Word Strumpet

She's In a Better Place, I Hope

My mother's cat, Emma, came to live with us about a month ago, when it became apparent that Mom was going to be in the nursing home a good long time, like forever.

Emma was as old in cat years as Mom in human years (92), if not older.  By our best estimates, she was probably 17 or 18, and she was a decrepit, skinny thing who clearly was not in the greatest of health.  Also not the happiest cat you've ever met.  I think she was charming and kitty-like when first we got her for Mom, but that was so long ago its hard to remember.

For the past month, she spent all of her time in our kitchen, either on the little rug I put out for her, or in front of the heating vent.  Every time the Big Scary Beast (the blind Pug, also getting on in years) came snarfling into the kitchen she either fled (in a slow, awkward way) or hissed and growled at him.

I should have known something was up when in recent days she no longer hissed at Igor the Pug, but seemed to tolerate him.  I thought she was mellowing and that maybe someday Emma and Igor would even be friends.  I also thought she would live forever, because she was that kind of cat.

Alas, such was not to be.  On Friday night we went to a party to celebrate the recent nuptials and when we got home Emma was acting strangely.  Still, she always acted strangely and so I petted her and went to bed. 

The next morning, at 6 AM, I found her dead, stiff as can be in her litter box (don't ask--I think it was a nice soft spot for her).  After the initial surprise and sadness, I felt guilt.  Guilt that I hadn't done more, guilt that I'd never really bonded with her, guilt, guilt, guilt.  But, come to think of it, guilt is a pretty selfish reaction--it makes the situation all about me when really it isn't. 

As a wise friend said, Emma realized that her job--taking care of my Mom--was finished. We did the best we could for her in the short time we had together, but clearly the enterprise was doomed from the start.  And so she went on to a better place.  The kitchen feels strangely empty and the Pug is wandering around wondering what happened to that nummy wet cat food he could once in awhile nab when nobody was looking.  We took her poor little body, with bits and pieces of kitty litter still clinging to it, to my Mom's backyard and buried her beneath a tree where many other pets have gone to their reward over the years.

Ah, life.  So many changes already this year, personally and globally.  All one can do is hang on tight and hope for the best.  And keep loving each other, or the feeble demon cat, or whatever happens to pass into your care.  Because, when all is said and done, the secret of life is to love one another.  It is just that simple.

The Mother,and Minister, of the Bride

A few years ago, a dear friend of my daughter's was planning her wedding and she and her fiancee asked me to become ordained so that I could perform the wedding ceremony.  A quick search on the internet turned up Universal Ministries, and a quick check of Oregon's loose marriage laws confirmed that getting ordained on the internet constituted a legitimate ministry in the state's eyes.

And so now I am a minister, complete with wallet size ID card and a handy mirror hanger I could use to snag a parking place outside of a church if I ever had the guts to try it.  I've married several couples over the years, and had strangers call and ask me if I'd perform the ceremony for them.  The answer is always no--I'll only do it for friends, because the responsibility feels so huge to me.  And of course, my beloved daughter and son swore they would never, ever, in a million years ask me to perform the wedding.

Because that would just be weird.

Flash forward to January of 2009, last month to be exact, when my daughter got engaged and began planning a wedding for three weeks hence (last Saturday, to be exact).  Her then-fiancee, now-husband is being deployed after coming nearly to the end of his inactive army duty and my daughter was determined to be married before he had to leave.

Good thing she's an event planner by trade.  And that lots of people adore her, because that meant that she was able to muster a small army to clean and decorate at the home of my mother (she who, at 92, only last month vacated the house for a nursing home.  Its been a busy year.) She found the most gorgeous wedding dress on the planet, ordered tuxes, planned flowers and food.  But she still needed a minister to do the ceremony.

And guess who was handy?

Forget weird.  She and her fiancee asked me to conduct the wedding with his father assisting.  I was honored and thrilled and not the least bit nervous.  I've done this before, several times, and in front of way bigger crowds than the small group that would be gathered for this wedding.   Everyone asked me if it was going to be difficult and didn't I worry about getting emotional and crying?

Of course not.  "I'm not the emotional type," I told everyone.  "I am not a crier.  I'll be fine.  Just fine."

We all know what a trickster the universe is by now.  And we also all know how very silly it was of me to think that I could get through my daughter's wedding ceremony without crying.  The minute I caught sight of her on her father's arm, walking down the "aisle," the tears started.  And flowed throughout the entire ceremony.  Which, according to well placed sources, made every single person in the audience start crying. 

My adorable son stood next to me and clutched my hand the entire time, much as he did when he was an adorable little boy, only now he was hanging onto me instead of me hanging onto him.

Long story short, it was the best day ever, a perfect wedding from start to finish.  Does everyone say that about their weddings?  Given the opportunity for drama, probably not.  This one was truly glorious, a spectacular day.

And now I can dry the tears and get back to my writing. 

A New World, Where Nothing is Impossible

I'm home from Nashville.  I actually got home Monday night, but I went right from being picked up at the airport to see my Mom, and came home exhausted.  Its a long drag across the country.  I know, I know, people fly much longer distances all the time now, but I don't care, it is still a long flight to me.  Despite being exhausted, I awoke at 5 AM, which seems to be my new default time at the moment.  Its actually fun to be up so early, and boy oh boy, does it give me a lot of time to write. 

Yesterday it was great to be awake at 5 AM, because it was a GREAT DAY.  I set up two TV trays in the family room, which is lacking in tables, and placed my laptop on one, and my journal and pen and the remotes (for some odd reason it takes two to operate our TV) on the other.  And then I sat in front of the television all morning--that is, when I wasn't running to the bathroom to grab kleenex because I was crying so much.

Obama and Michelle pulled up at the White House, Michelle with gift in hand, I started crying.  The limousine taking them to the ceremony pulled onto the crowd-lined streets, I was crying.  Hilary was introduced, I cried again.  And so on throughout the day.   It was really an amazing day.

A note about that present Michelle gave Laura Bush: rumor (or NBC) has it that the gift was a journal and pen for Mrs. Bush to begin her memoirs.  Here's what really interests me: it is said that ole Laura did not keep a journal for the entire eight years Georgie was in office.

She did not keep a journal.

Can you even imagine such a thing? Of course you can't because you are a writer and writers process everything through writing.  But so do people who are living through extraordinary times or events, and Laura qualifies there.  I can't understand how she would not have felt even a slight impulse to write something, anything, down.

While we're discussing the inauguration from a writerly point of view, how about that poet?  People on Twitter were making snide comments but honestly? I think the average American (myself included, alas) is just not that familiar with what is good poetry and what is not.   That being said, I liked her.  Her name is Elizabeth Alexander and I thought her poem hit just the right note--balancing the every day concerns that make up the lives of the citizens she addressed with the momentous aspect of the occasion.  Some of the lines I liked:

We encounter each other in words

What if the mightiest word is love?

Love that casts a widening pool of light

Praise-Song for the Day will be published in book form by Graywolf Press and sell for $8.  Oh, and they are printing 100,000 copies of it.  Not too shabby for a poet.

Finally, I leave you with the words of one of the NBC commentators (alas, I didn't catch which one, I don't watch TV often enough to recognize the voices):

"Nothing, now, nothing, is impossible."

Amen.

Oh, What a Night

It is Thanksgiving Eve here in the states and I, like so many others, have much to be thankful for.  Health, family, a career I love, a house that isn't going into foreclosure, new energy in the country after the elections....I could go on and on.

Tonight is a night that many of us are focusing on preparing a feast for our loved ones.   I should be making pie crust and pondering the intricacies of the vegetable dishes I'm preparing. 

But I'm not.  Tonight I'm glued to Twitter, watching real-time updates of the situation in Mumbai, and alternately cringing in horror at what is going on over there and marveling that I can be so up to date on it through the power of social networking.   People on the scene are tweeting, people in other parts of Mumbai are tweeting, people are aggregating news from TVs and other sources and tweeting.  It is citizen journalism at its finest, and it is beating out any other media source for real-time news.  Set your browser here to access an amazing constant stream of tweets.

What's happening in Mumbai is shocking and horrible beyond imagining.  My thoughts and prayers go out to everyone who is affected and to all of India.

But in an odd, strange way, the reaction on Twitter tonight gives me hope.  Terrorism and evil breeds in hidden, dark places and citizen journalism shines a light on those dark places so that the rats and vermin have to scatter.  Physicists say that all matter changes just by being observed.  Social networking, at its finest, has the capacity to change matter and more by virtue of the fact that everyone is paying attention now.

Global is now truly local.  General is specific.  The universal is in the details.

Join with me in sending prayers, or positive thoughts, or good wishes for the people in Mumbai.  And let's all be grateful for what we have on this Thanksgiving Eve, okay?

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Reason Number 5 Gazillion for Writers to Be Happy This Week

Obama is literary.

He writes his own books and they are good--I just started reading The Audacity of Hope this week.  And even though I make most of my living as a ghost-writer, I applaud the man for writing it himself.  Honestly?  I do a great job of getting people's voices on the page, just as an actor inhabits his role, but there still is no substitute for the voice of the writer himself.  Okay, I can think of instances where this is not true, but in Obama's case it is.

Obama actually reads.  An AP story tells of the time he phoned Nobel laureate Toni Morrison to ask for her support, but first he told her how he admired her work and how much it had meant to him.  The story goes on to talk about Morrison's admiration for Obama's writing.  To quote, "Writers welcome Obama as a peer, a thinker, a man of words — his own words."  The article also quotes Pulitzer Prize winning author Jane Smiley and novelist  Ayelet Waldman.

 My buddy Roy just sent me a snippet from Poets and Writers, headlined, "Will a poet read at Obama's inauguration?"   In 1961, Robert Frost read at John F. Kennedy's inauguration; James Dickey read at Carter's in 1977, and Bill Clinton, of course, featured Maya Angelou.  So who, if anyone, will Obama choose?  According to Poets and Writers, poet laureate Kay Ryan has the inside track.

Um, About Those Ads on This Blog...

I don't necessarily agree with them, okay?  Google Adsense puts them up and you know Google and their spiders, they crawl around and pick up keywords and choose ads accordingly.  If you have Gmail, you know how creepily accurate their spiders are--whatever the topic of your email conversation is, the ads are tailored accordingly.

So apparently my blog post about Jill Biden being a writing teacher has attracted some ads for people I don't necessarily support.  People whose names start with M and who think that women will vote for any ole woman, doesn't matter if she only has 20 months of experience as a governor and before that ran a town that had as many moose as people in it.

And of course, now that I'm writing about Jill Biden again, I'm just going to make the situation worse and the spiders will crawl again and there will be more ads. 

So just know that I support free speech and all that and I never would have written about Jill Biden in the first place were she not a writing teacher, but I don't have anything to do with the ads that run on this site.

And while we are at, can we all focus on what is truly, truly important tonight and send our love and thoughts and prayers to people all along the Gulf Coast who are facing Gustav? 

Friday Addendum

A few items as we wind up the week:

First of all, be certain to check out the great guest post by Roy Burkhead today, which is part of a new series which I hope will be a regular Friday feature.

Next, it has come to my attention that I'm having link issues, and no I don't mean golf, I mean internet links.  I guess there are worse fates than having links issues, but they are a bit of a pain.  I'm pretty sure it happens when I use the Mozilla Firefox browser, which for some reason does not seem to get along very well with Typepad.  So as long as I remember to open Explorer, this problem should be dealt with.  I hope.

Finally, I found another good article about the whole memoir/hoax brouhaha this week, and you can read it here.  The article is called "Stranger than Truthiness" (truthiness being a word James Frey coined to describe the not-quite-factual events he related in his memoir).   The article is actually a post, and it appears on the New York Times blog about books called Paper Cuts, which seems worth checking back to read often  (It cracks me up that all the newspapers are embracing blogging.  Our local newspaper is full of headlines and teasers about stories that will only appear in the blogs.  However, I applaud their efforts--newspapers must do something to keep up with the internet.)

Rachel Donadio wrote the blog about this week's memoir hoaxes, and these lines caught my eye as being especially apropos:

"As any publisher will tell you, memoir sells better than fiction. But why? Here, I think, we run up against the question of sincerity and authenticity. Memoirs are seen as more authentic than novels. And we earnest Americans, raised to value hard work and plain talk, will always choose faux authenticity over real artifice. (Mark Twain understood that better than anyone before or since.)"

We are a nation that loves reality shows, too.  But why is it that we don't understand that even reality shows are scripted?  And memoirs are shaped into books that conform to the rules of story-telling, which may not coincide with the truth.  Every novelist I know will tell you that that the number one rule of writing fiction is that it be truthful, even though it is not relating real events.  What novels do is create "real artifice" (which is my new favorite phrase) in the service of telling a great story.  And, I, for one, still prefer to read a novel over a memoir.  I've been burned by too many memoirs that promise a great story and end up being a  chronological recitation of someone's boring childhood. 

Another Character Arc Post, Sort Of

So, I had plans to write another post on redemptive character arcs tonight.  I planned to write about Jenna Bush, who has a new book out about a young woman with AIDS.  It seemed to me that Jenna's story told a classic redemptive tale.  It is always instructive for writers to study stories like this, and hers seems to have captured lots of attention. 

She started out as a screw-up college student constantly getting busted for MIPs, moved on to become a teacher at an inner-city school, and finally, now she is the author of a best-selling book and newly engaged.

I read a good, if a bit name-droppy, profile of her in the latest issue of Texas Monthly, written by Skip Hollandsworth, who I met when I was at the Mayborn last summer.  And, yes, her redemptive character arc is impressive.

But she is the daughter of George W. Bush and tonight that taints any warm, glowy feelings I might have had about her.

Because last night we learned that a friend of my son's died from injuries received in Iraq.  I don't know the full story yet, and so I won't yet talk about names or any other details.  His mother was an acquaintance of mine and I can't even begin to grasp the pain she is going through tonight. 

I'm stunned and I'm horrified and I'm grieving.

I'm sorry, but sweet little blond Jenna just isn't very appealing anymore, seeing as how her father is a war criminal.   

As he has often said, he has no trouble sleeping at night.  But yet another mother will be up all night long weeping and wailing.

I wish I lived in a country where mothers didn't have to mourn their sons who were killed in a fruitless war.

It is September 11, Do A Good Deed Today

Wait, what?  It is September 11, isn't it a day of gloom and doom?

Not anymore.  There's a movement afoot to make this day, the anniversary of one of the worst days in our nation's history, into something positive.

The idea is to focus on the humanitarian outpouring that followed the September 11th attacks, not the awful attacks themselves.  There is a grass-roots movement afoot to make September 11 Good Deeds Day.

You can go to the Good Deed Day page and make a pledge as to what your good deed for the day will be.  There you can also read what others have pledged to do.

If you'd like to learn more about the movement, including how its been endorsed by Congress, you can read the news article here.

So, here's my good deed for the day.  Actually, its not only for the day, but forever.  I'm no longer going to yell at other drivers.  I pledged to work on my propensity towards road rage after I heard the Dalai Lama speak a few years ago and I've not worked very hard at it.  So I'm going to start over and try again.  I just don't think the world needs any extra anger in it, especially over something so trivial as our driving habits.

Oprah/Mayborn Controversy Video

The infamous Nan Talese comments about Oprah are now available for your viewing pleasure here. 

She didn't even talk for that long, but I guess people don't usually diss Oprah, hence the whole world is now weighing in, once again, on the brouhaha.

Here's my own personal opinion (I know you were waiting for it).    I think that Nan Talese was grandstanding a bit, and that her comments sounded defensive.  If Oprah's people did indeed treat Nan Talese as she said they did, and I have no reason to believe they didn't, then their own actions were reprehensible.

However, let us not forget that all of this brouhaha is based on bad behavior to begin with, okay?  As a writer, I believe in truth, through and through.  How can you not?  That is the absolute bedrock core of what we do as writers--tell the truth, and that goes for writing both fiction and non-fiction.

It is important to remember that truth for each of us is different.  If 12 writers wrote an account of the same event, every account would be completely different because each of them would see a different truth.  But that is not the same as presenting material as truth when it is not.

I have heard--and again, I don't know for sure that this is true--that James Frey originally tried to sell his book as a novel, but the publishers (and by extension, Nan Talese) told him they wanted to put it out as a memoir because it would sell more books. 

That's bad behavior, folks.  Sorry, but it is.  And thus, she has just a wee bit to be defensive about.   

What amazes me is how and why we're still talking about it, a year and a half later.  There's something about this story that strikes to the core of our beliefs about honesty and disingenuous and betrayal. 

By the way, you'll notice once again that I'm not linking James Frey to Amazon in this post.  I have no interest in helping him sell more books.

Kiva

There's a wonderful article about Kiva on the ABC News website.  Its called "Finding Peace Through Paypal" and you can read it here.

You may have noticed the large ad for the organization on this blog.  I think its a great idea, a way to help other entrepeneurs help themselves.  Apparently, we can now lend money to people in Iraq, which is tres cool.

Check out the article and the website. 

Only Tangentially Related to Writing Post

I'm working on an assignment about global warming. 

As my sister would say, Geezus. 

This is scary stuff.  I've already been reduced to running around the house turning off lights and asking my son to show me how to change the air filter in the car (changing it monthly can save 800 pounds of carbon dioxide from spewing into the air a year.  And it that doesn't convince you, maybe this will:  it will also save you $130 a year in cold, hard cash.)

I said this post was only tangentially related to writing, but in a way that's not true.

Global warming is related to everything.  Because if we don't deal with it now, everything is going to get pretty miserable in the next 50 years.

Now excuse me while I go turn out some more lights.

PS.  Tomorrow I'm going to start a list of links to some great organizations with tons of information on global warming.  It'll be worth your while to check them out.