Over Here

Rise n' Shine

So I'm giving a brief motivational talk tomorrow.

Brief: Under 10 minutes.

Audience: High school graduates sitting at white-clothed round tables. They already know about the sunscreen, and now they want to play outside.

However: They have to sleep sit through my talk, first. Hmm.

We could do some morbid "bucket list" game, things to do before they die in about 80 years. (And no, hooking up with a Jonas Brother doesn't count.)

I could talk about my adventures as a bartender, but I don't want to go all Peyton Manning-on-SNL-teaching-kids-how-to-carjack on them.

Life lessons? Keep your options open. Don't shower when there's a thunderstorm. You don't have to "do" anything - own a house, have a kid, buy an SUV. Just do whatever makes your heart sing.

When I was their age, I pinned a button on my backpack that read: Life is too short to drink cheap wine. Then I stopped drinking wine because it gave me migraines.

I mean, I'm no expert on how to live a perfect life. And when you were 18, would you have listened anyway?

What I'm reading

You recognize this little guy. He grew up to be a gifted musician and fronted one of the world's most popular bands, The Police. In 2003 he wrote his memoir.

I love autobiographies in general, but "Broken Music" was a truly great read. I finished the last 100 pages in one sitting (I took a break to do yoga, which seems fitting, given that Sting is a fan of the ancient practice.)

Sting's book begins with a religious experience, of sorts, that he had in Brazil, conjuring up repressed grief over the death of his parents. Sting then pulls us into his English childhood spent in a fading port town, watching his parents lay their own private longings to rest.

What I liked: The book shows us how Sting rose to global fame. It wasn't a foregone conclusion - "Broken Music" is what Sting's grandmother called his early romps on the family piano. So how did he do it? You could credit chance meetings (what if he'd never met Stewart Copeland?), but really Sting succeeded because he defended his vision like a ferocious knight - lopping off distractions; galloping from the temptations of a stable teaching career; secure in the armor of his emerging talent.

What I liked: He writes about lovers with spare, careful phrasing, and saves the criticism for himself.

What I liked: His beautiful way with words.

What I would've liked: More insight into how he writes music - the only example he gave was how he came up with "Roxanne" (inspired by the hookers in front of his hotel, and city flyers for the play "Cyrano de Bergerac.")

What I would've liked: Any insight into his whole tantric yoga thing. How exactly do you hold Upward Facing Dog for six hours at a time?

The blues

 

We're having a pool party!  (And no, this isn't base housing!)

Our last theme party, ironically, was for Mardi Gras, but we want to stay away from Cajun food/colored beads/masks this time around. There'll be plenty of time for that once we're actually living in, well, New Orleans.

For our poolside farewell, I was thinking "nautical chic": crisp blues and whites and splashes of deep rose; pineapples and raspberry sauce; a string of nautical pennants across the balcony. Cheese-stuffed pasta and fried plantains; thong sandals and trim shorts.

Beyond that, I don't know. Have any other party ideas?

The Wink

He'd break up with you for putting "poison control" on your speed dial ahead of his number.

Your dates are numbered if you have man hands, cook a stringy mutton, or get territorial about his dry-cleaning discount.

You are toast if you dated his disgusting fat friend (and that fat friend had dumped you); if you wear the same dress every day, or eat peas one at a time.

And if you're too much like Jerry Seinfeld - well, he'd dump you for that transgression, too. "I can't marry someone who's just like me. I hate myself!"

The couples who have been through our house seem to be working off the Jerry Seinfeld model. Here are some of their reasons for not making us an offer: 

"The shrubs are overgrown."

"Too many flowers."

"Too much pressure to buy."

"The backyard is too big."

Eh?

Next thing you know they'll be whining that they don't like the color of our hot water heater, or we have too many hand towels, or that our roof shingles are, well, too shingly.

To which I say: Fine! No house for you!

A Little Dream

This dream is in mud, gray clay dripping on the lens. It coats the flimsy plastic shower stall, the cracked toilet, the horrible shag carpet of the closet-sized bedroom.

"I can't believe we live here," I tell Joe. It's a two-room apartment that opens into a shopping mall (or maybe it's a jail, I can't remember.)

And it's two rooms, plus that barf-tastic bathroom.

"It needs upgrades," I tell Joe.

"We'll have to ask the landlord," Joe replies.

But wait! We actually own the place! In my dream, I'm sponging away the gunky stains and swinging a sledgehammer.

"Now we can flip this apartment." I'm giddy. Fade out.

It is obvious that I've become obsessed with selling our house. But the only upgrade we need here is to a different neighborhood.

This used to be one of the freshest places to live. Now we're competing with homes that still smell of paint and cut wood, all closer to the military base and better schools.

You can switch out countertops all you want, but in the end it's the view from the mailbox that matters most.

Haunting houses

We're abandoning our house in a month, when the movers come. Maybe someone will look at our house, dead at night, and wonder what happened to that writer and her Marine.

 

I found these houses, similarly dead, at photographer Kevin Bauman's website. I think he shot these pictures in Detroit:

 

In this first one, I see a freckled kid in a newsboy cap leaping up those steps. With a bookbag slung over his shoulder, a beagle bounding behind him, calling out to his Ma for chocolate milk. Dad worked for the city, a cop or bus driver, and maybe Ma was always after him to put up iron rails on those steps but he never did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love the architecture and brickwork of this house. I see a ponytailed teen girl banging on a typewriter from that sloped room on the upper floor. She comes to the front door only when she notices her boyfriend waiting on the stoop. The next day the family eats breakfast behind those bay windows and the parents are dying to ask what she did on her date, and was she going to marry the guy or go to college and become a journalist? Because those were the options. But the parents were raised not to talk about those things, so they stir sugar into their cereal and say nothing. Why did they leave? Or did the girl grow old and die in this house?

 

 

 

 

 

This house reminds me of World War II-era houses on a military base. I see a big family who spent their summers on the lake. There was no drooping clothesline in the back of this house, because Mom had one of those new-fangled washing machines. And when Dad got a raise at his advertising firm (leaping over his best friend to get the promotion), they could afford to add on a sunroom and extra bedroom onto the right wing of the house.

 

The parents threw sparkling dinner parties that migrated to the sunroom, where Mom played piano and passed wedges of Romaine lettuce filled with blue cheese. Sometimes Mom hosted Sunday brunch for her girlfriends and they sat on that front stoop in their taffeta skirts and gossiped about the neighbors. And then the kids grew up and moved away, and when their parents died they sold this house to a real estate speculator, who then lost a fortune.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Matching the drapes...

The new apartment will need new curtains. The ones from our house - fluttery white cotton with small cherry flowers, red shantung silk, jersey done up in fiery fuschia - aren't going to work in New Orleans.

In the city, I'll count on the drapes to define each room, anchor them, elongate those older windows - a big burden for a floor-length panel backed with 100% cotton.

So I read decorating mags. I wade through the designer websites. And I stay away from our local fabric store, where only more fuschia awaits.

There are so many things to consider. Silk or linen? Butter or slate or chestnut? And what's the difference between a curtain and a drape, anyway?

"Just please, no old-people prints," Joe says.

Over Here, Over Easy

"Bring a kayak."

"Don't stop at any intersections! There's a law that if you're a girl you can run red lights. You know, because there's so much criiiiiiiiiime."

Those are a few reactions I got when I told these acquaintances - because they are not my friends - that the Marine Corps is moving us to New Orleans.

We have a sweet history in the Big Easy. My dad went to school there. Joe & I honeymooned there. I mourned the losses of Katrina while Joe went over with the Marines to clean up.

So now - soon - we'll be trading the smell of hog farms for warm beignets with powdered sugar tails. We're trading "Where do you want to eat tonight? The Olive Garden or the Chili's?" for "Do you want to go out for Cuban or Thai?" 

We're leaving behind country music (delivered by our neighbor and his Karaoke machine, at all hours) for scattered jazz, soulful blues, Zydeco cheer (also at all hours.)

Kids racing scooters on our driveway for neighbors stomping overhead.

Tradition, tradition, brides in white, for weddings done in sorbet shantung, parading through the French Quarter behind a jazz band.

You get the idea. While the country life has grown on me, I can't wait to live in a place where every house is painted a different color.

Sigh way

I'm bummed after getting a rejection letter from a literary agent. I don't like rejection letters, but normally I can live with them. They're like the wild brown bunnies who eat all the flowers in my backyard.

But break out the violins, folks. The letter I just got, the queen of rabid bunnies, came from an agent with whom I'd spent a year working. That's a whole year of revising my young adult novel based on her advice, and on the promise that she'd read it through again.

I'd even started thinking of her as "my" agent, my devoted partner. (In a movie, the montage would be the two of us skipping around New York City, pointing and giggling at copies of my book - our book - propped up in store windows.) 

But 500 pages later, here's what actually happens:

Her: It's not that I don't like the characters or even the plot. At least, I'm not saying that in my rejection letter to you. It's that you made the book too long. And some of your characters need to be more conflicted about the war.

Me: Okay, all stuff that can be fixed.

Her: Good luck finding another agent.

Me: But I can fix this. I've proved that I will waste spend a year of my life revising this book based on your advice, and with no promises. Believe me, I'm dumb and desperate enough to do it again.

Her: Buh-bye.

So. I'm thinking what to do next, and it hits me: my marriage has been one of the greatest successes in my life. So a few nights ago, over a beautiful roasted steak and some beers, Joe and I had this discussion:

Me: How can I apply the same strategy I used to finally win at love - after dating a ton of losers - to help me land a book contract?

Him: What strategy was that?

Me: The last "tempting" offer I had, before I met you, was from a politician who was "separated" from his wife and wanted me to spend the weekend at his beach house.

Me again (probably talking with my mouth full): And I swore, like Scarlett O'Hara shaking her dirty fist at the sky, that I'd never date again. Then I met wonderful you.

Him: We were set up by college friends.

Me: Yeah.

If I follow that logic, that means that I need an agent who will ditch class to road trip with me to Georgetown, give me his mom's antique set of wooden golf clubs, and doodle pictures of his future kids on a napkin while we're ditching class (again) in the Rathskeller.

Actually, I do.

The secret

Well, not that Secret. It's not like I can pluck a perfect short story out of the universe's catalog and paste it into my computer. Because I've spent two months writing a freaking short story, which is about four weeks longer than I thought it would take, and I'm not anywhere close to being done. I'd have to relearn the secret.

And it's this: that a short story should carry an internal problem and an external problem, and link them. In my piece for Random House's OPERATION HOMECOMING, my external problem was the struggle to find waterfront property. It was a good distraction for me while my husband was deployed to Iraq. The internal problem, resolved when a friend's son was killed in combat, was that I realized it didn't matter where I live with my husband, as long as we're together.

What I've got in my Word document right now is a mess--scenes that drift like ice floes, passing each other with no effect and no order and no resolution of anything. But I've got a woman with a problem. I need to get her off the ice.

Two minute warning

I've jumped on the Miami Dolphins Flat Tire Express, during their worst season ever. I blame Netflix for this. And my husband, who's been a devoted Miami fan since his family lived there in the early 1970s.

When it became obvious, this season, that the Dolphins were going to serve up Fried Faint Hope Sandwiches, followed by the dessert course of Bitter Fruit, to my husband every week, I decided to put us both out of our misery. I cycled a documentary about the Dolphins 1972 season to the front of our Netflix queue.

"Just pretend this is live," I advised my husband, after one spectacularly bad game that caused him to wad up a Dolphins pennant. We popped in the DVD and were transported to the era of leather helmets - well, maybe not that far back, but there were a lot of plaid pants and Chia-pet sideburns in the footage, which played to music that sounded like it had been taped underwater. During a typhoon.

It turns out the 1972 Fins had played with incredible heart. They weren't out to be superstars or set individual records - they played for their team, and for their beloved coach Shula. Well, I fell for them all. And I finally fell for the current Miami team who give it their all, week after stinking week.

When these Dolphins finally won, deep into the season (and courtesy only of a failed Ravens field goal), I was cheering as much as my husband.

p.s. For this weekend only: Go Chargers!!!!!