The Teacher

A writer must take infinite pains—if he writes only one great story in his life, that is better than writing a hundred bad ones—and that finally the pains the writer takes must be his own.
—John Gardner

In praise for John Gardner’s book, On Becoming A Novelist, my copy is underlined and annotated and always close at hand. I’ve read it and reread it, all the while wondering: do I have what it takes? And then self-doubt sets in, as it always does, especially when I awake in the middle of the night and all seems lost. Then, in the light of day this self-flagellation retreats like the bogeyman under the bed and off I happily go in search of the perfect word.

He explains better than any teacher I’ve ever had what writing teachers really mean when they say we should show and not tell. “One can feel sad or happy or bored or cross in a thousand ways,” he says. “The abstract adjectives mean almost nothing. The precise gesture nails down the one feeling right for the moment. This is what the writing teacher means by “show,” not “tell". And that is all they mean. You can tell a reader about almost anything in fiction except a character’s feelings. The characters’ feelings must be demonstrated, through an action (or gesture), dialogue or physical reaction to setting.”

If I would share any other thing from this generous book, it is his frequent reference to what he calls the vivid and continuous dream. A good writer, he says, evokes in a reader a vivid and continuous dream. This is the state of mind your reader falls into if you’ve done your job. Absorbed in the dream you’ve artfully weaved, they forget that they are reading printed words on a page. But be wary, for the dream can be abruptly interrupted. One misplaced word will jar them back to reality, one clumsy out-of-character action (why she would never do that!) will make them question the writer’s honesty, one grammatical error will make them page ahead looking for one more reason to stop or, worse, set the whole thing aside.

I think it relates back to the mysterious trancelike state all novelists experience when they’re writing a serious novel. We can’t explain it, even to ourselves, and certainly not to anyone who doesn’t write novels. The writer’s trance evokes the vivid dream in the reader. Good fiction requires it and the serious reader expects it.

Writers on Writing

This is a writer's chair. What? you say, where are the writing tools? Where is the electrical outlet? Don't jump ahead. One must first sit and watch, and much has passed by the front of this chair. Generations of writers have sat in this chair.

This is our old milkhouse which I hope to turn into a produce washing and storing station. The cement block exterior keeps the interior cool. I see a face looking out, eyes wide so as not to miss a thing. If you look at a thing long enough, it becomes something else, just as words can change their meanings right in front of your tired eyes.

Because I'm a sucker for tidbits of brevity and wit, I like quotations. I have compiled a list of my favorite quotes by writers and arranged them in an order that makes sense to me.

It is not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.
T.S. Eliot

A book ought to be an icepick to break up the frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
Saul Bellow

There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets….when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.
Charles Bukowski

Loneliness is your companion for life. If you don’t want to be lonely, you get into TV.
William Styron

When you’re writing, that’s when you’re lonely. I suppose that gets into the characters you’re writing about. There are hours and hours of silence.
Dick Francis

Suffering is the main condition of the artistic experience.
Samuel Beckett

When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there’s no holding me.
William Faulkner

Read all the Faulkner you can get your hands on, and then read all of Hemingway to clean the Faulkner out of your system.
John Gardner

Surprise the reader with the unexpected verb or adjective. Writing that has no surprises is as bland as oatmeal. Use one startling adjective per page.
Anne Bernays

As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
Mark Twain

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
Mark Twain

A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.
John Steinbeck

You must avoid giving hostages to fortune, like getting an expensive house, and a style of living that never lets you afford the time to take the chance to write what you wish.
Irwin Shaw

I am profoundly uncertain about how to write. I know what I love or what I like, because it’s a direct, passionate response. But when I write I’m very uncertain whether it’s good enough. That is, of course, the writer’s agony.
Susan Sontag

You can never know enough about your characters.
W. Somerset Maugham

We like that a sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
Henry David Thoreau


In looking over these, I realize that four of my favorites have to do with angst, which is the writer’s lot in life. But I believe there is nothing more worthwhile than writing. And when you get the words right—find the perfect word or an original metaphor—it’s like a mental orgasm. The highs, however infrequent, far outweigh the ever-pounding lows. If you are a writer, you will write, regardless of the clanging gong of the critic and the shattering rejection of the agent.

So, are you a writer? This is my list of ten attributes I believe you must have to be a writer.

1. Perseverance
2. Empathy
3. Affection for alcohol
4. Self-esteem
5. Imagination
6. Drivenness
7. Indifference
8. Willingness to sacrifice the ordinary TV-watching pleasures of society
9. An accurate eye
10. Fondness for daydreaming and eavesdropping.

Numbers 6 and 7 go hand in hand. Drivenness is what allows you to be indifferent to whether or not your novel sells which allows you to plod ahead. It helps you shrug off the well-meaning questions about what you’re doing with yourself and are you still working on that book and why don’t you answer your phone or organize your life and do something worthwhile (meaning something that will make you money). Questions asked with a puzzled look, because if you aren’t a writer you can never understand the trancelike state that writing requires and the sought-after solitude that is our aphrodisiac.

Laying in for Winter

My ferns huddle under a blanket and my last crop of lettuce is covered with a double layer of shade cloth. The eggplant and basil are dead and the peppers are on their last wobbly leg. I threw old flannel shirts over a couple of roses that were still covered with buds as we try to survive this spell of unusual cold, holding unto one last bloom, one last crunch of green, holding out for one more sunny day when I can hang my ferns back up on the porch and watch their fronds sway gently in the breeze. Come Indian Summer.

But this winter we will have a heated greenhouse. My father is getting an outdoor wood stove that will take big logs, tapping into his existing furnace and running a connecting pipe into my greenhouse which will sit beside it. The wood is ready to burn and I have spinach seeds left from summer for my first experiment! Maybe I can set up a little corner for myself to write, a corner where no one can find me, a corner of my own. And about my short story The Echo, while it is fiction, the problem with frogs is very real. Often this summer my husband commented how he never heard them anymore in the creek that runs behind our house. It is very worrisome. One more thing to worry about.

But look! I now have fifteen followers! Thank you all very much for reading.

The Banned and the Challenged

The list of banned and challenged books is like a Who's Who of the literary world. Not only should we writers strive to write something with the potential of making somebody uncomfortable, we should make a commitment to read at least five banned/challenged books a year. I have composed my list of personal must-reads and my top five are......

A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY- Irving (cause I'm a sucker for Irving)
AS I LAY DYING- Faulkner (ditto Faulker)
THE SOUND AND THE FURY- Faulker (can't believe I haven't read this one)
THE GIVER - Lowry (cause I just realized it's buried in my bookcase)
FANNY HILL - Cleland (cause I'm a sucker for sex)


Down with fluff!! It isn't going to be enough to just be published....I want to be on the Banned Book list!

Banned Book Week Challenge

In celebration of the freedom to read, I've further researched the banned or challenged books I've read and I'm proud to say I've found eleven more.

HEART OF DARKNESS
A FAREWELL TO ARMS
LOLITA
THE SUN ALSO RISES
LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER
A SEPARATE PEACE
THE GREAT GATSBY
1984
NATIVE SON
THE CALL OF THE WILD
NAKED LUNCH


So who has read the most BB's? And the other part of my challenge, to write your own story with the potential of being banned/challenged or in some way censored in a prior post must be amended. There is no way I can have mine ready to post by tomorrow. But by the end of the week....okay?

This brings me to a related subject... the problem of self-censorship. Who out there has caught themselves doing it or giving into pressure from a reader or editor or agent to do it?

Banned Books

The last week of Sept. is Banned Books Week, and I'm proud to say I've read many books that were once banned, challenged or censored. The one I most recently read was THE KITE RUNNER, a beautifully written novel which helped me understand the challenges the Afghan people face and the futility of our intervention. Evil exists and is manifested in such groups as the Taliban. I admire THE KITE RUNNER for exposing their hypocrisy. Some people have avoided the book because they think it's about child rape, which is only a very small part of the book and, again, I admire the honesty of the author because that's what the Taliban are about-making women walk around under tents they can neither see out of or breathe through and raping little boys. Whenever I think of Afghanistan I think of the beautiful woman with the startling blue eyes on the cover of the National Geographic thirty years ago.

Some of the other banned books I've read in the order in which I read them.....

OF MICE AND MEN
THE GRAPES OF WRATH
LORD OF THE FLIES
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
BRAVE NEW WORLD
CATCH-22
THE HANDMAID'S TALE
THE COLOR PURPLE
BELOVED
THE CATCHER AND THE RYE
SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE

I have my high school teachers to thank for making the first six required reading.

In support of banned books, I suggest we all write a short story (or the beginnings of a novel) with the potential of being banned. Mine will be posted here tomorrow.

Citizens for Discontent

There are dozens of anti-government groups who have organized to oppose everything Obama does. They would oppose Michelle’s organic garden if they could figure out a way to safely do so and label it with an acronym to misrepresent her intentions.

Citizens against unfair Taxes...Citizens for Honest Government...Citizens against Organic Gardens and on and on and on. They can call themselves anything they want. But perhaps a more honest label would be Citizens For Fermentation of Discontent CFFD (sounds like a disease one should be inoculated against) or...how about Citizens for Truthshaping through Promotion of Fear. (The CTPF's.)

If anything, Obama has been a disappointment to date in the fight for health care reform, having seriously underestimated the toxicity of the Right's venom and the power the health insurance industry welds due to the unparalleled accrual of wealth attained through the clever denial of coverage people have paid for. The 40 million uninsured is one problem, but a growing and often unheard of problem is the number of under-insured. And you don’t realize you are until the bills start coming in for treatments you thought you were insured for but which through loopholes and outright fraud, insurance companies and their cubicle monkeys are finding ways to deny.

We MUST have a public option. It is the ONLY thing that will make a difference. The insurance industry is all for reform that forces all Americans to buy insurance (like auto insurance) because they see 40 million new customers they can bleed to death, and they hate the idea of a public option. Why? Because they’re afraid people will choose it and it will be cheaper and it will force down costs and lower profits. Should health care even be a for-profit industry beholden to Wall Street? Your insurance company is more worried about satisfying their stockholders than paying for patient care. Doctors overwhelmingly want insurance buffoons out of their patient files. The majority of them are satisfied with Medicare administration and payments. Yes, our government can and does do a good job. And I’m tired of the far right beating their anti-government drum under the banner of patriotism. And, no, a public option and National Health Insurance is not socialism. Do we call Social Security socialism? Do we think of our public education system as Socialism?

Our country has veered so far to the right Richard Nixon would now be considered liberal. The health care reform he tried to get though back in the seventies was far more progressive then anything now being considered in the Senate.

We’re way past due for National Health Insurance. But that's just the modest opinion of a writing gardener with a family history of arthritis. What do you think?

The High Cost of Cheap Food

The crop dusters are out, billowing clouds of poison over the rich muck fields of the lowlands—the beautiful black soil where carrots and lettuce grow best in Michigan. If you were offered a million dollars to find one weed in one of those carrot fields you wouldn’t be able to collect. Your nails would be black and your back bent but you’d be penniless for your efforts.

My sister is a caseworker at Michigan Works, helping the unemployed and making sure those deserving receive their unemployment checks and have access to online job opportunities. There is one caseworker fluent in Spanish assigned to help a diverse migrant population who come up legally for the summer to do the back-breaking work of weeding and harvesting carrots and lettuce in the low-lying muck (peat) fields in the Imlay City area. There has traditionally been a great deal of summer work here. She (we’ll call her Margaret), recently lamented to my sister how there is no work anymore. All the fields are perfect and weed free. “There are no weeds, Christine!” she says. And more and more harvesting is done by machine. Some would say, well good, maybe they’ll go back home where they belong. Margaret says they work hard and spend money in the local grocery store and the hardware store and are honest and true.

What do we want? The great wall of China on our southern border? Vegetables that have soaked up chemical residue through their root systems to harbor it in the flesh we unwittingly eat? Do we want labor-free vegetable fields? What . . . cheap food? There is no such thing as cheap food. If you factor in the environmental cost and the health cost of our “cheap food” the true expense would far outweigh the cost of certified organic meats and vegetables.

The sun is rising over the treetops, and now the crop dusters are out, spraying the carrots which look beautiful and lush in the distance. The drone of the engines as they swoop over the fields across the road at the back of our farm wafts through my window closed to the 45-degree morning. The land is defenseless, giving back only that which is given.

Who Came Before You

My father lost partial hearing
in the middle of the night.
He woke up deaf in one ear,
shaking his head like a swimmer.
Now he has taken to playing solitaire,
and the cards stay on the table like a chess game.
Mother cooks and cleans and dumps thistle seed into the bird feeder
and replaces the battery in her cow cookie jar,
(the mournful moo) so she can catch the sneak.
But it isn’t Dad.

The only memory I have of my maternal grandfather
is him sitting at the table playing solitaire
with a curious knob in his ear,
while we nabbed cookies out of the cookie jar.
I have no memory of his voice, or his laughter or his work,
his coming in from the field, perspiring and flushed,
although I know he did these things . . . before me.

I don’t like my father’s hearing aid,
the way it amplifies background noise
and takes him out of the mix at the dinner table
where he used to drive the conversation,
the way he buries himself in the newspaper and doesn’t
say hello when you come in the back door.
The way the grandchildren I don’t yet have
won’t know him.

The Selling of Deanville Mountain

Can a man own a mountain?
Carve out the center and cart it away
to shopping malls and garden centers?
Can he haul it off to adjacent counties
and bordering states where people
won’t appreciate that their gravel made up a mountain?

This mountain . . . our mountain.
This land . . . our land.
What farceness.
What? I can’t make up a word?
One man can own a mountain and truck it away
in exchange for stuff from malls full of sullen children
who have never climbed a mountain.
One man can disfigure the landscape
and transform the view and there are no words for that.

This mountain was our mountain,
ten o’clock on our compass.
history and barometer and weather maker.
Deanville Mountain and the road that crossed it—
lined with trees tall enough
to support elaborate nests and birds of unblinking eye—
was a place for teenagers to find themselves in the dark.
A place where rumors were invented and secrets uncovered.
Too bad our mountain held such a rich lode.
Too bad about mining and ownership and the rumor
that didn’t travel far enough into the right hands
fast enough. Too bad about the gaping wound and the collapsing side
that I thankfully can’t see from my porch . . . yet
Too bad it was never ours.

My grandfather insisted that the mountain changed our climate.
Storm clouds moved around Deanville Mountain
like storms off the Pacific deflected by rugged coastline.
Rain would fall to the west or skirt the entire bulge
To head out over the lake.
It was a mountain to be reckoned with and perhaps
compensated us beyond our comprehension.
Perhaps we’ll now have more of the rain that a farmer
can never seem to get enough of.
(They’ll tell you all about that in the Central Valley.)
But the mountain isn’t grand anymore.

Humane Blog Award

I was recently nominated to receive the Humane Blog Award by Andrea Cremer over at A Blurred History. Thanks Andrea, for believing me to be worthy of this award.

The Clean Ground

I missed it again—that swift setting of the sun. Once it turns crimson and fat and begins its downward slide, one only has a few minutes to capture the scene. If you’re careful and diligent and don’t let yourself get distracted by the commonplace, you can sit with your feet up on my front porch and watch the sun set to the south of Deanville Mountain (the highest point in the Thumb).

The sky is big and beautiful this evening. I missed the sunset but the residual display is still breathtaking. The winds have died down and the flag hangs limp. I can always hear Dad’s whipping in the wind when I’m down at the garden. It sounds like someone walking across the grass and I look up, tricked once again by the commonplace.

I love our dirt road. Today it was groomed and graded and salted by county workers and tonight we have the grandest road in the country. Smooth and pothole free—the kind of road we loved to ride our bikes on when we were kids. The kind of road that connects you to the cedar swamps of the past . . . the footpaths of those who came before us. I can hear traffic on the pavement a mile away, but no sounds here on Clear Lake Road, except for a few evening birds.

I found a poem I wrote when I lived far away and my father had just completed the farm's transition to organic.

The Clean Ground

When I leave the pavement with a jolt
I leave what I have for what I know,
for the gravel roads of home that run past
tangled fencerows where the only gaps
are where elms once stood;
roads that are graded and groomed by men
in trucks with big blades that rumble
up and down the road. They hang out the window
with tanned arms and inspect their progress.

I cross the ditch which becomes a torrent in spring
and drive past gnarled oaks and lilacs that bloom on old wood
and try to remember why I left.

The pond lies at the lowest point on the farm
with banks of waving cattails.
Two months past summer solstice…
it’s only half full. A new dock straddles dry ground
because the drought persists.
Clouds hurry overhead.
They neither darken nor slow though we watch.

Dust coats the Queen Anne’s lace and Ice Age boulders
that lie scattered along the fence, smooth and broad as shoulders.
Bobolinks flirt with each other and the pheasants have returned,
waving mulberry plumage above the grass like a tease behind a veil.
Pesticides had thinned them rare but now the ground is clean.
There are worse things than drought.

I saw an eagle yesterday.
He was young because his head was dark.
Eagles don’t often crowd the hawks, but there he sat
atop the ageless oak, surveying the dryness.
Because this is a better place than some.

Improving Vocabulary

To improve my vocabulary, I am copying from my dictionary all the relatively short, common words I wouldn't ordinarily think to use, an exercise suggested by John Gardner in On Becoming a Novelist. The idea is to make an effort to use them in your writing as if they'd come naturally to you. Sounds easy, right? I'm still in the B's. What's interesting are the number of words in the English language that have more than one meaning, one which is common, and one which is obscure and can add muscle to a simple sentence. A surprising twist, if you will, that would make the sensitive reader pause and take notice. Another suggested exercise is to write an authentic sentence four pages long with no cheating (using colons and semicolons that are really periods). Yes, four pages long. I have not yet attempted that. Maybe while on vacation.... no, it would have to be a retreat.

Strawberry Fields

We picked the first strawberries of the season yesterday. There is nothing like a Michigan strawberry and they're well worth the wait. The memory of our Michigan berries enables me to keep walking past the morbidly huge berries, grotesque and hollow, that show up in grocery stores in April from irrigated desert fields. The reason Michigan and other places in the Upper Midwest grow the best vegetables and fruits in the world is because of our adequate rainfall, warm days and cool nights.

I like to mash them up with a bit of sugar and spoon them over vanilla ice cream for dessert. A dollop of real whip cream on top adds a special touch. If you take the time to whip up some biscuits or shortcake you'll have Michigan's best early summer dessert on your table. Wherever you are, should you see Michigan berries for sale, snap them up. They're worth whatever price you have to pay.

With my garden approaching forty fifty-foot rows on one side of the driveway and nine two-hundred foot rows on the other side, my hands hurt tonight and my legs are crampy. Tomorrow I'm taking a break from the garden to paint and work on my query letter and my ideal agent list, the perfect agent who will guide me to an editor and a publisher and a rewarding writing life.

Three Hail Marys for an agent, and editor, and a rewarding writing life.

Be Creative

I love it that I have followers. I love comments. You make it all worthwhile. It's exhilirating to know that there is someone out there who is reading my modest little posts. And if I can inspire you to venture out on your own creations, well, that's what it's all about. Whether it be a garden, a painting, a poem or short story, learning to knit or quilt . . . go for it! And now it's raining here in Michigan's fat, verdant thumb. And I am surrounded by books and works-in-progress and garden catalogs and family down the road, close but not too close. The lights are on and my laptop is virus free. Stay with me.

Water

I woke this morning to heavy damp fog but the little rain we had during the night was barely enough to knock the dust down. So we wait for rain. And wait and wait. We can water the garden with soaker hoses and give each struggling plant a drink from the can but there is no substitute for rain with the rich nutrients it absorbs from the atmosphere on its fall to earth.

I'm sorry to have been so absent here lately. There are the aforementioned garden duties and the novel and the query letter which, trust me, is harder to write than you'd think. After all, it's just a business letter . . . right? You can only stomach so much conflicting advice and I know there is such a thing as over-shopping the query. You must retain your own voice through it all. But, back to water . . .

There was a recent program on NPR about water wars in California’s Central Valley, the dispute between farmers, environmentalists, and fishermen. The farmers are being cut off with reduced rations or none at all for irrigation in order to keep more water in the river for salmon. Environmentalists are fighting for the salmon and for the life of the delta. The government made mistakes in the past—building aqueducts, irrigation systems and dams and encouraging farmers to expand, growing everything from cotton to almonds. This was a shortsighted vision of limitless water and farming took hold under this false pretense of plenty. Now, with a long draught to contend with and fishermen fighting back, farmers who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on irrigation systems find their pipes dry and are understandably upset. They were duped into believing it possible to farm in the desert and came to think of the river as rightfully theirs. But maybe there are better places to grow cotton and maybe California doesn’t have to produce 90 percent of the world’s almonds.

This whole thing makes me nervous because I know that water will be the oil of the twenty-first century and we have only a precarious hold on our Great Lakes treasure.

Not a Consumer, a Citizen

ASIDES . . .

The Six Million Dollar Man is now doing commercials for rechargeable hearing aids.

Two robin eggs lie broken on the rattan mat in front of my front door.
No, make it three. My robin keeps startling herself at inopportune times, darting out of her nest and dropping eggs. Is it my fault? Did I walk too close to the window in my morning ramble to the coffee pot?

Obama can even do standup. Did you see the recent clip from a charitable foundation dinner? "The Republican Party does not qualify for a bailout," he quipped. "And Rush Limbaugh does not qualify as a troubled asset." Funny stuff. Actually, I think that is a pretty good definition of a troubled asset. His second hundred days will be so successful, he says he'll finish them in seventy-two, "and rest on the seventy-third." But, no, President Obama, I don't think you'll ever lose your cool.

Not once did he mention shopping and spending. I appreciated that. I’m really sick of being told I should be out buying goods I neither need nor want.

I’m not a consumer; I’m a citizen.

Do you think there is a connection between capitalism and overpopulation? And what about the effect the world’s overpopulation is having on the environment? It's been suggested that patriotic Americans should stop at two. Not by me, mind you, but I find it an interesting idea. Implausible, but interesting. After all, this is America where we like to oversize everything.

There is a credit card Bill of Rights awaiting action in the Senate. It has passed the House but must now pass the Senate. President Obama has asked for a bill that stops credit card companies from taking advantage of consumers by the end of the month. We’ll see. If you believe there should be an end to usury and other unfair practices by credit card companies, contact your senator and let him/her know what you think. Or better yet, pay your credit cards off as quickly as possible and throw them away, unless you’re able to pay in full each month and are only using a credit card to acquire frequent flyer miles, etc. But do you ever wonder about the trail you leave by using credit cards? The “consumer” footprint by which you can be tracked and judged without your knowing? For the majority of Americans, however, credit card debt is imprisonment without the jingle jingle of the turnkey.

The full moon woke me in the middle of the night. I was wide awake, staring at the ceiling and wondering what woke me, waiting for whatever did to make another sound, but the house was as quiet as the garden in winter. I wandered out to the living room and the moon was in the window, big and yellow and shining across the wooden floor, and I felt I should go outside and soak up the wisdom of those who planted under the moon. I felt like a moon woman, a women who runs with the wolves, voluptuous and fertile, unable to make a mistake. The lettuce seed would be planted exactly 1/8 of an inch deep. The broccoli would be perfectly spaced and each seed would germinate. My rows would be straight without regard to the hills and valleys that make up the natural contour of the garden. But it was only forty degrees out and I’m not that crazy.

On the same night, my father was restless and up and about. His hearing aid was whistling at him and in trying to tap it into mute mode, he dropped it on the tile floor in the bathroom and it broke. Now he has but one ear until he can buy another.

Onwards and upwards . . .

Memory

Do you believe that robins return to the same location year after year? Last year we had a robin’s nest in an old arborvitae beside the front of the house. We dug the tree out mid-summer because it was scraggly and unsightly. We have yet to replace it with something new, so the front of the house is bare. This morning a robin is building a nest on top of a post tucked in beside a beam under the overhang on the porch roof. The activity is in direct view of my writer’s window, so I shall be able to keep track of her progress. Or is it a he? I know the male helps sit on the eggs. Does he help build the nest as well? I hope this spot offers protection and I’m sorry we took down her tree. My grandma used to shoo the sparrows off her front porch and knock down the pesky bird’s nests. But I think she would like my robin.

I wish I could spend all day exploring serious themes in handsome prose while watching the robins. But I'm in the throes of query letter angst...to lead with a hook or to avoid the hook. Or to hang oneself by the neck from a post with a rope until dead.

Just kidding.

What's Real and What Isn't

Greenhouse update: We added another three-tier shelf to the 6 x 8 house so I could get some of the flats off the ground and my feet inside the door. My tomatoes are 5-6inches tall, attempting to outgrow their pots. Everything is finally coming up; even the slow-germinating peppers are sticking their soggy heads through the soil. The melons are spreading, all pumped up and a lush green, and the red cabbage is a nice rosy color. The brussel sprouts look similar to white cabbage when they first start out. The eggplant is also a little slow, like the peppers, but they are starting to unfurl. On another note, it was 66 degrees when I got up this morning, warmer outside than in, so I’m off to the garden for direct sowing of cold weather crops—radishes, arugula, lettuces, broccoli and onions. The dark horizon promises an afternoon shower so we must not tarry over coffee and unfinished novels. There will be a time for that.

Seven hours later. The promised thunderstorm arrived about 4pm. The winds were so high they blew my new shelf over and dumped the contents of the flats—dirt everywhere and fledgling plants uprooted. Topsy-turvy and who is who? The eggplant and the peppers look alike at this stage of the game. Woe is me. I tried to right them as much as possible. Maybe they’ll right themselves.

So what did you do for Earth Day? I was the stooge for a tree-planting photo op. You’ve seen the staged photos; people huddled around a sapling with shovels stuck strategically in the dirt, as they pose for the camera. The main honchos are in front and put their backs to the shovel as if they'd actually risk getting dirt on their high-heeled shoes. But one must at least pretend to be an arborist on Earth Day.

Smile. Click, click. Smile.

I was bamboozled into just such a fake photo at my airport, me in my uniform providing a backdrop of authenticity for two higher-ups who would never risk breaking a nail in such a manner. Never, never, never. I was duped into being a prop.

The idea was commendable-we at TSA would all chip in money and buy a tree to plant on airport grounds for Earth Day. Who wouldn’t get on board with that? We even got two for the price of one. Who could fault that? The first whiff of trouble drifted my way when I learned they bought ornamental pear trees, in other words “fake” trees, not indigenous-to-Michigan trees. But then the airport doesn’t want messy droppings, fruit, nuts, and leaves, etc. They lean towards evergreens and/or trees with tiny leaves, not big messy maples and real Michigan fruit trees.

But back to the duping. They pulled a group of us off the floor, and anyone who works as a screener for TSA is always ready to get off the floor. We walked outside to the front mall area in short-term parking and there were our trees—90pct planted by airport groundskeepers; only lacking the top 4-5 inches of dirt to be shoveled in and tamped down. Those of us who were actually involved with the idea and the purchase were there but we had to wait for our leader to validate our efforts and grasp the shovel . . . the driving force. Click.

Finished, she dropped the shovel and rushed back inside with her hands outstretched as if up to the elbows in cow manure. As if she'd been digging through the garbage in the slums of Lahore. At the checkpoint she asked for the hand sanitizer.

“Where’s the hand sanitizer? I need hand sanitizer.”

Click, click.

What is a conservative?

This is the most succinct definition I've seen.

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt