An Old Song

This song was written a long time ago about a friend with whom I had a shy, almost mystical friendship with. In real life, I wouldn’t go out with him because there was always a long line of irrational women in front of him, and he had briefly dated all of them. (He was a guitarist). But in my dreams, and occasionally in life, we had great conversations …

Turn the corner

to a street beyond a map,

walk much further

till our feet forget the path.

We have walked here

but only in our dreams,

Then we wake up,

Never knowing what it means

Turn the handle,

slide back the creaking door

while I wonder

if you’ve been here before.

Weathered iron

is rusting in its sleep

As we settle

in the silence that we keep.

(CHORUS 2x)

In the morning,

if the snow has turned to gold,

does it matter

to the secrets that we hold

1), then CHORUS 3-4x and fade

Eulogy of My Husband’s Mother, Whom I’ve Never Met

My mother-in-law died a week ago at 83 from complications of uterine cancer. I will go with Richard to Kansas for a memorial service in March — possibly March 17, our wedding anniversary.
This seems oddly fitting, because Dorothy Steffens died believing her only son had never married. I will meet Dorothy for the first time at the internment.

Obviously, there is a story behind this. Dorothy Steffens suffered from mental illness and dementia. She was, Richard said, alternately demanding, doting, and delusional during his childhood. Richard was the only son of a Chinese mother and her farming husband, so he got more of his share of the doting — even smothering — behavior. His sisters weren’t as favored.

Dorothy became a divisive character in any household she lived in, setting spouse against spouse with frightening accuracy. Her cognitive decline added to her emotional turbulence, complicated by Type 2 diabetes and poor self-care. Soon the sisters realized that the only way Dorothy could be cared for was to place her in a nursing home.

In the nursing home, Dorothy became fixated on a savior who would sweep her from the nursing home and take care of her forever. At one point she had targeted the doctor at the home. When Richard and I were planning our wedding, however, she had pegged her own son as her knight in shining armor.

Which is why, when Richard sent her a wedding invitation, Dorothy tried to break out of the nursing home to stop the upcoming wedding.

Richard’s sister Linda called Richard — “How could you send Mom a wedding invite?” Richard had assumed that he should give his mother another chance to be the mother he’d wanted; it hadn’t worked that time either. It was agreed that Richard would fly down to Texas and assure his mother that he had broken up with me.

Of course I had fantasies that I would meet his mother and that she would bless our marriage. On the other hand, I am pragmatic, so I sent Richard to Texas to break us up in the eyes of his mother.

I had never met Dorothy E. Steffens when she died. She never knew I had married her only son. From all accounts, she would have tried to break apart our marriage either before or after the fact, and she might well have succeeded.

Strangely, though, I think I understand her. Sometimes, a child grows up in desperation — perhaps during the Chinese-Japanese battles of WWII — and no amount of safety or security will be enough. Because there’s never enough love, never enough food, never enough reassurance, the child demands more and more. The child who struggles with mental illness loses bits and pieces of their safety to the disease and needs even more to cling onto, and it’s never there because we don’t understand the broken glass of their perception.

The Star and the Street Lamp

He points at the star —
“That star was me once,
high on accolades,
floating on publicity,
viewed by telescopes.”

I point at the street lamp —
“Is it worth less, then,
to be the gleam of light
in the kitchen window?
Is it worth less
to help some poor soul
find his way home?”

He said he’d think about it.

I hope he finds his way home.

Valentine’s from the Outside

This will likely not go into Whose Hearts are Mountains, but I wanted a writing exercise on alternatives to Valentine’s Day, mostly to understand the collective members (Archetypes)
****************

We sat around the Trees, of course, in the deep night. Through the dome, we could see stars; our only other illumination the faint glow of lights that ringed the edges of the dome’s spacious lawn. I looked around at the collective members: Estella with her dusky skin and musical voice; Davis, with his tight curls and stocky build; Summer’s impish face in shadow; Daniel, his tall lanky bulk next to me …

Mari, as always the apex point of the semicircle, sat with her back to the Trees. “Kirsten and Derek” — the pale twins with almost white hair who looked unworldly — “informed me that we hadn’t celebrated Valentine’s Day.”

“Oh, no!” Jude chuckled from a hidden perch in the tree. “Whatever shall we do?”

“You might recall,” Mari said repressively, “we …” She paused to think, and that in and of itself suggested secrets. “We have placed importance on rituals to celebrate and cement our heritage.”

A long silence ensued, the type where people turn to each other and silently ask, “What do you think?” and nobody has anything to say.

I decided to break the silence: “Valentine’s Day is a problematic holiday.”

“Why?” Estella wondered aloud.

Another mystery — why did this group regard Valentine’s Day as a mystery? In the years before the Battles, the media was full of Valentine’s Day ads exhorting consumers to remember their loved one with increasingly expensive items. Could they have missed that? Were they refugees from a monastery?

“The trouble is that,” I explained as if my audience had never heard of Valentine’s Day except in name only, “the holiday celebrates romantic love, love between two bonded partners. It had become a competition over the last century, with the price of the presents representing how much you ‘love’ a partner, and disdain toward people who didn’t have a partner.” Having never had a partner, I’d noticed that last point keenly. “I’m not sure that’s what you want to introduce to the collective. It fosters jealousy and inequality.”

A long silence ensued. “Why did — who would invent that kind of holiday where your happiness was at the expense of others?”

“That’s easy,” I shrugged. “People selling items meant to be romantic. To create a market where people will spend more.” Not for the first time, I wondered if the economic collapse of North America had its advantages.

“We don’t buy and sell,” Summer said, braiding a strand of her hair in silhouette. “Nor do we buy partners, really. I mean, Lilly and Adam are partners, but they don’t own each other …” Daniel nodded his head, and I wondered about Lilly and Adam’s story.

“Ok,” I jumped in. This was folklore. This was what I was good at. “What is your notion of love?”

“Love?” Jude inquired, hanging from a branch.

“Love?” a less-familiar voice at the other end of the semi-circle echoed. “Hmm … I guess love is when you set down your wants to take care of another’s needs.”

“Love is training your eyes outside yourself to the people around you,” Estella intoned.

“Love is allowing the other into the pattern of your life,” Daniel rumbled beside me.

The answers were what I would have expected from a communal society — had these folks always been communal? Were their parents communal? How could that happen without anthropologists like me discovering them and writing about them?

“Ok,” Mari — the premiere Native American anthropologist and my mother’s mentor — called out. “How do we show love?”

As the residents around me fell silent, I took out my notebook, waiting for the answers this unique group had to offer.

Valentines Day is coming soon. Oh, no!

Valentine’s Day is coming up in the US, and never was there a more problematic holiday. A holiday originally devoted to sending a sweet note to one’s significant other, it has devolved into a sense of pecuniary* duty to one’s partner and, in some cases, a nuclear arms race of materialism.

For example, a sign in Maryville’s downtown: If you really loved her, you’d get her a limo ride. To “love” her, then, you have to 1) spend money 2) on luxury goods. Facebook at about this time consists largely of women posting what their significant others got them for Valentine’s Day, and the competition makes me sad.

My news correspondent from China, Yunhao, points out that this dynamic exists in China, perhaps even in a more amped-up version, because of the relative shortage of females there. Women can expect more because there are fewer of them. Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker referred to the matching of partners through skills, resources, and shortages “the marriage market”. Perhaps we can call the Valentine’s Day dynamic “the reassurance market”.

Perhaps Valentine’s Day is roughest to single people. After all, the day is marketed to lovers, spouses, partners and the like. I’ve been single most of my life, because in assortative mating (Becker’s marriage market) I have too many of the wrong skills — the presumably male skills of high education, intelligence, and a career — and not enough of the right skills — the presumably female skills of a stunning body and long hair. Valentine’s Day felt like a candy store that others were allowed into but I was not. The best Valentine’s Day I had as a single was in grad school when a couple of my friends got into the spirit and gave me a white rose (Dave, thanks!) and a mylar balloon (sorry I don’t remember who that was!) True to the use of Valentine’s Day tokens as visible proof that one was “taken”, my fellow grad students wanted to know who my boyfriend was.

I would love to see Valentine’s Day change. Instead of being a marketing ploy for everything from chocolate to diamonds, I would like to see it become a holiday of generosity to friends and family — and partners. Of course, if this developed, it would have to happen the day after Valentine’s Day —

National Half-Price Chocolate Day
*************

* pecuniary — having to do with money. One of my favorite words.

Plague, Pestilience, and Papulomacular Rash

In honor of having the pestilence on my face named — it’s an adenovirus, related to a cold of all things, in one of its less common manifestations — I will spend a moment talking about all sorts of pestilence a writer can infect their characters with.

I’ll start with smallpox. Smallpox is a disease you don’t want to have. If the high fever doesn’t end your life, the chance of toxemia, or toxic reaction to the viral load, could. Only 30% of people who contract smallpox die, but what if someone genetically tinkered with it so that the fatal form, malignant smallpox, resulted 100% of the time? Smallpox doesn’t exist in the wild anymore, having been eradicated recently through vaccinations. There are, however, stores of the virus in government research labs throughout the world, who endeavor to create better vaccines using smallpox in case of biological warfare. Unless they’re planning biological warfare themselves. Hmmmm…..

If the book is set in an earlier time period, dysentery might be the disease the doctor ordered. Dysentery is an intestinal disease which causes bloody diarrhea, and it can be caused by bacteria, viruses, or amoebas. Malnutrition and dehydration are the causes of death. If death by diarrhea sounds strange, remember that it’s the largest cause of death in the world. For those of you who played Oregon Trail, this is the disease that killed you many times. If the writer wants a messy, smelly death carried by contaminated water, this or cholera will fit the bill.

Tuberculosis and leprosy (related diseases, as it turns out) aren’t what they used to be. In ways, these diseases functioned opposite to each other in literature. Leprosy spared the victim’s life but disfigured them due to numbness and subsequent injury, and made them a pariah. Tuberculosis drove romantic figures to an early coughing death while making them more attractive in their frailty and pallor. Nowadays, both are easily treated; we only see the dramatic forms of these diseases these days in Edwardian/Victorian romance (tuberculosis) and in travel/adventure novels (leprosy).

Influenza doesn’t seem to get written much about. Possibly because we usually get it and get better. But the flu killed a lot of people — and still kills people. People actually die from complications from the flu, such as immune system hyperactivity, an opportunistic disease, or organ failure. The only place this disease creates much drama is in the regret that one couldn’t talk to a loved one before they died an unexpected death.

Cancer, as a slower disease, usually allows characters to interact with the victim before they die. In fact, it’s often portrayed in literature as being a “pretty” death, much like tuberculosis used to be. In actuality, cancer is often a messy death, involving stages of dying from less talkativeness to coma to death rattle to death. Characters facing death by cancer also get portrayed as beings that have already ascended into the afterlife, only their bodies haven’t caught on. Gleefully pursuing their bucket lists from a wheelchair, they dispense truisms to their unlucky earthbound brethren. There are people like this (watch Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture — he’s genuinely this enlightened by ensuing mortality), but there are also people who fight every step, there’s people who detail every pain they’re feeling, and there’s my mom — who demanded that the Catholic Church apologize for her abuse by nuns. (She only got as far as a chaplain, but he apologized).

Authors kill off characters. It’s one of the ugly realities of writing. My schtick, I guess, is that we should kill off characters as realistically as possible, to capture the humanity within humiliating, messy death.

Fictionalizing my Morning.

First person:

I faced the bathroom mirror. My eyes still squinted from a swollen face; my cheeks had faded from magenta to the pink of a first-degree sunburn. My nose had developed a smattering of tiny scabs near the tip. The rash that lined my cheeks and chin could not be seen, but felt. I placed my hands on my face to cool the burning and soothe the itching; scratching the itch would only make it hurt worse.

The sullen pink cheeks and nose formed a roughly butterfly-shaped rash that could, if I squinted, be the butterfly rash of lupus. It’s always lupus, isn’t it? Instead of indulging the hypochondria I inherited from my mother, I grabbed for Occam’s razor — the answer that requires the least mental contortions and complications is the correct one. That was easy: On Saturday or Sunday, I put an acne treatment product on my spotty forehead, nose, and chin. Monday, I woke up with the rash, which worsened on Tuesday, and lingered through this morning. I was not suffering from a chronic autoimmune disease.

I ran into Richard in the hallway. “Your face looks better,” he announced. Easy for him to say — he wasn’t wearing my face.

Third person:

Lauren peered into the bathroom mirror. Her eyes still squinted from a swollen face; her cheeks had faded from magenta to the pink of a first-degree sunburn. She spied a smattering of tiny scabs near the tip of her nose. She raised her hands to her face and felt the pebbly rash across her cheeks and chin. Her cool hands felt like ice against her burning cheeks.

The sullen pink cheeks and nose formed a roughly butterfly-shaped rash. Lauren searched her mind for a reference to a butterfly-shaped rash. Lupus — it’s always lupus, isn’t it? She turned away from hypochondria and grabbed for Occam’s razor — the answer that requires the least mental contortions and complications is the correct one. She racked her memory: On Saturday or Sunday, she had put an acne treatment product on her spotty forehead, nose, and chin, having heard about it from the pimple-popping videos she’d binge-watched the night before. On Monday, she had woken with the rash, which worsened on Tuesday, and lingered through that morning. By Occam’s razor, then, the acne cream was the likely cause of the rash.

She ran into her husband in the hallway. “Your face looks better,” he announced. Easy for him to say, she mused.

Future tense

In the morning, I will face the bathroom mirror. I will observe my eyes squinting from a swollen face; my cheeks having faded from magenta to the pink of a first-degree sunburn. My nose will sport a smattering of tiny scabs near the tip. I will place my hands on my face to cool the burning and soothe the itching; I will feel the pinprick rash that I cannot see in the mirror.

I will touch my cheeks, wondering if my face bears the butterfly rash of lupus. It’s always lupus, isn’t it? Instead of indulging the hypochondria I inherited from my mother, I will grab for Occam’s razor — the answer that requires the least mental contortions and complications is the correct one. I will review the sequence of events: On Saturday or Sunday, I put an acne treatment product on my spotty forehead, nose, and chin. Monday, I woke up with the rash, which worsened on Tuesday, and lingered through this morning. I will reassure myself that it’s not lupus.

I will run into Richard in the hallway. “Your face looks better,” he will say. I will grumble at him — “Easy for you — it’s not your face.”

P.S.: An excerpt from today’s work:

Of course I dreamed again after Ichirou left. Of course, I dreamed about being shot. And, of course, I dreamed about Greg:

I experienced the dream as if I was outside myself and inside my body at the same time. I saw the sniper level his gun. I heard the shot, and I felt the tearing pain from the bullet. This time, I looked down at myself as the bullet tumbled out of me, and there was a tear in my shirt and a blossoming of blood.

I collapsed, and everything happened in slow motion: I felt my heart stop; then I felt every cell of my body yanked backward by a second, maybe two seconds. I wanted to scream from the pain, but it was over almost before it had begun. I peered down to see the hole in my chest mended. Greg dropped to his knees, exhausted, and muttered, “O mój Jezu, przebacz nam nasze grzechy …”

When I awoke again, the barest tinge of sun could be seen through the trees from my window. Greg stood over me, his long hair falling into his face. He pushed it back with one hand in a gesture that had long become habit, revealing his long, homely visage. I noticed his eyes looked hollow in the sparse light.

“Are you an angel?” I asked in a parody of awe. Joking was the only way I could encompass what he had done.

“Definitely not,” he muttered. “I’ve done a couple things in my life that might actually keep me out of heaven.” He bent down by my side and inquired, “How are you feeling today?” Unlike Ayana, Greg spoke English in a definite accent, with rolled r’s and subtle accent differences.

I sat up. “I can sit up without help. I’m hungry — are you sure I can’t eat anything but chicken broth and rice? Don’t I have red blood cells to build up or something?”

“We could make you some befstyk tararski. That should set you up good.” He raised his eyebrows.

“Which is — ?”

“Raw beef with a raw egg in it.”

I uttered a long sound that resembled wretching, then managed to choke out, “Gross!”

“You’re missing a treat, let me tell you.” Greg shook his head. “It looks like you’ll be eating some of Ayana’s rice porridge again. Yours will get a little spinach.”

The porridge, it turned out, wasn’t bad at all. Certainly better than that raw beef Greg was talking about.

I whiled the time after breakfast trying to guess the implications of being resurrected. Nobody had come in to visit; I fretted about what they discussed in my absence. My viola was, as far as I knew, still packed in the truck, and I was pretty sure Greg was guarding the front door. I was ready, if not to run, to at least venture as far as the living room and eat lunch there. When I suggested the venue change to Greg, he scowled at me from the doorway.

“Why not?” I snapped at him. “I’ve got enough energy to —”

“Yell at me, it sounds like,” he smirked in his oddly accented English. “Maybe you are ready to come out and visit with us.”

“You mean — have tea, and talk about the weather?” I inquired.

“Not exactly. We’re having a debate about what we should do from here — running appears to be no longer an option.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ok, stand up so I can help you out to the living room.”

“I don’t need help!” I snapped. I stood up and promptly felt my knees give out from under me. Greg glared down his nose at me.

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“Ok, so maybe I do need help,” I sighed. I was an emancipated minor, with all the responsibility that entailed — which was very little up to this point. Even now, I relied on Ayana and Greg to keep me safe. I stood again, this time supported by Greg, and we ambled into the living room.

Progress Report

Honestly, I haven’t been writing much since the depression hit. I’ve been revising the first chapters of Whose Hearts are Mountains to incorporate some ideas that Richard (my long-suffering husband) suggested, but revising — “Oh, let’s change this verb to be more descriptive!” — doesn’t feel like writing.

Yesterday, I finally dug out Prodigies to write on it a bit when I had some downtime between classes and meetings. That book is only half-done, and I had written it as far as the first of the BIG plot points. This next part is crucial and a bit of a challenge because I have to document how four prodigies make the change from being hunted to being — well, proactive.

I haven’t been able to put much time in on either, because it’s also seedling season in my basement. I have a grow room, and if that makes you think of Cannabis sativa, you’ll be greatly disappointed. At the moment it contains a moringa tree sprouting from its roots, seedlings of two tomato varieties, two eggplant varieties, and two pepper varieties, one of which is “Peter pepper”. Look it up. Better yet:

Use a little imagination and you’ll see it.

I also have a couple experiments — cardoon (which I’ve never been able to grow before, but — bam! — I have an army of cardoon. Other experiments are perilla (a Japanese/Korean/Southeast Asian herb), and a Southeast Asian vegetable whose shoots are eaten in curry. I don’t have much hope for the latter; the seeds looked like they were firing blanks when I soaked them. There will be many more seeds — unusual herbs, edible flowers, and flamboyant beans — by the time the garden is put in.

I think the garden helps, rather than hinders, the writing. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before — taking breaks refreshes my mind, and I hear my characters’ voices again when I go back to write.

Tightrope walking

When I was in junior high school (middle school for you youngsters), I was walking home from school with my sister and a couple friends, and we came across a familiar piece of abandoned infrastructure from the old Illinois-Michigan canal: the remains of a lock that helped boats navigate the changing heights of the channel. It looked like this:

If you look closely between the massive retaining walls, you can see a concrete wall going from left to right. On the side closest to you, you see what is about a seven or maybe ten-foot drop into damp reeds. (This picture was taken too early for you to see the full-grown invasive Phragmites reeds dead and broken on the green side. Trust me, that’s the green you see.) On the side you can’t see is a shorter drop into what is brackish water most of the year. The wall itself is no more than a foot wide, and to access it you must sit on the retaining wall with your feet dangling and slip downward, landing on the retaining wall.

This is important, because my sister’s two friends decided we would take this route instead of the perfectly safe footbridge a half-block west. I expected Juli (not her real name) to navigate the treacherous path relatively well, because she was pretty slim and a tomboy, but then Bobbie (also not her real name) managed it despite her plump, awkward build.

Because these were my sister’s friends, they called out for my sister to try the path. I didn’t even exist to them, being younger and awkwardly embarrassing to be around. Lisa, who has a fear of heights, passed. I, seizing the chance to prove myself to them, shimmied down to the five foot jump onto the wall. Walking it was easy, if I didn’t think of the scummy green water on one side or the sharp canes on the other. And if I didn’t consider how immensely uncoordinated I was. I didn’t think about them, because I was working hard to walk fast across a balance beam when every other time I’d been on a balance beam I fell over. And trying not to pass out.

Somehow I made it, only to find the real challenge: trying to climb up that five-foot retaining wall with only a sharp, rusty bracket to hold onto. I withheld the desire to cry. Or barf. Luckily, Juli and Bobbie helped pull me up, after waiting a suitable time to make me suffer.

Why did I tell this story? To use it as an analogy for writing. Writing to be read is like walking a narrow beam where there’s a brackish pool of familiarity on one side, and a deep fall with sharp sticks on the other.

What do I mean?

Most people need some familiarity in what they need — whether topics, themes, plots, characters, or setting. For example, I’ve been told by a psychologist (of course!) that Jungian archetypes — Persona, Shadow, Great Mother, Wise Old Man — are necessary to sell a book. Genre fiction has its own tropes — where would science fiction be without the amusing alien (porgs in The Last Jedi), the ancient conspiracy (also in The Last Jedi), and the balance between Good and Evil (also in the Last Jedi)? Familiar topics help us place ourselves into the action, and familiar plots help us feel that an age-old myth unfolds before our eyes.

At the same time, people need their minds to be challenged, but not so challenged that they can’t identify. There’s a whole range of challenge from what we call “beach-blanket books” — light romance and slice-of-life books that are a vacation in a paperback — to Umberto Eco, whose books are so dense that one had to make a concerted effort to read.

In other words, people read things that affirm them, but at the same time they like some unfamiliarity. Danger, even — if not danger of being impaled on reeds, the danger of having their minds changed, their hearts broken, their lives expanded.

*********
Writing this blog also compares to that tightrope I walked as a child. My most read topics are the more personal ones: No Coffee, Marcie, Graduation, Bipolar disorder, Richard’s aunt dying. The creative pieces get a moderate number of visitors, thank goodness. The technical ones perhaps the least, but they’re not sparsely subscribed to, either.

I want to pick topics that appeal to everyone, but I don’t want to lose the writing/writer aspect of it. I want to share my creative writing, of course, and walk through the joys and sorrows of being a writer. I want to teach techniques in case I have writers out there. (Notice I don’t say “aspiring writers” — if you’re thinking about it, you’re a writer.)

So unless you object to the mix, horribly, I’m going to keep walking that tightrope.