Meditation VI

     Sun passing through a mini-Tibetan prayer flag, hanging in my classroom window, forms rainbow blocks on my desk. One moment they are brilliant squares of red, green and gold. The next moment they disappear with a passing cloud.

     On Monday morning I drove to school with the Super Moon visible through my windshield and the Rosy Sun rising in my rear view mirror. They tag teamed me the entire 25 miles, up and down the leafless hills between home and work. I remembered the day my sister died and full arching rainbow across the highway at the halfway mark.

     Walking in the woods on dried leaves and slippery pine needles the rays came sideways through the tree trunks. It was only three in the afternoon, yet the promise of an owl felt almost certain. Looking up the conifers, to their usual pitchy perches, no big eyes greet me.

     Ten at night. I take Cora out the back door for "the last pee of the nighttime". I bend to unclasp her lead from the post, as I hear them snort, stamp and start to leap. Looking up I see the white tails rise and hold her collar tight as the deer flee my leafy dooryard. I clip Cora into her tether, go back into the kitchen to retrieve the beautiful multi-colored sugar pumpkins that we'd used for centerpieces on Thanksgiving. They will make a sweet winter treat for the returning herd on a less moon-lit night.

    Clouds stack together in ridges like hard sand after the tides gone out. The wind is moving fast above, while there's barely a breeze on the ground. The blue tide pools between the grey-white mountains lend themselves to the idea that the days will start to get longer again, soon.  The candles and Christmas lights chase away melancholy on these dark days after sunset.

     Sounds of the heater filling up with hot water and an airplane flying high overhead are all that accompany me while I wait for my next inspiration. I've placed a blanket over my legs and haven't taken off my coat as the house is cold after being left empty, except for Cora, all day. Now a large V8  is down shifting towards a curve in the road by the cemetery.

     Snoring dogs, sketching boys, pinging computers and cellphones. All else is still in this house. My mind is only receiving and not leading. After five years of meditating, I've become faster at sweeping out the noise of the day. Not everyday, but most.

   My eyes are dry. The skin on my hands is becoming the parchment paper of my Mother and Nana. The veins are rising between the same tendons, too. Each generation twins the last and too fast.

    Time to play taxi. Taking teenagers to and fro. Seems I'm on the suburban carousel of cocooned kids who don't want to drive cars. Yet when it's behind me, I know I'll miss the candor that transpires when I wore my chauffeur's cap.

      Good night, dear reader, good night.......
   


 



   

   


   

   

Meditation V

     At  3 o'clock in the morning my head woke up full of ideas. It was saying to me I could explore various ideas in depth as the structure. Exposition, Rising Action, Climax/Catastrophe (repeat the last two if it's an action story), Falling Action and Denouement. How often have I mapped that out...

     Exposition has to do with setting (which equals time and place), starting in the middle of things, while giving clues to the protagonists deepest desires or motivations, the other characters who either enable or disable this protagonist, and grabbing the attention of the reader.

     Last night, I woke up thinking about Setting = Time + Place. How one place at different times (seasons, stages of life, hours of the day or night) would suggest a wildly different set of expectations and directions to my story.  Bolton from zero to 10? Lincoln from 10-16? Maine at the age of 4, 14, 24 or 34? Living on a cement sailboat at 17-19 in the Gulf of ME and St. Croix  and having sailed between the two through a hurricane? Visiting NYC at puberty, living/working there in my 20's?  Being in Copenhagen with the first terrorist bomb went off in 1985? Being in Belgrade at 23 and fearing being arrested for singing "Summertime" too loudly after midnight? Doing business in NYC while living in SF  my 30's & 40's? Or visiting NYC post 9/11 with my own kids and later students?

     Place has been very essential to my identity. New England, regionally and Maine in particular. But also my first home of Bolton, MA. It was truest home, from birth 'til I was 10. Leaving it made me heart and soul sick. It meant the true end of my nuclear family (although that had really come unravelled by the time I was 5). It also meant the end of living on 50 rural acres, in which I'd explored every inch with my dog, both of us untethered and unfettered. Running through fields, granite outcroppings, bunny circles, over the pipeline and skating on the pond. From there being moved to the confines of a quarter acre lot smack in the center, complete with a five-way intersection outside our picket fence, of a Boston suburb that although it had plenty of conservation lands, still felt like a slap to my sense of self. My dog, Tiger, ran away. He ran all they way back to Bolton. Through at least three towns.  I'd never been more proud of him.  He would have covered 18 to 25+ miles depending the straightest of driving routes. Goggling  the route we usually drove, and where he would have known the scents, it was the marathon distance he most likely ran!

     When I first moved to NYC, all I did was discuss the perfection of Portland, ME. New acquaintances wondered aloud, why did I every leave. Simple: one couldn't learn about publishing and the business of writing in Portland. At The Radcliffe Publishing Course, after 8 weeks of working 20hrs a day, with one day off and having produced three magazine proposals and five books proposals prior to our arrival (which were judged/graded by the Who's Who of NY Publishing world), the Course informed us that we all had move to NYC and must attend a job fair at The New Yorker.

     No pressure. Yet I pined for Maine (pun intended). The one writer/editor/mentor I knew in Portland was the person who recommended that I apply to Radcliffe, John Preston. Much to my amazement I was accepted. I was even more amazed when I arrived to learn that of the 100 students (out of thousands who applied), I was one of five who had attended a State University, and not the flagship at that! By the end of the summer we were down to 75+-students. Many of the myopic Ivy league kids couldn't cut it with the group work and the hours. Having done nothing but deadline group work (cabinetmaking, salvage diving, reporting, waitressing, crewing on boats); I was used to delivering my piece of job in a timely fashion so that the whole of a project could work.

     I would then go on to live in Brooklyn and work in Manhattan. Very few friends would trek to Brooklyn to visit me then, yet now many of them own houses there! My how the times have changed. New York was so different then in the go-go 80's when the streets were still lined with used needles and not brass kick plates along Thompson Square Park. I would go to work at the agency that represented my friend John, Curtis Brown Ltd. It was there I did an apprenticeship  and paid my dues that allowed me to start my own agency later in SF.

     So if I were answering the question of structure only from the point of view of where and when, what is the question:
Where and when was I the most miserable and how did I climb out of it (ala Wild)?
Where and when did I realize the drama and dysfunction in my life was  due to coming from a long line brilliant depressives and that I was just the next in line (ala too many authors to count and I'm directly related to Meriwether Lewis and one of the first Directors of McLean)?
Where and when did I accept that I wanted to be successful, even with my failures (ala many motivational speakers)?
When and where was I in extreme elements where I thought I could die, and others did or may have (ala books from the pages of Outside or War reporters)?
Where and when did I feel like I had arrived "home" after being "gone" for so long (ala either a love story or the lure of the local or a heroes journey).
Where and when did I know I could never go home again and could only create it in words or stories (ala T. Wolfe (perhaps soon?), many songs, nostalgic novels and immigrant memoirs)?

I have answers to all the above questions. I'm just not sure which is the deepest mine and which will set me on a fruitful path. Time to make dinner....Good Night patient reader, G'night.

Meditation IV

     Baby steps. Not giant steps, but baby steps. In my family Giant Steps could mean one of two things: something to do with my brother's band or a natural rock formation leading from the land down to the sea on Bailey Island, which is actually called Giant's Stairs.



     But this is no world tour announcement or conservation trail walk invite, this is me, myself and I taking a different kind of journey.....the writing kind.

     All day long I help students write: complete sentences, fiction, non-fiction, memoir, chapter books, college essays, 5 paragraph essays of all types and more. I help them focus on a topic, prompt, obstacle, issue, thesis,  argument or phase of life to build a narrative. It's often arbitrary which they hate, so I've learned to try to make it as meaningful to their daily lives, goals or desires as possible. I try to impart why it's important to write clearly, whether its about an imaginary world or the history of a mad scientist or cover letter. I've been doing this for 15 years.

     Before teaching students to write, I used to help authors shape books: from the proposal to the finished book; both fiction and non-fiction. I worked at agencies, writer's conferences, books festivals, author's guild seminars and conventions. Combining my work in NYC at Raines & Raines and Curtis Brown Ltd, and running my own agency in SF, the total amount of time was roughly 20 years.

     There was an overlap, as I started Grad School and teaching while I wound down my stable of authors. Thus, as I stated the other day, it's been roughly 30 years of helping other writers to write.

      Now I'm finding it hard to focus on just one topic and idea I want to convey. I feel like one of my students who wants to show me everything they've learned on a given subject, but can't arrange it simply enough to make their point.

     Topics: Love, Loss, Nature, Family, and Choices.
      Love: childhood, teenage, young adult, adult, middle aged...
      Loss: ditto; family, friends, critters, places, self
      Nature: ditto; reefs, dark, silence, animals large and small, "extinction tours"
      Family: framing is messy at best; only one frame could work, but which one?
      Choices: We are our Choices; right down to the stories we tell and the way we choose to tell       them, revise them, forget them, shade them and inflate them.

     The power of suggestion has always directed me to write about living on the boat or people and places I've lost. Events and places that are permanently and safely in the past, yet have also left an indelible stamp upon my character: Maine, Pinion, St. Croix, NYC of the 80's, SF of the 90's,  Craig Dempsey, Peter Frankham, Carolyn, Rosette, John Preston, Alton, and David Rakoff.

     Then the agent in me says, write about what you've learned from all the above. What I learned in all those places and the people who have taught me lessons along the way. How I fortunately had mentors at each abrupt and startling turn. Each choice seemed dramatic, and yet each organically made sense at the time.

     Then I think, the lessons might be easier to show in fiction. Like the short story I began last December, before everything fell to pieces (see archive). The lessons, loves, family and choice can be shown more easily in fiction, yet I want to try to remember, recollect and recreate moments from my life that mattered. To make sense of them for myself and those I love, and by extension, perhaps impart a connection or bridge to other readers going through similar phases of life.

     Other times, I feel like I did at Radcliffe, an impostor, who has no right to write. Who am I to espouse on lessons or insights that I've picked up along this journey called life?

     But I've learned some valuable things:

  When you're young, surround yourself by older people.
  When you're old, surround yourself by young people.
   If you don't use it, you lose it.
   Life is messy, and so is love.
   Children and travel are the two best gifts you can give yourself.
   Animals are Us; We're human animals and should never forget it.
   The only permanent home you'll ever have is planet earth and your body; be respectful of both.
    People who have the least are the ones who tend to give the most.
    Music and nature calm the spirit. 
    Nothing is constant except change.
    Life long learning is a must (see "if you don't use it, you lose it").
    Shared history with friends and siblings is treasure for the soul and a lifetime.
    Where ever you go, there you are (no such thing as a geographical solution).
    Power of suggestion is strong; be careful with what you suggest.
    Drama obscures reality; say no to drama at every turn.
    When one is in a flow-state the world becomes more open; strive for flow time.
    Time is far more valuable than money when you're given the choice.
    Health is wealth (cliche and true).
    Cooking for others is an intimate offering of self, never apologize and do so freely.
    Prejudice can't survive proximity.
    Doing things that scare you will slowly, but surely, make you fearless.
     Making small achievable goals, and allowing for refinement, will bring success.
    Letting go is never easy but often necessary in life.
    Embrace change and surrender to the pain of learning curves...it prepares you for parenting.
    So does surrendering control....
    However with writing and art, one has to set a structure to create the work that has meaning.
    Archetypes and creation myths make for good universal readership; singular and true is better.
   

     Thank you for indulging me with my topical baby steps and toe dipping. I could keep on going, but then dinner would never be made...Good night dear reader, G'night!
   
   





   

Meditation III

     My sleep was interrupted with additions that my mind wanted to make to yesterday's post. I guess the blessings and curses of being a writer are visiting me early and I'll take it as a good sign!

     The images were of Rosette. How our friendship bridged her entire lifespan. How it bridged coasts and bodies of water. How it bridged long distances and sometimes a year at a time passing without seeing each other face to face. How our journey together began and ended on North Haven, the island in Penobscot Bay where her family has a multi-generational and multi-home parcel of land that rolls down to the sea. The sea that we both loved most of all and to which we spread her ashes on her favorite sun bathing rock for the tide to collect after we left.

     She was the glue between the Nazor/Lattimore/Linnell families. On the day of the memorial celebration, those present were mostly Nazors, Lattimores, Pettits and Johnsons. I can't remember if any Linnells were there or not, I was too overcome with emotion. When that happens, as my children and siblings attest, I can forgot entire films or events in my life. Usually it's fear that triggers this erasure mechanism. This time it was a profound, and to the soul, sadness the had left me bereft  of my usually acute memory.

     What I do remember is music being performed by multiple generations (both on the stone beach and up in the dooryard of her mother's house), sweet words from her twin brother, Evan. Her sister, Clare with her dog Rosy who drove all the way from Alaska and took the ferry to be there. Rhodec, Rosette's son, being so kind, sweet and open to us all. Emily, Rosette's mother being so gracious to include my mother, my siblings and more at her home before and after the seaside service. I remember it was a clear, sunny August day in Maine, with a slight breeze ~ can't get much finer than that.

     The time we spent taking turns with Rosette in those last months in Eugene did something no amount of talking or writing or wishing could do. It had bound us together the way none of Rosette's beautifully woven blankets could do. She was our shared love. We learned how to share her and love her together. No easy task, as our family is full of strong personalities combined with subterranean sentiments that can take years to parse fully. This was a gift she cultivated with us as she lay dying and we've continued it since her death by extending it to being able to share and equally love Rhodec; he has become the next generation of glue ,that we all treasure, and forms a new bridge of love to the past and future.

     I met Rosette on that Island. Named the only doll I ever attached feeling to after her; Rosey. It was given to me by my grandmother; an antique china and plaster doll with cotter-pin hinged joints. Rosette and my stepsister Maggie made clothes for this doll as Christmas gifts to me when I was a girl. I still have the doll and the clothes. As I stated yesterday, that turned into a letter correspondence that continued until the advent of email, roughly two decades. We were both journal writers, too. We'd often copy passages out of our journals and write them again as a letter. We shared our deepest thoughts, fears, dreams and desires.

     As kids we skinny-dipped on the stone beaches of North Haven, later off the dock at Dingley Island, once in a lake in CA and our last shared water experience of wading in the Willamette River, which has a smooth rocky floor, much like the beach in Maine. Having her ashes on her sunning rock was one of those moments where I wished I could magically make her morph back to life. Yet, with each of us placing another rock on her sunning rock, it became apparent that no such magic would occur.

     Rosette is not the only touchstone person I've lost before we could grow old together. Another friend, whom I shared with my sister Leslie and Rosette in SF, was Alton Belcher who died on 12/11/97...so we're coming on an anniversary (imagine that spoken in as Joni Mitchell singing "Coming on Christmas" in a deeply Southern - Huntsville, AL- accent and that would sound like him).  The other dear-heart I lost in the fall was my touchstone of youth, Carolyn Glass. Her sister's book "I See You Everywhere" was a nice tribute, but I can't help feeling like I may have to write one of my own. We were partners in crime together. Adrenaline and Animal Adventures Crimes.  No one was hurt (except her boyfriend Paul, skiing, even though I warned them not to go, but that's another story), and many animals were saved. I miss swapping adventures and learning about animals from her. Plus barrel racing and jumping her family's foxhunting horses over the stone walls and through woods of Lincoln's conservation lands.

     I've outlived them all and they each knew my essence so truly, that it's hard not having access to that shared history any longer. So one idea has been to write about loss as a series of touchstones. Another has been to write about adventures (living on the boat, New York in the 80's, SF in the 90's, and my wild childhood--or traveling). Each has a different frame of reference and lens to focus on a different stage of my life and how I bridge/processed moving from one frame to the next. That is what my students and children most want to hear/read. At least that's what they tell me....

     Speaking of students, I must return to grading and my hour of writing is just about up (and yes I type straight into the keyboard and know I should correct typos/added-dropped words/tenses, but will once I start to structure a draft of something her); they also want to hear about how I met or know so many "famous people". My stock answer is that they weren't famous when I met them, they were artists (of one sort or another) or business folks who wanted to do good work. They wanted to master something or invent something that hadn't been done before and were choosing to live an uncomfortable existence and stay committed while they did it. The famous authors I met at various writer's conferences or conventions had started off the same way: wanting to do good and meaningful work.

     This ends my daily meditation and going forward I'll start to thing about one narrative to develop.


 

   

Meditation II

     Commitment. Structure. Routine. These are the things that I lost in the last year.  These are the things I'm giving back to myself now. I will be selfish and true. It took me years to find the value in these three words. As I'd grown up in a dramatic fashion where the value of these words were unfamiliar.

     Being a bridge for myself will be renewed task and hopefully a successful one. You see, I've been a bridge person within my family when I was young, my peers as I grew older, with writers as an agent and now as a teacher with students. Now it's for myself I'm building a bridge: from aspiring writer to working writer. The work will be committing to a story, structuring it, making a daily routine and refining it over time. It's an art that I've dared not practice seriously, yet I've been helping others with the tools and craft for decades.

     I learned to read and write late. Yet once I started, I haven't stopped. Story telling was a way of communicating in my household as a child. Music enhanced the stories with songs and we made up radio plays. My grandparents repeated stories to teach us our personal history and what they had learned from living the American Dream and traveling. My immediate family read books, wrote stories, listened to all kinds of music, went to concerts and stage productions of every sort. We painted, drew, burnt designs into driftwood with magnifying glasses.

     My family started off small; mother, father, sister and me. After the divorce when I was 6, my mother remarried to a man with four children (two sons and two daughters), while my father remarried to a woman with two sons. Basically I went from being one of two children to being one of eight children, and from being the oldest to squarely in the middle of the pack.
   
     We all lived in neighboring towns, Concord and Lincoln,  in Massachusetts after I turned 10. From birth to 10 I lived in Bolton. The adjustment or bridging to the cultures of these  two suburban towns was harsh. Instead of being judge by you physical abilities and common sense, you were judged by your wardrobe and vocabulary. During the summer we all went to  Maine. In July, my sister and I were  at my father's in Georgetown. In August, we moved to my mother's house in Harpswell. So six of us in July and eight of us in August.

     During the school year, we went to my father's house every other weekend. Walden Pond, still a touchstone to my spirit, was the half way mark between my parents homes. My stepfather's kids lived half a mile from our front door and could come over whenever they wanted to do so.

    From September to June there were lessons and classes and outings. During winter breaks we spent time skiing, skating and sledding. Traditional New England fair. In the summers we were free to explore the peninsula of Georgetown and the Island in Harpswell. We swam, sailed, rowed, kayaked, climbed, built structures, fished, picked berries and read books. With my father we sometimes climbed Katahdin and sailed on rented family friendly sail boats. With my mother,, for the first few summers we rented houses on islands in Penobscot Bay: Matinicus and North Haven. Later she bought a house on in Harpwell on Dingley Island. From there we went to see musical theater at Bowdoin and Shakespeare in Monmouth. If there was a  raging storm or full moon low tide she may take us to the granite shores of Pemaquid Point or the sandbar at Popham Beach.

     My sister and I bridged homes, expectations, abilities and ages. It wasn't easy. In hindsight, I see why it took us so long to form our own authentic identities. Unspoken rivalries between the additional six siblings, on top of our already fractured-by-divorce insecurities, stunted our development. Different sets of expectations in each household contributed to the internal schism. I was often either confidently carefree, manically macho,  or silently pensive. My sister was better at expressing herself, and yet she struggled, too.

     We have each chosen to live on the East and West Coasts during out adult lives. We've bridge and benefited by the two distinct cultures . We both were married and had out children on the West Coast, yet moved back East once our kids became school ages. I moved back to Massachusetts, after living in Maine, New York and California. She moved to Maine after living in California. I've been trying to move back to Maine ever since I left it 30 years ago (the last time I was paid for a byline). I still plan to retire there either in a small efficient house/condo or in a Golden Girl complex (Jennie and Nan, I'm not joking). My father and stepmother and one of my stepbrothers live there full-time now, too.
My mother and stepfather have retained the ritual of being in Lincoln during the Academic year, and in Maine the summer, and now some shoulder, months.

     In High School I wrote about trying to bridge my different selves. The Karen of the Nazor/Murnik gang and the Karen of the Linnell household. Little did I know that in my mid-twenties, a family with six children whom we'd known since I was 7 or 8, which included a dear friend, would become additional siblings. Now I'd become one of 14 children with including the Lattimore family. Which was fine, as we were mostly independent by then, and only met for Winter holidays in Lincoln and Summer holidays on Dingley Island. But that didn't mean new kinds of bridges didn't have to be built, they did.

     The dear friend was the youngest daughter, Rosette. We had chosen to bridge and weave our lives together since childhood. Through words and drawings sent through the mail we stayed close. Having six siblings each, we developed a coded language, so that nosey sibs couldn't read our letters; we each held the key for years. I still have bundles of the letters and cards in box in my room. She went to prep school with one of my Linnell sisters, and then we overlapped briefly in NYC after College. We both spent a lot of time in the Bay Area, and when I became engaged, she became pregnant and moved to Eugene, OR to be with the father. We resorted to mostly seeing each other in Maine in the summers and sending emails to each other. We coordinated being in Maine so the cousins could know each other and we could stay current. The last summer in Maine we kayaked around the island and the kids splashed about in the canoe. We shared bathing suits and clothes as we were the same size. She had always been a teacher, of music, and I was new to being and English teacher. She was very generous with ideas and praise. She was a phenomenal teacher, choir director, piano player, mother to her son and sister to all. At Thanksgiving we learned that she'd been sick and upon investigation, it was discovered that she had appendix cancer. She made it home for March, for her father's/my stepfather's 80th Birthday party. She never made it to Maine again. Having helped friend die (of Aids/Cancer/Heart disease), we had discussed me coming to her where she "felt the time was right". I went when she called. Our last outing was to a river, where we waded in the water and through our lives together. She asked me tough questions and I made her promises regarding her son, who I adore. She medically shouldn't have been alive for as long as she survived, but her spirit was fighting to reach her son's 16th birthday. After she achieved that, she died a month later (a month before Thanksgiving...she didn't want to taint the holidays).

     Her friendship bridged all kinds of odds. One of the tough questions she asked in the river was "when are you going to let yourself be the writer, instead of helping everyone else"?

     For my children, students and Rosette, I must start building/writing stories that can bridge my experience into something useful for others.

     (I started this yesterday, but finished today. After grading, I may write a short piece just for today).