It isn’t June anymore is it?  I love the summer, but July always makes me a little nervous — you’re suddenly in the MIDDLE of summer, and you feel some urgency to get your summer things done, which is crazy because the whole point of summer is to not do much, and to enjoy the not-doing of much.

In contrast, June was a month when a lot happened.  Because I am spending more and more time writing 140 character accounts of myself on twitter and facebook, I have fallen a little out of practice with the longer form that is a blog post.  So I am going to make a list of what June looked like, thinking I might fool myself into thinking that a blog post is as simple as stringing together small accounts of yourself, which, in a way, it is:

1.  I discovered this month that death and sickness, which are with us always, need not be disasters.  My Uncle Martin died early in the month, and then two weeks later, another uncle, a lovely man we’d just seen on our way down from my Uncle Martin’s funeral, also died.  Jim Berlin was his name — a man whose preferred form of communication was the three line joke,  a guy who drove a truck for a living, fished and hunted and camped and swam and loved my aunt and my cousins, who were just toddlers when they married, and who are now grown men with trucks of their own.  His funeral was a few days ago in Colusa — one of those places in California where it gets really hot in the summer and people grow things like rice and tomatoes, and the gathering after the funeral is in the park in the middle of town, under huge shade trees, right next to the municipal swimming pool.  People bring macaroni salad and five hundred different versions of chocolate cake. And a lot of cold drinks.

What I learned in June  is that small communities are rich places.

2.  I spent a lot of time in  June refreshing my e-mail inbox, waiting to get editing suggestions from my new agent, waiting to hear about a writing residency I applied for, waiting to hear about stories I have out.  The results:  new agent is a terrific editor so far and really busy, as all people who sell books for a living are; I will be doing this great writing residency with Antonya Nelson in the fall in Florida for three weeks; and no one at the remaining literary journals that have my stories is alive anymore.  I can only hope that in small towns across America people are eating macaroni salad and chocolate velvet cake with cream cheese icing to celebrate the lives of those literary editors who are no longer with us.

What have I learned about waiting?  That if you aren’t careful, and don’t guard against it,  you can divert your attention from the stories you want to tell to the business of writing.  I’ve spent far too much time in the last year doing that, and am slowly weaning myself off the e-mail inbox refresh button.  Maybe I will write a blog post instead of opening my e-mail to see what’s in there besides offers to grow the penis I don’t have.

More things than that happened in June:  my oldest sons are off to high school in the fall, and there is a lot of new teenage energy in our house, and then there is the next novel, which has to get in a higher, faster gear, now that I have come close to settling the business of the last one.  Also, if I am going to be sitting around a table with a woman who actually writes amazing fiction, shouldn’t I be producing something that could at least be described as a credible effort?

But in July it would be lovely if there could be a day or two here or there when nothing at all happens, except lying around and reading and dreaming.  I hope that’s the kind of July all of you are getting to have.

Last week, I went up to Susanville with my mother to help bury my uncle, Marty Paguegui, who lived on the eponymous street you see pictured above.  I’ve never been to Susanville, not being close to my uncle.  It’s a wonderful place.

On the surface, I don’t belong in a place like Susanville, not at all.  Susanville is about 80 miles west of Reno.  It’s in the mountains — 4,200 feet — it snows up there.  People ranch, and they work construction (which is what my uncle did), or they work at the High Desert Prison, one of those huge new prisons the state of California’s thrown up in all kinds of out-of-the-way places.  When you drive out to Paguegui Lane, you can see the prison from a long way away because it has so many lights outside and there aren’t that many lights on in Susanville at night so nothing competes with it.

Me, I’m from a place that’s easy to get to, any season at all. And people here don’t ranch, let’s just leave it at that.  Side dishes with mayo, particularly ones with macaroni?  Not much in evidence in Berkeley. But surprisingly yummy when eaten in the parish hall of the catholic church in Susanville after mass, or at my Aunt Vicky’s house, in Maxwell, which is off I-5, on the way home from Susanville. I’m not sure you’re supposed to discover how much you love a place when you’re on a funeral mission, but there you have it:  that was mostly what I did.

My uncle — who was in his early 70s — had a lot of friends.  The funeral mass was crowded with them, and the amount of help they gave was huge and without any hesitation.  It was lovely for my mother and my cousins to have people volunteer to do things they couldn’t do.  For example, my uncle left his important stuff in a combination safe.  He’d given the combination to two different people, but on the Sunday when we needed to open it, the combination was nowhere in evidence.  So, how do you get a safe open on a Sunday in Susanville?  Well, you take it to the local locksmith, a heavily tattooed ex-con, and he drills it open in about two seconds so you can get the instructions for the funeral, the will, and the cash he didn’t want to put in the bank.

My uncle was a handsome man, in that way Basque men can be handsome, with a white smile in a dark face, the kind of guy who loves to dance, and has a way of talking to women that makes them feel that they might possibly be the most beautiful and desirable woman in the world.  As a result, he was not that successful with women long-term, but he clearly had a lot of short-term fun.  So much so that when it became evident that one of his wishes for his funeral was to have women pall bearers, the rush to volunteer was immediate and fierce.

Here are some other facts about Susanville:

• Things start early.  Starbucks is open at 4:30 a.m.  That’s so the prison guards and the ranchers can get a latte on their way to work.
• The local AM radio station, KSUE, has a very popular swap program every day, a program in which you can, for example, let people know you’re willing to swap your used generator for a ride-on lawn mower.  And if you show up at 4:30 a.m. at that radio station, which is in a little house by the fairgrounds, there will be a guy there who’s wide awake, and he’ll read the announcement of your uncle’s death and the funeral mass to come a couple times a day, just to make sure the word gets out.
• You’ll discover, when you walk outside your room at the Best Western, after your mother’s woken you up to go to the radio station, that the air is cleaner and fresher than any air you can remember in a long time, and the moon will just be sinking beyond the edge of the horizon and you’ll notice that the sky is huge and open and so beautiful you want to stand there in the parking lot and not move because you know it’ll be a while before you see the morning in quite that way again.  And you’ll see this is why your uncle spent most of his life up here.  Because it is beautiful in a way few other places are.
• When the Irish priest in Susanville is on vacation, his place is taken by the Rwandan priest whose parish is up the road.  This Rwandan priest will hug your mother more than a few times, and he will give a remarkable homily about life and death, which you know he’s seen a lot of, even though he looks like he’s barely thirty years old.
• People will invite you to come back to Susanville because your uncle was their friend.  And you will come back — to a party in a few weekends, and to the big lamb barbeque your uncle gave every year, the one where the old Basques stand around telling jokes, charming women, living a good, full life.  You’ll come back because you like this place, this early-rising, kind, surprising place.

And that is where I’ve been, and what I’ve been doing, since I last posted about how good the food at the Berkeley Bowl looks in the summer.

When I first moved to Berkeley — in the early 1980s — my roommates at the time were old (in their late twenties) and sophisticated (they knew their way around an artichoke). They shopped at this place they referred to as “the Bowl.”  I imagined it was named after a  big bowl of fruit, because that is what they usually brought home after they went shopping.  They also brought home this wonderful cheese I’d never heard of before.  It was called Havarti.

Berkeley was a paradise in those days.  Now you can buy havarti at Costco, so paradise is more widely available in America, which can only be a good thing.  I mean, even in this wretched economy, you can still afford the occasional good thing to eat and you have a much better chance of being able to find it than you did in the early 1980s. Cheese has a way of making the worst things seem a little bit better.  At least that is what we believe here in Berkeley, which is why I live here.

Anyway, it turned out that the Berkeley Bowl was actually an old bowling alley that had been turned into a fruit and vegetable market which also sold cheese (at a long, exciting cheese counter) meat, seafood and, sort of as an aside, things like recycled paper towels and earthy moisturizers made by people who lived in Ukiah.  To successfully shop there you really did have to have some skills, just not with a bowling ball.  Basically, you had to be aggressive with your shopping cart, and willing to snatch fruit out of the hands of elderly ladies who wanted it too.  But you’d go cart-to-cart with these ladies because you wanted those raspberries MORE, having grown  up in a place where fruit (and tomatoes!) just did not taste so real, and fresh and amazing, thus making your desire for them really strong.  At the time, I didn’t have a car, so I had no idea the real challenge of shopping at the Berkeley Bowl was finding a place to put it.

And now there is a SECOND bowl in Berkeley.  It opened today (it is called “Berkeley Bowl West”) and it amazes me that this could be so — mostly because this means there will FINALLY be a place to park at the Berkeley Bowl in my neighborhood because all the shoppers who wanted my parking spot will be at Berkeley Bowl West.  And I will not have to get into unseemly altercations near the apricots to score the perfect ones that have my name on them. Still, in honor of the time that has passed since I first discovered havarti and artichokes, the Bowl in my neighborhood is now called the Old Bowl.  (At least that is what I’m calling it.) I am now the old lady you have to face down to get to the apricots first.  (I will add that I am not really that old, and I imagine the ladies I thought were so old probably weren’t either.  It’s funny how perception depends a lot on where you stand.)

Summer’s almost here.  Three years ago, when I was just beginning to write this blog, I was up to my arms in raspberries, making jam. A day or two after I wrote about that, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and I haven’t boiled fruit and sugar together since then.  This is to say that my hiatus from jam is over.  Raspberries at the Old Bowl were .99 a basket when I was there tonight — I swear to God.  And the apricots, which are slightly more expensive, are so beautiful this year.

This weekend, it’s jam time.

Thing of Beauty (n): Twin A does a push-up while Twin B releases skateboard UNDER Twin A and jumps over him, and then lands on the skateboard, after which all spectators (except mother, who is frozen in place) and Twin A and B shout, "Man. THAT was a Thing of Beauty!"

We all know it’s a joy forever.  (And if you didn’t, you do now.)  But have you actually READ those lines recently?  You should.  They’re here, at the end of this post.

Earlier this morning, the California Supreme Court released its decision in the marriage cases.  It’s been pretty clear for a while that they would uphold Proposition 8 and refuse to nullify existing marriages.  I’d like to talk about why that is not necessarily a bad thing, a position that I know is sort of  unpopular, but which is not an endorsement of bigotry or stupidity, qualities I don’t actually think California’s citizens are guilty of en masse.

You wouldn’t know that, by the way, if you, like me, worked in the State Building, where the Supreme Court is located.  The sign-waving people were out in force this morning.  But then they always are.  Today, they were hating California’s gay and lesbian citizens.  Last year, it was women who wanted abortions.  A few decades ago, it was African-American Californians who wanted a decent public education.  All they do is switch out the slogans and pictures — but the message is the same.  Those who are different are scary and hateful. 

But those people are so clearly a minority.  Having skimmed the court’s opinion, it’s obvious from its tone that the court feels no sympathy for the social views of those who passed Proposition 8.   In fact, their earlier opinion in the marriage cases, the opinion in which they announced that the California constitution is violated when marriage is made unavailable to gay Californians, makes their views about the civil rights issue quite obvious. 

I’m not sure what I’d have done if this was MY issue to deal with, but I’m going to guess that their limited view of their role in this debate is not a tragedy.  Look at one of the great civil rights decision of the 20th century, Brown vs. Board of Education, and then ask yourself whether the public schools in the United States are still segregated and you will see the limits of a court’s ability to change the way Americans think about those who are different.  Judicial efforts to integrate the schools have not been huge triumphs, at least not at the local level.  Even in a city like Berkeley, where I live, the public schools, particularly in the lower grades, are largely filled with children from poorer households, children who are overwhelmingly African-American and Hispanic. 

Why is this?  It’s complex, but my guess is that parents — even in places like Berkeley — didn’t like being told to drive their children across Berkeley to kindergarten.  And they are no more comfortable with racial and economic differences than their counterparts in less obviously liberal communities across the country, a discomfort that cannot be mitigated by a judge telling you that you must ignore your fears.  This discomfort can only change with familiarity with difference and good will — something we are all capable of, I’m certain.  When California’s generous financing of public schools was dismantled by Prop. 13, private schools became even more attractive to wealthier, white Californians, and gave well-meaning,  liberal, white people cover for pulling their kids out of public schools, and, well, there you have it, a story that’s true across the country and one I think is still being told.   

My point is this:  there’s only so much the judiciary can do and California’s Supreme Court has done about all it feels institutionally capable of doing.  It’s announced an important principle, one that isn’t popular with some Californians.  The thing to remember is that our attention is now very much focused on this issue in a way that it hasn’t been for decades. And most of the people who are now thinking about whether it’s okay to say gay people can’t marry are not in front of my building wavy nasty signs.  They’re thinking about how Mr. Sulu from Star Trek married his partner last year and how they’ve always liked him and that show.  Or about the teacher at the school where their kids go who got married last fall and looked really cute in those pictures where she was wearing a tux, and really, why shouldn’t she wear a tux?  I think it’s undeniable that we have begun to see that we are not so different from each other after all. 

Today the message is really that the courts cannot force social change to happen, not alone, anyway.  The thing to focus on is that the people can do and should do a lot more than the judiciary in this area.  The Proposition 8 opponents ran a poor campaign.  Much thinking needs to be done about how to run a better one.  It’s clear that the majority of Californians did not support Proposition 8.   They need to make that point much clearer, the next time this issue is on the ballot.  

And then somebody really needs to think about the wisdom of running our state government through initiative, an experiment in populism that has so obviously failed us — everywhere you look, you can see how California’s institutions have been weakened and even ruined because of whimsical and short sighted initiatives — Proposition 13 being the most obvious.  A proposition that bans the whole initiative process is looking very good to me at this moment. 

There’s more to be said, and more will be said, on this issue.  But I am going to guess that in the next five years, there will be another initiative, one amending the constitution to reflect the views of most people in California and that initiative will not look like Proposition 8.

Every week, I teach a creative writing class at William’s school.  The class consists of me, ten boys, and their teacher Brenna.  I love this class.  They sit there, their pencils clutched in their hands, squirming around in their chairs, writing wild, wild stuff.  When you’re nine or ten, you still have a fully intact imagination — most likely no one’s told you yet that your story violates the laws of physics (what would I know about that?) or that your inability to spell “rocket launcher” means you won’t make it as a writer.  I will not be the person saying those things, that’s for sure.

It’s cherry season, and the class is today at 11:30 — right before  lunch.  I’m bringing them cherry cake.  Really, it could be blackberry cake, or peach cake, or apple cake.  Basically, it’s a very thick batter with fruit on top and powdered sugar on top of all that.  I love this cake, make it all the time, and have even written about it before on the blog.  For those who don’t know about it, you really should.  Here’s the recipe.  Easiest thing in the world.

Happy Almost Friday!

Eleven years ago, when I discovered a child had chewed his way through My Antonia, I put away my books, the ones I accumulated during graduate school.  And I also got rid of the not-so-nice pine bookcases they were stored in.  I had lots & lots of books back then, and I did not want them to become a staple in that child’s diet or the diet of his brother, or of the brother to come.  

Last week, I installed the first ever BIG bookcase in my office, the place in our house where I write and I put a bunch of books into it.  

I have discovered a few things about bookcases, things I’d never have noticed if I hadn’t been away from them for a decade.  So I share one of them with you, because this is a blog, and that’s what you do when you have a blog.  

1.  When you have a bookcase, and your books are more or less organized in it, and you are writing a description of encroaching weather, in what you hope is a poetic passage, but not one that goes on so long that your reader slams the book down and picks up the closest magazine and gives up reading your novels forever because you suck so bad, and you think you need to read someone who does this well so you will have readers one day — well, you can just pull To The Lighthouse off the shelf and there it is, the great middle section “Time Passes” :

So with the house empty and the doors locked and the mattresses rolled round, those stray airs, advance guards of great armies, blustered in, brushed bare boards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroom or drawing-room that wholly resisted them but only hangings that flapped, wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans and china already furred, tarnished, cracked. What people had shed and left—a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes—those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor.

And immediately before this passage, this amazing moment, a parenthetical that breaks your heart:  

[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]

There are other advantages to having bookcases, but I am so overwhelmed wtih the beauty of this piece that I cannot think of what they are.  How lucky am I, to have all these uneaten books to open up and read whenever I want? I feel like my life is entering a different phase, one of even more beauty than I thought possible.  Being without books for so many years, I’ve had to rely on my memory, and the library, and copies I bought when I could remember what I wanted to see again.  But now the books are coming back — all of them.  And that is the loveliest thing to happen in a while.

Raise your hand please, if John Baker is on your blogroll.  Yikes.  The rush of hands created a huge draft of wind and nearly knocked me over.  Most of us have been reading John’s blog for as long as we’ve been reading book blogs.  For those who don’t know him yet (the few of you who were also knocked over by the show of hands), John’s written eight highly regarded mysteries and he’s been blogging about books and book-ish subjects since, well, before most of even knew blogs existed.

John’s newest book, Winged With Death, isn’t a conventional mystery.  It moves between Uruguay in 1972 and England in the present. There’s a really elegant narrative at work here — the story’s first strand is the tale of the narrator’s arrival in Montevideo when he was eighteen, at a time when Uruguay was in political turmoil.  The boy takes on a new name — Ramon — and finds himself absorbed in becoming a Milonguero – a tango master.  The second strand occurs in the present where, from the perspective of his life in York, and in the face of a crisis precipitated by the disappearance of his teenage niece, Ramon sees how the past, both personal and political, reappears in the present.  The book’s a departure for John in terms of the story he sets out to tell, but like all his books, it’s finely written and so smart about how we live and love.  I liked it very much, and was so pleased when he said he’d actually have time to come over here.

While we had our virtual visit, John and I had a virtual conversation.  I wish you were all here, drinking tea and eating cookies.  But this post really is the next best thing.  Come to think of it, it might actually BE the best thing.  After all, to get here  you don’t have to pack your liquid goods into ziplock bags or take your shoes off to go through security, or suffer any of the indignities of air travel.  You just have to turn on your computer, and then you get to hear John on the book, the tour, and how on earth he managed to parent children who still read his interviews.  So… here it is:

When I’ve done author interviews in the past, readers have been very interested in the intersection of personal history and fiction.  Can you talk about how you transformed life into fiction in Winged With Death?

That’s difficult. Winged with Death is fiction, I’m quite clear about that. But there, of course, aspects of my own life and my own experiences tucked in here and there quite consciously, and equally, there will be aspects of my life experience which are in there without my knowledge.

I never consciously write into a fiction a picture of someone I know, or have known in real life, and the characters in my novels, as in most novels, are made up out of bits and pieces of a multitude of real characters, fictional characters from books and movies, and, I often suspect, from shadow parts of my own personality which I have suppressed in my personal life for one reason or another.

The central character in Winged with Death is Ramon, and he, like myself, is an Englishman. He has spent part of his life out of the country, in South America, and I have spent part of my life out of the country, but in my case the stay abroad was in Europe.

Perhaps the main similarity is that we are both tango dancers. But he is a teacher and a master of the dance, whereas I am merely a social dancer, often with two left feet.

I don’t have the fraught emotional relationships that Ramon has, though my emotional relationships have not always been entirely stable.

Something else. Ramon is involved in writing his own autobiography, something I would never consider attempting.

Perhaps there are more similarities between the two of us that I am still unconscious of. I honestly don’t know. I’m concerned that my fictions resemble real life enough to convince me and my readers that they are dealing with real human beings like themselves, involved in a variety of relationships. But beyond that I am mainly concerned with ideas and with language.

Winged with Death takes on important political issues.  It is also hugely entertaining.  Writing a book that is not didactic, but still delivers a powerful message about and against a repressive regime is no easy feat.  How did you manage that?

The book took a long time to write. For most of that time it wasn’t working the way I intended it to. Fiction only works when it is specific, when it depicts the struggles of individuals in a truthful way. Getting hold of that truth and pinning it down in a novel is never easy. But I suppose when one chooses a real location and a real span of social or political history, there is always the tendency that the individual’s story will be overtaken by the momentous events involved.

The job of the writer, then, is to keep plugging away, a little like someone mining for gold, until the thing starts to shine from the inside out.

Two of the most important characters in the book are teenagers, about whom you write with sensitivity and authority. Many of the people who read this blog are parents of teens.  Could you talk about your experiences as a parent and as a teenager — any advice?

Questions are supposed to get easier, you know, not more difficult. I have had five children. They are all now well past their teens – (thank you, Jesus) – and have left home and formed relationships with others and for the most part live far enough away that visits have to be planned in advance. I remind myself that that was the object of the enterprize – their independence.

I have no advice.

There were good moments and there were others; all in all I think things improved dramatically once the teenage years were left behind, or perhaps it was the mere act of moving away from the parental home.

With hindsight it seems to me sometimes that each of my children arrived with an agenda, and there was little that I did that made any changes to that. They were, each of them, aimed right from the start to the places in life they now occupy. The role of myself and my partner was only to feed them and keep them safe so they could arrive more or less intact.

And my relationship with them now? Sshhhh. Most of them will be reading this.

You’ve been on tour for quite some time with Winged With Death.  How was your trip?  Any surprises or common experiences?  (By the way, John’s touring reviews can be found here.)

No real surprises, apart from the fatigue. It was a little like actual touring, relating to new people two or three times a week, answering comments, coming up with original answers, striving to listen – really listen – to the questions. The blogs I toured were a very mixed bunch. Some were popular sites with many commentors and a busy atmosphere. Others more like personal sites, with little happening. But I arranged it like that, as I wanted to elicit a variety of responses from different groups of people. It’s been good. I’d do it again. Better than actual touring – you get to sleep in your own bed.

I’ve been reading your blog since 2006, when I first noticed that things called blogs existed.  Could you talk about how you came to blogging, and how your blogging has evolved?  Longevity in blogging interests me very much, because I’d like to keep writing for a long time — how do you keep it up?

Committment. I started blogging in 2002, quite near to the beginning. I’d always kept a journal, and there was never anything in it that was too personal to talk about. I used the computer every day anyway and it struck me that I could do both things together. I designed my own blogging software to start with and modified it to suit for the next three years. Eventually I moved over to the open source software by WordPress and for much of the time I blogged every single day. Now I only blog when I’ve got something to say; it doesn’t have to be much, anything I’ve learned or heard that strikes my own interest seems to me to be worth passing on. I’m especially interested in words and writing and reading so I blog about those things. Then I get involved in wider cultural issues, film, theatre, exhibitions, etc. Sometimes politics, but not often.

I suppose I keep it up because I don’t see a divide between blogging and the other writing I do. It’s all writing. Sometimes it’s a novel, or a short story, and sometimes it’s blogging.  When I get up in the morning the only single thing I’m absolutely sure about is that I’m going to write.

Today, because I live in the land of the teenaged, I spoke to Charlie,  who is upstairs in the kitchen as I write this (from downstairs in my office), on Facebook chat.  And you know what?  It was sort of fun.  Tone of voice, which can so easily derail a conversation with someone you love who also happens to be under the influence of, well, whatever it is that makes you a teenager, is entirely absent when you type.  No one rolls his eyes.  No one raises her voice.  No one expresses disdain or impatience or irritation.  Maybe we need to spend the next four years texting and twittering and chatting.

I am beginning to see the charm of micro-communication.  140 characters need not always be superficial communication.  Those 140 characters can add up to something quite substantial when they are partof an ongoing series of micro communications.  On Facebook, I know when my friends are happy or worried or feeling elated. I can see the shifts in their moods, the moments that make up their days and what they really, really like to eat.  (Who knew there was such a thing as a sushi burrito?)  And because the price of admission to Facebook for my children was that they had to publicly acknowledge me as their friend,  I know when my child isn’t too crazy about school, or misses Easter, or is loving his freedom this weekend.  I don’t DO anything about any of this — except maybe a thumbs up (not to the teenagers — they really don’t want your thumbs on their facebook page) and an observation or two of my own.  But all this information accumulates into a sense of who people are — or who they want to be, or who they’re working toward being.  It’s terribly interesting and awfully weird, but really quite wonderful too.

It’s Shakespeare’s official birthday today and, in celebration, William and Jack’s school had a poetry recitation.  William recited a poem by Billy Collins that really cracks me up, so I am giving it to you today, in honor of both William, the son, and William, the writer of all those sonnets, and comedies, and tragedies and histories and the other plays which are harder to classify, and also in honor of Poetry Month in general.

Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep A Gun In The House

The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

Billy Collins

I am aware that it appears as though I’ve been loading up my  u-haul for the last three weeks in preparation for my move to the East Coast, where I will be pitching a tent in the Guilford Green and taking showers in the Guilford Free Library, because I will have no home and no job there when I arrive.

But, in fact, that’s not what happened after my recent trip to the east coast.  I got home to Berkeley.  Spring’s arrival is unambiguous.  Poppies everywhere.  Jasmine blooming in huge bunches.   Meyer lemons bursting on our bush outside.  How could I live anywhere but where I live?  And so I became distracted from blogging and everything else, and for three weeks I’ve been picking bunches of blooming things and coloring easter eggs and cooking stuff.   Lovely.  

While doing all that, I’ve been thinking about this particular time in my life.  Spring is universal and timeless.  It comes.  It goes.   Things burst into life and then they are dormant.  Against that backdrop though, my children are becoming teenagers — a season I won’t ever see again, but one I love watching from a distance.  

What I’ve noticed is that this  bursting-into-life, their spring, is actually pretty wonderful.  Adolescence is a time of big, gusty emotion, which can be a pain to deal with and can really unbalance a woman who isn’t used to that kind of drama (except when she’s doing it).  It’s also, though, a hugely fun time.  My kids are mischievous — they tease each other and me, and although I know that doesn’t sound like a big thing, I love it that they feel enough freedom to give me a hard time about listening to Lady GaGa.   I also love it that Lady GaGa, with her many weird outfits exists this spring.  And my kids are excited about being freer, about going to a big urban high school in the fall, about finding their own way — on the bus and at that school and then into the bigger world.  

This weekend, Jack’s performing in Rigoletto — he has three lines on that huge stage, but he belts them out beautifully.  And Charlie?  He’s jumping off things on his skateboard that are very big — and spinning around when he does it and then landing and looking like it was all no big deal.  (While he wears the helmet I force him to wear).  It’s scary and exciting and fun to watch them.  I love being the mother of these kids, love the way they’re stepping onto the stage and launching themselves into life.  

Happy Spring!

I’d like you to be the first to know that I’m going to move my family to Guilford, Connecticut, preferable to a house that’s right on the Green, and across the street from the Guilford Free Library, which is where I am at this exact moment.

The only trouble is that I can’t actually move, having a job I like in San Francisco, and a husband with a job HE likes in the Bay Area, and three children in schools they like in Berkeley and a dog, well, the dog could move to Guilford. Maybe. The thing is, though, he has a friend in the neighborhood, a sporty dog named Dash, who can actually play with Archie without giving in to him or getting into a big embarrassing dog fight. Archie would probably want to stay in Berkeley too, I‘m thinking.

What this is, of course, is what always happens when I travel to see friends. When I do that, I always discover thatI want to live in the places where they live. Although this isn’t possible, it is possible to list the reasons, which is what I’m going to do.

Why I Want to Live in Guilford:

If I lived in Guilford, I could be near my friend Debbie. And then I could watch her talk about her books with her beautiful long fingers making motions in the air to describe what she’s talking about and every once in a while I could even look into her office and see the drawings on her drawing table and know that here, where Debbie lives and works, wonderful books are being written for children, books that will entertain them, make them think, and make them love books even more than they already do.

If I lived in Guilford, I could be near Sandi Shelton. And then I could go for a walk with her on the beach at Hammonasset and she’d give me advice about my next book that would not only be correct but would also be inspiring. Plus, I would laugh a lot and so live a really long time, so I could take full advantage of her good advice. Also, I could watch her type, which is what I’m doing at this exact moment, and because she types fast, I’d always feel like things were good, because Sandi’s typing someone a really great,  long, funny and inspiring e-mail.

If I lived in Guilford, when spring came, I’d be so incredibly grateful that I wouldn’t quite know what to do with myself. Because after months of winter and then months of mud, flowers and green things would really mean something. I say this now, just as spring is about to arrive in Connecticut. What would it be like to actually live through these New England winters? I’m really not sure. Maybe it would be hard.

If I lived in Guilford, I could come to the Guilford Free Library, where there are just an amazing, amazing number of tables with plugs and lights and surface space. Not to mention, carrels, and little offices, and even, in the teen section, two of the kind of booths you see mostly a soda shops in tv sit-coms. Across from the booths in the teen section there’s a bunch of board games. Who ARE these people in Guilford who love library patrons so much that they even have a little table in the children’s library with a tea maker and coffee maker and an honor box where you can put in your dollar after you make yourself a cup of tea? If you were a tired parent, and it was the middle of deepest darkest winter, well, you could come here with your child and you could drink some tea and read a book because the children’s section has books for miles, plus a little yellow house where a child can sit and play for hours and hours.

If I lived in Guilford, I could walk the mile and a half down to the shore and then back again — the perfect three mile walk. I could do it every day, all year long, because that is what Gortex is invented for and so even if it was cold or icy, there are winter clothes that would make this intrepid behavior possible.

And if I lived in Guilford, my family would be wth me, and they’d be doing all these things too (well, maybe not the part about writing in the Free Library, although William might find that pretty tempting), plus W, who is a windsurfer, could windsurf out on the Long Island Sound, which is where he learned to windsurf in the first place.

I am leaving in two days, and I know I am not going to be able to move to Guilford. But I am at least able to be happy for Sandi and Debbie, and all the other people who live around here, because even though you can’t always live where your friends live, at least you can know after a good long visit that they are, in fact, living happy lives, which is pretty much why you travel to see your friends: because you need to know that they’re happy, and you need to live alongside them for a little while so when you go home their lives will feel just that much closer next time you find yourself missing them. So, I now have a good picture of the library and the Green and the way winter becomes spring, which should sustain me when I get back to Berkeley, which is a pretty fine place to live too, now that I think about it.

On my way to the Oakland Airport this morning (I’m going to Connecticut), we were passed by — and then stopped entirely for — the longest funeral procession I’ve ever seen.  Mostly, the procession was made up of police cars.  But there were plenty of motorcycle cops, and firefighters and ambulance drivers, and park rangers, and anyone else who does a job where they protect people from harm.  All of them were on their way to the Oakland Coliseum, which is one exit before the airport.  Today’s the day for the funeral of the four police officers who were killed last week after a routine traffic stop went wrong.  

Being a cop is a dangerous job.   Mostly, I don’t think about that.  My general experience with the police as a citizen is to  feel mad about the ticket I just got for turning left when I wasn’t supposed to, or to feel grateful that someone’s directing traffic.  

But there are ways in which the police let us down and these disappointments are what you often see when you encounter the police in the media — police officers who extract confessions through coercion, hide evidence or manufacture it, use physical violence out of frustration or take bribes.  

This morning, I just thought about how brave you have to be to pull somebody over, and how much more courage it probably will take in the weeks to come to do that.  And I also hoped that the men and women going to that funeral will remember that young black men aren’t the enemy and that even when you’re afraid, you still have to do the right thing by everyone in the community you serve.  And I hoped that the young black men in the community will remember that the police aren’t their enemy and that many of them, particularly in Oakland, are not so different from they.  This is what courage looks like today:  seeing each other more clearly, and realizing that we are more alike than we are different.

I don’t get flash fiction.  500 words!  Good grief!   How can you even begin to tell a satisfactory story in the equivalent of six paragraphs?  By the end of the sixth paragraph, you’ve basically managed to introduce the unhappy family, the way the sea looks from the porch of their house in the summer, and the smell of the strawberry jam the little sister is making in the kitchen, without knowing how, because her mother is out on the ocean photographing sea life and her father isn’t paying attention to any of the children anymore.  

And texting!  Texting eludes me.  160 characters (for a long time I thought that was 160 WORDS.  I suppose I thought that because I found it unbelievable that any unit of writing could be measured in characters.  That messages are indeed measured that way breaks my heart.)  160 characters isn’t enough to do anything other than say no, an unsatisfactory no at that, because you can’t tell a joke after you say no, or explain your no, or make your no into a no-but-yes-to-you-because-I-really-like-you-even-though-I-can’t-go-to-that-thing-with-you.   

 Right now, all I know is that I don’t want to read 500 word stories.  If I’m going to read a  story, I want it in the conventional short form (say 4,000 words or more), or I’ll take it long.  I mean that.  I’ll take it Victorian, three volume long,   I’ll even take it Russian three million volumes long.  

As for the 160 character  no, I want my nos to  go on and on and end in yeses or at least devolve into something so interesting you forget about the no.  That takes more than 160 characters, I think we can all agree.  If I am going to get a message, I want it to come in a letter, a really good, long letter with lots of descriptions and funny stories.   In a pinch, an e-mail will do.  Okay — an e-mail will more than do.

And if I do want to read 500 words of meaning, then I want a poem.  A world can live in 500 words.  A no can become a yes in much less than 500 words — in half of 500 words, in fact.   That is what John Donne is expert at, for example.  

But here’s a thought:  What if there really is something wonderful about short shorts and I am missing the boat?  Yikes.   Could be that the problem isn’t the form at all.  I mean,  every form — whether it is a sonnet, or a short story, or who knows, even short-shorts and, what the heck, text messages — has its brilliant practitioners, artists who need the form to give birth to what’s in their heads.  Take the Shakespearean sonnet, for example — 14 lines.  A lot happens in those fourteen lines, but almost always at either the ninth line or in the couplet at the end of the sonnet there is a turn, and the thought that’s been extended through most of the sonnet is resolved, or turned on its head.  I think some people must think like this — in iambic rhythms, maybe even the rhyme scheme makes a kind of innate sense to them, and the way a sonnet reasons also is the way they like to think.  And this could be true of the short short (maybe even the text).  Maybe there is a sort of thought that really sings when it is placed in the short-short form.  And maybe the Shakespeare of Texting is out there right now, sending texts that are miracles of language.    

And so, today, I have resolved to work my way out of my aversion to flash fiction.  I mean, really, who am I to diss any written form?  After all, I am the woman who thought of the short story — for an embarrassingly long time — as a failed novel.  (I admit this because I am Catholic, and can only be absolved of my idiocy by confessing to it, except I don’t go to confession and I don’t think having bad ideas about literature is officially a sin….).   And I was very wrong about that.  Very wrong.  

 So, fortuitously, today I had tea with a lovely fellow blogger, who recommended I read Lydia Davis, which I’m going to do.  And then I had lunch, with another blogging friend, and I realized she writes 100 word pieces — so I’m going to look at some of hers.  

It might turn out that narrative is my thing, and that I will be unable to enjoy something that looks like it should be narrative, but isn’t.  But I will find out, and that will be fun to do.

My GAWD!  Slow down the blogging!  I got  home from a weekend of cross-country skiing (okay:  confession:  we only skied one day.  I had to get home.  My google feed reader was shouting at me to come and see what it had waiting for me) and there were hundreds of new posts waiting to be read.  Wonderful posts.    Posts I am so happy to read.

It’s spring out there in blogland — all that snow is melting and the blog posts are pushing their heads up like mad, reviewing books, commenting on politics, talking about writing, taking photos of the throw pillows they’ve put on their couch, showing me ways to combine tough jeans with girly tops, reminding me that there are a million ways to go green save the earth stop wasting gas raise my children listen to music watch movies  ….. aaaagh.

Still, even though there is a lot of wonderfulness out there right now, it’s also a little overwhelming.  I’m thinking there needs to be a  Slow Blogging movement, some kind of pact among those who feel like it’s required that they post every day — a pact that it’s okay to  post less often and spend more time sitting around and chatting with our families, and making slow pots of soup, and watching stuff bloom.   Unless, of course, you post every day because you love it.  And if that’s the case, I will always be here to read it.    But I think it would be acceptable to many if the posting is less frequent.   I don’t want to read fewer blogs, you see.  I’d like to read every blog on my blogroll, and new ones besides.  But if there were fewer posts, then I’d have more time to leave longer and better comments.  More time to read the things people talk about.  More time to cook the soup someone’s just described.  

SO — Slow Bloggers of the World, maybe sometime we could unite and slow down.  I’m not in a hurry for that to happen.  I’m here for the duration — but it seems like things will last longer if they don’t move quite so fast.  I know that’s not physically true, but it’s sort of metaphysically true, don’t you think?