The professional part...

It's the professional part of every profession that I really loathe. The paperwork and the connections and...well, what some might call "the work part."

Currently, I have two projects that I am attempting to pull together.

First, the final revision of The Absurd Coincidences of the Vicarious Woman and the subsequent submission to agents everywhere. Revision is work. I'm a little weary of revising now, having already revised this particular novel three times, and I'd like to put off this last go round for a while longer, but I've been putting this book off for years. It's time to bite the bullet. Buy the ticket.

Then, there's the sending it off to agents. This is the kind of thing that I need a personal assistant for because my mind does not deal well with this sort of secretarial labor. While I can be counted upon to sew monsters from felt and the vaguest blueprints drawn by a six-year-old and to complete a ridiculous novel in a month, putting a stamp on an envelope and putting the envelope in the mail is chancy. Ask my mom. She'll verify. Simple tasks are not my forte.

The second task: devising a strategy to fund the road trip that will become the travel memoir Always Time to Go. I have this truly brilliant idea to persuade Michael Sprague, VP of Marketing and Communications at KIA, to give me a KIA Soul to take across country in exchange for free publicity. Imagine the commercials! Single mother, public school teacher struggling in an economic crunch, seizing the opportunity of summertime, against all odds, to show her son the world...well, at least the North American part of the world.

Initially, I had intended to create my own home video style commercials, but my friend Molly insists that KIA will want to send along a handsome cameraman to shoot the commercials, and she promises that will lead to a wonderful romance as well as a best-selling book.

Do you see what I mean? The dreaming part I've got covered, but I have quite a challenge reigning in the dreamer in order to access my inner staff assistant. Or either my inner staff assistant is like the secretary from The Carole Burnett Show who just sits around smacking gum and filing her fingernails, looking pretty.

Now that I've put it out there, maybe I'll be shamed into getting the work done.

In the Beginning was the Word

I have an image of God as a rustic, in a cabin balanced precariously atop a high, narrow mountain, like the mountains in Japanese sansui paintings, a mountain that is in a perpetual state of fall, golden and scarlet forest encircling it. In my mind, I see him hunched over his desk, writing away, writing from the top of the mountain down so that his words flow out like thick threads, weaving everything around him, from his floor boards down into the trees, through valleys, cities, farmlands, even into my own little home, where sometimes I can even catch glimpses, tiny word threads, woven into the delicate green three leaf clovers painted on my porcelain coffee cup.

He writes in cursive, in black ink, never picking up his pen so that the words flow together, in the way that monks once wrote, but as the words weave their way into the world, they are imbued with color by God’s audience. We, the readers, add our own perception to the creation, the way that readers interpret all writing, believing that the author must have meant such and so because that’s what we would have meant if we’d written it. However, in this case, we are also characters interpreting the book that gives us our existence, which makes us very unique characters in the history of literature.

We are stitched together from words and phrases, which is true to this fanciful notion that I have but is also true to uncontested reality. If I have been told dozens of times by dozens of people that I am beautiful, then I perceive myself as beautiful, likewise if I have been told that I am worthless, I believe that I have no value.

We, in turn, pull threads from God’s creation to piece together our own existence, a bit of blue here, a thread of work or of play, embroidering in love and cinnamon and pots of stew beef and whatever else we choose to add to the tapestry of our lives. Even after we die, other people pull at our threads, stitching our stories into their own lives the way that Ma does when she tells me about her Ma.

Maybe God doesn’t writes down stories, and in fact, I don’t want to pigeonhole him into the role of story-teller. He is clearly also a poet because only a poet could create love and patches of snow, glittering rainbows in the sunrise. He is a lyricist, writing melodies for mockingbirds, and he is the author of manifestos, stirring us to righteous indignation when we see another human harmed by selfishness. He created elegant scientific proofs, algebraic equations and philosophical treatises. Who else would wonder how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

New myths to solve old problems

It's the holiday season, and parents often face a host of holiday-specific dilemmas that can be mitigated with just a little creativity. The following were two solutions posed to me by fellow parents when dealing with two pesky problems that arise between October and December. Though the first is perhaps belated, it is something to bear in mind for next year.

To deal with the surplus of Halloween candy, the mother of one of Fain’s classmates suggested “the candy witch.” The candy witch, I presume, is the self-same witch as she of Hansel and Gretel, and naturally, with the perpetual demolition of her house by the nibbling of plump, pink young children in lederhosen, she is always in need of free or cheap building supplies. Therefore, if young children will stir up a pot of Halloween candy on an unheated stove and say a certain magical spell to summon the candy witch, she will come and take the candy at night while he sleeps and replace it with a toy. The beauty of this is that the toy can be a gently used one because it probably was left behind by one of the juicy little morsels she ate for dinner. (Of course, I don’t recommend that you tell your children that, unless they’re of a particularly gruesome nature.)

Now, how to deal with the pesky question of why some children get Nintendo DSs and mini-limos from Santa at Christmastime while others only get apples and cheap little wind up robots? This is the children’s philosophical equivalent to the problem of an all knowing, benevolent god and the existence of evil. The answer requires a little knowledge of the limitation of elf labor and copyright infringement.

The fat man and his elves have been making wooden toys and wind up robots and plucking oranges and apples from orchards on their world tours for centuries, but elves are not particularly tech-savvy; therefore, while the demand for new fangled toys has increased, the elves capacity to meet this demand has not. Frankly, elves are lost when it comes to anything requiring wiring or computer chips.

Furthermore, some toys are licensed. After the lawsuit against Santa pressed by the lawyers of Howdy Doody back in 1952 when Santa delivered an elf-made (read: unlicensed) Howdy Doody doll to Timmy Jameson of West Palm Beach, Florida, Santa has understandably been reluctant to ask elves to reproduce licensed toys.

Consequently, Santa has to purchase all digital as well as commercially licensed toys at Wal-Mart like everyone else. (Not at Black Friday prices because that’s his busiest time of year. Believe it or not, there are still kids the world over who are content with generic wooden puppets and teddy bears.) As a result, parents whose children want these “ticket item” toys must pay Santa for his trouble, including finder’s fees and delivery. It’s really just cheaper if parents buy the toys themselves and let Santa stick to his fruit delivery service.

Therefore, I am buying the Nintendo DS this year, while Santa will be delivering a bouncy ball, a few wind-up toys, a couple of books, and some fresh fruit just like the old days.

*Note regarding the threatened livelihood of elves: Elves tend to live a very long time, and currently, many are reaching retirement age, so do not fret that the desire of our children for technologically advanced toys will create a recession in Santaland. Elves have been putting money (re: chocolate coins) into their 401Ks for a millennia in most cases before retirement. Besides, their houses are made from gingerbread by the same gnomes that build for the candy witch, so the supplies that make the North Pole tenable for elven-kind are pretty easy and cheap to come by. It’s unlikely they’ll have to worry about a housing bubble bursting up there any time soon.

From the archives: Brunswick Stew Recipe for a Yankee

First, you cook a chicken until the meat falls from the bones. Then remove the bones and any other icky parts and put the meat back in the same pot of water. Let it simmer a little while longer just to really get all of the flavor infused in the water.

Chop up some potatoes into cubes, some smaller and some larger. The stew cooks for hours, so some of the potatoes should be small enough to break apart and thicken the broth, while others should be large enough to withstand the stew and retain their shape though they should still be bite-size and soft when the stew is done.

Also add okra that has been chopped into disks – not modern, high-tech disks, but rustic, stone-wheel disks. And slice some onions into rustic rounds as well. As to how many of each, when you’ve added all of them to the chicken pot, you should cry out loud, “Why! I’ll never be able to fit the other vegetables in this pot!” But never you fear. Allow the potatoes, onion, and okra to simmer for hours. I don’t know how many, so don’t ask. A lot of them. Enough so that you finally sigh, “Whew. There may be just enough room to squeeze in the other ingredients after all.”

But don’t rush. The key ingredient in Brunswick stew is time – and forehead sweat. The forehead sweat drips in as you stir and stir and stir. Not a lot, mind you. And you should really take a nice, long bath before you begin the process so that your forehead sweat will not be contaminated by hairspray, moisturizer, smog, or acid rain. But, once you are relatively certain that your forehead sweat is clean, then don’t attempt to make Brunswick stew without it. It’s just not the same. Now, if you happen to know a fat man from the coast of Georgia, you might ask him to stir for you because his forehead sweat will be more seasoned than yours. He should be about forty; older is fine, but if he’s younger you may just as well do it yourself.

One more comment on time. A good Brunswick stew will take no less than twelve hours. If it takes longer, even better, but if it begins to look done after only six or seven hours then your flame is too high, your water is too bubbly, you’ve added vegetables too soon, or perhaps you’ve let fall too much or too little forehead sweat. Shame on you. Your stew might not taste paltry, but I can assure you that it is not a true Brunswick stew. Don’t feel too badly. After all, you’re a Yankee.

Now, look into your pot with the intense gaze of a ninety-year-old chicken-bone-reader from northern Mississippi. Here is what you should see if you are thinking of adding any more ingredients – chicken strings, NOT chicken chunks, just threads of chicken stitching through a fabric of okra that has shed its earthly form to become one with the chicken, potatoes that have been mostly reduced to a shadow of their former selves, and onions that are now pure essence. But, regarding the potatoes, remember that some should retain their shape, like Elijah in a heaven of souls. The souls here being those of vegetable rather than Baptists.

If your stew has reached this level of soulfulness, then , and only then, you may add tomatoes. There may be some debate as to the kind of tomatoes you should use – some might attempt to persuade you to peel fresh tomatoes. These people are hippies, and they probably don’t bathe before they add their forehead sweat. Ignore them. They are probably from California anyway and don’t know the first thing about real Brunswick stew. The tomatoes should come from a large can. They may be whole or crushed, depending on your mood. But they should not be diced and definitely not seasoned with Italian herbs. This is Brunswick stew, not marinara. There should be enough tomatoes to tint the final product reddish-orange, the exact color of clay in the foothills of Georgia. If you are unsure of what I mean, you might consider Google-ing “Georgia clay.”

Once you’ve dumped the entire contents of one large can of crushed or whole tomatoes, including the juices, into your pot, allow the whole mess to simmer more, stirring occasionally or reminding Buford, your forty-year-old Georgian, to do so. After a while, a good long while, keeping in mind that while you may be on New York City time your Brunswick stew is on Southern, porch-sitting, howdy-do-ing time, the tomatoes will have intermarried with your okra and potatoes and onion and chicken, regardless of what their mammies and pappies have told them about it. This is the times to populate your stew with the more colorful vegetables – corn, green beans, and lima beans. Please do not add carrots or cauliflower or broccoli. Especially do not add Brussels sprouts. While they do have their places in a variety of stews, this ain’t one of them.

At this point in the game, if Buford is still sober enough to stir (you can rest assured that he’s sober enough to sweat), you may relax and enjoy a beer – but not a glass of wine or champagne – well, maybe a jelly jar of Boone’s Farm, if you must. And don’t be urbane or ironic and drink a German beer or even an English ale. Maybe I should explicitly limit you to Bud or Coors, but not Light. You can give that to the hippies with their freshly-peeled tomatoes and their free-range chicken.

When the stew is done, your stirring-spoon should nearly stand straight up in it. You should have the vague notion when you look carefully at it that vegetables once lived there. A green bean might bob to the surface and call to mind a memory of a swamp where once you saw a log that might have been an alligator peeping through the muck. A kernel of corn might seem to defy the uniformity of the whole, like a Cousin Myrtle who up and married a Mexican and now wears a sombrero wherever she goes.

Add some salt and pepper to your taste. Maybe even some red pepper flakes for Cousin Myrtle. But nothing more. You now have yourself a big, old pot of Brunswick stew. Enjoy.

But first a few more rules. Brunswick stew should only be made in the fall on a cool day when the leaves are a sympathetic orange. You might be able to pull off Brunswick stew in the winter, but you’d be better off just freezing some of what you made in November. You can eat Brunswick stew in the fall, winter, and during particularly chilly springs, but never in summer. Unless you’re the kind of person who eats ice-box lemon pie in December. I don’t think you are, though. The main reason for eschewing Brunswick stew in the summer is one of common sense – like why children only have three months of summer break during which to ride their bikes and abandon the rules of grammar – if you eat Brunswick stew year round, you won’t have it to look forward to.

Always Time to Go

I've been trying to think of the title for a book that I want to write this summer, a travel book. I want to take Fain on a road trip and write about the experiences of meeting people and seeing things, but I could not for the life of me think of a title, which is unusual; that's generally what comes first for me.

The day before yesterday, my friend and co-worker Acker and I were talking about writing, I guess, and he asked if I'd read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and I'm ashamed to say that I haven't. I know the premise, but I just haven't gotten around to it. There are a lot of those books. I read so voraciously as a child and even through college, but as I've reached adulthood, I've fallen off in my reading. Or I might read five chapters and never finish the book. That's usually the case. I have good intentions, but I'm easily distracted.

However, feeling guilty over this lack of Vonnegut in my life, and knowing that I have many friends who would look down on me for this confession, I took the book that he offered me and went back to my classroom and sat down to read for a few minutes.

One line captured my attention. In the first chapter, Vonnegut wrote about stopping by the Hudson River to let the two little girls traveling with him reflect upon it. They'd never seen a river, only the ocean, so they were captivated, but eventually, of course, they had to move on. Somewhere in there, he writes: ...it was time to go, always time to go.

I immediately scribbled this line into my journal, the way that I scribble in weird things that my students say or funny things that my friends say or random and wise things that strangers in malls or used book stores say. And I immediately thought, "This could be the title."

It fit. Traveling with children to see old friends, sure.

However, there are also the many other meanings lodged in the words always time to go. My first thought was the sad one. That's because I'm a mother and my child, my most favorite person in the world, grows each and every day, despite my protests. He is always headed in a direction far away from me, and it's impossible to be a mother and to not be aware of that. Time, like the Hudson, is always going, taking my son along with it, and one day, when I ask him to go with me, he'll say that he can't, and if I'm a good mother, I'll accept that and be happy for him.

My second thought was the more optimistic one. There is always time to go. Time never stops. It is always waiting for us to splash in and enjoy the ride. Time is one of those inner tube rides out in the country that I've passed and considered stopping for and continued on without stopping because I had another engagement, promising myself to come back on a warm summer day. There is always time to enjoy my child now. There is always time to go. Now is the time to go.

Sure. The economy is gray and there are wars and kids are growing up despite the protests of their parents, but right now my kid is still my kid and we have time to enjoy life and life to enjoy, and we shouldn't wait for some more convenient time; we should enjoy it right now. It is always time.

Smith's Red and White

Yesterday, I took Fain to Smith's Red and White in Dortches for groceries. It's far out of the way, and it may be a little more expensive, but it's the only local grocery that we've got in rural Nash County, North Carolina as far as I know.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not opposed to warehouse supermarkets. In fact, I love them. Robert's in New Orleans. Ralph's in California. Fresh Markets and Whole Foods and Trader Joe's everywhere. I could spend as much time in a grocery store, whether warehouse or tiny shop like the neighborhood Zara's or William's in the Garden District, as I could spend in a book store, whether a Barnes and Noble or a Beckham Used and Rare Bookshop.

When I was a child, Sunday was what you might call "going to the market day" in our house. We made a special trip from Tarboro to Rocky Mount, a thirty minute drive, to go to Harris Teeter, which was (and still is around here) the closest thing to a high class, specialty item grocery store. It used to annoy me. I dreaded the call to the car to make the long trip to walk up and down aisles. Can you imagine anything duller? But it must have lodged in my brain, sandwiched between other pleasanter memories, because now I find myself making excuses, sometimes on a daily basis, to make a run to a grocery store.

It's not strictly the food. There's an aesthetic quality to a grocery store; whether it is a cathedral or a small chapel, it is dedicated to Andy Warhol and Normal Rockwell. The shelves are neatly stacked with rows of uniform cans, each with its own iconic image of sunshine yellow corn or bright cheerful green peas, like little round babies tumbled together. Mythical creatures and comforting mortals intermingle, the tiny mermaid on a can of tuna and the matronly Mrs. Butterworth, King Arthur on a bag of flour and an impish devil on the canned ham. And then there are the landscapes, golden wheat fields and lush vineyards, Sumatran jungles and maple tree forests steeped in winter snow printed on the labels in miniature.

And the smells. The thick, sweet smell of the bread aisle. I confess that I manhandle the loaves and insist that Fain stick his little, freckled nose into the flowering plastic packages to determine which smells the best before we buy any. The earthy, warm, dark scent of the coffee aisle intoxicates me. And the scent of the spices. I couldn't even begin to describe that. What I suppose must be cumin and chili and cinnamon and cloves and dozens of other herbs and spices in their pretty glass jars. The possibilities of the spice aisle. To just stand there and consider the names, Chinese Five Spice, Herb de Provence, Hungarian Paprika, and then all of those American mixes from Paul Prudhomme and Mrs. Dash. I've got a dozen herbs right now in my cabinet that I bought in a fit of scent-induced passion, believing that I would truly have need for them in the near future.

Grocery stores are centers of communities, comforting ports when the outside world is all awry. Living in my car in Los Angeles many, many years ago, I found myself walking through Ralph's on a daily basis, as much for its normalcy, grocery stores are mostly alike wherever you are, as for its novelty, each grocery store has its own local wares. (And then, of course, there were the samples, which my child also pilfers today.) Likewise, in New Orleans, I found myself drawn to Zara's, the tiny neighborhood grocery store on Prytania. It was the first time I'd ever seen a neighborhood grocer, and I felt as if I'd traveled back in time. I can still remember vividly watching the manager peel back the unappealing brown skin of onions to make the display tidy and attractive, the onions shiny and purple. Even though the goods were probably the same as what I'd have found in a larger store, they seemed different, specially chosen. I suppose because the space was so small, I assumed special choices had to be made. And in Nashville, I'm drawn to the old Lowe's because I see the same people there every time, people from my church or from my neighborhood, and so it feels a little like a home away from home. A home on a special occasion when everyone has gathered together in the kitchen.

So I find myself repeating the pilgrimages of the past with my own child, driving down country roads while Fain reads to me from Captain Underpants, in order to buy the same groceries that I might have bought just down the street. Insisting instead on Smith's for its local customs, the three toy trains set up for Christmas, suspended overhead so that amazed children can walk around and around following their paths while parents plunder the spice aisle. The Christmas trees and the old-fashioned candy barrels, the over the top holiday decor mounted on the tops of the freezers and shelves, wherever they fit, the temptation of meatloaf made fresh in the deli and the blackberry cobbler, a former student talking and joking at the cash register, a local woman referring to the employees by name. It feels like being home for the holidays. Over the river and through the woods, to the grocery store we go.

Day by Page

Working on the sequel to The Vicarious Woman has reminded me of the joy of writing. It's also been a source of self-discovery.

Each morning, I've managed to wake up at four o'clock to write. Each time I sat down in front of the computer screen, completely oblivious, I've managed to write 1700 words or more. I've managed to move from one event to the next, one revelation to the next, one scene to the next, without having even the faintest clue when I sat down, where I was going to go. I followed my own advice to my students: Don't try to get it right, just get it down.

Yes, there's a lot of dusty black coal in there, but I've got more diamonds than I'd have if I didn't start picking away to begin with.

And I've learned that I do really love writing, and I would be happiest as a writer. Even with the nervousness, the anxiety, the fear of creating something from nothing, all of those pulse-quickening elements make writing worth the time. Every day I'm surprised by the novel. It feels like a separate entity that is writing itself; it just needed a pair of hands.

On the other hand, I've learned that life is exactly the same, and perhaps should be handled similarly.

I let myself be overwhelmed by worries so often. Worries far off in the distance. What will happen next month? What will I do next year? What if the money doesn't come through? What if the car breaks down? But worrying doesn't solve the problems. It just occupies my time and keeps me in a state of stasis.

What if I handled my life the way that I've handled the novel this month? What if I just woke up and moved forward, fully anticipating problems to resolve themselves? What if I just focused on the next 1700 seconds instead of the next 1700 hours or days? What if I let next year be a problem for next year? Next month for next month?

What if I discovered that the only thing limiting the plot of my life were the limitations set by my own mind? And then what if I pushed those limitations off of a cliff and chose not to establish new ones?