classmates. Between math problems, he can check Facebook or watch YouTube wonders. Sitting in the same room with my son and his laptop is like spending the evening with the Kardashians: too much, too soon, too often.
For whatever reason, anyway, a month ago the last straw landed, and I lost track of my life.
I was on my lunch break from work, trying to squeeze in errands—post office, dry cleaner's, the 30-minute speed workout at the gym—when my phone bleeped. I checked my email and got a call at the same time. The traffic light turned green; I sped ahead and pulled over to answer the call, but I was too late.
I started to call the client back, then stopped, my thumb hovering over the phone screen. I didn't want to talk to anyone. I didn't want to know what was on my email. I didn't want anyone to know where I was or what I was doing. And I sure as hell didn't want to go to the gym.
I shut off the ignition and sat there, simply trying to breathe as cars sped past.
To my right, I spotted a tiny road I hadn't noticed before. I got out of the car—so what if I didn't mail the Christmas packages until tomorrow?--zipped up my jacket, and started walking. I accidentally left the phone in the cup holder.
I've walked that road every day since. At the end of this half-mile lane is open land, some of which is being used as community gardens by town residents. There is an abandoned house on the property—a white Colonial surrounded by ancient perennial beds and a few majestic hydrangeas. The abandoned barn now houses only colonies of swallows, but when the wind is right, you catch whiffs of hay and horse.
It is past the growing season, but I can tell that the gardeners were busy this summer. There are still remnants of various small harvests: kale and broccoli, lettuce and eggplant, withered tomato plants and sunflower stalks. There are a few fruit trees on the property, their gnarled limbs almost human. Best of all, a trail leads from the gardens through a field hemmed by ancient stone walls. The trail ends at the salt marshes; beyond that is the river and a big swatch of sky.
I have visited this piece of land—my own circle of quiet—nearly every day. I don't stay long. I park my car at the end of the road and meander towards the field. Chickadees flit through the bushes, prehistoric-looking turkeys startle in the grass, and an occasional cardinal flashes bright. I spotted a great blue heron feeding in the marsh last week, and several times I've seen hawks circling the field.
I don't bring my cell phone. I don't always go at the same time of day, either, because I love being surprised by how different the sky can look over the marsh, depending on the hour and the elements. I have even, like I did today, walked up the road and through this field in freezing rain, blinking hard and shivering.
This walk, this forgotten field, and this quiet marsh give me a chance to take my life back once a day, and to feel whole again in a fractured world. It isn't praying or meditating, exactly. But it is peace on earth.

Book Covers, Backsides and Body Parts

2011-11-29T08:04:00.000-08:00

In the book world, you can easily spot novels designed to attract women by the body parts and backsides on their covers.
Don't believe me? Go to Amazon and browse the postage stamp images for anything that falls into the category of women's contemporary fiction, and you'll see what I mean.
Here are a few examples of covers graced with body parts, all featuring legs: Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos, The End of Everything by Megan Abbott, These Things Hidden by Heather Gudenkauf, Falling Home by Karen White, and Heat Wave by Nancy Thayer.
Even more popular for novels destined to be pitched to women's book clubs (the Great Last Hope of the publishing world) is the human backside. The humans are generally women—always slender, usually blonde, typically with their hair in disarray and in a style that shows off a slender neck. They might also be back views of children, usually in motion, and often with flowers around them or held in their sticky little hands. Contemporary examples of what I call BBC's (Backside Book Covers) include Julie Buxbaum's After You, Elin Hilderbrand's Silver Girl, Juliette Fay's Shelter Me, Wendy Wax's Ten Beach Road, and Lesley Kagen's Whistling in the Dark.
I suppose that, in the interest of full disclosure, I ought to mention that my own first book, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter, also shows the back view of a little girl running through an orchard of flowering trees. When my editor at Broadway Books first showed the design to me, I was appalled—this design was for the paperback, and I'd become enamored of the hardcover, which showed gerbils peering out of a pair of rubber boots. What did a little girl running through an orchard have to do with gerbils? Who was that child, and what the heck was she wearing?
Anyway, that was in 2010, and now I've been through another cover design process, this time for my novel, Sleeping Tigers (due out in December 2011). God help me, I have a body part on the cover.
Let me explain. When the designers sent me a form asking for my ideas, I wrote up a little synopsis of the novel: Jordan O'Malley has everything she ever wanted: a job she loves, a beautiful home, and a dependable boyfriend. When her life unravels after a breast cancer scare, Jordan decides to join her wildest childhood friend in San Francisco and track down her drifter brother, Cam, who harbors secrets of his own.
When Cam suddenly flees the country, Jordan follows, determined to bring him home. Her journey takes her to the farthest reaches of majestic Nepal, where she encounters tests—and truths—about love and family that she never could have imagined.
Funny, heartbreaking, and suspenseful, Sleeping Tigers reminds us all that sometimes it's better to follow your heart instead of a plan.
For cover images, I suggested that the designer look for something representing the title—the “sleeping tiger” within is breast cancer, as my main character, Jordan, sees it, because it can awaken and sharpen its claws at any moment. (Yes, it does sound like an obvious, hit-your-thumb-with-a-hammer image when I sum it up this way, but I'm trying to write a blog post.)
The other images I suggested to the designer were anything that represented Nepal, because I had traveled to Nepal and loved that country so much that I had set a good part of my novel there. I wanted this to be a sort of fictional little sister to the massively successful Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (which, by the way, has neither backsides nor body parts on the original cover).
The result: two completely different cover images. One showed a very literal (if reversed) image representing the title, with a woman sleeping and a faint drawing of a tiger in the background. The other was a gorgeous shot of a Nepali temple with prayer flags fluttering in the wind.
Neither worked. The sleeping woman was intriguing, but looked very Jersey Shore, with her mass of teased blonde hair, pouting lips, and obviously fake eyelashes. That cover might have worked for, say, a paranormal thriller about a woman who morphs into a tiger when she's ticked off, especially when men do her wrong. The other cover, while beautiful, and while certainly in Nepal, was more like the cover of a travel book—maybe one of those Lonely Planet guides, telling you where to buy a coffee for thirty cents in Kathmandu.
What to do? I went back and forth with the designer several times, looked at countless photographs online, and checked out other book covers. It dawned on me, as I made my study over a couple of weeks, that the reason you so rarely see an actual face on a book cover is because then it's harder to imagine the story in a way that lets it surround you completely.
If you don't have a face on a book cover, then you're left with household objects, typically set against a blue background (check out Deep Down True, by Juliette Fay, and Falling Together, by Marisa de los Santos), or backsides and body parts that give you the emotional feel of the book—happy, sad, searching, longing, scary, or whatever.
That realization gave me a new idea for the book cover. I asked the designer if she could try just one more thing: show me Nepali images with women in them. She promptly sent me several more possibilities. All of them had Nepalese temples (she must have read Eat, Pray, Love, too), but these included women in the photographs. Most didn't work. The women in the photographs were almost always too young (my character is in her thirties), or too touristy (taking pictures of the temples or standing in line to go into them).
There was one image, however, that I loved: an ancient Nepalese prayer wheel in gorgeous colors, with a woman's hand tentatively reaching out to turn it. But did I really want to contribute yet another book cover with body parts to the genre?
The more I looked at that picture, the more I loved it. The image captured the book completely. There was hope and longing in the touch of those fingertips on the prayer wheel, and the colors were exotic enough to suggest a woman on an adventure.
The woman turning that prayer wheel on the cover of Sleeping Tigers isn't just traveling. She is on an emotional and spiritual journey, like my main character—and like all of us who read because we love being transported to other worlds and other lives. It was perfect.
Yes, my new book cover has a body part. But at least it's a hand and an arm—no legs in sight.

Writer for Hire

2011-11-18T07:18:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, my mother asked what I was working on.
“Oh, I finished copy editing that memoir and now I'm writing a marketing brochure,” I said. She shook her head. “And to think that your father and I used to worry about you.”
It's true: they did worry. At one point, my despairing father even said that if I didn't focus on a real career, I'd end up “living on cat food.”
They couldn't see where I was headed. Neither could I. In college, I tried on majors like shoes, swapping animal science for sociology, then Spanish for biology. Finally I decided to become a doctor, the sort who wears Safari clothes and saves entire villages from infectious diseases.
My last semester, though, I took a creative writing class. I wrote my first short story and couldn't stop writing. I put off applying to medical school for a year.
A year went by. Then another. My desperate father sent me brochures about nursing school, dental school, and physical therapy. But I couldn't stop writing. To support my habit, I did the kinds of odd jobs all writers do: construction, teaching, editing, waiting tables. Eventually my tiny, poorly paid writing jobs led to better ones. I proofread telephone books, wrote marketing copy for a publishing company, served as a stringer for a newspaper, wrote press releases and newsletters for a school district.
When I had my first two children, day care cost more than my salary, so I quit working full time and consulted in a public relations office part-time. I kept writing, too, when the kids were sleeping or throwing sand at each other in the playground—and eventually paid for day care so that I could write more.
“You can't make a living as a writer,” my father said, still despairing. He had also been against me majoring in English in college, because what could an English major do for a living?
A lot, it turns out, which is why I encouraged my own son to major in English when he went to college. My paying jobs as a writer have included training manuals for a pharmaceutical company, feature articles for newspapers and magazines, ad copy, video scripts, view books and brochures for colleges, institutional newsletters, press releases, advice columns, humor, essays, and, yes, a memoir of my own. More recently, I have been working as a book doctor and ghost writer for celebrities, churning out four of these books in the past two years.
“Doesn't it bug you to write other people's books when you could be working on your own?” another writer asked me recently.
Not a bit. In fact, I love telling other people's stories. What other job would allow me to walk in another person's shoes so completely that I'd feel their blisters? Working as a book doctor or ghost writer, I have the opportunity to immerse myself in worlds as disparate as the priesthood, cooking, fashion design, and Tejano music—I just finished ghost writing an incredibly moving memoir for Chris Perez, the husband of the fantastically talented Mexican-American singer, Selena. Ghost writing isn't just a paying job for me. It's a passion. Sharing stories is what makes us human.
I can hear my writer friend snorting at this. “Okay, maybe memoirs,” she might say. “But university brochures? Really? Is that a passion, too?”
You betcha. I love interviewing students and academics, and finding whatever sets a particular college apart from all the rest.
In fact, I love everything I write. Being a writer for hire is sometimes like being a plumber—you have to get on your knees and stick your head under the sink to fix the leaks. Other times, crafting sentences feels like a delicate, time-honored art that takes your breath away.
Either way, the joy is in the process of writing as much as in the final product, whether those words are for someone else, or all mine.

Juggling Motherhood and Writing

2011-11-14T08:46:00.000-08:00

One of the most frequent questions I'm asked at book signings or when I teach writing classes is this one: “When do you write?”
The aspiring writers who ask this questions are searching for a recipe to follow. They want me to say something like: “If you sit at your desk from six to nine every morning, you will become a writer.” Or maybe: “If you set a goal of writing just 500 words every day, you'll have a novel in a year! Easy as ABC!”
Even people who aren't aspiring writers ask me this question. Maybe it's because they struggle to imagine what writers actually do. They imagine us on safari or having affairs like the characters in novels, or maybe kicking back with a brandy at noon.
“It must be so exciting to be a writer!” people often tell me. “When do you write?”
Writing, alas, is not that exciting, seen from the outside, and there's no simple recipe for getting it done—especially if you're a mother. Because mothers get so little time to actually put words on paper, we often look like we're doing something else when we're writing. We're burning dinner because we're working out a plot line, or furtively jotting notes during a school concert, or suddenly walking the dog when the dog is tired and acting like a cement block at the end of the leash.
In my early years as a writer, I, too, was looking for the secret to success. I had already become a mother by the time I was seriously trying to publish, and I was juggling a paying job as a public relations consultant besides. I was so exhausted when my kids were little that I just wanted to lie down at the end of the day with a pillow over my face.
My question at book signings therefore had a slightly different flavor. Instead of asking writers when they wrote, I would ask, “How do you find enough time to write?” I couldn't imagine it, you see, because I already had more tasks than hours in a day.
Most male authors gave very prescriptive answers to this question. They had set hours for writing—even if they had regular jobs and kids. “I get up early and write for two hours before my job,” they might say, or, “When I come home from work, I go straight to my study and write until bed.”
As a mother, I couldn't crack this secret code. How could I write early in the morning, if I had to find gym clothes or pack lunches before school? How could I write at night, if the baby got up every hour with colic, or if I had to help with one of those dreadful fourth grade dioramas, the kind where you have to fashion little ears of corn out of Play-doh and ladders out of twigs?
Finally, a famous male mystery novelist shed some light on how many male authors were finding the time. I knew that he had small children as well, so when I heard him speak at our local library, I said, “How do you find time to write?”
“Oh, that's easy,” the famous novelist said. “I have a wife.”
I swear to you that this is true, but I won't divulge this man's name. His wife would surely kill him if she heard this, or leave him, if she hasn't already.
Finally, though, someone gave me a recipe that I could actually use: the now-deceased short story writer and political activist, Grace Paley. When I approached Ms. Paley at the Boston Public Library to ask how she got any writing done when she had small children at home, she grinned and said, “Day care.”
Day care! I mulled this over in my mind. I had day care for the hours I worked as a public relations consultant, of course, but did I dare pay for babysitting if I was just writing? How could I justify such a debutante expense?
I couldn't. There was no rational reason on earth that I could give to support the idea of spending solid cash on a babysitter. How could I, when my efforts at writing short stories, novels, and essays were being rejected, one after the other?
For a couple of years after that comment by Paley, I kept trying to fit writing around the edges of my life: while the kids watched videos or played in the yard, or after everyone was in bed, before I fell into a coma. I had a ritual, where I'd make a cup of tea and allow myself two squares of chocolate, essentially bribing myself to sit in front of the computer.
Finally I started running away from home, abandoning my family to go on occasional weekend writers' retreats—typically to Wellspring House in the Berkshires, but sometimes just holing up in a cheap hotel to write for ten hours a day. Not everyone's idea of fun, but for me it was bliss.
Going away for even a weekend was tough at first, because I felt so guilty. I'd abandoned my family! I was missing that Girl Scout camping trip, that track meet, that night of video and pizzas with my children!
Plus, once I was at the retreat, it was hard not to mother everyone around me. I'd feel compelled to do all of the dishes in the communal kitchen at first. Once I even moved a glass out of the way, so that another writer (a young guy) wouldn't knock it off the table with his elbow with his wild gestures.
Once I got over the guilt, though, these retreats were amazing. It was absolutely liberating to just get up in the morning and go right back to the sentence or chapter I had been working on the day before, with nobody demanding that I make breakfast or tie shoes.
The downside was that sometimes it was more difficult to write when I got home. I'd face the same fractured work schedule and house chores as before, and I'd despair again because I wasn't making any progress as a writer. I needed more hours to myself if I was ever going to focus on ideas long enough to put words on paper.
My husband, luckily, was supportive. He urged me to essentially buy those hours. “If this is what you really want to do, then get extra day care,” he said. “We'll get by somehow.”
God bless him. I lined up extra day care hours. Guilt drove me to become assiduous about dividing my time: day care hours two days a week were for writing my own essays and fiction, and three days a week I would use day care for paid work.
Amazingly, it wasn't long after that when my previously unpaid writing efforts started to pay. I didn't sell any fiction, but I sold one essay to Ladies' Home Journal magazine, and then another. An editor from Parents magazine saw one of my essays and asked if I'd like to write an article for them. From there, I was able to use my clips to convince editors at many other magazines to buy my pitches for articles and essays.
It wasn't long before those day care hours where I was writing my “own” stuff were actually paying more than my per-hour PR work. I flip-flopped my schedule and started using day care three days a week to write and two days a week for public relations. I finally sold my first book, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter, to Crown, and from there, I started taking on contracts as a ghost writer and book doctor.
Best of all, because I had those long, uninterrupted hours to think and write, I was less frustrated, and more able to enjoy the days when I wasn't writing. Even more surprisingly, I found that I was more creative on my “off” writing days. Thoughts bloomed at odd times, like when I was grocery shopping or yelling, “Good job, honey!” on the playground.
When I visualize why this happened, I see it like this: the whole top of my head opened up and let ideas flow out like water on the days I had day care, as I poured the words out and arranged them. On days I didn't have day care hours designated for writing, that well in my head was able to fill with new ideas from some secret area in my brain that I'd never been able to tap into before.
Okay. I need to work on that metaphor. But you get the idea. Now, when people ask, “When do you write?” I answer, “There's never a time that I'm not writing, even if it looks like I'm doing something else.”
And, if the person asking me the question is a young mother, I add, “You'll write best if you pay for day care. Run away from home sometimes, too. Your children will survive. They might even be proud of you.”

Mothers, Teach Your Daughters about the Herman Cains of the World

2011-11-09T07:10:00.000-08:00

As Herman Cain strives to rise above the sexual harassment allegations dogging his run for the presidency (and I do mean “dogging”), almost every woman out there is uncomfortably recalling some former teacher, boss or neighbor who did the same things to her.
I have no idea if Cain is innocent or not. I suspect not, since more than one woman has come forward. The important thing about these stories is that here's one of those golden teachable moments: every mother should educate her daughters about the Herman Cains of the world.
I have been in similar situations as Cain's accusers. Most of the men who touched me or said inappropriate things did not frighten me. But these events did make me feel sour and wretched afterward, as if I had somehow caused them to happen.
For starters, there was the neighbor I babysat for who offered me a raise if I “just touched him a little in the car.” I was fourteen at the time.
One college professor—Sociology of Religions, of all things—took me to lunch and promised me an A if I went to Bermuda with him. There was another, less playful chemistry professor who showed up at my apartment when I was home with the flu, under the pretense of bringing me a lab report I could revise. He then proceeded to try and rape me. Lucky for me, he was crying about his divorce at the time, so I was able to fight him off despite having a fever of 102.
Shall I go on? Sure. While putting myself through college, I worked as a waitress in a restaurant. The owner of that place was a notorious groper—not just me, but any waitress was in danger if she made the mistake of being alone in the kitchen with him. His wife was a hostess in the dining room, but none of us ever spoke up because we needed the tuition money.
In one of my first jobs after college, the vice president of the publishing company I worked for promised to make me an editor if I gave him a blow job. “I won't even come in your mouth,” he wheedled. “It'll only take a minute.”
Years later, I worked as a PR consultant in a school district. There, my boss loved to take me to lunch. He never tried to touch me, but constantly referred admiringly to my “shelf,” as he so delicately put it.
Shall I go on? Nah. You get the idea. In fact, if you're a woman reading this, you probably got the idea long ago. Like me, you were probably neither stunningly beautiful nor desperate for attention, yet various men in power seemed to think that it was perfectly legit to make sexually explicit suggestions or advances.
These incidents did not damage me, but that's only because I am one of those fortunate women who had a strong, independent mother as a role model. My mom was a Navy wife accustomed to fending for herself; she taught me early on that there was nothing a man can do for me on the job that I can't do for myself. I managed to sidestep these men and keep moving forward in my life without them.
I hope that I have successfully taught our two blonde, gorgeous daughters—one a newly minted college graduate, the other about to complete her degree--about the Herman Cains of the world. I want our girls to be confident enough about their own intelligence and abilities to know that, when certain men make advances or inappropriate remarks, they don't have to put up with it.
I didn't speak out when these things happened to me, but I wish that I had. I hope that my girls, and generations after them, will know that our voices give us power.

Bad Vacation? Treasure the Memory.

2011-11-04T07:53:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, I convinced my family to drive to the White Mountains and hike up to Lonesome Lake hut on the Appalachian Mountain Club trail. Our plan was to sleep at the hut and do some day hikes, maybe see a moose and the last of the autumn foliage.
“Won't you be cold?” my mother asked.
“It'll be great,” I assured her. “How cold can it get in October?”
Pretty cold, as it turns out. We hiked through freezing rain, hail, and even snow at the highest elevation. We couldn't see more than a hundred feet in front of us at times because we were literally hiking through clouds. The trails were slippery and treacherous, too—wherever there wasn't mud, we were skidding on icy rocks.
It was definitely one of those trips that will go down in our family's Vacation Hall of Fame.
We've had a lot of those vacations. There was that foolish train trip to Florida, for instance, where our kids proved to be too young to contentedly look out the window; their idea of fun was playing tag in the aisles. We had another trip to Florida where two kids got strep throat and a third came down with a stomach bug; every time he vomited, he announced, “I tossed my cookies again!” causing the other kids to want a share of those treats.
Then there was our ill-fated trip to Washington, D.C. Determined to show our children the wonders of the cherry trees in bloom and the Smithsonian, we arrived and realized we'd forgotten a stroller for the baby. We managed to buy one, but that mistake cost an entire day. The cherry trees weren't in bloom because winter had lingered, which also meant that the hotel pool was frozen over and out of commission.
Oh, and let's not forget that trip to jolly England, where we rented a restored mill house in the countryside and it rained every single day we were there—so much rain that we finally bought the kids Wellingtons and hiked in it anyway, for fear that otherwise we'd die of cabin fever.
Ah, and the trip to Spain! We brought along my mother as well as all five kids on that vacation, which meant that we had to rent a nine-passenger van—not an easy vehicle to navigate on twisty cobblestone streets through Spanish villages. To make matters worse, they gave us a red one. We might as well have added a neon sign to it, proclaiming, “Stupid Loud American Tourists Here.”
At one point, we drove into the center of one small town and had to back all the way out again because we couldn't turn the van around. The mayor's widow, dressed in her black weeds, her gray hair coming loose in a fountain from her bun, helped direct us, screaming at all of the village men to move their scooters out of our way. Meanwhile, one of our kids (a different one) was carsick enough to toss his cookies, causing the others to shriek.
“That was an awesome trip, Mom,” my son declared after returning from the White Mountains, as we stuffed soggy clothes into the washing machine.
It was, it was. I can say that now that I've thawed out.
Here's the thing: bad vacations are the real family keepsakes, because you survive them together (ideally). You have to play games or tell jokes, you have to get each other through the hail or the flat tire or the flu. Surviving a bad vacation as a family requires everyone to step up and show determination, loyalty, and yes, even courage. Blue skies, sunshine, and a white beach are all pleasant, but what fun is that kind of vacation to reminisce about later?
Remember this, as you're packing up to go away for the holidays this year.

How Much Homework Is Too Much?

2011-10-31T06:20:00.000-07:00

It's Halloween today, and I'm bleary-eyed—not from getting ready for the holiday, but from helping my youngest son practice his Spanish presentation.
It wasn't a huge deal of an assignment. Just two minutes about someone deceased—he chose President Kennedy—for a Day of the Dead celebration in his Spanish II class. However, he also had homework for English, algebra, physics and Western Civilization—on a weekend.
He's a freshman in high school, and it's been a rough transition for him. His four older brothers and sisters all went to public schools, and they were whipped into shape early by homework drills: endless math sheets, word searches, posters. I gave up ever trying to clean off the dining room table, because somebody was always doing a project--or having a breakdown because a project wasn't done. Sometimes it was me having the breakdown.
These four older children all went to great colleges. Three have now graduated and actually have jobs, amazingly; the fourth is in her senior year and working on her college thesis. Good for them, right? And great for us, too, of course.
Did all of that homework get them there?
I have no idea. I never would have questioned the idea of homework—it was drilled into my head, too, that you should always have papers to keep you busy, even if it meant staying up until midnight to get it done—except that my youngest son went to a Montessori School. The Montessori philosophy was, hey, if you need to review something, here's some homework that can help you. Otherwise, go outside and play, cook dinner with your family, or draw a picture.
“He wouldn't be having so much trouble with high school if he'd gone to a 'real' middle school,” my cousin grumbles.
Maybe. But the thing is, our youngest son isn't really having trouble with high school. He loves his teachers, comes home repeating incredible stories about Chinese philosophers from his Western Civ class or trying out new physics theories. He loves to practice Spanish. He is making friends and shaving minutes off his time at every cross country meet. He's a successful high school student in every way—except for that struggle over homework.
The thing Montessori taught him—and me, too—is that there are lots of important things to learn in this world. Maria Montessori, in fact, had a theory that kids in early adolescence shouldn't even go to a traditional school, but to a farm school, where they could exercise their bodies as well as their minds and become truly engaged in the world. They should do community service and—gasp--hold down a small job, all as a way of stimulating intellectual curiosity.
Instead of doing homework, our son would rather be practicing flips on the trampoline, hiking with his dad and me, working in his father's wood shop, fiddling around on the bass guitar, and, of course, playing video games online.
“Computer games are ruining our kids,” a friend suggests.
Really? Why? Because he's playing games online with a team of kids from Canada, Spain, Germany, and the U.S.? Because they Skype and learn how to work on team strategies together, learning about how each of them lives along the way? Is that why those games are bad?
“He's always fooling around,” my mother argues.
I suppose that's what it looks like from the outside. Having been through Montessori, though, makes me question whether doing seven hours of homework on a weekend is necessarily more valuable than doing everything else that commands our son's attention.
Don't get me wrong—I'm highly impressed by my son's high school instructors and curriculum. And, given what research show about brain development—that our brains are the most plastic they'll ever be until age 16 or so, which means that whatever those brain synapses are doing during middle and early high school years truly impacts what kind of thinker your child will become as an adult--I'm delighted that our son is stretching himself in many different directions.
It's just the homework that gets me. Why isn't it enough to focus on academics all day, and then give it a rest?
In the incredible documentary “Race to Nowhere,” we see a series of students who have been crushed by homework, while parents and academics wonder how they can keep students engaged and inspired. Duh. If homework kills the creative buzz, why are we still letting it bleed into evenings, so that there's never time for a game of cards, never mind chess? Why do our weekends have to be spent figuring out physics vectors instead of hiking in the White Mountains?
The counter argument, I know, is that homework teaches accountability, reviews topics covered in class, and prepares your child for college. In college, though, students are older and more motivated to organize their time. (Plus, let's not kid ourselves, there's more free time in college than in high school.)
Meanwhile, what message are we sending by piling on the homework in high school?
Here it is: Stress is good for you, kids! See how stressed Mom and Dad are? That can be you, too! Stress is what you have to look forward to in college and beyond. Forget friends, fun, family, or even sleep! You'd better focus on school if you want to get ahead—so that you can take on even more responsibility later!
Really? Is that what we mean by preparing children for a lifetime of learning? Sounds like the School of Hard Knocks to me.

What Your Car Says About You

2011-10-27T19:30:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know it sounds stupid, but I cried all afternoon over selling a car.
Not just any car, mind you. This was my 2003 Honda CRV, a beat-up red car with probably enough forgotten food in it to sustain a family of five for a week. At 200,000 miles, the air conditioning had stopped working, only one door lock worked, the shocks were gone, and the brakes needed replacing. All signs pointed to the inevitable: it was time to get a new car.
Yet there I stood, weeping as if someone had just dumped my new Porsche into a river.
“You always cry when we sell a car,” my husband pointed out. “I still don't get it. You're going to be driving a better car. I would think you'd be happy.”
I am happy. I hated worrying about that car breaking down on some dark, nameless road while I was driving my children and elderly mother around. But I am sad, too. A car isn't just a car. It has a life of its own. Or, more accurately, your car contains your life.
For example, one of the first vehicles I ever owned was an ancient, wheezing Renault that my brother kept going with pliers and duct tape. But, whenever I drove it, I felt like a French actress, able to live on croissants and love. It represented who I thought I might become someday: a woman of mystery with many lovers.
The car I owned when I finished graduate school? That was a green Pontiac Sunbird with a six-cylinder engine, courtesy of my mother. She was understandably horrified when I informed her that, with this car, I was going to drive across the country—by myself—to start a new life in San Francisco. That adventure included getting stopped by the police in Colorado because I was driving 90 mph.
“If you were my daughter, I'd throw you in jail just to teach you some common sense,” the cop growled as he wrote out a ticket worth half my month's rent.
That ticket was worth every penny. My Sunbird symbolized my cowgirl self. It was a symbol of freedom and frontier daring—especially when I took that stick-shift dragster up over my first hill in San Francisco and landed with a cinematic thud on the other side.
Next came my sensible working woman's car, a powder blue Honda Civic: good on gas and easy to maintain. I invited that car to come back East with me when I married my first husband.
When I divorced and married for a second time, I added two stepchildren to the two children I already had. This meant buying a car that could fit us all. I went for an Audi Quattro wagon with a clever rear seat. The kids fought over the privilege of riding backwards and making faces at all of the drivers behind us. That Audi represented my determination to remain oh-so-cosmopolitan, giving a nod to my blended family status while stubbornly refusing the stigma of a minivan. I should have stuck with Hondas: that Quattro proved to be such a lemon that it cost more than our mortgage in monthly repairs.
Still, I cried when I sold it. I cried when I sold the Sunbird, the Civic, and even the Honda Odyssey, the beloved (and reliable) minivan I bought after I ditched the Quattro.
Why, why, why the tears?
Because a car isn't just a car. It is who you are, at least for the moment.
Inside your car, there are crumbs on the carpet and sticky wrappers forgotten under the seats. More importantly, there are those conversations you had while driving, the children soothed, the teenagers listened to (or lectured). There are great vacations, the time your best friend told you she had cancer, the year you got divorced, and the summer you landed the job of your dreams. All of those memories are there, embedded in that car as if trapped in amber.
When I sold the Sunbird, I grieved because I had reached an age where I would no longer rocket along the highway at 90 mph. Saying goodbye to my Honda minivan meant no more car seats—and no more babies of my own. So sad.
The Honda CRV? That had the college stickers on the back window. As I watched the guy drive it away from the curb, I wept for the trips I had made to those colleges, with or without my children in the car, mourning the fact that my kids had nearly completed the long, sad, happy process of becoming independent.
With one more child still at home, I now have a new car that I trust and love—a blue Honda CRV. I may not go 90 mph, but I can still plow through snow. This car has already taken my family to Prince Edward Island and back again. Once my new car was covered in that familiar red dirt, I started to feel at home in the driver's seat.
My new life has begun—and adventures await.

After Buying Our Canadian Dream Farm, Now What?

2011-03-27T17:42:00.000-07:00

In two weeks, we're going to face our dream – or our nightmare. That's when we're going to actually start living part-time in our Canadian farmhouse.
The house lies in the far eastern corner of Prince Edward Island in the Canadian Maritimes, about a dozen hours northeast of our house in Massachusetts. We drove past it one day in August – back when there was grass on the ground instead of two feet of snow – and decided to buy it on the spot. The house is a century old and has a sharp peaked roof, like the house that Lucy Maude Montgomery used as the setting for Anne of Green Gables, the island's most famous export other than potatoes. We couldn't get inside the house when we looked at it, but we made an offer anyway, lured by the two barns, an acre of rich farmland, a view of the neighbor's sheep grazing in the fields below, and the red clay road leading to our favorite beach.
My husband Dan and I made the offer by phone – an offer worth less than my brother just paid for his used BMW. We drove back up to the island last October to see the inside of the house with a home inspector, alternating between feeling giddy with excitement and terrified that we were buying a money pit.
We had reason to feel both extremes. Friends who actually live in Canada, and strangers, too, agreed with us that Canada seemed more peaceful and civilized than the U.S. Certainly it's a country less prone to doing things like, say, bombing Libya without a lot of discussion. Others warned us that Canadians want nothing to do with Americans, and reminded us of the blizzards. “Who would want to retire in a place like that instead of Florida?” many asked.
“We would,” we answered.
When we drove up for the home inspection, I was so excited to cross the Confederation Bridge that I leaped out of the car as soon as we stopped – only to have the door of our Honda nearly blow inside out in the wind. My face was needled with freezing rain and my jacket was soaked through in seconds. We had definitely arrived.
We'd arranged to stay in a wonderful B&B in North Lake called Harbour Lights http://www.harbourlightshouse.com To my surprise, the B&B was owned by Americans not unlike ourselves – a couple who had worked until near retirement in the U.S., then decided their hearts belonged on PEI. Bruce and Pat served us a fantastic home-cooked Chinese meal to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving, and we invited them to our home inspection the next morning.
The weather was gorgeous that night. We took a sunset walk along North Lake Beach that was doused in brilliant pinks, peaches, blues and plums, the sand glowing gold under our feet as we admired the dunes and fishing boats. It was paradise.
The next day was anything but, with weather that included lashing rain, winds, and freezing temperatures again. To add to our discomfort, the utilities in the house had been shut off for the past year.
We were nervous about what we'd find inside. But, instead of the usual horrors of an old house renovated and ruined, we were amazed to find original woodwork and hardwood floors, century-old charm in every room. The house even came with furniture, much of it antique and appealing as well.
“I could live here,” I thought, despite my chattering teeth, as I stood on the porch and looked at the sheep huddled in the fields below.
The house, in every possible way, called to us. We signed the papers that week, and for months afterward, indulged in looking at photos of the house, imagining what we'd do when we lived there. Raise alpacas? Make cheese? Start an arts cooperative? Keep working as a software consultant and a writer? Anything seemed possible!
And then things intervened, causing our house – and our future – to fade from view, to become a backdrop in front of the frenetic light show that is daily life for working parents everywhere. I have an elderly mother to look after, plus a young son still at home. My husband's company laid off half the employees and left everyone else scrambling to meet deadlines. Our four older children, two of them still in college, came and went over the holidays and spring break. We did the taxes. And, in the cracks between, we did the recycling and grocery shopping, volunteered and had occasional nights out with friends. It's a good life, but the kind of life that leaves you gasping at the end of every day, because you've suffocated yourself with obligations.
Now it's spring again, and it's a shock to think that we're going to start turning our dream life into a reality. In two weeks, we will see if our Canadian house is still standing. Meanwhile, I'm arranging meetings with the electrician, the plumber, the roofer, the mower, the heating guy, the painter...and probably more who I haven't thought of yet. If we can get the house liveable, we'll spend as much time as we can there – two months at least – between now and next Christmas. We want to give our future a true test run.
By the time our kids are all launched, with homes and families of their own, we might live in Canada and perhaps become dual citizens – or just travel between the two countries, with an apartment near our children. Who knows where that will be? Our children are all talking about different states – even different coasts – at the moment.
Are we crazy? Will our lives in Canada be saner, more content, more creative? Or will we just transfer the craziness North, and add more stress to our lives?
There's no way to know for sure, of course. But right now Dan and I are looking at each other across the dining table with a fresh glint in our eyes. We're on a new adventure together – with every reason to look forward to the next chapter of our lives.

Grooving with Rihanna, S&M and the Kids in My Car

2011-03-19T13:35:00.000-07:00

For the first time in my mothering life, I almost turned the radio off today.
Here's what happened: I was driving my 13 year-old son and his three friends to a skateboard park. The boys were busy doing what most teens do: multitasking with the help of an iPod, two cell phones and a Nintendo DS. As if that weren't enough, they wanted the car radio on, too.
Meanwhile, I was doing what most moms do: multitasking. I had tuned everything out to mentally plan my Saturday circuit: skateboard park, post office, grocery store, hardware store, skateboard park, dinner.
We were stopped at a red light when my son asked me to turn up the car radio. “Hey Mom, here's that song I was telling you about.”
“What song?” I turned up the volume. Frankly, as the mother of five, you could probably let a pair of rhinos loose in my car and I wouldn't even blink. I'd forgotten the radio was even on.
“Rihanna's Spaghetti and Meatballs song. Listen.”
You can see where this is headed, right? I turned up the radio, and there was Rihanna, whose music always has that wonderful danceable beat, but whose lyrics are so repetitive that I usually tune her out with the rest of the noise in the car.
This song, though, was enough to make even four teenaged boys fall silent.
Cause I may be bad, but I'm perfectly good at it
Sex in the air, I don't care, I love the smell of it
Sticks and stones may break my bones
But whips and chains excite me
This is one of those teachable moments that all the experts tell parents about, right? Well, I sure could have used one of those experts in my car right then.
I decided to play the dumb mother card. “I don't get it,” I said. “Why do you call this Rihanna's Spaghetti and Meatballs song?”
“Keep listening, Mom,” my son said.
Lord, did I have to? Well, it couldn't get much worse, I figured. I could survive this teachable moment. After all, just the week before, I'd managed to make it through the entire Greek exhibit in the Museum of Fine Arts with a pair of eighth grade boys, despite the seemingly endless array of ancient vases ornamented with satyrs chasing nymphs, penises thrusting like swords. Not to mention all of those paintings of nude women sprawled on couches, beds, chairs and fields. Sex in the air, indeed.
Alas, Rihanna wasn't through yet. Here came the cheesy spaghetti and meatballs chorus on a platter:
S-S-S & M-M-M
S-S-S & M-M-M
Oh, I love the feeling you bring to me, oh, you turn me on
It's exactly what I've been yearning for, give it to me strong
And meet me in my boudoir, make my body say ah ah ah
I like it – like it
“Huh,” I said. “What do you guys think of this song?”
“It's kind of boring,” one kid piped up.
“Yeah,” my son agreed. “You'd think somebody who writes as many songs as Rihanna would be better at it by now. All her songs are about how turned on she is.”
“What about what the song's saying?” I asked. “Do you think she really likes whips and chains?”
“Well, they probably look good in her music videos,” my son's other friend offered. “But most girls probably wouldn't like that.”
“No,” I agreed. “It's a bad idea to hit girls, right?”
“Duh, Mom,” my son said.
Duh, indeed. The boys went back to their conversation about skate parks and video games. Meanwhile, I put the grocery list out of my mind and concentrated on what Rihanna had to say:
Na na na na
Come on, come on, come on
I like it – like it
Come on, come on, come on
I like it – like it
Come on, come on, come on
I like it – like it
S-S-S & M-M-M
S-S-S & M-M-M
S-S-S & M-M-M
S-S-S & M-M-M
I remembered Chris Brown, suddenly, and his assault against Rihanna a few years ago, and I couldn't help but wonder: Is this the song of a liberated, powerful, sexy woman with a message not just for my 13 year-old boys, but for all of those high school girls getting excited about prom night this spring? Or for all of those middle school girls giggling as they share the ear buds of their iPods and talk about boys? Really, Rihanna? Is this the best you can do for them?
Na na na na. You can do better than this.

My iRobot: Can a Useful Gift Be a Romantic One?

2011-02-25T11:35:00.001-08:00

The newest member of our family, our iRobot Roomba, arrived as my designated gift on Valentine's Day (http://store.irobot.com). I went out to walk the dogs early that morning, and when I returned, my iRobot was vacuuming the kitchen. To his credit, my husband did glue big red hearts all over its pristine white carapace.
“What the heck is that?” I asked, noting poor McDuff, our elderly Cairn terrier, quivering in his dog bed.
“It's the iRobot 530 Roomba,” Dan announced. “I got it on sale,” he added. “You know how you always say you don't have time to clean. Well, this can help you!”
“Um. Thanks, honey,” I said, watching the iRobot zoom down the hall. “Nothing says I love you like a new vacuum cleaner.”
“This will give you more time to write!” By now, my husband was looking slightly desperate around the eyes. “It cleans while you sit at your desk and create!”
Okay, I had to admit that the idea behind the gift was good. It's true that I'm always complaining about housework. I work out of a home office, so I literally put my hands up like blinders when I walk to the kitchen for a cup of tea. Otherwise, I'm tempted to pick something up or wipe a surface. Then it's like that children's book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie: one damn thing leads to another.
I watched as the Roomba returned from the hallway, apparently satisfied with its job there. It was pretty cool, I had to admit. But was a useful gift the same thing as a romantic one?
In the living room, the poor little robot ended up eating a Nintendo cord and nearly choking to death. I freed it and set it gently back down by my son's desk, where it started overdosing on spilled cereal and stopped.
“It's full,” Dan said. “I need to show you how to empty its tray.”
I tried not to glare as he demonstrated the little drawer, pulling it out and dumping the contents into the trash. This was too reminiscent of another gift that Dan surprised me with recently: a giant litter box for our cats that also has a drawer, and a roof, too. You tip the cat box on its side and – stop me if you've heard this before – you pull out the drawer and empty it into the trash. If only those iRobot people would make a Catboxa, I'd be all set.
Since Valentine's Day, I've been thinking more about marriage and romance. Is a cleaning robot the height of romance after fifteen years of marriage?
The Roomba is certainly cuter than the tooth flossing tool Dan gave me one Christmas. And it's nowhere near as pitiful as the gift my friend Francine's husband presented her with this Valentine's Day: a new iron.
“He said it's so it won't take me as long to iron shirts,” she said. “Now I have something to clonk him over the head with.”
It took me a while, but I gradually embraced my Roomba. I've started thinking about it as another pet, albeit one that cleans up after us instead of the other way around. I suppose that's because it sleeps at its iRobot docking station under a side table, right next to McDuff's dog bed.
I've decided that my Roomba is romance at its best. Dan has given me plenty of jewelry and chocolate through the years. I have no doubt that there is more to come (especially after my tepid initial reaction to the Roomba). In giving me an iRobot, Dan was truly thinking of what I need to write more. And what could be more romantic than a husband who believes that his wife deserves more time to create?

Our Muses, Ourselves: Why Women Like Me Run Away From Home

2011-02-09T17:11:00.000-08:00

As my friend Susan Straight and I cross the border from Maine into Canada, the customs agent follows the usual script: Where are you going, are you carrying firearms, how long are you staying?
Then he trips me up: “What is the purpose of your visit? Business or pleasure?”
Susan and I glance at each other. Business or pleasure?
I'm not sure.
Susan and I have crossed this border together before. We met in graduate school and have stayed friends despite the fact that I live in Massachusetts and her home is in California. We usually meet in New York when we both have business there. And, for the past decade, Susan has flown east every summer so that we can drive ten hours north from my house to Prince Edward Island.
This year is completely different because we're actually sitting in the same car. On previous trips to Canada, we always brought so many children that we had to caravan in two vans. We have eight kids between us (me, five; her, three). We've also brought stragglers, whenever this child or that one begged to bring a friend. One summer we topped out at ten kids.
Those vacations were fun – endless hours of sand castles and board games – but crammed with chores: cooking and laundry, grocery shopping and vacuuming. Susan is divorced. For understandable reasons, my husband always opted out. So Susan and I were left on our own with the children like some wild combo of Sherpas and camp counselors.
This week, we're traveling to Canada alone in search of our inner muses. We have disguised our sudden decision to have a creative getaway as a janitorial vacation, since we're also opening up our summer cottages – she bought one on Prince Edward Island shortly after I did, and we rent them out to help support costs – but our goal is to devote uninterrupted hours to writing.
This goal makes me feel clammy with guilt. But why should it? I wonder about this as we meander along the Bay of Fundy. Guilt is a useless emotion. Yet I'm prone to it, especially when faced with a choice between what I “should” do and whatever I want to do most – as if doing something that makes me happy will make someone else unhappy.
Oh, wait: Escaping the home front to write does make the people I love unhappy. When I left this morning to pick up Susan at the airport, my husband was griping about having to leave work early to care for our youngest son, who stood with his forlorn face pressed against the door. My four older kids wanted to know if I'll have email and cell service, “just in case.” Even our dogs looked miserable.
As Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote in her timeless book, Gift from the Sea, my husband and children, my mother and friends, my home and pets, my neighbors and coworkers represent “a whole caravan of complications.” Leaving them behind for the sake of creativity makes me feel like I have phantom limbs: I itch all over.
Susan isn't doing much better. Luckily, we have time to talk about this, to shore each other up as we drive north, despite our cell phones singing with alarming regularity as our various children and work colleagues reach out to us through the state of Maine and most of New Brunswick.
Why the guilt? Like most women, Susan and I are people pleasers, willing to charge in to fill the black holes of need around us, even if that means sacrificing the time and concentration we need to be creative. Making art – whether it's music, drawing, dancing or writing – demands full attention and passion, but that ability to focus is easily worn down, especially for women with families.
Especially because, in our culture, art so rarely pays enough to put food on the table. With no money in art except for those lucky few breakout writers and artists, there is no power in doing it. Making art definitely feels like a luxury. Maybe that's because art takes so much time, and it's our precious free time that the people around us want most.
I can feel the hot breaths of everyone I left behind on the back of my neck as I drive.

*

I had imagined us rising early to write. After all, novelist Virginia Woolf proclaimed that every woman needs a room of one's own to do so. But Susan and I are so exhausted by the time we arrive at my house on Prince Edward Island – a modest summer cottage overlooking Malpeque Bay – that we can barely force ourselves out of bed once we have those precious rooms to ourselves.
Instead, we lie in our separate rooms as if we've been clubbed over the head. This isn't exhaustion from the drive; it's more like battle fatigue. Or shell shock: my ears are actually ringing a little. I think it's the silence.
We spend the first day doing chores, like that essential trip to town to replace everything from garbage bags to shower mats. We also go walking. The first day, we traverse the red beach around Darnley basin as if our lives depend upon making it from one end to the other, taking long, purposeful strides, arms pumping.
On the second day, house chores behind us, we take a different sort of walk. This one is a meandering stroll along the shore road that ends at Shipwreck Point. We see people doing more ambitious things: mowing lawns, jogging, carrying groceries into a house. It's almost like watching a movie of real life while we're in motion. We carry no cell phones, no purses. It's just us and the wildflowers and great, billowy white clouds that look like props for a theater piece.
That night, some sort of magic happens. We eat a simple supper of sandwiches and then get to work.
I sit at the little desk in my bedroom overlooking the potato fields and write almost maniacally, churning out sentences which build paragraphs that I might or might not keep. I don't turn out the light until 2 a.m., because there's nothing to stop me: No big kitchen cleanup waiting downstairs, no cell phone service, no email, no cable TV, no husband. Susan sits downstairs editing her new book galleys. We are completely separate, yet it's perfect, since each of us knows that the other is blissfully working.
I have so many good things in my life. Yet being here makes me realize how fractured my life is, with bits of my attention scattered everywhere like pocketfuls of gravel.
How did I let my life get so crowded?

*

Susan's summer house is an hour's drive from mine. One of her tasks is to buy new mattresses for the twin beds, so we track down a place that sells them at discount. We already have a carload of stuff. Still, rather than make another, separate trip to pick up the mattresses and waste valuable writing time, we jam the mattresses into the back of my Honda CRV on top of everything else.
The mattresses are so long that we have to remove the headrests and put our seats all the way forward. I have to keep my neck bent forward toward the dashboard; it's easy to imagine getting decapitated if we stop too suddenly. I do a little praying that the Canadian Mounties won't arrest us for driving with no visibility.
Then I have this comforting thought: This being Canada, the jail cells are probably really, really clean. If I'm locked up, the guards will let me write and I still wouldn't have to dust or cook.
We make it to Susan's house, then spend the rest of the day vacuuming up millions of fly corpses littering the windowsills and clearing out closets. We're both sore and exhausted by the time we finish. It's too late to go out to dinner, so we dine on fried sausages and potatoes. Then I set up my computer in the dining room and write for four hours. I can hear Susan tapping on her laptop in the kitchen. She is an award-winning novelist whose newest novel, Take One Candle Light a Room, is a gem. My memoir, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter, was put out in paperback this year. We're pleased to be published in this rocky economy. For us, though, the excitement has always been about the actual writing.
I have never been so content as I am right now. Men have always claimed wives and mistresses as their muses. Susan and I have ourselves and, for this week, we have each other. Are we writing masterpieces? Are we even writing something that other people will ever read?
It doesn't matter. The joy is in the creative act.
Women have always found satisfaction in being helpful. There is joy in that and love, too. Women are also creating some of the most exciting and challenging art today. Yet we still aren't catching up to our male colleagues in the arts. Look at the numbers for everything from cinematography to writing, from painting to conducting music, and men win out every time.
Feminists would probably say that there is a glass ceiling in the arts, as there has been in nearly every other field. I'm certainly a feminist. Still, I wonder if more women artists, musicians and writers aren't household names because we don't have enough faith in our own pursuits to give ourselves the time we desperately need to be transformed by a creative vision. Maybe that glass ceiling isn't really made of glass at all, but of sticky little fingers, dishes piled in the sink, and mortgages that demand two incomes.
Not long after my first two children were born – 16 months apart, so close together that I was in a coma for the first three years of motherhood – I went to a book signing by a famous mystery writer. He mentioned that he, too, had young children, so I eagerly approached him after the event to ask how he managed to find time to write fiction with young children at home.
“I have a wife,” he said.
It's true: Even when women have partners or spouses, our significant others often send messages that they'd rather do something – anything – rather than take over child care and housework. It's easy to rant about this, to say that women's lives would be easier if men did their fair share around the house. However, even when our partners are willing to shoulder domestic duties in equal measure, we often get in our own way by refusing to let them. We want to read that bedtime story. We think we're the only ones who can pack the right school lunch. And we long to be the ones greeting the school bus in the afternoon if we can arrange our work schedules to do so.
Many women arrange their lives around the people they love. Unfortunately, that arrangement takes up most of our days. And, as the writer Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out, genius isn't a matter of genetics, but of opportunities and persistence: He estimates that it takes 10,000 hours to get really good at doing something.
Nobody will give us those 10,000 hours. We have to take them for ourselves.

*

At the end of the week, we walk on St. Margaret's Beach. I'm in beachcomber mode, stooping to pick up stones that catch my eye. Susan wants to climb the cliffs. She hikes ahead of me and is soon clambering around on distant rocks, farther than I want to go without any shoes.
When I'm tired of picking up rocks, I decide to return to the car and get my book so that I can read until Susan returns. Then it dawns on me: she has my car keys.
For a moment, I'm irritated – why did she have to disappear like that? – and then I feel helpless. What will I do, all by myself on a beach, without even anything to read?
I sit on a boulder, disgruntled, and pile the rocks I've collected beside me. There's nothing to do but watch the waves wash in and out, frothy and pink on the red sand.
Watch the waves, and think. I remember another book signing I went to a long time ago. This one was by the political activist and short story writer Grace Paley. I asked her the same question that I'd asked the arrogant mystery writer: How did she find time to write with young children at home?
“Day care,” she said. “Don't ever be afraid to pay for writing time.”
Easier said than done. For most women, paying a babysitter so that they can write, paint, make pottery or dance is out of the question. Even for women without children, trading hours that produce income for hours that produce “only” art seems like a foolish decision.
What a loss for the world, though, to have women's voices silenced because art is our last priority. Even if we aren't making great art, or commercial art, the very act of creating it is a joyful, transformative experience, one where we explore new emotions and perspectives, ideas and values.
I think hard about this while I sit on the beach. I think about the pages I've written this week, too, and about the way my novel is progressing.
And then, after a while, I'm not thinking much at all, just contentedly watching the force of the ocean, and how the waves make the rocks roll around and create such beautiful patterns in the smooth red sand. I build a little pyramid out of the rocks I've collected. I watch some pulpy kelp become draped over a rock, then wash out to sea again. I dig my toes deeper into the sand. I admire the swallows darting in and out of the cliff above me. My mind is clear.
I am just here. I am here, just me. Through writing, I have discovered a wonderfully still place inside me that I've never seen before. It's good to be here.
Eventually, of course, Susan returns from her walk. I write again that night, staying up until well past 2 a.m. solving a particularly vexing dilemma in the plot of my new novel. The images are fresh and there is tension on the page.
The drive back is lovely and uneventful. Our cell phones chorus again in the middle of New Brunswick, and by mid-coast Maine we've talked to all of our children. Everyone has survived.
We reach my house just before nine o'clock. “Well?” my husband asks. “How was it? Did you write anything you can sell?”
“I don't know,” I tell him. “I missed you,” I add.
I toss dirty clothes into the washing machine, clean the kitchen after dinner, check my email, walk the dogs, help my son order new parts for his scooter online. I make a grocery list.
During all of this, I can feel my brain starting to thrum with activity. The still place inside me has disappeared again. But at least I know how to get there, and who to call when I need help on the journey.

My Superhero Underpants

2011-01-28T11:27:00.000-08:00

I came upstairs last night and found my husband Dan pulling something out of the laundry stacked on his bureau. He looked puzzled.
“These aren't my underpants,” he said. “Whose are they?”
I snatched them out of his hands. “Mine,” I mumbled.
“They look like superhero underpants,” he said. “I should buy you a cape to go with them.”
It was true. This particular pair of panties – a bit high in the waist, Lycra, and deep purple – definitely looks like something Wonder Woman might have worn, if she'd ever wanted to change up the star-spangled bottoms she favored before DC Comics updated her outfit recently http://www.dccomics.com/dcu/comics/?cm=16261.
It wasn't my intent to get into superhero role playing, fun as that would be. I'm just always on the prowl for underpants suitable for women of a certain age. I'm not talking about trying to be sexier. My husband thinks I'm a hot temptress even in my ankle-length black down coat, which makes me look like Shamu the killer whale. I just want attractive underpants that won't divulge my secrets or make me twitchy as a sixth grader in social studies.
Forget thongs. I've tried them all, from those Hanky Panky brands that come in fun little balls of Easter Egg colors to wider, more modest pairs. Whether I'm sitting at my computer or pushing a cart full of groceries, wearing a thong guarantees that I'll get a wedgie. Then I have to remind myself: Oh, wait: that's not a wedgie, that's my thong! Plus, the way jeans are designed these days, if I bend over, everyone knows my favorite color.
Bikini panties are comfy, but it's tough to find styles where the lines don't show. That leads to teenagers walking behind you and thinking, “Ew, gross.” Plus, after you've had children, wearing a bikini just reminds you of how it felt when there was something between you and tying your shoes, because the waistband slices you right where those last stubborn post-pregnancy pounds hang out.
The obvious solution was boy shorts, I thought: good coverage, but still lacy and sexy. Unfortunately, boy shorts seem to be made for boys. Every pair I tried had leg bands so tight that my thighs looked like sausages pinched at the ends.
Maybe the answer was underwear that went right up to my bra, I decided last summer, when I got a dress and the clerk talked me into buying Spanx for a smoother look. At home, I laid out my new dress, put my makeup on, and did my hair with a mounting sense of excitement. After all, Spanx has been giving Oprah a waist for over a decade http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Howd-They-Do-That/2.
At last, I was ready for my miracle foundation garment debut. I pulled the Spanx out of its slim packet. It was skin-colored and felt crunchy between my fingers. It stretched like pantyhose between my hands, but had an odd shape: a square top and legs cut off at the knees. It looked like a preschool craft project. There was no crotch. I tried not to imagine the disaster that might unfold if I guffawed at someone’s party joke and needed to pee.
Nonetheless, I inserted one leg, then the other, wriggling the garment over my thighs. When it came to getting the Spanx over my hips, it was like being swallowed by a boa constrictor.
My new dress did slide more easily over my waist and hips. However, just as a miracle bra gathers flesh from back to front to make you look like you've strapped on a pair of bowling balls, the Spanx gathered everything in my middle and squeezed it up under my ribcage. I was gasping for air like a dying trout.
Dan came upstairs and slid his arms around my newly tight waist. Our eyes met in the mirror. “Great dress,” he said, then cocked his head. “It fits kind of funny around your waist.”
“What waist?” I said with a moan.
“Your sexy, gorgeous waist.” Dan says things like this to me every day, and means them. But now he grabbed my hips and winced. “What the hell are you wearing? It feels like you’re made of cement.”
He wasn't trying to be critical. Dan is an engineer who just likes to know how things work. I hiked my dress up to show him.
“Jesus!” he said. “That can’t be very comfortable. Why are you wearing it?”
Why, indeed? My Spanx has been in my top drawer ever since, along with my discarded thongs, boy shorts and bikinis. Meanwhile, my superhero underpants have risen to the top of the heap. They're comfortable enough for Spin class and don't show panty lines even under leggings. I am Wonder Woman, after all. Time to go shopping for that gold belt.

Is Any High School Really Worth $136,000?

2011-01-03T09:38:00.001-08:00

As always, my 13 year-old son has waited until bedtime to download his anxieties. He's a bright, sensitive kid whose worries run the gamut from global warming to how long his gerbil will live.
Tonight his questions revolved around his private school applications, which we submitted just before Christmas. Will he be admitted to any of the schools he applied to? We calculate the odds. What if he gets into all of them? How will he choose? We talk about visit days and how he can decide which school suits him best. What if he starts at one school and decides he'd rather be at another? We discuss that, too.
The one thing we don't talk about is money. I'm glad. Not because I'm avoiding the issue – well, maybe just a little – but because I still haven't managed to wrap my mind around how much money a private high school education costs.
My husband and I are already tiptoeing through the college tuition minefield. We have two older sons who have just graduated from college. Our two daughters are still at university. We've paid and paid for our kids to grow into educated, worldly citizens with college degrees in hand. That's been tough enough. So what business do I have, thinking that I should pay $136,000 for this last kid of ours to attend a so-called “independent school” for grades 9 through 12? What will our son get for this money? A gold-plated locker?
We didn't start down this road by choice. We went to public high schools. Our four older children also went to public high schools and thrived. They played sports, participated in music and theater, belonged to clubs, did the proms and parties. They complained about the usual things: boring classes, teachers who yelled, mean kids, crowded classrooms, stupid homework assignments. Yet all four of them were accepted by good colleges, even Ivy League schools. They majored in subjects that ignited their passions. Our two graduates – one in 2009, the other in 2010 – even managed to find jobs right away in their chosen fields. Hallelujah!
Our youngest son, though, has been different from the start. He always hated his public school, starting with kindergarten, where he fumed about rest time. Why would he rest, when there were so many other, more interesting things to do?
In elementary school, he was chastised soundly by one teacher for making a gingerbread house that wasn't like the A-frame house his teacher showed them, but more like a Frank Lloyd Wright design, all flat roofs and porches. A fifth grade teacher complained that he asked too many questions that weren't on topic, while he ranted about her making mistakes, especially in science. He was selected for the Gifted and Talented Program in fourth grade, but that consisted of just more research papers. He hated going, but went because it got him out of class.
Here in Massachusetts, we have a tense, worksheet-driven MCAS curriculum that puts teachers and kids through their paces so fast that there's little room to do anything else. “Don't learn the math in that chapter,” one teacher warned our son. “Those problems aren't on the MCAS test.”
By the time he hit middle school, our son was complaining about “having to learn too many dumb things that I can't remember” as well as the typical mean or absent-minded teachers. His classmates bothered him, too. Their idea of fun was to push each other into lockers, smoke dope between classes, or de-pants each other in the hallway. His “most exciting day at school ever” was when his seventh grade math teacher lost his temper and chased one ornery kid down the halls with a chair.
At home, meanwhile, our son continued to be enthusiastic about everything, especially when he was building machines, like an automatic card shuffler or a robot that fed his fish for him automatically once a day. “School is just something I have to get through until I can come home and learn things,” he told me with a shrug. “I can't wait until I'm old enough to drop out.”
Uh oh. In desperation, I stopped by a local Montessori School to ask about their middle school program. Amazingly, they had space for him. Even more shocking, we could afford it. Yes, ten grand was a lot of money. But, if it made our son love going to school, it would be worth it. We were fortunate enough to have an education fund for him. We decided to use part of it for middle school instead of saving all of it for college. “It's just a different resource allocation,” my husband rationalized. I saw it as an incubation period, one where he could take a breather from the rigors of public school.
The result was shocking. Our son was transformed within a few weeks. He was happy, polite, and sweet again. He was not only allowed, but encouraged, to follow his interests at school. The first year, he built a camel out of wire and paper as a visual aid for a research project on the desert; he also built an architectural model of our bathroom to scale, and performed as Lysander in Midsummer Night's Dream, reciting Shakespeare in the car on the way to and from school.
“This doesn't even feel like school,” he confessed one day. “It's more like a place where everyone wants to learn things, even the teachers.”
It was true that Montessori didn't feel like a “real” school to me, either. There were no chairs lined in rows. The students wore slippers in the classroom. They snacked when they felt like it, worked together or alone as they wished, and called teachers by their first names. It felt more like learning in someone's living room. The philosophy of Montessori – that each child is naturally curious, and will do the work of learning if you just get out of his way, guiding him only as necessary – might as well have been designed for our son. It seemed to work for lots of other kids, too.
Alas, our Montessori School goes only through eighth grade. Now we're making another transition. Hence our dilemma: We've seen what a difference this private school education made in our son's life. We'd like to keep his enthusiasm level for learning high. But is it really worth paying $136,000 for a high school education?
Most New England independent schools average around $32,000 per year just for day student tuition – not much less than most colleges. These schools look like colleges, too, with their glassy science buildings, smart boards, indoor rowing machines, ice hockey rinks, music studios and playing fields. You name it, they have it: debate team, Latin, Chinese, AP Physics, study abroad, science internships, math teams. The teachers have masters and doctoral degrees. There are just 12 to 14 kids in a class. Who wouldn't want to go to a high school like that, especially if it's filled with other students and teachers who actually want to learn?
But – and again, I ask this in all earnestness, because I really don't know – is an independent school education really a better start in life than a public school education? Part of me thinks yes, absolutely, at least for this child. My hope is that our youngest will find a high school that fits him as well as Montessori has, and that his high school years will help him continue to blossom as a passionate lifelong learner; a concerned citizen of the world; and a confident, loving, generous young adult.
Then I am seized by doubts that aren't just nagging. They're like hammerhead blows to the back of my neck: What if we lose our jobs, I wonder, and we suddenly can't pay for this mythical, magical high school with smart boards and, for all I know, unicorns? What if one of us dies in the next four years, and we can't afford college because there is only one household income, and we've blown our education fund on high school?
Or what if paying $136,000 for a private school education turns out to be a mistake for other reasons? What if this money only continues to shelter my son from knowing what it's like to be around people who struggle every day to put food on the table and gas up their cars?
What if, by going to a school where it's considered normal for every child to have a laptop computer and a North Face jacket, he becomes one of the elite people who don't try to change the world, because they're busy maintaining their status quo?
My son is asleep by now. But I am wide awake, thinking about all of the decisions that we parents make for our children that are so much bigger than the here and now, starting with the kind of education we give them – both in and out of the classroom.

WAITING FOR THE BIG C

2010-12-26T15:52:00.000-08:00

I hate waiting. Yet, somehow I managed to book my mammogram for the week before Christmas, and found myself waiting for something I didn't want during the busiest week of the year.
I had a lump removed from my breast seven years ago, so getting a mammogram for me is always a cause for heart-pounding, knuckle-biting anxiety. What's more, since that first lousy mammogram, every mole, hive, aching joint, and stomach pain makes me wonder: Do I have cancer? Am I dying?
How stupid. Of course I'm dying. We all know how life's movie ends. Still, it didn't help matters that my pre-Christmas technician was one of those perky young ones. She wore a squintingly bright orange t-shirt to set off her sprayed-on tan and chatted like a parakeet as she maneuvered me in and out of the chilly breast sandwich plates. Her sharp nails were scratchy on my bare skin. I shivered like a wet dog at the groomer’s.
When she was through, the technician told me to “sit tight, Hon,” while she brought my films to the radiologist. She left me in a “For Women Only” waiting room with soothing prints of chubby women in garden hats, picnicking in a forest. Who picked out those particular prints, I wondered. Someone who thought we'd be calmed by them? Someone who thought, Oh, good, the fat women in these pictures will make everyone feel thin?
There's one other woman in the waiting room. She studiously avoids my eyes and flips through her magazine. I wonder which particular circle of hell she's in.
I consider the waiting room magazines, artfully arranged on the table in front of me like a colorful fan by some zealous volunteer. I can't bring myself to take one. It would be like pulling a feather out of a peacock's tail.
Seven years ago, I had the lump removed from my breast because my mammogram showed microcalcifications gathered in a “suspicious cluster.” Such a garble of a word, “microcalcifications.” Not cancer, just tiny calcium deposits. Lots of women have them. Normally, they show up on mammograms as big and round and scattered, like benign flower petals. But, for some women, microcalcifications appear in patterns associated with malignancy. These are smaller calcium deposits. They’re more numerous, and they come in an array of shapes: Rods, branches, even teardrops. A good radiologist will feel his hackles rise when he sees them arranged just so.
The last time I had an interesting pattern of microcalcifications, I had a “needle loc” biopsy, as the booking receptionist so breezily referred to it. Her good cheer suggested that there was nothing to fear about the procedure. My boyishly enthusiastic, tactless surgeon’s description of it was “just a little slice and dice.”
Now I know better. A needle location biopsy is a two-step procedure that takes several hours to complete. It’s a type of surgical biopsy that involves more breast sandwiches, but with the added discomfort of a hollow needle inserted into the breast. The hollow needle conveys a long thin wire into your breast in a way that makes you feel like a remote-controlled car. The amount of tissue removed ranges “from the size of a grape to that of an apricot,” as my surgeon had explained.
“What am I, a fruit basket?” I joked.
Oh yes. I joked around during that first biopsy. Then I got home and fell apart, plagued by unanswerable questions: Can you go barefoot in heaven? What would my children do without a mother? If I have chemo, will I look as good when I'm bald as Sigourney Weaver did in Alien II?
I waited weeks for those results. Because the local radiologist deemed my biopsied bit of flesh to be “in the gray zone,” the tissue had to be sent to a Boston cancer hospital, to a man so famous for his breast biopsy readings that my surgeon actually referred to him as “Dr. Breast.” And Dr. Breast, it turned out, was on vacation for two weeks.
“How dare he take a vacation when I need him?” I joked, and hung up, feeling sorry for that abandoned little piece of me sitting alone in a Boston lab, cooling its tiny heels.
As I waited, I tried to look on the bright side of cancer. If I lost my hair, I could be a shaggy brunette on Tuesdays, a smoky redhead on Thursdays, and hey, why not go blonde all weekend? Breast cancer could have other benefits, too. I could finally say no to the PTO! I’d book that vacation to Spain!
When the biopsy results arrived, they weren’t the best, but they weren’t the worst, either: I had DCIS, which means “ductal carcinoma in situ,” or “Damn Cancer In Sight.” The treatment was a lumpectomy, which the insurance company insisted on calling a “partial mastectomy.” I cried, because it suddenly seemed as if a piece of me had gone renegade: The breast that had once nursed my three children was acting up. Naughty, naughty breast, after all of that money I’d spent on expensive lingerie and bathing suits! If that was the thanks I got, maybe I’d just ask the surgeon to lop the whole thing off. Breast be gone! Ha! That would show ol’ Lefty who’s boss!
On the day of the surgery, the only truly bad moment came in the operating prep room, where I made the mistake of asking a nurse how much she thought the surgeon would remove. She patted my hand with a smile. “Oh, he’ll probably take out a chunk the size of a plum. You’ll be just fine.”
A plum! Can’t these people think about anything beside fruit? I fumed, and then the mask was over my face. The next thing I knew, my husband was leading me out to the car with a bandaged boob, a woozy head, and strict instructions to avoid my favorite underwire bras.
As I recovered from the lumpectomy, I had one more visit with my surgeon, who said, “Well, there’s no such thing as a 100 percent cure for cancer, but I’d say you’re in the 99 percent range.” He’d gotten clean margins all around the affected tissue, which meant I wouldn’t need radiation or chemo. “Go home,” he said. “Be happy.”
And so I have. For the last seven years, I’ve managed to do just that – except when I worry about having the Big C.
“What I hate about cancer is this feeling that I'm disappearing one piece at a time,” complained a friend as she headed into her second skin cancer surgery recently.
“Me, too,” I agreed. “Only with me, it’s probably going to be one melon ball at a time.”
We laugh about our battle scars, my friends and I. What else is there to do? We're all learning to wait with grace, and trying to remember that waiting is really just another part of living.
So take your next piece, I silently admonished the radiologist and the surgeon as I sat in the waiting room the week before Christmas, still not touching the magazines on the table. I know I'm not alone. I can deal.
The technician finally came back, all smiles. The other woman in the waiting room and I looked at each other. It was my name the technician was calling. I stepped out into the hallway, supposedly out of earshot, though I knew the other woman must be listening avidly, trying to see which one of us was going to make up the next count of breast cancer patients in this hospital, this country. We know we're in this together.
“Everything looks fine,” the technician said. “Go ahead and get dressed. Merry Christmas.”
Indeed. Happy New Year, too. And may every woman know that she is never alone in the waiting room.

ONE OF THE BEST WRITING TIPS EVER: SPIN CLASS!

2010-12-09T19:04:00.000-08:00

Two of the most common questions people ask writers are: 1) When do you write? And 2) What do you do if you get writer's block?
When I see these questions headed my way – whether from a friend, a student, a book club member, or a radio talk show host – I freeze like a possum crossing in front of a bicycle. That's because my answers are so unsatisfying to most people:
1)I hardly ever write, but I'm always writing, and
2)I don't get writer's block. Ever.
Yeah, I know what you're thinking: What the hell? What kind of writer doesn't have writer's block! Maybe you're even rolling your eyes like a dismissive teen in Algebra class. But both answers are true.
Here's my current secret weapon against low creativity libido: Spin class. You know, that's the class where you furiously pedal a stationary bike to nowhere in an ominously dark room, while an anemic looking instructor shouts orders over thumping techno pop music. “Sprint!” “Climb another hill!” “Break away!”
I never thought I'd take one of these classes, because who doesn't look stupid in padded bike shorts indoors? Then I discovered that I can solve any thorny writing problem in Spin class. Just this morning, I was pedaling hard to pass that old guy with the big calves in front of me – funny how I never can catch him – when I suddenly thought of a way the killer in the novel I'm writing could lure the protagonist into his car. Bingo! I nearly fell off the bike, it was such a brilliant idea! (I won't take time to explain it here. Let's just say that it involved a snake in the basement.)
I don't know if it's the rush of adrenalin that causes ideas to come when I'm exercising, but if I'm sweating, I'm writing. Jogging, gardening, moving furniture, you name it. Even a walk loosens up the words locked in the crammed, disorganized closet of my brain. I take my dogs hiking most mornings after dropping my youngest child off at school. My usual spot is a Conservation area with winding paths through marshes and woods. At one point, there's a terrific view of the river (where I often imagine bodies being dumped.)
There's just one trail that I can't follow anymore, because it passes a sculpted tree with colorful green and yellow lichen on its peeling gray bark. I once hiked past that tree and imagined a spirit woman stepping out of it, her hair flowing right out of the bark, to block my protagonist's path as she went walking. Now, Voila! I'm terrified of that tree. But it's a great plot point in my novel.
Sex serves nicely as creative exercise, too. I keep a journal on my bedside table. My husband has learned not to ask what I'm doing, as I roll out from under him and scrabble around for a pen so that I can jot down a new bit of dialogue that appears like a ticker-tape announcement in Times Square as we're getting busy.
This all might sound flaky – I am a writer, after all – but the truth is that even scientists have linked creativity to exercise. Some research suggests that you can experience a boost in brain power for up to two hours after just half an hour of exercise, no matter what the exercise is (http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/12/forget-brainstorming.html) Check out Dr. David Blanchette's studies on the link between aerobic exercise and creativity at Rhode Island College (http://www.ric.edu/faculty/dblanchette/ExerciseArticle.htm), or a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/31/3/240.abstract).
Better yet, print out articles about creativity and exercise to read while you're running on the treadmill. Then sit down to write. You might be surprised by how fast new ideas pour out of your pen.

Kayak: One Word, One Life

2010-12-06T07:56:00.000-08:00

“Kayak.”
The word was written in red ink across the top of the manila file folder. Shaky letters, a modest schoolboy hand. Definitely my dad's writing.
I sat back on my heels in front of the cupboard where I'd found the folder and stared at the word, almost unable to breathe. Like my father, a Navy officer, I never throw anything away that I might use. This folder was stashed among many others in my office. On some, the lettering has been scratched out and rewritten two or three times. How had my dad's folder ended up in here with mine?
I keep turning up odd things that belonged to my dad, despite the fact that he died two years ago. There are the old photos of him in his Navy uniform, for instance, where Dad looks like Gerald Ford on steroids. A collection of foreign coins, with buttons and batteries mixed in, that he gave to my youngest son the last time we saw him. And his wax jacket from England, which I can't bear to toss, even though it makes my hall closet stink like wet goats.
“Kayak.” Staring at that single, scrawled, red-inked word makes me remember, suddenly, that Dad's kayak was red, too. It was crafted out of heavy duty plastic and lightweight enough for him to lift onto the top of his car even after his seventieth birthday.
Dad bought the kayak when he was living in New England, near me, to use on a local pond. That pond is surrounded by houses and probably just half a mile across. Yet, being a Navy man who once commanded ships, Dad bought not only the kayak, but everything you might need to navigate an ocean storm, too: a bright yellow waterproof flashlight, a neon orange life vest, a floating whistle, a box of flares. He wasn't going to be caught up short in an emergency, no sir, not my dad the Commander.
When he was diagnosed with emphysema a few years later and moved to Arizona for drier weather, Dad gave me the kayak and its bulging box of accessories – miles and miles of nylon rope, it seemed – along with this folder. Dad was famous in our family for his file folders, neatly cataloging everything from Sears purchases (the only store he ever shopped) to our school records, right down to faded kindergarten reports claiming that my brother wasn't paying attention and I needed to speak up more in class. The kayak folder was the last one he ever gave me. It had contained maps, a booklet on efficient rowing, pamphlets on how to use flares in an emergency, and a thick sheaf of boater's regulations you wouldn't ever need unless you were caught in a tsunami on the high seas.
“It's always best to know what you're getting into,” Dad said solemnly, giving the folder a fond little tap as he handed it over. “Be prepared.”
By then, he was on oxygen and had to carry a portable tank with him. Being my father, he always made sure that his tanks were full and that he had a spare. He set his watch and timed his outings to the minute so that he'd never run out of air.
“Kayak,” in red ink, on a folder. What had that boat represented to my father, that he would buy such a risky toy at age seventy?
Dad was a boy from Ohio who joined the Navy before he'd ever seen the ocean or learned to swim. The kayak continued my father's love affair with water. It was also a vote of confidence in his own vitality, despite his age and failing health. The kayak let him have a final adventure his way, prepared for a seafaring challenge with a life vest, a whistle, and flares, even on a peaceful pond.
“Kayak.” It was more than just a word. It was a message from my father to me: “Know what you're getting into.”
Know what you're getting into, when you get into a boat on the water, or into a marriage, or into a house or a job. Be prepared for hard work, for joyful play, for travel, for accidental mishaps, for parenthood, for love, for anger, for sorrow, for illness, for taking life one breath at a time, for death.
Be prepared, most of all, with the single word you would choose to write across the last folder of your life, as a way of reminding the loved ones you left behind that you are guiding them, still.

Piano Chicken and other Tales of Cooking Gone Wrong

2010-11-29T09:20:00.001-08:00

Just in time for holiday feasting, I've decided to eat lean. This was a guilt-inspired decision brought on by invading my son's Halloween bag, which I managed to find no matter how hard I tried to hide it.
Eating lean means lettuce, lettuce, and more lettuce for lunch, as I explore the wonders of salad instead of making my usual Dagwood sandwiches. It also means that I'm having to stress my culinary skills, which are admittedly just one step above feral.
For instance, since all of the so-called experts on Web MD http://www.webmd.com/ (who I suspect are just college students paid hourly to churn out recycled holier-than-thou advice from women's magazines), insist that you need to balance protein and healthy carbs while grazing on greenery, I decided to make a big girl salad yesterday that actually included sliced hard-boiled egg. Talk about excitement! I was nearly panting with pride as I heated a pot of water and gently set two pristinely white eggs in to boil.
My virtuous frame of mind led me to my desk, where I actually paid bills on line (more cause for self praise!) and caught up on emails. I might have made a phone call or two also.
At any rate, it wasn't until the dog started barking in the kitchen that I realized my eggs were, in fact, not only boiling, but exploding. The water was long gone, the lid had flown off the pan, and my eggs had exploded onto the floor, the stove, and even up into the vent hood. Holy Mount Merapi! There is nothing like the stink of sulfur to put you off your feed – a diet tip that the WebMD minions are certainly welcome to borrow.
“You must have been cooking by remote control again,” my husband Dan said with a sigh, when I mentioned the disaster in the kitchen that night.
“At least I tried,” I said.
“Do me a favor,” he said. “Stay out of the kitchen.”
This is, really, the mantra of our marriage: I stay out of the kitchen until it's time for me to do the dishes after Dan cooks. I didn't know this is how it would be when I met him, of course. In fact, our first real date consisted of me whipping up an impressive (for me) lasagna out of jarred sauce and no-boil noodles, which Dan gallantly suffered through with nary a complaint.
It wasn't until Dan cooked dinner for me about a week later – handmade spring rolls, chicken satay, jasmine rice – that I understood what I was dealing with. My husband started cooking for himself at age 12. By his teen years, he was avidly reading Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Mother of God, what a weird kid, is what I would have thought if we'd met in high school. Luckily, I married Dan in my thirties, when I was old enough to know what kind of prize he really is.
There are people like me – lots of us, I'm sure – who would just as soon eat out of cans if we didn't have children to make us feel guilty for not serving something other than tuna on crackers. My friend Phoebe, for instance, describes her husband Michael trying to cook chicken; he went downstairs to play the piano and got so distracted that smoke filled the house. When Michael presented the blackened bird to their family, “He told us that he'd made a special dish called Piano Chicken,” she says with a laugh.
My friend Peach once tried to roast chestnuts. She didn't bother reading a recipe; she figured she could just bake them at 400 degrees “for a while.” She made the mistake of opening the oven to check on them and had to hit the floor as the chestnuts shot out like bullets. Another friend of mine, Chris, had no idea that you should pierce the skin of a potato before baking it, and was forced to spend an hour cleaning mashed potato off her oven walls before she could use it again.
Then there are people like Dan. Dan thinks nothing of throwing together Spanish tapas for twelve, and he made our Thanksgiving perfect, from the turkey he somehow set on fire with brandy to three different kinds of pies baked with his own special lard & butter crust. (You should have seen my daughter's face when he told her that he used 14 sticks of butter to make our holiday meal.)
Dan is the one my friend Deborah turns to when she wants to ask a question about braising beef or seasoning roasted vegetables, and he and our friend Mary can carry on a conversation about different types of Mexican peppers for hours. Dan and I once went to a dinner party where one of the women had just returned from a tour of different olive oil producers in Italy; I have never seen a happier man. Meanwhile, that woman's husband and I talked about our dogs.
What makes the difference between a cook like Dan and somebody like me, whose efforts often result in meals like volcanic eggs, or those shortbread cookies I made where I forgot to put in the flour, even though that was one of just four ingredients? Is it genetics? Interest? Experience? Or just the ability to pay attention in the kitchen for more than 12 minutes?
I have no idea. I only know that, when Dan cooks, there's no place like home.

Murder and Mayhem in a Parked Car

2010-11-09T10:40:00.000-08:00

When the man knocked on my window, I jumped and shrieked. It was dark and rain was pelting against my car windshield. I opened my window just a crack. “Yes?”
The man was old and bearded beneath his yellow rain slicker, with flat black eyes that seemed to absorb the darkness all around us. “Lady, you okay in there?” he asked.
I blinked at him. “I'm fine. Why?”
He shook his head. “I've been trying to get your attention. You're all done here.”
“Oh. Thanks.” I fumbled for my wallet and handed him my credit card. Damn. My gas tank was full. I'd been reading while the attendant pumped gas; now I had to start driving again.
The story of my life is that I often leave my life. There are long moments, even hours, where I have no idea what's going on in the world, or even in my own house, beyond the pages of the book I'm holding in my hands. Even as a child, I was so absorbed by my books that every family video shows a pair of adult hands reaching over to take away my book, and then me looking up and squinting like a startled hen.
The book I was reading at the gas station was Erin Hart's terrific debut mystery, Haunted Ground, and the reason I shrieked when the gas station attendant knocked on the window is because I was in a drafty manor house, just like the main character, American pathologist Nora Gavin. I had just found something dreadfully dead in my bed not long after digging up a girl's severed head in the bog. Just the head! No body!
This is my favorite kind of book: Any mystery set somewhere other than here, preferably written by a British author who knows how to weave history, forensics, and a love story together with a good dash of tension, just enough gore, some heart-pounding terror, and lots of eccentric characters. The other great new mystery author I've discovered recently is Elly Griffiths, whose first book, Crossing Places, I read in a single sitting, and whose second book, The Janus Stone, looks even more promising. Her main character is an eccentric archeologist and, in her first book at least, Griffiths crafts scenes of heart-stopping fright. God, I love her.
Other British mystery writers who always give me a thrill: Dorothy Sayers and her gentle but quick-witted sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey; Elizabeth George, who lives in England half-time and passes for a Brit even though she's American; and of course P.D. James, the creator of a poet who doesn't faint at the sight of blood.
What is it about mystery novels? Why do I keep reading about murder and mayhem not only in parked cars, but at the breakfast table, during my son's gymnastics practice, waiting at the airport, and late at night after the house is asleep and I'm the only one with a light burning?
I'm not a violent person. The last time I shouted was at our cat for daring to jump on the dining room table. I've never hit, kicked, stabbed, or shot anyone. I want to weep when I hear news stories of real beatings or murders. Yet I can't fit enough killings into my waking hours.
My grandfather was the same way, and he lived with us, so I guess I can blame him. Grandfather worked in the menswear department of Sears and was always decked out in suspenders and a felt fedora pinched just so over his bald head. He got mystery novels out of the library, and every night, he'd park himself in his favorite chair and slowly smoke bowls of lush cherry tobacco in his pipe as he went through them. He had two stacks of mysteries: the one on his right side was the stack he hadn't read yet, and the one on the left side were books he'd already devoured. As far as I know, he never murdered anybody, either, but we did have a really creepy basement.
Mom and I used to read Grandfather's mysteries after he did, sliding them off the left tower of books beside his chair. From about the age of 14 I was reading about rapes and brutal beatings, serial killers and child abusers, people shot or knifed or run over by cars, even people set on fire or carved into little bits. Corpses turned up in fields and bogs, stone churches and manor houses, inside walls and basements, or just flung willy-nilly by the roadside. It's a wonder I ever left the house.
The natural conclusion of wallowing in all of this mayhem is that I, too, have begun writing a mystery novel. It isn't a classic mystery – more of a thriller, really – and it's not set in England. Instead, this book is set in a house that my husband and I once looked at, thinking we might buy it; we were so terrified once we were inside this house that we couldn't get out fast enough. There was something evil lurking there. And now that evil is in my computer, and on the pages that I'm printing out as I write this.
My novel opens with a woman being tossed off the side of a cruise ship, and there are two more murders besides. There's a voodoo priestess, and unspeakable creatures from the underworld crawling along the stone walls at the edge of the property.
As I was writing a certain chilling scene yesterday, a scene set in atmospherically dusky woods with trees that look like sculptures, my son came up behind me just as my heroine spots something – or someone – standing in front of her.
“Mom?” my son said, and I screamed.
I've never had more fun in my life. The only thing better than reading mysteries is writing one.

Kids + Computers = The Perfect Match

2010-11-03T09:56:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, a friend stopped by while I was working at home. My 13 year-old son was home, too. As we passed the living room, my friend said, “How long will you let your son stay on the computer?”
I shrugged. “I don't know. Until it's time to do something else.”
“What? That's criminal!” My friend made a face. You know the face: the I'm-a-better-Mom-than-you-are face. “I let my boys have an hour a day on the computer. Tops. Then I kick 'em outside.”
“Well,” I said, and then stopped. What else was there to say? “You're a better parent than I am?” “Your kids probably have bigger muscles?”
I've been a mother for 22 years now. With three boys and two girls in our household, I've been doing battle with screens for almost that long. I still get exhausted remembering how hard I fought to keep our two oldest sons off the computer. Every time I made a rule, they'd find a loophole. Like the time I told them they couldn't have screen time between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. on weekends, and discovered – weeks later – that they were setting their alarms for 5 a.m. to ensure that they'd get their four hours of World of Warcraft in before breakfast.
Recently, one of my sons confessed, “You know, I was playing computer games until, like, 2 a.m. in high school. I just waited until you went to bed.” That was around the time that he was hooked on Everquest, an online role-playing game that drew in so many viewers that it was widely known as “Evercrack” http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/28/earlyshow/living/caught/main510302.shtml.
And where is that son now? He graduated from a great college, and found a job three days after graduation in an advertising firm in Boston. A company that specializes, by the way, in supporting web sites for their clients.
Our oldest son, meanwhile, graduated from a great college as well, and has made his way to Los Angeles, where he's working as a production assistant in the film industry. He was just named second assistant director for a Web TV pilot.
My youngest son, the last one at home, takes bass guitar lessons, does gymnastics, loves to rock climb and hike. But he's also on the computer every spare minute. Once in a while, it's homework related – his school gave him a great geography game to play online, and he can now name more countries on a map than I can. He also does math and science online rather than bring home textbooks. Usually, though, his time on the computer is spent pursuing his own interests.
He built a hovercraft after seeing someone do it online, out of a shower curtain, a piece of plywood, and a leaf blower. It actually worked. He learned all about microwaving potato chip bags and building Lego guns through Youtube. He plays his bass along with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Queen online. (“Did you dress like that in the 80's, Mom?” he asked recently. “God, I hope not.”) He learned how to do flips on the trampoline by watching kids demonstrate on Youtube. And, lately, he has been learning the algorithms for solving the Rubik's Cube from Dan Brown online http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsQIoPyfQzM.
Does he read books, this boy of mine? Only if I make him. Which I do. I am, after all, a writer and a book collector, and sometimes I fantasize about having one of those dreamy kids who stays up all night reading books like I did. But, let's face it: kids seem well-equipped to learn online. This particular son of mine knew all about how BP was going to clean up its spill before I did; he also followed the recent elections online. He can tell me where the most shark attacks occur in the world and he's currently looking up the value of individual Magic cards – his new obsession. If this kid wants to know something, he Googles it.
“It's an age of instant gratification,” my sniffy mom friend declared, when I pointed out how much my son learns on the computer. “These kids don't know how to work hard. The computer is making kids stupider.”
Her declaration echoed that popular article, “Does Google Make Us Stupid?” originally published by Nicholas Carr a couple of years ago in The Atlantic Monthly. Carr's piece led to fiery debates about how human intelligence is changing. Read a great summary of that debate put together by the Pew Research Center here: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1499/google-does-it-make-us-stupid-experts-stakeholders-mostly-say-no.
Maybe it's true that access to technology, and to such rapid fire information, is making our children seem like they have shorter attention spans. My son recently declared that when he's reading, “I feel like I'm not doing anything.” On the computer, on the other hand, his hands are engaged, and the visuals on the screen are more entertaining than those black-and-white ants marching across the pages of his books. Books are slow, he complains.
Let me repeat: I still try to make him read half an hour a day, if nothing more. Yet, I'm also well aware that I, too, would have learned on the computer if I'd had one growing up. I don't buy my friend's argument that my boys have had their learning stunted by the computer. Whether children absorb information by reading or online, learning new things makes them want to learn more. Children are inherently curious, active learners. Aren't the skills of building cities and fighting battles online – especially done in teams – worthy? And isn't the ability to discover, sift through, and analyze new information essential to survival in the digital age?
There is an infinite amount of knowledge. Why not soak it up as fast as you can, in a community of online learners, game players, and musicians who come not just from your own neighborhood, but from around the world? For kids with computers, learning has no boundaries.

The First Rule of Teaching: Do No Harm

2010-10-21T09:47:00.000-07:00

It wasn't until I went on a field trip with my son and his eighth grade teacher that I started pondering the recent debates about how a teacher's performance in the classroom should be evaluated.
My son and his teacher, Jennifer, were deep in conversation about some machine that my son had built at home out of spare parts. Jennifer listened, asked questions, then listened some more. She's a former engineer, so she has lots of high-powered technical knowledge she might have sprinkled onto my son's head like falling leaves. Instead, she focused on getting my son to ask the right questions, inserting facts only where she had to, until at last he said, “Oh! I know what I could try next. Thanks!”
I couldn't follow their conversation in detail – I barely passed high school physics – but it was suddenly clear that I was in the presence of one of those brilliant teachers who we hope like hell our children have at least a few times in their lives.
What makes a teacher brilliant? It's not easy for me to say, despite the fact that I've ushered three children and two stepchildren through school and into college. Along the way, I've attended countless parent-teacher conferences and PTO meetings. I've been a school volunteer.
But it was only at that moment, with Jennifer and my son, that I really considered what makes a teacher brilliant and not just okay, or downright evil. While we've never had a teacher as evil as Miss Trunchbull in Roald Dahl's brilliant book, Matilda – the one who locked children in a tiny room with spikes on the walls – we've certainly had our share of scary teachers.
There was, for instance, the elementary school teacher who made fun of my youngest son because he was anxious and had facial tics. When he told her that he wanted to be a mathematician, she laughed and said, “You'll never be a mathematician if you keep making those faces!” He also had a teacher who, when it was time to make gingerbread houses for Christmas, called him “defiant” because he didn't follow her A-frame plan and created his own design. The very next year, a teacher told my son that he would “grow up to be another Unibomber” because he had drawn a sketch of a gun he'd seen on YouTube.
Most teachers, thankfully, have not been so woefully ignorant or mean. Among the many teachers in the lives of our five children, most have simply followed their hearts in an effort to do good in the world. They get up every morning, balancing family life with work like most of us – only their work involves the emotional and exhausting rigors of caring for other people's children. They fight for what their students need, and sometimes, like the rest of us, they are irritable or too exhausted to be kind. They snap at the kids, or even, in the case of one math teacher at our junior high who, after being pushed to the limit by a wayward kid taunting him from the doorway, chase kids down the hall while waving chairs over their heads. Really.
Burnout isn't their fault, or at least not entirely. The educational system is overburdened – we all know that – and often more of a premium is placed on crowd control and compliance among students than on anything else. Students come to class unprepared or are confrontational, and parents are equally so. It's no wonder that our teachers are stressed and overwhelmed. If they'd wanted to be cops, they would have signed up for the police academy.
Yet, a few rare teachers continue to do their jobs well, or even brilliantly. My oldest daughter, always fearful of writing, became an avid writer because her sixth grade English teacher made her believe that she could do it – even as that teacher was battling breast cancer. My oldest son's first social studies teacher inspired in him a lifelong love of politics. A French teacher's encouragement led our younger daughter to study in Paris.
What sets those teachers apart? Brilliance in the classroom isn't about a teacher's education, training, or classroom experience. No, the kind of teacher who inspires students to learn because they want to, instead of because they have to, has more to do with elusive qualities, like being willing to meet a child where he is, having a keen and sturdy sense of humor, respecting every child's strengths, and bravely setting forth every day ready to try something new.
There has been a lot of debate about how best to test our teachers, such as asking whether we should use standardized student test scores to evaluate a teacher's performance. But the most important things to measure in a teacher are things you can't test for, like the willingness to trust that, within every child, there is a better person who just needs to be coaxed to come out. How do you test for that?
While we figure that out, the first rule to follow when evaluating teachers should be the same one we use in medicine. Teachers, like doctors, should First, do no harm.

The Book Tour: Is It Worth It?

2010-10-14T08:42:00.000-07:00

As I was winding down my book tour to southern California recently, I stopped at a cafe with new friends I'd made in a high desert town called Ridgecrest. The four of them had gathered to see me off after I'd done a book signing at the China Lake Navy Base nearby, followed by a discussion with local writers at Red Rock Books, a terrific independent bookstore.
My friends were clearly amused by my observations of desert life. They all ride motorcycles and routinely train their dogs to avoid rattlesnakes on the hiking paths. I'd come from New England and might as well have been dropped on the moon, that's how alien the landscape was: pale brown earth streaked red, abandoned mines, roads with improbable names like Twenty Mule Team Parkway, and even a Silver Dollar Saloon. Not a pine tree or maple sugar house in sight.
How did I get from a small coastal town in New England to the California desert to sign copies of my new paperback? It all started with an email from Vicki Rizzardini. She lives in Ridgecrest and started Red Rock Books; her stepdaughter runs the store now. Vicki had read my memoir, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter, and liked it, so she emailed me through my web site. I was ecstatic! After all, writers put words on the page to reach someone, and it's tough to know if you've done that. Sending your book out into the world is like having a kid go off to college and never bothering to call.
Vicki gave the book to her friend, Betty, an admiral's wife. Which, in turn, led me to screw up my courage and telephone the Navy Exchange at China Lake to see if I could do a book signing there. When they agreed, I thought what the heck, and called the Navy Base at Coronado, too.
“It's great that you're here, but do you actually make any money doing these book tours?” asked one man during my tour. “Was it worth coming?”
He had logically assumed, as most people do, that authors get sent on book tours by their publishers, and was perplexed when I admitted that I'd bought my own plane ticket.
Alas, the age of book tours is over. Every writer I know, with a few best-selling exceptions, has been told by their publicists and editors to just forget those bookstore appearances. “Nobody comes anymore,” they explain.
Sometimes they're right. At my best book signings, I've had a pretty good turnout – maybe 50 to 75 people. At my worst, I've had only one person show up, and that was an ex-lover I would have dearly loved to impress. Most of the time there are only a handful of people.
So why do a book tour, especially if you have to pay for it yourself? The reason bears repeating: we writers put our words on the page to reach someone.
Yes, I ponied up the money to go to California myself. Not a lot of money, since I could stay with friends in the three different locations I made appearances, but still, a plane ticket equals a lot of groceries. I paid out of pocket because I wanted to meet readers. I was especially interested in reaching out to Navy families, because my memoir centers around my father, a Navy Commander who became so obsessed by gerbils that we ended up on a farm with 9,000 of these pocket kangaroos.
Was it worth it? I mulled this over as I left Ridgecrest and drove through Red Rock Canyon, stunned by the beauty of the purple and red light in the sky over the stark hills. At the Navy base in Coronado, I had met a family with three girls; the oldest, a teenager, bought my book because she wants to be a veterinarian. I also chatted with a Navy nurse who bought the book for herself, because it was her birthday.
At China Lake, I talked with a Navy pilot who has a collection of over 300 books; he dreams of being a writer one day. There was a woman who bought four of my books as gifts for her sisters. At Red Rock Books, I talked with other writers about the future of publishing. We concluded that, no matter what form stories take, there will always be people who want to hear them.
Is a book tour worth it, if you pay for it yourself? Probably not, if you're just thinking about money. (Admittedly, it's hard not to.) I probably signed a total of 125 books that week in California. The royalties wouldn't even add up to a new pair of shoes.
But who knows? For every book I signed for someone, that someone might decide she likes it well enough to suggest it to her book club, or buy it for her mom. Word-of-mouth has always been one of the most powerful marketing strategies around.
Meanwhile, I got to see the splendor of the desert sky, to visit with old friends and make new ones, and to be inspired by readers eager to connect. What better reasons are there to keep writing?

Turkeys, Boltholes, and Self-Sustainability

2010-09-25T13:03:00.000-07:00

I live in a typical New England suburb: tall trees, a smattering of ranch houses, a few grand Colonials, a Cape or two. Yet, we still have our share of wild creatures, like the flock of turkeys I startled while walking my dogs, about a dozen prehistoric looking birds with gray wattles, brown feathers and clownishly large clawed feet.
As always, the turkeys proved to be as silly and indecisive as a flock of teenagers at the mall. As one started to dash across the road, two more followed. The others looked on anxiously, hesitant to make a run for it. This caused the three initially brave turkeys to question their own moxie and turn back partway, just as the first group decided to go for the gold and cross the road. Within a few seconds, all of the turkeys were milling around in the middle of the road, gobbling in distress.
The dogs and I finally moved forward. Turkeys scattered. As I watched them scramble up a bank, I thought about the book I'm reading, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer. It's a great read, funny and edgy and informative. The author, Novella Carpenter http://ghosttownfarm.wordpress.com/, describes how she created a garden in the middle of downtown Oakland, California on an abandoned patch of scrubby land. A central part of the narrative describes her decision to raise her own meat poultry. The first bird destined for the chopping block is a turkey named Harold, who she fattens up in anticipation of Thanksgiving dinner. I left off reading just as she was gathering Harold in her arms to bring him upstairs to the chopping block.
Seeing the turkeys this morning led me to wonder whether I could kill my own meat, and to ask myself why my family isn't more self-sufficient. I have a yard, enough land to grow vegetables, and there's no zoning in my neighborhood against raising chickens. Why don't I raise my own carrots and tomatoes? I could even have a stand of corn. And, if I'm willing to eat meat, shouldn't I also be willing to kill my own?
Thus far, I've rationalized my decision to buy every morsel I consume with this PC mantra: “I'm a busy working mom; I buy local; I recycle; I eat organic foods where it makes sense; I try not to eat much red meat;” etc. Hey, what more could any green-thinking progressive do?
I could raise my own food, that's what. I've been like Rip Van Winkle, sleepwalking my way through life. Yes, I drive a Honda with 155,600 miles on it and try to cook everything we eat instead of relying on packaged foods, but I'm newly awake and aware that I've become a lazy domestic animal accustomed to choosing from 514 brands of cereal on the grocery store shelves.
We've become a country where most of us take it for granted that food arrives on the table, as long as we can make the money to buy it. But making that money leads to lifestyles so far removed from the land that we never think about how much effort and energy it takes to produce what we eat.
This month, my husband and I made an offer on a small fixer-upper farmhouse with an acre of land and two barns on Prince Edward Island, Canada. We made the offer on a whim after seeing the house from the road and peering in its windows. The house has been abandoned for years; we're going up for a home inspection on Columbus Day weekend to see if the house will stand up until we can funnel the time and energy into it to make it a year-round home again.
PEI is a place where everything is about the weather, since the bulk of the Island's revenue comes from tourism and farming. Behind our house is a sheep farm, and across the street and on either side, the farmers raise wheat and potatoes.
Prince Edward Island is famous for its potatoes; the island produces over 20,000 pounds of potatoes each year, and over one-half of the island's total farm receipts came from potatoes alone in 2006 (www.peipotato.org). The island even has a potato museum http://www.peipotatomuseum.com/site/index.htm.
What could we grow on the island? Potatoes, surely. I'm guessing that an acre of land would be plenty for carrots and broccoli, tomatoes and chickens, fruit trees and whatever else we needed to sustain our own family, too.
My mother says this is crazy talk. She's thrilled to pay someone else to grow her food. She and my father lived through the depression; Mom's dad raised rabbits and chickens to get them through, and even when her parents came to live with us on the gerbil farm (http://www.authorhollyrobinson.com/), Grandfather insisted on having a half-acre vegetable garden, geese, sheep, and a flock of chickens. He and my grandmother froze, preserved, or canned everything we didn't eat over the summer and fall. He even made his own dandelion and apple wines.
“You never know when the world is going to end,” Grandfather joked, but of course to him it wasn't a joke.
It isn't a joke to us any more, either. The economists say that the recession ended a year ago. Ha! I don't know about you, but I must have slept through that, too. After walking the dogs and scaring the turkeys, I hopped in my car to drive to the gym. There was a bankruptcy notice on the gym door. A house down the road from us just went into foreclosure, and three other businesses in town have shuttered their doors. Several of my friends have been out of work for months. This is only small potatoes, so to speak, compared to what the midwest has faced; I drove through Ohio and Michigan last summer to visit my husband's family, and nearly every small town we drove through was a ghost town.
Yeah, I know I'm late, jumping on the self-sustainability bandwagon. I had college friends who were determined to go organic, get back to the land, dumpster dive, whatever. I made total fun of them. But now I think it's time for us to imagine a different life for ourselves.
What if? What if we could be more independent? What if we found a bolthole – Prince Edward Island, in our case – and figured out how to put food on the table ourselves? If Novella Carpenter can do it in Oakland, surely I can do it in rural Canada. I just need to quit being like those indecisive turkeys gobbling in the middle of the road.

A Survivor's Guide to Watching The American

2010-09-11T10:12:00.000-07:00

I'm no girly girl when it comes to movies. I like action – Broken Arrow still ranks as one of my all-time favorite movies – and nothing saves a rainy day like Austin Powers. So I went with great expectations to see George Clooney in The American. I love seeing Mr. Clooney, shirtless and spaniel-eyed, acting his heart out with those minimalist jaw twitches that pass for deep angst. Having just gobbled down The Girl with the Dragoon Tattoo, I was eager to view Clooney tromping around a snowy Swedish landscape. I was also looking forward to the Italian setting without having to suffer through Julia Roberts eating her heart out in Eat, Pray, Love to reach a size 6 on a fat day.
However, I'm sorry to report that I drifted into sleep mode halfway through The American. I had to let my mind roam to get my money's worth and make it to the end. Here are some of the questions that kept me awake that night:

Why do Swedish assassins look like Saturday Night Live comics?
Where did all of the people in that cute Italian hilltop town go while Clooney endlessly wandered their curvy stone streets?
Is it really a rule that hookers don't kiss their clients on the mouth? Also, if a john gives a hooker oral sex, as Clooney's character Jack apparently does with the prostitute Clara (Violante Placido), is the hooker then so grateful that she kisses him anyway? Most women I know would rather kiss on the mouth before oral sex.
In the scene where they swim by the river, was Clara's thong arranged deliberately to ride up one beautiful butt cheek? Or does she have the same problem with thongs that most women do, which is why we're always backing into corners to pluck them free?
Just how did Jack make that gun out of car parts? There are endless scenes of him machining parts that could rival CSI: Miami's porno lab sequences, but there are some steps missing here. Like, a hundred. It looked to me like he bought a perfectly serviceable gun to begin with. And is it really that profitable to handcraft a gun and sell it on the black market?
Do they sell that wash-and-wear color that lets ace sniper Mathilde (Thekla Reuten) change her hair color every day? There could be a big profit in that. Maybe more than in guns.
Obviously, director Anton Corbijn is paying homage to the Spaghetti Western here – a movie typically made by Italians, starring Italian actors and one American, as in Clint Eastwood movies. There's even a meta movie moment here, where a Spaghetti Western is playing on the little TV in the bar where Clooney takes his lonely self every night. But why remake them at all?
Couldn't Corbijn have come up with a friskier music score? The relentless drilling of the dirge-like background music here made my teeth ache.
Clooney is cast as a sensitive, regretful assassin. You know, good at his job, but guilty about his sins, yadda yadda. In case we don't get that on our own, we have the wise priest in this movie (Paolo Bonacelli, who has the world's most photogenic face) tell us this in a series of cliches. If we're still too thick to understand that Jack is a real human, not a cartoon, he has a butterfly tattoo and reads butterfly books! He even knows which species are endangered! And – spoiler alert – in his final tragic scene, as the hooker with the heart of gold and the pink thong gets Jack's gobs of cash, we get to see one of those little endangered fellas fly away. What are we to conclude from this? That movies like this are endangered?
Maybe there's a happy ending to The American after all.

Do College Costs + Retirement = Canada?

2010-09-07T11:56:00.000-07:00

“So how long do you plan to keep working?” asked a friend recently, after he'd waxed poetic about his own crafty retirement plan (take his pension at 65, sell his Massachusetts house and move to Florida, play tennis year-round, live happily ever after).
“Um. Forever?” I suggested. “I plan to die at my keyboard.”
I wasn't joking. Between the economic free fall and putting kids through college, my husband and I will be working for the rest of our lives.
That's why we made an offer on a house in Canada yesterday.
Why Canada? I've loved Prince Edward Island, Canada, ever since I started vacationing there some fifteen years ago. The island is gorgeous (see photos at http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?_adv_prop=image&fr=yfp-t-892-s&va=prince+edward+island+canada), laid back, friendly, green-minded, and there's fiddle music everywhere you go. It felt like home the first moment I hiked the red dirt roads between flowering potato fields.
“Yes, that's fine, but what about the winter?” various friends countered, so I tried traveling to PEI then, too, and found other things to love, like the ice fishing shacks stacked like bright Legos along Malpeque Bay and the snow tornadoes rising like long-skirted fairies in the fields.
But I digress. We made an offer on a house located in the remote eastern corner of PEI because there's no way that my husband and I can afford to retire here in the U.S. We haven't seen the inside of the house – there was no realtor around, and we had to leave the next day – but we peered into the windows from the rotted deck, and we'd seen the listing sheet online. We know that this farmhouse supposedly has five bedrooms and two bathrooms.
We also know that the house is being sold “as is.” That's a little scary, because Canadian realtors tend to be honest to a fault. When I surf www.mls.ca with these simple criteria: “Prince Edward Island, $25,000 to $75,000 price range, two bedrooms or more,” I regularly read descriptions like these: “This house has been neglected. Needs a strong arm.” Or, “Small country home that has been left vacant for a few years. Needs a real clean up. The property has no source of heat. Had a wood stove and previous owner took it.”
With this particular house, the phrase that struck me was this one: “Being sold with furnishings and other items too numerous to mention.” What happened to the owner, I wondered, that he would flee or fade away without emptying his house?
Finally, I called our realtor, Anne. She's a trim, no-nonsense woman who used to make her living fishing for lobster; last summer, she showed me a few houses while wearing knee-high green rubber boots. “I don't know where the old fella went that lived there,” she said, “but I can call his nephew down the road and find out more if you're interested.”
That's how the island works: if you know one person, you know six, without any degrees of separation. When Anne called back, though, she couldn't tell me much. Apparently this was an estate sale, someone's children selling it for someone who had died. The “old fella,” presumably.
“What about the septic system?” I asked.
“Doubt anybody knows much about that,” Anne said.
“How do I know if I'd have to replace it?”
“Guess you'd have to just dig it up,” she said. “But I wouldn't recommend it. You might want to leave it be.”
“You mean we'd just buy the house, and hope for the best?” I asked.
“That's about the size of things,” she said. “If it fails, you'd know it.”
This did not sound promising. On the other hand, if the old fella hadn't been using the septic system in a while, everything probably had time to drain.
So we made the offer, and now we're waiting to see if it was accepted. We'll find out this Friday. Meanwhile, I'm biting my nails.
Despite the fact that we love PEI – and this house, in particular, with its charming century-old architecture, peaceful farmland views, and proximity to our favorite beach – I know that this plan is more whimsical than logical. For starters, we have no money. Like so many people, we were nearly flattened by the economic downturn. My husband was laid off twice and two of the start-up companies he joined went under. We struggled to stay afloat as our oldest child started college and we paid health care costs out of pocket for one year, then a second. We finally decided to sell our house and buy a smaller one.
That's when the real estate market crashed. Our first buyer pulled a runner after we'd gotten locked into buying that smaller house, so we ended up with a bridge loan for a year, until we found another buyer. Goodbye, savings. Hello, credit cards.
With no spare cash under our mattress, we'll now have to dip into our retirement funds to finance the purchase of this house. Yet another bad idea: Why take a 10 percent hit, rather than wait until we're old enough to pull the money out without having to pay taxes on it?
Our only arguments in favor of doing so are admittedly weak: our retirement funds are stagnating with the limp stock market, making us think real estate can't be worse, and the PEI house we want to buy is one that we can easily imagine loving full-time. Plus, it's for sale right now at an asking price that's half of its assessed value.
“Prince Edward Island is too far away,” another friend complains. “Why can't you find a retirement spot closer to home?”
Where could we go? Ohio? Pennsylvania? Tennessee? Even those states are more expensive. We're not alone in thinking that Canada is the answer. Far from it: the number of U.S. citizens choosing to live in Canada hit a 30-year high recently (http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=2101397c-fe7c-4adf-a2d1-8665cb29ac66&k=0
The last time Canada saw such an enormous influx of U.S. citizens was during the political turmoil of the Vietnam war. Now, many are choosing Canada both for economic and political reasons. Our own reasons are simple: we love Canada, and the cost of living in the U.S. has killed us. Once our kids are grown, we imagine eventually selling this house in New England, which is about the same size as the one on PEI but worth ten times more. We'll have red dirt roads and fiddle music, potato fields and freshly steamed mussels to keep us happy. We'll still be working until we drop to pay back our debts. But we can freelance remotely for the same U.S. companies from Canada – my husband as a software engineer, me as a writer – while we make goat cheese, have a few hens of our own, and grow our own vegetables, all without a crippling mortgage and punishing health care costs.
It's a crazy dream. But it's less of a fiscal nightmare than what we've experienced here.
Or am I missing something? Should we back out of this house deal now, while there's still time to be sensible?

Is the Grass Greener in Canada?

2010-09-01T11:01:00.000-07:00

I was vacationing in Prince Edward Island, Canada this summer when I came across this article in The Globe and Mail: “The World Would Love to Be Canadian” (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/g8-g20/news/the-world-would-love-to-be-canadian/article1612707/). The writer, Joe Friesen, cites this startling statistic: “Given the choice, 53 percent of adults in the world's 24 leading economies said they would immigrate to Canada.”
I'm teetering on the edge of joining them.
This isn't a whimsical decision on my part. It's been brewing since 1974, when my father took our family on our one and only camping trip. He rented an RV and we headed north from Massachusetts to Prince Edward Island, which he described as “a peaceful emerald isle of enchantment, where the sands are red and the waters sparkle silver.” Dad had never read Anne of Green Gables (http://www.anneofgreengables.com/), but he made PEI sound tantalizing, like the Land of Oz without the Wicked Witch and her horrible flying monkeys.
Sadly, my mother did not take to camping. “Just more chores for me!” she declared, and forced us to turn around in Maine after driving a grand total of four hours. My parents were divorced soon after that.
Fast forward to my own divorce. When my first husband and I split up, I had two young children; I was dead set on giving them a family vacation, man or no man. Affording a beach vacation in New England was impossible on my single-parent salary, so I convinced a friend and her kids to join us on a week-long trip to Prince Edward Island after spotting an ad for a cottage there that rented for just $400 a week.
We drove twelve hours north from Massachusetts with our kids making more noise in that van than most rock concerts. Between the various stops to pee and feed them all, it was midnight by the time we reached the island. (In those days, the only way to get to PEI was the ferry.) The cottage was on a rutted red dirt road (still plenty of those up there, for all of you Anne of Green Gables fans). I was shaking with fatigue by the time we arrived. It was pitch black all around us, but the sky was a bowl of stars and we could smell the sea.
We woke the next morning to the sound of fiddle music. I sat up and looked out my window at Rustico Bay, where great blue herons dotted the shore. Tall purple and pink lupins waved like some Disney cartoon animation; I half expected the flowers to sing. Across the bay was a tall white church, and that's where the fiddle music was coming from: a festival that we attended that very afternoon. I was hooked on PEI from that moment on.
I've gone back to Prince Edward Island every summer for the past 14 years, and sometimes in the fall or even winter, when the snow blows across the potato fields and the roads disappear out from under you. There is never a time when I don't love it.
Yes, there are certainly moments while driving up Route 95 through Maine (where the State motto should be “Maine, the Infinite State”) when I think, “This is so not worth it.” Even in New Brunswick, where I've come to love the Bay of Fundy's rocky shoreline and the long stretches of farmland with their big brown loaves of hay and spotted cows, I sometimes think, “Why can't I find a closer place to love?” Then I cross the Confederation Bridge from the mainland to Prince Edward Island and fall in love with the place all over again. The colors seem brighter and the air is clearer here than anywhere else on earth.
The Globe and Mail article reports that more than three-quarters of those surveyed in China said they'd prefer to live in Canada, followed by Mexico and India at nearly 70 percent. Most respondents perceived Canada as a place where rights and freedoms are respected on a deeper level than anywhere else.
Is this true? By now, I've explored most parts of Canada, including many of its cities, from Vancouver to Ottawa, from Montreal to St. John. There is urban blight, as there is in the U.S., and visible evidence of unemployment – the Canadian unemployment rate is just over 8 percent overall. Certainly Canada isn't free of crime or substance abuse. The last time I was in St. John with my mother, one drunken spacey fellow stepped onto the escalator behind Mom and rested his chin on her shoulder, passing out for a second until she barked at him to back off.
Yet, wherever I've been in Canada, there is an overall feeling of goodwill from most people – my husband calls most Canadians “pathologically friendly” because of their willingness to chat you up – and generosity abounds. Most recently, I was staying at a friend's house on PEI when another friend brought her bike over for my husband to pump up the tire. Within minutes, we were joined by two other neighbors, both asking if we needed help. They stayed for an hour.
Three years ago, my brother and I went in on a small summer cottage on PEI. It's a typical cottage, mostly porch, overlooking Malpeque Bay. I bought it online, sight unseen, and we've camped out in it happily every summer, renting out empty weeks to help sustain the costs of having an extra house. This summer, I spotted the perfect year-round house for sale in the more remote eastern part of the island, near our favorite beach. Now we're trying to decide whether to buy that one as well. This sounds luxurious, even decadent, this idea of having second homes – but neither costs more than most new cars here.
If we bought the farmhouse, I imagine one day retiring there with my second husband, or living there half of every year after the last of our five kids is off to college. I dream of raising alpacas and selling the wool; my husband is arguing on behalf of goats and cheese-making. Both are pipe dreams at this point. Sensibly, we'd probably do better just doing what we do now: writing and software engineering. But it's the simplicity of having a ramshackle farmhouse on Prince Edward Island that lures us – and the good neighbors I know we'd find there.
Should we, or shouldn't we, go for this dream? Am I fooling myself about Canada because the news headlines here are so awful (think war, oil spills, harsh immigration legislation)? Is it a purely escapist impulse, the kind we all have when fantasizing about living in our favorite vacation spots, that makes me want to flee north of the border? Or is Canada really a better place to live?

The Author Photo: Where's My Body Double When I Need Her?

2010-08-10T13:16:00.000-07:00

Occasionally, I'm lucky enough to be invited to visit with book club members who have chosen my memoir as their monthly selection. I make a point of joining any book club within half a day's drive, because the members inevitably have such sharp observations that I always come away with something new to think about.
Last night was no exception. In fact, I was stubbing my toe on sharp observations before I'd even made it through the front door.
“You're the author?” asked a woman in obvious disbelief as I headed up the sidewalk and greeted several people gathered on the porch.
“I am,” I said, waving my book as proof. “It's an honor to be here. Thank you for inviting me.”
This woman continued to stare at me as I climbed up the steps. She wasn't hostile, exactly, but she was looking at me in a way that made me glance down quickly to be sure that I'd remembered the essentials: my purse, my notes, my pants.
While we waited for the hostess to answer the doorbell, this woman and I stood eye-to-eye while the other book club members shifted their feet around us like nervous ponies ready to bolt. “Were you expecting another author tonight instead?” I asked after a few moments.
My challenger shook her head vehemently. “Oh, no. We read your book for tonight. I just expected you to be...” and here she deliberately paused to look at the author photo on the back of the book. “Taller,” she finished.
“And younger?” I suggested.
“Well,” she said, and then the hostess opened the door.
Saved, I thought, but no. This woman wasn't done with me yet.
“When did you have this picture taken?” she demanded.
“Not soon enough,” I said. “I probably should have gotten it taken ten years ago, at least.”
With that, thankfully, everyone laughed and we moved into the house, where things proceeded more normally.
Still, her remarks stung. I had struggled, like all writers do, with finding the “right” look for my author photo. Unless you're Stephen King or Jodi Picoult, the publisher doesn't send you out on tour or pay for your book jacket photo. Most authors are left to sink or swim on our own dimes. Some of us ask our husbands and friends to take our pictures, while others bravely go out and risk paying for a professional photographer, hoping this might make a difference in sales.
How much does an author photo really count when it comes to selling the book? I have no idea. I only knew that I didn't want to end up with an author photo like any of the ones that Catherine Lacey gathered for her recent blog http://htmlgiant.com/author-news/author-photo-failures , all of which I'd seen while snooping at my local library to consider the photographic possibilities.
The thing is, how many possibilities are there for an author's photo? You can do black-and-white (artsy and classic) or color (fun and contemporary). Beyond that, your decisions are still limited: head on hand or arms folded? Smiling or not serious? Leaning or not leaning? And, if you are leaning, do you lean on a tree or a barn or a fence? That's about it. Oh, unless you want to add a pet (a dog if you're a mystery writer, a cat if you're a romance writer, a camel if you're a travel writer).
Not a lot to choose from, right? Plus, for writers like me, with a mortgage and kids in college, funds are sorely limited. I knew that I'd be lucky to afford a passport photo at my local post office. (Yes, I considered it.)
Then I had another creative brainstorm: What if I just hired my daughter as a body double? She's 21, blonde, blue-eyed and gorgeous. It wouldn't matter what kind of photo or pose she took, because my daughter is in that flawless bloom of young womanhood where she could be wearing a paintball mask and still look good.
Books might not sell better with a gorgeous author, but it couldn't hurt. I wished that I had the sort of look that can sell a book, like the young and lovely Vindala Vida, author of The Lovers, or exotic Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Unaccustomed Earth. Hotties have an easier time marketing just about anything in our society, from detergent to shoes – unless you go in the other direction and market a product with someone noticeably dorky, like that little troll of a guy who has built his empire out of playing the downtrodden Windows PC guy on those Mac commercials.
If I used a body double, though, I'd have to send her to my book signings and media appearances. What would I do if I ever ended up on The Today Show or Jon Stewart? I couldn't disappoint Jon Stewart! He's the conscience of our country!
On the other hand, there was some merit in this idea: If I had a body double, I'd get a lot more writing done. And my daughter loves to travel.
In the end, though, I let go of the body double idea. Here's the real truth: I wanted to be on my own book jacket. After all, my book and I had traveled this far together. How could I abandon my memoir now?
In the end, I hired a neighbor – an art student who is building a photography business from the ground up http://mariahgale.com/ and was therefore in my price range. Mariah lives across the street and came over one evening to photograph me in the back yard. The process was painless mainly because she was so chatty and relaxed.
Mariah had experience photographing weddings and children, so she had no trouble moving me around various props: an old Adirondack chair, the back garden, the porch. She used a digital camera and was familiar with the many tricks used to massage portraits to perfection. I made her promise not to flatter me too much; on the other hand, I told her that it was fine to make me “look just a little better.”
She did a terrific job. In these photographs, I look older than my daughter, but younger than I am – which was apparently what threw off this particular book club member.
What I love most about my author photo is that there are all kinds of clues to my life: I'm wearing the silver earrings that my daughter and I bought together on a trip to Mexico, as well as the bright woven shawl that my stepdaughter brought me from France. There's a birdhouse in the background that one of my neighbors made me. My dog is there, too, though you can't see him because of the way the pictures are cropped: a white Pekingese that joined our family because I was so sad when my son went away to college.
The author photo does exactly what I wanted it to do: It is a portrait of me, welcoming readers into my life.

Sniffing and Sobbing My Way through So You Think You Can Dance

2010-07-11T13:53:00.001-07:00

Okay, I admit it: I cried when So You Think You Can Dance judge Nigel Lithgow announced that contestant Alex Wong was going to have to leave the show due to an injury.
I'm sure I was in good company. Like most viewers, I replayed the stunning hip hop routine Alex did with Twitch at least half a dozen times. Wow. Besides, there isn't another reality show on television that provides so many sobfests. Whether it's in homage to a fluid contemporary dance routine or in solidarity with a gushing contestant, I can count on judge Adam Shankman (who I want to be my very own BFF) to get the waterworks going. In fact, I imagine people in living rooms around the country grabbing for tissues as soon as Adam tears up.
Like Adam, I've always been a weep-aholic. I used to lie under the coffee table during certain TV shows because my brother always teased me if I cried. I'd try to hide the sniffles, but my dad would always catch me sliding away and yell, “Holly's leaving us now!” as I belly-snaked along the floor to my Cave of Sorrow beneath the coffee table.
Now that I'm adult, and a mother besides, I cry even more easily: over the newspaper's headlines of doom, during NPR's even gloomier reports, whenever friends admit scary medical problems or divorces, during certain songs on the radio. Now it's my children who throw me under the bus, rolling their eyes at each other and saying, “Mom's crying again!” as I'm trying to choke down a sob in their dry-eyed company. I couldn't even sit through ten minutes of Up without grabbing for the hankies, and I'm afraid to see Toy Story 3 because I know that seeing Andy leave for college will really push me over the edge.
Which brings me back to So You Think You Can Dance. I'm a newbie to reality TV shows. I started watching this show last year, and like any other creeping addiction, this one had me by the throat before I noticed the needle in my arm. I followed it right to the end, rooting for Jakob and Catherine without knowing anything about how, or why, they were better dancers than the others.
I don't feel the least bit guilty for watching. Unlike most reality TV shows, this one is actually instructive. I had dance lessons as a child, but quit (like many) because it was hard work and people kept trying to tell me what to do. Later, I signed up for a jazz dance class in high school – friends talked me into it – and all I remember from that was this monotonous series of steps to Van Morrison's “It's a Marvelous Night for a Moonbeam,” a song I still can't hear without side-stepping and lifting my arms.
Watching So You Think You Can Dance, I've learned about fluidity and toe pointing, partnering and extensions, different dance styles, why the Quickstep is the Kiss of Death, and the importance of conveying character through dance – sometimes by making your gestures “small” instead of large and overwrought, as Adam taught contestant Kent Boyd, the sweet jug-eared boy from Ohio, last week. (Was that kiss between him and Lauren for real? Sure looked like it to me. You're a long way from Wapakoneta, Kent.) I have even started attending live dance performances in my area because of the show.
I wish I could dance. Instead, I can only marvel: How do these incredible athletes perform such feats of strength – while pretending to be dolls trapped in boxes, hunters and jaguars, Ninja assassins or lovers at a prom? And how do they make me cry almost every time?
I'm going to sit right here with my box of tissues until I figure it out.

From One Book Cover to Another: Saying Goodbye to My Gerbils

2010-07-09T11:36:00.000-07:00

The paperback of my memoir was released recently, but I barely recognize my own book with the new cover. It hurts my heart to say goodbye to the gerbils on the hardcover edition of The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter. But what else can I do?
In the publishing world, a lot of money and talent is poured into creating the perfect image and identity for every book. You can't always judge a book by its cover, but a cover definitely helps sell the book.
On the grand totem pole of decision making, the author is usually among the last to see a book's cover – after the designers, editors, marketing and sales teams, and publicist. Last year, when the editor of The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter emailed me the cover design for the first time, I was as sweaty-palmed as a girl on her first date. I had reason to be nervous: Since my brother and I were both models for my father's pet books about gerbils, I'd sent the publisher plenty of embarrassing photos to choose from, like that portrait of me at age 12, looking cross-eyed at two gerbil butts while I demonstrate how easy it is to tell males from females.
When I finally took a deep breath and clicked on the editor's attachment, up popped an image that made me laugh out loud: Two gerbils – one brown, one spotted – peeping out of a pair of kiwi-green rubber boots with red trim. It was perfect. I'd even had rubber boots like that when I was a child. What better way to portray the comic story of an eccentric Navy man who became obsessed enough with gerbils to raise nearly 9,000 of them, with his entire family along for the adventure?
The book was launched in May 2009. For the past year, those gerbils have accompanied me to teach classes and do readings, sign books and serve as a pet judge at The American Gerbil Show. Fans seemed to love the cover. One woman put it this way: “That cover just says 'pick me up and read me!'” The book cover was on my web site, and I carried roll-up posters with my gerbils and rubber boots to various events. For a while I even contemplated buying a pair of adult-sized green rubber boots.
Then, as the publisher was getting the paperback ready, I got this startling news: they were creating a new cover. “No more gerbils,” my editor said.
When I asked why, she explained the decision this way: “We'd like your book to reach a wider audience.” She hesitated, then added delicately, “You know, some women just don't like rodents.”
I do know that. My own mother, despite being married to a gerbil farmer, never did develop any fondness for them at all. So what if gerbils put food on our table? “They have tails like rats,” Mom always said. “Ew.”
So, once again, I waited anxiously as the publisher tested different designs with focus groups. I saw two of them – both black-and-white photos of young girls with their backs to the camera, one in a white slip and the other in a bikini – and had mixed feelings. I know that flesh sells. It's also true that black-and-white photos somehow carry more artistic heft. These potential book covers for the paperback of my own memoir were both lovely, moody images in the category of some of my favorite memoirs, like The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls or The Liars' Club by Mary Karr.
On the other hand, they weren't very cheerful pictures, and my own childhood, though decidedly bizarre, was a lot less tragic than theirs. Should my book go out into the world – to beaches and airports, subways and living rooms – with a moody black-and-white photo? I didn't really think so.
At last, my editor sent me the final design for the paperback of The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter. I was so nervous that I made my husband stand beside me while I clicked on the attachment.
Once again, I had to laugh. Because apparently those at the top of the publishing totem pole had come to much the same conclusion that I had: Instead of a black-and-white photo of an adolescent girl poised for something to happen to her, the new cover has a little girl in a polka-dotted play suit running up a hill toward some flowering trees, pigtails flying. She isn't waiting for something to happen to her. She is, instead, gleefully running toward her next adventure.
Admittedly, it's a bit odd, as the author of a memoir, to see my book flashing a photograph of someone who definitely isn't me. I can't help but remember the covers of those other memoirs I've read and loved that have color photographs, like the chubby baby on A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel, and wonder now if those are the author's own photos.
In the end, I suppose what really matters is that the new cover of The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter exudes the energy and joy of a quirky, free-roaming childhood. The design captures the essence of the book, if not the literal subject matter. That little girl and I will become fast friends as we carry my book out into the world together.

Now that School is Out, What Did They Really Learn?

2010-07-05T08:51:00.000-07:00

“So what do they teach at that new school, anyway?” my friend Donna asked recently. “Does Aidan still learn math and science? Will he be ready for high school?”
School has been out for a week now, and the kids have moved on to whatever they're doing this summer, notebooks and backpacks happily abandoned in whatever closet they'll live in until we dust them off in September. So Donna's question took me by surprise.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Of course he learned math.”
“I thought it was an alternative school,” she pressed. “What kind of education is it?”
Last fall, my son Aidan started seventh grade at the public junior high school. It was a disaster; my son hated it so much that I had to crowbar him out of the house.
What didn't he like?
Everything. Mostly, Aidan was bored. In his view: There were too many classes. The homework was stupid. The bus ride was too long.
“What a complainer,” my mother sniffed. “Just make him get up and go. Everyone goes to school. You did.”
I did, it was true. And I hated school too. Especially junior high. I was bored. In my view: There were too many classes. The homework was stupid. The bus ride was too long.
Whoops.
Our four older children went to the public high school and did well. All got into good colleges. This caboose of a child is a different story. Aidan isn't the type to sit still when bored. No, he's the kind of kid who, when he wants excitement, will make his own, like the day he got busted in elementary school for running a casino at his desk. His favorite times in seventh grade were when he got sent to the principal's office.
“At least then I'm not sitting in some boring class,” he said.
I had to do something before trouble became Aidan's favorite pastime. I met with his teachers, who just said he had to learn to sit still and control his impulsive behavior. They whispered about ADHD.
I already knew that Aidan had attention and organization problems. I also knew that, under certain circumstances, he could focus better than anyone.
After visiting several private schools in our area, I stumbled across a small Montessori school. Amazingly, they had an opening mid-fall in their seventh grade. Even more amazingly, when I described Aidan's progress, or lack of it, they were up to the challenge.
I knew nothing about Montessori. But I was at the end of my rope: Aidan had to go somewhere that wasn't the school he was in, and nobody else had any openings. I took a deep breath and made the switch.
For a long time, I worried, as Donna did, that Aidan might be missing out by not being in the public school. I quizzed my friends whose children were in seventh grade about what their kids were doing in math, social studies, English, and science to see if I could pinpoint anything that Aidan was missing. I worried, too, that by “letting” him act out in school instead of making him “sit up and fly right,” as my father would have put it, I might be doing Aidan a disservice. We all have to go to school, learn how to get along with others, and put up with supervisors who bore us. Was I spoiling Aidan by pulling him out of the public school? Would he emerge uneducated and unprepared for the so-called “real world?” because he was now going to a crazy school where the kids call the teachers by their first names, wear slippers to class, and can eat snack whenever they want?
Fast forward six months. It is nearly summer, and for their culminating event, Aidan and his classmates at the Montessori School are performing Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. On a real stage, with real costumes and lights. I'm sitting in the audience, and there is Aidan on stage as Lysander, holding hands with Hermia. Aidan is wearing a tunic and tights. He is saying his lines. He is not the best actor on stage, but he's into it, waving his hands around and managing to lie still with his eyes closed while Puck dances wildly around his head.
If you had asked me what I wanted Aidan to learn during his first year of middle school, I would have said math, science, social studies, and maybe how to write a book review. I would never have predicted that Aidan would create, as he did at this school, a model of a half-size camel, which he presented while spouting facts about the desert biome. I never would have predicted how much Aidan loved volunteering with senior citizens, as his middle school does once each week. And I certainly never could have imagined the stories I heard about how, during the middle school field trip backpacking in the White Mountains, Aidan stood up as the moon was rising and started reciting lines from Midsummer Night's Dream.
Did my son learn math at his new school, Donna? Oh yes. He studied language arts and geography, current events and science, too.
But what Aidan really learned was much more important than any of that: His new Montessori school gave Aidan the confidence to be creative and joyful, to ask questions and seek the answers himself. As his teacher wrote in her final progress report, Aidan “embraced learning to understand, rather than studying to get a specific grade on a test.”
And that, to me, is a real education.

A Writer's First Year: Seven Ways to Be Your Own Web Butler

2010-06-03T08:12:00.000-07:00

I first discovered that the Internet is a magical land when my DVR cut off a recording of American Idol before I found out who got kicked off. I raced to my computer, typed in, “Who lost on AI?” Within seconds, I had the answer.
That's what convinced me that maybe there really is something to this Internet marketing thing for books.
I didn't want to believe this. I'm a writer, which is the opposite of being a marketer. We writers like to sit around alone in our flannel pajamas and slippers, not answering our cell phones and blissfully swilling tea. Marketers dress up and go out into the world, or pull the world toward them by using just the right spin on the phone or online.
When I published my first book last year, I got my very own marketing person courtesy of my publisher. My marketer is beautiful in the intimidating way of a TV news anchor still young enough to be on prime time: ethereal, tall, slim, and naturally blonde. She wears the kind of shoes I always thought were especially manufactured for episodes of Sex and the City.
In fact, in my own mind, that's what I named my new marketing person: Sex and the City. I was, after all, no longer alone in my barn, but encapsulated with my marketer in a 13th floor office of Random House in New York City.
Sex and the City informed me that she would work closely with my publicist. Then she started speaking in a foreign tongue that almost sounded like English, except that it was peppered with scary indecipherable phrases like “create a buzz,” “blog tour,” “domain names” and “before your launch.”
When Sex and the City discovered that I neither blogged nor commented on other people's blogs, she instructed me to start. Now. As in, yesterday.
I was paralyzed with fear. I still used my laptop like a glorified typewriter and encyclopedia: I liked to write on it, and when I needed to know something, I Googled it.
Now I was expected to take action online. I didn't have a web site, I'd never bought a domain name, and I had no idea how to use Facebook, despite the fact that it's been around so long that most of my friends have moved on to tweeting. I didn't want to do this. I wanted a Web Butler who could open doors for me and introduce me to strangers. Preferably one like the butler Batman had in the first movie.
Little by little, though, I tiptoed deeper online and conquered my fear. Along the way, I made some key discoveries about marketing books online:

1. Domain names are easy to buy and cost a lot less than shoes. I went to GoDaddy and had no trouble navigating the site, at least while my husband held my hand and told me when to click the mouse. (I ran into a slight difficulty because that greedy actress, Holly Robinson Peete, bought up all of my domain names. Then I realized that, as long as I bought something with my name contained within it, it would still come up just fine on Google.)

2. Web sites are like second homes. Once you own a domain name, you can put your web site on it. Within that, you can showcase anything you like: links to your articles and books, favorite web sites, pictures of your pets, your biography and blogs. I think of my web site as my other house. A house where it's very cheap and easy to add fresh linens, hang more pictures, or even add a hot tub.

3. Blogging is like writing in a journal. Blog posts don't have to be long, involved, sublimely crafted essays. They can just be short and informative. Blog posts can be a great way to meet other people who share similar interests; I now think of blogging as my virtual water cooler time.

4. Blogging is the opposite of writing in a journal. Writing in a journal is a very private act. Blogging is about as public as you can get, so be prepared for criticism. The first time I put up a blog post on The Huffington Post, for instance, I wrote about the American Idol showdown between Kris Allen and Adam Lambert last season. Who knew that so many people thought Mr. Vanilla Kris Allen shoulda won? Ouch.

5. Using other people's web sites and blogs is a great way to promote your book. If you have a book about motorcycles, or one that features a tattoo artist as the main protagonist, seek out web sites about those topics and see if they'll take a press release. Or search for blogs related to whatever you're writing about and comment on them. You can also do a blog tour.

6. The more time you spend online, the greater your visibility. This is a good thing if you're launching a book. Your goal is to get your name and your book title out there enough times so that the web crawlers will bring it up immediately for anyone who types in something related to you or your book topic.

7. The more time you spend online, the less time you have to actually write. Yes, I still wish that I had a Web Butler. The thing about putting time in online is that it can become, if not an addiction, a source of anxiety of the meltdown variety. If you blog, you get comments and feel compelled to respond. If you see a new book club web site, you can do a bio and a guest column for them! There's your Amazon author profile, your Goodreads fans, and those photos you meant to upload, oh my! Pretty soon you're lost in the forest and the Internet witch is threatening to throw apples at you and steal your little dog, too. Here's the thing: marketing online is a great way to publicize the book you've already written, but it's a lousy way to keep working on your new projects. After the first manic social sessions at this giant virtual water cooler, it's time for every good writer to return to doing what she does best: making sentences, one word at a time.

Can Any Woman Really Have It All?

2010-05-24T12:06:00.000-07:00

Every so often, I read something that makes me take a deep breath and reconsider my life choices, like “Judging Women” in the latest New York Times Magazine http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23FOB-wwln-t.html?ref=magazine.
In that piece, writer Lisa Belkin points out that, if Elena Kagan is confirmed by the Senate, there will be three women on the Supreme Court for the first time – and two will be single and childless.
Many people are ranting about this being a bad decision on the part of the Obama administration, their rationale being that we need a mother on the Supreme Court to truly represent our population. That's an interesting argument, but not the one that stopped me.
No, the bits and bobs that jumped out at me in this piece were the statistics gathered from author Sylvia Ann Hewlett, whose studies show that half of all high-achieving career women (those making at least $100,000) reach that age without having children.
Can a woman really have it all, as in marriage (or a lifelong partner), children, and a “high-achieving” career? That's what I've been thinking about today. You see, I have two college-age daughters, both of whom are driven academically, but also prone to falling in love. Oh, and they both adore kids.
What do I tell them about a woman's choices?
I came of age on the skirts of the women's liberation movement. My mother stayed home with us despite her college degree; in her day, a diploma was simply better bait for a better brand of husband. Nonetheless, my parents expected me to 1) get that college diploma, 2) marry, 3) have a career, and 4) give them grandchildren. All of which I've done, yet none of it turned out quite the way I thought it would.
I had already earned a master's degree and was working as a public relations director for a California school district when I met my first husband and got pregnant. It was a big job with big hours, yet I fully anticipated rushing back to the office after my 12-week maternity leave. I loved my job. I loved making money. Plus, what in the world would I do if I stayed home all day? Didn't babies sleep all of the time?
Ha. Within two months of becoming a mother, I recognized two truths: 1) Because my husband was in sales and traveled three weeks out of four, there was no way both of us could be gone all day, every day, without going broke on day care; and 2) I couldn't bear the thought of leaving this 8-pound person in the hands of anyone else. At least not yet.
After discussing our dilemma for weeks, we made what seemed like a rational decision: My husband earned three times as much money as I did, so he would continue working. I'd stay home for a year, maybe two, then get another full-time job.
We both breathed a sigh of relief as we fell into the roles we knew so well from our childhoods, since both of us had come from families with stay-at-home moms and fathers who traveled for business. In the meantime, I started working as a freelance writer, thinking I'd try to get a job in publishing. As a writer or editor, I reasoned, I could have more control over my work hours than I'd ever had in public relations. That would be a more compatible schedule with mothering. I was adjusting my sights, but still career-bound.
Again, fate bitch-slapped me with an unexpected wake-up call. My husband was promoted and traveled even more just as I got pregnant with our second child. Now day care costs would be even more astronomical. We decided that I should keep working part-time until the kids were in kindergarten.
Fast forward eighteen years. Husband #1 and I are divorced (but still friends). I have, for the most part, continued to raise our children while he has traveled. He rose through the ranks of his company to become a Really Big Cheese. Meanwhile, I kept freelancing. I took more jobs as the kids got older, but I was still the one on call for snow days and sick days, school vacations and summer, juggling what needs to be juggled by mothers everywhere.
I put motherhood before my career. That was my choice. Little did I know that, just by having a baby, I was jeopardizing my career and putting myself at risk for poverty, as so many studies around the world show (http://www.weawomenatwork.org.uk/topic-June-08---motherhood-and-poverty-g.asp, http://apps.olin.wustl.edu/macarthur/papers/gender-gap-SociologicalPerspectives.pdf

I am not complaining. I consider myself one of the luckier divorced mothers: I am now remarried and my second husband and I are happy. I love being a writer. But, damned if I didn't do it all over again and have another child with Husband #2.
Between us, my second husband and I have five children – two of his, two of mine, one of ours. He has a steady job as a software engineer. I have continued working as a freelance writer rather than go into another demanding public relations job, simply so somebody is here to manage doctor's appointments, school schedules, grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, whatever.
Husband #2 is a wonderful domestic partner when he's at home. He'd be a better stay-at-home parent than I would be in many ways. However, again the reality is that he makes more money than I do, and he has the health benefits. So, when somebody has to take a day off to meet the appliance repairman or take a kid to sports practices, it's me.
It's me, and it's most working mothers, who – even before we get to our desks every morning – have to wake kids and get them dressed, make breakfasts and lunches, throw in loads of laundry, bake for the PTO sale, fill in the permission slips for field trips, schedule haircuts and oil changes, figure out summer camp and day care and dinner. And, oh yeah, try to get to to our desks on time to meet deadlines. Maybe even while wearing matching socks.
Recently, as husband #1 and I were discussing college tuition expenses for our oldest child, he threw up his hands in frustration when he saw my tax returns and discovered how little money I made last year. “It was a tough year in publishing,” I told him.
“You could have been in sales like me,” he shot back.
He was right. I could have made more money if I'd seen less of our children. And I know he regrets having missed out on so much time with them.
On the other hand, I'm right, too: If I could just waltz out the door every morning and stay gone for eight-to-ten hour work days like the men in my life (and like the men in the lives of most other women I know), I could make a hell of a lot more money. I might have become president of my own PR firm or a New Yorker staff writer. Hell, I might even have become an astronaut or a Supreme Court judge. That would have been a fascinating, fulfilling life. But that wouldn't have been the right choice for me.
The way our society is currently structured, with so little parental leave and no subsidized child care, and very little support in the home by relatives, women can't have it all. Neither can men. All we can do is make our best choices, sacrifice what we must, and hope that we're doing the right thing for ourselves and for the people who depend on us.
That's the answer I'll give my daughters.

Cheers and Tears for American Idol Finalists Crystal and Lee: Singers with Heart

2010-05-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

It's easy to make fun of American Idol. There are the judges, filthy rich and full of themselves, so bored that they're passing notes and giggling, especially Sir Simon Cowell, who seems to have already checked out of the show mentally, even if his tightly-t-shirted body is still affixed to its chair. There's groovy Ryan Seacrest, the consummate TV host, smoothly chatting up contestants and building mass tension by moving Idols around like pawns on a chessboard. There are the tiresomely cheerful Ford commercials and tall red Coke cups. As Ke$ha would say, “Blah, blah, blah.” (http://www.downelink.com/downetv/video.aspx?url=74829-Keha--Blah-Blah-Blah-feat-3OH3)
Meanwhile, the cameras pan across the audience, lingering on the TV and movie stars planted there to flog their newest commercial ventures, or on the pretty girls swaying on cue with their hands in the air like seaweed as the tide comes in. It didn't help garner more viewers during Season 9 that the two finalists were 1) the clear frontrunners and 2) less mind-blowingly talented than past Idol contestants like Kelly Clarkson and Adam Lambert.
But, somehow, I cried and cheered harder this week for these two contestants than I have for any other. (Yeah, I know what you're thinking: Get a life.) Why? Because Crystal and Lee are both musicians with big hearts, soulful singers who love their families and hometowns with the kind of embarrassing fervor that makes us all stop and think, “Whoa. Maybe it's not such a bad time to be alive after all.”
Crystal is sly and subversive in the best way possible. She went along with the Idol program enough to keep herself from getting kicked off the show. She didn't cut her dreadlocks, but she did pin them up. She let the stylists slick her up with lip gloss and eyeshadow, and even stuffed herself into a gown and heels.
Yet, Crystal has stayed true to her Ohio roots, and is ready to tell anyone who will listen that the recession isn't nearly over for that hardscrabble state. That much was clear during her visit home – and during her conversation with Ryan, when Crystal said that it was only because of American Idol that she has the health care she needs. I cried when Crystal visited her farmhouse in Ohio, thinking about how many farmers, single moms and unemployed factory workers across American are rooting for her. Crystal's victory is something to hope for when everything else is lost.
Lee is that guy who could have sold you paint in the hardware store and wouldn't have gotten impatient if you dithered over colors. He's sexy mainly because he doesn't know that he is. (Husbands and boyfriends don't understand this.) He went home to Illinois; like Ohio, that state ranks among the top ten for unemployment. (Ohio is 40th with an unemployment rate of 11%; Illinois is 43rd; that state's unemployment rate hovers at 11.5% http://www.bls.gov/web/laus/laumstrk.htm.)
I thought I was done crying after Lee's soul-searing version of Cohen's iconic song “Hallelujah” on Tuesday night, but no. When Lee wept during his homecoming, overcome by gratitude for the flow of support from the people in Illinois who'd gathered to cheer him on, I cried right along with him. He reminded me of all of the parents like Lee's and Crystals, doing their best during tough times to give their kids a future that's about more than just survival.
Whether it's Crystal or Lee who gets crowned on Idol this season, it doesn't really matter. Both artists have given America a reason to cry, cheer, and move on from what's been ailing us.

HOW GLEE IS CHANGING THE WORLD, ONE 12 YEAR-OLD AT A TIME

2010-05-14T07:52:00.000-07:00

I've been following a couple of stories lately. One is about the Massachusetts Catholic school that recently accepted, then rejected an 8 year-old boy because his parents are lesbians (http://www.boston.com/yourtown/hingham/articles/2010/05). The other is that juicy media firefight sparked by “Straight Jacket,” the Newsweek story (http://www.newsweek.com/id/236999) questioning why heterosexual actors seem to play gay characters in films and on television, but gay actors can't return the favor (http://www.newsweek.com/id/236999). Part of that particular story focuses on the openly gay Broadway actor Jonathan Groff, who plays new heartthrob Jesse St. James on the television show Glee (http://www.fox.com/glee).
Glee is where the real story is, folks. With singing gay football players, Down Syndrome cheerleaders and dancing wheelchairs, Glee is changing the world, one 12 year-old at a time.
We're not an especially conservative family. I could use that “some of my best friends are gay” line without a blink. Our kids all have friends with gay parents. We live, after all, in Massachusetts, where you can't throw a pebble over your shoulder without bruising a liberal forehead.
Even here in gay-friendly Massachusetts, however, we have a long way to go. Kids still fling around “fag” and “queer” as insults at the high school. There is a valid fear that the same-sex marriage law will be repealed here as it was in Maine. That's why I'm so glad to watch Glee with my 12 year-old. Or rather, so pleased to be in the living room with him as he is prompted to talk about the different characters and issues paraded before us on Glee in ways he never could if it were just Mom lecturing him about acceptance.
Gays abound in Glee. The lead, Rachel, has two gay dads. That quicksilver actress Jane Lynch, who is openly gay in real life, plays Sue Sylvester, that sadistic sort of lesbian coach all of us had at one time or another. Santana, the most conniving Cheerio, gets it on with Brittany, the dumb blond Cheerio, usually in a 3-way, who originated the line, “Did you know dolphins are just gay sharks?”
In fact, the most powerful story line in Glee follows scene-stealing Kurt, the openly gay fashionista played by Chris Colfer. When Kurt first came out to his dad Burt, played by Boston comic Mike O'Malley as a rugged, macho tire salesman, I fully expected the stereotypical showdown. After all, when Quinn (who headed up the Celibacy Club) got knocked up, there was no surprise: Her parents promptly threw her out of the house. Yawn.
But no, no Nanette! Instead, what we got on Glee was something very, very new: a father who accepts his gay son. “I care about you very much, which is the important thing,” he says, “and I'm glad you had the courage to tell me.”
Glee viewers are currently treated to a more nuanced struggle, as Kurt and his dad try to connect now that the truth is out and so is Kurt. There are other questions, too: Will Kurt find a boyfriend? Will Kurt's dad marry Flynn's mom? Who knows? Who really cares?
What matters is that my 12 year-old son – and lots of other kids – watch Glee. They might not want to talk to their parents about acceptance and tolerance, and they might scoff at all of this new anti-bully legislation being touted by their schools. But, when something is on the news like a kid being banned from a Catholic school because his moms are gay, my son and his friends are truly puzzled. They can't imagine why. As they see it, if you're gay, you're gay. If you're not, you're not. What matters is that you're human, you try to be a good person, and you try to love your friends, your family, and – by extension – everyone around you.
A lesson learned from Glee, it's cause for song and dance.

I WANT AN "I SURVIVED AMERICAN IDOL" T-SHIRT

2010-05-06T08:56:00.000-07:00

Whoever watched last night's results definitely deserves a t-shirt saying “I made it through American Idol.”
First, there was that Sinatra medley by our five finalists, all dressed like pallbearers. Then Lee was sent to the Lifeboat Stool while we had to sit through Lady Gaga's taped performance. After she tinkered on her bramble-covered piano in front of the flaming angel statue, we got to watch Gaga do the Zumba with hairless dancing satyrs in their black girdles. During this act, I wondered 1) how long it took the hair and makeup people to get that fishnet stocking over her entire body and 2) how prime time TV was going to react to the sight of Gaga's thonged backside. The answer to 2) is that the Idol children were protected from the glare of that aerobicized tush by fog and camera trickery. Still, we got to see the satyrs pawing at Gaga and one of them apparently having a stroke when he couldn't get through her fishnet, his arm trembling like a cobra above the orgy.
Simon, what was it you said about Siobhan's leaf costume being a distraction?
Harry Connick Jr., the so-called crooner and actor, performed a martini-and-Prozac version of “And I love her.” Then he told a story about screwing up a song in front of Frank Sinatra that was long enough for me to go have my shower and get my own martini and Prozac.
Just when I thought it was safe to go back to the couch, we had yet another medley, this time with Lee rejoining his co-competitors for a mash-up of Connick songs.
A medley on American Idol, it turns out, is the equivalent of those montages in movies where there isn't enough plot or script, and they want you to know that time has gone by because the couple in love is in bed, eating (and usually feeding each other), walking on the beach, and maybe having a pillow fight or pushing each other on swings to show that love is fun. The Idols were trying to act like singing is fun, but they looked as bored as we were.
Just when I was beginning to wonder whether Idol is really a government conspiracy, an opiate for the people meant to distract us from war and hurricanes and volcanoes and that Black Mask of Doom disguised as oil gushing off the coast of Louisiana, we finally got to the results. Ryan sent Lee back to his Lifeboat stool, then dimmed the lights as he put Casey with Crystal and Big Mike with Aaron the Tyke.
What? Casey was safe? Casey, the Cougar Bait?
Now, admit it: Despite the fact that Kara has trouble seeing through that bruised eye makeup, and occasionally has so much neck jewelry that her head floats like a balloon on top of her skinny shoulders, she called it on Tuesday when she compared Casey to a bleating lamb during his Sinatra performance. I hadn't quite pinpointed what that near-vibrato (otherwise known as a “vocal wobble”) sounded like, but yep, it sounded just like a little lost lamb looking for his cougar.
But, this week, anyway, Casey was no lamb led to slaughter, despite the disconcertingly large blonde bun he sported with his purple shirt and vest on Tuesday night. Nope, he'll be grazing in the green grass with the others for another week, anyway, and it's Aaron – so good to his adoptive mom, so clearly never going to have trouble with a prom date, so easily turned into a barbell by Big Mike – who we won't see coming back. But all is not lost: He's going home with a better haircut and he's still only 17.
In fact, not only is Aaron still 17, he still “feels 17,” as Aaron told Ryan last night, when the host tried to save the night but failed. Unlike the rest of us, who have probably aged decades as we watch the Idols flicker and go out, while we refuse to worry about the next disaster headed our way.

"Do Not Snort on NPR" and Other Tips for Authors

2010-05-03T09:03:00.000-07:00

What becomes shriekingly clear after you publish a book is this: Nobody cares as much as you do.
I'd been writing for many years before I sold my memoir, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter. I was thrilled when I landed a contract with a major publishing house and found myself in the competent hands of a skilled, enthusiastic editor and publicist. I felt even luckier when my book garnered praise from reviewers and was featured on radio and TV. Even People Magazine, gadzooks! Surely Oprah's people would want to talk to my people! Could another book contract be far behind?
Alas, 1) literary success doesn't always translate into sales and 2) a second book contract is even harder to land than your first, unless you break out of the box with Really Big Sales.
Oh, and 3) eventually your publicist leaves you for another book.
Nobody is better qualified than you are to advocate for your book as it makes its way into the world. Here are a few helpful tips about book flogging that I've learned during my first year as a published writer:
1.Move Past Online Lurking. There are computer savvy writers. Then there are writers like me. I once wept when my computer seemed to be broken, until my engineer husband removed the strand of uncooked spaghetti lodged between the keys. No matter what your online comfort, it's time to quit lurking on other people's blogs and facebook pages. Blast yourself into the blogosphere. Hire a web site designer if you must, but do the rest yourself. Do this before your book comes out – it takes a while for the web crawlers to find you. (Isn't that creepy? I mean, don't you just picture web crawlers as those worms with sharp teeth that burrow into people's ears, like on Star Trek?)
2.Be a Blurb Slut. You know those little quips on the backs of book jackets? These blurbs catch the eye of potential readers in book stores. They're also important because they give your book heft with the sales team and can be used on promotional materials. Sadly, blurbs don't just magically appear. Whether you want Jodi Picoult or Lady Gaga to endorse your book, they have to know that it exists. You're part of the publishing team now, so get to work. Google the agents and editors of other writers and grovel. Ask friends of friends of friends and grovel some more.
3.Do Not Snort on National Public Radio. If you're lucky, you'll land some radio interviews. These are weirder than TV interviews, where you have actual face-to-face conversations. Why? Because radio hosts call you at home, while you're worrying about why the washing machine is making that noise that sounds like there's a body in there. Plus, you never know what they're going to ask. Have some ready sound bytes written out – note cards are a godsend, and nobody can see you cheating. Oh, and do not snort, as I did on National Public Radio when a man described how he'd tried to save his dying gerbil's life while trying to give it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Sandra Bullock can snort and make it seem sexy. Not all of us have that gift.
4.Bookstore Readings Don't Sell Many Books, But Do Them Anyway. Publishers don't send most authors out on book tours. They'd rather spend money on marketing than on buying you plane tickets to go to bookstores where three people will show up for your readings. But do bookstore readings on your own – it's fun and a great way to connect. Choose bookstores in areas where you know someone, so that you can promote the event yourself. Stop by bookstores anywhere you're traveling and sign copies, too, because that will make them more likely to sell.
5.Ignore the Siren Call of Amazon. Okay, few people can really achieve such a Zen state that they ignore Amazon. Trust me, you will look at your Amazon rankings, and you will despair. Remember: very few writers make it above 1,000. It won't do you any good to compare your numbers to the numbers of your best writer friend, or to the numbers of that writer you hate, either. Amazon numbers fluctuate every hour and only tell you how you're doing relative to other books. THESE ARE NOT REAL SALES FIGURES.
6.Contact Book Clubs. Find book clubs through friends, online, at independent bookstores, and at your local library. Contact whomever is in charge of deciding what the club will be reading and let her know you're available. Most book clubs are thrilled to have authors meet with them. Although these clubs are often small – maybe a dozen people at most, usually women – they offer a chance for you to get important feedback from readers and will make you truly believe that what you do is worthwhile. Plus, most members will buy your book and, if they like it, who knows? Aunt Edna and Cousin Tina might be getting your book for birthday gifts.
7.Even When Your Publicist Quits, You Can't. Eventually your publicist will quit. Not literally. If she's the muse that mine is, she'll still answer your needy calls and emails. However, her job requires her to bring other books to life, many by Big Name Authors who need her to escort them to multiple TV shows, damn them. It's tempting to quit when she does. But you can't. Sure, Curtis Sittenfeld and Elizabeth Gilbert are free to hole up in sweat pants and drink tea while they write clever sentences. But those of us without movie deals have to keep our books alive. Set aside a few hours a week to flog your book. Send press releases to web sites. Blog and comment on other people's blogs, give readings at literary festivals, whatever. Just keep getting out there. Publicizing a book successfully is a lot like writing: all you need is staying power and a willingness to try anything.

Why Women Need Book Clubs

2010-04-26T10:15:00.000-07:00

As a working mother, I have to pursue my literary pleasures with tunnel-vision passion and 007 stealth. I sneak reading time in the bathtub, at lunch, and before bed. I read books in line at the grocery store, and yes, even to sports practices, looking up between chapters to holler, “Good job, honey!” at my kids.
When we moved to a new town a few years ago, our youngest child was in third grade and I was invited to join a book club named “Mothers of Third Graders.” B-O-R-I-N-G, I thought. Why go to a book club, when I can stay home and read?
“You might learn something,” my husband pointed out. “You are, after all, a writer.”
Hmph. The only people who like crowds less than readers are writers, but he had a point. Maybe it was time to see what other people were reading. “I'll go,” I muttered, “but I won't promise to like it.”
I didn't, at first. This was a big, noisy book club made up of women whose children have known each other from the womb. I felt like an outcast. Plus, these women read best-selling commercial fiction like Twilight and anything by Jodi Picoult. What was there to discuss?
Plenty, it turned out – and a lot of the conversation was intense and intimate in surprising ways. We writers work in solitude, usually with nothing more than a dog to consult about plot twists, descriptions and character development. Joining a book group has taught me how writers can reach readers better – or leave them out in the cold. This particular group talked about the characters as if the characters, too, lived in our neighborhood: “Why did she marry him?” “If I had a kid like that, I'd put him in boarding school,” etc. They talked about plot, setting, and the occasional emotional resolution, but hardly ever about the thing writers ponder most: the sentences. Readers just want a good story, duh.
After we discuss the book – which might take five minutes or two hours – our conversations morph into an open forum about families, schools, work, sex, the economy, religion, politics, and every other topic that you can imagine included in the fabric of daily discourse. Even if these women hate a book, it's a springboard for discussion.
When my own book, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter: A Memoir, was published recently, I decided to contact book groups. I left my phone number at libraries, put the word out to friends, and added something to my web site so that book groups would know that I was available. I didn't expect much response. Again, I was surprised: book groups did contact me. I met with over a dozen last year, and discovered that being an author at a book group is like being an anthropologist, an American Idol contestant, and a lottery winner all rolled into one.
As a book club anthropologist, I observe each group's unique character and habitat. There are wino book groups and sober book groups. I see alpha moms and women too shy to speak until after the wine is poured. There are book groups with millionaires and groups where the women haven't attended college. Some have themes, like cooking foods from the book. Others have a strict classroom atmosphere, with members adhering only to discussion questions put out by the publisher.
Being an author at a book group discussion is also like being on American Idol: You never know whether the judges are going to praise your performance or say, like Randy, “That was pitchy, dawg. I just didn't get it.”
“It seems like a long way to drive,” my husband said the other night, as I headed off to a book group ninety miles from home. “Is it worth it?”
It is. Wherever I go, and whatever people think of my book, I learn about women's lives. Perhaps because my book is a memoir about a father who raises gerbils, women are amazingly open about their own eccentric parents, troubled childhoods, obsessive husbands or clever mothers. I always come away astounded and humbled by their stories.
In the end, meeting with people who have actually read your book is mostly like winning the lottery: I have never felt so lucky. These are hard times for writers and readers, with magazines folding, book publishers often springing only for name brand authors, and independent book stores dwindling. Authors spend hours each day writing, without knowing if anything we put on the page will ever be read. Book groups allow us to learn what moved our readers (or didn't). They inspire us, giving us hope that writing is a craft worth pursuing.
And, as a woman visiting women's book groups, it helps me feel part of a sisterhood, an extended network of women who work, think, parent, love, grieve, dream, believe, cry and laugh as they journey through their unique lives, support one other, and bring books to life.

Lessons from American Idol

2010-04-22T11:53:00.000-07:00

Goodbye, sweet Tim Urban, you smiling greyhound of a Beatles-coiffed contestant. I'm sad to see you go.
Who knew that I would ever love American Idol? I'm a reader, not a TV watcher. But, last year, when I started watching Idol with my youngest child, I was immediately hooked. I love the made-for-TV stories about these people who claw themselves up out of poverty, foster homes, gangs, etc. to sing for their suppers. I'm even more intrigued by the cultural phenom of this public flogging that passes for judging. I mean, wow. These people keep getting knocked down only to jump back up again.
Yes, Teflon Tim, I mean you. You'd make a better actor than singer. (I can see you joining Glee this season as Rachel's boyfriend! You're way hotter than that big dumb cluck, Finn!) You don't have Mama Sox's pipes, Casey's rocker style, Aaron's skinny Sinatra charm, Lee's bar room gravel and bedroom eyes, Big Mike's showmanship, or Siobhan's range and butterfly costumes. But you do have something that I'll sorely miss: Staying power.
When the judges skewered your performances, you smiled and took it on the chin. You didn't break down. You didn't argue your case. You didn't whine. You didn't even come out and bitch slap Simon. You just came back for more. And we can all learn from that – especially if we're writers and artists.
I think all writers should watch Idol. We can relate to rejection. I once had an editor of a top magazine turn down one of my stories, saying that I was “too old to be called promising.” That was when I was 29! I have had editors write curt rejection notes for pieces I've slaved over for months, saying only, “This does not amuse,” or “We have too many stories on that topic.” Recently, a a book editor told me that my novel was a great read – she couldn't put it down! – but “it's not right for the current publishing climate.”
Watching Idol makes me realize how glad I am that we writers get rejected in the privacy of our own bedrooms, where we can weep and throw ourselves prostrate under our laptops without anyone watching. I can too easily believe that the preening Simon might say to me, “You don't know who you are as an artist!” Or Randy shaking his big bullet of a head and sighing, “I just didn't get it, dawg.” And what if I had to get up to read my last failed article or story just to prove, once more, why I got the fewest votes? Ouch!
The most important lesson of Idol is that the marketplace is fickle. I wasn't surprised when Lily got sent home this season. Sure, she has a great voice, but she has white hair, and who likes the ukelele? I wasn't shocked when Andrew and Paige got the boot ahead of Tim, either. They had better voices, but he has the looks and charm.
The Idol judges keep trying to pretend that “this is a singing competition,” but we all know differently. This TV show is really all about nailing what kind of pop star will turn on young, female viewers enough to get them to blow up their phones and buy iTunes with their parents' credit cards. Witness last year's debacle: Adam Lambert clearly has a better voice than Vanilla Allen, but Allen was way cute and mild, while Lambert was way gay and probably scared their hairbands off.
Last night, I comforted myself that Tim – like any Idol contestant who makes it into the top 10, or maybe even into the top 1,000 – probably has enough talent to carry on with his dream. I told myself that again today, when I got yet another rejection email.
And at least I don't have to read my piece aloud on TV, while Simon and Kara fake flirt as I pretend I don't care what they think.

Hanging with Hoda & Kathie Lee on The Today Show

2010-04-19T11:37:00.000-07:00

The call from the Today Show came as I was buying a used car in a New Hampshire neighborhood thick with tattoo parlors and fireworks outlets. I had just left the seller's house – where an overweight pitt bull sniffed my legs as I was getting into my car – when Melanie, a lovely producer from Kathie Lee & Hoda's show, called my cell phone. Could I appear on their Friday morning show to talk about an essay I'd written for Ladies' Home Journal called “The Politeness Project?”

“Sure. I'd love to be on The Today Show,” I said, gunning my used Honda onto Route 1 by Wal-Mart.

TV producers don't kid around when they want to get someone on a set. Within hours, I had my travel arrangements, and the next day I arrived in New York City to find a car and driver waiting to whisk me off to a hotel. (Truthfully, I suspect that having a hotel room alone is enough of a lure for any working mom to say yes to pretty much anything.)

The next morning, I met Julie Bain, LHJ's health editor, in the Green Room. This meant traipsing past the flags and fans in Rockefeller Center and being escorted into the room by a series of security guards. Yes, I felt like Sandra Bullock!

The Green Room is surprisingly functional. It didn't feel all that different from the teacher's lounge of my son's elementary school, where I always volunteered to put together the newsletter. But the next room was much more fun: Julie and I were escorted into a long, brightly lit room with a row of chairs staffed by makeup artists and hair stylists with the tools of their trade strewn about the counters. Everyone is made up and blown out at once, kind of like that scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and her cohorts arrive at the Emerald City and get combed out and shined up to see the Wizard.

Travis, the lovely man in a pink v-neck sweater who did my face (which took a lot longer to do than Julie's, I might add, since she's a New Yorker who already knows how to use makeup ), eased my nerves by chatting about his mom in Atlanta, where he has a house. He also suggested that I might want to invest in eye cream if I didn't want to look, well, quite so much like a tired working mom. Meanwhile, behind me, Kathie Lee was just hanging out in sweats, chatting with various people who kept stopping by, until she was ready to be zipped into her floral dress for the set.

Julie and I returned our transformed selves (me, blinking hard because it felt like I had a pound of makeup on each eye) to the Green Room. Then yet another handler led us onto the Today Show set, where Kathie Lee and Hoda were interviewing adorable Aussie Alex O'Loughlin, the male lead in Jennifer Lopez's new movie, The Back-Up Plan. Alex's fans were waving banners through the window behind him, but he kept his cool even as Kathie Lee asked him what he was looking for in a woman, and he admitted he could be interested in anyone from 18 to 60, which caused every single woman on set (and there were a lot of us, crammed in there with technicians wielding cameras and microphones and lots and lots of cords to trip on) to swoon a little.

Finally, it was our turn. Julie and I clambered over the cords and took our seats next to the stars. Who, it turns out, are actually warm, lovely women. The topic was how to disarm with charm, based on my essay, but those two need no lessons in that: Kathie Lee and Hoda have the ability to make everyone, even a working mom from northern Massachusetts, feel like they belong right where they are, and isn't that the point of politeness?

At one point, Kathie Lee even reached over to adjust the collar of my sweater during a commercial break. It really did feel like chatting with girlfriends, despite the teleprompters and cameras and, oh yes, those bright lights, and the thought that everyone could see us on TV and judge: Are we old/fat/thin/wearing the right shoes? (I had on a quickly-purchased $20 pair of heels and $14.99 slacks from Marshall's. I tried not to think about how much Kathie Lee and Hoda spent on clothes.)

And then it was over. I went home that afternoon. A car, courtesy of The Today Show, collected me from the hotel. This time, I slid into the back seat almost as if I belonged in a long black car with a driver at my disposal. Maybe I could get used to this life.

Then, as the driver and I chatted, I heard about how his father, still living in Haiti, was trapped and nearly died when his home collapsed on him during the earthquake.

“I'm so sorry,” I said.

“Me, too,” the driver said. Then he shrugged a little. “But that's life, is it not? It is one way this minute, and another way the next.”

That, I thought, was the truest thing anyone had said to me all day.

(See the Today Show segment here):

today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/36597889#36597889

Why I Don't Want to Live on Girl Island

2010-04-18T19:30:00.001-07:00

Recently, I was having lunch with a group of women friends who only have daughters. They were bemoaning, as women at lunch love to do, the habits of their husbands. You know: the dirty clothes on the floor, the snoring, the need to own the remote. Oh yeah, and peeing into bushes because that's easier than asking directions to a gas station when you're on a road trip.
“I want to live on Girl Island,” my friend Carla said. “Sometimes I don't think I was meant to live with a man.”
I thought about this as we parted, and decided that, if I had to choose, it would definitely be Boy Island for me.
I have three sons and two daughters. Nothing against girls – I love my daughters and cherish every minute I spend with them – but the boys keep me sane. Throw kids together at a picnic, and the girls circle each other, wary as cats, while the boys pick the top dog in minutes and all play together. Girls on the school bus make each other cry with a word or a look, yet it might be weeks before you hear about it or even figure out exactly why your daughter was so upset. Boys? They're either really mad and throwing something, or so happy that they're yelling and singing in the shower.
Girls do art projects without getting glue and paint all over the furniture and each other. Girls will sit in the kitchen with you, sometimes, too, and let you know what their teacher wore that day and what their English papers are about. Meanwhile, the boys say school was “uh, okay” and just want to ride their bikes, or show you how cool it is to put cereal in the ice dispenser and then hold a glass of milk under it.
Most of all, boys like to puzzle over the wonders of the world. Last week I drove my 12 year-old son and his friends to the skateboard park. It was kind of like riding around with the editors of Ripley's Believe It Or Not: “Did you know that more people are killed by vending machines than by sharks every year?” “If everyone in China was chewing gum and spit it out at the same time, would there be enough gum to cover Rhode Island?” “Did the Egyptians invent glass?” “There are probably 1800 thunderstorms happening in the Earth's atmosphere right now, that we can't even see!”
At the skateboard park, the boys were out of the car almost before I had it in park, donning helmets and pads and zooming off to a place that probably wouldn't exist on Girl Island: a place where 360 is a verb and you can do ollies, grinds and slides while wearing brightly colored puffy sneakers. A place where Moms, alas, can only visit for a short time before they're banished.

The Secret Life of Working Moms

2010-03-28T18:12:00.000-07:00

When Laura, one of my marketing clients, called me from her cell phone last Friday, I looked out of my window and smiled. The weather was perfect: blue sky, sunshine, just enough breeze. “Where are you?” I asked. “Playground?”
“Sandbox,” Laura admitted with a laugh. “Think it'll wreck my laptop?”
“It'll survive. Just don't let Owen build a castle over it,” I said.
Laura and I chatted about a brochure I was writing for her while Owen, her toddler, played in the background. We then arranged a follow-up conference for the next week. “Can we talk late Wednesday afternoon?” I proposed. “That'll give me time to get Aidan home from school and settled with his snack.”
“Perfect,” she said.
Perfect: That's what we working mothers strive to be, especially when we finagle flexible work schedules that allow us to keep food on the table without missing out on being at home to watch our kids grow up. Some days we nearly achieve that goal.
Of course, it's a rough transition to the secret world of working moms. In the final months of my first pregnancy, I gave notice at my public relations job and told my coworkers that I had decided to consult from home after the baby was born. This news caused my secretary, an older woman known to type faster than anyone else in our building despite daggers for nails, shake one scary finger at me in warning. “You're making a big mistake,” she said. “You'll never get any work done without daycare.”
I smiled and nodded the way I always do whenever someone gives me unsolicited advice. And then I proceeded blindly and blissfully into the Bermuda Triangle of working motherhood.
Now, as any parent of a newborn knows, babies sleep a lot. But they also wake up a lot, especially at night, when you're trying to restore the damage done to your brain cells by those pesky post-pregnancy hormones. And, whether sleeping or awake, babies are their own personal disaster areas, peeing and pooping and spitting up, mostly when there's nothing but your shirt to use as a mop.
Between tending Blaise, my son, and doing Himalayan piles of laundry, the actual physical labor involved in early parenthood turned out to be more taxing than any other job I'd ever had. That included the summer job I once had on a factory assembly line, pulling plastic paintbrush handles out of a hot mold machine every three minutes. That was mind-numbing work, hot and hard on my back, but I got regular coffee breaks. With the baby, I was clocking in a good eighteen hours a day as a personal valet to someone who didn't even have the wits to say thank you.
What's more, any time I wasn't actually performing a physical service for my new lord and master, I was worrying that I wasn't nourishing Blaise's intellectual development. My mother once caught me hanging those stark black-and-white pictures all around the edges of my son's crib and asked me what the hell I was doing.
“I'm trying to stimulate my baby's brain,” I said. “You don't want your grandson growing up stupid, do you?”
Mom sighed and turned away. “I try to keep in mind that intelligence is largely an inherited trait, though sometimes I wonder about you. I hope you won't screw him up by scaring him out of his little mind with all of those weird things you do,” she said.
By the time my firstborn was six weeks old, I had a steady stream of clients, including the PR firm I'd been working for full-time. It was great to discover that they couldn't live without me. I took every job that came my way. Too late, I discovered that babies can be perfectly content one minute, but will wail like somebody's sticking them with invisible pins the next. That's how they keep their mothers on task.
My husband traveled often for his sales job, so he couldn't offer much parenting help. I had to devise a system of my own. Gradually I discovered that working at home required getting up before the bluebirds and sitting at my computer in a bathrobe, pouring coffee over my head. When the baby woke, I'd feed him and then put him in his infant seat on the bathroom floor, so that I could shower while playing peekaboo around the shower curtain. I'd play with my baby for a bit, and then I'd plunk him into a jumpy swing in the doorway of my office while I called clients, thumbed through research, or wrote reports at top speed. Never mind that the swing was recommended for babies six months and older, or that my own infant dangled like a puppet: he was happy and this tactic worked darn well.
Women clients, I discovered, would overhear the baby in the background and keep right on talking to me on the phone, assuming I had things under control. Men were more problematic. They'd hear the baby and assume something needed tending.
“He's not choking,” I'd reassure them. “He's chortling. He's hanging in his swing in my office,”
“Oh,” they'd say, unconvinced. “Shouldn't you be doing something with him?”
“I am doing something,” I told them. “I'm helping to keep a roof over his head.”
At times, I'd have to do research at the local library. This was a pleasant outing for the first eight months, because I could carry Blaise in a backpack. When he got antsy, I'd lay him on a blanket on the library floor. This worked well, until one day when I was so engrossed in reading that I was startled when a woman tapped me on the shoulder.
“Yes?” I asked, barely taking my eyes off the screen.
“I think you lost something,” she said.
I looked down at the blanket on the floor beneath the computer. No baby. The woman pointed. I jumped up and saw with horror that my son had learned to crawl, and that he was headed, butt high in the air, for the elevator.
After that, playgrounds were my biggest salvation, especially when I had a second child just sixteen months after the first. My daughter Taylor was fussy, the sort of child who cried for no reason and was always thrusting her fists in the air like some miniature antiwar demonstrator. She was only content if I kept her in motion. I did a spread sheet calculating the costs of commuting, buying clothes for work, going out for lunch, and paying a babysitter, and decided that paying for two days of family day care outside the home was optimal; anything more than that, and I'd barely break even. So I dropped the kids off with a sitter for two days but kept them home while I worked for the other three.
On the days I worked at home while my children were there, I still got up at 5 a.m., so that I could clock in two hours before they woke up. And then, when everyone was up and fed, off to the playground we'd go, no matter what the weather. I once wrote an entire brochure in longhand while pushing a swing.
Nap time was sacred: I scheduled most conference calls and interviews for those precious quiet hours. Then the kids would get up and out we'd go again. The one thing I always skimped on was housework. I once had to iron a dress for a meeting, and when I took the ironing board out of the cupboard, Taylor had to ask me what it was.
Things got a little easier once my children started preschool. I had more solitary work hours, provided that I was diligent about not doing housework, gardening, laundry, cooking, or any other domestic chore while my kids were out of the house. (Though I confess: I sometimes did fold laundry or unload the dishwasher while chatting with clients on the phone, taking care not to pant with the effort of lifting baskets or clank the dishes.)
Despite the novelty of school hours, during some wintry weeks I still put in more hours at our local McDonald's than most of their employees, simply because it has an indoor playground. Here's one dirty secret nobody ever tells working parents: school is not day care. Just as you get used to having your babies out of the house and stop weeping every time you pick up their little socks, you realize that the nurse will send your kids home with sore throats or fevers or even the merest sniff. There are snow days and teacher workshop days and once, I swear to God, almost an entire week of rain days off from school, just because the river happened to overflow and blocked off a few measly roads.
I now have three children and continue to juggle my time, despite the fact that the youngest is in elementary school. I still get up early and stay up late to meet deadlines. I still work on weekends. On snow days, I've even been known to skip a wholesome outing to a science museum, where Aidan, my youngest son, can learn about gravity and whales. Instead, we head for one of those germ factories, an indoor playground with arcades that gear your kid up to play the slots in Vegas: they are that addictive. Everything in those places, even the food, seems to be made of brightly colored plastic, like you're living in a TV show – but, hey, working parents like me can plug in their laptops and work in an empty birthday room.
The flip side of juggling work and kids in the same space is that I also can take breaks. When my kids want to spend the afternoon outside, I can often go with them. When I have a child who's home sick, I can climb into bed with him and read him stories. If I have to work, I can set the kids up at my desk with their own notebooks or computer while I work alongside them. Watching me meet deadlines, my children understand about work. And, because of them, I appreciate the value of play.
Mothers have always worked – in fields, on farms, in factories, at home. No matter where we work, most of us take joy in having jobs that we value and children who enrich our lives. I'm one of the lucky ones, in that I can spend some days working at home, straddling the divide between job and family that confronts most of us.
Recently, a client called me during an early release day from school. He was discussing a marketing brochure that he wanted me to write when I had to stop him mid-sentence. “Sorry. Please hold that thought,” I said. “I have to tend to something here.”
I was in a rock climbing gym and Aidan was taking a lesson. For the last hour, my kid had been swinging around like a human yo-yo while I worked on a laptop I'd set up on a corner table loaded down with ropes and harnesses. Now he was waving at me. I stopped talking to wave back and blow him a kiss.
“Okay,” I said, once Aidan was belaying back down. “I can probably do the brochure by early next week.”
“Really? That fast?” my client asked.
“Sure. Have I ever let you down?” We said goodbye. I hung up as my son came running towards me, grinning, to make sure I'd seen him climb to the top.

If No Child is Left Behind, Where Was Mine?

2009-11-14T18:17:00.000-08:00

By the second week of middle school, I had to crowbar my son Aidan onto the school bus. The classes were boring, he said. The teachers spent a lot of time yelling. All they did was worksheets and tests. “I thought middle school would be more interesting than elementary school,” he fumed, “but it's way worse.”
I kept battling, bribing and threatening to get him out the door. My two older children had gone to the same public school, which draws students from three towns and has a good reputation. They were in college now. Why couldn't Aidan settle in? What was different?
Everything. The No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in 2002 when Aidan was halfway through kindergarten, has turned the public school curriculum on its ear. This legislation requires public schools to administer standardized tests annually to all students. Where there was once time in the school day for projects and performances, there are now stacks of worksheets. Schools are expected to make yearly progress in upping student achievement scores, so teachers teach to the tests.
I was once in favor of this Act. Who doesn't want to see schools held accountable? But now I've changed my mind. Sure, the test scores might be rising, but at what cost?
Aidan – a bright, quirky kid identified for our regional gifted program in fourth grade, balked at many of his elementary school assignments and started sliding fast in middle school. Every Sunday morning, he'd moan about having to go to school on Monday. “The only time school is fun is when I'm getting into trouble,” he mumbled one night.
Uh oh, I thought. I'm losing him.
I met with his teachers. They noted Aidan's lack of focus and danced around the topic of medication for attention issues.
“He's getting A's and B's,” I pointed out. “He earns advanced scores on the MCAS tests.”
Meanwhile, Aidan was getting mouthier and meaner at home. He was withdrawing into his computer. When his dad and I complained about his attitude and threatened to take away the computer, he shrugged. “My life is over anyway,” he said. “I'm already dead at school.”
One afternoon, I noticed the sign for a Montessori school tucked between a couple of brick buildings in a nearby town. On a whim, Aidan and I went inside and talked to the head of school. She invited Aidan to spend a day with them.
The Montessori middle school classroom was nothing like the ones in his public school. There was a carpet and the walls were painted a soothing periwinkle blue. The windows were enormous. The kids called the teachers by their first names. In public school, Aidan switched classes every 55 minutes. At Montessori, group instruction was kept to a minimum and students were expected to organize their own schedules. Grades were almost nonexistent and students didn't have to take MCAS tests. Middle school kids still got an hour of recess.
After his first day at Montessori, Aidan came home puzzled but smiling. “I don't know what this is, Mom, but it doesn't feel like school,” he said. “The teachers aren't really like teachers. They're just people who want to help you learn.”
His dad and I spent a weekend thinking about this. We were on the fence about Montessori for two main reasons: 1) we worried that Aidan might just drift through Montessori's free-wheeling, creative curriculum without having to really learn anything; and 2) we felt like traitors and failures because our kid couldn't make it in public school.
I went online and looked up articles on Montessori. One of the most helpful was by Emily Bazelon in Slate on the eve of Montessori's 100th anniversary, at http://www.slate.com/id/2166489/pagenum/2. The Montssori teacher's site was also useful, at http://www.montessori-namta.org/namta/geninfo/whatismont.html. I discovered that Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page credited their Montessori school educations for their development as creative, self-directed individuals at http://www.michaelolaf.net/google.html.
We agreed to let Aidan switch to the Montessori school and waited for the other shoe to drop. Surely he would hang out with friends from his public school and beg to go back.
That didn't happen. In fact, each day Aidan was happier than the day before. He was excited about doing a project on the history of batteries. He started spouting facts about camels as he researched desert biomes. He began taking time on homework assignments. He respected his teachers and they respected him. No more yelling, in class or out, and no more resistance to going to school.
At the end of the second week, I picked Aidan up early from school for a doctor's appointment. When I entered his Montessori classroom, I saw two middle school students lying on the floor, quietly reading. A few children were gathered around the computers. One teacher was holding a writing conference with four students at a small table. Aidan and another boy were working on math puzzles. Music played in the background. There was the blissful hum of concentrated activity.
“You seem awfully relaxed,” I noted as we walked out to the car.
“I am,” Aidan said. “Maybe it's because at Montessori they let you do math in your socks.”
I thought about this, and decided that if I had to do algebra, I'd rather do it in my socks, too.
I left the Montessori school thinking about the students seated in rows at our public school, diligently taking multiple choice tests, memorizing the names of explorers, and studying pictures of rocks and plant cells. Our public school teachers work hard to do their jobs, and students work hard to do theirs. Somehow, though, we have managed to make factories out of our schools and drain all joy out of learning.
It was well-meaning legislation, but the No Child Left Behind Act has handcuffed our public school teachers and stripped the natural curiosity and passion that all children have for learning. There should be no child left behind, yet mine nearly was.

Two Women Bare It All

2009-10-09T12:42:00.001-07:00

Our first morning at Berkshire Vista Resort, my friend Mandy sleeps late while I muster the courage to leave our room. The question isn’t so much what to wear, here, as what not to wear.
We arrived late and identified ourselves calmly enough at the security intercom, but our cool evaporated at the sight of a sign that said, “Caution, Nudists Crossing Ahead.”
“I can’t get out of the car,” Mandy laughed, clutching the steering wheel like a life preserver. “What if naked people suddenly jump out of the woods to greet us?”
I left her doubled up over the steering wheel and marched toward the inn, a restored 1770s farmhouse, expecting to find the office. Instead, when I climbed the steps and peered through the window, I spotted a couple of men in easy chairs. Naked.
I turned heel and fled. “Whose idea was this?” I gasped, crawling back into the car.
Mine, of course. Surfing the Net to find a nature camp for my kids, I typed in “naturist” and stumbled onto a list of nudist camps. Hundreds of them. I couldn’t believe it. I thought everyone put their clothes back on after free love and Woodstock.
Giggling, I telephoned Mandy to announce that I’d found the perfect present for her 40th birthday: A weekend at Berkshire Vista, the northeast’s only luxury nudist resort. “We’ll celebrate your birthday in our birthday suits,” I coaxed, “and laugh about our nudist days when we’re 80.”
I proposed the idea as a joke to cheer Mandy on through the last difficult days of her thirties. Although she is a successful professional in business for herself, her personal life has been rocky; she recently ended her wedding engagement and feels bereft and uncertain about her future. I fully expected her to call my buff, I mean bluff, as the Day of Our Unveiling approached. When it became clear that she was going to do no such thing, I panicked.
I couldn’t possibly go to a nudist camp with Mandy, of all people! She works out at the gym four times a week and maintains a perfect tan. When I treated Mandy to her birthday dinner, she ordered a lobster and ate it without butter, observing my plate of fried scallops with astonishment: “That’s more fat than I eat in a month!”
I’m a junk food maven whose favorite snack du jour is a handful of cookie dough. I have three kids and the body to prove it. Mandy wears bikinis to the beach, while I’ve graduated to bathing suits bigger than my mother’s. I’m so self-conscious about my body, in fact, that I sometimes feel awkward getting undressed in front of my husband.
Most of my friends sympathized. “A nudist camp? OH MY GOD!” one exclaimed. “Listen, you may be hesitant about being naked in front of your husband, but I don’t even like being naked in front of myself!”
My husband, however, tried to reassure me. “You’re a beautiful woman,” Dan said, then grinned. “If you want to practice ahead of time, I’m always available.”
I stared at him. “Don’t you even mind that I’m going to be naked in front of complete strangers? Or that, by the way, those strangers will also be buck naked in front of me?”
Dan, who once wore a ponytail and a long beard that made him look like an Amish farmer, shrugged off my concerns. After all, he still reminisces fondly about his glory days as a member of a hot tub club in San Francisco. “Social nudity is about acceptance, not sex,” he lectured.
Oh, sure. I lie in my bed and will the skies to open up. At least if it rains, I can twirl a strategically placed umbrella.
Along with the umbrella, my suitcase bulges with enough gear to survive a winter in the Himalaya. Facing all-new fashion dilemmas caused me to overpack. I knew I needed bug spray and a few gallons of sunscreen, but then I noticed a garden party on the resort’s agenda. How did one accessorize for such a thing? A big sun bonnet and open-toed shoes? And where would I keep my lipstick and keys? I couldn’t carry a purse.
In the end, I solved the purse dilemma with a fanny pack, trying not to visualize what I’d look like wearing that and nothing else. I also poured all of my necklaces out of the jewelry box and into the suitcase. With enough weight around my neck, surely I’d look thinner.
I can hear voices now, men and women chatting in the kitchen outside our bedroom door. Naked voices, I remind myself.
I get up and, still in my cotton nightie, peek outside the window. My first nudist of the day is a woman on the deck of her RV. She’s wearing a sweatshirt and bends over, bare-bottomed, to water a planter of pink flowers. My second nudist is a man walking his dog. He’s in a t-shirt and flip-flops, swinging bravely along the open road as he and the dog trot down the path towards the brook.
It’s not raining, but I’m in luck: It’s chilly enough for a few people to wear sweat pants and tops. I’m one of them. I vowed to shed one article of clothing at a time, though, so that means no bra to breakfast. Mandy is still asleep, her blankets pulled up to her chin, as I let myself fall prey to gravity and slip out of the bedroom.
Headed into the restaurant, I rely on peripheral vision to avoid staring. A hairy man looms up on the other side of the pool fence like a grizzly bear on hind legs, drying himself on a towel the size of a handkerchief. A topless woman pushes her naked toddler on a playground swing, and a man wearing only a baseball cap squats next to a motorcycle. I don’t relax until I’m on the clubhouse deck, where I focus on the rolling hills that form a bright green basin around the resort.
When the sun comes out, the place has the giddy atmosphere of a summer camp. Campers bounce about the tennis courts, wearing only sneakers, and two elderly men toss a Frisbee with the glee of undiapered toddlers. I remind myself that the athletes of ancient Greece were naked, as I make the stunning observation that I’m among the most petite women here. I’m also one of the youngest. I had expected Aphrodite and Adonis, but this place is crawling with Ozzies and Harriets with broad smiles, fantastic tans and big bottoms. So this is where all of the flower children have gone!
As the temperature rises, the only people still dressed are the clubhouse bartender and waitress. “Well, at least you’re down to shorts,” one friendly fellow teases, striding past us with his wife. This couple is our age, and they have identical blonde manes of shoulder-length hair brushing their bare shoulders. Both wear shorts.
“So are you,” I observe.
“I hate carrying a towel.” He lifts the front flap of his dungarees to show us that he’s really not wearing shorts, but a skirt. And, as with all men in kilts, the mystery ends when the breezes blow.
Mandy and I decide to hike. If we’re hot, we’ll be more inspired to bare it all. “Are you going to wear earrings?” Mandy asks me anxiously. “Earrings and lipstick do seem sort of superfluous here, don’t they?”
“I’ll wear my most slimming earrings,” I declare, “and just one article of clothing.” I pull a sundress out of my suitcase and go into the bathroom to put it on. “Why am I closing the door, when in just a few hours I’ll be frolicking naked in the freesias at the garden party?”
“I don’t know,” Mandy answers, as I emerge from the bathroom and find her pulling on a t-shirt that reaches to her knees. “But I’m leaving my underpants on.”
Within an hour we’re sweaty and changing into our, uh, into nothing but towels for a swim. The brochure strictly states that this is a clothing-optional resort, but “Nudity is required in the pool, hot tubs and sauna. No bathing suits,” they add, in case anyone misunderstands.
We pause by the pool fence, still safely cocooned in our enormous towels, to watch a man wearing only sneakers erect a trellis for the garden party. “I understand why I’m reluctant to get undressed,” I tell Mandy. “I’m overweight and pasty white. But you’ve got the body of a goddess!”
“My breasts are too small,” Mandy argues. “Besides, your body is the way it is because you’ve had kids. I’m 40 years old and my body hasn’t done the work I think it’s supposed to do. Sure, I’m thin, but what’s the worth in that, at the end of a life? Nothing.”
I’m sad that she feels this way, and tell her so. Still, the fact that Mandy feels self-conscious, too, lets me take the final step. I drop my towel onto a pool chair and scuttle over to the outdoor showers, where a shriveled gnome of a man chats up an attractive blonde woman. Like many women here, the blonde has gone in for some decorative shaving. The result is a fuzzy caterpillar creeping downward from her navel. Another woman by the showers has two enormous nipple rings, leading me to think, Ow! Then I wonder whether, in fact, most people are more ornamental without clothing than I’d realized. How would I know? I’ve never even seen my own mother naked.
I’m content in the pool, where I have the illusion of being less exposed while my breasts bob along with me like a pair of happy white ducks. It’s not so bad being naked when I lie down in the sun, either. For one thing, my stomach looks flat. For another, the woman beside me is nearly twice my size. She’s sprawled across the chair the way my kids lounge in front of the television, leaving no place where the sun can’t shine. This is the first time in my life that I can contemplate the entire visual spectrum of the human condition, and that spectrum seems infinite. I am lying in a sea of flesh, and all around me are the old and the young, the thin and the fat, the hairy and the bald, the pierced and the unadorned.
That afternoon, Mandy and I don sunhats, bangles and beads. Clanking and tinkling, we follow the parade of people to the garden party in the Snob Hill area of the campground and discover an amazing fact: What nudists do for fun is dress up. The men are in top hats and spats, bow ties and cummerbunds. One woman wears white lace gloves and carries a parasol, another has chosen a black nightgown clasped at the neck with an elaborate brooch. There are a lot of sarongs and fanciful clothing created from scarves tied in fancy ways. These chatty couples all seem to have been nudists for decades and married even longer. Most of their grown children have no idea; they think Mom and Dad are just off camping again.
There are overflowing window boxes and elegant gardens, tasty snacks and, at one trailer, a tiny toad orchestra tooting away on a table. Someone sets up a croquet game and there’s a sale table to benefit a legal fund for nudists. It all feels like a PTA carnival at our elementary school, as I talk to two lawyers and an engineer, a construction worker and a teacher, a speech therapist and a banker. The key difference is that, without clothes, you can’t tell a ditch digger from a doctor. Nudists, I realize, are part of a subculture, like golfers or birders. And my husband was right: Nudism has nothing to do with sexuality, but with finding an activity you enjoy and seeking out places where you can practice it and feel accepted.
The party blooms into the night, when we all gather at the clubhouse dance. Mandy and I borrow dresses from our new nudist friends, since scanty evening wear is the one thing neither of us packed. Mandy’s is black and fits her like an ace bandage; mine is a filmy, copper-colored gown.
“This will bring out the highlights in your hair!” promised the owner of the dress.
The highlights in my hair? This dress is invisible! But it’s perfect for the dance, where a disco light swirls over people who leap, amble, hop, and sway to every wedding reception favorite from The Macarena to The Electric Slide.
Afterward, Mandy and I go back to our room and reverse our normal routines, going naked by day and then dressing in our comfy pajamas at night. “So what do you think of all this?” I ask her.
“Well,” she mumbles around her toothbrush -- by now we can do almost anything in front of each other -- “I’ll be glad to get back to the safe comfort of my clothes. But it’s certainly interesting to get a new perspective on aging and on the self-created shame most of us feel about our bodies.”
I think about this the next morning, when it really is raining and I find that I’m slightly disappointed. I’m not as anxious to zip, tuck and button myself back into clothing as Mandy. In fact, even my nightgown feels like too much right now.
I undress and shower, then wander into the kitchen to make tea, a towel draped over my shoulder. It’s a little odd, since I wouldn’t even walk around this way in my own house, and I almost wrap the towel around me. But then, through the kitchen window, I see several of the couples I met the night before. They’re soaking in the hot tub on the deck, never mind the rain, and laughing. One woman sees me and motions for me to join them.
I hesitate only a moment before I do it. Everyone slides over on the benches to make room, and the warm water rising to my rain-cooled shoulders feels like a blanket. I glance at the gray sky and have a sudden memory of the time I hired a small plane at the local airport to fly me over our town, of how astonishing it was to see our home as just another rooftop. Our house would have been nearly indistinguishable from the others, if I didn’t know the life within its walls. Just as now, from up above, my body would look like all of these other bodies next to mine, our heads tipped back to enjoy the rain on our faces.

My Midlife Crisis Shoes

2009-09-25T10:46:00.001-07:00

Last month I took my son Blaise out to lunch at his favorite diner.“Wait!” I implored as I teetered across the parking lot after him. “I can't go that fast. Walking in these new shoes is like walking on stilts.”
Blaise turned and glanced down at my feet, encased in a pair of brand new embroidered espadrilles with 2-inch wedge heels. “What are those, your midlife crisis shoes?”
Definitely. With four kids in college and one in junior high, it's high time for my midlife crisis. Shoes are cheaper than a boob job, a tummy tuck or a new car. That was my rationale, anyway, when I decided to spring for a pair of comfortable heels.
Except that now I had to wonder if “comfortable heels” was an oxymoron. Imported from Spain, those ankle-twisting espadrilles had called my name from the top shelf of a boutique while I was shopping with my daughter, Taylor. Taylor's blond curls, blue eyes and perfect runner's body make her look runway ready in anything from flip flops to Gortex boots, but she's a sucker for pretty shoes. When she spotted these exotic espadrilles, she had to try them. “These are the most comfortable shoes I'll ever own,” she declared.
Since I was footing the bill, Taylor urged me to buy a matching pair. “You'll love them,” she said.
I didn't. As it turned out, my luncheon foray in espadrilles was a near-death experience when I tipped over into a pothole, then had to curl my toes like Aladdin so I wouldn't fall out of my shoes while climbing up the diner stairs.
I came home feeling old. I grew up in the age of platforms, kind of like the ones Meryl Streep struts around in during Mama Mia, and I loved how they made me look leggy, hip-swishing and, well, taller. I'm 5'3” on my best posture days, so wearing heels in my youth was a guarantee that I could reach the wine glasses on the top shelf. Besides my platforms, I owned red stilettos, pointy black boots and working women's pumps. As a young woman I always chose beauty over comfort: I had lethal chandelier earrings that scraped my neck, tummy-tightening pantyhose and underwire bras that could come unleashed at any moment and stab me through the ribcage. God, I looked good.
Then, somewhere between motherhood and deciding to work in a home office, I took off my earrings and kicked off my heels in favor of sensible flats. My favorite shoes are black, round-toed Merrills that make me look like a nun, no matter how often I tell myself that they make me look like a British mystery novelist hiking the moors.
The night after my espadrilles escapade, I modeled the Merrills for my stepson Drew, who just finished a film internship in Los Angeles and is the family's resident fashionista. “What do you think of these shoes?” I asked.
“They scream 'unavailable,'” he said at once. “But at least they're one step up from Crocs.”
That did it. I set out on a mission. There had to be comfortable heels out there. After all, I am no reality show virgin. I've seen Dancing with the Stars. Those people don't just walk in heels, they dance in them! Even intellectual women manage to get around in heels. Sure, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor fell and cracked her ankle while rushing to board an airplane in heels. But there she was, just minutes later, filmed using crutches but wearing a sexy black high heel on her good foot!
For my next foray into the upper reaches of footwear, I went with a pair of cute gray El Naturalista shoes stamped with abstract ivory designs. They had a respectable heel, just under two inches of comfy looking cork. I fell in love with the little frog label, too.
The woman in the shoe store gushed. “Naturalistas are made of all natural materials, so they're not just good for your feet. They're good for the environment!”
“Great,” I said. “But can I walk in them?”
“You'll never need another pair of shoes,” she vowed.
Okay, maybe she didn't mean to say that. What shoe clerk would ever tell you to put your wallet away? The point is, I bought that pair of shoes for philosophical reasons: I wanted to be a Naturalista! According to the company's web site, “Naturalistas start their journey observing everything that surrounds them. They travel through the world and observe it, becoming impregnated by its textures, its colors, its lines... and after a thousand journeys, real and imaginary, they discover that a single idea brings us together. Whatever our race or culture... we all walk in search of happiness. Movement is El Naturalista´s reason to exist. That is why we enjoy creating comfortable and attractive footwear, that helps us to move along the amazing journey of life.”
Formerly impregnated with children, as a Naturalista I could now bravely move along in my amazing journey of life in environmentally correct high heels! I was ready to become impregnated anew with textures, colors and lines.
Alas, my journey proved to be a short one. I wore my new Naturalistas to a marketing meeting – they went perfectly with my swishy gray mid-calf skirt and slinky black sweater – only to tear them off the minute I was out in the hallway an hour later.
“Cool shoes,” my colleague Laura remarked as I was limping back to the car. “Are they comfortable?”
“Sure,” I said through clenched teeth. “It's kind of like not noticing you sprained an ankle because your feet are on fire.”
Maybe I was going about this all wrong. Maybe wearing high heels was like learning to ride a bike: I should start with training wheels before navigating stairs on a unicycle. On my next shoe store odyssey, I opted for black leather Ecco pumps with a 1.5” heel. These were more streamlined and less Croc-ish than my Merrills, more pilgrim than nun. Their motto was good, too, or at least shorter: My world, my style, my Ecco!
Alas, my world, or at least my foot, was too wide for an Ecco. After half a morning these shoes made my feet feel bound in baling twine.
“High heels that don't fit are a torture chamber all their own,” I complained to my husband.
“Why are you even bothering?” he asked. “Men don't notice a woman's shoes. To me, women in heels look like hooved animals.”
If my husband didn't care about high heels, why did I? I thought about the waitress who had served me in one of our local restaurants recently. She was French and wore high heels to serve scrambled eggs, along with dangling earrings and a beautiful bell-sleeved wrap dress. I wanted to look that put together at least sometimes.
Over the next few weeks I went through all of the shoe outlets north of us. I started with Ariats, Clarks, Danskos and other brands that advertised sensible comfort and offered chunky, clunky heels. The problem was that these shoes might be tall, but they were undeniably ugly. I might as well go back to Merrills. I moved on up to the pointiest, tallest dancer shoes, some of which had wraps and ties that made me feel like I should wear a toga with them.
At one point, I fell head-over-heels for a pair of gold Elites close to three inches high; these shoes had a gold patent leather upper and special cushioning inside that looked and felt like bath mats, with all of those little dots. I'd gotten smarter, however, and wasn't about to buy any of the shoes I tried on if they felt even a little bit uncomfortable. A shoe that's too snug or slips on your heel in the store will feel like a snake is biting your toes or a dog is chewing your heels when you wear it doing anything other than sitting down. I really wanted those Elites. I visited them three times, walking for fifteen minutes up and down the shoe store aisles during each of our encounters, willing them to be comfortable. Eventually, I had to give up. The straps around my heels weren't enough to keep me from sliding around. Even Cinderella, with her fairy godmother tailoring her shoes to keep her stepsisters out of them, couldn't have danced in those.
Finally, I went to the swankiest shoe store within an hour of my house and explained my situation to the patient clerk. What I needed, the clerk said, were heels made of top quality leather, because those would be softer. A pillow insole would be a good thing, too.
“Here,” she said. “Try these.” She handed me a white box with an abstract design in bright green and yellow green. Inside it snuggled a pair of black Joy Chen shoes with 2 ½-inch heels. The shoes had a closed back, an open toe, a wide elastic strap, and a snazzy gold interior. The heels were thick but not wedged. In fact, the shoes were shaped like an elegant bridge, or even a piece of art. I was instantly in love.
I tried them on. I walked around. My feet didn't seem to notice. I looked in the mirror and still saw a middle-aged woman in jeans, only this woman was elegant and lanky. I saw me, only better.
“Let's try one more thing,” the clerk suggested. She ripped open a packet of little gray rubbery things shaped like clouds, called “Tip Toes,” and thrust them into the Joy Chen shoes.
I put the shoes back on. “Wow,” I said.
I walked. I jogged. I pranced in place. I had found my shoes! And the best part? They were on sale.
The next day, I had a meeting with an attorney over a house sale. I wore my Merrill's as far as the lawyer's parking lot, not wanting to chance driving in heels. Another obstacle presented itself as I got out of the car: a gravel path leading to a steep set of stairs made out of rough timbers. Could I do it? I cast a wistful glance at my abandoned Merrill's, but squared my shoulders and got out of the car in my heels.
There was nothing to it! I could have run up those stairs!
I shook hands with the lawyer, and I swear to you that he looked me in the eye, then did one of those looks men do when they think you're not noticing. It might not have been the shoes. After all, the shoes had inspired me to wear earrings and lipstick, too. But after the meeting, I drove home in my Joy Chen's with the windows down and the radio on, feeling like it was spring all over again.

The Bride Wore Red

2009-09-08T10:01:00.000-07:00

While my friend Judith tried on dresses, I watched the brides.
There were six of them in the tiny wedding boutique. The brides had brought mothers and friends to help sort through the racks of silk and chiffon. The gowns billowed as the brides carried them to the dressing rooms, yards of promise held aloft by young arms and hope. We friends and mothers gathered on the floral armchairs and watched as, one by one, the brides climbed to the single stool in the middle of the room like awkward birds of paradise taking turns on a mirrored perch.
My friend Judith was the reason I was sitting here instead of hanging out on the playground with Dan and our four children on this bright September Saturday afternoon. “This is the place where you and I will both find perfect wedding dresses,” she had crowed as we pulled up to the shop. “I feel it in my bones!”
Amazingly, Judith's determined use of online dating services had led her into the arms of a man she wanted to marry. I was getting married to Dan in four weeks. The fact that we were both, as she loved to say, “betrothed,” should have brought us together. But I was feeling increasingly isolated. This was Judith's first wedding and my second. Plus, my backyard ceremony would include our four children – Maya, Taylor, Blaise and Drew were 5, 6, 7 and 8 years old – so Dan and I had invited their friends as well as ours to celebrate the creation of our new family. Of our 96 guests, half were going to be children. Our crowd ranged in age from three months to 91 years old.
I hung back as Judith plunged into the racks and started trying on dresses – all of them white and strapless to show off her toned arms and slim waist. She giggled along with the other brides as the sales clerks pinned dresses here and lifted hems there to give every bride the perfect princess fit.
I'd never felt so old. I was 39, old enough to be the mother of some of these brides. In fact, I was a mother. I didn't belong here.
Judith made me try on four gowns, each dress worse than the last. “I can't wear a dress that I can't zip up by myself,” I declared. “And I don't want to wear something that I'll trip on when I have to go upstairs to help the kids get dressed.”
“What's the matter with you?” she grumped on our way back to the car. “You're not even excited about trying on dresses! You act like you don't even want to get married.”
Was that true? I loved Dan with all my heart. Yet, the reality of my approaching marriage was getting on my nerves. I kept wiggling it like a sore tooth, poking at it in places that I knew would hurt. Getting married with children meant that the details of domestic life – the school lunches, the laundry, the mortgage, the car repairs, the holidays – would swell around us like a river of responsibility with unseen rapids. We would surely be swept away from each other.
“Well?” Judith demanded. “Do you want to get married or not?”
“I do,” I said, taking a deep breath, but I couldn't say any more. Just practicing those two words aloud had sapped the last of my courage.
A week before the wedding, I finally bought a wedding dress. It was red. Not fire engine red, but a deep red lace the color of a pricey claret draped over an even deeper red satin. The neckline was low but not too slutty for a mother to wear, and the skirt moved so easily with me that I could imagine grocery shopping in it – a possibility that I did not exclude from my imaginings of what might really happen on my wedding day. (With four children, you never knew when you might run out of milk.) As an added plus, the dress was on sale; I paid less than $50 for it.
Our daughters, both fashionistas who changed their outfits three or four times daily at the ripe ages of 5 and 6, were horrified by the sight of my dress swaying brazenly on its hanger.
“But it's red,” my daughter Taylor wailed. “Brides should wear white!”
“It's true. You don't look like you're getting married,” Dan's daughter, Maya, agreed mournfully.
It was such a rare thing, having these two girls agree – our daughters sometimes played well together, but couldn't seem to get past the idea that neither was the only girl in her family any more – that I momentarily thought of returning the dress and getting a white one to make them happy. I still had a whole week left to shop!
But no. Our wedding was the start of a different sort of life for both Dan and me, I reminded myself. We wanted to be in a marriage where we could be truer to ourselves than we had been in our previous relationships.
I finally hit on the perfect solution. “How would you two like to wear the white dresses?” I offered.
The girls were ecstatic. By some miracle, the week before the wedding I found two matching white dresses with full skirts and lacy underskirts. We bought matching white Mary Janes, too. Oh, and veils. The girls wanted headbands with veils, and I found them in a costume shop for less than $10 each.
As the girls dressed for the wedding, they asked if they could use their dresses to play in afterward. I said yes, why not, and they immediately started arguing.
“I should be the princess bride when we play, because I'm older,” Taylor asserted. “Besides, you're just the stepsister.”
“You're a stepsister, too,” Maya reminded her. “Besides, in stories the real princess bride is always the youngest.”
I left them to it and went to put on my red dress, worrying about how it would turn out for our daughters. Would they grow up to tell their friends about the special day when they first became sisters and each gained a new brother? Or would the arguments escalate, until by their teens they scarcely spoke, and in the end they wouldn't even attend each other's weddings?
I shuddered. There are so many unknowns when you marry. But, when you marry with children, these unknowns spool out into infinity.
It had started to rain early that morning, a light drizzle from a pewter sky. Luckily, we had ordered tents for the backyard. The rain added to the beauty of it, as the tents caught a kaleidoscope of falling leaves, like handmade Japanese paper in a complex geometric pattern of reds, oranges, and yellows.
At any wedding, being the bride means that you're in a fugue state of anxiety. You know less about what's going on than anyone else there. I do know there were the usual last-minute crises. Our boys refused to put on their neckties and scratchy jackets; they wanted to wear their black Ninja Turtle t-shirts. “We want a Ninja wedding!” they cried, karate chopping each other.
Dan finally coerced them into their suits by bribing them with $5 each. Twenty minutes later, Dan insulted my mother when he banished her from our bedroom as we were getting dressed.
“But she's the bride,” Mom said. “You're not supposed to see her before the ceremony. It's bad luck!”
“Yes,” Dan said, not unkindly. “But this is my bedroom, and I need to get dressed.”
I kissed him, impressed that he would have the courage to stand up to my mother – few men did – but I worried about bad luck just the same.
As we stood in front of the minister beneath the tents, I tensed my shoulders as we got to the part where we had to read the vows we'd written for each other. My vows seemed lame in front of this crowd of well-wishers. My children, the people dearest to my heart, stood next to me, and Dan's children, their faces pale and expectant, stood next to him. What were we doing, bringing these children together when they really had no say in the matter? What right did we have to turn their young lives upside down forever?
Just then, our dog – a white American Eskimo named Ben, who the girls had adorned with a deep red bow to match my dress – wandered up the aisle to stand with us. Everyone, even the minister, started to laugh as Ben wagged his tail and tipped his snout up in the air – sniffing the lamb kabobs the caterers were grilling, no doubt – and I suddenly felt an overwhelming love for everyone there: Dan and our children, our family who had traveled so far to be with us, and the furry, benevolent presence of this white dog. I said my vows.
During the reception, our sons, having kept up their end of the bargain and earned their $5, tore off their ties and suit jackets and wore their t-shirts. My grandmother and her two sisters, all three of them in their eighties, sang, “Let Me Call You Sweetheart!” And our children danced together with their friends -- the chicken dance, the hamster dance, and the Macarena -- between nibbling on treats in the separate children's tent.
Dan and I danced with our daughters on our wedding day, too, holding their hands as their white skirts billowed around them, our girls like two tiny, giggling brides just beginning to learn about love.

The New Shape of Family

2009-07-21T08:36:00.000-07:00

The night before my niece Lizzie's wedding, we attended a rehearsal dinner unlike any other I've ever experienced. For one thing, it was in a bowling alley. A bowling alley! There was a Mexican buffet and an open bar. We gathered in a tap room next to the lanes and loaded up our tacos, then sat and listened to speeches the way people do at weddings all over the world.
Except, at this dinner, I clearly saw the new shape of family in the United States. Lizzie, the cute blond bride, isn't really related to me. She is my husband's niece. He is my second husband, and between us we have five children: two of his, two of mine, and one of our own. The bride's mother and father are divorced, but both were in the taco line. So were the bride's stepmother, the bride's three siblings and two of her step-siblings. The groom, whose own parents are out of the picture, was accompanied by the woman who raised him. She arrived on a motorcycle with her boyfriend, who she described as her “balance partner” after a hand-binding commitment ceremony. Most of the grandparents were there, too, smiling and dipping into the guacamole and chips.
During dinner, everyone sat at tables according to family ties. But after the buffet and speeches, we all drifted out to the lanes. The bowling balls glowed yellow and pink, orange and blue in the black light, and the rock music was punctuated by the pinging of arcade machines. We donned our bowling shoes and started downing pins: children with adults, step-cousins and step-siblings with cousins and siblings, ex-laws with in-laws. As the pins came down, the family divisions blurred and we were all bowling together.
Among the shrieking and victory dances on the bowling lanes, under the black light that turned our white buttons and laces blue, I remembered my first wedding. That marriage ended in a painful divorce after two children in seven years. Just like Jon and Kate Plus Eight, my ex and I shared a house for a while after we were separated, trying to disrupt the children's lives as little as possible. It wasn't a mansion, and we didn't have nannies and security guards, but it worked well enough. “If you can do that,” my mother proclaimed, “then you can stay married.”
Sadly, no. But what we could do was remember the qualities we loved in each other and be civil for the sake of the kids. As Arianna Huffington pointed out in describing her own vacation with her ex (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/vacationing-with-my-ex_b_226310.htmlin), divorce can be dignified. Our children deserve the best of us even when the marriage bonds we once thought permanent fray and break. This is an important lesson, since blended families are now the norm and the majority of American families are in some form of step arrangement, according to The Stepfamily Foundation (http://www.stepfamily.org/). In fact, The Council on Contemporary Families reports that at least 65 percent of remarriages involve children younger than 19 (http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org/).
Lizzie's wedding took place in a garden the next day. Her dress sparkled in the sunlight and we were surrounded by lilies and roses. But what made the day so different, so perfect, was the fact that each of us felt surrounded by an abundance of love and acceptance.

Mark Sanford Makes Vampire Love Look Good

2009-06-28T15:16:00.000-07:00

So Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina wasn't hiking on the Appalachian Trail, as his staff led us to believe. Nor was he off alone to “clear his head” as his wife reported. Nope. Republican Governor Sanford was hiding out with an Argentinian lover who signed her emails with “sweet kisses” and “I'll dream with you” http://www.thestate.com/sanford/story/839350.html.
Meanwhile, we, the incredulous public, are still reeling from TLC reality couple Jon and Kate's decision to split after Jon's alleged affair with a preschool teacher. And that's after picking our jaws up off the floor following revelations that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was smitten with a prostitute named Kristen.
Why the great shag fest? Because, as anybody who tries it knows, marriage is tough. It's an institution held together by duct tape that unravels over time, when romantic notions crumble beneath the collective weight of parenting, vacuuming and bill paying.
I have proof. For many years, I was a sex and marriage columnist for three different women's magazines. A lot of letters started like this: “My wife is too tired for sex.” Even where bonfires once raged, embers cooled: “I'm no longer attracted to my wife since she became such a fatso.” Or, “My husband's a workaholic and I met the perfect man on the Internet. Is phone sex cheating?”
When I first started reading these letters and scouring the country for experts to dish out advice, I was in a state of disbelief. According to the media, everybody is having great sex all of the time, even married people, and orgasms are as easy to come by as sneezes. Then one night I went to a dinner party with friends and the women began talking about how they avoided sex with their husbands. One woman said, “I know not to smile at my husband when I get into bed, because then he thinks I'm in the mood. I'd rather read a good mystery novel than have sex.” Another told me, “If my husband is still awake when I go to bed, I make some excuse, like I have to go downstairs and make sure all of the lights are out. By the time I come back up, I know he'll be snoring and I'm off the hook.”
Say what? But that's not as bad as the hot tub party I went to a few months later -- women only, all of us in bathing suits, nothing kinky, sorry – where we played one of those truth-or-dare games after a few fizzy drinks. One question went like this: “If your vagina was an article of clothing, what would it be?” Hot, right? Except that most answers went like this: “A shut purse,” “A worn out sweater,” “A tattered pair of stockings,” or some other forlorn item.
More recently, I went to my book club's discussion of Twilight, that soft porn vampire novel. This was a true literary love fest among our book club members – soccer and baseball moms, mostly – who crooned over Edward, the vampire hero at the heart of that series. Why? Because Edward is a true gentleman, a guy determined to keep his lover safe by not biting her neck, no matter how good she smells. Chivalry is not dead. You just need to find a vampire lover strong enough to race through the forest while carrying you on his back.
What does this all add up to? I'm not sure, except that I'm not surprised that Jon chose a preschool teacher over hypercritical Kate, or that Mark Sanford ran away to Argentina, to a woman who signs off her emails with, “I'll dream with you.” Dreams and lovers, and maybe even prostitutes, are much easier to take than the thorny reality of slogging through children and housework, jobs and disappointments, death and taxes, with only occasional moments to embrace between chores. Those of us who stay married might not make the papers, but we are truly making love.

"Teachers Don't Like Boys, Mom"

2009-06-17T13:40:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, I was volunteering at my son Aidan's elementary school after hours. The building was empty but for a knot of teachers clustered in the hallway. As we entered his classroom, Aidan leaped up to touch the door frame. Immediately, one of the teachers scolded him about safety.
Aidan apologized. As soon as we were alone, though, he rolled his eyes at me. “Teachers don't like boys, Mom. If I was a girl, she never would have said anything.”
“They're just trying to keep you safe,” I said.
Still, I couldn't help wishing, as I do so often, that we had better schools for boys.
I say this with resignation as another school year draws to a close. Now that Aidan, the youngest of our five children, is in sixth grade, I have little hope that the system will change. Our public school curriculum in Massachusetts, as in so many states, is designed to help students conquer basic skills and prepare for the state-administered MCAS exam. Not a bad goal. Just one problem: our teachers now scramble to teach to the tests. This means lots of worksheets get handed out and there's little time left for creative, hands-on projects.
This is a tragedy, especially for boys. Research tells us what most parents know: boys are apt to be “kinesthetic learners.” That's educatorspeak for the fact that most boys learn best while they're in motion. Boys want to get their feet wet and their hands dirty. They want to build things and take them apart, trap small animals and climb tall trees. Or jump up and touch whatever they can.
As Aidan observed once, after spending an entire science class watching a movie about the life cycle of frogs, “We'd learn a lot more if the teacher just brought tadpoles and frogs into the classroom and we could look at them.”
Students in our public schools are rewarded for being quiet and respectful, for scoring well on tests, for coloring inside the lines, for collaborating instead of competing, for writing about their feelings, and for civilized classroom behaviors that don't include farting or burping. All fine skills. The thing is, most girls – I'm basing this on our own family of three boys and two girls, plus the children of friends – seem to want to please their teachers and be praised. That's why so many more school valedictorians are girls. The boys, not so much. Until you show them why something matters in the outside world, they mostly don't see the point of doing something that bores them silly. And I mean silly.
It doesn't help matters that most teachers are hard-working, well-meaning women who are already overwhelmed with the responsibilities heaped on them by school administrators, inclusive classrooms, parents, needy kids and the threat, always, of losing their jobs or having their pay cut. Would things be different if more men populated our classrooms? I have no idea. I only know that, as it stands now, boys are more likely to fail in school and to be three times more likely to be labeled as ADHD than girls because of their activity level (http://www.healthcentral.com/adhd/c/1443/13716/addadhd-statistics/). Aidan earns A's and B's in school, yet I'm constantly fighting battles like this one: When he misbehaves, his teachers take away recess. Please. Are they out of their Vulcan minds?
Recently, I was walking with a few friends and listening to their lamentations about next year's teachers and class sizes. When they asked my opinion, they were shocked when I shrugged and said, “Maybe it doesn't matter. It's just school.”
But I can't help seeing school as a necessary evil instead of an inspiration. It's great that Aidan has learned how to do algebra, read a map, write an essay and navigate social situations without a black eye. Outside of school, though, is where Aidan does most of his real learning. He pursues his interests with passion: rock climbing, coin collecting, fishing, engineering, snowboarding. Our house is one big science lab; in recent months Aidan has built a hovercraft in the driveway, figured out that you could shrink potato chip bags in the microwave oven, and erected a K'nex roller coaster taller than he is. He has memorized the periodic table and taken apart an old computer. He surprised me in the kitchen by saying, “Here's a cool invention for kids, Mom,” and pushing a cup of milk onto the ice dispenser of our freezer. Instead of dispensing ice, cereal came pouring out of the freezer and fell into his cup of milk. Messy, but way cool.
What would a perfect school for boys be like? Classes would be small and held outside half the time. Boys of all abilities and temperaments would build, paint, draw, take things apart, play computer games and listen to music while reading if they felt like it. If they wanted to write about volcanoes instead of the weather, or study the Civil War in January instead of September, why not let them choose? And, if they wanted to do math standing up or run a few laps between exams, why not?
Oh, wait. Our boys couldn't do that. That would be breaking the rules.

The American Gerbil Show: What Our Pets Teach Us

2009-06-08T12:27:00.000-07:00

The animals were groomed and shiny. The judges wore white coats and serious expressions as they rated the furry contestants for conformation, color and disposition. There were competitions for agility and speed. Every owner hoped to win Best in Show.
Was this The Westminster Dog Show? Nope. This was the American Gerbil Show. The competitors may only be palm-size rodents with tufted tails, but their owners still eagerly trekked to this year's Massachusetts show from as far away as Nebraska to talk gerbil.
The American Gerbil Show is held twice each year by The American Gerbil Society. Some of the day's events are just for fun, like the Gerbil Olympics, where pet gerbils take on paper tubes to prove their jaw power and race against each other in plastic balls. Their owners cheer them on from the sidelines, shouting things like, “Yeah, you got this! Go, go, go!” When it comes to exhibiting groupie level enthusiasm for these curious rodents, it's tough to tell the kids from the adults.
But serious business is conducted at these shows, too. Gerbil enthusiasts have been breeding these pocket kangaroos since the animals were first imported to this country from Japan in 1954. By now, the color variations have spun out far beyond the golden agouti gerbils that my own father once raised by the thousands. Today there are lilac and nutmeg gerbils, Siamese and Burmese gerbils, dove and polar fox gerbils, honey cream and silver fox, and many more.
There is even, as of this spring, a blue gerbil in the United States, shown by the show's coordinator, Libby Hanna. Her devoted husband flew to Helsinki, Finland to pick up the animals, turned around in the airport, and flew right back – his Christmas gift to Libby. “Massachusetts is a real hot spot for gerbils,” she assured me. “We had to have blue gerbils.”
The new blue gerbils were certainly a show stopper. So was Herman the Show Jumping Gerbil, an athletic YouTube celebrity (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-HUFPO-Bek) who is even more debonair in person than on screen.
A few side tables at the American Gerbil Show displayed gerbil paraphernalia for sale: gerbil purses and gerbil hats, wooden gerbil houses, gerbil art and gerbil books. There were even hand-knitted gerbils trucked all the way from Ohio by their creator.
As I mingled with the gerbil fanciers, I couldn't help but recall one of my mother's favorite sayings: “There's a lid for every pot.” These were people who wear their passions emblazoned on their t-shirts: American Gerbil Society: Christmas Revels, Audubon Society. If they weren't here, this crowd would be out walking for good causes.
One example: Tom and Renee. Tom tells me that he's had pet gerbils since the 1960s. These days he specializes in rescuing gerbils with disabilities, like his personal favorite, a blind gerbil called “Blindy.” In an unfortunate incident, Blindy once caught his leg in the crack of a coconut shell while taking a dust bath. Blindy couldn't see which way to pull his leg out, Tom explained, so he thrashed around and broke it. Tom and Renee had to nurse him back to health.
“It was a good thing that happened, really,” Tom mused, because it showed their adopted son that, “when parents love you, they don't abandon you. They take care of you no matter what happens. It was a good lesson in love.”
Good lessons in love: that's what our pets, small or large, teach us all.

Singer Susan Boyle: The Poster Child for Late Bloomers

2009-06-02T08:46:00.000-07:00

As I stumble through American Idol withdrawal and recover from the fact that vanilla is still the flavor of choice in the U.S. whether we're talking ice cream or singers, I've been increasingly thankful for Susan Boyle, the hairy angel on Britain's Got Talent. Whether she wins or loses the chance to sing for the Queen, she is the inspirational poster child for late bloomers everywhere.
Besides looking like that crazy spinster aunt in Wal-Mart clothes that your mother always invites to dinner because she lives alone with her cat, Boyle is a creaking forty-eight years old. That's right: she's more than twice the age of Kris Allen, our newly crowned American Idol. Yet, Boyle's age, hairy church lady looks and lousy luck in love didn't deter our feisty lass from climbing up on stage and belting out “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables in a way that made even the only female judge, Botox beauty Amanda Holden, cast cow-eyed looks of awe at this unlikely Scottish songbird.
Why did this performance become such an instant viral plague on YouTube that even my son sent it to me via his college email? It wasn't just for that okay tear jerker of a song. It was because Susan Boyle gives all late bloomers hope that we still have a chance to realize our own dreams. Want to be a singer? Write the great American novel? Run a marathon? Be a millionaire? Take up painting? Invent a flying car? Sail around the world? Watching Susan Boyle, we know it's not too late! Even if I could wave a magic wand and somehow combine Kris Allen and Adam Lambert into one perfect manchild megastar, they could never do that. They're too beautiful. And way, way too young.
As writer Malcolm Gladwell noted in his wonderful October 20, 2008 New Yorker essay, “Late Bloomers” (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell), “doing something truly creative, we're inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth.” He points out notable examples of that, from Orson Welles to Mozart. However, Gladwell goes on to note that many geniuses are late bloomers, not prodigies who burst out of the gates at age fifteen, talents and ambitions razor sharp. Late bloomers muddle ahead, experimenting and failing and trudging forward for decades before they're a success, or even noticed at all. Until then, many late bloomers are perceived as failures. They have to rely on mundane jobs (think of Einstein toiling away in his patent office) or kindly patrons as they inch forward toward their dreams.
What's so inspiring about Susan Boyle? She dreamed her dream not for a mere seventeen years, like bluesy, confident American Idol finalist Allison Iraheta, so perfectly at home on stage next to veteran rocker Cyndi Lauper, but for almost half a century. Now that's star power.

Why Our Stories Matter

2009-05-29T09:01:00.000-07:00

The last time I called my father, he asked me what time it was.
“Don't you have a watch, Dad?” I asked.
“No, they always take those away when you travel, and the clocks in the train station are all wrong,” he answered.
“He thinks he's going on a trip,” said my brother, who'd driven down to Myrtle Beach from New York to visit Dad in the hospital. “He keeps trying to do up his seatbelt.”
Dad was going on a trip. It was his last journey, the same one we all eventually make. For him, the journey came just after Christmas. I'd been to see him the first week of December, and we'd managed to play a game of Monopoly, though his hands were so shaky that I had to move his little cannon around the board for him. Still, Dad's blue eyes gleamed with the hope of landing on Boardwalk.
He landed in the hospital two weeks later with pneumonia. Given his emphysema, his prognosis wasn't great. I wanted to fly down to see him, but Christmas and New Year's were in the way and our four children were coming home from college. Plus, the doctors were noncommittal. He might bounce back, they said. Let's get him into rehab. I made a reservation to fly down from Massachusetts to South Carolina the week after Christmas. Dad died the day before I arrived.
I flew down anyway, taking off from Boston in a blizzard on the last plane to have its wings de-iced for the day. I drove so fast out of the Myrtle Beach airport that a tiny, sunburned, Napoleonic cop handed me a ticket for $100.
“Do you have any idea how fast you were going?” the cop asked.
“Not fast enough,” I said.
I spent the next week helping my mother clear out Dad's closets and dresser drawers, marveling at how my father, a career Navy man who served his country during the Korean War and Vietnam, still folded his briefs and t-shirts in that tidy military way despite his palsied hands and lack of breath. The neat rows of shining shoes bothered me the most, clear evidence that Dad never went anywhere at the end. Only his slippers were scuffed.
I kept a soft flannel shirt and a few family photos. Otherwise, off it went, all of that detritus of life carted away to the Salvation Army in the mafia-sized trunk of my mother's lumbering American sedan. My last stop was at the funeral home to retrieve Dad's ashes, which weighed so much that I staggered when the funeral director handed me the brass box.
Death is seldom convenient, but for me, Dad's death has a peculiarly sharp resonance because I wrote a book about him that he never saw. My memoir, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter, is due out today by Harmony. To research the book required spending many hours with my father, talking about how and why he, a Navy officer, became so entranced by gerbils – “pocket kangaroos,” he liked to call them -- that he retired from the military and raised them on a grand scale. My dad was a world- renowned gerbil expert, a Gerbil Czar with nearly 9,000 gerbils housed on our 90-acre farm in Massachusetts. We kids were his first employees.
Despite what some readers might think after James Frey published his memoir-that-wasn't, A Million Little Pieces (which probably made more money because Oprah gave him such a sound scolding for faking it), most people who write memoirs are not fanciful liars, but dogged researchers. In my case, I interviewed family, friends, my father's employees, and anyone else I could get to talk to me about Dad, hoping to capture a life on the page.
At Dad's memorial service last week, our family gathered for an outdoor ceremony at a cemetery that is, literally and figuratively, on a dead end street in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. Standing in this cemetery, you get no sense of the world beyond. There are no traffic sounds or children shouting, no ambulance sirens or buses honking their horns. None of that busyness of life to interfere with our contemplation of that last journey we all make, leaving behind our shoes and hats and families who love us. When the minister sang, though, a mockingbird sitting high in an oak tree above us suddenly started chattering and singing, too, louder and louder over the minister's fine soprano until we were all laughing.
“That's Dad, having the last word,” my brother said, looking up at the bird.
“I hope so,” I said.
For all I can think, as my book makes its way into the world, is this: what if I got something wrong? Dad read the book before he left for his last journey, but what if he missed something, too?
Ah, well. As the brilliant writer Jim Harrison says in his poem, “Larson's Holstein Bull” from In Search of Small Gods, “Death steals everything except our stories.” That's why it's so important to tell them as best we can.

American Idol's Lambert v.s. Allen: Good v.s. Evil?

2009-05-15T10:14:00.001-07:00

My son, Blaise, an erudite English major at Bates College, recently caught me curled up in a chair, red wine in hand, watching American Idol. Blaise is a 21 year-old idealist taking a class in deconstructing the media, so he was quick to lecture me on the evils of falling prey to would-be Idols who are manufactured with their own little stories, just like those American Girl Dolls his sisters once loved. There's the Idol with the dead wife, the blind guy, the impoverished mother of three, etc. "Idol panders to the prurient interests of the masses," he said. "How can you stand to watch it? You have a master's degree in English, Mom!"

Exactly. With my pedigree, how can I stand NOT to watch AI? I was a reality TV show virgin until this year, when I accidentally stumbled onto one of the early American Idol audition shows while searching for a public television documentary on prison torture or plague viruses, I forget. I was after some mind expansion. Instead, I found people singing their hearts out in front of psycho judges who speak in tongues, using words like "dope" and "chops," or uttering playground insults like, "Your singing sounded like a cat being dropped off the Empire State building." I was hooked.

I've watched every show since then. With the help of my DVR, I can zip through the drearier performances, like those by Matt in the Hat, kind of like skipping some of Proust's descriptions of his bedspread. Now that we're down to the final battle between Kris Allen and Adam Lambert, I've come to believe that American Idol is like great literature everywhere, offering us the classic conflict of good v.s. evil.

In this corner, Ladies and Gentlemen -- let's just call it the "right" or the "red" corner -- we have good boy Kris Allen, the cute and humble guitar picker from Arkansas who has already landed himself a Barbie trinket of a wife. He sings white boy mood music kind of like Jack Johnson, well suited to animated children's stories. He's exactly the boy you hope shows up at your front door to take your daughter to the prom.

Facing off Chris in the opposite corner -- yep, you got it, that's the LEFT or the blue corner -- we have Adam Lambert, a favorite of the judges, because hey, guess what? As Randy would say, "You can sing, dude." In fact, whether Lambert is singing Johnny Cash or Led Zeppelin, he sings like he's on fire, or maybe just his pants are smoking. He's Steven Tyler, Mick Jagger and Cher all rolled into one. Without a doubt, he should win.

But will he? Perhaps not. Remember that, in the greatest works of literature, there are unreliable narrators and multifaceted characters who are never just good or bad. For many, I expect Kris Allen represents all that is good and whole and milk-fed, right down to his lucky jeans, business major, and that weird curling tongue thing he does when he sings. Meanwhile, Adam Lambert is the sort of guy whose unrevealed (yeah, right) sexual identity has landed him on magazine covers and provoked the likes of Bill O'Reilly to try and knock some common sense into us before our poor innocent children can all start wearing black nail polish and cutting their hair in crazy ass polygons. But Adam has a big sexy body, he's from California, and he looks good in LEATHER. Scary good! Any girl (or boy) who went to the prom with him would have a night to remember.

What will America do? That's really why I'm watching. I want to know how the story ends.

Still in Love with Spock After All These Years

2009-05-11T19:57:00.000-07:00

May 11, 2009

Still in Love with Spock After All These Years

My love affair with Spock is no passing fancy. I was starstruck at age 11, when I first watched Star Trek on TV and hid under the coffee table because I was afraid of having the salt drained from my body by an alien and being covered with red welts, just like Darnell in “The Man Trap.” I wanted to be Spock, whose blood was immune to such things. I vowed to live long and prosper, and I wore a red turtleneck every day of sixth grade because I wanted to be mistaken for a member of the Enterprise crew. (You can imagine what this did for my popularity.)

I could only do that weird split-finger Vulcan salute with my right hand and never my left, due to some genetic quirk. Despite this minor physical shortcoming, I persevered. Whenever my best friend and I played Star Trek, with our very own cardboard box Enterprise bridge and my pet gerbil as an extra crew member, she was always fearless Kirk to my rational, conflicted Spock.

Spock was the first man to whom I wrote a love letter, and in return for it I received an autographed photograph. I pressed that picture inside my favorite horse book, My Friend Flicka, for the next six years or so. (I would still have it, but my father was a Navy officer, so nothing was forever.)

I thought my lust for sexy Vulcans was gone for good, too, until I went to see the latest Star Trek movie with my youngest son, now 11, exactly the same age I was when Spock first ignited my passions. It was Mother's Day, so we saw Star Trek in a sold-out IMAX cinema north of Boston. It was a digital, full body experience far removed from the pale, flickering television of my youth. This theater had a towering screen, rumbling seats and a sound system that made me feel like the theater was being nuked the minute before the opening credits.

But I didn't think about the theater at the time. While my husband and son were entranced by the battle scenes, I had eyes only for Spock. Or should I say “Spocks”? Leonard Nimoy was the Spock of the future, a grand old man who can still do the most famous split-finger salute in the universe and say “Live long and prosper” and make you think he means it. Our present-day Spock was played by Zachary Quinto, who had to have his fingers glued because he couldn't do that funky Vulcan finger thing, either. Must be the same genetic quirk I have. (William Shatner used fishing line to perform the trick in the original series. Check out http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,25459863-5012980,00.html)

I first noticed the actor Quinto as Sylar (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0704270/bio) on the brain-bruising Sci Fi conundrum that is Heroes (http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/) . He is perhaps best known as the villain who can open the craniums of his victims the way you or I might lift the lids off of yogurt containers. Could Quinto possibly pull this off, I wondered? Could he reignite my passion for all things Vulcan and make me remember why I loved Spock?

Yes, yes, yes! Quinto plays a brooding Spock with such loyalty to his human mother that he does unVulcan things like clock whatever dumb ass insults her. He has the classic arched eyebrow, the ability to easily subdue lesser men with a single shoulder pinch, and says “fascinating” with authority.

Did I care whether the Federation, with its courageous Enterprise crew, subdued this latest rebel ship of the Romulan Empire (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Romulan_Star_Empire)? Not one whit. On Mother's Day, I cared only that the movie brought my first love back to me.