First Overnight Guest!

Lynne just called from FAT – Fresno Air Terminal on her way to SFO then direct to San Antonio. We’ll pick her up at 6:35 and go to River Walk in spite of it being another very hot day. If it’s too hot, we’ll find a cool place inside where we can have a nice cold beer and crisp salad.  She’ll be here till Thursday. We have a whole list of things to do from art to writing.

My toe is healing.  There is a yin/yang sort of scab, half oxblood, half tan, where my toenail should be. I wonder what it will be like when it falls off? I know many people say they’ve lost toenails and it’s no big deal, but I also have stitches, so don’t know how this will affect the new nail.

In 1987, a summer day on Venice beach, I was with John de Persio. He was pet sitting for a very sweet Doberman.  When I went home, I reached for my car door but must have been looking somewhere else. My hand hit the handle in such a way that a fingernail on my left hand split right down the middle.  To this day it is split. This is because the nail bed suffered a trauma. (The doctor who stitched my toe explained this to me.)

I find it fascinating how the body heals. Sometimes there is no evidence of injury or illness. Other times we scar.  I suppose the same is true emotionally.   Which brings me to my writing.

I’m working on my memoir and having great days, okay days and some distressing days.  I took the first five pages of chapter The Bay Theater to writing class Tuesday. Everyone there (6 others) liked it. It brought back memories, etc. However, the teacher circled all the times I used  “was”.  She said I might want to consider not using the passive voice so much.

I was so bummed. (There I go again with the passive voice!) I had to call Katherine. She said there is always a lot of editing to be done, to keep writing. This is what the teacher said, too. But I can’t stand the idea of writing two or three-hundred pages then going back to the beginning for edits.

So I waited another day, then went back to the manuscript. Lo and behold there were many instances where I WAS able to change the wording to make the language more active.  Not in every case, of course. I think of the opening of  A Tale of Two Cities - “It was the best of times, it was the worse of times.”   Or, “It was a dark and stormy night.”  Passive voice can set a scene.

The other thing we went over in class was structure. Supposedly 25% in to your story the protagonist should have a “shift”.  Then the action continues to a peak, then a set back, followed by the climax and the denouement.

I took a piece of lined paper and oriented it horizontally. I drew the plot line, moving from left to right.  Then I turned the page back to vertical and wrote the chapters down the left side of the page, with how many pages I’ve written, and how many more there are to write.

I thought I had written so much, but I’ve only done 85 pages – 40 of which were taken from the three pieces I recorded for Valley Writers Read.  This means I’ve only written about 45 new pages.  Worse, it means I have between 150-200 pages still to go. Yikes!

So perhaps this is a good time to have a guest. I’ve organized all my papers, folders, notebooks, files and put them away.  When I look at them in a week, I hope fresh eyes will make me see that the task isn’t as daunting as I had thought.

In the meantime, John bought netting for the garden. Mockingbirds have been absconding with my cherry tomatoes!  He is out in the garage assembling a portable air conditioner. The garage was 100 degrees yesterday. Poor Jane Kitty  - although she doesn’t complain, it can’t be good for her. John says he can vent the AC through the dryer vent, which is in the laundry room and has Audrey’s’ litter box.  If the door to the garage is open and the laundry room door to the kitchen is closed, it means Audrey can’t get into her box. So it'll have to be back in the house.

I think Jane will just have to stay out when we go fetch Lynne. She can seek shade under a bush. Better than sweltering in the no-window garage. (You also can’t open the garage door just a little, it’s all or nothing.)

Preparing for the Rapture - A Check List

Pet owners, if you expect to be swept up in the Rapture tomorrow, I hope that you have found good homes for your pets.  If you have not, please do not leave them locked in your house!  If you haven’t found homes yet, leave the door unlocked so that they can be rescued. Leave them plenty of food and water.

Wait for Jesus in your front yard, (or on the sidewalk if you live in an apartment building) so that it will be easier to collect your body when your spirit is spirited away.

If you live in a rural area, it might be more practical to just wander off into the woods and let nature take its course.  Likewise those who live near the ocean may want to camp on the beach overnight, as close to the shore as possible, so the tide can carry you out to sea.

Consider giving your houseplants to your neighbors. Don’t disconnect your electricity, so sprinkler timers will continue to come on, and food in the freezer will not thaw. 

Make sure your house is clean and tidy. It might be a while before anyone comes to claim your house.  If you are a renter, notify your landlord so he/she can get your place cleaned up and re-rented by the first of the month.  Make sure there’s toilet paper in the bathrooms.

If you own your home outright I hope you have already transferred title to next of kin who aren’t as holy as thou, or given it to your favorite charity.  It’s heartwarming to think that all the empty houses left behind may be used to provide shelter for the homeless, or places of safety for battered women, even if you think they deserve their lot.

If you are “upside down” on your house or are locked into a high-interest mortgage, then don’t sweat it. Look how many people have already had to walk away from their homes.   Take off the screens and open the windows. There are many raccoons who would find your house way more comfortable than sleeping in a storm drain or hollow tree.

By now I trust you have destroyed any embarrassing evidence of past indiscretions for which you have been forgiven by God, but which your friends and neighbors would find hilarious.  Unless you really don’t care what others think, you might also want to shred photographs of you in the 80s with big hair and shoulder pads.

Enjoy heaven, where you can eat as much as you want and never get fat! The rest of us will be along eventually but most likely we will not run into you because as I understand it, heaven is quite huge and just as here on earth, we’ll hang out with those who share our beliefs.  Look for me in Cat Corner.

It rained!!! (Yesterday)

This happened Thursday, May 12 but the site wouldn't let me post until May 13th.

          Finally, it rained!  Just at the end of my morning walk with Walter drops started to fall.  Then a few minutes after we came inside the sky got absolutely black as night.  The thunder that had been distant when we were outside was overhead.  The lights blinked off, then on, and then a crack of lightning, like a gunshot, exploded over the house. Walter shivered.  Then, light again – an eerie green light, like we were swimming in a cool celery soup – and wind!  Rain blew down the street in waves, drops flew side wards.

          I emailed my students asking if we should cancel class and one said “yes” but three showed up.  When I called to check on Frank the storm was pummeling Fredericksburg and he was not about to go out in it. The three of us had a great workshop. I think it’s so funny, when I tell them I love being around other poets, they say, “we are?”  They’re natural poets” they appreciate words and how to put them together in an interesting way; they love fresh metaphors and straight-forward from the heart phrases.  Poetry is like food: whether complex or simple, there’s lots of it to be enjoyed. Especially poems fresh off the printer. Yum, like diving into warm cupcake.

          I’ve often thought my poems are like cupcakes. I whip them up in about half an hour; then clean up (edit) time. They take about a minute to eat, a little longer to digest and I hope leave the reader with a pleasant aftertaste.  At least that’s my desire.

          After the class left, I watched about half-an-hour of

Quality Street

, an early Hepburn movie while I ate my lunch. The script was based on a novel by J.M. Barrie, who wrote Peter Pan. - a genteel comedy.

          I went to Walmart to pick up my new glasses: bronze metal frames for indoors and big dark glasses for outside.  I returned the photo-sensitive ones because I had to hold them out the car window for them to get dark. 

          The frames of the new sunglasses are good but I should have gotten gray not brown: my red car looks red-orange.

Ding, Dong, Bin Laden's Dead!

          Call me a cynic: I didn’t rejoice upon hearing of the demise of Bin Laden.  I’d rather he had been taken alive.  I’m even sorry Sadam Hussain was executed. I wish he were in jail.  This is not because I’m a compassionate person who doesn’t believe in capital punishment, or killing our enemies. It’s because I want the evil doers to suffer. I took great satisfaction seeing photographs of a disheveled Sadam Hussain hiding in his hole.

          I praise and commend the individuals in the intelligence service who worked so hard to make sure they knew where they were going and how they pulled if off. I hope that by confiscating the computers this will impede whoever was linked-in to that particular terrorist network.

          I do think about the women and children who were in the compound, though.  What must it have been like to live a sequestered life? We’ve seen it before from cults right here in America.  That’s one of the reasons I was so fascinated by “Big Love”, the HBO series about plural marriage.  What must it be like to be so devoted to -- or held prisoner by – a charismatic figure head?

          Perhaps some of the children never saw the outside world, like the narrator of Emma Donoghue’s brilliant novel, Room.  But aren’t all of us, more or less contained in our own reality rooms?  How big is your room? Which windows do you choose to look out?  Which windows do you keep closed?

          My “room” hasn’t changed all that much in my life in spite of having traveled to Asia, Europe, South America; in spite of having been married, divorced, single fifteen years then married again (going on 19 years!).  My life is measured out pretty much like J. Alfred Prufrock’s, in spoons, coffee cups, glasses of wine.

          Lately, writing my memoir, I’ve focused my attention on certain periods of my life that were fraught with emotion – happiness or sorrow. First love!  First heartache.  Becoming a woman! Realizing the responsibilities of being an adult.

          When a rare day, or week, comes that I’m not on an emotional roller coaster because of the anxieties of life – worry about my mother, husband, friends, finances, the world – I seek out books or movies or memories that reunite me with the adrenaline-inducing thoughts that make me feel alive.

          Lately I’ve taken great pleasure in making collage greeting cards. This is one of the rare times I slow down and focus on a simple task that blots out the world of terrorists and tornadoes, and lets me live peacefully in the moment with the regular rhythm of my heart the only music I need to hear.