My Earliest Memories

Lady Slippers (closer)

I have to admit, I'm not sure what my very earliest memory is, so I'll just go with what I can just manage to call up.



We lived in Amherst, New Hampshire at the time, on a bend in a road called Cross. My father had the house built when I was born, while my mother stayed in Washington, DC with her parents. And then, when I was 6 weeks old, off we went to the sticks -- my city-dwelling grandparents' opinion, not my own parents'.



Obviously I don't remember that part. What I remember is warmth and sunshine, birch trees we peeled the bark from (we called them the Paper Trees). There were Lady Slippers in the forest, creeping up on the firepit there. I never did learn who made that firepit and I have no memory of anyone in the neighborhood ever using it. I just know it was there and we weren't allowed to play in it.



I remember wild blueberry bushes on the slope in the front yard -- the house was on a hill -- and I remember being out there with my friends, our mothers sending us to the slope with our sandbox buckets to collect the fruit. It wasn't a chore. They were just getting us our of their hair for a while.



I remember our babysitter from across the street, a teenage girl who were so thrilled would even talk to us. I remember one time she was blowing bubbles and one popped right in my eye. And of course at 4, you think everyone does everything on purpose. I can still feel my temper break over that one.



I remember Kevin, the other kid across the street, who I was going to marry. Because, you know, he had really cool toys and we were the same. Didn't exactly work that way, but you know. At the time, it was everything.



Someone in the neighborhood had a Saint Bernard. For some reason I remember riding him. I don't know if that actually happened or I wanted it to, but he was a seriously large animal and I've always been a tiny human. It might have happened.



There was a lot of snow.



I remember the inside of the house, and eating cake donuts at the kitchen table with my father at the crack of dawn. My dad's ubiquitous breakfast of cinnamon donuts and black coffee. I tried the coffee and I remember being intrigued by it. Can't drink it that way now, though. He's since told me he learned to drink it black in the Army, because he had no choice. I keep telling he does now and he just grins at me.



We had a backdoor with the sun shining through and I would sit in that warm sunlight and just bask, like a lizard. Come to think of it, I still do that when I can.



The swing my father hung from the tree in the backyard. It was a rope and board affair, hung over the enormous branch on the enormous tree. Funny that the tree was there at all. By today's building standards the whole site would have been cleared, the lumber sold off, puny saplings anchored too firmly for their own good put down in its place. But we got lucky, and had a 100-year-old tree in the backyard, with a rope swing and a canopy of blessed shade and birds and my friend Wendy's cats lurking at the bottom waiting on them.



We had two cats of our own, Samson and Delilah. And a dog, Pepe, which was apparently short for Potage Poulet. Yes, someone named the dog Chicken Soup. I remember the dog being big and friendly, and Samson too, and Delilah getting up on the roof of the house so that my dad had to go get her. Probably used that tree to do it. She ate a lot of those birds, as it turned out.



And then, one day, we moved. Back to the Washington DC area, back to a better salary for my father, and into years of readjusting for me. I didn't handle it well; I had an accent, I had an attitude, and I hated the heat of the DC area. All this at age 4! It had to happen and I managed. But I still love lady slippers. And I miss that tree.

The Book I Just Couldn't Like

I wanted to like this book. I mean, I really, really wanted to like this book. The lead character, Simon Ziele is an intriguing character, smart, compassionate and driven. He has a great backstory well worth mining for his current experience of the world: a detective who's permanently disabled when he fails to save his own fiancee from a ferry disaster, a man who's somewhat fled from the only world he's ever known to try and find some peace, only to have that world come and get him in the form of a brutal murder he's assigned to solve. So much great emotional stuff to work through as Ziele struggles to solve both the crime and what the crime could possible mean to him personally.



But...something's just missing here. It's a murder mystery, 32 chapters worth, and I had it figured out by chapter 9. I think that's probably a bad sign, even with the slight "twist" at the end, the involvement of a character I did not suspect -- but only because that character isn't mentioned for most of the book. That left me feeling cheated after I'd spent so much time frustrated that I could see what the author refused to allow Ziele to recognize.



Compounding this is the brittle, nervous fourth wall in this book, that allowed me to see the characters moving about and thinking, but prevented me from knowing how they feel -- even when the emotions are described, precisely because they are described instead of shown and shared. I wanted to be in Ziele's head and to walk alongside his heart as he began to come to terms with his loss and how that loss affected his view of himself.



But the author only allowed me to get so close before she pulled back, especially in those scenes involving male-female interactions. Almost as though she feared the outright expression of emotion might taint her story. Again and again, we're swallowed up by the motions of the mystery, even when it's not even an issue any longer.



Put it to you this way, and this is spoilery so fair warning now: Ziele gets the perp and saves the girl. Remember that he lost the first girl. This moment should be massive for him, a dreadful replay he's forced to face for the good of everyone, including himself. He failed his lover and saved a woman he barely knows. That's affecting.



And during the scene, the author glides right over this like it doesn't even matter.



This book ended up disappointing me because it didn't fulfill it's promise to itself and therefore me. I'm struggling to learn to write too, and God knows I've made some of these same mistakes. All of them, actually. I'm not posting this as a know-it-all. I'm saying, rather, that it probably takes one to know one. It's true: when you spot it, you got it. I'm just disappointed that I spotted so much so soon, when this character and this book could have been so very much more.



And because of that, I really will read Pintoff's follow-up, A Curtain Falls. Like I said, I really like the character, and characters are always what keep me reading long after the narrative doesn't give me what I think I came for. He has so much potential. And I hope Pintoff cuts loose and lets Ziele's heart run as fast as his feet.

"Brainstorm the plot for a novel," Plinky says

What? Just one?

Mmmk. Irish immigrant travels as hired hand in wagon train west to Oregon. During the journey he loses his employer to cholera, but gains a ward — wife, maybe? — when one young woman’s father or husband dies of it too. Out of this wagon train there’s only a handful of survivors. Maybe this includes a young woman and her newborn who need a lot of help getting across with all that stuff. Maybe this is the ward/woman he meets — by the way, I’m saying ward only because initially he’s not looking to get married or have a family or any of that crap. He’s only interested in getting somewhere close to California — he wants gold and opportunity, and clearing massive forests to grow vegetables in the rain isn’t his idea of a good time.

But he’s a man of honor and decency, even if he hates that about himself, and so he sticks it out all the way to Oregon City. Maybe he does this because he’s one of only two or three men left; maybe everyone else is women and children. Maybe some of the other men died from mishaps, which were frequent (and often operator error LOL). On the way it dawns on him that if he can pass himself off as the husband of one of these women, he can actually own land for the first time in his life, and make something of his life that way. He’s the son of tenant farmers and laborers, who’ve been lucky just to own a suit of clothes. And then to own his own land?! Might be tempting.

Or maybe not. I don’t know him well enough yet. Maybe he leaps in thinking this is the sensible thing to do, and then when it comes time to make it happen he realizes he’s betrayed not only himself, but the woman he conned into lying for him. So what does he do? Does he bloom where he’s planted or does he take off and look for something more to his temperament? Maybe he’s never farmed because at heart, he’s no farmer.

So let’s say he gives in to his wanderlust and takes off. Does he abandon the woman or does he drag her and any children along with him, because while he can’t sit still he can’t quite be an abandoning ass either? I don’t know. If he goes by himself, then he’s got to think about what he’s done at least a little. Maybe he lies to himself that he’s earning money to bring back to the people he’s abandoned, just to keep the guilt at bay.

Maybe he earns a truckload of money and gets completely mugged, seriously brutalized. Maybe this makes him realize that he’s been using other people. Maybe he doesn’t care. But if he does, then he goes back to her to apologize and we find out whether she can forgive him, or if she’s moved on. What if she has, and he has to leave again? Maybe this is the point, that this journey has taught him to bloom where he’s planted, or at least care enough to include those who care about him in his plans. Maybe the point here is to learn that no man is an island, or that his actions have consequences, or even more basically, it’s not all about him.

Or maybe this is just a pile of hooey. I’d have work on it more. :)

Text ©22 August 2010 Margit Marselas.

My Super-Pet! Huzzah!

Wonder...um...triplet powers activate!



Form of...a Badger...and a Tiger...and an Elephant!



No, really. It'll work. Trust me!



Excelsior!

What I know about not being authentic...so far.

Well, I must say, I’ve had the 8 months from Hell.  And this may get a little confessional, so hang on tight.

I started the year with a friendship going down the toilet. The details aren’t important, except for this one: this far down the road, I can see that my contribution to its failure was my unconscious unwillingness to be fully honest or true. I played it safe and did what I thought I “should,” some of me showing…but most of me not. None of it done with malice, but a lie of omission is still a lie, and therefore does the same level of damage. Maybe even more, at the end of the day.

I cannot and should not portray myself as anything other than who I am, either to myself or anyone else. And yet in order to please another person I did exactly that, without even thinking. Without thinking or even being aware of it, I morphed into what I assumed I should be, instead of just relaxing and letting things happen. Please note the word assumed. It’s there for a reason.

Now it would be easy to blame someone else for teaching me that, but this part is my responsibility. I’m not a victim here nor did I victimize anyone else, and I can say that with a straight face because I never meant to harm anyone. Quite the opposite, sadly. But I screwed up anyway because I failed to be honest with anyone, including me.

I will say one thing for it, though: it forced me to completely re-examine how I treat everyone, including myself. And that has lead me to completely re-examine how I go about structuring my life.

Ok, that and the horrible financial aftershocks of several job-related mishaps.

The details here aren’t necessary. What’s necessary is the realization that the common denominator in all this unhappiness is a rather unhappy and unfulfilled me. It’s nothing so external and banal as an unhappy marriage or any other obvious signs of midlife. Sadly, it’s nothing so easy.

It’s the understanding that I have been lying to me about me.

For about ten years now I have been denying me to myself, out of the fear that my essential self couldn’t possibly be up to snuff. Mostly this is about being a Good Mother, but there is more. I’d like to emphasize that this is not me taking the opportunity to cry about how much time I’ve lost and if only I understood I was ok just as I am! Yes, but also: waaa-waa-waa. I’m just saying that at some point after the birth of my first child I seem to have made an unconscious assumption that I need to “grow up” and “act like a Mom.” You see why I started with the tale of my lost friend? Because I did the same thing to the whole world, and now everything’s a fucking maelstrom.

For ten years I’ve indulged in all kinds of self-denial and worse yet, self-indulgence — the kind that doesn’t actually get me anywhere. In fact, it’s dragged us all down the rabbit hole. Or is it rat hole? Doesn’t matter. What matters is I now have ten years’ worth of hole to dig us up out of. And I’m useless, really. I have the job skills of a plastic spoon and far less scheduling flexibility. I have no idea how this is going to work. It’s just that failure isn’t an option.

Because this isn’t about personal bravery and drama and knuckle-chewing, Heaven-gazing heroism.

Ugh.

No.

This is me realizing quietly and calmly that I’ve been walking an inadequate path, a route inside a blank hallway instead of out in the wide, untamed open. I’ve drowned myself in petty things at the cost of, well, nearly everything now. I’ve limited myself unnecessarily and denied myself possibilities because I thought I had to fit in — because I assumed I wasn’t acceptable as I was. No matter my long-standing history with this idea; it makes no difference how I became saddled with it. The point is, it’s here and I struggle with it, and then at times like this I realize it’s come to rule my entire life yet again. I stick myself in a too-small box and lash out with stupid ideas and even stupider decisions.

And then it finally dawns on me to stop pushing into the box in the first place.

Honestly, I have no idea if I even have a light to shine. It’s too easy to get mushy and say, “But we all do!” Well, yeah. And no. I hardly think I will ever be some twinkling fairy in the Forest of Amazing. I’m not even sure I would want to be. Right now I’d settle for a good night’s sleep. And I think in order to do that I need to stop once and for all, and make some real plans based on some real goals — some of them pragmatic and immediate, and some of them will be very long term. All of them coherent steps, finally. I’ve got to get a handle on these fears. Being afraid is how this whole mess started 10 years ago. This is just bullshit.

I have two weeks to go before my kids start school again and I will have some actual working hours to devote to this. Right now things are too crazy with them and their friends using my house like a way station. But once they do get going in school again, I will sit and I will plan.

Watch this space, because I may finally be ready.

Namaste.
xx mm