Our granddaughter had her second heart surgery this morning. It went well. Minimally invasive and she may go home this afternoon. Incredible.

There’s more goodness…

Okay, so this starts off not so good: Someone sent up huge burning paper lanterns on the coast a couple-three weeks ago. Burning. Paper. In a community surrounded by forest and with many homes having cedar roofs, this is a profoundly stupid thing to do. It is also against the law. Local firefighters take such floating lanterns very seriously. Most fireworks are illegal on the coast, but limited police protection means no one will come if I report a 30-foot bonfire or illegal fireworks like bottle rockets. They will come about burning lanterns.

I found the first two on the rocks, rimming the shore. I found the third on a neighbor’s roof. I could see from the ground it had gone out.

One January, a few years ago, a fire burned many acres of the hills east of our home.

Fortunately, none of those three lanterns started a fire.

More good: I discovered (rediscovered) cashmere in my stash and knit a hat for our son. He thinks he can fix my treasured waffle iron. I put the labels on the “Apple Orchard” weavings in bright reds and blues. I found a story I started years ago and stopped mid-sentence.

So writing…

I meant, at the start, to write about how I have come to watch procedurals as a way of avoiding violence. I know that sounds odd, but literature is invariably based on conflict, and sexual and physical conflict—fighting scenes—that I find I simply do not want to watch. It’s not that I cringe about fighting scenes, it’s that I find them tedious, irrelevant, sometimes even offensive. The advantage to procedurals is that fight- and even chase-scenes are relatively rare. People do get smacked on the head into unconsciousness without actually dying all too often, so there’s that. But few procedurals dwell on the death but on the figuring-out-who-did-it-and-how-it-was-done. I have watched procedurals and social dramas from Thailand, Turkey, England, Scotland, and Ireland, all the Scandinavian countries, Estonia, Korea, Japan, China, South Africa, and around the Mediterranean. Typically, there are partnerships between people of differing ages, genders, races, nations, classes, religions, and periods of time. No prolonged sword fights, beheadings, or ruined horses. A mystery solved. And the struggle, the required conflict is discovering truth, not who wins a battle. Sometimes a fight, but more often discovery. The one found, the culprit or criminal is sometimes viewed with sympathy, sometimes killed off, but there is rarely any doubt about murder being a bad thing and that justice might be complicated but is good. I believe “May the best man win” is wishful thinking. “Best” is a subjective judgement usually defined as “my side.” Sexist too. Procedurals are about discovering responsibility.

We watched Women Talking yesterday. I thought it was brilliant, but I will confess that I am also troubled by the recent focus on sex. Necessary, I know. We need to address sexual violence and violation, and surely the conflict makes for drama and a good story. No argument here. It is long overdue. And of course sex, the act of sex, as well as gender identification and sexual orientation are very important aspects of human life. Is it reasonable to remind ourselves that they are not the only things that matter in a human life?

When I was in college—I will remind you that this was 1970-1976 when I earned three undergraduate degrees—I read science fiction between terms. Not all SF worked for me because a lot of it was just what I saw every day in life and media and read about in books: sexism and violence. I faced sexism every day and looked to fiction for escape from that. Thus I cruised the bookstore shelves for books depicting a future egalitarianism I might prefer. A world where her sexuality and gender were not the only qualities required of a woman. A world of people who had sex but did not allow that desire to define everything about them. Different conflicts perhaps. Imagine that.

For several years now, I have been wrestling with that notion of conflict in literature. I taught the concept to my students: conflict between people, between a person and an institution or nature or even within the self. For a story to work, this conflict must be compelling and must also be resolved. But so much of conflict in film and other media relies on violence, a fight. Is it even possible to tell a story without violence? It is where my most recent writing comes from… that desire to eliminate violation and violence… so I killed off my own species to find out what might be left. Is that ironic? Answering my own questions has been interesting, challenging, satisfying.

So this is all good, very good. I am thinking and making and imagining possibilities. The otter on the beach. My ALL THE DAUGHTERS SING podcast going live. My friend safe, if homesick, in Istanbul.

But our granddaughter safely out of surgery? Well, that is on another order of good.

And gratitude.