This one will date me. Remember Idlewild? Remember when air travel was exotic? I can still visually recall my first trip in an airplane, we were heading for my sister's graduation in Minnesota. It was a prop jet. The sensation of weightlessness as we lifted off was exhilarating. I even enjoyed the turbulence. Those were the days . . .
Amelia was correct in predicting that flying would become routine. It has, much to my chagrin. But by setting my book in 1980 I give Amelia a chance to find a little fading glamor. She wants to get back into the cockpit, but to do so means catching up with forty plus years of aeronautic innovation. So she heads for the local airports; she haunts (okay I know this is too apt a verb) JFK, LaGuardia and Newark. She befriends crews as they get their breakfast, she chats them up and knows what questions to pose, but really she lets people talk and they talk about what they do and what they love. She's an excellent listener.
I used to find airports romantic. Waiting for a flight out, I'd find a spot where I could watch the planes as they took off. The most powerful dreams I ever had were flying dreams, in those I didn't need a plane. I just lifted off and soared.
I haven't had that dream in more years than I care to think about. But I feel that sensation sometimes, writing. That pure energy, that sense of losing myself. You lose yourself to find yourself, or so they say. I really hope it's true and now, back to Amelia and her search for a pilot's license . . .
Monday, January 11, 2010
Saturday, January 9, 2010
dying to meet you . . . and other sayings
When I was much younger I used to listen to a recording my parents had of Dylan Thomas reading his poetry. My favorite was "Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
It will be five years this January 22nd since my father's death.
Now my mother is fading, her memory is shot. She is frail and weak. I will visit her today, having been away for two weeks. I dread seeing her. She's been transformed from this stolid, intense and powerful being to a terrified, anxious wreck. I miss the mother I lost, the one I fought hard to forge a relationship with, the one I spoke with every day by phone, the one who actually supported my writing career. The one who loved me for who I am, not who she hoped I would be. That woman is gone.
I think of how Muriel said that Amelia wouldn't have wanted to live too long, that she would have hated the changes time wrought. Some seem to take this as a reference to Amelia's vanity,but I believe it's not that simple. We age and we watch ourselves diminish incrementally, we lose those we love and lose pieces of what made us love ourselves. It's a vicious journey. Muriel outlived her mother, father, sister, husband and son. Who would want to face that much loss?
In my novel I want her losses to matter, to mean something more, I want to give Muriel what I am unable to give my mother, a reason to hope.
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
It will be five years this January 22nd since my father's death.
Now my mother is fading, her memory is shot. She is frail and weak. I will visit her today, having been away for two weeks. I dread seeing her. She's been transformed from this stolid, intense and powerful being to a terrified, anxious wreck. I miss the mother I lost, the one I fought hard to forge a relationship with, the one I spoke with every day by phone, the one who actually supported my writing career. The one who loved me for who I am, not who she hoped I would be. That woman is gone.
I think of how Muriel said that Amelia wouldn't have wanted to live too long, that she would have hated the changes time wrought. Some seem to take this as a reference to Amelia's vanity,but I believe it's not that simple. We age and we watch ourselves diminish incrementally, we lose those we love and lose pieces of what made us love ourselves. It's a vicious journey. Muriel outlived her mother, father, sister, husband and son. Who would want to face that much loss?
In my novel I want her losses to matter, to mean something more, I want to give Muriel what I am unable to give my mother, a reason to hope.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
what money does and bravery
My father was blacklisted, but before that he'd worked at Justice as an attorney. My mother built a practice in D.C. as an OBGYN. She delivered babies and dealt with infertility and was amazing and beloved. Their life began in Washington, it was full of hope, and hope was all around then. FDR was president. They began in the throes of a depression but lived to see it ease; his policies were close enough to the socialism they believed in to comfort them. And of course war came, their relatives either fled or were murdered, they joined anti-fascist movements, they committed themselves to making a better world. And their own world grew exponentially. I look at photos of them and am amazed at the evident happiness. They had managed despite all obstacles; my mother had a booming practice and interesting patients, my father was a successful attorney, then Truman became president and the witch hunts began. He lost his job. He lost his self respect. My mother supported them. When he was finally hired, it meant leaving all they'd built to move back to New York City. For my father it was a new beginning, for my mother a new struggle. She endured, but never had the same affection for her work. She retired early and never complained about giving her career up, but I saw the effect it had on her. My siblings were out of the house, but I was there and I knew a very different woman from the one they grew up with. She was anxious, angry and chronically insecure. When I was very young I thought my mother was incredible, I wanted to be just like her. But as I grew older, I found her very different. It made me realize that giving up one's identity is a huge sacrifice.
Which brings me to Amelia and Muriel. They grew up in a household where money and lack of work became a huge issue. Their father moved from job to job, his alcoholism fueling his descent. Her mother's discontent was palpable, she left him once, then came back for a while and finally divorced him. Amelia and Muriel made their own way, with little money to back them. In Muriel's case I have a feeling this fueled a desire for stability, while in Amelia's . . .obviously the opposite. At the core of Amelia's character there is this willingness to try. She saw that control was an illusion. I'm not saying she wasn't afraid of death, I'm saying she was willing to face that fear in ways that most of us wouldn't.
I see her trying now, in my book. I love watching her do it, love watching her explore her options yet again, she threw off the traces then, would she do it given a second chance? Would she choose to soar, or would she have to address some of her regrets. Indeed, what would any of us do given that chance? There's my question for you out there, what would any of us really change? We like to say we would change a great deal, but I wonder if we would or if that's just Dickens calling, A Christmas Carol's conceit. It's brave to fly east to the dawn, but it's also brave to see yourself whole and wholly. To try and change who you are, that's bravery too. It may not be something the public cares about, but if you can do it, if you can change how you interact with someone you truly love, well that has to matter.
Which brings me to Amelia and Muriel. They grew up in a household where money and lack of work became a huge issue. Their father moved from job to job, his alcoholism fueling his descent. Her mother's discontent was palpable, she left him once, then came back for a while and finally divorced him. Amelia and Muriel made their own way, with little money to back them. In Muriel's case I have a feeling this fueled a desire for stability, while in Amelia's . . .obviously the opposite. At the core of Amelia's character there is this willingness to try. She saw that control was an illusion. I'm not saying she wasn't afraid of death, I'm saying she was willing to face that fear in ways that most of us wouldn't.
I see her trying now, in my book. I love watching her do it, love watching her explore her options yet again, she threw off the traces then, would she do it given a second chance? Would she choose to soar, or would she have to address some of her regrets. Indeed, what would any of us do given that chance? There's my question for you out there, what would any of us really change? We like to say we would change a great deal, but I wonder if we would or if that's just Dickens calling, A Christmas Carol's conceit. It's brave to fly east to the dawn, but it's also brave to see yourself whole and wholly. To try and change who you are, that's bravery too. It may not be something the public cares about, but if you can do it, if you can change how you interact with someone you truly love, well that has to matter.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Amelia and the politics of difference
The more things change, the more they stay the same... yet Amelia went missing in 1937. She didn't see the unfolding of the Second World War, or the aftermath. She didn't learn about the Holocaust, or fully understand the power of the atom. She never saw photographs of shadows pressed against vacant walls in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
By the time she returns in 1980, the world is different. Looking at this through the prism of race relations, I turn to seminal moments, some were public, Martin Luther King Jr's March on Washington, Malcolm X and the Panthers, the subsequent assassinations. Some more personal, my sister was a Freedom Rider. I was terrified for her and incredibly proud. In elementary school I had one best friend, her name was Mildred Patterson and she was black. I know it mattered, but I can't say how or why. We were just friends, we played together. We liked each other I suppose and then life moved on and we moved with it.
In Muriel's book she speaks about the day she and Amelia ran off to school in their newly sewn dresses and discovered that a classmate, "Lulu May, a Negro" was wearing the identical print. "I was embarrassed as the similarity of our dresses seemed to serve notice to the world that our father could afford nothing better for us than that which Lulu May's father, who was a porter . . . got for his daughter." Class and race had mixed to form a potent brew. The girls ran home to change at midday and their Mother who was truly quite progressive, she let them wear bloomers and eventually got divorced at a time when few women would have dared . . . admonished them. In Muriel's telling, she forced them to see the other side. How would Lulu May feel? And of course Muriel lets Amelia take the lead, it's Amelia who declares she won't change her dress. Muriel follows suit. Muriel's Amelia has a strong moral compass.
This story stays with me as I draw Amelia into our world. I believe she would look deeper, and see more than what would obviously compel her initially. Scientific advancements would matter, but no more than social change. She would have such a unique perspective. . .it would truly be a gift.
By the time she returns in 1980, the world is different. Looking at this through the prism of race relations, I turn to seminal moments, some were public, Martin Luther King Jr's March on Washington, Malcolm X and the Panthers, the subsequent assassinations. Some more personal, my sister was a Freedom Rider. I was terrified for her and incredibly proud. In elementary school I had one best friend, her name was Mildred Patterson and she was black. I know it mattered, but I can't say how or why. We were just friends, we played together. We liked each other I suppose and then life moved on and we moved with it.
In Muriel's book she speaks about the day she and Amelia ran off to school in their newly sewn dresses and discovered that a classmate, "Lulu May, a Negro" was wearing the identical print. "I was embarrassed as the similarity of our dresses seemed to serve notice to the world that our father could afford nothing better for us than that which Lulu May's father, who was a porter . . . got for his daughter." Class and race had mixed to form a potent brew. The girls ran home to change at midday and their Mother who was truly quite progressive, she let them wear bloomers and eventually got divorced at a time when few women would have dared . . . admonished them. In Muriel's telling, she forced them to see the other side. How would Lulu May feel? And of course Muriel lets Amelia take the lead, it's Amelia who declares she won't change her dress. Muriel follows suit. Muriel's Amelia has a strong moral compass.
This story stays with me as I draw Amelia into our world. I believe she would look deeper, and see more than what would obviously compel her initially. Scientific advancements would matter, but no more than social change. She would have such a unique perspective. . .it would truly be a gift.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
in this new year . . . Amelia's resurrection continues
I am now a third of the way through what I hope, pray is the final draft of this novel. I return to Amelia. She is seeing the world as we knew it in 1980, marveling at the changes.
When you're with someone on a daily basis you notice the sprouting of gray, the incremental changes, when you see them again after years, you're overwhelmed. How did that happen, you try to find what was in what is. And eventually you do. Amelia is trying to make sense of this new world, and finding echoes of her own in it. Of course she's smitten with all that progress has wrought. Cars speed by, planes crisscross the sky and they're jets, space is no longer the final frontier, even small things are hugely different. Radio is no longer the cheap entertainment of choice, it's a TV generation. And popular music which figures prominently in this novel is rock and roll, at least for the young, though there are proponents of disco too. My seventeen year old protagonist Sam has grown up on the Clash and Elvis Costello. Radio has changed course, it is a forum for popular music. There is so much to see, and so much to take in, eventually she'll find antecedents for all of it, but first, she'll have to marvel at it. Right now she's stepping into a van bound for New York, and she'll get a turn at the wheel. The need for speed, she always had it. I can't help but think it would have been marvelous for her to take over the wheel on a late night highway, pushing the speedometer up and up and up. She drove cross country with her Mother beside her when her parents finally called it quits, and in Boston she drove everywhere in a yellow Kissel car, Muriel describes it as a "low-slung sport model car, which was called affectionately the Yellow Peril."
What would she see first, and what would she love most? I ask myself this, and I think of her driving down that long stretch of I-95 at the wheel of a van, pushing it to see just what it could do, loving every single second.
When you're with someone on a daily basis you notice the sprouting of gray, the incremental changes, when you see them again after years, you're overwhelmed. How did that happen, you try to find what was in what is. And eventually you do. Amelia is trying to make sense of this new world, and finding echoes of her own in it. Of course she's smitten with all that progress has wrought. Cars speed by, planes crisscross the sky and they're jets, space is no longer the final frontier, even small things are hugely different. Radio is no longer the cheap entertainment of choice, it's a TV generation. And popular music which figures prominently in this novel is rock and roll, at least for the young, though there are proponents of disco too. My seventeen year old protagonist Sam has grown up on the Clash and Elvis Costello. Radio has changed course, it is a forum for popular music. There is so much to see, and so much to take in, eventually she'll find antecedents for all of it, but first, she'll have to marvel at it. Right now she's stepping into a van bound for New York, and she'll get a turn at the wheel. The need for speed, she always had it. I can't help but think it would have been marvelous for her to take over the wheel on a late night highway, pushing the speedometer up and up and up. She drove cross country with her Mother beside her when her parents finally called it quits, and in Boston she drove everywhere in a yellow Kissel car, Muriel describes it as a "low-slung sport model car, which was called affectionately the Yellow Peril."
What would she see first, and what would she love most? I ask myself this, and I think of her driving down that long stretch of I-95 at the wheel of a van, pushing it to see just what it could do, loving every single second.
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