saturday morning

There is a wind blowing that I want to turn into a cliché about change and atmospheric pressure and storms. How lazy is that? Why not focus smaller, see the way the fronds from the Chinese fan palm click together like snapping fingers in a forest full of applause? Or the way the hair falls across your face when you look down, sheltering your eyes when it is too painful to look into mine? Or too honest? Easier to note the way that you stand, and turn to go.

Cliché. I want to fall back on you, write silly genre pieces that won't disturb anyone for long, leave your impressions of me intact, leave you untouched in anyplace that matters at all. But I can't. I can't settle for surface tension when beneath the water, deep, deep down there is a current, warm to the touch, steady, strong, that carries me to places you can't see from up there, a current once touched that won't release me until I've found the source of things, and then I am afraid to discover that there is no source of things, that it is all cyclical, circular, hop-on-let's-go-around-again the same.

So I choose. I pick a cliché here, a bud to slip into a crystal vase, a bit of green for contrast and let it be. But it is so lonely.

I awaken aroused, an image behind my eyelids I don't want to let go, Words that I know I need to write down … gentle words from an outlaw that don't belong there, the kind of contrast that makes me stop, listen, beg. I tremble, worried that any one spoken will change the tenuous balance, make you disappear, make you weep.

I don't want to open my eyes. I don't want to see that when I do the cat still lies at the foot of the bed, the dog beneath, each tuned to every movement I make, each guarding that what I do is only that which they can predict. It is too early, they will know that, and all the passion in the world won't matter if I disrupt someone's or something's routine.

There is a storm coming in from the Gulf, and the pressure changes again, the wind chills and I carry the energy of this naked moment with me to the tasks at hand, and all that I know for sure is that change is necessary, change is perfect. And that I owe nothing to the sunrise, and much to the dark.

spring fever

I truly hate it when I don't get any new words down in a day, and the truth is it's been almost a week now. Too much of that time has been spent fighting with software that is supposed to be seamless, and my inability to accept that it isn't… but can you think of anything more boring to talk about in a blog than computers? Me either.

It is definitely spring in most of the country… I can tell by the email and instant messages that I've been getting. I don't mind, really. It's fun to be human in the springtime.

I've been driving convertibles. If it doesn't get hot soon, I'll buy one. I love the feel of the wind in my hair, and the new ones don't even tangle it much. When I was a kid, my parents had two… both Oldsmobiles. One an F88, a tank of a thing, and the other a cute little F 85. (I have no idea if that means anything or not. I only know what the numbers mean for the moment in time that I'm actually listening to a car salesman…. Then I just forget. Not like the numbers are the tax code or a phone number after all.) Whenever we went on a trip, my hair, which I wore waist length at the time, was horribly twisted and tied up. My mother tried to make me wear scarves, ala Grace Kelly, and that just wasn't going to happen

Anyway…. my lease expires in June. I'll be traveling a good portion of the month, so need to decide to buy or turn my car in by the end of May. The question: is it too stereotypically middle age to buy a convertible? Better question, why on earth, when I feel the wind lifting my hair, the sun kissing my shoulders and the connection to the road rumbling all the way to my fingertips, do I care what it seems like?

Ah, spring. Gotta love it.

I'm working on a story that is at best sacrilegious, and at worst just plain kinky. It's sort of fun, too. I was called perverted yesterday. I'm so proud. And that person has never even MET Megg.

friday night tight

There is a lot of good to be said about champagne.

it is from france.

it is bubbly.

it makes me giggle.

i don't, as a rule, giggle.

jolly, jaunty, jovial, fun, cheerful.

April 20, 2005

Even though Word believes that to be the date, it is well past midnight and I've gotten my nights and days so confused again that I can't sleep. The cable is down for "scheduled maintenance" and I'm thinking that if Time Warner can send me newsletters trying to get me to enter contests for things I don't need or want, they could have actually advised me that we were going to be offline tonight.

But that requires customer service….

I've started to write several things here, a whole laundry list of potential topics spinning through my head…. But the needle doesn't seem to want to stop on any of them. I wish I had a menu of topics; I can ramble on about anything.

But I find I'm tired of my real life and want to give Lily or Megg a chance at the keyboard. Only Megg is sulking because she's not getting the attention she wants, and Lily is quite the girl about town lately. She's still trying to recover from the blow that her favorite writer crush is gay. Just breaks all the rules. He's a writer damn it! That carries responsibility!

Eh.

Okay, when worse comes to worst, I have a bunch of resources on my bookshelf, I could be like a, you know, REAL writer and open up a book with writing prompts. I could even dive into the Jar of Magic Writing Topics that the girls made for me one year when they got tired of brainstorming WITH me… it is a mason jar (where does that term come from you think? Like Masonic masons ala Da Vinci Code (I never did get through that) or like the Mason Dixon line? Preservation of food seems to be more of a southern thing… northerners had natures deep freeze if they could get things to last that long (I just made that theory up and yes, I know it makes no sense. Humor me here.) Anyway, inside the jar is black sheer fabric, speckled with gold stars, the kind you'd see on a wizard's cape. Inside the fabric lining are several tiny little scrolls. Each scroll is taped closed with Magic Transparent Tape. Inside each scroll is a writing prompt, intended to inspire short stories suitable for framing... er... giving away to my friends. I started to write a novel from them last fall during Nanowrimo, thinking if I got on a roll and let each story link to the next that it might serve several purposes… but I got stuck. The jar itself captured my imagination and I wasn't able to conjure up any magic from the prompts.

So here is a randomly chosen prompt from Megg's Jar of Magic… want to write with me?


Gay men in 19th Century England often wore green carnations in their lapels as a signal to those in the know. (The pun is that green carnations, like homosexuality, are "unnatural."

Now let's just set this record straight. I am not homophobic and neither are my daughters. They just think it's funny to try to get me to expose my ultra liberal thinking among my not so liberal colleagues. Any other day, and they'd get their wish. (He's a writer! What is that about? What's wrong with bisexuality anyway?)

Okay, you write about nature if you want. I'm pulling another prompt.

Get a dead man to tell a tale. Preferably sans help from supernatural la-la land.

That's just too easy. It's CSI. They must have been rushed on these. Not like someone in my family to push a deadline….

One more try.

Huysman's "Against Nature " features a protagonist who orders his life completely around aesthetics. (insert here from me…. Do we see a theme developing here???)(back to prompt)—giving a party at one point which is completely themed around the color black, with all black décor and costume, serving Black Forest cake, caviar, marinated Portobello, etc.; the garden done over only to feature igneous rock and of course it's on a moonless night. You're invited.

Well, who doesn't love a party?

you are simply striking

There is something about drinking dry champagne that is less like drinking and more like trying to quench something other than thirst. I think about what made someone bottle those first bottles in France so long ago, what made someone come up with the concept of wine or beer or whiskey in the first place. I like to know the source of things. The whys.

I'm really an outdoor girl at heart. I fell in love the first time at a place called Pine Hills. It was a nature preserve, basically untouched at the time, where you could hike backbones and ridges all day, but had to be out at night. There was a stream in Pine Hills that you could follow up to its source... a spring bubbling out of the side of the Indiana Limestone. Felt like going back in time.

Now my outdoor locale of choice is always a beach. I'm not a sun worshipper, I just need the water. And the woods seem so far away these days. Hard to climb to the source of streams with knees like mine. They are getting stronger though. Soon.

I started to look up the history of the seven dirty words, because I wanted to type them all out and add the term "alternative minimum tax" right there with them. But then the seven dirty words aren't all that dirty anymore, so that took the fun out of that little tantrum.

I don't feel like I've stretched myself with words for weeks, and it is necessary to get back to them. For one think I've got deadlines coming up that I want to meet, and for another I feel less detached when I write. It's good to loosen up here, because some of the junk gets out of the way and then I can proceed. I like that word. Proceed. The judges say that when you've won a point of law… but I also was always fond of the phrase "move to strike" which takes whatever language offended you as litigant from the record. I always want to use it in conversations when people say something that just isn't good. "I hate that person" "move to strike" "he's a fat slob" "move to strike" "she sure bumbled that opening" "move to strike!"

Anyway, time to proceed.

procrastinating. again.

The clouds this morning do appear to be lined in silver, backlit by the sun somewhere out there over the water. I need them to stick around because if they don't, I'll want to be out there, too.

I have no right to be scribbling here right now, have put this task off so long that I've given up my right to choose. Sure, I could file an extension, but it is a source of pride now, not to have ever done that. The fact that Grandpa's forms don't match and that the household paperwork, which is outside the scope of my responsibility, had to be dug out of Thelma's stacks doesn't matter. If they are not finished today, it is my fault.

Yet I can't keep from playing with words. Taxes. Spelled backwards… sex at… .hmm

But there are things I want to write, so:

- the possum on the baseball field. Just a baby, pink and fuzzy, snooping under the bleachers first then chased by the little kids whose big brothers were playing, into the dugout, then the pen where the pitchers warm up. It didn’t' seem to be afraid of people, as though it was happy to be a little league adoptive mascot. It even left the park when the game ended. Funny little creature; reminded me of rats.

- I haven't seen many rats in my life. One in Galveston that freaked me out and made the superstitious Midwestern voice in my head, the one I try to forget, whine about signs and bad luck. Another in New Orleans. Both times were times I wasn't sure I should be in that particular location at that particular time. The Galveston one was the beginning of the end of a great friendship, and some of my own naiveté, the New Orleans one was during Allison, and while I was watching rats, my house was flooding. Well not really. What really happened was that the pool overflowed and no one knew how to waste it. You can bring us to the city, but you can't give up common sense.

- there are always stories to be told that can't be told to certain audiences because the foundation for them necessary to make the story work comes across wrong. Like my story of the tollbooth in France. I was so proud to be DRIVING on the freeways in France, that I could read enough of the signs, that I could actually find the sea without help. But it had been a year of international meetings and I was not along for my brain. We'd been in Mexico the week before France and I am not good with currency. Not even US currency. So when the toll was (I don't remember how much the toll was. Five franks? Does that make sense? Doesn't matter really.) I handed the operator the change in my bag that added up to the correct amount, and didn't understand why she was asking for more. She kept saying "not a frank, not a frank" like it was some animatronic response. Only when I realized that I'd actually given her some pesos did it click. So cosmopolitan G.

- I'm going through something similar as my spouse finally gets the job he came here for. I have a sense of resentment that makes no sense at all and can only wonder if Hilary felt this way. I'm going to deal with it, because no one deserves resentment when they've worked this hard. I am going to drink champagne. After the taxes.

- My dog has major ocd. She cried to get out a while ago, and then just stared at the patio table whining. I finally went out to see what was going on and there were two tennis balls up on the table. Her sheep were out of the pasture I guess. She brought them in where she could watch them and is now curled happily beneath my desk. Yesterday she played so hard with the twelve year old that she came in with bleeding footpads. All the way to the bathroom there were little Scout blood prints, like a gruesome crime ending at the toilet where she of course had to get a drink. I'm not sure why there weren't prints back. She's smart enough; maybe she gave herself first aid while she was in there. What kind of pet fetches a ball on a sidewalk until her feet bleed? Today she is limping too. You'd think she were ancient. Just an old soul I guess.

- it is clear I have nothing really to write and am just stalling. Odd how it works the other way when I'm supposed to be writing.

basking

The sun has awakened cheerfully the past few days, lilac wisps of vapor fanning along the horizon. The dog and I walk in the morning, before the rest of them have to get up, and while it isn't as cerebral as writing until dawn, it feels right.

Savoring thoughts of summering… languishing in the day after a few hours with people I really like. How long must I wait before I can do it again? The feelings are the same, that warm toasting glow on the skin, just fragrant warm, and the perfume of good conversation. I forget how pleasant people are in my isolation here, lost in my head, (where I commune alone?)

Roller coaster emotions today as my daughter announced her first real job, right out of college, my husband moves up another rung and I argue with my son about alcohol and prom. Lily and Megg just want to play. I keep telling them, "after the taxes." They hand me extension forms and say, What about Hamilton pool, What about enchanted rock? I say… good night.

A memory though first.
When I was very young, my grandparents had a centennial farm. Not my grandparents really, my step grandfather's family, good old Charlie whose estate is still a mess… (Grandma's 4th husband) (What can I say? The women in my family know what they are doing!) Charlie's farm was situated a couple miles outside of a small town in Indiana near Greencastle (think the college town in "In and Out") The farm had a huge garden plot, a few acres, and that is why I found myself unattended and happy in a tire swing. The rope holding it to the walnut tree must have been fifty feet… that tree was enormous. The sun broke through the branches like the warm smiles of a thousand friends and if you twisted the rope around and around, the ride you would spin out on was breathtaking, like being on stage to a hundred curtain calls. The scent of walnut, tangy green when in their skins blended with the scent of hard work as the family came in with buckets of tomatoes.

Tomatoes deserve entries all their own though. You haven't lived until you've eaten a tomato sandwich made with Indiana tomatoes.

I'm typing words my mind hears but my consciousness doesn't so I'm giving in and going to sleep now. Yes. Now.

Franzen

From Franzen reading: (paraphrased from memory)


With reference to writers, particularly Kafka… just an individuals writing out there and there are things he doesn't understand in life, so he tells stories to try to understand them. That's what writers do.

Readers are an elite group… it is a luxury to read. And we come together in this thing we enjoy together communally, only for readers and writers, the communal experience we share with one another is that we are always alone. Sometimes our communal experience is even with dead people.


Three moments that struck me as worth preserving today.

--Sweat dripping, even if it is from artificial labor like an elliptical trainer, running down my face, my back… cleansing, purifying, oxygenating. Makes me stand straighter. If only to keep it from tickling.

--Driving and the trip to the city took me only 15 minutes. Some days it takes an hour and 15. But the weather was fine, the traffic sparse and moving. I moved to the left lane and let my zippy little car do what it was meant to do. I was going 75 when I went around the black Lexus convertible. A very sweet machine. The blonde woman driving and I made eye contact as I passed her. We smiled at each other. It was like yeah. I get it. It was a classic moment… one that I'm not sure everyone ever gets to feel. Freedom, brought to you courtesy of speed and the sunset and later the smile of the moon. And machines that look sexy and perform.

What more could a girl want after all?

--Finding my friend Keith after the reading. Keith is my image of the southern gentleman, from Louisiana, tall, well groomed, and soft spoken. He would no more make an untoward comment than he would let his 10 year old read the books he collects. (But he did get lost trying to get from the theater to the parking garage. A little flustered perhaps.) We meet by understanding in the autograph line after the reading, which is where we first met, just turned around and started talking. We have an amazing amount of things in common, and for someone I see only a couple of times a year, whose last name I don't know, and whose email address I don't have, we are very connected. We intended to sit together this time, but by the time I found him the reading had started. Neither his spouse nor mine care for the events. I go because I am addicted to words. He goes because he collects books with autographs. He has a whole room full of signed first editions. But he doesn't read them. When I ask him, he says he'd just as soon read a paperback mystery.

My favorite word when I was a kid was serendipity. Keith fits that definition. As do beautiful evenings in Houston, like today.

more

Another perfect morning where staying in bed only makes sense if you are having fun, because sleep wastes too much time. Tubby the cat knows this and wakes me earlier every day, he is careful, if he steps across the midline of my side of the bed, my husband will awaken and toss him to the floor. But if he is very careful, and walks only on me, he can quietly press his claws onto my shoulder, which wakes me instantly (it hurts!), and I will pet him, and he will purr loud in that way that boys do when they know no one else can hear them and they aren't afraid to let you know they love you the most. In his case, it is the thrill of getting up early to chase lizards, and then bring them in to show me. Or grasshoppers. Usually legless by the time I get them. Ugh.

Yesterday I finally nudged the committee I've been working on for two years, "cyberlaw"(not nearly as much fun as cyber... um. Never mind.) … to a place it needs to go, though those of us who stuck it out the last two years will miss it. It has been a meeting where the members almost show off… to present the issues that are unique and interesting to us, a bunch of senior lawyers who've grown jaded with all the simple stuff over time. I have seen it happen so many times. Minds like these need to be constantly stimulated, so rather than stay in an area that becomes rote and easy, they move to the next level of difficulty as though they are playing a video game. And then they wonder why nobody comes to talk to them, hear them speak. The point is that for most of the population, it isn't relevant. If it isn't relevant, it wastes too much time. And time as we all know, is m o n e y.

So I gently talked to them about target markets. They took the ball on their own then, and the point was made. We won't have our esoteric discussions of Grokster or UDRP's anymore, at least as a topic, and simple things like digital signatures and filing electronically will take over. It will bore the old guard, but it will appeal to the masses. And after all, we are here to serve.

As for me, I've moved from one area to the next so many times it is embarrassing... let's see, first five years or rotation so that I did everything once. I hated that. Debt collections, divorce, insurance defense, workers comp, litigation. I admit it was good training, to see what one had to go through if they screwed up a contract provision or failed to negotiate between spouses… then the specialty years… pension and profit sharing plans, then condos, then radio stations and bank mergers, in house issues (like securities) agriculture, then estate planning, all in Illinois. Off to Michigan where it became liquor licenses, then all mergers and acquisitions, buy outs and insolvencies, esoteric corporate matters like dissenters rights and freeze outs, Riparian rights, real estate development, then school law, then politics for a bit, campaigns. Then… what? Software licensing, health care, tax, always tax. And now publishing. I'm sure I'm forgetting something. So much law… and I never go to court, where most people think law is centered. I've always maintained that if my clients end up in court, I've failed enormously.

What a strange entry this is becoming. Where is all that pretty writing, those descriptions that remove me from the world of phrases likes "survive the execution" " not by way of exclusion" and "inure to the benefit" … where are they indeed.

I am thrilled with the turn out for our planned class dinner on Tuesday. So far nine of the potential 13 have confirmed. Some time the Jr. Leaguer in me won't stay quiet. Some day I will exploit that in fiction. I did in one of my "nano" novels… I wonder if that plot still holds water. Maybe that will be my summer project. The country club meets 9/11 was sort of the theme. My mind is quite sick sometimes.

Speaking of 9/11… I finished Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. It is a heartbreaker in the way that only fiction that feels like reality can be. If you ever wanted to capture the voice of a nine year old boy, especially precocious, you will have to read Oskar's story. I do wonder if it will stand the test of time, if its heartbreak is strong enough to do the job after 9/11 is consigned to a place in history like Pearl Harbor.

What shall I read next?

in which i ramble uncontrollably

An easy dawn, the brightness of the sun muted by clouds too thick to be pretty and too thin to bring rain. I wake happy, feeling the effects of physical labor, even if it is artificial labor, and I like it. Anything that feels like being alive gets my respect.


It was such a beautiful day that I couldn't be responsible and stay inside at my desk. I tried working out on the patio, but my heart wasn't in it. Went to see an old friend, then took my book to Le Madeleine where I thought I could read and have a salad. I've become extremely fond of dark leafy salads with fruit, spinach and strawberries are on the top of my list. When I took my tray outdoors, which was the whole point of paying seven dollars for an undressed salad and Perrier, the wind surprised me. I rarely use salad dressing, so the tender leaves blew off my plate like feathers. It was interesting to me, wondering if the cars out on the street would wonder why leaves of spinach were flying by their windshields… I know it would have made me wonder, had it been my wipers capturing those leaves.

A case of nerves tonight… the kind you will only understand if your child is at bat with bases loaded and two outs, with the team down by two. The pitcher walked him. The next batter hit a grand slam. A good game.

Another parent moment… when you realize that the boy out there who stands a foot taller than the others and runs without seeming to touch the ground, the one the coach puts into pinch run for his own kid, is the same one with a crush on his English teacher, and the same one who reminds you to turn left when you are lost in the time warp of a story in your brain but also happen to be behind the wheel of a car… and is the one who still wants you to kiss him good night. You never get too old for that stuff. You just don't.

In 55 days I will be able to put my manuscript in the drawer with the other ones, and start something new. I finished the story.... Undertow… unabashedly women's fiction, that had been waiting and waiting for its conclusion … for two years… last night, revised it with the help of a writer I don't know, and realized that it is the last of the old ones that I will polish instead of starting fresh. I can't imagine how good it will be to have the yoke of this last novel off my back too. I have been asked to write a horror novel next time. We'll see. Megg doesn't like to write more than three thousand words.

I'm tired of smelling paint, though the associative memory is interesting. With any luck, one more days will complete the job. Most of it has been under spousal duress and not done intelligently, with carefully planned decorator schemes or thought given to the themes of the room or even the furnishings. It is purely the result of builder khaki revolt. That's right, my avant-garde builder didn't paint the house in those time-honored shades of white. This is upscale paint! It is khaki! It is the result of buying a house not yet completed fifteen hundred miles away.

Here are the colors I've had it painted: Interactive Cream, Open Air, Lucky Green, Resolute Blue, Cyclamen, Breaktime, Misty and Bagel. Not to mention the Eggplant that I did myself before I realized just how stupid that was,

Two phrases from conversation: "Non computer mediated"… speaks for itself I think…

and Telematics: like when telephone call centers, for example, are connected to databases, so that when a person calls before you even lift the receiver you have a whole wealth of info about them –

Bet you didn't expect to be quoted, did you? I think Anthony Tedesco would call them money words. Maybe I should send them to him.

I still have hundreds of bits racing through my mind but the night last night only lasted two hours, and I have to be on my game tomorrow.

Ignore the typos, wrong words, extra spaces, etc, etc, etc. I'll fix them after I've slept.

miracles and challenges

A cup of green tea, no wine, no more beer. Not even that warming glass of scotch my skin asks for with its gooseflesh.

The word I needed to review today: Bohemian... somebody who does not live according to the conventions of society.
But whose conventions? Don't we all make those up as we go along?

I need to be more careful here. Some forget that my words are only words, that the interior voice belongs to whatever character is playing a role today. I don't need the trouble of the attribution back…. I always screw up my pronoun antecedents too… because you see I don't write the words, I live them first.

Last week I had to go back and change every verb. EVERY verb. When I wrote it, it was happening. But the text called for past tense. No wonder I forgot to change the pronouns.

A miraculous thing happened though, when I took the advice of my colleagues. They said: you don't get to know what happens to those kids if you stay true to your pov. And guess what? One of those kids said, phew, that was close, and he ran away. Poor soul has no clue what happens next. But it solved a plot problem and a bit of triteness I wasn't quite sure how to get around and the book is still alive. For the moment.

If that makes no sense, please don't worry. It isn't necessary, just a placeholder.

We drove to the beach today. I was hungry for the salt air and the soothing rhythm, and it had been months… I didn't realize they were reconstructing the bridge. The boys came begrudgingly (adverbs adverbs!) and brought their skim boards. But when we got there, it was too windy to be comfortable, the sting of sand blended with the chill off the water, and we opted instead for food. Don't we always?

The times book review featured Extremely Loud today, and I had to set the section aside so that it wouldn't spoil the ending for me, but I couldn't tear my eyes away fast enough not to notice what the review pointed out about the ending, and I had to flip to it in the novel, so now I feel a little cheated. I don't want to get too much farther because I know the ending is awful. Its like the train wreck though. I can't not keep reading. Just as I couldn't turn off the television after 9/11. In many ways the depression I've been dealing with these past years are tied to that day…. Many ways. Maybe it is the dragging on of war or maybe it is that I associate that event with sadness in my own life. I just know I've not been the same since then. I don't expect to be.

Ah well.

I've not done stream of consciousness memories for several weeks now. Let's spin the wheel and see where it stops. This is a writing exercise for me, much the way writing sunrises used to be, to try and free the demons caught up there in the crinkles of the gray matter, if you are new to this place. I close my eyes, and where ever the … bottle? Stops? Oh but I am not one to kiss and tell. {smile}

It is April third… that day has two significant attachments. It is the day my father was born, in 1913. He'd have been 92 if he'd lived. He died at 56. I don't remember much about his birthdays. I suppose it is because he must have been nice on them, and I refuse to remember him nice. I can be a bitter unforgiving bitch.

The other was the Tornado. My freshman year in college, a campus chosen because it sat on 500 acres of woods overlooking the Ohio river, one of the most beautiful places I'd been up until then, and still quite lovely today. 3:53 in the afternoon, I don't remember where I'd been but the sky was green and I'd lived in Indiana long enough to know it wasn't right. I went into my third (top) floor dorm room to find my British roommate, Laurey, whom I dearly loved, sitting listening to music and paying no attention to the sirens or the wind. It grew dark, the power went, and I remember grabbing her hand and telling her we had to go NOW. She trusted me, and we headed for the tunnels beneath the building… six flights down. We had reached the stairs between the first floor and the tunnels when the pressure changed. …like it does as an airplane takes off or lands…and the noise overpowered our voices. Laurey was screaming, but I just pulled her along until we were with the others and were safe.

The all clear was sounded sometime later… the girls whimpering in the tunnels were sure it was, as it always is, a drill…. Laurey and I knew better. She was quiet for a long time after that.

We emerged from the tunnels expecting life to be unchanged. But the dorm was missing its roof, and much of the third floor. Our room wasn't destroyed completely, but it was a mess. The worst part though was walking outside. On the beautiful quad, trees that had stood there for three hundred years were uprooted like carrots, pulled and left to dry in the sun. A block away, a sorority house was flattened.

Miraculously, there were only "minor" injuries. A professor walking in the woods had taken cover by a tree, and the wind pasted him too it… mostly shock for him. In the ad building, someone trying to close a door to the wind lost all the fingers on her hand when the door was sucked closed. There was 13 million dollars worth of damage to the campus, but no one put a value on the swath cut through the woods, as wide as a football field.

And for those of us who lived through it, a bond was formed, the kind that forms when you realize you've survived. Three days without electricity or water, and a blizzard followed the tornado. We got to see what we were made of.

That night of the tornado was the first night I slept with a writer. He held me close all night, assumed the nightmares were from the storm. He was my favorite person in college, with his shaggy hair and brown eyes, a day or two's growth of beard most of the time. It was odd to see him pulled together…. I tended not to like it much. Even now, I have a special place in my preferences, if you will, for the scruffy writer look. Together we solved many of the world's problems, and postulated, discussing Einstein over coffee, that life is indeed relative. If you stop existing for me, perhaps you don't exist at all, or perhaps you never did. Or maybe I don't?
Enough. Good night.

Turning a page

The sun is bright, the sky someplace between cobalt and periwinkle… it would look good on you…. The air 78 degrees and the wind strong enough to make the palm fronds applaud the song of birds whose names I don't know.

It is a perfect day.

I read the paper this morning, and am fixated on the reviews of the surrealists, who made great art while traveling at their whim, loving among themselves, and living outside the box of the moral strictures of their time. (I have concluded, however, that no one will ever make great art or much of a contribution to the world stuck in the suburbs of Houston.)

I don't know what it means. If it will just frustrate me more, or if it just gives me intellectual permission to do that which I love most, to inspire and encourage people who have the talent, the calling if you will, to make art. Whether it is words or sculpture or music or photos or landscaping. Your work gives me joy. It inspires me in turn. It pushes me sometimes.

I am the best I've ever been. I've loved, lost, lived, died. I've made a lot of money, a million friends and enjoyed my children. I've been a good wife, friend, lawyer, lover, leader. All of that has brought me to this balmy tropical paradise of a day. I'm not finished yet.

So this morning I am leaving melancholy to it's creative corner, letting it mature, fester if it must. I don't live in a box, and I don't answer to anyone but myself.
And neither, my lovely friends, do you. You are the best you've ever been right now. I can't wait to see what you do next.