What Remains

The last year of my life has been a slash-and-burn of most of what my old "normal" was. My life, in many ways, was completely decimated by a few events, and now I am standing in what used to be the forest and seeing what remains.

I believe what remains is nearly always what is worth nurturing and growing.

For starters, I lost my place of worship after a toxic situation. But I lost more than the building, I lost a wide swath of acquaintances. The person or two who remain in my life remain as precious to me in ways I find difficult to describe.

I lost my days. I can sum this up with one word: SALAMI. Work with me here. You see, it used to be that once I got Oldest Son and Younger Daughter on their respective commutes (his is over an hour each way to school), and got the Not-a-Morning-Person Pirate Boy off crankily to school where he can torment his teacher for the day, that day was indeed mine. (Aside: Shockingly, Pirate Boy's teacher says he is an "angel"--if a bit "chatty"--today I volunteered in his class and noticed during the film about baby birds being born, he regaled his nearby seatmates with talk of the baby robins looking like multi-headed zombies . . .. but I digress.) When my dad came to live here, my day disappeared down a sucking vortex of outings. He doesn't like the salami at Wal-Mart. Nor Kroger's. He LIKES the salami a HALF-HOUR AWAY at the Italian deli. So for a pound of salami, we're talking an hour and a half excursion. I know you want to be me.

But what remains . . . after I adjusted and cried and hyperventilated . . . is a three-generation household that somehow works. If nothing else, the fact that I now have a handicapped sticker when he lives here means I park up close everywhere. In the rain, this is a good thing.

My health got not-so-healthy this year. My new normal isn't so fun there. Whether Crohn's or a second autoimmune disease, my joints are swollen and they hurt like hell 24/7. But what remains . . . is an absolute clear eye about what's important. I don't HAVE the energy to waste on what isn't. And the rest falls away.

And it's not unlike writing. The longer I write, the more I realize that less is more and stripping a story down to its absolute barest beauty is hopefully what works. What remains . . . is the heart of the work. It's Story.

I also realized that What Remains is acquired wisdom. I think when you are younger, sometimes, losing things feels frantic. You just hold on tighter. In both writing AND life. But we all have slash-and-burn years, and all writers have that slash-and-burn manuscript that nearly kills you. And there is nothing like stepping in the middle of the still-smoldering earth, seeing what remains, and walking fearlessly forward. Writing fearlessly forward.

Have you ever had a slash-and-burn book? A time of life? And what happened on the other side of it?

Too Personal

I have a really, really good idea for a book. A nonfiction book. A book with a "platform"--one I could very ably talk about, I think. The book would be funny--sort of my "real-life" voice, which is a lot more like my Demon Baby blog. Kind of Erma Bombeck on acid. It has a single-word catchy title (which I won't share in case I do it someday) like "Blink" or "Outliers."

It's really about my life. Not a memoir. But about raising a toddler while having concerns about aging parents, or in particular, my father, who has gone blind. My experience isn't unusual--there are millions of women facing this. Maybe their kids are not quite as young as mine . . . but as people's life expectancies advance, chances are many people reading this will one day find themselves in my shoes. Minus the Demon Baby. He's one-of-a-kind.

I have a million stories from these weeks and months with my dad here. Funny stories. Poignant stories. Last night, we laughed so hard, I thought I would choke. I had such a bad day, but then . . . my God, but the stories he told from when my parents were first married were hysterical. Well, actually, my mom was telling them. She married my dad for love. She stayed with him for SPITE. Swear it. She was going to leave him, with me in tow, and she walked out on him for real, sat down on the front steps of their apartment. I was 6 weeks old. And she said to herself, "I will be DAMNED if all the people who took bets this marriage wouldn't last a year will be proved right." So she stayed. They're married for better or worse over 40 years.

Of course, no one then could have pictured we'd be leading him around now, or counting his money because he can't see it or whatever. That's the thing called life. It throws you curveballs when your back is to the pitcher.

Anyway, as I pondered all this . . . I realized . . . there are some stories that are just too personal. Who do stories belong to anyway? If I share about his hypochondrical tendencies . . . is it MY story of my stress? Or his? Or the universe's?

So for now, I write fiction. And I suppose I am grateful I do. I can filter in the experiences, process my feelings about then, use what's dynamic and dramatic, and keep the rest in my heart.

Thoughts?

I'd Tell You But Then I'd Have To . . .

I rarely tell people I am a novelist. It invites those dreaded questions. What's your book about? I have this great idea for a book--would you write it and we can split the royalties? You know all THOSE questions. I usually tell people I am an actuary. Lately, I've been thinking of switching my career to "theoretical physicist" but then I am afraid someone will ask "What's that?"

Of course, I have four kids . . . and a couple of them tell people what I do, despite my asking them to say I am an actuary. So then I meet parents of their friends. "Oh, your Baby Girl's mother . . . she tells me you're a writer."

"Um . . . she said that? Oh . . . sort of. I work from home."

How's that for sufficiently vague?

But lately, despite my best efforts, acquaintances are finding out what I do. And a funny thing has happened. More and more, I think people realize that I am a writer and ALSO that I appear to listen very well--to observe them. And if they know me for long enough, they realize I remember EVERYTHING. And NOW, some people start to tell a story and stop and say, "Okay, you can't put this in one of your books."

People now have "off-the-record" conversations around me!

I just crack up. Even if I "use" something, it's usually blended and changed in such a way that no one would recognize it. But it's just very funny how my being a writer affects conversation.

In fact, in my work in progress, someone has to go interview someone else, and the interviewer is told, "Don't take notes. People think twice about talking to people when someone is taking notes." And it's true. I'm not a true journalist, but I am there taking mental notes.

Has this ever happened to you? Of course the opposite happens too. Sometimes someone doesn't STOP talking and says, "You have to put this in a book someday."

When I tell stories, I usually just say, "I'd tell you what really happened . . . but then I'd have to . . ." You know the drill.

Thoughts?

The Path to I Do

I read this every single Sunday.

I get my cup of coffee before church, and sit down and read it while it's quiet around here (if such a thing even exists . . . quiet in this house is relative). If I go on vacation and miss a week of it, because it's archived at the NY Times, I go back and read the week I missed.

So why? Why do I read it? If you met me, I doubt you would say I am a hopeless romantic, though I am hopelessly, impossibly sentimental. I cry at Kodak commericals. I cry reading this every Sunday. I cry when my kids write me goofy notes like "I luv U, U R the best mom, don't be crabby" (I get said notes once a month if you get my drift, and if any of my kids are reading this, that explains my homicidal mood this a.m.--but I digress). In general, I cry at anything sentimental--and I don't even have to KNOW the people involved. My kids once made me watch that show Extreme Home Makeover, and I had to go get a BOX of tissues I was crying so hard. I can go to a total stranger's wedding and weep all the way through it. People are so full of hope at weddings, it's contagious.

But as a writer, what I love is that the stories in the Times each Sunday capture two things. One is that there is someone for everyone. That all our foibles and neuroses and the delicious things and not-so-wonderful things that make us human somehow find a match in someone else. And two, as a fiction writer, I love the stories, the way the Fates conspire to bring two souls together. The "how we met" stories. Two people each on their own path who somehow manage to meet and survive to become a couple. When I look at The Roofer, which isn't a romance by any stretch, it's a miracle that Ava can even try to form a relationship. Yet people seem to have it in themselves to try for love. Or the Fates seem to insist on it.

Fate? Maybe. When I met my significant other, I hurled a steak at his head through the window of a kitchen pass-thru because his sous chef had burned my best customer's steak. In my defense, I wasn't a Buddhist then. I was a single mother who had been so broken by one man's possessive streak that I thought I would suffocate. But somehow, this guy I hit with a steak made me laugh. From there, we went on a date, at which he said he wanted to marry me. Which was enough to make me run the other way. It took a couple of years, multiple proposals, three rings, and a dress for me to finally agree. I found a VERY nice wedding dress in a formal dress shop, off the rack, sample sale, and thought, "If I ever was going to be so utterly INSANE as to CONTEMPLATE getting married again, I would wear THIS dress." I came home with the dress. I called him at work and said, "If we're going to do this, let's do it in a month before I change my mind." We found a preacher, an inn to have it at, and a place to do pronto invitations. All within one week, which is insane. The inn had a cancellation. The cakemaker said he could do it. The preacher was a relative who offered to drive up and hitch us. And right until I actually walked in the inn, it was never a sure thing. Had my best friend from high school not physically gotten me into a cab, I would probably not have four children right now. In fact, I was so unsure I could go through with it, I didn't even have flowers for my hair and bought some on the way, pinning them into my hair in the rearview mirror of the cab (with a very nice cabbie, whom we tipped well for putting up with me doing my hair in his cab).

You don't have to write romance or romantic comedies to appreciate the stories of people's lives. That's what makes most of us writers. So, do you collect stories of people and the fates like I do? Do people and their stories fascinate you? Do you think the Fates intervene?

Everyone Has a Story

As a fiction writer, I am fortunate in that I have lived a really full life, complete with family members who really should have their own reality show. Not kidding. Eccentric relatives, LOUD relatives, crazy but lovable people all around . . . and I've packed a lot of living in my years--some of it unhappy--divorce and unhappy marriage, a life-threatening bout of illness, high-risk pregnancies (baby#3 was born with me having a catheter inserted into my heart while in labor--and I went on to try for baby#4). But even the sad and difficult and grief-filled parts of life are fodder for fiction.

When people meet my family--boisterous and funny and a little left of criminal at times--they say how lucky I am. "They sure give you stuff to write about."

But that's where they're wrong in a way. I once met an aspiring writer who told me he had lived a timid, quiet, shy, boring life. "Nothing to write about," he told me. "I've been a scientist all my life. I never even got married."

But he was wrong--because even in THAT there is the story. Maybe, in my own take on living life fully, it is a tragic tale of a man afraid to love or a man afraid to take risks. Maybe there is tragedy in the man (not him but some hypothetical man) burning with resentments and filled with pessimism and a life unfulfilled. Or the man who has sat in the same armchair for twenty years, drinking himself into a stupor. Or the wan who tossed his wife and children away for a chance on what he thought was love--and gambled wrong. In these lives of quiet desperation, there are stories.

In the lives of the man who packs my groceries and the woman I meet at the park who secretly loathes her mother-in-law, there are stories.

We all have them. The key, as writer, is to pull them out and write about them.

I am lucky in I have a bold life. A reckless, wonderful life that I can draw on. But everyone has a story. Don't you think? Do you listen to the stories of others or just imagine them? Do you draw from others' lives? I'm curious!

Peace,
E