Pie

Today, as I pull out my hair and gnash my teeth trying to get through some mind-scrunching edits on my book when I really should be in the kitchen baking two pies for tomorrow and definitely shouldn't be blogging at all, I offer you only a modest gift. But isn't it a lovely one?

“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.” – Arthur Miller

The question is, which will be the right regret? The unfinished essay or the unbaked pie? Guess I'll find out tomorrow.

Happy Turkey Day!

Blooming Eventually, Repeatedly and Currently

The meeting with the publisher went very well. If all goes as discussed, my book will be on the shelves next fall.

It’s the strangest sensation.

Driving home, my brain was short circuiting. I have every reason to think that this is actually happening, after so many years of it not happening. I am going to publish a book. And yet…that moment is not quite here, not just yet. When does one actually bust out the champagne? When the book goes off to the printer? When it’s released? At the launch party? When it’s positively reviewed? Sells well? When the next book deal comes?

I said to my mother, “I just realized that there will never be one final moment of victory. Just incremental triumph.”

“Like life?” she said.

Which reminded me of a message a friend sent me a few weeks ago responding to this blog. Here’s part of it:

The way I look at it is that women are ready to bloom at any moment. We are not the annual flower that blooms once in a lifetime, whose beauty is awed but is fleeting and temporary. We are perennials - ready to bloom over and over with the proper amount of care (love, sun, etc!). It is the person who thinks they have bloomed once and it is over who begins to molder. Sometimes we are dormant, but the bloom is always in there waiting for the proper care to bloom again.

Now is a perfectly appropriate time for the champagne. Ahead lies more uncertainty and certainly more work, but it’s too easy to skip the small triumphs while waiting for the big ones. I’ve done enough of that in the last nine years. There is always something to celebrate, and I intend to start toasting. Care to join me?

Thanks to Jennifer for the comments.

A Bloodcurdling Halloween Horror Story

Imagine a dark and blustery night, a room cast with shadows. A writer polishes her working manuscript. The publisher has asked to see what she has so far. (Plot Twist). She adds fancy words, changes the formatting, calls on the universe for extra powerful positive thinking. The wind blows like a demon out her office windows. Will this be the realization of a ten-year dream? Or just another disappointment? Zap – she hits the send button on Halloween night (well, not exactly. Three days later. But it makes a better story this way).

Then she waits.

The publisher receives the manuscript and reads 50 pages within 36 hours. He emails the writer, responding with words so enthusiastic some are unfit for print. He loves it. Really loves it. He fell in love with the character, her growth and setbacks and little triumphs. Thinks maybe his press can’t do this book justice.

It is the email she’s waited a decade to receive.

But she doesn’t receive it. Unbeknownst to her, it languishes in her junk mail alongside a sales pitch for Discovery Toys. She doesn’t want any Discovery Toys. She does desperately want a book published. She waits, biting her nails, cursing every doctor who never gave her xanax. Would the publisher have responded by now? Maybe not. Maybe she’s a terrible writer. Maybe he hates her. Maybe the universe hates her. Maybe she should sell Discovery Toys.

She waits.

The publisher waits.

The email waits.

The wind blows.

Finally, six days later, before she’s had her first cup of coffee on a Tuesday morning, she opens her junk email box. What is this? Could it be? Such amazing things said? About her work? But the date—last Wednesday? Dear God, no! The horror, the horror! Do emails expire? Has he changed his mind? Has he decided she’s ungrateful, crazy, delirious on xanax? She emails him back immediately.

She waits.

Shouldn’t she be celebrating? Not yet. Not until the junk mail universe has righted itself. Blasted junk mail universe! She spins in anxiety. She neglects her children. She forgets to take the trash out. She drinks just the tiniest bit of vodka.

Finally, the publisher emails her back. He wondered why she hadn’t responded. He hasn’t changed his mind. They have a lot to talk about. He’ll see her next week.

Stay Tuned for A Terrifying Tale of Gut Wrenching Distress!: Getting What You’ve Always Wanted

Sorry About Those Totally Wasted Seven Years

I got the completely wrong college degrees. I’ve never been bothered by this. At least I have some college degrees. And their wrongness is an accurate reflection of my nature (blooming ev-en-tu-al-ly). I didn’t know and/or embrace what I wanted out of life early on.

Who cares, because I got what I wanted in the long run—a self-made, totally authentic writing career. People pay me to write. Sometimes. That supercedes all ill-conceived college degrees, right?


Yes. Until recently. Feeling the need for something new, something less speculative, something to prepare me for the not-so-far-off future when I’ll need medical benefits, I recently looked into teaching writing at the local community college.

And learned that, two college degrees and ten years of professional writing aside, I am not qualified to teach even pre-college level writing. To do so, I would need a MA in English. (Not even an MFA in writing, incidentally, which I think says something about the controversy around MFAs in writing. Someday I’ll blog about that).

It’s the first time I’ve regretted my academic past, or rather regretted that I wasn’t more directed in my academic past. No point to this regret, naturally—it won’t change anything. And in the big picture, I believe you can’t be where you aren’t yet. In 1996 when I started down the road of MS in Natural Resource Education, I wasn’t a writer yet.

But the question remains—what now? Do I live with my inapt resume, or correct it by getting another master’s degree? Hmmm. We are education junkies in my family. But yikes almighty, back to school? (The third option is to write a mega best-selling novel, which would pay for those medical benefits.)

By the way, I took a teeny tiny job as a writing tutor at the community college instead. Apparently, I am qualified to do that. Next post: Blooming is reacquainted with comma splices, run-ons and fragments.

The Same Suit and the Same Skin

Friday night, I took the chickens to the local brewpub for dinner. As is common to the genre “casual American restaurant”, the BBC boasts televisions perched above diners like rocks on a cliff, threatening to fall on your head or at least your nachos.

We have a TV at home, but it sits in the basement unenhanced by cable and functions more like a disregarded piece of furniture inherited from a maiden aunt than an entertainment device. This makes public TVs all the more enticing.

Chicken Noodle glanced up just after we sat down and said, “I saw the president!”

I looked up. On screen was the Orlando Magic/Atlanta Hawks game. Great, I thought. My child can’t tell the different between a basketball player and the president. But I knew immediately from where the confusion stemmed.

“Are you sure it was the president?” I asked her. “Or did he just have the same skin?”

“He had the same suit and the same skin,” she said matter-of-factly.

I watched the game with her for a minute and sure enough, here came a guy with the same suit and the same skin as our president—Hawks’ coach Mike Woodson. In practically no other way did he resemble Obama, but I could see how the misidentification might be understandable if one were, say, four, with a mother who never let her watch TV.

Ten years ago when we had time for such leisure activities, Captain Daddy and I used to pass entire evenings arguing about completely speculative, futuristic problems, like how we would raise well-rounded, cultured children in a practically all-white town, and what we would do if a child of ours demonstrated an impolite reaction to what would surely be an uncommon sight. How would we teach respect and equality without practical experience? “Well, if our country elects the first black president by then, we won’t have to worry,” was not part of any realistically imagined scenario we hauled into our futile discourse.

I observed Noodle split her attention between coloring a rainbow and watching the game. She had no further comment. And then it hit me—a wave of joy. This was my problem? My motherhood challenge of the evening was to correct Noodle’s assumption that all black men in suits are Nobel-prize winning leaders of the free world?

I think only as I watch my children come of age in this era will I understand the truly remarkable feat that Obama, and we who elected him, achieved a year ago.

(See Bye Bye Bush to read about last January’s Inauguration Playdate.)

A Three-Year-Old Could Do That

I recently bumped into the professional photographer who took my glamour shot—the headshot I’ve used for magazine bios and my website for the last few years. The photo is only four-and-a-half years old, but friends have been complaining that it doesn’t look like me anymore.

(Aside: Chicken Noodle is also four-and-a-half years old. A coincidence that my entire appearance has changed in the same amount of time I’ve been a mother? I don’t think so.)

I told Carol that apparently, I need a new headshot.

“You know, I would totally do that for you, Kim,” she said.

“Well, I would pay you,” I replied, thinking that, in reality, my glamour shot savings account has a balance of about $1.52 these days.

She read my mind. “Really, who has money to pay anyone for anything anymore?”

Her generosity was appreciated. Still, my respect for the creative process is too great to take advantage of her. At the same time, I don’t want to be one of those writers who persist in using a head shot from thinner, blonder days; the kind that makes people do a double take (and not the good kind) when they see them in person.

So I went home and trolled through my own computer photo files for a semi-recent shot that would update me without breaking the bank. I found one I’ve always liked, taken earlier this year in Hawaii. True, it’s a bit overexposed in the face. But it looks like me, it's kind of fun and casual, and the background is lovely. Better yet, I already owned it.

Still, I thought I’d better ask the photographer’s permission.

I called Chicken Noodle into my office. “Do you remember this?” I pointed at the screen.

“At the Hawaii Zoo!” she said.

“Who took it?” I asked her.

“Me!” That kid has an ironclad memory.

I pulled off of my website the picture of that blonde I used to be and replaced it with this one, taken by Noodle when she three. With no offense to Carol (www.carolsternkopf.com), whose talent is clearly superior than my preschooler's and who I will definitely commission to photograph me prior to my first book publication, I think I’ll go with this for awhile. It feels more appropriate to the economy.

And anyway, it’s good to support budding artists, even if they aren’t in Kindergarten yet.

Bend Film: Portal to Blissville

The Universe must have heard my siren call to the aging process, my little shout-out to 39, because last weekend was one of those rare times when the stars aligned and every single thing that happened made me want throw my arms in the air and sing like Julie Andrews.

Here’s how the hard facts lined up:
A) Birthday
B) Press pass to the Bend Film Festival
C) Captain Daddy willing and able to liberate me from motherhood for the better part of three days

Sounds pretty good, huh? But the hard facts never explain everything. Last year, the hard facts were that I was in New York City for my birthday weekend. The trip was undeniably incredible. But I will admit that on the day of my birthday I couldn’t help but feel a little bit sad that I wasn’t with my peeps (except for my main peep Captain Daddy). No reason to complain—it was 70 degrees and sunny, I spent the day walking through Central Park and visiting the Met. But something was missing.

This year the magic started with Bend Film’s opening night party and didn’t let up until the Chickens sang me “Happy Birthday” for the 15th time. In between were a hundred tiny miracles.

I drank Rainier beer with a filmmaker who made a movie about D.B. Cooper, my grandfather (okay, his movie (www.theskyjacker.com) was about the hijacker; my grandfather was just a regular guy with the same name). I met a woman who journeyed to Antarctica with the eco-conservation group Sea Shepherd to fight illegal whaling four years in a row; I sat next to her while watching footage of her in a Zodiac, zipping under the prow of a Japanese ship (www.attheedgeoftheworld.com). I met a trio of filmmakers in their 20s whose film was flipping brilliant and who swept the awards (no late blooming for these little buggers: www.theatticdoormovie.com).

I ran into friends I hadn’t seen in ages. I made all sorts of new friends. I saw amazing films. I saw one heck of a sunset from the roof of a downtown building.

I saw a movie about a guy and a bike and cancer that made me want to go right home and hug everyone I love. I did. Then I went back downtown and hugged all sorts of other people, because after four days of soaking up tons of energy and story and creativity in the company of others, I loved everyone. By Sunday I was on such a Bend Film high, I kissed the director of operations, even though I’d just met her.

I know! I don’t know what happened to me, but it was incredible. Like ecstasy, you know? Yeah, me neither.

Bend Film, which totally rocks the Kasbah, had a lot to do with my little trip to Blissville. It helped that my expectations for the weekend weren’t already sky-high (as they were for NYC, or my what-the-heck-was-that? class reunion (see The Lost Weekend)). Surprise rapture is always better than premeditated rapture. And it didn't hurt that it was my birthday.

But I finished those four days with such an existential buzz that I might venture to say that powerful joy and connection is always out there somewhere, should we just be bold and brave enough to go searching for it.