Remembering Erich

My younger brother, my only sibling, died a little more than a year ago. This will be our second Christmas without him. My brother was a loner and unpredictable so Christmas without him, even when he was alive, was not rare, but this year feels different. When you love someone, even if you don’t always enjoy their company when they are around, knowing they are safe somewhere in the world is a comfort. My brother’s existence seemed less and less safe as the years went by, certainly in the last few years when he had physically moved a thousand miles away and was living in his van, but he kept in touch with my mother by phone, often daily. I didn’t always believe or trust in the news he shared with her about his life. My brother’s narratives often strayed from reality, and I never knew how much he believed of his own tales. Toward the end of his life I would have liked more than anything to know how much he believed himself of what he spun for the rest of us. But that was the one thing you could never really know with him.

My brother was an alcoholic.

He was the smartest person I ever knew, smart enough to observe and draw conclusions about life that most people happily miss. He was smart enough to see that his intelligence, his dyslexia, his six foot seven inch, one hundred ninety pound frame, his poet’s heart and painter’s eye made him an odd stranger in this world. We were eighteen months apart in age, and the children of addicts. That it was my job to pilot my little brother to safe waters seemed clear to me at an early age, but I lost that sense of mission when I started school. While school was a place of safety and belonging for me, it was only ever a danger to my brother. So it became every man for himself in my little family, and that single, unspoken truth wounded him immeasurably. It also, as wounds often do, defined him.

When you love an addict, you always imagine there is a way of helping just within reach, something that you, and maybe only you, can do, or say, or maybe a way of being that will change things. That somehow it lies within your power to make the light snap on. There isn’t of course, but the fact that you believe there is makes you and your addict perfectly suited to one another. My brother found and made his own family as an adult, cobbled together from childhood friends, and like-minded dreamers. He sometimes loved well, and was loved by others along the way, but his wound would not be healed. He died alone. A resilient few people tried hard to keep that from happening, but looking back, I think that is how he had planned it.

Christmas, however, offers an alternate ending to my brother’s story.

Christmas was not his holiday. Too much family. Too much forced cheeriness. Too many ways to disappoint and be disappointed. Christmas is about beginnings, about the hope that comes with beginnings. Christmas, as a holiday on its own, does not have much to recommend itself to broken people, people with wounds, people who have seen more endings than beginnings. But Christmas, as a holiday, doesn’t stand alone. It is encompassed within the story of a larger life, the life of a man who, like my brother was defined by his wounds, left alone by his friends, and homeless. Christmas, as a story, is circumscribed by the story of Good Friday and Easter. The baby grows. The man loves others more than himself. The world sees no use for him. He dies alone.

And then, in the most unimaginable twist, he conquers death, takes back his broken body and walks among us. Christmas introduces us to the One who can truly say, “No one dies alone.”

I think, in the days and hours after we left his side, the days and hours he lay in hospice dying, my brother had a divine appointment with a fellow wanderer. How he responded in those last moments is, for a time, a mystery, but because it is Christmas I can hope.

Flushing Barbie

I just heard an advertisement on the radio for the new Barbie Dreamhouse, which now has toilets that actually flush… Is this necessary? Have Barbies physically evolved that much since my daughter was a little girl? And to what end? I understand baby dolls that express real life sounds and even fluids. I had a Tiny Tears doll. Then there was Betsy Wetsy, and I’m sure her descendents have gone on to perform even greater feats of infant distress. But Barbie and Ken are fully formed adults.

There is no end to the questions that come to mind.

Which isn’t exactly what I want to write about this Christmas, but it does seem to be an excess of the kind that I’m afraid I’m growing more and more inured to. This one just happened to wake me up because I’m out of the slipstream of little girl role-play. In plenty of ways I am as swept up and jaded as all the other citizens of Babylon. Case in point, I determinedly soldiered through my queasiness and discomfort in watching the first season of “Breaking Bad” until I was completely addicted to it and watched every single season with relish. I did understand (and even rooted for) the need for the ultimate demise of Walter White, but I have to confess a soft spot for Jesse Pinkman. When I saw a Jesse Pinkman action figure for sale in B & N a couple of years ago, I desperately tried to think of someone I could appropriately gift it to for Christmas. Just to reiterate— this is a moronic, conscience deadened, drug addicted, drug dealing, mass murderer of innocent people whose television character I wanted to own in doll form and give to somebody I love. I didn’t buy it, but to this day I kind of wish I had. This state of mind didn’t just happen to me overnight. I worked at it.

When I was first married, I cross-stitched a quote from a singer that I liked and hung it framed on the kitchen wall of our townhouse. It read, “Let us live more simply, that others might simply live.” It was my mantra for the kind of life I wanted to make with my new partner, the kind of life I wanted to teach to my children. When we moved across the street to the townhouse with the extra bedroom I hung it in that kitchen, and once again when we bought our old house it hung on the kitchen wall. In our first townhouse, I baked all our own bread, and processed our own baby food. In our second townhouse, the sign hung between the new cordless phone my husband gave me for Christmas, and the baby monitor. When we bought our historic Victorian house, we installed a whole house intercom system, planning for the day when our older children would have bedrooms all the way up on the third floor. As you can guess, the main panel was in the kitchen, where I still spent most of my time (although not making bread) (and not baby food either) and I had to move the sign slightly to make a space by the multi-switch light plate and in between the cordless phone and the two baby monitors. When our oldest children were school aged, we got a second phone line installed for the kids and so got a multi-lined phone to go in the kitchen. My kitchen wall looked like NASA’s command center, and at this point my little cross-stitched saying, wedged in among all the technology, seemed more like a joke than a heartfelt sentiment. One little decision at a time we were outgrowing simplicity. You could say we had worked at it.

That was years ago. Since then we’ve acquired smart phones, laptops, Kindles, iPads, Apple TVs. My kitchen wall is no longer cluttered, as all the technology I need resides in my lap or the palm of my hand. That’s what simplicity means to me now– not lack of technology– just smarter, smaller, more densely functional. None of it is bad, but it’s something we have chosen. What we didn’t know we were choosing was the extent that it would own our time and attention, since both time saving and time wasting are now available in excess.

The other day my husband and I went shopping for a new car for me. Cars have really advanced since the last time I got one, almost thirteen years ago. I thought I had a few minimal needs for my next car, but as we sat with the sales lady and she explained the various packages that can be installed, we kept checking them for inclusion. Comfort is good, safety is essential, music, check, accident prevention–hello, have you driven with me lately? We didn’t feel pressured or guilted into our choices (and we took our traditional twenty-four hour cooling off period before deciding) but there was just so much more technology available than we’d realized. My next car will be so tricked out that if an asteroid falls through the open panoramic sunroof and hits me on the head, it will still be able to stop, back up safely, and parallel park. This is one sort of progress. Yet a deep, equally true part of me that longs for a life where all I need is a horse and a bicycle wonders how I got here.

So how do I reconcile myself with myself? I appreciate the artistic instinct to push the boundaries of what is possible. In art, literature, entertainment, I applaud the genius of the writer who can invent and sell a truly despicable character as an antihero. It doesn’t necessarily represent a forsaking of values or a blurring of the lines between right and wrong, like some might argue. It can be an effective way of confronting people with their own relativistic value systems, of holding the mirror uncomfortably close and shining a light on their certainties. What I produce as an artist or designer does not dictate what you consume as a consumer, and you cannot compel me to read or watch or buy something just because it’s available. The availability of just about everything the imagination can produce is the hallmark of my future. Where it leads me depends on how hard I work at being lead there. But let me be honest; the availability seduces me. So I should probably not be so surprised that Barbie can now flush her own toilet. Maybe I should be surprised that I’m still surprised. And happy that I’m still disgusted.

The Problem with Thanksgiving

Things happen at Thanksgiving, right? It’s like we can’t have a holiday celebrating all we should be thankful for without the universe conspiring to make us just a little bitchy about it. And maybe because of all we juggle around the holidays, it’s harder for women. Beer, a football game, and some sort of roasted dead animal on the table are all many guys need to be thankful.

Women are more susceptible. We have that thing in our heads. And no matter what kind of Thanksgiving celebration we’ve decided to participate in, no matter how modern, how streamlined, pared down, green, community-minded, or spiritual we want it to be we have these expectations of ourselves and every single person who crosses our path. That’s when the universe messes with us.

I have hosted Thanksgiving dinner at our house for the past 30 years, and I have plenty examples of being profoundly and aggressively ungrateful. My personal worst best was the year the electricity went out at ten in the morning, one hour after I had put the turkey in the oven. That year my husband was away at work, and I had twenty some people arriving in hours. I managed to pull off an entire dinner on one of those round charcoal Weber grills (while it was snowing) and we all squeezed into the living room in front of the fire to eat in our coats. The silver lining (it’s mandatory to find a silver lining on Thanksgiving) was that it was cold enough to leave the leftovers out and not bother with cleaning up until the next day, but of course the electricity went back on the instant we had finished eating.

Over the years, I have gotten pretty good at pulling off a feast for two dozen people. Most of the things that would have sent me into a panic in the past I can now anticipate or adapt to. So I keep upping the ante. I want our Thanksgiving to be better each year. More thankful. Less gluttonous. This year I wanted Thanksgiving to be more integrated, less clannish. I wanted us to talk to people we don’t see often. I wanted us to come away from our time this year knowing a few more people on a deeper level.

Because we have so many people, seating is always a challenge. We’ve done the long banquet table thing, but people sit next to the same people year after year having the same conversations year after year. I wanted to orchestrate the interaction a little more this time. I thought about dividing our group into two or three smaller numbers and then having us rearrange ourselves in between courses. A Round Robin Thanksgiving. I spent weeks perusing menus that could be divided into discrete courses so as to facilitate a natural break for switching tables. Soup and salad, followed by meat and potatoes, followed by dessert? I spent days scribbling potential table groupings and regroupings. I sweated the numbers and various combinations as my guest list swelled and shrank and swelled and shrank. I considered sounding a bell to initiate a switch, mid-meal, take your plate and glass and run to the next station. A Chinese Fire Drill Thanksgiving. Thursday morning, as I penned yet another configuration of people and tables one of my sons looked over my shoulder said, “It’s Thanksgiving, not speed dating.”

Hmm. Point well made. Sanity returned.

This year a predictable number of things threw a wobble into my carefully spun event. At the last minute four people were added to the mix. (Thank goodness I’d abandoned the designated seating!) Running out of gas was the theme of the day– first my rotisserie grill at some undetermined point during the five hour roasting period, and later the car of the daughter bringing the vegetables. For the first hour and a half the two year old screamed any time someone spoke to or looked at him. Like every year, we scrambled a little, improvised some, and carried on.

There was a moment, after the food was on display, the candles lit, multiple tables set and optional casual seating provided, that I paused to enjoy the scene. But it was later, half way through the evening as my husband and I sat quietly together and shared a smile that I felt the full force of gratitude for this day. At that point plates and napkins, beer bottles and half full wine glasses littered every surface. The floor was an obstacle course of matchbox cars and legos. The guitars were out, the singing was boisterous. The five year old, wearing feathered headdress and loin cloth, hopped and whooped and beat the drums to his rain dance while the two year old lay peacefully on the floor feeding handfuls of pie to the dog. My Martha Stewart Thanksgiving had turned into Animal House. And I loved it, all the more so because of the stuff that could have ruined it for me, but didn’t.

This, I think, is the problem with Thanksgiving. It’s not the work ahead of time, or the clean-up after, and it’s certainly not that things happen. The problem with Thanksgiving is that it is only one day. On this one day the bad stuff actually reminds me to be thankful. On this one day I look for, and (surprise, surprise!) find the silver lining. On this one day I am mindfully grateful. On this one day.

A First World Prayer for the New Year (i think i might be back)

Let me follow Jesus.

let me be beautiful and thin while I do it, and well rested.

let me follow Him humbly, without regard to human approval, and let the whole world be inspired by my love and service to God.

let me sacrifice for His glory, and let me trust Him to meet all my needs while I sacrifice.

let me love others even when they don’t love me back, especially when they don’t love me back, so they will come to repentance when they see my selfless actions.

open my eyes and ears to understand God’s will for my life, so I never have to doubt or wonder or be confused or conflicted.

let me learn all His lessons quickly so my suffering is short,

but if my suffering cannot be short, let it be painless,

and if my suffering cannot be painless, let it produce visible blessings around me so I can find comfort in that.

and if I can find no comfort in that, let me feel God’s love.

let me write a great work of literature during my suffering.

let me be one of those people who doesn’t really consider suffering to be suffering.

let me follow Jesus and be joyful in my suffering, and let my joy alleviate my suffering.

Let me take up my cross,

and let it strengthen my flabby upper arms while I carry it.

let me run the race well, and maybe a little faster than everybody else.

let me be humble with my many blessings.

let me be content to shop at Target and wear knock-offs when all around me wear brand names, and let it be a testimony to all around me who know I could afford to buy the real thing but choose not to.

let me be humble and honest if I ever get to the point where I can’t afford to buy the real thing, and not keep on pretending it’s because I’m following Christ.

let me keep my eyes on what is important and not on what everyone else thinks is important.

let me be a light on a hill, not under a basket.

but if I am to be a light under a basket, please don’t let it ruin my hair.

(just kidding)

let me remember always to pray, and especially when I’ve told people I will.

let me be a strength and a comfort to everyone, and especially to people who don’t like me.

if I am to be misunderstood, please don’t let it be about Jesus’ love, or let people think I’m a Republican (or a Democrat).

let me love the sinner but not the sin, and let it be clear to everyone even if I sometimes have to gloss over the sin part to make the sinner feel really loved.

let me never compromise God’s standards, and when I do let me embrace grace.

Let me follow Jesus,

especially if our frequent flier miles will apply.

let me travel lightly in this world, and you know, God, that it’s not about the excess luggage fees.

let me walk through the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil, because I’m an American. And I have excellent health care.

let me follow you, even into places where I might be embarrassed or feel foolish or be the only white person.

let me serve the poor and the needy, and not forget to post it on facebook.

let me be radically and utterly yours, Lord, but still fit in enough to be a witness to my well connected neighbors.

let me follow you Jesus, even if it means aggravating my allergies, even to a place where I can’t buy unlimited quantities of my self-tanning sunscreen.

let me post this prayer and have people think it is funny rather than true.

What I’m Doing While Busy Not Writing

So I decided if I can’t write, then that’s what I should write about, but it turns out that writing about not being able to write doesn’t make for very good reading. At least, if you write about it while you are still unable to write.

Even for a blog, it’s a little too little of something, and a little too much of nothing.

So my mind began to wander to a book I’m reading by Donald Miller about how his life changed when a previous book he wrote was made into a movie. If you don’t know who Donald Miller is, he’s kind of the male writer counterpart to Anne LaMott, who I’ve written about before. Miller’s earlier book, Blue Like Jazz, was made into a movie after being financed through the organization, Kick Starter, when the original Hollywood financing fell through. Because I gave some money for the production of the movie, I got all sorts of emails and phone calls from people I didn’t know thanking me, and then I got an associate producer t-shirt and a movie poster, and my name listed (with a thousand other people) in the movie credits.

And that got me thinking about Kick Starter, because I actually have a project which has been approved by Kick Starter, to raise several thousand dollars for a number of book promotions that the publicist suggested I do. The way Kick Starter works is that once you start your fundraising project you only have something like thirty days to complete it, and if you fall short of your financial goal, then you don’t receive any of the money people pledged. You can raise more money than you aimed for and get it, but raise less money and your project is a complete failure. So before launching a Kick Starter campaign, you should have all your ducks in a row so to speak, meaning you should pretty much know that you have enough people who want to see your book do well and will give money to help. All that planning and networking scares the shit out of me. So I have a project sitting on the shelf at Kick Starter that I may never launch because I don’t want to fail.

Which got me thinking about failure. Failure is the kind of thing that, if you are afraid of it, then you are pretty much married to it for life. It doesn’t go away with avoidance.

Which made me think about Kick Starter again. Which made me wonder how many people would actually give money to help me promote Alabaster Houses. Which made me think about the thousand fans that I have on the Alabaster Houses Facebook page and how if each of those fans gave only five dollars apiece, I could make my goal. But lots of the fans on the Alabaster Houses Facebook page are in their teens with really angry and sometimes scary profile pictures, which makes me wonder all sorts of things about my book. And while I’m really, really happy, (and a little puzzled) that they like my book, I think it might also be some kind of inside joke, and so I’m not sure I could count on a lot of money from my fans. And I guess I’d also prefer if they are going to be my fans, that they actually read the book if they haven’t, rather than give me money.

So then I started thinking about having a thousand fans, and how that’s not very many compared to people like Donald Miller and Anne LaMott who have tens of thousands of fans. If I had ten thousand fans I would want to stay in my house all the time for fear of running into one of them. Which made me think about failure again, because how much success could I really handle if I’m afraid of having tens of thousands of fans? Which reminded me of what Donald Miller said about fear, that it’s not just “a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.” I never thought my life was boring, but now I wonder if I should ask someone else about it. I feel afraid of all sorts of things, like having someone yell at me for no apparent reason, and throwing a party where no one shows up. Actually that last thing has happened to me. Once I threw a party for another person, and no one but her showed up, and another time I threw a party for two people and every single person showed up except the two people. The only thing worse than having a party where no one shows up is having a party where the people who do show up feel more rejected than you do and you can’t go to bed and cry yourself to sleep because you have to entertain your rejected guest(s).

Writing this non-blog is not helping me feel less depressed, so I’m going to stop now. I’ll try again next week.

The Winter of My Discontent

Winter is always a difficult season for me. It is a season of dormancy, and with the onset of shorter days and greyer skies a vital part of me seems to go into hibernation. The upside of winter, though, is that it always ends, so I have come to view winter as a time of waiting. Winter tempts me to contemplate its brighter cousins, and to believe that by March or April life will change. Transformation will come, and not just to the world outside, but to the inside of me as well.

This past winter something tripped me up. Nothing terrible happened; I just lost myself.

Nothing terrible happened. Here lies the shameful underbelly of my depression, that a person so perfectly blessed as I am could be tripped up by something so dark, so unexpected, and find no way to make sense out of it. I am like a thirsty person who finds only muddy water in her glass. I know my condition; I just have no clean water to drink. All around me others are fine, but the water in my glass is filthy and I just keep picking it up and putting it down again without drinking.

I have been unable to write this winter. As a writer, I’m a creature of reflection but some experiences take all your resources, leaving nothing in reserve for reflection; all is thrown in for the fight. I became a selfish schlub of a person this winter. In an effort to just feel better I surrendered to my lower urges, and became content to harbor a slew of petty resentments and serial disappointments. Winter has passed and, like scales, the residue of my self preservation hangs from me, ugly, uncomfortable, and alien to the core. I am emerging from this winter like a caterpillar that didn’t receive the cocoon instruction manual. Not only have I failed to become a butterfly, but I am no longer even a particularly appealing caterpillar.

What was this winter for, I wonder, other than to show me my own darkness?

I used to joke that it’s a good day if I’m alive at the end of it, but then I lost my sense of humor. That’s what the sleep of exhaustion is for, for the blanking out of the day that leaves nothing good except the fact that another one just like it will be waiting for you in the morning. Now I see that it can be a good day but I have no senses left to know it. And just because I don’t understand what a season has been for, doesn’t mean it hasn’t been for something.

So I wait, and in the waiting, my personal winter goes on.

Goodbye Easy, Hello Happy

Recently a string of minor inconveniences has detoured me from getting any kind of daily exercise, and the combination of this with the holidays, a nasty recycled virus, and some extra responsibilities have left me feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and now, according to my all-wise therapist, depressed. I am Patient Zero for mental illness. I already have SAD, ADD, and chronic Just Let Me Take a Nap-itis. Now I’m depressed. Really? Just now? I thought I was born depressed.

In all seriousness, this happens to me every winter to one extent or another. This winter, though, I have gained weight. More than the usual oh-no-its-time-to-give-up-the-second-glass-of-wine weight. This is a sneaky, perfidious weight. My sluggish mind acknowledges that action must be taken, but it is cold outside, and I’ve been playing phone tag with the trainer at the gym to get a new workout planned, and my jeans HURT me. I should take them off. There’s not a lot one can do without wearing pants, except nap. I should nap.

And so it goes. I just want things to be easy.

I was talking to a friend recently who was returning to the grind of medical school after a month off. He was remarking on how easily he had adapted to doing absolutely nothing, and how that scared him because he had some relatives who’d ballooned to four hundred pounds and had not left their house, had not left their sofa, in a decade. “It runs in my family!” he said, looking mildly horrified.

I don’t have to shake the family tree too hard to find my own versions of what I might become if I let things slide, but this only occasionally prevents me from practicing a slew of bad habits. This winter it’s getting harder and harder to find external motivations for doing what my internal motivators have decided to nap through. What if my internal motivators don’t wake up? What if they just go on a long, long holiday and leave no forwarding address? I can see the handwriting on the wall, folks. Inside me there is a fat, alcoholic, hoarding, crazy cat lady living on the public dole and the only thing I have to do to let her emerge is nothing at all.

I don’t want to have to exercise to be thin and fit. I don’t want to have to get up early to get anything done in a day. I don’t want to have to wrestle out all the terrible paragraphs onto a page before one beautiful sentence emerges. I don’t want to have to fight with an acquaintance to have her become a friend. I don’t want to have to embrace a lot of ugly truths about myself before I find the grace to extend forgiveness to someone else, and yet I’m greedy. I want to be, and have all these things.

I just need to say no to the Easy Button.

My therapist says to start with one thing at a time. Get back to exercising every day. I’ve promised him I will, so now I have to do it or lie to him next time. I hate the cold. I’ll blow my knee or shoulder out if I start a new workout without the trainer. The fat lady in me wants to take a nap immediately. But the greedy lady in me wins. I put on three complete layers of clothing and waddle out into the arctic freeze to do three miles.

It is positively blissful.

The Things We Buried (apologies to Tim O’Brien)

One of my resolutions this year, and sooner rather than later, is to find my desk. My desk hasn’t gone anywhere, but in the past couple of years with the publication of my novel, Alabaster Houses, and all the subsequent non-writing activities required to publicize it, I have gotten surprisingly little work done on my current novel, and absolutely none of it at my desk. At the same time, our empty nest has undergone a population explosion. Lots of returning, reproducing, and relocating has been going on here. As more and more of our household items have had to be moved, sifted through, re-designated, or given away with each new arrival and departure, the loft that was once my office has become a purgatory for displaced belongings.

Recently I’m feeling the yearn for routine again, coffee in the same place at the same time, the slow slog, the tedious work of writing a novel. It’s time to sit my ass down on a hard plank of a chair, plunk out black letters onto a white page for several hours at a time and intermittently stare into space. That sort of work can only get done at my desk. Time to find it.

At first my desk remained visible. Shipments of books arrived and were placed on top of piles of research and binders with early drafts and more book shipments and boxes of promotional materials. I spent some time traveling, and my desk became a dumping station, shrouded under piles of paper and books and boxes that may or may not have contained things I should or should not have been paying attention to. Then it became the mere backdrop to the pile of things I was storing in front of it. Later, that portion of the room where my desk had first been accessible, then merely visible, then vaguely locatable became the forgotten area behind the space that I could no longer get to where I had stored some things that I no longer remembered if I did or did not need, because they were barricaded by the stack of things that I definitely needed but had no current room for anywhere else in our house.

So what do I find on the way to finding my desk? Lots of outgrown baby equipment. Since the publication of my novel, my grandson has fast forwarded from a preemie to an infant to a toddler. He has shed just about as much molded plastic, rubber, and enamel coated metal as he’s shed skin cells. We have baby-sized containerization technology that swings, rocks, bounces, rolls, sings, whirls, blinks, whizzes and sighs.

I find old, unopened bills. The thing about bills is, you never get sent just one. Fail to pay it, and new ones arrive punctually every month. I open this one and find a twenty month old invoice for something I must have eventually paid, since I’m not in jail, but who can remember these things?

I find lists made to myself for things I was supposed to do that might or might not have gotten done. I find books I meant to read but haven’t, articles I meant to read but haven’t, clothes, whole wardrobes in varying sizes and conditions, folded, bagged and ready to pass on. I find boxes of beads, threads, craft books, my Bedazzler with scraps of studded, beaded, and dazzled fabrics waiting to take shape. I find a stack of picture frames in advancing stages of disrepair. I find an endless supply of things I always need but can never find- pens, pencils, notepaper, binders, folders, paper clips, packs of light bulbs, two cans of Endust, several random, unmated book ends, a box full of colored coat hangers. I spy an art easel slumped in the corner, crates full of old textbooks, school handouts, and lesson plans.

I find a cat. To be honest, I recognize this cat; it belongs to us, but who knows how long it has been hiding in this particular box waiting for me to shift the lid a little. It springs out with a screech from the middle of a pile.

I find a crate full of old Marine Corps cammies and dress shirts. A box of model cars, a plastic crate labeled “Vital- Do Not Throw Out!!!” full of my married daughter’s old bank statements, college tuition statements, employment pay stubs and high school theater Playbills. A box of old cds, letters from various girls, foreign coins, ticket stubs, photographs, a belt buckle, a broken watch band, an incredibly expensive school ring still in the box, some individual, unmatched socks and one old pair of graying briefs.

These are the vestiges of the life that has been waged around this space, the peripheral and sloughed off artifacts of heroic efforts, daily grinds, unexpected upheavals, well deserved advances, and the simple but unstoppable passage of time. My loft office, perhaps because of its availability or disuse, perhaps because of its proximity to the entrances and exits in our home, has become a repository of clutter, but clutter that, on closer inspection, as all clutter inevitably does, tells a story.

I am struck by how easily our lives have continued and prospered without any of these things, stored, lost, or forgotten as they have been over the years. Money has been spent replacing some of these things. I am chastened by that. But most of what lies here signifies the passage of a stage of life, a time when my children were younger, more vulnerable, when I had more time to pursue artistic hobbies, a time when I labored at something other than my writing, a time when I labored at my writing, and now, a time when the success of my labors has moved me on once again.

I wonder if people who are relentlessly orderly, compulsively organized, have opportunities to take stock of their lives in such massive, physical chunks. Although the accumulation of disorder on such a large scale leaves me longing for some personal improvement, this is the way my life is lived- in a rhythm of ebbs and surges, and I find value in both seasons.

I also find my desk. A new season about to begin.

The Power and Perils of the Blank Page

A writer with whom I’m acquainted,
Once stared at a blank page and fainted.
For the thoughts in her heart
Were too big from the start
and to put them in words left them tainted.

To an optimist, a blank page is the beginning of something; to a pessimist it may evoke dread. To a writer with an idea, a blank page is a promise to keep. It signals the point in creation when everything is possible, when aspirations are poised on the verge of actuality, and intention has not yet been weighed down by the gravity of the work that lies ahead. But a blank page is only valuable for its potential, for the invitation it extends to the writer. Left alone, it is never more than itself. Unused, a blank page is a travesty, a blight.

Today is January 1, the blank page on which the year 2013 will be written. I have aspirations in my heart for the coming year, and I know before putting a single stroke on the page of today that as the year unfolds, some of my aspirations will change, some will fall by the wayside, some will be grieved and new ones will be celebrated. That is the way of creation. The minute I transform the blank page of this day into a work in progress, I will be faced with regrets; that is inevitable. I will get it wrong. I will need do-overs. But if I become afraid of the process, if I become captive to the beauty of the blank page and forget why it lies before me I will have wasted myself.

My hope for all of us this year is that we recognize the blank pages that lie before us, and that whatever our medium, we transform those pages one day at a time into lives well lived. They may not achieve the aspirations we had for them, but neither will we be found guilty of squandering them.

Happy New Year.

Support for Victims of Writers

Being a friend or relative of a writer is exceedingly difficult. Because we writers are shameless users of people, we view your lives through the narrow slits of our ambition. Not only is all you do and all you are fodder for our wicked profession, but all you don’t do and all you aren’t and never will be is equally at risk for exposure. We writers make things up and we make things believable, a particularly nasty combination for the innocent by-standers in our lives. Driven by larger than life egos, we believe that what we think, and what we imagine we might think, and what we think we might imagine all belongs on the printed page. Yes we put ourselves in your shoes daily, but only so that we might exploit you as material. We struggle mightily to put aside our quivering qualms about using you because we are chasing the high that comes like a shot of pure heroin when a reviewer calls us “fearless”, “honest”, “insightful”.

So what can a person do to shield themselves from the carnivorous pennings of a writer who lives close at hand? I’ve given some thought to this and would like to make several suggestions.

The best and most effective response might be to become a writer yourself. Wreak revenge in the very same way your writer has injured you, through the printed word. Be better, sharper, snappier than your writer. Become the competition.

Not up for the printed page? Gossip can be a powerful tool. Get on the telephone and talk about your writer to all their friends and relatives. Spread half truths about things they’ve written that you haven’t actually read but that you have on good authority from someone else is about you or someone you love.

Remind your writer that you are vigilantly fact checking everything they write. This is an especially pernicious weapon if your writer writes fiction. Saying things like “I didn’t actually say that,” drives fiction writers crazy.

Take offense on behalf of someone who doesn’t bother to take offense for themselves. This strategy works well if your writer has actually named someone, because they will have had to have gotten permission from that person. Be all about protecting that person from your writer. Find other people who will be outraged on behalf of your duped friend. Taking up this kind of cause makes people feel good about themselves, gives them a reason to get together and work up a righteous anger.

Help other people to recognize how your writer has alluded to them personally. Say things like, “How are you holding up after reading that short story?” Or, “You must be a saint to be able to smile after that last column.” Of course, if someone comes up to you and says this, you must smile and say “Oh I’d be silly to take any of that personally.”

If all else fails, and the writer in your life continues to pillage your life in order to attain fame and profit, you must simply stop living it. Do nothing. I mean this in the most literal terms. Be the most uninteresting, unengaged, lump of a person you can be. Granted it will be a sacrifice, but persevere long enough and your writer will either stop using you or stop being read. That’ll really show us.