When You Can't Explain It, Sing It!

I'm loving this song right now because it expresses poetically the way my husband is feeling. Here's my inadequate translation:

"Provincia de Río Negro" 
Manolo García

I’ve seen the province of Río Negro reflected

in your lake system gaze.

I’ve seen the flight of the white shadow,

a chain that moors a traveler who doesn’t want to go home.

Your Basque grandfather was a shepherd in Patagonia.

I’ve touched your meadow hair,

I’ve held your copper-colored thatch hands.

Hung up on sheepskin fleeces,

trembling tendrils on golden fields,

on the windy, soft afternoon of the earth.

Like foam on the crests of some earthen waves

shimmering in your sea of pampas grass.

Ooh, I’m leaving now. Ooh, here I am.

When I come back, I find myself frozen stiff with nostalgia

on this impossible highway.

Under the private smoke from the thousand chimneys

of the new development on the edge of the city,

we move along at infernal speeds

on machines with wheels — and I can’t get used to it —

to come together like a plague of locusts

at the same times, in the same places.

So I feel I’m wasting my life here,

that I only want to hold

your copper-thatch hands in mine.

Ooh, I’m leaving now. Ooh, here I am.

Hung up on sheepskin fleeces,

Trembling whiteness on golden fields

on the windy, soft afternoon of the earth.

Like foam on the crests of a few eternal waves

shimmering in a sea of pampas grass.

Ooh, I’m leaving now. Ooh, here I am.

Ooh, I’m leaving now. Ooh, here I am.

Put simply: my husband knows there's something better out there. Even more simply: he's fed up.

Call it a mid-life crisis. Call it 30 years of bouncing around doing work that vexes his soul. Whatever it is, I think we're on the verge of a life-changing decision. I'll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, the Clear Your Shelf giveaway hop is still going on, so get your entries in there while you can! 

Our Second Wedding Anniversary

Two years. What a couple of years! In this photo, taken minutes before we said our vows, my husband is showing a tooth he recently lost to the aftereffects of a cracked crown. (I love him no matter how many teeth he has or doesn't have.)

I could describe the delirious feeling that led to the laughter captured here, but the photo says it all. Happy Anniversary, sweet love!

It's So Obvious We Don't Even Realize It Until Someone Points It Out

About 98% of the thoughts that go through our minds are repetitive and useless.

Yep. It's a side effect of the way human consciousness has developed.

Take a moment now to witness the thoughts that cross your mind. Just by observing them and letting them go on their merry way, a lot of people can decrease these repetitive thoughts. Enjoy the silence!

Things That Set My Heart Aflutter, Virtual Likes Edition

In this day and age, there are plenty of external gauges of popularity. No longer do we have to wonder whether they like us: the cold hard numbers will tell us whether it's so. Facebook has the "like" feature, which is becoming more common in other venues, and turning into rating features on a couple of my published flash fictions.

As of this writing, there have been 155 hits on "A Business Venture in Glue," five people have rated "The Writer's Wet Nap Dream" "six-tacular" (though that number seems to fluctuate up and down), and I have 33 "likes" on my Facebook author page (that's not as many as I have friends on my normal user account, but I'm still impressed by people's generosity!) I've also received interesting comments on other pieces floating around out there.

Any feedback fulfills my purpose as an author. Seeing the numbers grow, and especially whenever an actual comment appears, makes my job as a writer truly worthwhile. Yes, it makes my heart leap! Thank you!

Happy Memorial Day!

Snowbirds

See what I mean about "fainted, diva-like"?

I never heard the term "snowbird" used the way it is in Arizona. (Or if I did, I had no understanding of it.) While my husband and I were living with my sister-in-law, I heard her use the term. She's a very nice lady, and not native to Arizona herself, so I didn't get any negative connotation, just the bare meaning: people with so much money or such a concern for their arthritis pain that they live in Arizona during the winter months, while spending most of the year in their native states of New England, the Midwest, or other potentially snowy places.

Okay, that's their business. Also, the word "snowbird" inevitably brings to mind the classic Fleetwood Mac love song "Songbird" (the version at left ended up on our wedding video). It's such a beautifully evocative word that I never suspected the vitriol with which it could be said. I heard a teenager, certainly a year-rounder and probably an Arizona native, hurl it as an invective against a couple of people probably in their sixties who weren't moving fast enough for the young ones.

I guess I can understand that people who stay here, really call Arizona home, and suffer through the summers, might resent people who only stay as long as they care to, using natives' resources. When I was growing up in Northern California, we had a similar resentment toward people from LA who came North to retire, causing a population spike that might have led to overdevelopment, etc. But it takes a teenager (or similarly evolved individual) to imbue such a lovely word with the profanity I heard that day.

I began to think that my husband and I are sort of poor-man's snowbirds. We've arrived in Arizona just in time for the winter season, and so we've missed the massive storms where we came from, which certainly would have put a kink or two in our backs from shoveling. The similarity ends there, because it's not exactly a vacation home we've set up here with borrowed furniture, and we won't be leaving when the weather gets really hot. But just as Arizona saves the real snowbirds' aching joints, so too has it saved my husband and me from certain economic doom. I still feel like a complete outsider here, but I'd like to offer Arizona my sincere thanks for accepting us when we had nowhere else to go. Arizona has been a perfect model of the ideals expressed in Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus":

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"


Since coming to Arizona I have felt slightly less tempest-tossed and vastly less homeless. Wretched, maybe a little, but that's not Arizona's fault. I know there's a lot of controversy because of the people who come across the southern border, but for my husband and me Arizona has opened the golden door. Thank you. 


And thank you all for voting for my exciting project! There's still time to get your votes in! Look here. I'm the sixth pitch down. Thanks, really!

I Said I Wanted to Work With Books

I've been working the textbook buyback rush at the University of Arizona Bookstore for a week and half now. Unknown lucky sods get to do the buying and inspection. At that point, they ship the heavy, dusty books to a group of us, on dollies, or in wheeled tubs. We put those lovely stickers that say "used" on them and then try with all our might to put them in the right place. That means finding out whether it's been ordered for the spring semester or not, and tens of thousands of other variables I would never have imagined only two weeks ago.


The burden is mostly physical: standing all day, walking miles across hard floors, lifting, bending, crouching, etc. We also have a heavy burden on our memories, as we need to recall exactly where things belong or cost ourselves a lot of extra physical effort.  I'm impressed with how much I remember. I'm mostly in the rhythm of things now, so I don't feel as desperate or soulless as when I started.

The first day was really hard because all these wonderful books were coming under my nose, and yet I couldn't stick my nose into them! The pace is much too fast for a contemplative perusal of each interesting bit of course material that comes my way. When I was a cataloger at the library in Boston, at least it was understood that you could set some books aside for yourself before finishing up the records and sending them out for the public. We were all bibliophiles there, and it was an unspoken benefit of the job. In this situation, books are whisked out from between one's fingers -- to occupy their spaces on the textbook shelves so the avid students can find them, or to languish among other things that have been purchased "on spec," or in the overstock piles -- long before one can do more than get a sense that one would like to continue reading. The longing was so great that first day, I thought I might have to quit on the grounds of psychological torture.

Then there are the myriad assaults on the sensibilities of those who love the book-as-object: torn and folded covers (book drop accidents); mutilated, replaced, detached spines; excessive note-taking in margins; dog-eared-ness; signs of being dropped in the bathtub; and other scenes too gruesome for this blog. Perhaps even more depressing, we frequently see books still in the plastic shrink-wrap, sent to us as if they've been thoroughly used. In these cases, perhaps the students meant to return the books new because they weren't taking the class, after all, but didn't get around to it in time, thus costing Mom and Dad hundreds of dollars. I usually assume they were coasting, and never opened the book, all the while hoping to get an "A" anyway. I always send loving thoughts to those books, sending them on to, I hope, be truly loved the next time around.

One day, I will be able to actually start reading a book, never mind finishing one! In the meantime, please look the other way if I've developed a habit of leafing through the pages as I scurry across the warehouse. A single sentence is better than silence.

What's Next -- You Tell Me!

As you may have been able to piece together through the hints in the posts on this blog, my husband and I can no longer support ourselves in Pennsylvania. Very soon, we're starting a journey across most of the United States with a few things in the car, to live with my husband's sister. It's the only solution we can think of to the intractable problem that my husband is highly employable and loves his work, but is only getting paid $1000 per month.




My husband says I should write a book about us. We went from $100,000 a year to $12,000. It's a pretty startling figure, but I'm thinking it's not that unusual these days. We were able to avoid foreclosure and we have someplace to go, even if it is more than 2,000 miles away. Overall, we're much happier than we were three years ago, when we had no money troubles, but didn't know each other yet.

So, I won't be able to post for a while as we pack up and I pay less attention to writing and the writing world. I hope to be able to post from the road, especially if we encounter anything interesting.

COMING SOON
* I have some important birthdays to commemorate later in November, starting a week from today, so be sure to check them out!
* The day after Thanksgiving, I'm posting a great interview I had with author Barbara Briggs Ward, and that is sure to get you into the Christmas spirit!
* From the new digs, I hope to offer you more free excerpts of my writing! Tempting and thrilling!
* I'm also considering posting on how to be happy, seeing as my husband and I have found the secret. Please let me know if you would be interested in that kind of reading. I would love to know!

Lastly, I know my books are unusual and undefinable, but if you're feeling charitable and just want to help, please consider buying them or telling your reading friends about them. (The links are in the Good Reading link on the upper left of the page.) Research shows: it makes you feel lastingly good to help others! Even if I were sleeping under the stars and living on bread and water, what I would most want is to be read. The writer's disorder.