Sick days....

It's been coming on for a while. I've had a headache that most closely resembles a giant needle stuck into the back of my brain. I've been tired. I've been cranky. I've been achy all over. I knew that I was in for something miserable.

I woke up yesterday with a fever and a cough and feeling as if a truck had driven over me during the night. A visit to my doctor confirmed that I had a virus. Not the flu, luckily, but a garden variety bug that has moved in and set up housekeeping.

His advice was to go to bed and stay there. I decided to heed it.

I don't like being sick. I feel helpless and ineffective. I feel like I should be doing something besides watching HGTV all day and dozing off.

But my doctor pointed out to me that in this day and age, people seldom allow their bodies enough rest to heal. It made perfect sense to me.

Besides, I no longer have little kids who need to be tended all day. They are semi-adults now and can, presumably, fend for themselves. I have a fantastic teaching assistant who can take care of things when I am out of school, and everything else, I suppose, can wait for a few days.

So, with my husband out of town and both kids at school, I came home from the doctor, put on my warmest pj's and slipped into bed. I fell asleep and stayed asleep for the better part of the day.

Only, I forgot about the one inhabitant of my house who does need to be tended all day. That's right, Toby, the Golden Lab Hellhound, was left alone.

Toby wasted little time protesting this change in his routine. He promptly ate one slipper, one black permanent marker, two socks, one Christmas cactus, a roll of tape, a pair of boxers (Steve's or Trent's - it was impossible to tell from the remains) and several dryer sheets.

Then he had the audacity to wake me up using his cute little wet nose. Thank goodness Trent arrived home at around the same time.

"Take this dog for a walk," I ordered.

I returned to bed and slept until this morning. I'm feeling a little more human, but I know that after cleaning up the effects of the Toby Tornado, I'll be ready for a nap again.

This time, I am going to chain him to the rear axle of my car.

NaNo What?....

I'm going to do it.

Growing up, I wanted to be a writer. I wrote poems and stories. I loved term papers. I loved essay tests. I loved to put a pen to paper and let the words begin to flow.

In college, I started out as a Journalism major. I wanted to write feature stories and music reviews. I saw myself as the next indispensable staff member of Rolling Stone. The girl who got to tour with the Stones and live to tell about it.

Then, I listened to conventional wisdom.

Getting a writing job would be next to impossible is what conventional wisdom told me.

So, I lost my courage and decided on a nice and safe English degree instead. Writing? I liked doing it, but what was the point? I was getting married and I needed a job.

And really, I do understand that apart from teaching high school, an English degree does not guarantee an entry level position with a Fortune 500 company. I graduated in the early 80's when greed was good, and business majors ruled the planet. I've paid my dues.

I did get married, found a corporate job, had kids, went back to school to become a teacher (HA, I say, laughing at myself. Should have known all along.) Apart from monthly school newsletters and parent handbooks, writing went on the back burner for a long, long time.

Then, I started hanging around the Compuserve writer's forum.

I began by just lurking. Then I gathered up my last reserve of courage and actually posted a few things.

I was shocked that people didn't tell me to surrender my password and leave the forum. Other writers, farther along in their journeys than I, actually encouraged me.

I cannot express how affirming this was. I became hooked. Besides, I have learned to love writer's lingo. I get all tingly when someone talks about word count, or chunk writing, or author intrusion.

In short, I felt like I had come home.

I've been dabbling for a while. Have a couple of things half-finished. The little voice - you remember conventional wisdom - still whispers to me "What the hell are you doing wasting all of this time in front of a computer?"

I am trying to ignore it.

Then I found out about NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. The idea is that you write a novel in a month. The month of November, to be exact. So I registered to do it.

I'm certainly not going to talk about the book I have planned, or even share any of it. I just want to write furiously for a short period of time and see what happens. I love the process, and I hope I'll find a few things salvageable about the product. If not, so what?

Wish me luck.

A special guest...

My dear husband of many years has asked if he can make a special guest appearance on my blog. Apparently, he would like to relate some stories about my driving. For some reason, he finds these stories hilarious.

Yes, I have granted him special permission. But, before I let him hijack this little space, I must say a few words in my own defense.

I am actually a pretty good driver. I've had only one traffic accident in 30+ years of driving.

I just seem to have this spatial problem. The kind where I perceive that stationary objects are farther away than they actually are.

Please keep this in mind when reading his words. Thank you.

What I'm reading...

Last year, I signed up for a website called Goodreads.com.

I did this because Goodreads allows you to keep track of every book you've ever read. For some reason, I had been wondering how many books I've read. In my life, I mean.

I tried to guess. What if I'd read 50 books a year? This means that over the last 40 years or so (I really don't think it's fair to count all of the Golden Books or Nancy Drew Mysteries that I read as a child), I've read maybe 2000 books.

Could this be true?

Over at Goodreads, I was only able to come up with about 400 titles. This was disappointing. I really wanted to have 2000 books on my home page, but I couldn't remember every trashy novel I'd picked up at the grocery store.

I was faithful to Goodreads for a while. I would finish a book and add it to my virtual bookshelves. Still, I couldn't get that number up to even 500.

Finally, I got lazy. I would forget to add a book, and read three or four others, and then forget to add those, until finally I gave up. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. In the end, it turned into another chore that I would put off and feel guilty about. I sure don't need any more things like that in life.

So, let's just say I've read 2000 books and leave it at that.

On the journey to 2000, I have read just about everything. I'm a fiction junkie, but I don't limit myself to one genre. Sometimes, I'm looking for a literary tome. At other times, I'll settle for a great horror story or mystery or crime novel. I'm partial to post-apocalyptic tales (think The Stand), but I've also been obsessed with historical fiction. I overdosed on Queen Elizabeth a few summers ago, and I really don't want to sit through another go-round of Henry and Eleanor. I don't mind vampires (loved The Passage this past summer), but I'm also a big fan of Richard Russo and Wally Lamb, two guys who write about 'normal' life and pierce your heart while doing it. I love Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, and, along with the rest of the civilized world, I enjoyed Stieg Larsson's books.

As a teenager, I would read Gone With the Wind every summer. I devoured most Agatha Christie titles in middle school and high school. I read War and Peace sitting on the beach, and I remember sneaking over to my friend's house to sit in her laundry room and read Love Story when I was in fifth grade. It seemed racy at the time, and I knew my mother wouldn't approve.

Some books I read earlier in life, like The Sun Also Rises, really stuck with me. I know he's not everyone's cup of tea, but I loved this book so much that I waited my whole college career until, as a Senior, I could write a paper on Hemingway. I tingled with anticipation as I sat at my typewriter, finally able to pound out 20 pages on my writing hero. I think I got an A. In fact, I think I still have the paper somewhere.

So lately? I've read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, and was not enthralled. His characters were pretty boring, and I really didn't much like them. Just finished a new novel by Julia Glass, whose debut, Three Junes, won the National Book Award, and was just heartbreaking and wonderful. Her latest, The Widower's Tale - not so much.

I'm on to what I hope will be a good ghost story - A Dark Matter by Peter Straub. He knows how to weave a story and keep me guessing until the end. Fall is a spooky time, after all, and there's nothing better than a spooky story to go along with my favorite season.

Oh, and I've never read any of the Twilight books. Just so you know.

Happy Fall. Happy reading.

Saturday morning....

Today, a Saturday, I woke up while it was still dark - about 6:15 am. Because I had fallen asleep at 9 pm (thanks, Julia Glass, but your new novel is really a snoozer), I decided that 9 hours of slumber was enough, and hauled myself out of bed.

I fumbled around in the dark for my slippers. I can no longer keep them next to the bed because my Golden Lab puppy considers them a chew toy, so I have to hide them on a high shelf in the closet. Luckily, I was able to locate them without knocking over anything.

I made coffee, and I poured myself a cup before the pot had finished brewing. This is one of my secret vices, and has been, believe it or not, the subject of the most vehement arguments between my husband and me over the last few years.

But I digress.

Faced with a long stretch of quiet and peace, I pondered what I should do. Years ago, when my kids were small, I would have used this time to accomplish something meaningful....like clean out a closet or wash windows.

Now - not so much.

I used to be an absolute ogre about my house. It had to be clean all of the time. I would never consider going to bed with dishes on the counter, and, like an obsessed scullery maid, I would crawl around on the kitchen floor with a damp paper towel to make sure that every spot or spill had been annihilated.

I continued with this irrational behavior even though my kids were toddlers, capable of destroying a room in a matter of minutes. I persisted even though we had a big black Labrador whose shedding output could create enough fur to weave an afghan at least twice a day.

In short, I was nuts.

Funny how life changes. This morning, I sat on the deck and looked at the stars. I watched dawn break over the trees. I drank two cups of very strong coffee and played with my dog. I considered doing the laundry. I decided to go to the dog park instead.

I can only wish now that I had been a little more relaxed and a little less neurotic when my kids were little. I probably would have played with them more and cleaned a little less.

So, this morning as I briefly considered washing down the cabinets I reminded myself that I'm all better now.

Phil, they're playing with a dead bird....

One of my most vivid childhood memories is of the day we found the dead crow.

There was a whole gang of us - neighborhood kids whose names I really can't remember now. We hung around outside all day because, well, that's what kids in the 60's did. We played with whatever was around. We built forts and went exploring. We looked for snakes in the field behind our house. I don't think we were ever bored.

One day, we found a not quite alive crow behind our house. By not quite alive, I mean dead. Stiff and cold. Eyes that were gray and glassed over.

So we did what any kids would do - we put the recently deceased crow in someone's old bird cage.

We took Mr. Bird (I'm fairly certain this is what we called him, but the name Batman also rings a bell) all over the neighborhood. Being the animal lover that I was, and still am, I think I wrapped Mr. Bird in a baby blanket. We played records for Mr. Bird. Since some of us were young Catholics, we may have held some sort of funeral mass for him. I'm not really sure about this last one, but I know we did something ceremonial.

Our capers with Mr. Bird went on all day, undisturbed. No grown ups had noticed our new friend. Mr. Bird was very probably beginning to smell when we decided to play in our basement, and bring Mr. Bird along.

I remember a look of panic on my mother's face when she realized just what we had brought into the basement. I remember my father descending the basement stairs and I remember Mr. Bird being taken from us rather quickly and without explanation. I can only hope that Mr. Bird found peace in his final resting place, and that he was not thoughtlessly tossed into our metal trash can.

The subject of Mr. Bird never came up in our house again. We probably caught a snake or dug up some termites the next day and were happy again.

Ah, childhood....

Shifing the parental paradigm....

Having little kids was easy for me. I loved the raising of babies, toddlers, preschoolers, elementary schoolers. I seemed to have a knack for saying (mostly) the right thing at the right time. Problems were easy to solve, and solutions usually involved a band aid or a hug.

My daughter has always worn her heart on her sleeve. She's been a verbal kid from the very start. She started talking at a young age. As a young 'un, she followed me around the house to engage me in conversation. All of the time. And since she stopped taking naps before her second birthday, there was hardly a break in her chatter from sunrise to sunset.

Don't get me wrong - I loved having a kid who loved to talk. But I do remember my clenched teeth as I asked, for the hundredth time, if mommy could just have a little quiet for just a little while.

Things started to change when she reached her teens. Sure, she still talked to me all of the time, but the topics started to change from which shoes would be suitable for her Homecoming dress to should she change her major after two years of college.

Often, in the guise of imparting wisdom and a shot of reality, which I thought was my job, I would end up saying something that would send her into a fit of irritation and contempt. She'd accuse me of wanting to crush her dreams. She'd tell me I wasn't really listening to her. She'd tell me that I didn't really understand her and that I was treating her like a child.

I was often left frustrated, and so was she. Our relationship was untangling. I worried that we were alienating each other, and I wasn't quite sure why.

Then, one day, I had an epiphany. I wondered if maybe, just maybe, all she wanted was for me to listen to her, hold my tongue, and support whatever decision she was going to make.

I tested my fledgling knowledge one snowy morning. She found me in the kitchen sipping coffee. Her quandry? Should she risk her safety by driving to work when the road conditions were terrible and getting worse, or should she call off and stay put at home?

What I really wanted to say was something along the lines of you'd better get your butt into work - a snowstorm isn't really an excuse. Then, I stopped myself. I realized that this particular reaction was due to my own fiercely Puritanical work ethic, honed over the years in response to my particular neurosis of always wanting to please everyone, all of the time.

This was a decision she was going to have to make, and she was going to experience the consequences of it.

So I kept my mouth shut until she stopped talking and looked at me expectantly. I gathered up all of my courage and said Whatever you decide, I'm sure you'll make a good decision.

Then I ran away.

Something shifted. She realized that I didn't want to argue about this. I realized that I would be OK with whatever she decided. And a weight lifted, from both of us.

Of course, we still have our struggles. We're both women, with very strong personalities, living under the same roof. But I think, on that snowy morning, that we redefined ourselves, and each gave the other permission to reboot and start over.

I like it that way.