Not on the List

My name is Susan and I am a recovering snob. I’ll share.

My organization hosts, coordinates, promotes, sponsors and facilitates professional development events and meetings for educators. Because we’re a small, no-frills, not-for-profit outfit, this requires me to get off my high horse and be event-Cinderella – serve a few lunches, and do a few dishes from time to time. I don’t mind this role because I’m so grateful to have found this workplace, it feels good to feel sorry for myself now and then.

It’s easy to carry out this task effortlessly because our little office pantry is always stocked with boxes-grande of everything I need to get the job done. These boxes-grande come from Sam’s Club – the jumbo warehouse store that sells everything in quantities of five thousand and looks on the inside like they never quite finished the building. A Sam’s Club membership is required to shop there, and only two of our staff have one. For several months, this has allowed me to offer to go “if only I could.”

I don’t like most stores to begin with but I really don’t like warehouse stores that feel like airport hangars, have bad lighting and are high and wide enough to have indoor birds. If I have to be in a store, I want it to look nice, smell nice, sound nice, and preferably sell shoes somewhere on the floor.

I’d rather go to Saks than Macy’s

I’d rather go to Macy's than JC Penny

I’d rather go to JC Penny than WalMart

I’d rather go to Walmart than Toys R Us

I’d rather go to Toys R Us than the dentist

That's not true. I’d rather go to the dentist.

I'd rather go to Toys R Us than to the emergency room with a head wound

But I’d almost rather go to the emergency room with a head wound than Sam’s Club.

I never wanted a Sam’s Club membership or one of those Sam’s Club IDs that make everyone look like they’ve been apprehended for a serious crime. It was my plan to continue leaving for the rest room when the subject of “getting Susan a Sam’s Club membership” was raised by staff/members.

A few weeks ago, my co-worker Bernice (who understands me almost like my mother does and likes me anyway) handed me a form and said something like, “You’ve been offering to go to Sam’s, so I got you a form for membership.” She sipped her coffee and said, “You should probably make a list.” Then she turned around and laughed up her sleeve.

My first shop was yesterday and my first stop was at the membership desk where my photo was taken while I was looking at someone walking by. Then, I went looking for paper plates and found the ones I needed in a sealed crate several hundred feet above my head. I moved on to bottled water and encountered the same situation. I couldn’t find the Granola bars at all, and the freezer bags came in crates of six units each. When I looked for someone in a smock who might help, I found nobody.

I went back to membership services and leaned on the counter. A worker came over and looked at me without saying anything.
“I need some help,” I explained, “I need dinner size plates that are too high for me to reach.”
“What kind of plates are they?” asked the worker.
“Dinner size, 10-and-something inches,” I said.
“But what make?”
“I don’t know, they’re blue around the edges.”
“You’re calling them dinner plates? Where did you find dinner plates?”
“No, dinner plate size,” I said. I motioned toward the left half of the store, “Over in that section.”
“What aisle?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know the type of plate or the aisle they’re in?” He spoke into his collar microphone, “John, got a woman who needs dinner plates and she doesn’t know what kind.” To me he said, “Glass or ceramic?”
“Paper.”
“You shoulda said paper. See, that's the difference. Paper plates, John,” he said to his collar. To me he said, “He’s on his way, let’s meet him halfway.”
We walked, and I asked the worker where the water and granola bars were. The worker said to me, “Not sure, but wait until you meet John. John knows everything about this store. Been here forever. Like the whole time the store’s been open. No question you ask he can’t answer. You’ll see. You want to know where something is? He’ll tell you. Like the granola bars. Just ask him.”
“Maybe he can just stay with me while I shop,” I said.
John met us halfway and the worker said, “Here’s the woman.”
John and I said hello.
“And she wants you to stay with her while she shops.”
John looked at me and quickly, I told him I was kidding. He led me to my plates, pointed out the other things, and I was on my way.

At the granola bars, I turned around and the other worker was standing there cradling two cases of water. He laid them in my cart. “So what else do you need?”
“Oh, you don’t have to do anything else,” I told him.
“But I thought you needed someone to stay with you,” he said.
Well.

Back in my car, I paused for a moment. I looked at the bumper sticker on a pick-up truck up in back of me which said “Pro-life Dad” and I watched a teenager enter the store, wheeling a huge cart. I saw two men talking who looked like they might be neighbors, and a scary looking guy with a zillion tattoos and an indoor pallor walk past them. I sat there for a while.

You can’t be a writer without getting in the business of life. You can’t be a writer and only venture into the kind of places that turn the price tags from view. You can’t be a writer and not look for the chance to be Everywhere.

Real life isn’t for snobs. But real life is for writers.

I forgot the Diet Coke. I’ll have to go back. But I know who to look for.

Long Term Love

A while back, when my friend Jordan, twenty-five today, was in the throes of a torturous relationship, we discussed the subject of love. What it was, what it wasn’t, what it looked like, what it didn’t.

“What do you think long-term love really means?” asked Jordan in one of those conversations.

For me, it was like wading into the middle of an ocean and remembering how to dog-paddle to offer perspective on this; you know that love is something you do and may do well, but can’t say why. You don’t remember learning how to love, and you can’t tell someone else how to do it. Trying to describe love is like telling someone over the phone how to walk.  He asked me to write about it Someday.

Well, my friend. It’s still only a dog-paddle, but here goes:

Love – real love – can’t be anything but long term in my humble opinion, because unlike lust, which is a function of attraction, love is a function of time – it can’t happen without it. Love isn’t born. It steeps. It becomes. The way we transition into who we are, so does love transition away from what it was in its younger period – lust, dependence, need, possessiveness, validation, passion – into what can be likened to a relationship with life itself.

Yes, even I had to read that again but it makes sense. Love is not a way of being with someone. Love is a way of enriching your own life, by enriching someone else’s. Love is wanting to know what makes someone who they are, finding out, and then believing in it with all your heart, because your own heart is who pointed them out to begin with. People find each other, fall in pre-love and make plans for you-know-what, while their hearts circle each other and say “not so fast.”

First, as I’ve already pointed out, before it is love it is the conditional, highly circumstantial, frequently confused, but never interchangeable experience of attraction when you are drawn – sometimes so powerfully and irresistibly that your respiratory system has to bang on the ceiling with a broom handle– to the outer Everythingness of someone; the look of them, or the way they walk into a room or make eye contact with others, or act around the elderly, or whatever. It is an experience you can see, smell, hear, touch, feel, and respond to for so long, you feel betrayed when it turns to you, thanks you for the party, and disappears, leaving only a void. If it’s love that keeps you enjoined, it’s barely noticeable when age and time change something about who you care for, much less is it a dealbreaker. Love doesn’t go off in a huff. Love turns a page of the newpaper and says, “I could really go for Lobster Thermidor tonight, doesn’t that sound good?”

Love isn’t conditional and it takes a long time for that to be true of even the deepest unions. It doesn’t vanish when looks fade, or when scales climb, or when jobs get lost because love is about your heightened respect for another person’s individuality without being forced to give up your own. Life can be crappy, can seem hopeless and endless and disappointing for one of you and sometimes the other must leave to remain whole . A good, strong pre-love may sigh and be willing to wait it out. But love helps you find your raincoat so you can walk into the storm at the side of your "other." You know you might both get wet, but you also know you'll dry out in time. Love does not create voids, love fills them.

Love doesn’t happen overnight, it doesn’t happen temporarily, and it doesn’t happen because we ask it to. But there are signs you’re dealing with someone whose heart talks the language of your own; someone who views life as you do, who understands who they are and doesn’t need you to complete them, who treats others with the respect, kindness and gentleness that you do. Cultivating love, celebrating it with such a person are both a matter of choice. But love is as determined as it is deliberate. If you try to make it leave, it says “You and what army?”

But the most wonderful thing about love, and because it’s your birthday Jordan, I’ll call it long-term love, is that as it transitions from the could-go-either-way period, to the place in your heart where it puts its bags down, it fills you not with worry, or fear, but with trust. For a little while, you may be aware that you’ve begun this slow, occasionally mystifying, sometimes painful, often joyful trip into your own heart. But then, with some surprise you’ll realize you’re far from where you started. You will look around, you will not see how you got there, you will not see the way back. But you’ll realize that only from there can you have the best view of someone else's heart.  Dear Jordan, when that happens, you will never want to leave.

With wishes for your happiest of birthdays, and with long term love,
Susan

Oh the Dreams We Dream

My sister’s recent post about dreams made me remember something from my big-hair, pencil-skirt days of olde. I love remembering anything from those days, even if I love these days more. It’s like hearing good things about your best friend from high school, even if you don’t want to run into her at the grocery store.

Back when I was Barbie-on-the-job, I worked with a woman who, unlike the rest of us twenty-something girls-about-town, was solemn and quiet and industrious and frankly, a little unnerving. She had very dark hair, an angular too-white face, and huge, dark eyes that always looked too hard at everyone. While my Barbie co-workers and I wore sweaters with belts around the middle, Frye boots and long straight skirts that we hoped made us look like Pam Dawber from Mork and Mindy, the gloomy one wore frumpy jumpers and turtlenecks and clogs and looked like Wednesday Adams. She was pleasant enough and we never talked about her in her absence but you also didn’t want to make eye contact or have a lengthy conversation with her, because she gave you that therapist stare while you spoke and then nodded when she should have been responding. She was more than unnerving. She was spooky. Her name was Merle.

One day I was holding court, talking about a dream I had which featured me and a runaway elevator. While everyone was saying things like, “Oh, I have that dream all the time, and the one about yelling but nothing comes out, and the other one about running away but not moving,” Merle stood off to the side making copies, nodding her spooky nod. When we all went back to work, she came over to my desk and stood there noiselessly until I sensed a “presence” and turned around.

“I interpret dreams,” she said.

“Okay?” I said, hoping the phone would ring.

“I know what your elevator dream means.”

“Oh,that,” I Barbie-said. “ I always wake up, it’s no problem.”

“You have it often then?”

“Only when I sleep on my back. Really, it’s fine.”

She left and went back to her dimly lit fortune-tellery office which I had been avoiding like eye contact.

But my curiosity took over. About an hour later, armed with a document which doubled for an excuse to visit, I went in and said awkward-cheerfully, “So! How long have you been interpreting dreams?” She got right to the point. “People make the mistake of thinking literally about their dreams,” she said. “Dreams aren’t television shows. They are symbolic. You were not in the elevator. You were the elevator. How long have you been feeling like someone cut your cables?”

“Oh,” I said, “No, it wasn’t like that. That was definitely me in the elevator. I was wearing my beige corduroy skirt with the flaps over the pockets, and these boots. It was definitely me.” She nodded and I nodded and then I praised her “gift” and went to find Hansel on the path.

But it stayed with me that day, and later into the week, and then beyond. Whether it was insight, or an uncanny “read,” it was accurate. In life, I was in exactly the position she described, trying to be all things, for all people, all the time. Afraid that the smallest of wrong moves would send me in all directions. Frayed cables. It worked at my outlook like a splinter under the skin until I made Serious changes in my perspective. I calmed my life and I didn’t have the elevator dream again.

If you are lucky enough to dream, pay attention. You might be the traffic jam, or the lightening in the sky, or the crowd that wanders the street. But there are answers in there and we’re never too old to need answers about Everything. We’re old when we run out of questions.

Now go and check your own cables. Make sure they’re good and tight and if not, get them serviced.

Yes, you

If we’re lucky, very lucky, lucky-grande, there comes a time when our inner lives quiet enough for a talent, or skill, or interest to rise above the din and capture our imagination. It can be cooking or dancing or painting, but when this happens, we must fall in love – unconditionally – because like love does, expressions of ourselves come to life in the soul and ask for nothing but to be heard. If we don’t respect them, or at least try and understand them, they wither. If we make the sad mistake of believing a passion is valid only as long as it can be marketed, it will go back to its place in the soul and it will die there.

Writing was something I enjoyed more than I wanted to sell. Then it became something I wanted to sell more than I enjoyed. When the first two books failed, I considered giving it up. And then, I realized writing wasn’t a product to develop, or a way to make money. Writing was a way to feel my own life. Do I want to sell my writing? Absolutely. Is it hard work and disappointing and maddening and thrilling? Absolutely ++. But only one is a function of the other.

For those who need the advice ( yes, you) look at it like this:

If you had a beautiful child, who sang like a bell, who was praised by everyone you knew, whose future was brilliant…a child in whom you saw yourself and for whom you’d do anything, and finally, in caring for whom you felt a little more alive each day, would it all go away when that child came to you to explain that it was only for you that she wanted to sing at all?

Never stop hearing the voice of your own soul.

The Last Driver

With every “first” in a child’s career as an independent person-in-training comes a “last” for a parent; the first time a child takes his or her own shower without needing help with the water temp, the first time a child gets him or herself up in the morning, does his or her own laundry, prepares h/h own meal…etc. I know this can make us sad in those “where did the time go” moods, but when that happens, we need to think of the gains: child feels independent, parent gets to leave fewer tasks unfinished to tend to another one. It also helps to think of what is harder time-passing-wise, like accidentally wearing your readers into the bathroom when you’re not looking your best, face-wise.

When I was a tightly scheduled parent with to-do lists that had to be stapled together, who didn’t serve a meal during baseball/basketball/soccer season before 7:45 p.m., and who didn’t attempt to socialize before the weekend, I was not only unsentimental about anything I could off-load as the children grew up, I looked forward to it.

Until age-wise, they were ready to drive.

It’s like looking at a pre-verbal child and trying to imagine them speaking a whole sentence to visualize a fourteen or fifteen-year-old sitting earnestly behind the wheel with their ten-and-two hands. It’s astonishing. It’s not astonishing when you’re staring at the headlights of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler saying, “hug the right, HUG THE RIGHT!!” It’s astonishing later when you’re thanking God for making other drivers stay home so that when your child veered left explaining (incorrectly) “I have the right of way here,” you were not both in the paper the next day under a bad headline.

Forget rules of the road and passenger seat coaching. We are how we drive. If we’re careful, considerate people, we’re right-laners. If we overbook, and need more hours in the day, we speed. If we write fiction, we daydream and wonder how we got there as we shut off the engine. Sam is adorable and funny and smart and makes my day better just by getting up in the morning. He’s also a person who doesn’t pick up his room, leaves his dishes in the sink, takes care of too many last minute tasks in the morning and keeps his clothes on the floor next to an empty hamper. I imagined he’d be a careless, fast driver, too hurried to tend to the details.

It’s good to be wrong sometimes. Halfway through our second trip with Sam at the wheel, I realized we were talking like we do when I myself am at the wheel only with fewer near-catastrophes. He maneuvered past cyclists, he did not clip the side view mirror of a car parked three feet from the curb on a narrow road, he came to a complete stop to look in all directions when there was nobody in sight, he slowed past walkers. In the tight spots, he hummed to himself while he navigated his way through, a coping skill he developed long ago, at around the same time he wanted me to stop solving all his problems.

We are how we drive. So apparently, while I was picking up Sam’s room and loading the dishwasher and complaining about how I used to run a business before I became a maid that nobody appreciates, he was honing other skills – balance, pace, observation, perspective, control – all the Everything we need to stay alive on the road – and off.

Mommy at large

I went mommy-ing over the weekend, and it paid off. I’ll share.

Very soon, after I make my detective expert’s edits and read my book again and have a long talk with it on the porch about its journey and how to behave when I’m not there, I will be sending the first five pages to agents far and wide. God willing, several will put down their coffee and contact me immediately to request additional material. And with this possibility looming, what is the one thing I have run out of? Yes, paper. So I went to Staples, a place I heart as much as I heart Ann Taylor and possibly more, because things at Staples don’t go out of style or have to be tried on.

Under the influence of my high hopes I bought not a ream or two, but a box-grande of laser paper with six reams inside. With a decent amount of muscle, I carried it to the front, where, three days before every school in the land was to open, only two registers were open.

The line at Staples before school starts looks like this:

Behind each register stood a cashier with a name tag that said, “In Training.” My cashier in-training was Caitlin. When I took my place in line she had one customer in progress who was either a teacher or the mother of eight judging from the size of her order. Next, and in front of me, stood another woman buying toner cartridges. Periodically, Caitlin glanced over at the very long line that was forming with that unmistakable shell-shocked look of seasonal help – wide, unblinking eyes, hands hovering over the items stacked in front of her like she was putting out little fires. With each item she scanned and bagged, she reassured herself , “Okay, that’s all set,” before reaching for another. It took forever and I could no longer feel my arms.

But here is where I did not get frustrated. Here is where I thought about each of my daughters applying for their first jobs and about a mother like myself, who probably watched Caitlin hang up the phone after being hired, and said, like I would have, “Congratulations! They’ll love you!” At that point, Caitlin was not thinking about the hell that waited on this kind of a day. The hell that waited was the woman in front of me.

I watched as she grew agitated, the loud sighing, the watch-checking, and the shifting from one foot to the other while she muttered under her breath, “Unfreakingbelievable.” Then she turned to me: “Can’t believe this,” she said.

After another five or six minutes, Caitlin came to the end of the order and loudly enough for everyone to hear, the woman in front of me said, “Jesus, finally.” Caitlin asked her customer if she had a Rewards card to which the customer offered the dreaded response, “No, as a matter of fact, I don’t. Can I get one?” And Caitlin, looking like she’d now cry, scanned the floor for anyone wearing a red Staples tunic who might bail her out, but saw no one. “Sure, you can,” she soldiered on, pulling a binder from a shelf behind her.

The woman in front of me came undone. “What? WHAT? You’re going to do that NOW? With this FREAKING line? Are you KIDDING ME?”

While Caitlin kept her attention on the customer, the woman dropped her items on the floor in front of her and crossed her arms. “I can’t believe you’re doing this now,” she said three or four more times. She turned to me again.
“Can you believe this? Can you believe she’s doing this now?”
“It’s part of her job,” I said. “Give her a break. She’s new, she’s in training. Didn’t you read her tag?”
The woman stared at me so I asked, “What, you’ve never been new in a job? You think this is easy for her?”
“I should have gone to another line,” the woman said.
“You’re absolutely right,” I said, “Why don’t you just do that now?”
She gathered her things, swore a couple of times and stomped off.

I moved up and put my paper on the counter. “This will be a piece of cake,” I said to Caitlin, “And no, I don’t want a Rewards card.” With a smile of relief-grande Caitlin said, “Thank you.” But I was mommy-ing so I said, “You know, this is not easy what you’re doing, you’re very brave.” And she got a little teary then and said, “thank you for saying that.” I added, “And I think you’re doing a great job.” She smiled again and said thank you again and God said, “Okay, enough,” and so I signed my receipt and left.

Everyone needs a little mommy-ing now and then, and I’m just the mommy to do it.

Game called

My submission date of 9/1 has been rained out.

A couple of weeks ago, I submitted my manuscript to my detective expert, or, as I have been referring to him half-Seriously for some time, my detective. I asked him to check the police-y stuff, thanked him for his help, and I think I added a :)  too, because after all the praise I’d had from my circle of close friends and family, I was feeling secure-grande about this “work,” patting it on its cover before work, smiling at it on my way by, telling it I was proud of it, and so on.

:):):):):)
“Feel free to make suggestions,” I invited my detective expert to do in my breezy cover letter.
A couple of days went by. Nothing.
:):):):)
 My detective expert had become involved in something else, I considered. Probably he went out town and left the manuscript on his kitchen counter.

:):):)
The first email came shortly after that. After a nice beginning, it referred me to a particular chapter and page and said:
“This won’t work.”
:(
Another email followed:
“This isn’t factual.”
:(:(
And another,
“This wouldn’t happen.”
:(:(:(
And finally, a fourth,
“Just my opinion but..”
:(:(:(:(
In one case, he cited not just an error but an error that when fixed, would render the paragraph (which was damn funny when it was wrong) as interesting as a piece of wood. But he was was not only right, he was collaborative, offering a perfect detective-esque fix which was so smooth, it made me friend him on Facebook.

I haven’t heard from him since Thursday which means he either went out of town again, or loves the manuscript but has been too busy to tell me, or hates it and is asking his friends right now how they’d tell me my book sucks.

A couple of nights ago, I dreamed I was reading a review of my book in the Union Leader (it’s a start) and the headline said: “About a book that asks: Are we really alike in the ways that count? I can only reply: Who cares?” I woke up feeling like I’d been dropped from the top of the Serious tree.

I decided I would rewrite the book again. Then I woke up ++ and realized the man in my dream looked a lot like a vice president who hated me when we worked together in 1983. Then I woke up +++ and realized that if I write another book, it should be a first draft, not an eighth.

I remembered that it’s hard to be Serious, apologized to my book for thinking bad thoughts about it, and promised to give it those scenes it needs to be better. Then I realized that in my detective expert I have not a reader but a collaborator who is as Serious as I am. More than reading the manuscript he is examining it. Instead of saying, “Great read!” and blowing it off, he’s taking several hours of his life to help make it better.

I don’t have a critic. I have an ally.

It’s a heady experience to realize how much your family and friends love you, support your work, and will do whatever you ask to help you succeed. But in the end, it’s a lonely job to be Serious. Sooner or later you stop thinking about who will play the main character in the movie, and you go to work, hopefully with the email address of your friends and allies at the ready.

Thank you, Rick. Feel free to make suggestions, and I’m Serious.
:)