An Early Epiphany

A silhouette of the three wise men atop the Prudential Building heralded the arrival of Christmas in Jacksonville, Florida. It was the 1960s. We would visit our grandparents there for the holidays. I can still feel the excitement of driving into the city at night and seeing that iconic sight. That was always the beginning of Christmas for me.

Countdown

Christmas Eve day arrives in fifteen minutes. I just finished painting in the studio. Tonight, Chloe made chocolate peppermint bark to give as Christmas gifts and a Monte Cristo sandwich for her Dad to eat as a late supper. Burk and Redd put a live tree up in the dining room and Redd surprised us all this afternoon when he produced several Christmas gifts to put under the tree. Tomorrow, we'll buy seafood to cook for dinner and then it's off to church for midnight mass. Merry, merry.

Finis

Just finished another (and hopefully the last) major revision of Starfish. Will do some visual tidying of the manuscript then figure out the next step. The summer before last, I worked with Jill McCorkle, so I will definitely email her along with some of the agents I met there. Also worked with Michelle Brower at Wendy Sherman. Will give that another shot.

Mostly, am just ready to read something new. Anyone got any suggestions?

Daily Joy

• Parent's Weekend
• Brach's "Autumn Mix" candy
• saucer sized cinnamon rolls
• taupe nail polish
• sleeping in
• text messages
• lesson plans

Daily Joy

• Having a workplace "home"
• the "five minute" warning bell
• fields of dried cornstalks
• the Pledge of Allegiance
• the Collect for Purity
• a denim jacket and a rhinestone pin
• Ghandi's birthday

Daily Joy

• morning yoga
• an afternoon run
• a "certain slant of light"
• Carl Sandburg's Theme in Yellow
• working on your novel
• hot, black coffee
• going to bed by 9

Some Sunday Things

• fudge brownies baking in the oven
• gray gardens out my window
• freshly laundered towels
• Dr. Kingery steaming milk for espresso
• revising my novel
• planning my lessons
• making pancakes for Redding
• reading "Firefly Lane"
• cleaning Madison's room, putting fresh linens and a new comforter on the bed
• writing this

A Front Seat at the Table of Life by way of a Saturday Afternoon Bike Ride

• fall gardens, freshly planted
• fat pumpkins tucked among the mums
• slashes of late season purple
• sprinkler soaked sidewalks
• the smell of damp earth
• sleeping cats in driveways
• a saturday school yard, empty and silent
• students, gathered on steps and porches, waiting for the game to start

A Simple Meditation

"Imagine what it may be like to have no worries, no fear, no confusion, no stress, nothing that you are wishing for or waiting for, nobody to be angry at, and no pressing matters at hand. In your mind's eye, invoke an image of yourself as a young child - remembering that a child would have just such a life. Take all of that carefree feeling and bring it into the circumstances of your life as it is now. You are looking at your life with the people and things that exist in it now - but with absolutely nothing to worry about. This is what it feels to integrate spirituality into your life".

-Barbara Ann Kipfer from 14,000 Things to be Happy about website
http://www.thingstobehappyabout.com/books/meditation.php?db=meditation&terms=child

Stranded. Sort of.

It was my job to watch. When the water got lower, I was supposed to motion to Dr. Kingery to come back to the boat. He was in fishing heaven, wading on the flats. The reds are finning and tailing he said when he came in for more bait. I was reading a book and got so totally absorbed highlighting passages, I didn't pay attention. Thomas Merton will do that to you because he writes so well about God and all the crazy stuff we do in our lives that takes us everywhere but where we really want to be. He has such clarity and eloquence, such razor sharp insight into the human condition that I have to remind myself he was writing sometime in the middle of the last century.

So. . .

We got stranded on the oyster shells which still mystifies me. The shell ring, that is. Where did it come from? Was it the remains of an old indian mound? There is a mound on the other side of the Isle of Palms Connector. Was this one, too? Instead of watching the water level, I obsessed about the shells and didn't pay attention.

Dr. Kingery had a few choice words to say about it. I was crying by then because all our pushing barely budged the boat and the tide wasnt' due to turn for another 6 or 7 hours. We wouldn't get out until well after midnight.

But. . .

Some nice young guys who looked a little bit like Redd and his friends stopped what they were doing (climbing up the channel markers and somersaulting into the intercoastal!!) and motored over to help. Turns out they were students at Wando High and must have been athletes because they pushed the boat free without even breaking a sweat. Dr. Kingery, (who's in pretty good shape himself) helped and I stayed out of the way and tried not to cry tears of relief.

Maybe the really enlightened people are the ones who somersault off channel markers and rescue people like me from my own mistakes. When the student is ready, the teacher will come. Merton didn't say it.
But he could have.

The Word is Out

Ms. K. has the best kids in fifth grade this year. Maybe someone in administration owed her a favor. Maybe she got in good with the principal. Maybe she just got lucky. Whatever the reason, it's true. Her students are the brightest and the best; super smart, eager to learn, engaged, interested, creative and talented. It's going to be a fabulous year in room 355. The bookcases are full of great books, works of art hang on the walls, Mozart plays in the background, the scent of vanilla fills the air, but it's the students who breathe life into it all. Curious and eager to learn, they are the true source of the positive energy radiating from the fifth grade hall.

Maybe Ms. K. got lucky. Or maybe she's the one spreading the word about the great students who walk through her door each day. Whatever the reason, she knows it's true.

Isn't believing a huge part of making it all happen?

You Might be Suffering from Empty Nest Syndrome if you....

-cleaned your house in the morning and and it was still clean in the afternoon.

-didn't come home to a pile of dirty dishes in the sink.

-enjoyed the company of your spouse with the bedroom door open.

-didn't stay up until 1 a.m. texting and leaving voice mail about a curfew that came and went thirty minutes before.

-didn't stay awake until 2 a.m. listening for the back door to open.

-locked the door before you went to bed, turned off the outside lights, turned off the kitchen lights and found the door still locked and the lights off when you got up in the morning.

-walked around the house in various states of dress or, in this case, undress, and carried on extended conversations with your spouse in that state.

-found your groceries reduced from a dozen bags to a string sack containing a rotisserie chicken, green beans and a carton of Edy’s low-fat vanilla ice cream.

-did one load of laundry this week consisting of the following: some underwear, a dress, two pairs of khaki’s and a t-shirt.

-cleaned off your desk and threw away calculus notes, senior thesis index cards, a lacrosse catalog and three volumes of SAT practice questions, each the size of the Manhattan phone book.

-donated perfectly good school uniform shirts to the Goodwill.

-turned on your car and it still had gas in it.

-found your car in the morning where you parked it the previous evening.

-found your mail.

-had a coherent thought.

-took an hour long walk with your spouse.

-ate breakfast. With your spouse.

-went to a store at eight o’clock on a Sunday night and didn't get stressed out about it.

-ate tuna salad on a cracker for dinner and didn't feel guilty about it.

-ate ice cream for dinner and didn't feel guilty about it.

-didn't eat dinner. And didn't feel guilty about it.

-passed by the Gatorade aisle without picking up an eight pack.

-thought the house was a little quiet.

-were tempted to buy school supplies and gave in. Just in case.

-look forward to Thanksgiving.

-had a minute think about your blessings, the ones past, the ones to come and the ones right now.

-Found yourself falling in love with your spouse. All over again.


It's hard to believe Dr. Kingery and I have sent our youngest child to college, but we're making the best of it!

Back in the Studio

Patchwork squares on canvas has made for some "Klee" inspired work in the studio these past couple of days. It's good to be painting again after an almost two year hiatus.

Why Writing Matters

The Harley chick scattering her mother's ashes

The young mother who isn't ready for school, sleepovers, cell phones, acne and graduation but who knows it's coming anyway

The poor girl whose life was saved by the bookmobile

The guy with the beer gut and the baseball cap remembering a childhood trip to McDonald's with his father.

The woman with the sandpapery voice reading about a morning on the dock with a bible, an egret and an alligator

Lucy, leaving home for the first time

Eliza, wondering about her unborn child

Joanna, talking about sweet tea and summer, how both disappear too fast

Kendra, who described her hero by saying everything she wasn't

The week. The writers. The poems. The stories. The USC Summer Writer's Institute was seeded from the Writer's Project in NYC. This week forty of us learned how to take those seeds into the classroom where the stories will continue.

Writing transcends labels. If we can hear each other's stories, we can see beneath the surface. If my students are half as inspired as I was, those seeds will live and grow.

And we'll all come to a better understanding of one another.