the waiting is the hardest part

Apologies to Tom Petty. I have discovered that we have a scanner. Actually we've had one for some time but since I just sent the draft off to a friend to read I'm playing with it. On to the photo that I am about to upload, Amelia on the roof of the library at Columbia University. I just absolutely love the idea of her sitting up there watching the world go by. What nerve she had. Also I've been reading some of her letters again, and there's such enthusiasm there, especially when she was young.

I wonder if she was fully conscious of this, or if it just is apparent to those of us interested in looking back at her. I think about being young, I see my own children and try to remember, through the fine mists of time, what it was like to be seventeen, or twenty two. I do remember this feeling of possibility. But also a great deal of confusion. I expect she was confused as well, she certainly changed career paths enough. But she also found a passion.

The thing I admired most about my father was his passion for the law. He knew he was meant to do one thing and one thing only. I felt and feel the same way about writing, whatever the drawbacks are. Amelia felt as strongly about flying, but god what a choice she made. What an incredible, wonderful choice.

A look is worth a thousand words

eulogies and the power of forgiveness

I wonder what they did for Amelia, I wonder how you mourn someone when there's no consensus. I wonder this because with my father, there wasn't even an urn. He sent his body out to sea, there's no marker other than a bench my nephew bought and sealed his name to on Riverside Drive. He loved to walk there, so if we want we can go sit in the bench and remember. My father walked from home to work up until six months before his death. He walked with long strides, the steadiest sort of pace, he was hard to keep up with until the cancer took over. Even when he knew he was dying, he walked. We gave him a service, and hundreds came. I wrote a speech, one that differed considerably from the ones given by my brother, my sister, my nephew.

Two nights ago I woke and found myself writing a speech for my mother's funeral. She's not dead, but she'd dying. Dying in fits and starts, her mind almost gone, her body giving out on her. It will be so different from what I wrote for my father, you see I know who she is and was. I barely knew him. And I don't question her love for me, while with him . . .

I think of what was done for Amelia, her husband declared her lost on January 5,1939 (although a book I'm reading says January 6th, I'm going to dig into the research and see why this discrepancy). It was done so her will could be probated. By then some had given up, but others never did. So many theories have been proposed. In my novel I have a character point out that "everyone loves a mystery." Having written a few of my own, I know it's true. We like the puzzle, and we like the idea that there's a solution we might get to. But when someone dies, we also like to remember them and speak about them in ways that helps us mourn. I wonder if her family got to do that for her.

In my novel, I let Muriel get her shot. I let her talk about her sister, warts and all. I let her say what most of us never say when they can overhear. The best memorial services are the ones where you listen and think, "That's right!" You see them whole. You can't grieve for a saint. You can only admire them.

oh joni

I never get tired of it, thank you Joni. . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bFgxKov8Ts

sorry . . .

I can't help thinking of Love Story whenever I hear someone say "I'm sorry." It's such a weak excuse, and one I use repeatedly. What on earth does it mean? Sorry when you hit someone inadvertently as you're shoving past them in a crowd? Or sorry that you insulted your best friend or significant other with panache yet again? Sorry big? Sorry little? It's not a word that works. We throw the word out as if we mean it. The other day I had an encounter with my own sibling. She walked all over me verbally and then when I stood up for myself, told me she was sorry. She apologized ten minutes later. It's a pattern, one I regrettably learned at my mother's knee. My father was sorry too, but he never actually knew what he was apologizing for. He'd manage to be sorry as he attacked you yet again. He had this odd aphasia about the way he acted, "what me? I'm the nice one," he seemed to be saying.

Anyhow, on to being sorry in my book. Muriel tells my young protagonist Sam that the word is useless. I agree with her. Sorry isn't ever enough. To make amends you have to be able to offer up more than a word, you have to understand more than that one word gives you and you can't expect to be let off the hook so easily, to walk away unscathed from whatever you've done to someone else.

Sorry only works for politely strong arming your way through the crowded streets in New York. Sorry doesn't work when you've spent a lifetime disappointing someone else. To make that up, you have to dig deeper. You have to show more. You have to give more. Only then can forgiveness come.

I'm going to let Amelia think about that, and I'm going to see what she does . . . I'm going to let her surprise me. I think she will. She's gotten me this far.

Sorry, how many times have we used it, and how much does it ever mean, and when is it enough? Now there's a question for you.

sex . . .yes that's right, sex

Here's the thing, there are sex scenes to write. But how to do it? Delicately? Without bodice ripping? Without euphemisms? Getting across the point without making the point too obvious. Or making it so obvious it makes you squirm? To titillate or not? I'm not telling who has sex and who makes love, but there's a difference surely. Or at least the aftermath is different. You don't groan and stand up and go wash off and run away. You stay, you stay put and admire the other person, you admit that you want them, and still want them after you're done.

I can write a decent sex scene, but the best I've ever read is in Sue Miller's book Lost in the Forest. When any other writer would have pulled back, she kept going honestly, efficiently, relentlessly. Amazing. Creepy and amazing considering it was an older man with a teenage girl and he was basically molesting her . . . almost molesting her because there was such a thin line. The line between dangerous and safe, the line between I want this, and I really don't.

Yesterday I thought to myself how do I begin, today I wonder how do I continue. Sex is a pastime. Sex is a release. Sex is an obsession. Sex is part of life. Sex is natural. Sex is perverse. Sex is whatever it is for you personally and why does the world have to know. Sex sells. God does sex sell.

Rest assured there's sex in this novel, gay and straight. Let's leave it at that. But when I write I do think back to an assignment I flubbed long ago, writing some of those "true-life" Penthouse letters. The pay was good, my writing inadequate to the task.

In my novel, one of the two young girls tells the other, "sex is the easy part."
Is she right? I wonder.

How does one have it all

Reading the paper just yesterday, I noted that another billionaire was going belly up and getting divorced. Apparently this is news. Still, the poor man would be allowed to keep his paltry million dollar a month lifestyle. I probably have the figures wrong, but you get the picture. He'd married his second wife without a pre-nup and now was deep in trying to make sure she didn't walk away with too much, meanwhile he'd managed to make a few understandable mistakes. Didn't pay taxes. That sort of thing. Ran some companies into the ground. Once he had it all. The money, the power, the art collection, the trophy wife.
For a woman what does having it all really mean? You're Meryl Streep I believe. Or you're out in the cold. And therein lies my comparison. Meryl is hands down amazing and has been since I was younger and striving. I'd always tell myself I wasn't Meryl, who could be? The woman was amazingly talented and able to pull off having a top of the line career, being apparently happily married and raising children. How on earth did she juggle all that?

I see her now, apparently sans plastic surgery. She is still amazing, even more so. She opens movies. She has that same family all grown up. She's self effacing and caring and yes, she has it all. She is still the pinnacle. The fact is, it's not exactly crowded up there.

I look back at the choices Amelia and Muriel made. It's quite possible that Amelia had no real interest in parenting, and that Muriel was willing to barter with her husband and eventually achieve a career as a teacher. Both may well have suited who they were. But both were necessary. I look around at my friends and see that we still make the same sorts of choices. We juggle home and career and worry about both. We wonder if we're doing things well or well enough. We put too much on our plate, and tell ourselves that it's a scientific fact that women are born multi-taskers. We hold ourselves up to such high standards.

Do men? I'm not angry, I'm just asking. Is it a product of brain chemistry or how we're raised? Has this generation changed? A little, a lot? I'd like an answer from you and no, I'm not answering for you. My husband's an incredible cook, a wonderful father, a supportive husband, and he works his butt off. This isn't about him, it's about the world around us.

What does having it all mean to you?