Welcome Home Porkchop

Can I Get a LIttle Rest Around This Place?

There once was a little girl who found a cat. But her parents already had too many. Her mom made it her mission to find this cat a home. That home turned out to be mine.

Saturday 2-ish, a six year old boy waits by the front door peering out of the side window.

“THEY’RE HERE!” He takes off on a tear, jumps up on the couch and picks up his Leapster. He forgets to turn it on.

I get to the door and in walk Lisa, Sophia and Porkchop. We all go into the library, Porkchop’s temporary home until Pearl, the fifteen year old alpha cat can get adjusted. I make the introductions and J stares at the Leapster as if he hasn’t been waiting every second of every minute of every hour for the arrival of the newest furry member of the family. Did I mention the game wasn’t even on? The boys come into the library where now we’re all crammed sitting on the hard wooden floor. Yes. This is how I welcome all visitors. What hospitality.

Sophia, an absolute doll and animal lover plays with the kitty as he tries to get adjusted. The boys watch in amazement. J wants nothing more to hold The Porkster but has been trained by the older cat who on occasion will show her pointy teeth and hiss. It takes some convincing that most cats aren’t like that. Maybe they’re just watching because Sophia bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Audrey Hepburn. The oldest appears to be smitten. For Sophia’s part, she’s showing them how it’s done, how you play with a kitten, how you hold him, without ever saying a word.

The visit moves in a whirlwind. It’s the strangest thing to know someone so well because you’ve been reading them, yet not to know them in person at all. We cover being a fish out of water in your town, the state of the nation, a bit about politics. I grill Lisa about her writing. I never get a chance to talk to my peeps and I can’t let the opportunity pass. The WIP sounds amazing and needs to get out there in the world. That’s all I can say.

Lisa herself is absolutely charming. Her gray hair is stunning and as she’s talking I think about how I wish I had the balls to do it. But my hair dresser won’t let me. He doesn’t want to deal with me if I go gray. He and my husband seem to think it’ll make me crazy, which is less of their concern than me making them crazy. Well, duh. Of course I will. But nonetheless I covet Lisa’s hair.

For my part I was much more quiet than normal. I tend to babble when I’m nervous and I worked really hard at not babbling, not letting that switch I have be flipped. Which left me more quiet than normal, but eh, it’s the best I can do.

They left too soon, there was so much more we could have talked about. I imagine that’s the way it is when you meet such a dear friend whom you’ve never met though, no? So many questions, too little time and surrounded by little people who I was doing my darnedest to ignore, but who were demanding to be heard.

There was also a lovely sexy dance put on by my two year old. Which after many guffaws he continued to do and do and do…did I mention when Lisa standing at the bottom of the steps caught an empty toilet paper roll that came flying over the ledge? Yes. Welcome to my home…

They left and J spent the rest of his day holding Porky, or at least trying to. His big sister got home after being on vacation with her other family for a week and the two of them (the youngest was done with the cat for the time being, lucky for said cat) passed Porky back and forth until they went to bed around nine. The Porkster unlike most kittens, passed out and didn’t awake until the morning. They wore the little guy out.

J and A woke at seven and were back at it. No rest for the wicked. My husband and I sat drinking coffee, listening to music as all of the kids were entertained. We wondered why we didn’t do this sooner.

And quiet as could be, they emptied their rooms into the library. What cat doesn’t want a full collection of  “stuffed-ups” (stuffed animals), two full balls of yarn, miscellaneous paint chips. three fake mice, two baby blankets and an Etch-A-Sketch to entertain him?

So thank you Lisa and Lisa’s family, for bringing us such a little treasure.

Two Writers (Look at that hair!) and Audrey Hepburn

Artistic Uprising

As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a teacher. Truth be told, I wanted to be a writer but that was something so intangible I never thought that to be a possibility.

I come from a family of teachers. My grandfather was a superintendent of schools, my grandmother a teacher, my father a teacher. Now some kids want to do what their parents do either out of worship or a lack of imagination. I wanted to be a teacher because I couldn’t imagine anything more fun than having books for homework and being able to talk about them all day. I was young and didn’t account for the rest of it, the kids who could care less, the mindless vocabulary grading, reading paper after paper derived from creative rewording of CliffsNotes.

I had two really encouraging teachers my junior and senior years of high school, during which I was picked to attend a poetry seminar (imagine that) and I wrote my first play that was published in the school literary magazine. I remember liking the poem I had written, the only part I remember was something about long nails of a vampire and an affair, but the play was awful. They needed a 20 page play, and I produced a 40+ page play that was really quite awful to begin with, but after it was “edited”, it made no sense at all. If I remember correctly, they just took out pages to cut it down to the size needed. Random pages.

As college loomed, I got into my three choices. I was thrilled to get into the top state school. It was where the kids that wanted to get into Ivy League graduate schools went, mostly of a Pre-Law, Pre-Med nature. It was the only state school that had no teaching program.

For many reasons, the health of my best friend’s dad being the strongest one, that’s the school I went to. But I recall discussing it with my dad, very briefly one night. He really did not want me to become a teacher. He said that going to the top school was the only decision that made sense, and I should look more toward business. That’s where the jobs were, that’s where the money was.

I don’t fault him for his advice. He was a man who worked four jobs as far back as I can remember all so that his wife could stay home with his kids. He didn’t want me to struggle like that. But all I ever thought about was teaching. The only thing that appealed to me about business was the idea of working in a big city, and wearing suits to work. And heels. And a briefcase. That was where the dream ended because I hoped that briefcase carried a novel that I was touching up, or some poems or something creative.

I went to that school and got a degree in literature. I wanted a job of any kind that I could write for a living, but had no idea how to go about it. I moved to Chicago and fell into business. Until the world went business casual I got the suits, I got the heels and I had train rides to spare.

Years ago, a dear friend of mine was in Chicago for a medical convention. She’s one of my hometown posse, my girls. And she’s a doctor.

She met me at my job at the time, this was ten, twelve years ago. I led her up the escalator to an old trading floor built in the 1970′s. My desk was on an island in the center underneath a large fluorescent dome, divided up in squares, each square being two foot by two foot. You felt as if you were working in the interior of a golf ball. The size of the room was about half a football field and the exterior of the trading floor was surrounded by offices. There were no windows. No windows. Not on the floor, not in the offices. None.

I led my buddy, A, onto the floor to my desk where my three computers sat angled toward my empty chair. She smiled and nodded as I introduced her to my co-workers and shortly we left, off to get a beer or twelve. As we walked down the escalator, she said, “Lyr, that place will kill you.”

A is not known for drama. That’s my job in my hometown group, the free spirit, the one who would do anything, could be anything. I will never forget the look on her face, such sadness. “You can’t work there.”

“I know, A.”

We didn’t discuss it anymore, but only one of my dear friends would see that someone like me in a place like that was in no hyperbolic way a slow death sentence. She also knew that sometimes we have to do what we have to do, which is why we said no more. But years and years later and I still remember the sound of her voice, the look on her face.

I’m trying to turn that around, but now it’s not just me, it’s a family and a house and a mortgage. I’m reaching as far as I can in the time I have to do what I have always wanted to do.

But I also am trying desperately at times to show my kids the world. When they play video games, I tell them there is a person who makes them. When they read, I mention someone sat down and wrote that book. When they draw I say people make a living off of art.

I’m making them take piano, my son starts this year, but when my daughter and son questioned it, I told them, “You don’t want to be the bartender. I’ve done that. Be the piano player. Plus, every band has a keyboard player. You could be in a jazz band, a rock band, anything.”

I’m mildly obsessed with opening their eyes to the numerous possibilities as jobs are outsourced more and more every day. I don’t want them dying a slow death working at a call center with a script unless that is what they want to do. They are far too special to believe the politicians about the economy and jobs. I refuse to believe that there won’t be a turning point where people rebel and their is an artistic uprising. At some point we will have to declare that life is more than living paycheck to paycheck as we do their marketing for them on Facebook and Twitter. People are under the misconception that we are the consumer. No, we work for the companies. And we’re doing it for free. I live in hope that our kids are smarter than we are.

It’s my job as their mom to teach them that freedom comes from learning to live cheaply so that you can follow your dreams. I teach them to garden and fix things. Maybe someday, it’ll make the difference.

What do you think is crucial for your kids to know, that you only learned later? What are you trying to change that started long, long ago?

Fixing A Gate

I fixed the gate on our fence. I’ll wait for a moment until the applause dies down.

I knew from a very young age that my father had always wished for a boy. No one ever discussed it as far as I know, my sister and I surely didn’t, but it was known the same way one knows that they will be awoken by polka music blaring from the bathroom early Sunday mornings. Yes, my parents know how to rock out.

From a very young age, every project my father embarked on was prefaced with, “Lyra, come here. You need to see how this is done.” And off I’d trot, to be given a tool to hold while I listened to the why the oil on the car had to get changed. Then we proceeded to change the oil. I sealed the driveway, mowed the lawn, changed the oil and anything else that broke my dad fixed with me holding a tool by his side.

I opted out of home economics because my dad was as shop teacher. I wish I hadn’t now as something as basic as sewing a button is a shining light into my incompetence as a homemaker, however being that I opted into extra shop classes, I know my way around machinery. I love machinery.

At my old house, my partner and I decided we wanted to put a deck on the back. I drafted up a plan, which coincided with a long weekend my parents would be out from New York. I ran the plan by the inspector only to find out that because of Dutch Elm disease you needed to stay ten feet away from any Elm trees. My parents arrived and I had a blueprint for a beautiful deck that the tree police would not allow. I thought that even with this tiny hiccup, we could do the deck in a weekend. My dad was kind enough not to laugh aloud, but said that perhaps I was underestimating how difficult it was.

It took a day to revamp the plan. Steps leading out from the raised door onto the deck which would be 10′ by 10′ then one step down and another 10′ by 10′ deck. With a cantilevered boat nose. And a small set of steps leading off of the lower second deck.

We rented a two-person Auger to spin large holes into the earth only to come across brick paths two feet down from a town built upon earlier. The required depth was 36″. If memory serves there were thirteen holes dug between an unruly Auger and many a friend that stopped by for the price of cold beer and a fire at night. Someone would be lowered into the hole to pull up pieces of brick by hand. By the time my parents left, we had poured the cement into the prefabricated tubes inserted into the holes and set up some chalk lines. That was it.

To save you the misery of detail it took that beginning week, and every waking second of every weekend for the next two months. By the end we had exhausted our friends, my partner and I were no longer speaking and it was just me drilling screws into every last baluster spaced every 3 1/2 inches around a 22′ long deck. If I remember correctly there were 118 balusters with two screws apiece and the deck was tilted down for rain purposes so I had to individually cut each one to disguise the slope. The day I finished, I remember dragging up some patio blocks to the lower deck. I lugged up my firepit and spent the night drinking beer around my fire, toolbelt and do-rag still in place. I was happy and exhausted.

When it came time to leave, the deck was the only thing that made me consider fighting for the house. Fortunately, I’m not that person.

Fast forward nine years later. I have spent these years either working, commuting or being the mommy to my kids. My husband, not a born Mr. Fix-It has improved greatly. We learned early on that we work horribly together. I read directions and get the right tool. He storms ahead, throws something, uses his “Weed Wacker” talk, “Plumbing” talk, “Fixing-the-F’n-Garbage-Disposal” talk, none so much as PG-13, and after a time or two he gets it done. He also throws things. I see pride there when he’s done although he would hate for me to say that. He didn’t grow up fixing things so this is all new. That’s not easy and I know that. Even though most of the time my comments are solid, it just makes him crazy.

I have learned to stay out of the way and let the man do what he needs to do to learn. (Unless I see a major thing going wrong. I’ll take the heat and “suggest” a way around it.) In the meantime, I’ve spent these years either pregnant or with a toddler not letting go for fear that I won’t be there when they turn around. I hate that having a job gives kids that anxiety but if people think it doesn’t, trust me on this. It sucks and we all do the best we can.

The gate to our fence has been broken for a long time now. Some electricity guys had to get to the thingywatchit that is in our backyard. They needed to remove the fence to get their tractor in and when they put it back they put the lock on wrong. I knew it would take me ten minutes, but I don’t as a rule have ten minutes. So, the other day while the kids were playing in the sprinkler I traipsed down to the basement and pulled out my handy 100 piece ratchet set. I had gotten it when I replaced the hood of my old beater car with a hood that I bought at a junkyard. But that’s a story for another day.

I opened my ratchet set and was, I don’t know the word, happy? fulfilled? joyous? to see the tools staring back at me and on the first guess I picked the right one. Oh yeah. By then I had two blond boys staring up at me in befuddlement. It hit me. They had never seen me fix anything. They thought I should get their dad. This is so not how I planned on raising my kids. See? That’s what my dad gave me without ever saying a word. If I wasn’t strong enough to fix something, we’d get a different tool. Fixing things isn’t about brawn it’s about brains. These young boys learned how to use a ratchet by their mom and that gives me joy and it’s just the way it’s supposed to be. They also learned how to drill new pilot holes for the bolts when some douchebag cracks your gate because they tried to force it. But I digress.

My husband thanked me for fixing the gate, but I don’t think he got it. I had lost that part of me, that stubborn part, that part that knows how to fix tangible things when they break. And God that felt good. And now my boys know it isn’t a man’s job.

Now, if I could just find my toolbelt…

Maximum Overload

This post over at Dear Betsy’s got me thinking.

To sum up, her question was why do you abandon books? Reading through the comments, an overwhelming number of people abandon them because they didn’t love them, they didn’t move fast enough. Uh oh.

We have to consider that Betsy Lerner is an agent and the commenters are writers, fellow agents, people in publishing, editors and perhaps the odd stalker or two. The reason I mention this is because these people read profusely. The people in the business of writing have to be able to decide quickly, sink or swim. Do I love it or do I not? I get that. But the majority of the commenters are writers I assume.

Between blog posts and news articles with hyperlinks, telephone prompts for “your convenience”, banks that decide the amount you’re going to withdraw before you press the button, and McDonald’s profiling your car to get a head start on your dinner, I daresay that our need for speed has reached maximum overload. The internet has gotten faster and yet I have less time. I have less time because every convenience has demanded more of my attention which means there is less time to sit talking to a friend. There is less time for big books, books that are slow to get into but the payoff is huge.

Ah, but there is the rub. The payoff is huge to me. I read Middlemarch a few years back and now I can’t even recall what triggered it other than my love of Victorian literature. I have the ability to shut the world out when I read. With a book like Middlemarch, you aren’t immediately invested. But the language…what George Eliot can do with a sentence is nothing short of magnificent. I read and could only dream to write one fragment so clearly no less an entire novel. The language pulled me in, and then one story line emerged, then another and yet another. She piled in the topography, geography, feminism or lack thereof, the state of marriage, socioeconomic divides, all of it and then made me care because of the characters. I dragged out the end because I could not bear to let it go, to let her go, Dorothea Brooks. To have written a book in 1874 and have me care in the year 2008 is nothing short of magic.

Yet, it’s a book I rarely recommend. I consider this book an investment. If you read it, you will come out a different person. Period. A different wife, a different daughter, a different husband, a different son, you will somehow come out different, and yet I dare not recommend it because I fear it is just too great an investment in the year 2011 and won’t keep a person’s attention. How sad is that?

I take it a step further and think about my own novel. Before I continue, I do not mean to compare myself to George Eliot. I am not worthy to write a footnote for any of her works. My book however is not small and it is not quick. There are characters that you will need to get to know and they don’t care for you to know them. They are of a different time, a different era when things weren’t so readily discussed. Life happened behind the scenes.

What I have attempted to do, I have done intentionally. Hence my fear. Are there any people out there who still read books that take an investment? Are there any people who continue reading even if there is no immediate payoff? I’m beginning to doubt it. I poll my friends, exciting friend that I am, and they are reading what most people are reading. You can find their books in an airport, in Target, because the books are so popular. What does it say to you when you think your closest friends may not even enjoy your book? Uggh.

When I went away this summer up to the cabin, my soul felt whole. Corny as it sounds, there were just too many things in daily life that sucked me in and wouldn’t let go until there was no me left. I needed that time to step away and be me with my family and without the chaos and demands of life in 2011.

Now that I’m back, I try to recreate the feeling. We rarely turn on the television. I spend my mornings writing, my nights blogging and the time in between first working, and later tending to my family. I don’t really consider blogging a timesuck because I enjoy it. I enjoy the connections, the people, all of you and what you have given me. This is my version of a drink out with friends.

I want to turn back the clock. I want to move to a time when books were events and people made time for the investment because it was worth something. It was worth everything.

I know I can’t. But wouldn’t it be grand if I could?

 

 

Sitting On A Dock At Night

Sometimes you’re just happy to be up past your bedtime.

Sometimes you get to share it with someone else.

Sometimes you look at the dark of a lake and don’t want the night to end.

Sometimes you hope no one will notice you’re there, so it doesn’t have to.

Sometimes sitting on an old rickety dock is the best place to be in the world.

And sometimes Mom tells you it’s time for bed.

Sweet dreams.

This picture reminds me of us, all of us, striving to finish what we’ve started. Never alone, friends just an arm’s reach away. We look out and can see nothing. Yet we know it’s there. The story is out there if we can just have faith that even if we can’t see it, it exists.

Sure enough if we keep going, there will be a light to guide us. Eventually.

Keep going.

Love.

Because It’s What I Want

Writing is such a strange thing to do.

Some people have been surrounded by stories their whole lives. They gravitate toward them from a young age, a means of escape, a way of living a life much more intuitive than the one they possess. When I was young, I would have rather been reading Beverly Cleary or Judy Blume than anything else. That gave way to Roald Dahl which led to Stephen King and then Danielle Steele and V.C. Andrews. By the time I entered college, I had firmly led a double life of required reading and my reading, two completely separate worlds. Being a literature major, the classics were covered, but in my spare time I read Anne Rice with a brief foray into Dan Brown, James Patterson and J.K. Rowling.

By the time I graduated Richard Russo and Kurt Vonnegut became my masters. Now the strange thing, which never seemed strange to me at the time, was the obsessive quality of my reading. If I found someone I loved, I’d read everything they’d ever written. Everything. Once I broke free of their spell, I’d never return. The times I tried to venture back, usually trying to recapture a place of my own past through which books were my wormhole, I’d read in disdain. The books that captivated me, I’d emotionally grown from and could not return. The window had closed.

As my life post-college became more complicated, my reading followed. I’d print off lists, “best of” lists. One year I printed off the Pulitzer Prize list and worked my way through those books, unable to comprehend I had missed so many for so long because I thought they were above me, beyond me.

I began to write. It was bad. Horrible. My first attempt was going to be a thriller. Short chapters, little description, dialogue heavy. Think James Patterson meets Dan Brown. It seemed a good place to get my feet wet. Did I mention it was atrocious? When you hear someone cut down a writer that they presume is below them, suggest to them to try writing something like that. We could all use that sort of humility in our lives.

I didn’t think they were below me by any means, let the record show. It just seemed that aside from the twist of who was the villain, or why they were the villain, the rest would be easy to plot. Mais non, mes amis. It was also an odd choice because I could no longer read anything horror or thriller. I became skittish, perhaps from reading so much at a young age, my nightmares began to become more vivid than anything that I had read. I would wake in a sticky sweat staring at someone coming after me unable to tell if I was waking or sleeping. No, that was it for the thrillers. I leave those for the young and the not faint of heart.

So, I was attempting to write in a genre that I didn’t read and I was writing (looking back of course it’s all so obvious) something that would be made into a Lifetime movie. It wasn’t a book, not even a bad book. It was a script treatment, yet less than that. I shut down the computer one day (I used to write on the computer directly) and never looked back. It wasn’t even a drawer book.

I went back to reading full-time, and what a relief. I am first and foremost a reader. It is one of my favorite things to do, and when I get a great book it brings me back to that seventh grader holed up in her room wondering if her parents knew what she was reading if she’d be able to continue. I was greatly fortunate they never questioned my reading. It was pre-helicopter parenting, and they were content if my grades were good and I came down for dinner. It wasn’t all that simple, but that’s a story for a beer, not a blog.

When I met my husband, that nascent writer reared her ugly head. I never wanted to write because I thought it was easy. It wasn’t a case of picking up a crappy book and saying, “Well, duh, I can do that.” No, this was a case of me realizing that my entire life, my whole entire life, I thought I’d become a writer. It was when I met someone who showed me that you can not only have dreams but work toward them, that I realized I needed to write a book with everything I had to see if I really was that writer. At the same time, my grandmother who lived this incredible life was put in a nursing home. The idea was there without any of the details. But for once I didn’t use that as an excuse, I just wrote. And wrote. And wrote some more. Because I didn’t have the details until I got into the story, I have written tens if not hundreds of thousands of words that will be cut out because the story has changed. But when I read the beginning words, and then the recent words, I can see they are better. Whether or not the story is, or if it’s enough, that remains to be seen. But it is better. I am better.

And that’s very cool.

All of this is to say that thinking about it, I think being a writer is one of the only jobs I’d be good for. It’s the way I think and the way I see things, but God knows if I’ll be any good. What an odd thing to do with my spare time. But here it is. It’s not that I can do nothing else. It’s not that the characters write themselves and I just chase after them with my pen. It’s not that I think I’m amazing, or that (back of hand held to forehead) I must. I want to do this because I think storytelling is one of the best things in the entire world, bar none. No matter where you are or what your circumstances, stories can help you, guide you, if nothing else distract you for a moment. I want to be the creator of something so powerful and as Hogwart’s misplaced my invitation years ago, this is my only chance of being a wizard (I know it’s witch, but wizard is infinitely cooler so if I’m all powerful you can be damn sure I’m going to be a wizard).

I feel like a petulant child, and trust me, I know petulant children, who stomps her foot and says, “Because it’s what I want!”

And so it is.

Why do you want to be a writer? If you’re not a writer, what is it that you want…really, really want?

 

Humor Me

The house is abuzz with excitement.

After much debate the new name of Kitty Noir is the ever classy, Pork Chop. We decided to let the kids name him since he would be their first very own cat. Pork. Chop. I know.

It’s been awhile and rumor has it that I write every now and again, should we discuss it? Let’s!

First thing’s first, my husband wanted me to let all of you wondrous writers know that the downloads for the short story podcasts are free on The New Yorker. You have to log in and then you can somehow get to them, but you do not have to have a subscription.

But this, this is magnificent. For your Friday enjoyment listen to a David Sedaris story about his childhood with obsessive compulsive disorder. I challenge you not to guffaw.

Humor Me.

On to business. The summer heat has been fizzling my brain. 6:15pm tonight and the temperature gauge on the Credit Union sign read 99 degrees. I’m looking for more time and less heat.

I’d like to have a day, a solid day to sit and write. But I need more. It seems it gets harder and harder to do this WIP in fits and starts because the plotlines are criss-crossing and I need to keep all my ducks in a row. I’m uncertain how to do this. For work reasons, I will be unable to take any time off between now and September. My secret goal (shhh, don’t tell anyone) is to get not just the book finished, but the first massive rewrite done before my 40th birthday. I’ve got until November.

I don’t know where the time can come from unless I can rewire myself to write at night. I write this at night, but this is a completely different place for me. I’m uncertain if I can let go of the day enough to give the book my all. It’s going to need my all.

I like the early morning because the day hasn’t gotten to me yet. I write before I’ve really spoken to anyone and my brain is clear. The words flow. Even if they go in the wrong direction,  at least they come.

Not so at night. My words stumble. I can write essays, but not sentences dependent on the write word, the right order of words, the right subtlety. So night owls out there, tell me what it’s like for you. How do you turn off your already full day and clear the mental space to write? Choice or necessity?

Okay, it’s Friday and enough of me picking your brains. I leave you with this.

Me and My Girl

 

Because really, this is what we should be filling our mental space with, no?

Here Kitty, Kitty

I’m a dog person. Seriously.

I grew up with a German Shepherd. One does not ever, ever become a cat person growing up with a German Shepherd, let the record show.

Then came the first cat, not mine but a roommate’s. Zach was the cat who acted like a dog. Thus came the beginning of my downfall. My roommate had Zach and a co-worker lived on a farm in Indiana. What? Does this not yet make perfect unequivocal sense?

Okay, so the co-worker had a barn cat that had kittens and she had one that she couldn’t bear to give away. The cat was white with a black tail, one black ear and a black nose. Her eyes were blue which unless a Siamese usually meant deafness. I told her no, I did not want a cat. I’m a dog person. She decided she’d drive by and just let me meet the cat.

Merlot moved in with Zach. Merlot became Merle, which became Merle the Pearl and eventually Pearl.  Pearl is a fiesty girl, but she didn’t start out that way.

I moved out from said roommate and thought Pearl was depressed. You’ll keep that between us, yes? Because really, it sounds insane. Yes. I know. Upon a vet visit, I told the vet I wanted to get Pearl a roommate because she missed Zach and lo and behold she had just the candidate. A high-maintenance client of hers had just found a cat by the side of the road. The cat was named Lucky.

Lucky had been thrown out of the window of a car in a plastic shopping bag. Her paws had been skidded off by the asphalt, they didn’t think she’d make it. Then along came Jane. Jane was an incredible cat lover on the way to a wedding. She had owned her own printing company and had retired early because the printing chemicals had destroyed her immune system. She lived off of inhalers, and after years of working towards a dream lived in a beautiful condo on the Chicago Lakefront with a type of cat I only now remember as being called Teddies. Teddies were the only species she was not allergic to.

Jane saw this kitten on the side of the Edens Expressway in Chicago with a plastic bag wrapped around it and stopped. She stopped. She missed the wedding.

Jane got the kitty who was bleeding and put it in her trunk and went to the vet. She paid thousands of dollars to have this cat strapped up in a harness while it’s paws were soaked so that they could regenerate. Did you know they could do that? Yes. They can. And now Jane was interviewing for a cat parent. Did I mention I’m a dog person?

The whole thing sounded insane, so well, yeah, I was in. The vet gave Jane my number and I was scheduled for an interview. I went to her condo and watched videos of Lucky in her days at Jane’s home as Jane sneezed and labored to breathe. She would have done anything to keep this cat and here I was explaining that I was a dog person who had a cat. I left and found out that after numerous interviews Jane had picked me. Did I mention that I love Jane? Someone that doesn’t give a damn about what people think or how crazy she may seem, yeah, that’s Jane.

Lucky and Pearl became the best of friends. They wrestled like bear cubs and all was right in the world. My partner at the time and I took photos like they were our children.

Then came Daisy.

I lived in Logan Square and had a neighbor with two Blue Russians, another type of cat. She was in cahoots with the Humane Society and when they found a litter that they were going to put down, she’d intervene. It was her job to give them their worm medicine at her apartment so that they’d be able to be adopted. Otherwise they’d just be put down. Doesn’t that sound so humane, “put down”? They’d be euthanized.

Rachel, my neighbor, travelled all the time. Naturally after many a beer on our back fire escape, she asked if I’d mind giving the kitties their worm medicine and watching the other two. A sucker for a sob story, I agreed. You do know I’m a dog person, right? Yes, of course. Here’s their medicine.

The kitties healthy and renewed went back to their cages…but there was this chubby one. My partner fell in love.

“We cannot, CANNOT, become those people. We have two cats and three makes us into cat people.”

“We can’t send her back.”

“I am not taking care of her.”

“I know.”

“Fine.”

“FIne.”

Daisy was added to the menage. Pearl hated her, Lucky loved her. So Pearl and Daisy fought for Lucky’s attention, Lucky the cat who was thrown out of a car going 60 miles an hour.

Then came the divorce. We dealt with the house, and the joint bank account. The friends picked sides, lines were drawn. I lost a family I had come to think of as my own for seven years.

But there were the cats. Pearl and Lucky were mates, inseparable. But Lucky was a mom to Daisy. I knew if push came to shove, Lucky was my cat. I also knew that Pearl was tough, and Lucky needed to take care of Daisy. So I had to let both of them go. It broke my heart, the heart of a dog person.

I met my husband and my new daughter had allergies so the idea of a new cat was out of the question. Pearl is now somewhere around 15 years old and hasn’t had a sibling in 8 years. My husband looked forward to the day when we didn’t have cat hair on everything, hairballs randomly left on the carpet, or cat poop just outside the box. She’s old, but we all get old and someone had to clean up. He says he doesn’t care about her, but I see him pet her. He cleans up after her. If nothing else, he knows I love her.

I’d be the one who’s a dog person without a dog. And then I heard about Kitty Noir…

My dear friend is going to drive the newest member of my family home. My husband won’t let me tell the kids yet because he’s worried something may come up and it may fall through, but, well, it won’t.

Cats have a way of finding me.

So welcome Kitty Noir! And what a great reason to finally get to meet one of my favorite people.

Since I’m not yet allowed to tell the kids, I thought my son would try for the name “Anakin”. Yet tonight when I asked him what he would name a kitten, hypothetically of course, he responded “Black Widow”. Ick. Then he said, that’s kind of a girl name. “Flash. Flash is better anyway.”

I like Inky. My husband has no comment, and I’m waiting for the other two kids to weigh in once I can tell them. In the meantime, what do you think we should call this sweet little cat? Puppy?

 

Satisfaction

It was 95 degrees today and is set to be hotter tomorrow. There is pugilism in the air. Have you noticed it? People are touchy, the space has become too close, why is it the person with body odor is always the one walking in front of you?

There is a moodiness in coworkers, a discontent and yet we all appreciate having a job. In this economy, we’d be crazy not to. Yet…yet. The humid, swampy days of summer bear down. In Illinois, we spend the better part of winter frozen in our discontent, housebound except for those commutes in snow and ice, praying to just make it to the train, no less on time.

Then summer comes and you are no sooner out of the shower than you are covered in a layer of sweat. With the air on.

My husband and I had just bought our first house and there was a notebook laying on the table. I flipped it open so that I could put it wherever it should go. I did not know it was my husband’s journal. There was the date and one sentence,  “Lyra is never satisfied”.

We weren’t married yet. I closed it immediately feeling hurt and angry, but also horrified that I had stumbled across it. Who would leave it on the dining room table? The curiosity for what else was inside ate away at me, but I didn’t read another word. I believe in the privacy of the written word until you choose to share it.

I told him what I did, and he believed me. I don’t know I would have believed him were the situation reversed. Now, this may seem melodramatic, but in my world, there is nothing more violating than someone reading your written thoughts, unasked. When I was a kid, I kept a diary and my mom read it. She rooted it out of its hiding place and read it, then proceeded to make passive commentary until passive skipped the passive-aggressive phase and she went straight into aggressive. It was horrible. I wrote the things that a kid would write. They were unkind. They were private. She never admitted to it, but that was the last diary I kept. Ever.

My husband explained what he meant (which was in fact that I am never satisfied), but my initial reading came with a chip on my shoulder. That I was a difficult, complaining, miserable human being. But my husband even in his own thoughts, means what he says. He explained that I am always striving and trying to make things better. I don’t rest peacefully for long, I need challenges no matter how much I tell myself I want to live in a state of zen. I push constantly.

The downside to all of this pushing is I end up running a marathon (or two) injured, willing myself to the end. Most people would have started with the 5K. I think about a great idea for a short story, but then it turns and twists and you guessed it, a novel is born. I bite off more than I can chew and then am devastated when I fail. I am, in fact, never satisfied.

I think I’ve gotten better. I’ve tried to loosen up about money, and the constant fear that I’ll lose my job. I try to come to terms with the idea that it’s all out of my control and one shouldn’t live in this state of anxiousness. It isn’t healthy.

I try to put comments from others in different contexts to see if it’s me who has the chip on my shoulder or is being over sensitive. Even if it’s not me, there is nothing to lose by giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Everyone has a bad day every now and again.

We all have struggles and triumphs and really, my only point here is to take a deep breath and sit outside in the shade with a spray bottle full of ice water. Sit and be still. Watch the wildlife. Count your breaths. Mist yourself when the heat bears down and feel the cool air as it hits your skin. Really feel it. Listen to the kids screaming at a distance and thank God they aren’t yours this time. Think how grateful you are that there hasn’t been rain as you haven’t had to mow. Think about how easy it is to hold the door open for the next person, or to say thank you when someone does it for you.

After all, it’s summer. The popsicles are cold, the hot dogs are warm, and the beer has been sitting in the cooler just long enough that when you reach in the ice water to grab the one on the bottom, your fingers throb just a little. And that is satisfaction.

Beauty

A Family of Ducks Out For a Moonlight Swim

Beauty.

It takes five days with no makeup, no shower, just layer after layer of bug spray and the daily rinse of cold lake water to make one reevaluate where they’re going. This is my official survey with, well, myself.

The amazing thing about digital cameras is that they are instant gratification. The blurry photos are deleted along with the really horrible ones of ourselves. They disappear as if they never existed.

Then there are the other shots.

I was fortunate to have not one, but two of my dearest friends come up to spend the day at the lake, towing their two children apiece. I held rank with three kids, both the youngest at a month shy of three, and the oldest at eleven. Five kids stood between them.

I am a waterbaby. As far back as I can remember, I could swim and would spend the weekends of my childhood up at the lake, underwater most of the time, swimming until I was interrupted for food or because someone deigned that I should take a break. I’m the grown up that kids want at the lake with them, because when they ask if they can go in (the rule being that no kids can be in the lake unless a grown up is physically in the water), I am the one to say, “Let’s go.”

At one point my oldest son in his lifevest, and one of the girls, eight years old and swimming with a pool noodle convinced me to swim with them across the cove. Let’s go. Mid-cove, I see how far it is to either side and see my two friends wading in the water up to their thighs, hair pretty and sunglasses on, as they chat away. I look around and see I’ve got my daughter and youngest in a raft, and four others swimming their hardest with their floats of varying shapes and sizes. The only one missing was one friend’s oldest boy, nine years old and sitting on the porch in a rocking chair engrossed in Harry Potter. These are my people.

It took about 45 minutes for the swim. We got to the other side, stood on the rocky, silty wading area to catch our breath for the return trip. We made it back and by then my husband was in the water tossing the kids as far as he could, limbs flying in the air as the kids tried to be the one who could be in the air the longest, make the biggest splash, all the while shouting, “My turn!”

IPhones were passed around with pictures of dogs, and husbands absent and seven kids got to see three women who adore each other. I had the privilege of getting to know my best friends’ kids and to see that our children, although their own people, are in fact so much like us. There was a built in comfort level as their quirks and tics were in line with each of our own.

My daughter whipped out some nail polish and was painting baby chicks on a new friend’s nails, my son was following around another girl who loves Star Wars as much as he and dressed up as Spiderman for Halloween. My youngest followed around “the pink girl” as he affectionately called the one closest in age, an older woman of four. He was smitten. She’s the only one who has been up before and my baby was taken with her last year as she was with him referring to him thus, “Mom? When are we going to see that guy, M.?” My at the time almost two year old was already “that guy”. He and his brother have fallen for sisters who are as different as they are.

When I flipped through the pictures after they had gone, I was struck by how much I had aged, my skin covered in sunspots that have become par for the course after my last pregnancy, my eyes bloodshot from the lake water and newfound allergies, my body puffy in a one-piece, the largest I’ve ever been.

And for the first time ever, I saw something else. I saw a group of kids who had fun with me because we went on a grand swimming adventure. I didn’t think once about parading around in my bathing suit because fun was to be had and I was the ringleader. I saw two of the best friends a girl could have, and the different shapes and sizes we’ve been over the, in one case, thirty-six years of friendship. I kept flipping through pictures and I saw the kids and me building fires, playing a game in the sand pit, taking a walk and listening to my mom try to get a bullfrog in a swamp to speak to her. When he did, he was quickly referred to as Grandma’s boyfriend.

I saw a woman who has had trouble seeing herself as she is. All I could see was how different I’ve become physically. But now I see so much more. I am a writer who has put more time and energy into her WIP than any other single thing in her non-mom life. I’m a mom, a wife, a daughter, a sister and a good, good friend. When kids are around me, they all become mine. M’s four-year old girlfriend pulled me aside to have me tell her mom that she could come back and pick her up tomorrow. She’d just stay here with me thankyouverymuch.

The only way to move forward is to look at yourself warts and all. And then see the rest.

I’m a huge proponent of telling other people to treat themselves the way they would a friend, with the same compassion, truth and love. Although there are many things I want to change, need to change, I finally feel like I get it. For the first time I feel like it’s possible because until this moment, this moment of seeing the good stuff, changing the other became yet one more thing on my neverending to-do list.

But that’s not why we should change. We should change because doing so will bring more joy, not less.

And because somewhere out there are people who love you as you are, warts and all.

You should too.