Pomp and Circumstance and Pasta Salad

My daughter was graduated from college last weekend.

It was at once like all other graduation ceremonies (black gowns, boring speeches, worries about the weather) and unlike all other graduation ceremonies (because my daughter was one of the participants).  While I sat there, I thought about my own graduation from college 32 years ago.  At the time, I thought I had set my life on a nice, straight track.  

I don’t even have words for how that turned out.

I also thought about how hard my daughter was to nurse.  She was always stopping and looking around, losing interest in the task at hand.  After a few weeks, I thought, To hell with this, and buttoned up.  I thought she was going to be distractible and unfocused, a person who never finished anything.

As it happens, she is still impossible to feed.  She won’t eat most meat, or beans, or bananas, or mashed potatoes.  She still eats cereal dry, with her hands.  When she makes a salad for herself at a salad bar, she returns to the table with a mound of black olives and a mound of shredded carrot and maybe, if she’s feeling adventurous, a slice of cucumber.

But this girl who has never eaten a ham sandwich was just graduated from college.    Over the course of four years, she endured the usual dramas in the housing, friend, boyfriend, and unsympathetic-professor departments, but she persevered.   She wrote a senior thesis in which words like “filmic” and “diegetic” figured prominently.  While she was writing it, she called me a lot, panicking.  But she stayed focused.

Graduation ceremonies are, in at least one way, remarkable.  You—the parents—are all sitting there feeling very private feelings, calling up your own memories.  But inexplicably, alchemically, you feel a connection to all these strangers, and their rightful pride in their children somehow ends up enhancing your pride in yours.

After the ceremony, we ate lunch on one of the college’s beautiful lawns.  My daughter had pasta salad: pasta, tomatoes, lettuce, carrots.  She didn’t eat the lettuce.  She doesn’t like it when the pasta and the lettuce are touching.    

Old Age

My 91-year-old mother has some sort of dementia.  Not Alzheimer’s, probably.  She gropes for words, can’t remember what she did three hours ago, insists that I grew up speaking Hungarian, as she did.  She calls my partner “Richard.” 

I am sad a lot now.

The weird thing is that my father died when I was 19, and I would give a lot if he could have lived into old age.  I miss him every day. 

But I miss her, too. 

I call her every night.  Usually, we talk about three things: the weather, politics (“Do you watch Rachel Maddow?  She’s such a doll.”), and whether she went for her walk.  Recently, her foot has been bothering her.  The half-hour walks have become 15-minute walks.  I think it’s an omen.

My mother has become less hard-edged in old age.  She oozes love. She hugs receptionists.  Once a woman who complained about everything her friends did (“She walks too slowly!”), she now has mostly nice things to say about people, assuming she approves of their politics.  It’s a nice change.  And lucky.  Dementia can make you nasty.

Last night, at dinner, she told the waiter at the Lark Creek Café how old she was.  I almost fainted into my steamed asparagus.  One of the hallmarks of my mother’s life has been her easy ability to lie about her age.  I didn’t know how old she was until I was 20.  Even then, she told me that she was 57, and told my brother that she was 56.  Lying was something she did even when there was no benefit to be gained.

As soft and mushy as she has become, my mother is still infuriatingly stubborn.  She lives alone and insists on driving.  (A few months ago, I stole her car keys.  My brother had new ones made.)  She has control of a lot of money, and she Will Not Let Go.  I have begun the process of taking that control away.  She wants to argue about it with me all the time.

It breaks my heart.

At dinner last night, I needed a tissue, and she rummaged in her purse to find one.  She pulled out a paper napkin wrapped around a brownie.  “I forgot about this,” she said.  “How long has that brownie been in there?” I asked.  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said.  “I got it at the JCC.  They serve lunch for six dollars.  The meatloaf is fantastic!”  Then she leaned in close and whispered, “But everyone who eats there is so old!”

Finishing What I've Started

I am working on a manuscript.  I have written 91 pages.  It will eventually be a good middle-grade novel.  I’m almost 100% sure it will sell.

I started this novel over two years ago.  Since that time, I’ve written and sold another manuscript, and written and submitted yet another to my agent.  (She’s still considering it.)  Meanwhile, I cannot finish this particular book (tentatively called Three).  It’s driving me crazy.

Part of the reason is that it’s a story about three kids—two girls and a boy—and different chapters are told from different points of view.  I have a hard time juggling that.  I have to remember obscure details about each character, and the longer I take to finish the book, the harder it is to recall them.  Recently, I decided I wanted to make a small change in the boy’s home life.  It took me weeks to incorporate it, and long after I thought I was finished, I kept finding references to the boy’s parents that no longer made any sense.

 

It is said that all writers have manuscripts in their desks (or on their computers) that were 1) never finished, 2) finished but never sold, and/or 3) abandoned for various reasons.  I have a few of these.  In one, I tried to fictionalize my mother’s experience growing up in an orphanage.  In another, I wrote about a crazy family loosely based on the one into which I was born.  I think I stopped working on these because I realized I would be divulging other people’s secrets.

  

Family loyalty is a double-edged sword when you’re a writer.

Another reason it’s hard for me to finish Three has to do with the fact that one of the characters is poor.  I spent yesterday working on a scene in which she has to figure out how to make a dinner for herself and her father out of rice and a quarter of a brick of cheese.  I felt a huge responsibility to do justice to the scene without sentimentalizing it.

After I wrote it, I felt sad and weary and spent.  It wasn’t until long after dinner (organic baby greens, roast chicken, root vegetables) that I realized why.

 

Caring about the characters I’ve created is a good sign.  It means they’re real to me, which usually means they’ll be real to other people.  But knowing that they’re living in dire circumstances makes it hard for me to want to spend time with them.  I find myself stalling: running errands, making phone calls.  Anything to avoid thinking about a kid who has to lie about why she never has enough money to get a smoothie after school with her friends.

So I’m writing here about Three in the hope that I will now feel compelled to finish it.  I will tell myself to woman up.  I will stop whining.  I will get over myself and just do it.

Joy (and A Video of My Son Dancing)

One of my best friends from college died on Friday.

 

To combat the sadness, I’ve been thinking about joy and what brings it to me.  Small things, it turns out.

--The first gulp of lemonade on a really hot day;

--Sitting on the front steps after my morning jog;

--Turning a cake out of a pan and feeling with my whole body that it slid out perfectly;

--A belly-laughing baby;

--Figuring out a plot problem in any novel I’m working on;

--Watching David Letterman with Robert;

--Getting a phone call and looking down and seeing that the last two digits of the incoming number are either “74” or “02”;

--Animals, especially dogs and chimps (and yes, I know chimps are nasty and vicious, but I don’t care);

--Shopping with Cara;

--The moment in a restaurant (especially with Robert) when the waiter brings the salad and I know that the whole meal is still ahead of me, to be anticipated, but I don’t have to be hungry anymore;

--Birds twittering (which I never used to care about at all—how is that possible?);

--Road trips;

-- Tom Waits’s “Heart Attack and Vine,” Johnny A’s “Oh, Yeah,” anything by Benny Goodman;

--Opening a brand new book;

--Watching my son dance.  Here is a video.  He’s the tall young man in the untucked blue shirt--#424—dancing with the woman wearing a black-and-white top on the right-hand side of the screen.  This is a jack-and-jill competition, which means they were randomly assigned to be partners.  He had never danced with her before.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w--V4LdtjA8&feature=more_related

Whatever joy I feel in watching him—which is considerable—is dwarfed by the joy he feels himself.  It is palpable in every move he makes.

A Little Old

Last weekend I drove down to L.A. to bring cookies to my thesis-writing daughter and a scratch cake to my son, recently bereft of wisdom teeth.   Daughter and I decided to bond over some retail therapy at an enormous mall in Glendale.  It was crowded and raining and I was tense, having already been in the car for six hours.

We entered a store, and immediately I noticed that the music on the loudspeaker was so loud that I had to shout to be heard.  “I hate it when the music is so loud!” I groused.  She said, “What?” and I said it again, yelling this time.  She laughed.  “You are such an old lady,” she said.

Something inside me snapped.  “You know what, Cara?” I said.  “I am an old lady!”  I felt incredible freedom—a sort of zinging inside my brain—as I said it.  I thought, Well, okay.  The secret’s out.

 

Except for one thing.  I was lying.  I am not old.

 

I know who Mumford and Sons are.  I can bench press half my weight.  I wear cool suede boots with brass studs.  I am, as I constantly remind my kids, adorable and hip.

 

I am the opposite of old.

As it happens, I am grouchy and curmudgeonly and a big complainer.  But it’s not because I’m old.  I’ve always been this way.

What I realized in the mall is that now I can chalk up all the weird things about myself—that I hate loud music in public places and camping and movies with car explosions and the way that nobody even cares about split infinitives anymore—to being old.

   

It’s completely fabulous, finally having an excuse.

   

While we were in the store with the loud music, I bought myself a filmy, float-y ecru-colored top patterned with figures of women in mid-20th-century hats and dresses.

     

I bought it because even though I know who Mumford and Sons are, I like to listen to Benny Goodman more.

Okay, maybe I’m a little old.

For Someone Who Makes A Joyful Sound

One of my best friends from college is very, very ill. 

I met Leslie on the first day of my freshman year at Bryn Mawr.  She—daughter of a Connecticut minister—sought me out, attracted by my curly hair and the fact that I came from California.  We nurtured our growing friendship with endless and largely inaccurate speculations about boys and sex.  We got drunk for the first time together.  We ordered innumerable cheese steaks from Pizzi’s.  We went to New York and sat in a bar with Paul Simon.  We worked at the dorm switchboard and laughed harder than I have ever laughed since.

We were both English majors and enamored of the idea of becoming writers.   She loved Virginia Woolf and J.D. Salinger.  She also loved James Thurber and Joni Mitchell and Alexander Calder and Woody Allen and Cape Cod and the doughnuts they used to give out in Thomas Great Hall every morning.  Mostly she loved Bob Dylan.  When I told her I didn’t, she threatened, seriously, not to be friends with me anymore, so I backed down and said I didn’t like him as much as Jackson Browne.  We spent many hours listening to our favorite records, trying to convince each other.  In the end, we decided we both loved Bruce Springsteen and called a truce.

She was a bridesmaid in my wedding, although even by then we weren’t as close as we’d been.  Later, she married Mike, her college sweetheart, and had two kids.  They lived outside of Chicago for many years, and then in Milwaukee, where they are both on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin.  Leslie did become a writer of nonfiction and wrote several best-selling books.

We lost contact for a while but re-connected via e-mail and Facebook.  It has been nice to be in touch again, although our friendship is grounded much more in memory than in events of the present day.  Which is fine—sometimes you need friendships like that—but I have always wished that we could rekindle what we had.  Even though I know that sometimes, “what we had” is such a product of time and place that it has to remain in the past, and the best you can do is call it up from time to time and remember it lovingly.

I ought to be able to insert a pertinent quote from Bob Dylan.  But I never really liked him. 

So here’s a little Jackson Browne for Leslie, with love:

“Keep a fire for the human race

Let your prayers go drifting into space

You never know what will be coming down

Perhaps a better world is drawing near

And just as easily it could all disappear

Don’t let the uncertainty turn you around

(the world keeps turning around and around)

Go on and make a joyful sound”

On Anthony Trollope, the Real Housewives, and What I Do All Day

I am always fascinated by what writers do during the day.  When I was younger, I had the idea that writers sat at roll-top desks, sipped tea, and took long walks on the beach for inspiration.  I did not think about land-locked writers at all.  And I did not think about how they had to get their engine lights checked or go to the drugstore or get a cavity filled or vacuum or sit freezing on the bleachers during soccer practice.

I’ve read about writers who say that they eat breakfast and then work from 8 am to 4 pm.  This is amazing to me.  First of all, what kind of breakfast?   Who cooked it?  And cleaned up after?  And then there’s the work itself.  Does working “from 8 am to 4 pm” mean actually working?  Actually writing something down?  Because that is just unbelievable to me.

Here’s what my work day looks like:  I get up at 7:30 am, check my e-mail, and play a few games of Mahjong Titans on the computer.  I may be thinking about work or I may not.  Usually I am thinking about how I know I have to exercise and don’t want to.

 

At 9 I go for a jog/walk through my neighborhood.  The good part about this is that I do get to do part of it on a beach.  The bad part is that it is exercise.

I get home at 10 and do weight training while I watch terrible morning television shows.  I know the Real Housewives and various hoarders intimately.  Then I shower and eat breakfast.  This morning, it was two bite-size Almond Joys and an orange.

By now it is 11:30.  If I have to go to the grocery store, I go now, when it is less crowded than in the afternoon.  When I get home, I put away groceries and do some medically necessary things to manage a chronic health condition.

 

At 2 pm, I am ready to work.  I take my laptop into the kitchen, because even though I have a lovely office and a perfectly nice desk, I get more work done in the kitchen.  I don’t know why, exactly.  I think it’s because in my office, I know I’m supposed to be WORKING, which freaks me out.  In the kitchen, I drink tea, look out the window, check my kids’ Facebook pages, and once in a while, type out a sentence.  I do this until 5 and if I’m lucky, I’ve written two pages.

Anthony Trollope was a postal surveyor who wrote 5,000 words every day before he went to work.

Camille Grammer is one of the Real Housewives.  She has four nannies for two children.  And homes in Malibu, Beverly Hills, the Hamptons, and Colorado.  And no job.

On the laziness spectrum, I fall somewhere in between Anthony Trollope and Camille Grammer.

Tomorrow I am writing three pages.