Category: Blog

Creation, Destruction and Writing

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A lot of writer’s blogs give writing advice.

I’m not entirely comfortable with this.

Never mind the whole question of at what point in your career are you really qualified to offer advice on the art and craft of writing. I really couldn’t say. But I notice that people often pass around the same “lessons” on how you should do things. Frequently this kind of teaching is repeating what someone has told them, rather than from experience.

We used to run into this kind of thing with Kung Fu.

I studied and helped teach some of the Taoist arts for about 15 years. The three major internal arts, Tai Chi, Pakua and Hsing-I, are often presented as arts for lifetime practice. Like most arts, it takes time to learn the forms, the movements and the rules. Then you practice. Over time, you make it your own. Like most Taoist approaches, results are measured by your internal barometer. There are no real external markers for success.

Of course, our society isn’t much for long-term anything and we’re all about external markers of success.

Thus the weekend seminars where people learn Tai Chi, and then go teach it. To me this is a lot like passing along writing lessons that aren’t from actual experience.

So, I rarely give writing advice, except to talk about an experience.

I’m breaking that rule today.

I notice a lot of people complain about getting stuck in their manuscripts. Always at the same place. For some it’s starting, for others finishing. A lot of people hate the middle.

This isn’t just about writing a novel, it’s about dealing with all of life.

So, I give you the cycle of the five elements here. If you’re familiar with this sort of thing, you’ll know the principles of the five elements form the foundation for much of the Oriental philosophies. Yeah, I’m lumping India in with the Orient.

Here’s a nice simple chart. There are some abysmally complex ones out there, but we’re keeping this simple. So a basic way to read this is, water grows wood, wood burns into fire, fire reduces to ashy earth, earth transforms into metals and metals reduce back into simple water. Don’t get caught up in the logic – suffice to say their idea of “metal” is a bit different.

Instead, look at it this way.

No, I’m not just randomly substituting. Birth is like water, like the primordial sea that is the beginning. Wood is growth, like the forests, plants and vines covering the world. Maturity is the fire, the balance between growth and decline. It can be nurtured to last a long time or can be a flash and disappear. Earth is the decline, the sinking back of growth into the ground. Death is the endpoint that cycles back into birth.

That’s one of the points. This isn’t a straight line; it’s a circle. Death makes birth possible.

You can match this to the seasons, too: Spring is birth, followed by summer, a moment or forever of midsummer, the decline of autumn and the death of winter – which gives way again to spring.

So, at last, my point:

We can apply this to writing our stories and novels. The analogy should be clear by now. You have your beginning that sets the stage, the growth of the story, the middle, which often contains the turning point, then the the decline, the wrapping up of the story and the ending.

Most of us are better at some points in the cycle than others. In our hearts, we already know which parts of life we struggle with. Some can start things; some can’t end them. Some get stuck between growth and decline with no understanding of what to do with it.

One writer-friend of mine has a hard time with decline, for example. She hates to let things go. Once they’re already declined, she can let them go into death, but she has a tendency to try to keep things from declining. That’s where she gets stuck.

Me? I don’t like killing things off. I like things to last forever. So I practice. I try to embrace the end of things in my life. Kill it off and let it go.

I’m not necessarily good at it.

Ah, but the birth that follows is a glorious thing.

High Drama

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Overheard from the Crazy Gym Lady: “That wasn’t sugar. It was honey. Honey isn’t sugar.”

This morning, the Jeep was completely frosted over. A heavy fog had settled in overnight – indeed a wind-driven fog bank was still whipping by overhead, foaming and turbulent like those old paintings of horses boiling out of the surf – and froze onto every surface in a thick coat.

David turned on the defroster, to the second-highest setting, then got out to scrape off the windshield. Once he was out of the car, I turned the defroster up to its highest setting. He won’t do this. Something prevents him from using the “high” setting on anything. Even boiling water in the tea-kettle, he’ll put it on just a notch down from high. Or, much more aggravating, he’ll put it on somewhere around the low side of medium.

Not particularly wanting to wait half an hour for the water to heat, I’ll sneak into the kitchen and turn it up to High.

“Why is the tea kettle on High?” he’ll ask.

“So the water will boil,” I tell him in my soul-of-patience voice.

“It’s already boiling.”

“No – it’s just hot. I want my water hotter than that.”

“You just like to superheat everything,” he tells me.

He tells me that a lot. I like to put the take-out pizza in the oven to keep warm while we eat the initial slices. Yes – “superheating.” I bring pasta water to a rolling boil. I like baths hot, not tepid.

Oh yes, it’s a problem sometimes. I’m impatient, so I nearly always start a skillet or pan on my favorite setting, start the oil, maybe the garlic, and dial down from there. Sometimes I might, um, get distracted, too. I really do try not to let this happen often. The getting distracted part. I’m still quite fond of High.

That’s the intensity in me. The drama. I like things bold and decisive. Dithering drives me up the wall. While David rarely dithers, he’s for the careful approach. He likes to ease into something, take it slowly. Wait and see.

We’re fire and water. It actually works for us.

Though I’m forever turning the dials up, he’s there turning them down. He hesitates to take action, but I’ve already bought the tickets. When I’m running too hot, he tells me to settle down.

Are we attracted opposites? I think it’s more the balance.

Honey isn’t sugar. Except it is.

Suicide Owls

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I’m not usually rabid about symmetry. In fact, for a long time I habitually wore two different earrings, just to be asymmetrical. But I like how this photo came out.

Straight road to the mountains and the sky beyond.

The other day I heard a loud crack, the unmistakable sound of a bird hitting one of our windows. I knew immediately the bird had killed itself. I didn’t have to get up from my desk to know. Birds hit our windows sometimes, because they reflect all that sky, but usually they’re just scooting around the house on birdie business and bounce off. In over a year of living here, this is only the second bird to die on our windows. It’s only when they’re not paying attention, when they’re hunting or being hunted, that they screw up.

It’s with dread that I go look to see what bird it had been. Sometimes I’d like to pretend I don’t know, avoid looking altogether. I can’t give the bird its life back and yet I feel I have to at least witness it.

Surprising to me, this time it was a raptor. I thought a little kestrel, but David ID’d it as a pygmy owl. Turns out they sometimes hunt birds during bright daylight. Which also explains why he was easily fooled by our windows. Daylight is still not the strong suit for owls.

Really a neat little guy. I wish I’d seen him alive.

Cycle of life and all that.

And then David found out yesterday that one of his lifelong friends had “died suddenly at his mother’s house,” according to the obituary. He hadn’t seen the friend in quite a while, but it’s a shock. The guy was only 56.

These things make us sad, in diffuse ways. There’s nothing to be done. It’s part of the natural order and yet, it’s also natural to mourn their passing.

Death is the bookend to birth. A dreadful symmetry that draws boundaries around our mortal lives. We might try to buck that, play little games with ourselves and pretend that death is far away or that we’ll be different. But we know it’ll chase us down sooner or later.

We never know when we might be shooting for the sky and snap our necks on plate glass instead.

Because we can’t know, we focus on life. Death moves among us, but we live. In some ways, we owe it to the dead to enjoy our lives. Relish every breath, every joy and sorrow that reminds us that we’re part of the world.

And when we get down the road, there is the sky, and everything beyond.

Smell Me a River

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So, today Crazy Lady at the Gym – who works there every morning but Thursdays (ah! how I’ve come to love Thursdays…) – stops us just as we finish running on the treadmill.

“Now that it’s winter,” she says, “I’m asking everyone to wear deodorant to the gym. And to wear fresh exercise clothes everyday.”

We stare at her in disbelief.

“Because we’re all closed in here,” she explains. “I’m asking everyone.”

She added this last, in case we thought she was making a personal remark about us.

Yeah, this one annoyed even my mild-mannered David.

“It’s a freaking gym!” he exclaims as soon as we walk out the door. “People sweat in gyms. If you don’t want to smell sweat, don’t go in a gym!”

He also started in on a rant about adequate ventilation systems. I just smiled. Usually it’s me complaining about Crazy Lady, while he pats me on the head and makes sideways remarks about how I’m not always the most tolerant person.

I know this is just her little deal, since she seems to view the gym as a cross between her personal exercise area and her living room. This “rule” is, of course, not in the contract. Never mind that a good proportion of people around Santa Fe don’t use deodorant at all because of health concerns or sensitivity to perfumes.

Have I mentioned Crazy Lady is from Louisiana? She probably thinks women glow.

The subject of smell is a sensitive one. Or not, depending on the person. In our refined, technological society, we’ve been taught that the smells of the human body are bad. We scrub our teeth and mouthwash our breath. We use body-washes, lotions, powders, anti-perspirants, perfumes, deodorants, and shoe inserts. All to keep us from smelling like human bodies and more like a pretty object in a parlor decorated in chintz.

I’ve noticed it’s rarely men who complain about how someone smells.

On the other side, it’s becoming far more common to ask people to refrain from wearing heavy perfumes and deodorants. I’ve noticed it on several conference flyers now, reminding people that many around them have allergies. Physiological reaction to aerosols is somewhat more grim than not liking a natural smell. Allergies and sensitivities are different than dislikes.

This is like the shades up vs. shades down battle. People who like shades down think it’s only considerate for the shades-up people to lower the shades if a shades-down person complains. Similarly, people who don’t like certain smells feel free to tell other people to correct it. Rarely do they seem to realize that they don’t have to have things the way they like them all the time. I don’t like small children being disruptive in restaurants, but I would never ask someone to leave. I simply put up with it.

With perhaps a bit of grumbling, but still.

If I go out to a restaurant, I run that risk. If I walk into a perfume shop, I expect to smell perfume. If I walk into a gym, I expect to smell, well, sweaty people. In fact, I’d wonder about a gym that doesn’t smell like that.

I’m trying to decide now if I want to complain to management, or simply wear the same clothes over and over for weeks on end…

PV=nRT

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Yesterday, two crows chased our resident Cooper’s hawk down the valley, where it turned and made a stand on a juniper. One crow took off, but the other lit also. It looked like the hawk had captured something the crow wanted. (No, we won’t think about what kind of critter it likely was.) After a fairly long stand-off, the crow finally gave up.

I found out yesterday that my blood pressure is high. Technically it’s on the high side of pre-hypertension, but for a person who’s always had pretty low readings, it was daunting.

It’s also totally hereditary and thus no surprise. My mom has been on high blood pressure medication for almost twenty years. She’s in otherwise excellent health and the medication works well for her.

So far as bad apples in the genetic gift basket, this one isn’t so bad.

Still I’m annoyed.

Oh, I have a list of things to do, to try to lower it naturally. I can increase my magnesium and Co-Q10 from what I’ve been taking. David has me adding Hawthorne berry extract. I’ve been working the weight and body fat down, but now I need to get serious about that last ten pounds. I might have to back off drinking wine, my very favorite thing.

*sigh*

Amusingly – or not – I’ve had the gas law, PV=nRT, on my list of blog topics for a while. That’s the formula that describes how pressure, volume and temperature interact. It’s a fascinating equation, really, because so much of our world, and our physiology, is governed by it.

Basically it says that Pressure multiplied by Volume equals Temperature. The n and the R describe molecular action, which is pretty stable for most purposes, so we can safely ignore it for most purposes. That makes the equation P*V=T. Or, to put it in a way that makes more intuitive sense by using that algebra you figured you’d never need, Pressure = T/V.

Thus, the hotter something is? The more pressure you have. Think of a pressure cooker. The more you raise the temperature, the more pressure inside the pot. Once you take off the lid, you increase the volume from a little pot to a great big room, and the pressure decreases.

There are more factors when you get into liquids, but the overall principle is the same. Body temperature is relatively steady, so blood pressure becomes largely a function of volume. As arteries narrow, for whatever reason – constriction due to stress or a wallpaper of fat – the volume available decreases and pressure goes up. That’s why diuretics, like my mom takes, work well. Reduce the volume of blood and there’s less pressure.

For whatever reasons, too, computer screen time is being linked to elevated blood pressure and there’s strong evidence for email apnea. So I’m resolving to decrease my screen time. And also to get up from my computer once an hour and breathe, walk, do the dishes or Tai Chi.

It’s not easy for me. I tend to sit for hours, concentrating on my work until the driving need to pee forces me out of my chair.

Yeah, I know – not healthy behavior.

But I’ll get better about it.

Time It Was

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Overheard from the crazy lady at the gym: “None of the clocks in here are right. They had to come in last week and reset them all – but that doesn’t mean anything.”

I should note that she said this before the time change.

Yes, due to popular demand, I’ve started writing down what the crazy lady at the gym says, in my little notebook where I keep track of weight lifted and distance run. On those occasions when I don’t have the solace of my earbuds, I sometimes catch what she’s saying to some other poor soul she has trapped in conversation.

Clocks and time have been on our minds this week. At least, for all of us in places who embrace the antique custom of Daylight Savings Time. For the record, we just went off DST and back to real, actual, dictated by the cycle of the earth’s rotation time. Amazing to me how many people don’t know which is which.

Yes, it does so matter! (This message brought to you by the People In Favor of REAL Time, aka PIFORT.)

People have been feeling the pain of the time change for the last several days, complaining of lost sleep, children awaking early, pets being a pain. It seems that we shouldn’t feel the impact of the autumn change (back to REAL time), because we get to sleep an hour longer in the morning. Well, yes, this would work great, except that we’re staying up later.

Instead of acknowledging that we feel sleepy and ready for bed earlier, we look at the clock. Hoo boy, no! we chortle. It’s *way* too early to go to bed. But our bodies know, regardless of what the clock says.

Changing our clocks reminds us, rather brutally, of our circadian rhythms. Otherwise we tend to ignore our animal selves in favor of our tech selves. We stay up late, with our lights and our TVs and our computers, working into the night and ignoring the sleepies.

In the morning, the alarm sounds and we force ourselves from bed, to meet our carefully detailed schedules.

It’s not really what Ben Franklin had in mind at all. We’re not taking advantage of shifting the pattern of our days to take advantage of the light so we can work in the fields more effectively or save on artificial lighting. And yet, our representatives in the House and Senate voted to expand DST as an “energy-saving” measure.

Yes, our PIFORT lobbyists are working on this.

The truth is, I think, that we’ve made the clock king. The digital readout, not how we feel, runs our lives. Sleep science has long shown that we spend more time in healing Slow Wave Sleep (SWS) in the early part of the night and more time in REM sleep (Rapid-Eye Movement or dreaming sleep) in the morning hours. You can really witness this if you sleep during the day at all. Sleeping in late into the morning produces lots of dreams. Afternoon naps are heavy and dreamless.

So, if we don’t go to bed until late at night, guess which kind of sleep we miss out on?

Sometimes I think it would be interesting to live a non-electronic life. I think people must have slept long hours in the dark of winter, which is what my body wants. Once black night fell and you fixed and ate supper, you wouldn’t sit around by the fire knitting or whittling or reading for all that long. Even if you woke at dawn to feed the chickens and milk the cows, you’d still be sleeping maybe ten hours a night?

I think about this sometimes, when I look out the windows and see the slanting glare of our electric lights spill into the night.

Then I go back to whatever brightly lit thing I was doing. I reset the clocks, but that doesn’t mean anything.

Babysiting Disasters

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I posted this photo to Facebook back in August, but a high school friend just commented on it and reminded me. This is Lisa and Denise, two of my best friends in high school. We were on a geology field trip in the mountains on a drizzly day. And, no, I have no idea why they look so dramatic and pensive.

Makes for a cool picture, though.

This has kind of been high school nostalgia week, anyway, what with celebrating Kev’s birthday and some odd 30 years of knowing each other. I know it’s old news to lots of people, but I think my cohort is just now realizing that we’re hitting our middle years. We don’t feel old, but it’s hard to deny those mid-40s numbers.

Interestingly, I don’t see a lot of us racing out to buy sports cars or cougar on nubile young people. I like to think it’s because we are so much wiser than our parents.

Also, those nubile young people? They don’t know Mikhail Barishnykov was a ballet dancer before he was on Sex and the City. And they don’t understand when you try to explain that he claimed political asylum. I’m sorry: you can’t base even meaningless sex on that.

Anyway, I mentioned yesterday that my high school years were largely spent babysitting. This was partly on my mind due to teen nostalgia, but also because of a blog post a friend put up last week about leaving her kid with a babysitter for the first time. She asked people how much they checked in, etc.

And it reminded me of this one babysitting disaster.

As, I mentioned yesterday, I babysat A LOT. I had a great reputation and new people often called me who’d been referred by other people. Well, this mom called me. She lived in the next subdivision over, had *just* moved in and had been invited to a neighborhood party. I’d been recommended by a neighbor and could I sit their three kids?

Easy peasy job. Older boy, younger girl and a toddler. Boxes everywhere. But mom was organized. She had the list of emergency numbers, including the party. (For you nubile young people, this was before cell phones. Yes, indeed. Sit wide-eyed at my knee and listen.) She gave me a list of allergies and rules and bed times. The kids were charming. Everything seemed just fine.

All went smoothly. We ate some dinner. We played games. Bedtime went with stories and without protest.

Until the middle girl started puking.

Lots of puking. And diarrhea.

She was sick all over her bed, so we had to clean her up, change her sheets and put on fresh jammies. Then the toddler got sick. Big bro was helping me and I’d had sick kids before, but this wasn’t looking good.

Now, I pretty much never called parents. I figured they’d were out for a fun evening and, really, very little ever occurred that couldn’t wait for them to deal with. I’d called a couple of times to ask questions or verify something, but never had I called parents to come home.

But I couldn’t find more fresh sheets, so I called the parents.

At the party.

A very LOUD party.

As with most parties, the person nearest the phone was, of course, not the person who lives in the house. But the guy was genial (happy drunk) and I explained that I was babysitting, my kids were sick and the parents should probably come home.

He says, okay, who are they?

I realized I had absolutely NO IDEA.

I’m sure when she called me, she’d said “This is Mrs. Such and So” or “Judy Such and So,” but it hadn’t stuck in my head. I looked around on the counters. They hadn’t started getting mail yet, so there were no clues. I couldn’t find a name anywhere.

I explain this to genial drunk guy, tell him the house address, and he offers to go around the party asking people. He’ll call me back. Um, no, because the phone number to the house isn’t on the phone. I don’t know what it is, either.

At this point, I felt like a complete bimbo. Not my usual competent self.

So, he sets the phone down and heads off. I listen to the party banter while my three miserable charges huddle in blankets on the couch. Eventually someone, probably wondering why the phone is off the hook, hangs it up.

By then it was getting late, so I hoped the parents would be home soon, anyway.

Then – Hallelujah! – the front door lock clicks and in they come!

“Oh!” I exclaim, “I’m so glad you got the message.”

They look puzzled. “What message? Our neighbor’s sitter called and said the kids were sick, so we decided we’d just come home, too.”

No, I say, that was me. I wonder if I got the address wrong, too. And I confess that I didn’t remember what their names were.

They were so nice to me and, yes, I babysat for them many times after that. I also asked new families to write down names for me and put them by the phone, just in case.

It turns out, bizarrely enough, that the neighbors’ kids *were* sick also and that sitter had called, just around the same time I did. It was a mini-flu epidemic and a bunch of kids got sick. My poor little girl ended up in the hospital for a few days, to replenish her fluids.

Elizabeth’s question reminded me of this story and I wanted to tell it to her. But, 1) it’s too long for comments and 2) I didn’t want to freak her out.

Of course, the advent of cell phones and texting has really changed this.

As long as the genial drunken parents pull their phone out of their pockets once in a while, just in case.

Diapers and Destiny

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This weekend I went shopping for diapers.

Along the way, I stopped into the Borders and found Enemy Within cozied up with the Iron Duke. In broad daylight, even.

I started reading Enemy Within, too, and *love* it. No, I hadn’t read it before. I read a draft of Marcella’s second book and my comments resulted in her gutting it, rewriting and missing her deadline by, oh, a couple months. She says I shouldn’t feel guilty.

Now I don’t because if Enemy Within is what she’s capable of producing, then I’m glad I held her to a high standard. I realize I haven’t read any classic sci fi in a while. I know I’ve never read a post where the main character has been imprisoned and tortured by insectoid aliens. The latent psychological trauma is gritty, moving and incredibly well done. Romance-wise, I’m all about the hero getting through to trauma-girl where no one else can.

(Currently plotting time away from work today to read more, more, more!)

Anyway – I went shopping for diapers for little Aerro. I mention this here because everyone seems to forget I have grandchildren. I bought a few cute things, too, but for a tiny baby she has lots of stuff already. My stepdaughter and son-in-law are doing cloth diapers this time around and they do need more of those. Lauren told us the brand they planned to use, which I ought to be able to buy in Target.

So, I went to Target, I went to the cute baby stuff section. Nope. Several burgeoning couples were there with the baby-registry scanners having a grand old time, but no sign of diapers anywhere. I went wandering forlornly, expanding my circles outward through the various stages of clothing for kids, teens, adults, fat adults, cars. Finally a worker in the automotive section spotted me for what I was, completely at a loss. I hesitated to say I was looking for diapers – of course, he immediately laughed at me. I wanted to explain that I figured they didn’t keep diapers in automotive (being clever like that) but that I was on my way to somewhere else where they might more logically keep it.

The baby section, right? No no no.

He says “see this big wall right here?” Yes, even I can spot that big wall. “Go to the opposite wall on the other side of the store.”

Right. Paper towels, cotton balls, Q-Tips, tampons, depends and…diapers! Organization by function. All absorbent materials must be shelved together.

Then they didn’t have the kind Lauren said. So, I’m the woman on her cell phone getting the man at home to look them up. Turns out Target sells them in Colorado, but not New Mexico. Not in Wyoming, either, David discovered. Why? It’s a mystery. Emptier landfills in Wyoming and New Mexico, perhaps.

So, we’ll order online. I bounced off to the bookstore and to get a pedicure like the light-hearted non-diaper buyer I normally am.

I’m not quite sure at what point in my life I became the non-maternal type. When I was younger, I babysat all the time. I didn’t have much social life, so I babysat pretty much every weekend and on weeknights, too. I cared for newborns, even, which was the big money in those days. I could change any diaper in a flash.

A friend of mine has a daughter who just started her sophomore year at a prestigious Ivy League college. She’s always been a startlingly intelligent and talented girl. However, she has never had a job. Last summer, strongly encourage by her parents to start getting a feel for the earning money thing, she babysat for a friend’s baby. When the baby’s mother returned home, she saw a Google page up for “how to diaper a baby.”

I love this story.

But I was not that girl. I always had the idea, as most girls do, I think, that I’d have babies someday. Somewhere in the sweep of graduate school, acquiring stepchildren, and trying on careers, I never got really excited about having babies. Once, when I was 36, a woman I knew asked me if I’d regretted never having children. I replied that I didn’t know I’d never had them yet.

Yeah, it was a bitchy thing for her to say.

I did think, though, for a very long time, that I might wake up one day and have the overwhelming urge to have a baby. That clock that women talk about would suddenly tick-tock in my head and I wouldn’t be able to hear anything else until I had a baby in my belly.

Didn’t happen.

Instead I became completely obsessed with writing and becoming one of the great writers of my generation. Or possibly just supporting myself as a writer. Both of which have the added bonus of never requiring diaper-shopping.

People talk about being childless-by-choice. I’m not that. I helped raise Mike and Lauren from the time they were five and seven years old. And I never really decided not to have children of my own. Instead, I never decided to have babies. Kind of like I never decided to move to Thailand. It’s just that, most people never decide to move to Thailand.

It could be pointed out that a lot of people don’t necessarily decide to have babies either, but fall into parenthood, as it were.

I suppose I’m just on the opposite wall from everyone else. On the other side of the store, wondering why anyone would dress up their car in zebra print.

Exercise to Writing to Work

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Today we have the long-awaited (at least since Wednesday) expose on how Jeffe changes outfits multiple times a day.

No, really.

(I can’t believe you guys are interested in this. Or that I’m posting pictures to the internet of me looking scuzzy. But look, here I am.)

In the interests of science, and glasnost, I’m showing you my actual “look” for the various times of day. Hang on, phone is ringing….

Vogue, again. When will they take no for an answer???

Okay, so, KAK asked about PJs. Here’s me at 6 in the morning. Please cut me generous slack. This is the black wintertime robe. There are no actual PJs. We live in a natural world and, hey, I’m a natural girl.


I change into my exercise clothes. There’s a red jog bra under the pink sweat shirt. I would have shown you, but I figured you all don’t need to see my astonishing toned abs. The picture might make you spit up your coffee or something and that’s no way to end the week.

This pic is post-workout. The sky is barely lighter at this point. Looking very much forward to the end of Daylight Savings Time on Sunday!

Then we get to the best part: the writing clothes. This is what I’m wearing as I type. So, see, when I first started writing, back in the day, I really didn’t have a dedicated writing desk and I wasn’t good at sitting down to write on a regular schedule. I created rituals to ease myself into the process. I wore my favorite shleppy dress, this blue jersey knit that I loved. I loved it for years. Um, until it literally fell to pieces. Finally I wondered aloud if I should throw it away.

“Yes,” said David.

“But – ” I whimpered.

“It has holes in it.” He replied.

“But it’s been my writing dress for years!” I cried.

“The writing comes from you, not a dress.” He told me.

I had to concede the point. The dress went to the great beyond, a farm maybe, where it’s playing with other happy outfits and Velveteen rabbits. So now I wear the fab sweatshirt my stepsister Hope picked out for me. If you can’t read it, it says:

Careful, or you’ll end up in my novel.

Note that this outfit includes comfy slippers for feet and a headband to keep the hair out of my eyes as I furiously type. It helps me to stay in kind of a dreamy, sleepy mode to write, to maximize that subconscious flow.

Once I get my words in, it’s off to the shower for me. I do hair and makeup, put on some workier-type clothes. If I think no one is likely to see me all day, I usually wear something like this. It was tempting to put on one of my snazzier outfits for this photoshoot, but that would violate the honest spirit of this expose.

If I have meetings or will see people, I dress up more. If you’ve seen me at conferences, that’s the general spirit.

So – more than you ever wanted to know about me?

Yeah. That’s what I figured.

La Kev

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Okay, I know that I promised the whole exercise clothes to writing clothes to work clothes expose today, but it occurred to me that I need pics of each stage. So I’ll do it tomorrow.

That seems suitably frivolous for a Friday anyway.

Instead, today I think I’ll do a little ode. An essay of mine once appeared in a literary magazine dedicated to odes, which I always thought was kind of a cool idea. While the first definition of ode is “a poem written to be sung,” the modern use has it as a “lyric, rhymed or unrhymed, addressed to some person or thing and characterized by lofty feeling and elaborate form.”

Since this is about my friend, Kev, maybe that’s not what I mean at all.

Hee hee hee.

Today is Kev’s birthday and it’s made me reflective. We’ve know each other now since I was 15 and dropped as a bewildered sophomore into trigonometry class with a bunch of juniors. Kev helped me with problem sets and charmed me with his charisma and humor. I fell in love with his soaring tenor in our high school stage productions as much as his sweet brown eyes.

Oh yeah, I pined after him.

He flirted with me. Okay, he flirted with pretty much ALL the girls. But the other ones he dated. I crushed on him until spring of my junior year, when I finally broke down and left a love letter on the windshield of his car – a Baha VW Bug he’d dubbed the Baha Humbug – inviting him to the Sadie Hawkins dance.

What can I say? I’m a traditionalist.

Maybe I had a way with words even then, because he bit and we started a love affair that lasted two years. It was consuming and wonderful and perfect and everything first love should be. Between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I broke up with him. I still remember the pain of that, how I’d asked him to love me, then asked him to stop.

The thing is, we still love each other. That’s the best part.

I don’t regret my choice, because we’ve both found really wonderful life partners and our lives have moved in very different directions. And yet, after all this time, we’re still friends. We talk on Yahoo IM and know each other’s old jokes. We trade music and he keeps me up to date on the musical theater scene. There’s a deep-running affection between us. Sometimes I think his is more for the girl I was, but he also keeps a library shelf of everything I’ve ever published. He was among the first to encourage me to write, which was a gift beyond compare.

So, Happy Birthday Kevin! It will be interesting to see what the next 30 years brings.

P.S. If I forget who you are, will you remind me?