A Short Story for a Great Cause

Grab a perfect beach read and contribute to a great cause at the same time. Omnific Publishing has partnered with the Save the Ta-Tas Foundation and all proceeds will be donated to the charitable organization. Read the romance and do your part to Save the Ta-Tas.

Within Summer Breeze, a lovely collection of summer romances, you'll find a short story I wrote in memory of my times in Maine.  The story, Whatever It Takes, was inspired by a photo of  a young Aaron Eckhart, a killer bottle of chardonnay, and the Westminster Dog Show.  Intrigued, grab a copy.  It's for a very worthwhile cause.

Missing home

By 11:30 p.m. I had given up any hope of making it home.  Snow and ice had crippled Newark, with the threat of more on the way.  My backs were packed and I was itching to give in to the hell that is travel.  "If only they could beam me there," my mother used to say.  And I agree, like some Star Trek technique, I could stand in my doorway and zoom, off to another.  Another home, a place I can still call home, although I have lived in this old house in San Francisco for nearly the same amount of years.

But why do childhood years seem so much longer?  They are epic in their sprawl and emotion.  Christmas mornings, snow covered streets, summer nights thick with fire flies and skinned knees.  And it is for this home that I ached to be.  To be mothered when all I seem to do these days is mother others. To have a shoulder to lean against, to have someone who bakes an apple pie because she knows how much I love it.

My daughter, the iron butterfly that she usually is, fell victim to the clingy "you can't go" tears over her Cheerios yesterday morning.  So here we had mothers and daughter, each missing the other, linked together like those beads on a string that knock eachother closer or farther away, depending on the force.  And here I was in the middle, wishing I could keep both nestled against me.

To change the subject, my apologies from being absent from the online world.  I've been writing in an self-imposed exile.  Last night, as I reached out to my friends on Facebook to determine how bad bad was in NJ, did I realize how much I miss it.  But one novel is done, another may be dusted off, and a short story is nearly complete, so there's something to share to make up for my negligence.  Will post more about that very soon.

Love to all.

Mother's Day

There is a story I remember (but not the title, unfortunately) where a woman is on trial for the murder of her mother.  At last the woman is allowed to take the stand in her own defense, to testify why she couldn't do such a heinous act.  She does not confess, nor does she incriminate herself, she merely states that she did not understand how different the world would be without her mother:  the silence, the lack of grounding, the abscence of someone who loved her in the very best way she knew how.

The very best she knew how.  What does that mean?  We often hold up mothers to pretty tough scrutiny.  They must love unconditionally, they must be willing to die for their children, they must sacrafice without complaint.  Wide, melodramatic statements that should have a breast beating in there somewhere.  But what if that's not the case? 

I hazard to say that it's a dirty little secret, but not all mothers love their children smack out of the shoot.  And for the collicky, screaming, no hope for sleep infants, she might be ready to walk out that door.  But it is that very ability to stick to it, to get up at 2 am when she's had 2 hours of sleep and walk and rock and walk and rock until she can't see straight, to allow her robe to absorb blood, spit, puke and tears, to be willing to have her heart broken a million times just to feel that pang of overwhelming love that defines what it means to be a mother.  The ability to be there.  The ability to stay.

Mothers are oft the first to be judged and the last to be forgiven, but they know us, or knew us.  They understood what dust mosts looked like dancing on the last of  the afternoon sun rays coming in from the den's window; they understood why it was so necessary to give a home to that flea-bitten stray cat with bad teeth and a worse temper, they understood why you had to say goodbye and drive away to college.

My own mother has the most amazing hands.  Small, slight, nimble things with perfect half moon nails.  They have sewn, cleaned, typed, and probably flipped the bird to some poor New Jersey driver during her eighty plus years.  They are quick witted things like their owner.  Despite the ying and yang of mother daughter love, I cannot look upon my mother's hands and not be moved.  I reached out to those fingers, I reach out to them even now.

And She is there.

Men's literature?

My husband read over something I'm currently working on and said, "This reads quite male."

The water from the tap had run over my glass before I knew how to respond.  "Male?  And how would a female story play out?"  I didn't say it with criticism, just curious, and also tickled as somewhere in there, I believe there was a compliment -- I think, maybe...

Hard hitting, short sentences, action packed versus copius description and flowery dialogue?  Hemingway versus Austen?  Rock and rollers versus nannies?  But didn't The Hurt Locker walk away with the Oscars?  What constitues female and male writing?  And can it be defined?

I finished Possession the other night -- I had tried to make it last as long as possible, like some piece of chocolate stashed in your night stand that you bit off inch by inch.  Books alter you -- or at least the truly fine ones do, and I love the imprints they leave behind.  This one did, so much so that I gasped at the end, gasped -- like some Victorian lady corseted into suffocation.  Now I am bookless, homeless, drifting -- suggestions -- please.

A full week of writing ahead.  Rejoicing at the prospect.   Also having my picture taken in a cemetary.  I will leave that to your imagination.

Guilt at not doing enough

For the past few weeks I've been awol on this blog as well as all the other electronic homes where I reside.  It's not because my muse has gone on a bender, but because my other social committments, aka, school auctions, those great time sucks that force you to spend most of your time nodding your head like those bobble head dogs on the dashboard of cars, have taken the center stage of my life.

This got me thinking -- as women, how much of our time is spent doing for others?  Now, don't get me wrong, this world could benefit from a ton more "doing for others."  Yet, at the end of the day, don't we ache for that one moment that is ours and ours alone?  We are someone's wife, mother, daughter, co-worker -- our names are shouted early in the morning and in the middle of the night, usually linked with a "can you, I need, where is, have you seen."  For me, the late night wailings make my eye twitch like something out of a Pink Panther movie -- hard wired to some remote part of mybrain that forces me upright when all I want to do is get three hours of sleep.

And the guilt, oh the guilt.   It's bad enough I was raised Polish Catholic with a German mother -- a veritable kilbasa of heart beating guilt right there.  Asserting yourself was not high on the menu -- where one did X,Y, and Z in that order if one wanted to be happy in life.

Virginia W. was right.  A room of one's own.  Where one can remember what is like to look at the sky, to swing on a swing until your lungs and legs hurt, to feel the heat of the ground on your back and smell the promise of spring below you.

What do you do that let's you remember who you are?  Tell me.

Musing on invisibility

At the age of forty I became invisible. I’m not exactly sure when it occurred, though I’m sure it was gradual like wrinkles and loss of memory. But one day I found that flirting and making direct eye contact was something I didn’t want to do because no one wanted to do it with me.




The subtle embarrassment crept over me with the fact that I was now somehow ten years older and my reflection wasn’t something I wanted to examine for longer than a glance in the vanity mirror of the station wagon. My skin had fallen, cut in fourths by lines. Years of accumulated worry had let the avalanche loose. My face had simply fallen onto itself. I had simply fallen onto myself.



My twenties had been spent in indentured servitude – working feverously because that is what one did in Manhattan in your shoulder padded magenta suit with the shiny black buttons and the high heeled patent leather pumps. It didn’t matter that 1987 saw stock brokers trying to force open the sealed windows to jump, we were too ambitious, too poor and too centered on the other end of Manhattan. My thirties was still work that melted into motherhood which was more work only a slower numbing kind where the wheels were dulled by no sleep and the fact that every meal was swallowed standing and rocking. Communication with my once lover reduced to grunts and gropes in the dimly lit hallway. Those years full of pathos too keen to recall in mass. Only sharp memories – unwanted spinal tapes of three year olds, gushes of blood down the legs and loss, triumphs of companies being sold, oxygen depleting happiness and gnawing doubt as to worth. Like a stew that simmered, your face a centimeter from the fire. No perspective. Trench warfare.



Then forty arrived. And the door to mortality stood before you. People in bars become as old as your t-shirts. The choices you didn’t make, the choices you finally understood the repercussions of not choosing, became clearer. Tired, still tired, but you could gasp a breath like a man under water resurfacing through the depth. And now what?



There is something brewing, god forbid that you consider menopause as this tectonic plate shifting your desires. The word closes more doors to your ears. But something is crawling under the surface itching, burrowing farther; reticent, scared to be above ground and recognizable and answerable.



So you stifle about, flitting upon things, unable to commit with the level of ferocity you clawed into work early on, you feel untethered and your kisses to your loving, patient husband whisper the pleas to recognize this woman as vibrant as alive as worthy of notice. You aren’t ready to become that eccentric old woman that pals around with the stock boy or the green grocer. Like some awkward Sean Connery phase of the bad toupee and girdle, you pivot this way and that trying to align your direction, trying to matter in a society so focused on youth and beauty, as if infants would soon be given lipstick and curled hair, younger and younger till at birth everything for that little girl was decided, and no spark, no tenacity, no wit could deter her from her course.



At night, when you turn and drift up from sleep, from that cave where dreams lie in cubbyholes, when you can see the light from the street lamps filter around the edge of the drape, and you feel his breath warm with sleep, the depth of his weight next to you. And you reach out so that he will anchor you to this life, the lifeline to this world, apart from the dark unknown of what will come after.

Words

One of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite plays, The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard.

HENRY:   Leave me out of it. They don’t count. Maybe Brodie got a raw deal, maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. It doesn’t count. He’s a lout with language. I can’t help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech…Words don’t deserve that kind of malarkey. They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more, and Brodie knocks their corners off. I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.

Act II, Scene 5
 
At times I feel as if I'm that lout Henry is referring to, and maybe when compared to Stoppard we are all louts, for he can make words that children will speak for him while he is alive.  Perhaps that is the the thrill and curse of brilliant writing.  We rejoice at having found it; we experience the luxury of rereading certain passages with the relish one would normally reserve for some monsterous dessert (the kind with drifts of whipped cream into which your spoon sinks as your eyes widen) all the while nursing a not so silent hurt inside.  A hurt that tell us, "You cannot enter there.  Abandon all hope.  Adults only.  Scram."
 
But I wonder how much of what inspires us sinks into our skin, into our gray matter and undergoes a sea change?  Maybe not into something rich and strange, but something singularly ours?  There is so little of my own writing that I can revisit and not be struck with the feeling that I'm biting into aluminum foil -- do you know that sensation?  The piss shiver cringe of 'I didn't actually write that, did I?'
 
So how do you balance economic writing with a love of words?  I'm currently reading Possession by A.S. Byatt.  Would I call her writing economical, no, she drowns in words and I want to drown with her.  But there are times when her dialogues is a sparse as Hemingway's -- and it works -- perfectly.  It is a masterpiece.
 
The endless balance, I suppose, and all the while fighting against cliche and melodrama.  What are the books that have blown the top off for you?  Why?