Reading about Writing

The trouble with reading about writing is it takes up one’s writing time. If you have to choose between writing and reading about writing the choice is clear. But what do you do when someone sends you a book on writing as has just happened to me? The book is excellent but I have decided to put it face down—pages spread helplessly akimbo—while I write about not reading it.

Or not reading it now—bedtime is okay because that’s not my writing time. Why not? I don’t know. Perhaps it will become my writing time even though it isn’t yet. When you read about writing it appears that it’s hard to feel comfortable about any time not being your writing time. I suppose mealtimes are exempt, but I need to check.

Of course. if you write about food professionally, spearing a flower of broccoli dripping in garlic and olive oil is research and you may need to write or take notes while you consume it. Which reminds me–food is never far from my writing-because while writing I’m either having a snack or thinking about what I’m going to have for dinner.

I feel sure my characters are a hungry lot. I’ll have to ask them later-maybe do a little rewriting to get in their three squares between all the scenes of sex, murder and mayhem. In any case. they surely all have refrigerators even if the fact of it doesn’t appear on the page. Perhaps that’s been the trouble with my writing all along—not enough refrigerators, not enough food—even though there’s been plenty of rewriting. Puh-lenty.

Rewriting is what writing is about as you probably realize if you’re a writer but no one’s going to tell you that up front if you’re a writer wannabe. You may think you can just go ahead write your heart out, check for spelling mistakes and publish. I couldn’t agree more—that’s the way it should be but since it’s not, you need my book entitled The Joy of Rewriting. Here are some chapter headings:

Blather and tripe: how to recognize and remove.

How to rewrite when there’s nothing left after removing blather and tripe.

And so forth.

I anticipate this will be a best seller when I finish rewriting it.

My Two R’s

I love to read. More than that, I have to read. Stuck with neither book nor newspaper, I’ll read the small print on labels or the large print on advertisements. When there’s nothing left, I’ll find words in words–two letter words, paper and pencil not allowed. Give me a word like restaurant and I’ll stay happy until rest, test, nest, stare, rare, utter, ratter, arrest, attune, etc. have been discovered. This is all well and good and you’d think my brain would be appropriately exercised through the years to qualify as up to par in my dotage. But no. I do almost everything at least twice: I unhook a cup for my tea, only to find a cup is already in position; I buy a tube of toothpaste and find four at home. Like that.

However, the main complaint I have about my brain is—- remembering what I read. Or rather not remembering. Most mornings I read the op-ed pieces in the Times but can’t tell you what they said an hour later. Scratch that–five minutes later. At night I read books or magazines. The following day–gone with the moon.

Moreover, thoughts enter my head and vanish like the bubbles I used to blow in my first childhood, about which I remember everything. Okay, not everything–but a lot. This would be great if anyone was interested in hearing about it. How strange none of my grandchildren has inquired. The only time I find any interest at all in my past is when I try to access a bank for my account or credit card on-line and a program demands to know the name of my mother at birth, my first dog, first school, or first best friend.

I should be grateful to have software care about my facts of life but lately after I type in the answer, it tells me I’m mistaken. What does it know that I don’t know and when did it know it? Have the details of my childhood been commandeered for the sake of national security?

Did I say Sondra, Yvonne or Linda was my first best friend? Oh, dear, I just remembered–her name was Beverly. You can tell my grandchildren, if ever they should ask, but don’t bother mentioning it to the banks because, obviously, they already know.

Sound Effects

Our house is old and makes noises. The poor thing groans, creaks and whistles as does, given half a breeze, every tree surrounding it. It also thumps but that’s not the house’s fault; rather it’s a consequence of twenty-four CD’s that produce sounds in sequence, and are supposed to improve health, hold back age and cause general rejuvenation. The noise they make is like a furnace functioning in extremis. I have no idea if the thumps are working but I’ll keep you posted.

“What in the world is that?” my husband used to say before he got accustomed to it.

Meanwhile, it bothered him so much I purchased another machine to minimize the noises coming from the CD changer. This machine played the sound of rain, the sound of waves crashing, a white sound and several others we never heard. These new sounds just added to the general hubbub that included dogs breathing heavily by our bed, coyotes howling in the woods, and squirrels and mice skittering overhead in the attic.

Nevertheless, my husband is more likely to wake himself up with his snoring, or as he sometimes claims, mine. Of course you and I know I don’t snore; I’m much too well behaved even when unconscious.

On the other hand, my grandmother snored and she was even better behaved. Hmm.

When the house isn’t groaning my good husband is. If I ask him what’s the matter he asks why I ask. When I tell him he says, “You’re wrong. I didn’t groan.” Ditto when he sighs. If he’s not groaning or sighing he’s using expletives although according to him he’s not doing that either. So you can understand why I’ve been looking for my voice-activated cassette recorder.

My husband is asleep seconds after he turns off his light-and often talks or responds to questions so that we have amusing conversations I can’t remember the next morning. I need the recorder for that, too. Also he speaks in foreign languages although English is his only conscious tongue. I don’t know what this means but am willing to consider his having had lots of former lives in different countries or just one former life as a consummate linguist. Sometimes I ask him what language he’s speaking and either he won’t say or I can’t understand him. Most recently he answered, “Ancient Russian,” which is exactly what it sounded like. Once again the recorder would come in handy especially since I don’t think he really believes me when I give him a play-by-play the next day.

Nothing is unique about the noises our phones make but we have five lines, three in the office, two in the house plus a cell phone and although each has a different ring, the rings are not different enough to know absolutely which phone to sprint for.

I think of us as having embraced the quiet life despite the many sound bytes bouncing around and banging uninvited into our ears. Groan. Sigh. G-ddamn it to hell. S–t.

Soon to be recorded.

I Believe Therefore Let’s Talk

 

Now and again the furniture goes on attack and I’m done for. Tables hit me on the hipbone, chairs trip me, and our bed throws me over its side. I end up near or on the floor wondering what I’d ever done to them. I have bruises as proof so please don’t scoff like my husband. I am against scoffing and never do it myself unless I’m responding to the promise of an elected official. When I was young I thought such individuals were doing their best for the country and guileless as newborn pups—I truly thought they were next to God in their goodness and wisdom. So I’ve come by my scoffing at them the rocky uphill way. In all other regards I’m pretty much a believer.

For example: I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows. You may believe the same— although I doubt either of us has a garden with enough flowers blooming to show for it. A true believer, as you know, doesn’t need proof. A true believer for good reason or no reason has embraced a philosophy or a point of view and will stick by it no matter what. And so, too, the true unbeliever. In fact there may be more true unbelievers than their antonyms. True unbelievers do not believe in evolution, global warming or leap year and some thus can be identified without confrontation when you ask them what day it is.

What difference does it makes what anyone believes or doesn’t believe? Either way whatever is or isn’t remains the same and at the proper time the Almighty, in whom I believe, will let each of us know what’s what and what’s not what. I can’t wait. Can you? Of course that implies I think my beliefs and unbeliefs will prove out, an unbelievable form of hubris for someone who purports to be reasonable, even sane.

On the other hand, what we believe or don’t believe makes a difference in the here and now, as you know perfectly well, because of what we do or don’t do to edify students, protect the shoreline and insure the integrity of the calendar. I can’t believe I had to explain that.

You may have run into the category of people who are neither believers nor unbelievers—they are the I-could-care-lessers. They are seldom interviewed or polled because they could care less. The extremists on the far right of this group are the I-don’t-give-a-s—tters and if you want my advice I suggest you stand back when you run into them because they really, really don’t, which means they could give you a surreptitious pop in the eye for which you probably don’t carry insurance. The extremists on the far left are the I-haven’t-the-faintest idea-ers. They often say, “Whatever.”

One redeeming quality of the latter category is that they are all non-scoffers since you have to believe or not believe in order to scoff. My husband believes what his nanny told him, which is you can’t take a bath until an hour past dinner for fear of drowning. I don’t believe it and yet, unless you count a half-hour laughing fit, I don’t scoff. Never. Oh all right. Twice.

I thought the inanimate objects in the house had given up their aggressive acts for the day, but a door that did not look the least bit menacing just flew back and hit me on the shoulder.

 

 

 

 

Foot Fault

August 8th, 2007

I tortured my poor feet for a very long time. Ten years ago they refused to take me where I wanted to go in the shoes I wanted to wear. Since then I haven’t worn heels measuring even one measly inch. Moreover, I can only wear shoes deep enough to accommodate orthotics-plastic molds that match the bottoms of your-that is to say my-feet to correct their imbalances. Such shoes do not win awards for pizzazz.

Details of what I did to torture my feet were seized by the CIA to use against terrorist operatives Here are a few from memory:

I wore high-heeled shoes.

I wore high heels shoes with pointy toes.

I didn’t take off my shoes when they were killing me.

I never soaked them or gave them the time of day.

I just took them bloody well for granted as perhaps you are
now doing yourself.

My mother hated her feet. “They’re ugly,” she’d wail, holding them one at a time and giving them the full force of her most disapproving look before pulling on her panty hose.

“It’s all those years on my feet,” she’d say as if most people had an alternate way of standing and walking about.

“It’s all those years on my hands,” perhaps some woman gymnast is now complaining to a palm-reader looking at the calluses on her mounds of Apollo and Saturn.

“Look at these toes!” my mother would command as if I hadn’t already observed them a few hundred times.

The toe next to her big toe on each foot crossed all the way over its two sister toes and snuggled up to the littlest one. In order to put her foot into a narrow high-heeled shoe she had to force the rambling toe back to where it belonged while moaning and looking up at me for sympathy.

Finding shoes that both feel and look reasonably good to me and pass muster in the eyes of my mother, as well as my two daughters is daunting; my mother does not approve of anything clunky or flat. On my last visit to see her I noted she was in a bad mood the moment I arrived from the airport exhausted from carrying luggage and grateful that my feet were still willing to support me–never mind that I was wearing clunky black running shoes.

“Are you going to wear those?” she asked before I could sit down.

I changed into other shoes somehow more acceptable even though they held my travel-swollen feet as if in a vise.

“Now that’s better, isn’t it?” my mother sighed, flashing, for the first time, a loving smile. “I’ve been worried sick about you.”

My daughters have pretty feet that do not hurt-at least not yet.

Both often wear sling-back, high-heeled numbers destined, were it not for my daily prayers to the Almighty, to catch on something and throw them flat on their lovely faces. Whenever I’m with them something disparaging comes up about my appendages or, rather, what I have elected to put on them.

“Oh my Goddd!” one or the other will say. “Don’t you have any nice shoes?”

I reassure them that as soon as a good percentage of boomers require orthotics, attractive, even stylish, flats will appear in stores and I will be able to look fashionable and move about comfortably at the same time.

A frown crosses each face. What did I say? Oh dear, I completely forgot. They’re on the cusp—call it a foothold—yes, borderline boomers—and if they end up wearing orthotics—it will be, like so much else, all my fault.

 

You’d Think by Now I’d be Somebody

I am a mature woman and then some. Still, what I don’t know fills the internet and all the libraries even though I may have read more than the average dowager and even paid closer attention to the world around me. Nevertheless, wherever I look, experts abound and it occurs to me that, by now, I should be one, too. I am not an expert on, in or at anything and so I’m looking to prove myself wrong.

There are areas in which I excel or used to:

Short order cooking: Assuming nothing needs to be defrosted–add a few minutes if it does–a great, nutritious meal in fifteen minutes is yours at our house, or was until I crossed over into another age group.

Dishloading. Not my strong point. I do fine on the bottom rack but the top rack is wild with cups, bowls and glasses. My husband fixes it nightly and God bless him for not giving me sidelong, exasperated glances while he does. By the way I wash and dry all pots, pans and knives after every meal. Do I get stars for this? Also I have three shiny sinks. If you need instructions on how I maintain them do not hesitate to ask.

Gardening.: Yes, I’ve had years when my tomatoes were fabulous but was it really worth all that watering, mulching and weeding when I could buy luscious ones at a local stand and have time for a nap to boot? And oh my zucchini—beautiful and bountiful until our squash borers killed them from the underworld. And yes indeed, I put fireplace ashes on the seedlings and later cut out the squash borers then squirted organic insecticide into the wounds. To zip avail. Yes, I already know anybody can grow zucchini.

I grew corn one year–it was wonderful–but when twelve months later I tried again, the raccoon network descended and made off with every cob of the crop. Had I been I an expert, I would have known to harvest them the day before they struck.

I have also grown kale, collard greens, assorted string beans, pea pods, snap peas, cauliflower and broccoli with success, sort of. My radishes and carrots have come up too gnarled and uncivilized for polite consumption. My brussel sprouts, the one time I grew them, were adorable to behold at a distance but covered with tiny gray-green insects up close. I removed each sprout and their outer leaves so they were absent all bugs. It only took all day until midnight to accomplish this.

The lettuces, basil, parsley always are fine—but never mind the dill and cilantro. Peppers and eggplant are fun but the frost comes along every year just as they begin producing in quantity.

For the record–-I know how important this must be to you–-I will continue to plant broccoli. Nothing can beat it straight off the stalk to the steamer.

Sewing: I made all of our curtains–-most of them by hand so they’d hang right, but how I managed such an undertaking is a mystery. Clearly, I’m not the woman I was. Too bad you didn’t know her. She may well have been an expert.

A Little More Drivel Please

With everyone so well informed by pundits and twenty-four hour news, it’s hard to believe people are still alive who were raised with hardly any information about the world and the people, famous and infamous, who ran it. They dwelled instead in silence, except when allowed to turn on the radio, listening from time to time to adult homilies, proverbs and other sayings, which semi-filled the sound molecules of one’s childhood home.

Yes, perhaps it was pure drivel but, damn it was comforting—not a terrorist other than your principal loomed on the horizon—and one only had to avoid looking a gift horse in the mouth or make a stitch in time to save nine and all would be well. The horse homily was and is beyond me still and what did the other one mean when you were five and had never held a needle? Absolutely nothing but without television there was plenty of time to hang over a porch chair wondering and perhaps expanding your brain so eventually you would find a cure for the common cold. Did I? Well not yet…but hold on–have some patience if that virtue is one of the arrows in your character’s quiver.

Sorry to be in your face– but you may not have any at all because you never stood or sat waiting for buses and trains and then ascended them to take multi-hour trips to wherever and back. Right. Well in my day of very public transportation that’s the way people got around. whether they liked it or not. No one asked or cared if you minded. There were cars, of course, but in my experience you didn’t have one until you were a bona-fide adult, if then, and before that you were on your own carrying a heavy bag. In my case make that two heavy bags because I didn’t learn about traveling light until last year.

If you were so blessed as to go to college—your parents, if you didn’t live a great distance, might drive you up freshman year with all your paraphernalia and then pick you and same up four years later following graduation. Otherwise you were traveling on your own by train or hitching a ride with someone’s boyfriend who had a car and would give you a lift if you anted up part of the gas money. Many of my friends never even had the freshman year benefit–they lived in far off Ohio, Illinois, California, Texas or Louisiana but arrived none the worse for wear—unflustered and enthusiastic from planes, trains and buses neat as you please in stockings, heels, and suits.

What is the point? Well there was just plenty of time while you waited for or rode on buses and trains for lovely drivel—talking it and listening to it for as long as you liked until you fell into a deep sleep full of drivel-laden dreams. There was time to do crossword puzzles and time to play bridge before dinner. There was time to do a lot of very silly things I don’t suppose you’d care to hear about if I could even remember what they were. It was, after all, pure drivel but there was time for it and, sorry to say, maybe you can’t have one without the other.

Cutting Remarks

We ought not to have a lawn but we do. It was here when we moved in and, until recently, I never thought once about its carbon footprint or, for that matter, the carbon footprint of anyone or anything.

Not to say the lawn is in and of itself a creator of environmental bad-stuff––it’s what you’re cutting it with that is–or might be––assuming if, like me, you haven’t figured out how to make it into a charming meadow. The first cutting choice is clearly a family of goats that would nibble the grass and fertilize it at the same time. I like that idea a lot as well as the one of making cheese from their milk, though having an illegal product on my hands tends to upset the bucolic vision. “Oh do take some,” I hear myself cry to departing friends. “It’s unpasturized, yes, but we eat it all the time with nary an ache of the belly. I mean, we don’t sell it, do we?”

Also, there’d be the barn cleanup, the vet bills, and the immense unknowable goat fall-out no one will tell you about until after your dogs have died and you are scratching all the time from something dire. Seeing that our barn is now a garage, the idea becomes a complete non-starter much like our gas push-mower which, along with our riding mower, is now in for repair. Upon their return, courtesy of Dave at Chain Saws, my husband will assume the duties formerly executed by Mark whom we paid in advance for five weeks; he needed the money––as if we didn’t––and who then mowed twice and has not been seen since. Yes, the good-deed/punishment association is much in our minds and, no, it isn’t the first time.

During the weeks it’s taken for us to come to terms with tall and taller grass and before we decided to fix the machines long moldering while giving shelter to mice in the garage, I looked into quiet, pro-environmental alternatives. I nearly purchased a reel mower until I read the only one that would work on Soysia grass wouldn’t work on tall grass, and we have only a little of the first and a lot of the second. I then sought an old fashioned mower on-line, over the phone and by car but was unable to find one anywhere. The people in stores dedicated to mowers were either confused by my request or pitying; on-line searches turned up more reel mowers. To be fair, I found a place in town where the manager knew what I meant and said there had been such a machine in the store but, alas, some other person of doubtful state-of-the-art intelligence had already purchased it.

It was then I broke down and purchased an electric mower so I could achieve a near-silent, non-polluting cut above. It is here, unpacked and not ready to go. Apparently, I need to oil just about everything including the wheels–meaning I must remove the wheels before and after I approach the lawn. No one told me this was part of the deal. All I can hope for now is the thing won’t work so I can pack it back up and hit send.

Goats, again, are starting to appeal. I could put up a little shed.