#SaturdayScenes No. 5: Kodiak, Alaska

I've moved around a fair bit in my life.  I'm forty-three now, and, though I spent most of my childhood in a single location, I have now lived in fourteen places. They're clustered in certain parts of the world, but there's a fair spread.

map made at https://www.zeemaps.com/

I got to thinking about all these places in terms of scenes and settings. Right now, as I face moving into summer in North Carolina (I don't like heat so very much . .. I wilt), I'm nostalgic for Kodiak, Alaska and its lovely Pacific Northwest rain and fog.  So, for my #SaturdayScenes this week, please enjoy this poem, written by a much younger me, many miles ago.

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A Clear Day in Kodiak, Alaska

On a day such as today
when the fog has lifted at last,
when a collective dream
of green mountains
materializes in our midst,
and I can see that the sky
had been blue all this time,
I fear I have dreamed this place.
I test each step for sureness,
digging my toes under warm black sand,
and walk slowly, keeping
my feet anchored, lest the sky
drag me into its undertow.
Without the integument of clouds,
the exposed horizon makes these mountains
a mirage brought on
by miles and miles of water
with an unquenchable thirst for land.

http://www.alaskatravel.com/photos/fort-abercrombie.jpg

Who's to Blame?

Pick a bad thing that happened. Anything.

It could be something little, like falling in the supermarket and bashing your elbow. Or something big like the Elliot Rodger shooting.

Why is it that the question after any bad thing is always: Whose fault is this?

Is it society? parents? the media? movies? mental illness? poverty? nutrition? aliens? gamma radiation?

http://www.mau.com/Portals/23906/images/shutterstock_71759158.jpg

The finger-pointing and banner waving commences, then dies down. Until the next bad thing. Then it begins again. It gets really ugly.  It turns perfectly good and reasonable people into trolls. And if people were already trolls? Well, they get fed and become fatter, meaner, uglier trolls.

And I have to fight against my own urge to simply shut down and hide from the vitriol.

That's what a lot of us do. We disengage. We give in to the "almighty shrug" (an awesome phrase I read in this article about intersectionality), and thereby free ourselves of responsibility. There's nothing I can do, therefore I will do nothing.  Like Ned Flanders's Mom once said in a very good episode of the Simpsons, "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"

http://deadon.wordpress.com/2007/03/27/the-20-most-cromulent-simpsons-episodes-of-all-time-19/

I get it.

I'm tired, too. But, even if we somehow made it through the chicken-and-egg, house-that-Jack-built world of argument to actually find someone or thing that was definitively to blame, how would that help? How would that keep any particular bad thing from happening again?

Engagement is the only thing that will make a difference. You have to try something.

Maybe if we could all let go of ego just enough to say, "Hey, maybe this isn't about me." If we just stopped worrying about covering our own behinds and worried about leaving a situation better than we found it. 

So, I fall in the grocery store. Do I walk away quietly cursing? Do I sue the store? Or do I tell someone about the puddle and help make sure it gets mopped up so no one else falls? The choice is up to you.

Burnout

“The flame that burns Twice as bright burns half as long.”

― Lao Tzu, Te Tao Ching

from: http://coachdawnwrites.com/wp-content/
uploads/2012/01/grumpy-dwarf.jpg

It's that time of year again. The merry merry mouth of May. The world is merry and bright and in love, and I'm the grumpy dwarf in Snow White's house. 

I'm tired. Epicly tired. Body-tired, soul-tired, brain-tired. Crazy tired. Stupid tired. 

Most jobs have a cyclical nature, I've observed. A busy season, a down season. My sister is an accountant, and when she was working for a CPA, tax season tried to kill her every year. My husband's work ebbs and flows according to what projects are on his plate in any given week. The difference in both of these cases, is that there is ebb as well as flow. 

Teaching doesn't have an ebb. Starting at the end of August and straight through to the middle of June, teachers are on. Every day is high pressure. We get to our "vacation" times and collapse gasping like fish who have been pulled from the water and left on the bank. 

This year was especially rough as a series of snow days removed all teacher work days from the calendar (teacher work days are days when teachers are paid to be at school working on the things that you can't do while supervising students: grading papers, analyzing assessment data, making lesson plans, gathering materials, cleaning your classroom, collaborating with your colleagues, etc.).  The tasks that I do on those days were not removed, however. I just had to find non-paid time to do them in. 

Over the years, I've gotten more and more efficient, capable of doing more in a sixty minute prep period than some manage across an entire workday. Unfortunately, this doesn't catch me a break. It doesn't mean that I suddenly have time to have tea with a colleague or take an actual lunch break during which I don't work. It just means that I bring less of my work home into the hours of the day the state is not paying me for. 

I know, I know. I get summer, right? That depends on what you mean by "get" and "summer." Non school days amount to ten weeks for students this summer in my school district. June 16-August 25. Teachers on the other hand finish work on June 25 and start again on August 18. Myself, I also work six extra days this summer on various kinds of planning and materials development sessions. So, about six weeks. For many teachers, it's even less. 

It's just barely enough to recover from the burnout factor enough to feel like you might be willing to try that again. If you have to work a summer job to make finances meet (as many of us do), or you are trying to fit some classes into your schedule so you can move up the salary schedule from "miserable pittance" to "mere pittance", then you don't benefit from the recuperative effects of the time. 

So, it's the time of year to fight your own burnout at school. 

For me, that means upping my caffeine consumption, making sure I get at least three hours of time outdoors in the sun each week, and reading escapist literature in my downtime (Spiderman Noir was excellent). So, pass the coffee and the comics, we've got a month yet to go!

#Saturday Scenes No. 4

I love #SaturdayScenes ! +John Ward , plusser extraordinaire had this brain child, and I'm a happy participant.

The idea is that writers share a piece of their writing with you each Saturday. You can check them out en masse, by using the hashtag: #SaturdayScenes

This is the fourth week. If you want to see what I did on other weeks, you can find those posts here, here, and here.

This week I have the opening chapter of my superhero novel for you. Meet Linda Álvarez, one of the main characters in Going Through the Change (not yet published), a menopausal superhero novel.
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CHAPTER ONE

Things Get Hairy for Linda

Linda Alvarez stood in front of the mirror, horrified. She’d just been to the beauty salon yesterday, but all those weird hairs were back, like they’d never been tweezed and waxed away. She had eyebrows like Frida Kahlo Por Díos, and practically five o’clock shadow. Thank God David had already left for work. She’d have time to take care of it before he got home.

David had been her rock through all this menopause garbage. He’d fetched blankets and brought her ice as she changed temperature four and five times an evening. He hadn’t complained about the extra money she was spending at the beauty shop or commented on the way her body seemed to be shifting around her, reshaping into something else entirely. Something much thicker around the middle than she had ever been before, Linda thought ruefully. She was lucky to have him, she knew.

Come to think of it, it wasn’t just the hair today. She looked really different. There was something different about her jawline and her favorite pink tee shirt hung oddly on her, like it was too tight in the shoulders all of a sudden and didn’t quite reach her waist. Had it shrunk in the wash? She hadn’t changed anything about the way she’d been washing it.

She grabbed the new bar of soap she’d picked up at the Farmer’s Market last weekend. She’d bought it from the daughter of her old neighbor. Her name was Cindy Loo, or maybe Lou. Something like that. She was Asian, so Linda wasn’t sure how her last name might be spelled.

Ms. Lou had moved into the old house after her mother died. Linda had been meaning to bring her a welcome package of some sort, but Cindy kept strange hours and Linda had not yet caught her at home.

Despite living down the street from the older Mrs. Lou all these years, and spending a fair amount of time visiting the old lady, Linda had only rarely seen the daughter. She had been using Cindy’s teas and lotions for years, though. Cindy’s mother had kept a booth for her in the local market and would hawk her daughter’s products, and fill the buyer’s ear with praise of her brilliant child.

Cindy worked the booth herself whenever she was in town. Linda wasn’t sure if she liked the younger Ms. Lou. She had a gruffness to her and didn’t seem to understand how to talk to customers. But she did like the things the woman made. Whether it was psychosomatic or not, those products worked. Her cramps went away, her blemishes cleared up, her mood lightened. Ms. Lou was a genius.

The new soap was called “Nu Yu.” It had a picture of a woman drawn in lines, out of calligraphy, on the wrapper. The woman’s legs were impossibly long and her stride was the length of the wrapper. Ms. Lou had said it would let the inner person shine through. Linda assumed that was just a New Age spin to sell to the hippies who came to the market, a play on the idea of inner beauty, something like that.

Whatever. Even if it had a silly name, the soap was just as wonderful as all of Ms. Lou’s other products. It smelled marvelous and made Linda’s skin tingle. She wondered what was in it that made her feel so alive when she used it. She unwrapped the new bar and reached into the now-steaming shower to set it in the soap dish atop the little remnant of the previous bar.

Linda peeled off her clothes with some difficulty. They seemed to cling to her tightly. She dropped the poor maligned pink shirt on the floor and stepped into the shower. She’d start by getting good and clean and exfoliated, then she’d figure out what to do about her crazy hormone hairs.

Her grandmother had suffered from the same problem, she knew. When she got too old to take care of it herself, Linda used to come by the assisted living place and wax her upper lip on Saturdays, so she would look her best for church on Sundays. Linda tried to remember how old her Abuelita had been when she started having the mustache problem, but she couldn’t remember. Probably Abuelita had suffered with it for a long time, and Linda only found out about it when she needed help to take care of it. Maybe she had only been forty-eight, too. Luckily, there were products for that.

Linda rolled her neck and let the warm water wash over her, grateful for the warmth and the white noise effect of the water beating against the tiled walls. It was easy to let her worries fade when she was in the shower. She stretched out her arms above her head and ran the new bar of soap over her arms and into the armpits—hairy again of course. Really hairy! Caracoles! She was sure she had shaved just yesterday.

She grabbed onto the ledge the tile wall made at the top for balance, surprised to find out she could reach it easily and grabbed the pink Daisy razor out of the little hanging basket just outside the tub area. If she was going to keep growing hair this quickly, maybe she’d need to check into some electrolysis or something. The peluquería was good with waxes and such, but she was going to need a more permanent solution. When she stood again, after shaving her legs, she knocked her head into the shower spigot. Weird. Maybe David had left it set lower than usual?

A few quick strokes and her pits felt smooth again. Linda rinsed out the razor, grimacing at the amount of dark hair that swirled around the drain between her feet. Even her feet looked strange to her today, more spread out. She thought that only happened in pregnancy. Or maybe it was time to see the eye doctor. She might have to upgrade from her simple readers to bifocals or something.

Turning her back against the warm stream of water, Linda ran the bar across her upper chest and shoulders. It felt so smooth and hard. So did her torso. Maybe her time on the treadmill was paying off. When she ran her hand up around her breasts, she gasped a little. She’d never been a busty woman, but her breasts seemed to have all but disappeared. Surely this wasn’t more cambio de vida. She’d never heard of anyone losing their breasts because of menopause. Maybe she should call the doctor and see if she could be seen this afternoon.

More tense now, Linda continued her washing. At least the soap felt good and moisturizing. It made nice creamy suds in her hands. There wasn’t any jiggle across her belly when she ran her soapy hand across it. Her belly hadn’t felt tight like that in a good fifteen years, not since the last baby, the one that had come by emergency C-section.

Then, Linda dipped her hands lower, to clean between her legs. Her eyes flew open. Something was definitely not right. It felt—it was just like—Linda looked down and screamed. There, resting against her thigh was, unmistakably, a penis.

Reading Like a Writer: Orphan Train

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline is a good book. I really enjoyed reading it.  I want to say that up front because I'm going to pick on it for some problems it has. It's not a perfect book in my opinion, but it is a book I learned from reading. I'm trying to "read like a writer" this year . .. taking time to analyze why books work or don't work for me as a reader, to figure out exactly what the writer did that I can emulate or improve on.

This book was recommended to me by a writing group friend and I read it in paperback with my neighborhood reading group. It's historical fiction, a perfect choice for me right now as I am writing a historical fiction novel myself, parts of which are set in this same time period.

Historical fiction is a tricky beast, requiring that the writer is really well informed about the history involved and uses that information to create a believable narrative, but doesn't fall into just writing a treatise about the historical moment. When it's done well, you don't even realize how much you are learning about life in that era and circumstances. It feels natural.

The historical parts of Orphan Train are really well done. Right from the beginning, when we meet Niamh/Dorothy/Vivian (the main character is known by three different names at different phases of her life--I'll call her Niamh here since that's the name her mother gave her), Kline blends information about her life and the setting with narrative that draws you to the character emotionally.

"Maisie was eighteen months old, but her weight was like a bundle of rags. Only a few weeks after she was born, Mam came down with a fever and could no longer feed her, so we made do with warm sweetened water, slow-cooked oats, milk when we could afford it. All of us were thin. Food was scarce; days went by when we had little more than rubbery potatoes in weak broth. Mam wasn't much of a cook even in the best of health, and some days she didn't bother to try. More than once, until I learned to cook, we ate potatoes raw from the bin."

This is one jam-packed paragraph, giving you the details of the kind of poverty this family was living in (Food was scarce), the nature of the mother's problems (weakened by illness, probably depressed, too), the kind of child the main character is (responsible, old beyond her years), even the implication that they are Irish immigrants (Maisie, Mam).  The details are given emotional impact by being specific to the characters in the story. It's a common enough story: children in poverty doing the best they can. But Kline makes it specific, gives you someone to root for and care about right away. Much more effective than telling us about how many people were similarly suffering.

The fact that the historical parts of the narrative were so well done might have something to do with why I didn't enjoy the contemporary setting as much. Mollie is an interesting enough character, but the two story lines felt largely unconnected, even after the teenager and the now-elderly Niamh were sharing space on a single page. The parallels between their lives were obvious: both orphaned, raised by strangers, hated by some for their ethnicity, strong-minded, intelligent.

Every time Mollie came back into the book, though, I felt like I'd been pulled out of the narrative and handed a side story with little connection. The novel actually begins with two Molly chapters, where we meet the girl and see how she got in trouble. Molly gets assigned community service for trying to steal a dog-eared copy of Jane Eyre from the library.

I get that the author needed Mollie to be in trouble, since community service is what brings her into contact with the now-elderly Niamh. I also understand that she didn't want the trouble to be too heinous, nothing that would make us as readers distrust her good heart. Still, I found it implausible that Molly would be assigned community service for the crime as described. More than likely, she would have been forced to return the book and been banned from the library.

That point aside, Molly arrives and meets her new employer. At the end of the scene, Vivian points out that they are both orphaned and says, "Now--when do you want to begin?" Presumably she's talking about the work of sorting her attic stuff, but then the next chapter flashes to 1929.

It's six more chapters before we see Molly again, thirty-two pages that cover Niamh's journey from losing her family to her first placement in a foster home. Honestly, when I read the line:

"Sometime in the second week it becomes clear to Molly that 'cleaning out the attic' means taking things out, fretting over them for a minutes, and putting them back where they were, in a slightly neater stack." 

I went: Molly? Who the heck is Molly? I flipped back through the pages and then remembered the frame from the beginning. Once I remembered the frame, I tried to figure out how much of this story Molly was actually hearing versus how much was supposed to be the older woman's memory. I couldn't tell. Niamh's chapters don't feel like they are being told to someone; they feel like time travel.

That pattern continued. A couple of brief chapters of Molly, followed by a longer slice of the other woman's life. Each time, I felt jarred out of the true narrative of the historical story.

So, I wondering about the author's reasons for this way of storytelling. Was the intention to break up the horror of Niamh's life by telling us about something else for a little while? Giving us a break, like a comedy moment in the middle of a hard drama? Was it about highlighting parallels and contrasts between Niamh's and Molly's lives? Either of those sound viable, so why didn't they work for me as a reader? I don't know! Anyone have a theory?

My current theory is that I am jarred by the change in narrative voice. When Niamh is telling her own story, she always seems strong and brave and true. No matter what horrible things are happening around her, I feel her strength. When she's on the page in Molly's point of view, she's a shell of herself. Molly does see her as strong and admirable, but in the same way that she sees dead historical figures as strong and admirable, like whatever she's good for has already happened. That may be accurate to a young person's point of view, but I don't feel their personal connection in the way it seems like I should.

Maybe it's just me, though. I know other readers haven't felt that way.

So, what have I learned?

• Balancing more than one POV is tricky
• Historical fiction is becoming a favorite genre of mine (both to read and write)
• I'm not entirely happy about that second one, because research takes a lot of time

#SaturdayScenes No.3

It's the new sensation that's sweeping the nation: #Saturday Scenes !

Each Saturday, writers you know (or should know!) are posting scenes from their various works for your free enjoyment. Kudos to +John Ward for the idea and impetus. You can find us all on Google+ under the hastag #SaturdayScenes Some of us are also posting on Facebook and Twitter.

The first week I shared a scene from Cold Spring, a historical fiction novel I'm writing, set in the early twentieth century.

Last week, I presented a scene from my other WIP an untitled superhero novel.

This week, I'm showing you a scene from His Other Mother, a women's fiction novel I'm shopping around for publication right now. The main character, Sherry Morgan, struggles with infertility and schizophrenia. This chapter is the psychotic episode that begins her active phase: The Kidnapping. Hope you enjoy it!

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Chapter Three
Sherry: Claiming Alex

Sherry had been watching them for a few minutes now. The baby had to be about a month old. He was all wide blue eyes and chubby cheeks, riding in his car seat in his mother's grocery cart, not yet big enough to sit up in the built-in seat. Whenever his mother came into view, his face relaxed, and every time she stepped out of view, picking up some broccoli, squeezing an orange, his brow furrowed and he shook his little arms and legs in silent distress. Oh, how he loved her.

And she didn't even see it, that mother. Didn't know her luck. Didn't stop to coo over her sweet one or let him smell the oranges. She just piled groceries into her cart silently.

Sherry followed them throughout the whole store, aisle by aisle, picking things off the shelves that she didn't even want or need. From time to time the baby would meet her eye. It felt like the world stopped--no, like it contracted, everything else was gone except the connection between them. Sherry found herself hating the mother, who could so casually push this little miracle around the store and not even notice him. If that were her baby, she would talk to him as she shopped, showing him the things she chose, letting him touch them. She would pause to kiss his toes. Or even better, she would carry him against her body, swaddled in a patterned cloth sling. She would be able to feel the warmth of his body against hers, and smell his milk-sweet breath every time she glanced downward.

She followed them through the checkout, hardly noticing the clerk who rang up her groceries in the lane next to theirs, and then followed them out to their car. It turned out she had parked just across from them. They had a beat-up green Honda, with a dented door on one side. It contrasted poorly with Sherry's brand new VW bug, sunshine yellow, freshly washed and spotless. Sherry loaded her groceries and stood by her car, pretending to text someone on her cell phone to make it seem less strange that she was just standing there in the middle of the parking lot.

The mother had left the baby in the grocery cart while she loaded up her trunk, still silently. Then she placed him in the car, gave him her keys to play with and walked away to return her grocery cart, leaving the door open. Sherry was watching the baby through the open door, his little brow furrowed and his agitation beginning to shake his car seat. She could see the large key ring catching the light as he shook it. Watching the baby, she didn't see the accident. But she looked when she heard the metallic crunch and saw the grocery cart skid before falling clattering to the pavement.

The mother was on the ground, the grocery cart she had been pushing dented and thrown some distance from her. A young man was yelling for help. People were running to the woman from all around the parking lot. Suddenly there were so many people. Where did they come from?

Without really thinking, Sherry went to the Honda. She reached in to the baby, offering one finger. He grabbed it. In that one moment, she made her decision. She took the keys from the baby's hand and jingled them at him, smiling. She put one finger to his impossibly soft lips and said, "Hush now, sweet boy. Mama's here." She pressed the release button between his legs—he had the less expensive version of the car seat Sherry had bought for her sister-in-law at her shower last month—and lifted the seat, baby and all, letting him rock gently and cooing to him as she carried him to her car and buckled him in. She even thought to grab the diaper bag.

The baby fussed in her back seat and she twisted around awkwardly to stroke his cheek around his backward-facing car seat. “It's okay, Alex,” she said softly, “we'll go home now.” She pulled out of her parking place carefully, driving around the back of the store to avoid all the commotion in front.

The Joy of Unselfish Selfishness

I'm a mom and a teacher and a wife, three roles that can make it difficult to find "me time." I was also raised with a particularly strong work ethic, one that makes it hard for me to relax sometimes. I feel like you have to earn the right to play by checking off everything on the list. And we know how realistic that is when it's a mom's list.  Most of the stuff on it is cyclical and cannot ever actually be completed. So, if the list is never all checked off, then I never get to that clean space where I feel like I can play.

It can be really difficult to get to the selfish moment you've promised yourself sometimes.

But sometimes the universe lines up right. You do something because it's really what you want to do:  make a cake, play a game, see a film, take a walk.  You invite someone to do it with you, because they are really the person you want to do that with. And, afterwards, your someone thanks you . . . like you've given them a gift in making them do what you wanted to do.  Selfishness was a virtue.

It makes me wonder. There's a theory that happiness is what makes a person beautiful. So, if I am taking care of me and making myself happy, then that makes me inherently more attractive to others. In that sense, a bit of selfishness is arguably good.

In my above scenario, the friend I invited feels the magnetism of my happiness in what I've selected for us to do, and that's why she enjoys it, apart from any inherent enjoyment of the activity itself.

It makes me feel like I should be selfish more often.

No, don't get me wrong, I'm no Ayn Rand, thinking that if we all just watch out for ourselves that somehow it will all work out. In fact, I'm a big believer in the Greater Good and our collective obligation to see to it. I also know that there are those in this world who would take advantage of those of us who feel that way. In fact, the entire teaching profession relies on it. Because teachers are motivated by a desire to help, they put up with things that, in other professions, would lead to mass walk outs.

Takers (whether they are individuals or systems) rely on givers continuing to give.  So, how do us givers protect ourselves without changing who we are? It seems as if a person moves into thinking that selfishness is good, the pendulum swings way to one side, and she becomes self-serving and opportunistic, losing sight completely of her role in any kind of Big Picture.

I don't think we have to stop giving. But, I do think we have to learn to look at the world a little more skeptically, to ask ourselves why we are being asked to do something. Is it because we are the person best suited to the job? Because we have talent or skill or training that others don't and it would be easier for us to accomplish the task? Or is it just that we are giving by nature, and a taker has noticed that we will do it for them?

It's a weird mind game I play with myself, protecting me from me. Not letting me give away every moment of the day, but keeping some for myself for whatever use I want. Because I love my children and my students, and children are self-centered until they learn a sense of perspective, I can give too much of myself.

If I do that too often, there's a toll on my spirit. I get cranky, irritable, easy to upset. That's no good for anyone.

Like everything, it's about balance. Balancing selfishness that allows you to rejuvenate and replenish yourself, with selflessness that allows you to give to others and make a meaningful life. I'm not there yet, but I think I'm starting to understand. Taking care of me is taking care of the people I love, too, being the best me I can be for them. If I'm being selfish because of my love for others, then arguably, that's unselfish, too. And that, my friends, is joy.