104 years young

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Winofred White

My five-generation photo

The earliest memories I have of my great-grandmother were made during the weeks she spent in our house just after my baby sister, Megan Marie, was born. In my mind she arrived like Mary Poppins with an umbrella and a sense of order that was like a foreign language to us. Winnie, who only had one daughter (my mother’s mother) must have had similar feelings about us. Megan Marie was the seventh baby in eight and half years and the delivery had not been an easy one.

With our mother on bedrest and our father departing for work before the sun ever rose, that September, it was Winnie, one of eleven children herself, who fed us breakfast and assuaged worries I and my brother had about the start of a new school year. She knew how to help when help was needed.

Even though she only lived about 14 hours away, we didn’t see much of her growing up. Every year she sent each of her great-grandchildren a birthday card with a crisp dollar bill and one year I spent a few days with her in her apartment in Oakland. She took me to the circus and laughed harder at the clowns than any of the children. She also took me to the zoo and paid the few extra dollars it cost to ride a giant tortoise. At night I slept in her bed with her and I remembered how strange and paper-like her bare feet and the overwhelming aroma of her cold cream.

As a teenager, I loved hearing her stories about the movie theater she helped operate with her parents and listening to her play the piano. I also bragged to everyone I knew when she went back to school in her eighties to learn how to use a word processor so she could write a book about her family. That book, self-published, when she was ninety-one, is one of my most treasured possessions.

We had the opportunity to visit her this summer when we drove across the country and as I’ve said before the moments shared between my children and their great-great grandmother are as much as I’ve ever wanted out of life. I wish I could have been there on January 14th as she celebrated her 104th birthday and I hope that the group home she lives in now indulged her with the breakfast she’s been eating as long as I can remember: Mountain Dew and M&Ms.

Surprise failure

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True fact: Root canals fail 30 percent of the time.

My dentist rattled off this bit of information as if it were no big deal, as if it were only worth mentioning now to reassure me that I am not alone in my failure. I wish I’d known that failure was a possibility three years ago when I had the original procedure. What I assumed was that a root canal was like setting a broken arm. That is once it was set, it wouldn’t spontaneously break again on its own. However, it is more like removing a tumor–that is the dentist is pretty sure she filled in all the canals and passageways where bacteria like to hang out, but there’s always a chance some hidden area escaped being filled in.

Enough about my tooth. The real issue is that I’m okay with failing, as long as I know it is an option. What I don’t like is the surprise failures. You know the feeling. When your 1989 Honda station wagon with 200,000 miles fails to start in the morning, it is a minor inconvenience. However, when the heel breaks off of your just purchased yesterday shoes, it is a soul-crushing blow.

These surprise failures have a way of sticking with you and making you cautious in ways that you never were before. Here’s a list of failures that I’m still holding onto:

  • Being told I wasn’t the singing type by my second-grade music teacher
  • Not making the varsity basketball cheerleading squad after spending all of football season cheering varsity
  • My high-school boyfriend breaking up with me after I’d taken two busses and skipped school to surprise him
  • Overhearing my college roommates planning ways to ditch me on what I thought was going to be a girls night out

Looking over that list makes me sad. It seems like my surprise failures are all wrapped up in my relationships with other people. So, maybe what truly sticks with us and changes who we are and how we view the world is when people fail us. I kept trying to think of times I’ve failed–and there have been plenty–but the thing about failing yourself is that you always see it coming.

Makes me grateful most of my surprise failures these past few years have been from inanimate objects.

P.S. This is not to say that I didn’t deserve not to make the varsity squad. I tripped in my audition, I’d just never considered that I wouldn’t. The breakup with the boyfriend made me cautious in love until I met my husband. The eavesdropping on the roommates changed the way I trust my female friends. And my second-grade teacher was right–I am more of a tambourine girl. I can’t sing on key to save my life.

What a star does

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This summer we drove to the Grand Canyon. We spent two days, our tent pitched among the rockiest soil I’d ever encountered while camping, exploring the trails around the South rim. We watched the sun rise and fall from the great hole in the earth and looked at the fossils of sea creatures trapped in the desert. As awe-struck as I was over the actual canyon itself, I was even more astounded by the night sky.

The night we arrived dozens of amateur astronomers  filled one of the park’s lots with telescopes and welcomed any park visitor to peer through their lenses and get a closer view of the stars and planets in the night sky. A handful of rangers took people on constellation walks and used green laser pointers to map out the constellations in the sky. They told us about not only the traditional stories for Cassiopeia, Orion, Ursa Major, and a dozen more constellations, but those stories that the Hopi tribe had about the stars.

I watched my children’s eyes widen as they finally began to connect the shapes of constellations to the stars in the sky. The longer we stayed looking at the sky, the more stars appeared. The rangers and volunteers were adamant that no one use any light source of any kind. They insisted that our our pupils would open wide enough to enable us to see by the light of the stars. There was also a lot of disparaging talk about light pollution and those dastardly city lights, which made my husband and I laugh because we are in the heart of hearts city people who love city lights.

When I was a child for one of our Christmases, we were given one of those machines that turns the ceiling into the night sky. Essentially you plug it in, slide in the correct piece of paper (Northern Hemisphere, Summer) and then turn off all the lights, and the bulb in the machine projects the image onto your ceiling. My brother and I spent hours looking at those projections and trying to trace with our own fingers the path that would give us Leo or Hydra. (I know the other siblings must also have done this, but I don’t have memories of arguing with them about where the tip of Orion’s bow started as I did with Nathan).

For a couple of years in high school, I worked at OMSI as an explorer. This basically meant that I walked around the exhibit areas and helped visitors interact with the displays. We technically weren’t allowed to go to the shows gratis, but sometimes depending on who was working, the other employees would let you slip into a laser light show or Omnimax film. As a teenager I had to pretend to LOVE the laser light shows, but I didn’t. What I slipped into most often were the planetarium shows.

Yesterday as part of my poem a day efforts, I came across “The great bear” by John Hollander. The premise of this poem is exactly how difficult it is to see constellations and to point them out to others. I read it and then I read it again. Each verse is wonderful, but my eyes kept catching the lines “What a star does/Is never to surprise us as it covers/The center of its patch of darkness, sparkling/Always, a point in one of many figures.” Beautiful isn’t it?

Which is to say that what I love most about stargazing is the ability stars have to anchor humans in a particular time and place and then be connected to another by pondering “a broken/And complicated line, webbing bright stars/And fainter ones together” as the Romans did, as the Hopi did. It is the same reason I love books.

spoiling Harry Potter

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I was a senior in college when Harry Potter came out. My younger brothers and sisters devoured the books and tried in vain to get me to read them. I resisted–at first because I was in completely the wrong sort of place in my life to enjoy young adult fiction–and later because I got it into my head that I wanted to read the books with my children.

When I decided this, I didn’t have any children, but I was always planning what my unnamed, unborn children would read. My childhood had been spent devouring Ramona, Trixie Belden, the Little House books, Louisa May Alcott’s books, and every word written by L.M. Montgomery and I wanted to share every book with them. Dragging my husband through Powell’s, I would see a forlorn copy of Where the Red Fern Grows and purchase it, insisting that someday I would read it to my children. I spent years looking for a copy of No Flying in the House, which had been my favorite of the thirty books my second-grade teacher read to us. (It has since been reissued and is easy to find). But I realized that reading a book for the very first time and re-reading a book are completely different experiences. The desperation of needing to know whether Anne and Gilbert end up together created a feeling I never experienced again. No matter how many times I read the books (9 times).

When the subject of Hogwarts came up, I excused myself–mentioning my lofty goal of remaining spoiler-free. I did not want to know one event that happened in Harry’s world before I read about it with my own children. I was pretty successful. One of my most joyous parenting days was when I looked up to find both of my children with their heads tucked down in the particualr tilt of a reader. I knew then it was time for Harry Potter.

This summer we read the first book and most of the second. It was glorious–exactly what I’d hope. My daughter was hooked–reading ahead of me. I kept up in my own copies. But then, she went back to school and the one detail I failed to account for in my quest to remain spoiler free is third-graders. It turns out third grade is when the know-it-all-itis hits. Some of the children had seen all of the movies. One or two of the children had already read all 7 of the books. And once Sofia started to talk about her love of Hermione and Harry to her classmates, spoilers started flowing fresh and fast.

Harry marries Ginny.

I knew that would surprise you. It did me. My daughter managed to sneak that one out on me in the car when I was only half-listening to her chatter.

Hermione marries Ron.

Now, I’m not sure I believe this one. I think sometimes eight-year olds might get their facts mixed up, but my daughter assures me that this is absolutely correct and that I must come to terms with it.  Following this revelation (which I still do not fully believe) I explained to my daughter the concept of spoilers and she has promised to keep any other enormous revelations (especially about Voldemort) to herself. I shall trust my lovely internet not to spoil any other events in the series as well, because each of you know the joy of being surprised by a book.

No screen Sundays

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For the better part of my childhood, I didn’t have regular access to a television. My parents were early adopters of the “kill your television” movement. Which meant from the time I was small enough to actually remember watching television to right up until I was a teenager there were no screens in our house. This was of course well before personal computers, the internet and phones that primarily serve as angry birds video games. When I mention this in my more academic of circles, people applaud my parents’ decision and imagine a childhood full of classical music, the world’s good books, and discussions about chaos theory. If I had to describe my childhood, I would just use the word chaos, but that’s a story for another day.

I didn’t enjoy not having a television. At school when the other children discussed Mallory and Alex, I played along offering such insightful commentary as “Skippy is my favorite.” and “Alex is cute.” Here and there I was able to sneak in some television–the neighbors down the street, in addition to having  a whacked out Felix the Cat clock, also had MTV and my friend Angela would run into the street and holler anytime a Michael Jackson’s video came on. If I was outside at that moment, I’d sprint the half a block to her house and arrive breathless in her living room just in time to see the moon transform movie Michael into Wolfman Jackson. It wasn’t until youtube was invented that I finally saw the first three minutes of the Thriller video, including the disclaimer that it is no way glorifying the occult.

Eventually (right around the time my Dad’s favorite college basketball team made the NCAA tourney) my parents caved and purchased one of the dreaded boxes. There were strict rules attached to it–each of the seven children was allowed one twenty-minute segment of time to pick what to watch. Since all the shows we wanted to watch were at least a half an hour, this meant  daily negotiations and minute swapping. And then after dinner ,the television became the sole property of my father–whose priorities seemed always to be sports, star trek, weird PBS shows, and badly-written comedies starring teenage girls. Which meant that when we got married I knew more about basketball than my husband, had a crush on Wesley, an affinity for large red telephone boothes, and an obsession with buying a chair in the shape of a hand (see  Out of This World).

The last vestige of my parents’ anti-television campaign became the no television on Sunday rule, which lasted until I left the house at which time all rules seemed to disappear and my younger siblings had the advantage of watching television whenever they wanted (provided my father wasn’t around). If you are an oldest child, you understand this phenomena. There ought to be some scientific law that addresses this issue of the diminishing enforcement of rules once children begin to leave the nest so that by the time the youngest child leaves, the home is in a state of near anarchy.

In my own family I have tried to have the no television on Sunday rule, but it has been amended by my husband to include the important phrase “except for sports.” A few years ago, when my children became old enough to realize the computer could offer entertainment, I had to amend it again to no screens on Sunday. And because I am my father’s daughter and have a little bit of the dictator in me, I had still allowed myself to indulge in screen time on Sundays. This year, tired of being a hypocrite and tired of feeling chained to my laptop and phone, I amended the rule again to include no screens for parents (until the children go to bed).

Sunday was my first test of this new system and it was harder than I thought, but like kale, really good for me. Instead of incessantly checking my email and facebook I made it through 2/3rds of The Glass Castle, played Apples to Apples, baked 80 cookies, watched my husband work on CJ’s bike riding skills, visited with our dear neighbors, and  ignored 99 percent of my list.

Of course now it is the first real day the New Year and I’m trying to stave off the panic I feel about all that remains undone. Thank goodness I have those 80 cookies to help me through it.

List

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I like lists. I make them in my head, on post-it notes, on scraps of a paper, on my computer, on my iphone, in fancy notebooks, in plain notebooks, in the margins of books. I make teux deux lists where I write down tasks I’ve already accomplished just so I can cross them off. I’m sure you do this too. I think it is a natural human behavior, like avoiding the chatty check out clerk at Target.

Yesterday, in the midst of my great purge and organize of every space in my house, I came across a list I made when my daughter was an infant of 54 items I’d like to accomplish in my life. Considering the list was numbered to 100 and it was tucked in with a similar version from my husband (he only had 10 written down). I can assume that the lists were some sort of ill planned reconnect with your spouse night written around the time our oldest child was six months old. Those of you with children will recall how insane you felt the first year of your first child’s life. Marriages go through accelerated change during that time and it can be scary and provoke all sorts of ridiculous behavior–like making bucket lists with your spouse.

At the top of my list is take a trip to Italy. Can’t say I can check that one off and unlike some of the other items on the list (find the perfect shade of lipstick) it is still an accomplishment I want to have under my belt. I can’t even comprehend what state of mind I must have been in to have written down the bit about lipstick. I haven’t worn lipstick in twenty years. I don’t like it. Charlie doesn’t like it. Then there were the accomplishments that are entirely out of my control (be surprised by a surprise party). Think about it. In order to be surprised I have to know nothing about the party. I might as well have written in number 11 on Charlie’s list: surprise wife with surprise party. It would have spruced up his list a bit, which starts with wear a tie and a hardhat and ends with write a book.

Reading over the list I was able to cross out about ten items–the highest ranking of which was No. 2: write a novel. That is a little more than an item a year, which given my family history is not too bad of a pace. I think I’ve got at least another 44 years left. Of course there’s a good chance I’ll never learn how to do a proper dive (no. 20) or own a small newspaper and be the editor (no. 27). This year, though, I plan on taking care of number 5 (invent a new cookie) and number 22 (ride a horse on the beach).

And maybe, just maybe in 2013 when my book is released in Italy, I’ll have a reasonable excuse to visit.

 

Generation Present Tense

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Meet Elizabeth Taylor. Not who you expected right? Even if she didn’t have a decades-long love affair with Richard Burton and smokey purple eyes, this Elizabeth Taylor is a rare bird. She, like the protagonist of my novel, stands as the matriarch of six generations. I am fascinated by the image of the oldest generation standing next to the youngest. And it is that image that propelled me into Roots of the Olive Tree.

In general I am fascinated by the differences between the generations. This fall I started teaching fiction to undergraduates and I was amazed by their undying devotion to writing in present tense, which can be one of the most difficult and limiting tenses to work with. Yet most of them are all too willing to trade hindsight and reflection for immediacy. There’s a lesson in there somewhere. One that tells me much more about how they view the world than the subjects they choose to write about. And now I’ve taken to referring to all of them–these twenty-somethings as Generation Present Tense, which I feel is much more fitting than the ‘Aughts or the Millennials.

Thinking about the vast difference between me (a late Generation X) and these college kids has made me more reflective about the generation gap between myself and my children. Now that they can read, their choices of entertainment are far more their own than mine. Most recently, they’ve started to request specific songs and recognize and listen to specific bands. Because Charlie cares so very much about music, he is carefully crafting their choices–so that what they want to listen to is less Justin Bieber and more Vampire Weekend.

I am known for my fabulously terrible music taste, but we got to talking about the twentieth anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind, we realized that to our children listening to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is the same as when we were younger and were forced to listen to “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” (Bee Gees). This is, of course, speaking in strictly comparison of time, not music. And somehow, that made the gap between my children’s generation and our generation seem more like the Grand Canyon and less like the pond it had been before we started down musical memory lane. To take it even further, if my parents were listening to the Bee Gees in 1971, then in 1951, my grandparents were extolling the virtues of Perry Como and my great-great grandmother might have had a serious crush on Guy Lombardo in 1931.

My great-grandmother, Winnie, is quite musical and although she’s a little on the senile side now, she can still sit at the piano and bang out a spritely version of any Gershwin tune. I can hear my daughter right now practicing the Carol of the Bells and it makes me wonder what she’ll be tapping out when she’s nearing the sunset of her life. It is this image that makes the gap between us all seem once again like a pond with each generation just a ripple away from the one that came before it.

Poisonous Trees

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I used to be a journalist. I filled inches and inches of column space with information about cities, businesses, people and even a pot-bellied pig. Most of what I wrote was entirely forgettable. A handful of the stories have become entwined in my own memory and altered the way I look at the world. But mostly what I got out of those years was advice on writing. One of my editors told me the surest cure for writer’s block was research.

It is advice I continue to use.

The current book is in the capable hands of a copy editor and I’ve started on the next one. There is too little of it to give anyone much idea of what it is about, but one of the characters uses wood to make art and jewelry. This means I have on my desk no fewer than a dozen books about trees, wood carving, wood identification, etc. And among the gems I’ve found when I can’t seem to write is a most lovely chapter on poisonous trees.

Did you know one of the drawbacks to using planks from the Arcwood (a tropical tree with heavy wood and yellow flowers) is that the sawdust created when cutting Arcwood lands on human skin and turns it a muddish red? Also breathing the sawdust can cause major breathing problems. Or perhaps you are familiar with the Carolina Allspice, an ornamental with seeds that mimic the effects of strychnine. I think though my favorite poisonous tree is the Giant Nettle. Its leaves are covered in fine hairs that have poison sacs attached to the tips. It takes only the tiniest bump to break these hairs free and then once it touches an animal or human, it causes unbearable stabbing pain that can be followed by paralysis.

Before this, I think the only tree I’d ascribed danger to was the Poison Sumac–easy to know its is poisonous because, you know, it is right there in its name. The same goes for the Poison Wood  tree. But I think the most interesting fact is that there aren’t that many trees that are dangerous to humans and most of them that are, only affect some of us. Like the famous tree from a Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It was a Tree of Heaven, which is native to eastern asia and many people after touching it come away with symptoms similar to what happens when you touch poison ivy.

Which is to say all of this just reminds me how different we all are. What is poison to me, you may find beautiful.

Our world strives so hard to take away all the danger–the threats to mortality. We wear seatbelts, bike helmets, have created laws about drinking and driving, texting and driving, policies about the proper temperature to serve coffee. But what is life without a little risk? What is life without mortality? What happens to us when despite all our precautions we bump up against a poisonous tree?

These are the thoughts that come to me when I think about my children and how much I’m trying to protect them. I see your children nearly everyday in my classrooms–or rather they aren’t children anymore, they are trying to become adults and venture out without all the precautions their parents gave them. And I think they need to be prepared to bump into a poisonous tree every now and then. I hope it isn’t a Giant Nettle, but a maybe a Osage that will give some folks a nasty itch if they get any of the milky sap on their hands.

Because recovering is what makes us stronger.

The nineteeth rejection

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One of the perks of my new job is that I get to hobnob with authors. Okay, maybe hobnob doesn’t quite describe the organizing and arranging I do, but the end result is I get to go to lunch and dinner with people who have published actual books and books that are esteemed, or have been made into movies. My friend and poet Tara Mae has an excellent post on the importance of learning how to network. Basically, she’s right.

Are you back? Have you stuck with me this long? Are you wondering where I’m going with all of this?  Well one of the amazing stories that Bobbie Ann Mason told me is that she started writing in her late thirties and nearing forty, she sent a story off to the New Yorker. She got an encouraging rejection back and so she sent another, and another, and another. You get the picture. She does this 19 times and then famed editor Roger Agnell took the twentieth story she sent them. And boom at the age of 40 she becomes a published writer with her first story in the freaking New Yorker. (sidenote: have you read her new book? you should)

If you are a writer, you are thinking well, sure that happened to Bobbie Ann Mason. That was back in the 1980s when editors at the New Yorker still occasionally read the slush pile and responded with personalized notes instead of impersonal emails. If you are not a writer, you don’t really get the fuss and that’s cool. If you want to know what rejection is like, take off all of your clothes and walk around in the middle of a group of super fit and attractive twentysomethings. That will give you some idea of what it feels like to get little mimeographed slips of paper in envelopes telling you that your work doesn’t meet a particualr literary journal’s needs.

But this post isn’t about rejection. It is about success. My daughter, who takes Chinese at school, (I know, I know) told me 2011 was a very lucky year. It was the year of the GOLDEN rabbit and that it would be full of good luck. I’m inclined to believe her. For the last six years I have entered Memphis Magazine’s annual fiction contest. Some years I sent two stories in. One year, they sent my rejection to my neighbor, who had also entered the contest. She opened the envelope–making my rejection that much more painful. But this year. The year in which I have already had more luck than one person deserves. I won.

My story “Wind Gap” was selected by the editor as the grand prize winner and it will be published in the June 2012 issue of the magazine. Marilyn Sadler, the editor often added a kind note at the bottom of her mimeographed rejections. I took them to heart. I kept trying. It means the world to me to add this contest to my list of wins. My writer’s group now boasts three winners. They helped me fix this story. They told me it was okay to put Oprah in a story–because what better symbol is there than the all powerful Oprah? I’m glad I trusted them and I’m glad I kept submitting. I hope you do too. And look, you don’t even have to be a writer to keep trying. Soon it will be your year of the golden rabbit and life itself will explain itself to you.

The unbearable difficulty of poetry

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Poetry is like coconut to students. They firmly believe they don’t like it.

Richard Tillinghast says this attitude is our own fault. That we’ve made poetry out to be for the superliterate. We tell them it is more complex that it seems, that to quote Whitman it “contains multitudes.” To read poetry requires you to have read Dickens and Joyce. Or at least this is the culture we’ve created. During the interview he gave earlier this fall at the University of Memphis, he essentially told us to knock it off and encouraged us to read a poem everyday. Because what is more consumable in our fast-paced, multi-tasking world than a poem.

I took his advice to heart and have been starting most of my mornings with a poem. I do what I’ve not allowed myself to do since I was in high school–I jump around, skimming and looking for poems that catch me, catch my mood. Which means I’m mostly reading contemporary poets. I like poetry foundation–where I can type is a word like “rain” and get all their poems that contain that word. I like poems by women. I don’t like poems that set up an elaborate specific situation–either historical or imagined. I like poems that are full of marvelous turns of phrases or that redefine an abstract concept.

Sometimes I post parts of them as my status update and try not to worry that it makes me seem high-faluting or showy. I post them because they made me cry, or smile, or laugh, or inspired me to write a paragraph of my own. I am letting myself feel about poetry like I did when I was young enough to write an entire graduation speech about “The Road Not Taken” only to realize several years later that I’d never truly understood what Frost wanted me to about the two roads in a yellow wood. The woman who taught me that went on to win a Pulitzer for her own poetry, thus teaching me that first-year composition teachers are highly undervalued.

For a while, back in college, I fancied myself a poet. I became unholy fascinated by Sylvia Plath and started down my own path of intensely autobiographical poetry that was for all intents and purposes intensely bad. Not as bad as the bunkum I wrote in my high school diary, but of the same spirit. But it introduced me to a wonderful teacher, Heather Ross Miller, who is a tremendous writer with novels and poetry and stories. And deep down in my practical heart I decided it would be okay to pursue writing someday.

I hope you read poetry.