Flame on!

It’s that time of year when leaves turn vivid, seeming to push every last bit of red, orange, and gold out where we can see it. Putting it on display.

And then, almost overnight, that bright color transforms into autumnal crispness. Beauty done to a turn.

After the show, we get the olfactory and auditory encore: the rustling, crunching, unmistakable fragrance of fall with every footstep, with each bicycle tire turning over leather-brown and gold bits, with all the scrambling dashes of any-age children through piled-up leaves.

A quotation about wealth, from the first episode of the TV series Matt Houston (circa 1982), spoken by the title character (played by Lee Horsley):
A man can only wear one pair of boots at a time.

The right stuffing

I still have my first teddy bear, named Teddy (how original). He is older than I am. He was my older brother Scott's bear, so the story goes. Scott gave him to me when I was but a babe. I, however, did not pass him along to the next sibling. Teddy and I suited each other admirably, so he stayed with me.

Teddy has long been a creature of comfort and company, but he’s not much of an eater or drinker. When I was a little girl, I shoved the red buds from springtime trees into a crack in Teddy's hard shell of a mouth. I figured he must be hungry, and wouldn't a bear like berries? Such were my thoughts. Then, thinking he might be thirsty, I poured in some milk. I was sharing. Over time, the resulting mess turned unfriendly inside my bear, and my mother had to perform surgery, a tree-berry-and-ruined-fluff-ectomy. He stills bears the stitches. The bear survived, but his voice box stopped working. Eventually, the silent voice box migrated downward, along with much of the remaining stuffing. Eventually, it had to be removed as a nonfunctioning body part.

Gravity and wear have a way of causing padding and parts to shift, making us lumpy or saggy or both, even as we become and remain lovable and, if we’re fortunate, wise enough to know that the downward trend isn’t all the important.

The years have not dimmed Teddy’s shiny-black eyes nor his ability to radiate acceptance and understanding, though they have done damage to his two-tone fuzz and the tilt of his head. May the years be no less kind to you and me.

Books: Berg and duplication

I keep finding Elizabeth Berg books on my shelves and in the stacks of books on my stereo and credenza and elsewhere in my book-glutted house. This week I found Until the Real Thing Comes Along. Last week I discovered two: Joy School and What We Keep. I polished off What We Keep in a few days by reading at night and in waiting rooms, then started on the new one I received just this week, The Last Time I Saw You. I knew I had Pull of the Moon and Talk Before Sleep; I've read and loved both. The latter is the one I took with me to a reading given by the author at our local Barnes & Noble the last weekend in April. If there had been a prize for bringing the oldest or shabbiest paperback form of a best-selling Berg book, I would have won it.

The miracle in finding copies of Berg's books I didn't realize I had is that I didn't find duplicates. I have been known to buy a book and then, unless I read it immediately, I may buy it again, thinking, "I've been wanting to read this book." This becomes especially likely when I'm shopping in our Carmel Public Library Friends Shop, where hardbacks are $3 and paperbacks are less, and I have the pleasant excuse of helping to fund the library by buying a donated book. While sorting through my bookshelves, I found duplicates of The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Scatterfield, The Shape of Sand by Marjorie Eccles, and The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. It gets worse. I have bought The Thirteenth Tale three times. The first time I bought it, the book had just been published. I gobbled it up and passed it along to a friend. The next two times, I was buying to replace it, because it was such a good yarn. I had only intended to replace it once. Apparently, there was a blip in my mental inventory of books.

What do I do with the spares? I donate them to the Carmel Public Library Friends Shop, of course. I just have to remember not to buy them back.

Lisa Rice Wheeler, Elizabeth Berg, Kelly O'Dell Stanley

Dry silk

The sound 

on this sun-bright afternoon 

is the dry-silk 

rustle of trees 

crowded with leaves 

jostled by an exuberant wind.

Minneolas

Three weeks ago I found Minneolas in the local Whole Foods store: tangelos. The Minneola is a cross between a Duncan grapefruit and a Dancy tangerine and was released in 1931 (thank you, Wikipedia, for that info). Amazing flavor and scent. Richly juicy. Intriguing ovoid shape. And the color of my favorite marigolds, the ones I can't find anymore: Janie's Tangerine.

Delicious. Better than any other citrus. My opinion, of course.

Cat's feet and dusk

I wrote this in an e-mail to my friend Kelly, to tell her about a recent Sunday evening: “Mike, John Michael and I went to Shapiro's for dinner and ate plenty of comfort food. Then we took a walk along the Monon as twilight crept up on its little cat paws.”

Something about dusk and cat’s feet stirs my lit-major brain, but I cannot recall what the quote is that is niggling at my thoughts, whispering and then hiding. So much of what I think about when writing is like that: glimpses, soft sounds, light seen through a curtained window, spring rain against dusty glass.

Wear and tears

I came across this quotation when I was looking for a chapter that Robert Fulghum wrote about crayons. Bill Watterson’s quotation isn’t cheery, but then, his creations—Calvin and Hobbes—aren’t cheery, either; they’re wry and memorable and true.

"A box of new crayons!  Now they're all pointy, lined up in order, bright and perfect. Soon they'll be a bunch of ground down, rounded, indistinguishable stumps, missing their wrappers and smudged with other colors.  Sometimes life seems unbearably tragic."

~Bill Watterson

Keep in mind the fate of the Velveteen Rabbit, who had 
his fur and his features loved off.  Was he more beautiful in love-crumpled disarray or when he was fuzzy-new and 
bright-eyed?

Green haze

Just as spring arrives on the calendar, the beginnings of what will become leaves appear as a kind of tender-green haze around bushes and trees and other branches. The leaves don’t appear to be attached, but rather, floating like a veil around the branches. 

Tiberius

On March 27, 2010, Oliver William Boyle was born to my son Chris and his wife, Colleen. That was the day I found out that the baby boy whose birth we'd been awaiting would be called Oliver. It's a good name. A strong name. But it's not what my husband, younger son and I had been calling him. To us throughout most of the prenatal period, he was Tiberius.

When Chris and Colleen had decided to keep the name a secret, we needed something to call the baby-to-be. So his uncle-to-be suggested the middle name of Star Trek's James T. Kirk: Tiberius. And it stuck.

It's quite possible that Oliver will still be Tiberius to some of us when he's old enough to find it annoying.


(Photo: Tiberius with his Uncle John Michael)

A Steve Perry Morning

It’s been a Steve Perry morning. Shortly after I awakened, “Missing You” began playing in my head. I didn’t hear the words at first, just the music, including the sound of Perry’s voice as an instrument.

Even if you somehow slid by popular music in the ‘80s  and ‘90s and then overlooked the seemingly permanent place many of his songs and his work with Journey have on playlists, I’ll bet you’ve heard his voice. Pause here to go to iTunes and listen to a sample, in case you’ve forgotten the sound. Try “Oh Sherrie” or “Who’s Cryin’ Now.” Or just go straight to “Don’t Stop Believin’.” The texture of that voice, the astonishing range (from high tenor to low bass), and the clarity of it, make it memorable. The drum and guitar work from Journey is worth a listen, too.

Anyway, I put on my earphones and plugged into my iPod to listen while I worked on a rather mindlessly repetitive task. No one was nearby except the cats, so I harmonized to “Missing You” and then belted out “Oh, Sherrie” multiple times. I felt happy. The sometimes-sad lyrics aside, singing with Steve Perry is energizing. I danced, too. With Steve Perry.

Recommended, in no particular order, to revive your musical memory and, perhaps, bring on a Steve Perry morning:

“Oh Sherrie”

“Open Arms”

“Foolish Heart”

“Who’s Cryin’ Now?”

“Anyway”

“Go Away”

“Missing You”

(The photo is from the Wikipedia article about Steve Perry.)

Alfred

Have you ever noticed that the bracket { looks like Alfred Hitchcock’s profile?

What I do

I write. That, in short form, is what I do. I also edit, which, being about words, ideas, and images, is part of writing. I observe. I imagine. I organize. And while I’m doing that, I attempt to distill into words what I'm observing, imagining, or organizing. It’s what I’ve been doing since I could hold a crayon. I tell stories. Some factual, some fictional, some strictly my opinion. All true.

When I was not yet 10, Gene Bennett taught me to type.  My first typewriter was an antique Underwood with clackety keys and a satisfying krrrrrring when I returned the platen. “The quick brown fox jumped over the log” soon became pages and pages of observations and conversations and thoughts poured out near the close of most of my childhood days. My diary grew as did my skill with a keyboard. Eventually, placing my hands on a keyboard—any keyboard—would start the flow of words and ideas, causing me to sort and reassemble what I knew and what I understood.

Years later, when my then-five-year-old son told his class what his mother did for a living, he said that I was “a typer.” He didn’t understand the concept of a professional writer, but his description, while limited, is accurate. Apply hands to keyboard. Writing happens.

First post

Needing to come up with something profound to say for a first post applies an uncomfortable pressure to one’s creativity. Perform! And do it now.

This does not improve my ability to do so.

I could write that I took a walk on the Monon Trail at 8 this morning, just as the Easter egg blue and white-marbled sky was separating itself from grey dawn.

Or that the daffodils outside my office window shiver rather than dance in the crisp breeze of morning, which in no way diminishes their ability to charm me. I am relieved to see them and to know with certainty that color is returning to the world.

That will have to do.