Well, now, this is a weak post—you may have noticed by now I’m aiming at weekly posts on Fridays. This post is short because I put up a “New Year” post yesterday. If you choose to click below, you’ll find a local story.
The brief story…
Continue readingIt’s New Years Day, the day we make promises to ourselves about how to have a good or better year. But I’m not making promises, only suggestions for myself. Here’s the short version:
In 2025: I went through dramatic changes with my novel, the most notable of which was sending back the advance, cutting it to 60k words, and recognizing that if it’s going to be published I will do that myself. We stopped drinking altogether in October as a result of observation of a friend’s disastrous decline. I injured my foot in May and recovered enough by November to run.
Gary and I quit drinking in October. He was having a beer or three each day, and I averaged a glass of wine. Then our tenant totaled his car and left his home in filth to go into assisted living—that was September and we’re still repairing the damage caused by incontinence, smoking and drinking, and neglect. We were surprised by how easy we found our choice to quit drinking, we don’t miss the alcohol or the hangovers, and we’ve noticed we’re saving more than a hundred dollars each month, which is particularly welcome.
The national news was mostly awful, but we are well.
One more personal suggestion for this coming year… I was once an eight-hours-sleep-a-night person. When I was still a child in the early 1960s, an article about sleep made me determined to get my eight hours of sleep each night, and I maintained that excellent habit all through college and parenting and teaching Art and English and writing. But in the 2000s, I found teaching while caring for my mother did not leave me much “free” time to write, so I deliberately cut an hour from my sleep schedule. Seven hours allowed me to write novels and complete an MFA, but I’m now down to an unhealthy six hours of sleep and I’m missing those other two hours.
I really want that sleep back, and I will be taking steps.
I’ll probably read at least 50 books in 2026 and worry too much. We’ll pick up litter on the beach, hopefully find someone to rent our rental, and visit family and friends. I’ll bake and cook and make stuff. Gary will do kindnesses, remember, listen to music, and garden. No promises, but we’ll try not to do anything stupid while staring into the face of fascism and maintaining some level of optimism because we are hopeful people.
May it be enough.
.
The truth is, I used to hit. (I’ve stopped—when? Decades ago now.) For example, I’d slap my husband’s arm in what was meant to be a playful way. Not hard. Well, a slap hard enough to leave a red mark on my son. Briefly. That was bad. This is my confession. The screaming was bad. The frightening loss of temper was bad. The irritability was bad. I regret all of it. Mea culpa. Je regret. In every language, I am sorry. I don’t know where that oral and physical violence came from. I was slapped just once as a child, but not beaten, not yelled at or berated, as best I can recall. I remember the abuse suffered by my peers. I don’t recall being spanked, just the one slap from my mother. [She did not remember doing this.]
Like last week, this post is late. I mean to write early, but it’s been a week of strong wind, heavy rain, an 18-hour power outage, some baking and planning and writing, and exhausting work on our rental. A friend sent me notes on the novella version of my book and I began a new draft. Good stuff. It sounds like I’m complaining, but I have no business doing that.
I nearly didn’t post this week at all. But let me share a personal tradition that I miss while I’m sitting here on the sofa, the television paused. I had a writing assignment I shared but the most important thing I used to do this time of year, when I was teaching, was show episode 10 of season 1 of The West Wing. The entire series is playing on Netflix just now. A homeless vet dies wearing a coat that Toby Ziegler donated to charity. It had his business card in the pocket and for that reason Toby is called by the DC police to the Korean War Veterans Memorial in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C.. They hope he can identify the body.
This week I got started painting our rental and completed my quilt top and three submissions.
I was researching something the other morning that I don’t remember, but Gary and I got to talking during our walk about the people we still knew from high school after more than fifty years. I thought I would blog about that when I got home, but did my chores, and then forgot completely what I wanted to say. I titled this post “Lucy and Me” but can’t remember why I did that either. I might be losing my mind, but mostly, I’m busy.
I saw a reel of this and am shamelessly reposting Tim Minchin’s 2013 address to UWA “Nine Life Lessons” from a site that has already done this:
However, I have had large groups of people listening to what I say for quite a few years now, and it’s given me an inflated sense of self-importance.
So, I will now, at the ripe old age of 37.9, bestow upon you nine life lessons to echo, of course, the nine lessons of carols of the traditional Christmas service, which is also pretty obscure. You might find some of this stuff inspiring.
You will definitely find some of it boring, and you will definitely forget all of it within a week. And be warned, there will be lots of similes and obscure aphorisms which start well but end up making no sense. So listen up, or you’ll get lost like a blind man clapping in a pharmacy trying to echo-locate the contact lens fluid.
I was still teaching when I reposted an old blog: WHY YOU DON’T WANT TO BE A TEACHER. That post arrived on my old Blogger site in 2011, then here in 2019.
Thousands of people read the original posting about why you don’t want my former job. At least two college programs assigned that post to students training to be teachers.
I’m grateful for the years I spent in education. I loved teaching but I enjoy other things, and I understand why teachers last, typically, just four years in the profession. There are people who think I’m a fool to have done it at all.
Continue readingAs I began writing this on Wednesday, I was reading Helen Whybrow’s memoir, The Salt Stones, which focuses on her family, her ninety-some Icelandic sheep, and how as a pastoralist she lives within the rhythm of her animals, the trees and grasses, blueberries and shrubs, the soil microbes and those in our gut, and all that lives in and on, over and above that soil and makes of her two hundred acres a thriving ecosystem. Her husband is kind, her step-daughter has gone off to live her life, and soon her daughter will follow. Her mother has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t always know her daughter, but is the same kindly person for all that. I read the final chapter yesterday. I felt grateful for the beauty she shares.
“This is what makes the myth such a great lie!” Gary says. Shoulda-coulda-woulda. It’s always someone’s fault, not ours.
We tried to watch the right/left overview of the our political week on The New Hour on PBS. We’d previously vowed not to watch it anymore, but today I backslid, found it on my computer a day late, and was sorely disappointed. Two journalists talked about the Epstein files and decided that was a big nothing. [Really?] The more astonishing thing, to me, is that both Brooks and the democratic-journalist-of-the-week totally blamed the Democratic party for ending the shut-down. The Democrats should have stuck with it until they got subsidized healthcare, since it’s what people want. Brooks said that and the other person said it too. They were so disappointed.
I was thinking about a man, smiling and thankful for the gift of a few spoonfuls of honey.
It’s not my day to post, but this happened a few hours ago—the homeless vet and the arrogant journalists so sure about what others should have done.
