This Year, What I Will Do

The other day my friend Angie sent me an e-mail, and I always love getting e-mails from Angie. She has great ideas, for one thing. And when I read her writing, I can hear her soft South Carolina accent in every word. It never fails to make me smile.

Anyway. Back to the e-mail. Here's part of what she wrote:

I believe we are bound by the universal nature of our personal stories. ​By sharing them, we inspire, we entertain, we connect. We learn, we grow. We realize that our flaws and our screw ups make us more normal than we thought. Our secret hopes and dreams suddenly seem possible.

She writes about a friend and fellow blogger who invited her to answer five questions - and while she plans to answer them one by one on her blog this week, she has sent the invitation out into the world as well. "I saw it as an opportunity to try something here that I've wanted to try for a long time," she writes.  "And that's build a community of shared stories."

"A community of shared stories." Bloggers do that so well, I think. We share our stories, our beliefs, our hopes and dreams with the wide world. And in doing so, we definitely learn and grow, are comforted and encouraged, supported and inspired. Even though Angie and I are a generation apart in age we share the same vision about the importance of personal stories.

But I'm going to tell you a truth here...when I read today's question, I heaved a big sigh. Here's the question -

What is one thing you’d like to accomplish (professionally or personally) in the next year?

If I'm honest today (and since we're telling our personal stories I'm going to be brutally honest)...I'm tired of trying to accomplish things.

I'm also tired of thinking about trying to accomplish things.

This year I want to simply LIVE.

I want to soak up every minute of sunshine that God allows me to feel.

I want to savor every word of every book I read.

I want to kiss my Grandson's silky smooth cheek nine hundred million times.

I want to sit on the back step and watch my little dog come racing up the yard with his tail flying like a banner in the breeze.

I want to listen to my mother tell me stories about growing up with all her cousins and the games they used to play in the blue Kentucky grass.

This year I want the soundtrack of my life to be simple folk songs with singable melodies, not three-part inventions or finger twisting toccata's.

This year I want the epigram of my life to be a Mary Oliver poem, not a Tolstoy novel.

This year I want to just BE.

Happy. Yes.

Alive. Yes.

True to myself.

Yes.

Let's see if I can accomplish that.

How about you? What's your story? To join in Angie's initiative to create a community of shared stories, go here and add your link to the chain.

TLC Book Tours: The Tale of Lucia Grandi

When an old woman is asked to recount the story of her life, she tells an intense and poignant tale about growing up in and surviving a warring suburban family during the 1950s and 60s. ​Written as a memoir, each chapter describes a particular incident in Lucia’s life which shows the constant struggle between her parents and the perverse effect it has on her and the family. From her complicated and unwanted birth, to her witnessing a suicide at age 3, to her stint as a runaway at age 14, the story progresses to the final crisis where as a young woman, she is turned out of her house and banished from her family forever.

Told in breathtakingly beautiful prose, this is a powerful and timeless story of a dying woman's courageous attempt to come to terms with her past and the troubled family that dominated it.

This is exactly the kind of book I love to read - a woman's personal life story, one that explores legacy and interwoven with family history. Set in the period of time I myself grew up in, it has all the elements to make it fascinating reading. Author Susan Speranza uses the device of a fictional memoir to tale her tale of Lucia Grande, and she writes beautifully, setting the scenes and describing the emotions evocatively.

But as I read,  I wished desperately for some happiness for Lucia. Her life and relationships are so filled with emotional pain, and there never seems to be a relief from it. I could not fathom so much cruelty in this family, and, sadly, found myself needing to set the book aside from time to time because the relentless unhappiness too intense.

Susan Speranza is an excellent writer, and while I'm sure there are family situations as intensely miserable as Lucida Grande's, I wish she could have found a way to balance the pain in this story with some positive outcome.

Thanks to TLC Tours for the opportunity to read this book.

Author's website, Facebook page, and Twitter account.

The Sunday Salon: Spring Forward

Having dutifully set my clocks forward last night, I was prepared for the shock to my system this morning when my body clock awakened me at what seemed like the normal 7:00 a.m., but was actually 8:00 a.m. I was prepared for it, but not happy about it.

Admittedly, I don't like the sensation of losing an hour, especially when what gets cheated is usually my reading time.

Boo.

Daylight savings time notwithstanding, I've been clipping along with my various reading projects. This week I'm mid-way through Nobody's Fool, a Richard Russo novel I picked up on the library sale rack (50 cent trade paperbacks make me very happy.) Russo has a knack for presenting the quirky, down and out, everyman types with such warmth and affection you can't help but root for them as they bumble through life and relationships. This novel (published in 1987) is populated with more sad-sacks than any of his others, most notably Donald Sullivan (Sully), a half-hearted construction worker who's been carrying on a lackluster affair with the wife of another man for the past 20 years. Russo's requisite down-and-out town, North Bath, is as dismal as its residents. Somehow, though, Russo can make the reader laugh at and even love these folks, for if we look closely we can find pieces of ourselves dwelling within them.

I'm also re-reading Care of the Soul, by Thomas Moore, a guidebook of sorts for finding sacredness and meaning in everyday life. I purchased this book when it was published in 1994, but never finished it. Life was hectic and busy in those days, with a teenager and a job, and I don't think I had time to consider (or, truthfully, even care) about the sacredness of it all. But now "everyday life" is very present in my mind, and I'm rethinking the concept of seeking a more meaningful approach to it.

Up next is Amanda Coplin's The Orchardist, which I'm eager to read. I'm reviewing it for TLC Tours, and also reading it for a book club meeting with some friends here in town.  If you've read it, I'd love to know what you think!

I'll be spending the afternoon at a concert, but am tucking a book into my purse as usual :) You never know when a spare minute might crop up, and I need all the reading time I can muster today!

Birthday Stories

My mother tells me that the March wind was so vicious on the night I was born she was afraid the windows in her seventh floor hospital room were going to burst into a million pieces. And thus her first (but certainly not last) sleepless night of motherhood.

My mother has been telling me a lot of stories lately. It concerns me a little bit, this new propensity of hers to talk about the past. "I suppose I've told you about the time your Aunt Lissie and I went on a double date with these boys she met in the drugstore," she'll say. Or "I'm sure you've heard me talk about those people who lived in the apartment upstairs from us when your dad and I were first married."

Thing is, many of these stories are new to me. My mother has never been one for dwelling on the old days. But recently, it seems like she wants to make sure I've heard all the things about her life that I might have missed.

My birthday story  is one that's been told many times. The blustery March wind, the early labor brought about because her doctor told he he was going out of town and wouldn't be there on her due date. My dad leaving the hospital to go have the oil changed in his car and completely missing my birth. ("But they told me it would be a long time!" he always protested when we got to that part.)

I've always loved hearing stories. And I love telling them.

Which is why I started writing this blog seven  years ago on my birthday.

Since then I've told you all lots of stories. About my job, my family, my dogs. The books I read, the music I play, the places I go. I've told stories about houses bought and sold. About a Grandson who graced our world with hope and light.

Stories are important to me. I'm soaking up all these stories my mother is telling me these days. She was born in March, too, only not in a hospital, but in the four-poster bed at her grandmother's house in central Kentucky. She has 86 years worth of stories to tell, and I'm happy to listen.

I'm happy you've listened to my stories here for the past seven years.

I hope you'll keep listening. There are bound to be more.

Write On Wednesday: Writing By Hand

Writing by hand is laborious, and that is why typewriters were invented. But I believe that the labor has virtue, because of its very physicality. For one thing it involves flesh, blood and the thingness of pen and paper, those anchors that remind us that, however thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit a corporeal world.

Novelist Mary Gordon wrote these words (presumably by hand) in her essay Putting Pen to Paper, But Not Just Any Pen or Just Any Paper. She writes of how she primes the well of her own imagination by copying out (by hand) the words of writers she admires. She tells of an elaborate system of notebooks she has kept over the years, "small soft-covered one, confectionary coloreds ones, square red-covered and long canary yellow ones," into which are delegated  the different morsels of thought.

And she writes of her pen, that most important of tools for the hand-writing writer.  It is a Waterman's, she says, "black enamel with a trim of gold. When I write with it, I feel as if I’m wearing a perfectly tailored suit, and my hair is flawlessly pulled back into a chignon."

Dare I say there is not a writer alive who doesn't thrill at these words, this intimate discussion of pens and paper? What was once the bare stock of our trade, their romance is now enhanced even further by the sad fact that they have all too often been forsaken for the glare of a computer screen and the clickety-clack of a wireless keyboard.

Like most writers, I have notebooks and pens galore. There are flimsy, cheap spiral notebooks such as I used in junior high school, the kind that cost ten cents each at the Back-to-School sales in August. There  are pretty soft-covered journals embossed with arty pictures and life-affirming slogans. There are leather bound books which contain only the most profound of words, those first penned by my favorite authors, and that I've copied out laboriously in my own handwriting, hoping against hope that a smidgen of their genius will impart itself upon me.

Pens? Yes, I have those too, although I'm not as finicky about pens as Ms. Gordon purports to be. I do have a Waterman's pen, a gift from a favorite uncle who always seemed to divine the things I most coveted but would never buy for myself. Waterman pens. Coach purses and gloves. Waterford crystal paperweights and letter openers.

How I miss that man.

But I'm happy enough to write with a medium black Bic Ultra, or a fine tipped Pentel R.S.V.P. I confess to a newly developed a fondness for the Pilot G-2 (07) after accidentally walking off with one from a restaurant.

It is the physical act of writing itself that is so important, Gordon says, and I believe this to be true. The taking up of pen and putting it to paper seems akin to priming the pump, to blowing air through the billows of the pipe organ, to the singers diaphragmatic breath. What is most interesting to me is what Gordon writes to start her day  -  "copying out paragraphs whose heft and cadence she can learn from."  Somewhat wistfully she says that "it is remarkably pleasant, before the failure starts, to use one’s hand and wrist, to hold and savor pleasant objects, for the purpose of copying in one’s own delightful penmanship the marks of those who have gone before."

It may sound silly, but it comforts me to know that while I'm sitting here in my small corner of the writer's world, scratching away in one notebook or another, Mary Gordon is doing the very same thing.

Just a couple of writers, writing by hand.