speak softly….

Thirteen reasons why I love her so:

1.  The way she sleeps with her feet sticking out, and a blanket wrapped around her head.

2.  Her beautiful hands, busier and busier every day.

3.  That she was student of the month in April, but was too preoccupied with something that interested her to hear the announcement over the PA.

4.  How her teachers this year have recognized her strengths, and applauded them.

5.  The loyalty and devotion she shows her friends.

6.  How talented, creative and original she is.  Honestly, one of a kind.

7.  Her sense of humor.

8.  Her (great) taste in music.

9.  Her love of books.

10.  What a great writer she is, gifted and unique.

11.  Her sweetness, and her saltiness too.

12.  Her style.

13.  Her love of life, from the chance to walk alone to school, to laughing in the dark at night.

Happy birthday, Josie Girl.  We love you.

Readers of this blog, friends and family members know how much I love the library, where, as my friend M. likes to say, “the angels are.”  On the weekend, the Husband and the Girl will rib me about going back to the “office” when we pull into the lot on a Sunday.  Last week, I told the Girl that we didn’t need to visualize a parking space on busy Sunday afternoons anymore, I’d been assigned a spot.  For a moment, she believed me.

Yesterday, I pulled up to the library ready for a day of writing and reading only to see the lot full of film crew vehicles:  semis, trailers, even a crane towering above the library’s three stories.  I barked some sort of complaint to myself about the annoyance, then gathered my things to forge on.  By the front door, it became clear that the crew had in fact moved in to the library, setting up lights and cameras and directors’ chairs in the large, central reading room.  I had a book to renew and two books on hold waiting for me at the circulation desk but when I approached, it was equally evident that the entire library staff had been replaced by actors–none of whom could help me with my books on hold or my renewals–and that I had walked into a scene by stepping up to the circulation desk in the first place.

“It’s a show called H—,” one of the “real” librarians informed me, once I’d given up at the circulation desk and headed past the reference desk to my usual spot.  “It’s about a gym teacher who moonlights as a male prostitute to make ends meet.”

Another friend insists that the library has strayed so far from its defined course that he can barely handle waiting in line behind someone wanting to check out DVD’s.  “The library,” he told me yesterday, “is for finding books no longer in print, preferably by using a card catalog.”  We lamented the ways in which the library has come to be abused, although part of me realizes that the library is probably the rightful inheritor of the Greek Agora.  It’s the perfect meeting place–for coffee and the exchange of ideas–and if books have now become a bit of library lagniappe, then so be it.  I’ll always come first for the books, even if in some cities others are now coming to the library to order and pick up their groceries.   Honestly, I’ve never met a librarian I didn’t like, or who didn’t have truly wacky and creative ideas for how best to use resources, and reach out.

And yet, the film shoot yesterday had even some librarians shaking their heads.  “I’d like to know which character–the gym teacher or the prostitute–is using the library in this scene?” I asked one of them.  She just smiled and shrugged her shoulders.  “I have no idea.”  A friend later suggested it was perhaps the gym teacher, researching kinesiology.  That answer did not account for the actor’s fancy suit and tie.  Apparently, the show itself was a bit confused over their presence in the library, despite the obvious effort that went into bringing the actors into its realm.   In the scene I watched them shoot (and reshoot, and reshoot), the dialogue went a little like this:

GYM TEACHER/PROSTITUTE:  “Why are we meeting in a library anyway?”

GYM TEACHER/PROSTITUTE FEMALE COUNTERPART: “Because she WANTED to meet here.”

LIBRARY PATRONS LOUDLY SSSHHH HER.

My friend who works the courtyard espresso bar at the library decided that the ironies were so layered, we could not possibly untangle them.  But consider this:  a show that sends a message that because you can’t earn enough money as a gym teacher, you have to make ends meet by becoming a prostitute, finds its way to the library for a film shoot, which, as several librarians mentioned yesterday, brought “good money” into the library system, so strapped for cash it is now closing every branch but one on Sundays.  Perhaps my friend is right, perhaps those ironies ought not to be untangled.

Meanwhile, look for my back in the upcoming episode.  I’m the one in the very worn brown corduroy jacket, trying to get an actor’s attention at the circulation desk.

I’ll be speaking at an event next week in which I intend to talk about instincts, and intuition, and what they mean when you’re the mother of a disabled child, how to rediscover them when the old ways aren’t sufficient.  This has me thinking, naturally, of how intuition and instinct come into play with writing in general, how they guide us through the dark territory of  placing words on a page.

In the book I’m working on, a mother puts her teenage son at risk because of the truths she is unwilling to accept about herself and her past.  The present time of the story becomes an accounting, more or less, of these past deceits.  She knows she is hiding, and lying–much of this is apparent on a pure plot level–but I’m learning, as I write my way into her son’s jeopardy, that what this mother has done is deny her own intuitions, fan them away as if they weren’t true or didn’t matter.  She believes she can escape them, run from them, and by so doing, make them not true.  I’m not sure why, but today her denial strikes me as the existential problem she’s meant to work out.

And too, that it’s the problem of writing itself, how to keep on when we have no idea why we’re doing it, if it will all add up.  And how that same intuition and instinct tells us there is, in fact, a reason for doing it.  This mother has planned her escape over and over, and yet she returns (somewhat literally) to the scene of the crime repeatedly, knowing, I believe, that there is something crucial she is meant to understand about herself.  When the writing is going well, it too gives us this necessity of return, a similar promise of insight.

“At home, the house was dark, the street quiet.  Somehow, Peter had trained them well.  Despite Gilda’s obvious misstep in the bank, they’d survived the first few hours without being caught.  Luna moved quietly through the kitchen, using only the glow of the stove’s clock to guide her to the back stairs, up to the cold second floor, past the old man’s closed door and into the safety of her room.  That word again:  safety.”

In the dark, safety.

Up early to write:

Note the new binder.  I’m such a fan of binders, and loose leaf, for writing drafts I really ought to add a tag, and start marking the posts in which I mention BINDER and LOOSE LEAF.  I was in the car at pick up last week, before spring break, realized I had some thoughts on an essay beginning, and wished I had some good note paper on which to write them down.  Lo and behold, I had with me a DIFFERENT BINDER (this one for school) and LOOSE LEAF and was able to scribble a good four pages before the Girl arrived.

Also note the drawing the graces the new BINDER.  This is a nifty colored pencil sketch the Girl must have done in about first or second grade, one I kept and for which I have found great use.   On the back is a strange catalog she created around the same time.  It reads, “nature-sea-bumpy-bubble-volcanos-hard” and under that heading is a list of items that fit each category, with “teeth” appearing twice.  A fitting picture and list for what is finding its way inside the binder, words from my head to the page, that include not one but two book ideas, like the two heart-shaped flowers in the sketch.  More to come, as thing shape and form on the LOOSE LEAF.

And an impromptu afternoon at the beach:

We went to visit the Husband at his new job, one that put us in striking distance of the water.  It turned out to be a glorious day to walk along the waves, even if we didn’t have suits, chairs, umbrellas or a towel.  Imagine–the beach in April, 73 degrees, with loads of folks in the water.

A slow week, but a fine one.  This morning, one last frozen pizza in the oven, a lunch date for the Girl, and me, a bit of typing up of the LOOSE LEAF.

When Evan died, a friend gave us a lovely Japanese magnolia tree to plant in our yard.  The tree came to us in bloom, with tender white blossoms and delicate green leaves.  I kept it in a pot that fall and winter, watching my yard’s light to find exactly the right spot with the proper amount of open shade.  That spring, I thought I found a spot, and put it in the ground, only to discover that the tree was too much in the sun, all day.  The leaves burnt, then fell off.  After a week, I dug a new hole and hoped I’d remedied the problem.

The tree survived briefly, sprouting some new buds and leaves, but by September the leaves had turned again–first yellow, then red, then brown–only to fall.  Each day I felt the tree’s bare branches to see if I they seemed soft, and still alive.  I asked my gardener about it, and he said, “Yes, it’s fine.”  But those same bare branches continued to torment me.  Had I killed the tree?  Was it still not in the right spot?

As I was leaving the gym one afternoon, that same fall, I saw a tree with leaves turning the same golden, yellowy red, and recognized instantly this tree as the same as the one  in my front yard, the one I felt certain I had mishandled.  Several of this same tree’s leaves had dropped to the ground below.  My east coast roots had no trouble realizing that this tree, with its changing leaves and bed of fallen comrades, was, in fact, deciduous.

Last week, I pulled into my driveway to see the tree was back, suddenly, definitively, with a healthy crown of newly-sprouted leaves.

No bare branches any more.

Today is World Autism Awareness Day.  In honor of the tree, very much alive, and  what it taught me about patience, and how to look, I’m giving away a copy of My Baby Rides The Short Bus, a new anthology that offers fresh and wonderful insights into what it means to be the parent of a child with disabilities.  Leave a comment and I’ll pick a name.