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.

TLC Book Tours: The Comfort Of Lies

Three women, three mothers, all connected  in various ways to one five year old girl. Sounds like trouble, doesn't it?

It is trouble, with a capital T, and Randy Susan Myers  deftly handles all the emotional ramifications of this interesting situation in her new novel The Comfort of Lies.

Told in alternating points of view, The Comfort of Lies reveals the darkest and most private thoughts of Tia, the child's birth mother; Caroline, her adopted mother; and Juliette, wife of the birth father. In one year their lives collide, and they all must confront the choices they've made, the truths about themselves and their relationships, and how they feel about the responsibility of motherhood.

Tia was too young when she got pregnant, the result of an affair with her professor, a "happily" married man with two sons of his own. Nathan gave Tia the kind of love and affection she needed so desperately, but when he found out she was pregnant he urged her only to "take care of it," before ending their relationship and returning to his wife, Juliette. To his credit, he came clean about the affair and the couple spent the next five years working out their relationship. Things seem to be on an even keel until Juliette accidentally uncovers a piece of information Nathan neglected to tell her - that a child resulted from his union with Tia. Juliette, stunned, finds herself unexpectedly sympathetic toward the little girl, and feels that they must somehow acknowledge her existence and make her part of their family.

Meanwhile, the child's adoptive parents have issues of their own. Caroline is a dedicated workaholic pathologist, and she's always harbored some ambivalence about motherhood. Her husband, however, adores family life and being a father - she agreed to adopt baby Savannah mostly to please him, and now five years later, she finds herself wondering whether she was really cut out for motherhood and domestic life after all.

The book asks the reader to ponder some big questions about adoption and the importance of family, about the true nature of motherhood and the sometimes ambivalent feelings it can engender in even the most loving of women. It also asks us to look at the lies we tell in an misguided attempt to "protect" the ones we love from a more hurtful truth.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel, although I can't say I liked ANY of these women. Tia is whiny and immature, Juliette bossy and controlling, and Caroline just plain aggravating with her self-centered musings about the boredom of childcare. I found myself wanting to slap all of them at one time or another.

Still, the great writing and fast pace of the book kept me enthralled.  I always enjoy a well written book that explores the dynamics of family life and relationships gone awry, especially when it comes to a satisfying conclusion. The Comfort of Lies delivered that in a big way, and has me eager to read anything else Randy Susan Myers dishes out.

Get Social with author Randy Susan Myers: Randy's website, Facebook page, Twitter account, her articles on The Huffington Post, and her Pinterest pinboards.

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

Write On Wednesday: Embrace the In Between

Because the way I know myself is through the written word.  The ways in which I am able to access any understanding of what makes me tick, how I see the world around me, what I feel, what I know, is through the daily practice of grappling with the page.  The grappling itself is the point.  Ideally something comes of that grappling, eventually.  Every story, novel, essay, memoir begins with that dive, that free fall, that willingness to not know.  We begin with the barest of ideas, a flickering image, a phrase, just outside our grasp, and we begin to try to capture it by sitting with the page and seeing what emerges. Dani Shapiro, On the In Between

I haven't been able to forget Shapiro's words since I read them yesterday morning, and in fact have returned to her blog several times today to savor them once again. She's writing about the time in between completing a book and starting the next project, the time when the writer's mind is fallow. She worries during this time period, worries that her imagination has left her, that no good ideas will come. She writes "this between-books limbo is, for me, like a long, slow leaching of color from the world.  A steady decline of mood and connection to the universe until one day I wake up and hardly know who I am."

It's true for most writers (and I count myself among this number) that we do our best thinking on the page. I've recently returned to the practice of morning pages, three pages of stream-of-consciousness style journaling, a habit I had been seriously committed to for several years but one that fell by the wayside during a particularly busy time in my life and never got picked up again. Since I resumed this practice, I realized  that taking time to write those three pages is as valuable for me as eating three meals a day, or getting seven hours of sleep, or taking my morning walk. I've written through some things that were bothering me and discovered other things I didn't even realize were going on in my head.

And it's true that the act of sitting down and starting to write - something, anything - often helps me over the hump when I've procrastinated on an outside writing assignment, blog post, or review.

But where Shapiro finds the "in between" to be a soul deadening place, I wonder if it sometimes is more fertile than she - or the rest of us occasionally fallow writers - realize. I wonder if, during those times when when we're not actively writing but going about the business of life full throttle, when we're reading and conversing and driving, when we're sitting in meditation or performing sun salutations, when we're dicing onions or measuring coffee out in spoons, I wonder if we are really gestating the ideas and emotions that will work their way onto the page.

Shapiro says No. For her the real gestation happens on the page when her fingers begin to dance along the keys, the pen scrawl across the paper.

Lately I've been thinking about mindfulness, about paying closer attention to the world around me, getting my head out of the internet and television and even books and taking more time to be quietly thoughtful. I think some of that has to happen before we can even begin to put words to the page. And because for most of us daily life  (or the things that Virginia Woolf called "non being- the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; washing; cooking dinner")  tugs at us so insistently, it's easy to think that productive mindfulness could not occur in the midst of this banal state.

But with a subtle shift of perspective, I think writers have the power to elevate themselves beyond the state of mundanity, have the creativity and depth of emotion to see past the "cotton wool" of day-to-day living and find instead the moments of gold, the moments that could bring those first tiny seeds set to grow into something larger, something that will indeed sprout to life on the page. With age, I have come to appreciate the beauty and sacredness in my daily routine, in preparing and partaking of meals, in reading books and conversing with friends, in porch sitting and dog walking.

I've learned to embrace the in between, confident that something will grow from it, the words will return in their own time, when they are ready.

How about you? Do you embrace the time in-between writing (or other creative projects)? Or do you chafe against it?

The Open Hearted

We hear a lot about big gestures in this world of ours, about people who give enormous gifts of money or time, about spectacular examples of courage or devotion. It's easy to feel as if we must do something equally grandiose, something just as awe inspiring, in order to make a difference in the lives of others. But how many of us ever have the wherewithal to make that happen? Even though our hearts may be open, we have neither the way nor the means to be as magnanimous as we wish. So instead we pull back, we say we can't help, we have nothing to give.

And we are so wrong in that assumption.

There is a young man I know who heads a project in our city which helps immigrants become legal residents of the United States. Sometimes, despite the best efforts of the volunteers involved, people are denied legal status and deported back to their country of origin. He spoke of visiting several of these people in a holding center where they were awaiting deportation.

"I had never been to visit the detainee's before," he said. "I didn't know how I could help. But I went, and I spent the afternoon sitting with them and talking and holding their hands. When I left, many of them thanked me, thanked me profusely, and I felt like a fraud. I didn't think I deserved their gratitude, for after all, what had I done? What earthly use were my words when they were facing the destruction of their hopes and dreams for a better life?"

Here he stopped talking, obviously emotional, before continuing on. "One of the men told me how much it helped him to have someone listen to his story, someone to acknowledge his struggle, someone just to notice that he had been here."

Sometimes, simply taking note of someone's presence is a big gesture. Who would have thought?

We laughingly call my mother the neighborhood shrink, because for many years she has been the one her friends call to discuss all their problems. Sometimes, especially when she is in the midst of life-troubles of her own, she will say "what do they think I can to for them? I can't even help myself!"

"But you're a wonderful listener," I tell her, "and maybe that's all they really need, is someone to listen."

The gift of a listening ear. Not a big gesture, but an open hearted one all the same.

Free empathy, the title of Katrina Kenison's blog post today, also talks about the gift of  lovingly bearing witness to another's struggle."  She recalls the face of a man, sitting at a card table on a street corner in Santa Cruz, a handwritten sign offering "Free empathy."

There are times when I despair of making any kind of mark on the world, want to throw my hands into the air in disgust at my inability to effect change, my powerlessness to make the kind of big gestures that have lasting impact.

But Kension says "we won’t save the world with big gestures or grand schemes, but by becoming better listeners.  By asking how someone else is doing, and then taking time enough to put ourselves in their shoes, to see the world through their eyes."

By bearing witness, by taking notice - one person, one heartbreak, one small but open-hearted gesture at a time.

I think I can do that.

How about you?