Fighting Fanatics with Delight

Maybe one reason Christopher Hitchens' hot new book "God is not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything" grabs me so primally as a preacher's kid is that I know in my gut the suspicion fundamentalists have for what I might call "the good life" -- those dangerous and wily worldly pleasures. It's not just his contention, offered in comments at an interview Ted and I attended at BookExpo in New York last weekend that "religion is the most important fallacious explanation of life and its meanings," but, as he added in his acknowledgement to novelist Ian McEwan, that "the natural is wondrous enough for anyone" without a supernatural overlay.

Fundamentalist religion as I knew it was rooted in repudiation: it deeply mistrusted the body, calling for women (in Ohio versions of the burka) to cover their bodies. It was very uneasy about art or any kind of decoration; wasn't too comfortable with music except of the sacred sort; it rejected dancing, rejected wine, and certainly did not talk of pleasure except as a seducer into sin. As I wrote in Night Blind, "It was sometimes hard to keep straight what we were saying yes to, except homegrown roughage and modest silence."

My mother, a person of great sensual appreciations, never trusted the "holiness" movement for just that reason. Her natural instinct was to welcome, not to repudiate, the world. I've often criticized my father for falling into the tight-lipped fanatic school, asserting it was my mother's essential joi de vivre that saved me from fanaticism. But then I remember the raredos.

It's a story many of my friends have heard and reheard -- about how my father tried to make a wooden screen, what he called a raredos, for one of his churches -- artfully decorated, painstakingly hand-carved with a symbol he found particularly moving -- tumbling bunches of grapes, signifiers of fruitfulness and ripe harvest. The church members mutinied over this intrusion of art into their bleak chancel and made him take it down. In a twist of wonderful irony, it became the headboard behind my parents' bed. (the photo above is of an antique raredos in the UK).

Driving home from school the other night, I caught a snippet of something on NPR that struck me so powerfully that I determined to remember it -- only a few words stayed in my brain, and then when I got home I forgot to pursue it. But tonight I finally found it -- an interview with the Egyptian writer Ali Salem interviewed by Dick Gordon on "The Story." In describing what he thought might be the road to peace, Salem said the extremists had to get jobs -- something to be proud of so that they would not be "miserable." He said, "what characterizes the fanatics is that they don't find on earth anything delightful."

And according to Hitchens, for related reasons, growing bands of religious fanatics are craving the Apocalypse, consumed by a massive and communal death wish. "They want it to be over," he said in New York.

Could this be the answer to the world's chaos -- to protect and stand up for and restore delight?

I suggest we start with jobs for artists and robust funding for the arts -- before the fanatics' misery overtakes us all.

Fireflies

Is it possible they awakened, or arrived, or whatever they do, over just one night?

The first surprising glow in the corner of the eye (did I just see that?) then another by the bird bath, then another back in the corner by the floppy hosta, and then a whole yard full, the green, just-mowed, fragrant yard oscillating and aglow, silent, pulsing and unexpected. Not last night, but tonight.

Last night a dream of shattered glass, wandering the house in that bellicose dark of 3 a.m., my telltale body goosebumped with fear. No sleep and the BBC up loud to scare away trouble.

Then tonight, first fireflies, dusk a velvet plush, and just like that it's summer.

(image above, Empire of Lights, Rene Magritte)

A Doctor in the Family

This is for Lauren Carol Worth, M.D., my niece and goddaughter. Today family and friends, a tribal gathering of two distinguished ancestries (A wonderful mix -- second generation Lebanese and Syrian restauranteurs, WASPy teachers and engineers, spawn of British whalers and Quakers, Dutch Calvinists, farmers and preachers) celebrated our daughter and granddaughter as she graduates from the Wayne State medical school. She's flying out tomorrow with her mom, Gail, her father (my brother Wes) and her brother Michael to return to California, where she's starting her residency in San Diego. We are immensely proud of this smart and beautiful young woman.

It was one of those days, sitting in the shade of her maternal grandparents' congenial yard on Grosse Isle, when the years both melted away and presented themselves as something formidable. We note the absences -- especially Lauren's paternal grandmother, my mother Carol Love Worth, who would have been so moved by Lauren's accomplishments that she would have melted with pleasure. My generation -- Lauren's parents and aunts and uncles -- are becoming the elders, though the grandparent Daranys -- Joe and Elaine and Chuck and Frieda, for instance -- show inspiring fortitude and longevity. These are good people, people who've struggled and survived and continue to deliver love and support in giant portions.

And these young kids coming up -- a tableful of new doctors, a doctoral student in environmental science, a self-declared "policy wonk," a kid about to join the Peace Corps, a women's basketball star from Wayne State, and maybe most important to our communal safety, an apprentice electrician -- blow me away. They sat there eating their earth-friendly fruit and vegetables and fretting about the state of the world and pledging to do what they can to make a difference. I believe they will. Driving back north on I-75 in deepening evening sunlight, I took in the Detroit skyline and its Ambassador Bridge with renewed appreciation. The vista looked beautiful this time -- the architecture of a place that's somehow nurtured these fine children. It's time tonight to indulge in a moment of gratitude and hope.

A Caveat About the Cosmopolitan

Dear Reader,
Ted appropriately wishes me to clarify something about his exceptional foray into the world of cocktails. He notes that the amount of alcohol he consumed that day in NYC represents about 20 percent of the total amount of alcohol he's swallowed in his entire life. He's not a teetotaler because he's in recovery, but because -- perhaps luckily for him -- he has never liked the taste of the stuff. This matters to him, and to me, because he does not want his decision to take that drink to be a sign that he was a jerk, numbing himself out in my moment of need. Also, he doesn't want a reader to think I enabled a dangerous experiment and a consequent fall from grace. On the contrary, he wanted to share the moment with me using my ritual of choice: one stiff drink. Since by nurture or DNA neither of us is particularly addictive, one round was more than enough to fulfill the liturgy. And our later, blissful ride with Rickshaw Harry provided the benediction.

We both understand what's at stake for our friends and loved ones who are, in fact, in recovery, and we want to be sure our experience in New York, and my telling of it, doesn't make light of their often monumental and awesome struggles.

48 Rings

Possibly the best tonic for disappointment and weariness after New York is walking around my familiar old neighborhood, back home. On Franklin a medium-sized Norway maple had been chopped down since I left, and big hunks of trunk were piled at the street awaiting pickup. I paused to look and counted the rings: 48. That makes me think the much bigger trees on my own street must be at least 70 years old. Without putting too fine a point on it, I noticed the rings got wider with age. Open to the hopeful possibility that things grow bigger and better with years, I took a grateful deep breath and walked on.

Mallard couple in Gilkey Creek, muddy and full after recent rains -- a sign, perhaps, of the improving health of the watershed.

Ted's Cosmo and a Rickshaw Ride in Central Park

Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo.

If I were a rickshaw driver like Harry in New York, I'd have that famous mantra handy, too. We met him outside the Roosevelt Hotel, at the corner of Madison Avenue and 45th Street, Friday night after an exhausting and not very happy day. As I had expected, I didn't place higher than my finalist berth in the ForeWord contest, and in the sweltering Jacob Javits Convention Center at BookExpo America, as the winners were impersonally announced on a PowerPoint screen, my roiling mammalian brain let my conscious mind know for the first time that I did, in fact, really care. Disheartened and coated with clammy sweat, I proceeded to my appointment in a steamy little BEA booth to record a podcast about Night Blind, during which my passionately prepared answers to five prepared questions seemed vapid and rote. "To hell with corporate economics," I found myself exhorting to the weary interviewer and two unflappable underage techies. "I'm tired of not having control over what happens to my writing. Writers are always at the bottom of the food chain. But now I have this beautiful book, and I made it happen." They smiled faintly and fussed with various knobs.

Outside the cavernous hall, waiting for the hotel shuttle, my brave ferocity evaporated, along with a couple of infuriating tears. "What's the point," I muttered to Ted. "Maybe I could take this if I was 37, but I'm 57, and I think I've about had it." He rested a reassuring arm lightly on my shoulder. His touch, unconfining and eloquent, was a gesture vastly better than words, which for the moment were the enemy.

We decided to eat in the mostly deserted Roosevelt Grille. I ordered a kamikaze, my favorite cocktail lately and also a metaphorically sound choice for the occasion. "I think I want to drink in sympathy," my teetotaller husband said. I've never seen him drink; I should have said no but I said yes and the waiter and I decided he should have a Cosmo. When it came, Ted bent over slowly like a large animal, sniffed it, and sipped it without lifting it up. It touched me -- how he sacrificed his abstinence like a ritual to exorcise disappointment, and how he seemed to taste the drink with his whole body. Then he sipped it again and again and then he picked up the martini glass in both hands like it was a coffee mug and drained the rosy dregs.

"I feel zingy," he said.

A baby grand piano in a corner played some indistinguishable tune, mechanically programmed, without a person. The vestigial bench, pulled out as if to make room for, say, Art Tatum, looked undusted.

"That's depressing," I said. "It's New York City, for godssake. Couldn't they find some actual hungry kid to actually play piano?"

"Labor unions," Ted speculated, wiping a drop of cranberry and Triple Sec from the corner of his mouth.

"That sucks," I said. I couldn't see the point of being witty, even though we were sitting so close to the Algonquin Hotel you could get there in the time it takes to say "Razors pain you, rivers are damp."

After dinner we went outside for fresh air. That's where we met Harry. "Want a ride around the park?" We paid him $60 and clambered into the little buggy and, with an innocent tingle of the bike bell, Harry pulled away into the early evening traffic -- black Lincolns, UPS trucks, yellow cabs. For a half hour our carbon footprint was nil.

He said he was 50 and drives the pedicab four hours a day, after going to school to be an air conditioning repair person. His wife is a Colombian dance choreographer; they don't always get along. Beads of sweat sluffed off him effortlessly, and he talked and pulled our 350 pounds and breathed in miraculous congruence.

At the south end of Central Park, he took us to the "literary walk," its quadruple rows of elms shimmering in the evening sun. Robert Burns, William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott silently peered over strollers. At the Reservoir, he said he always tells passengers that's where Holden Caulfield saw the ducks -- and, when we let out with appreciative "ohs" and "ahs," he said Ted and I must be educated.

"A lot of people don't know what I'm talking about when I mention Catcher in the Rye these days," Harry said. A little boy with big eyes stared out of a horse-drawn carriage, and I smiled at him. He looked a little afraid, as if it was all too much, to be at the mercy of the big clumping horse, smelling the unavoidable pungent dung. I reached for Ted's hand and it was there, welcoming and warm.

Back at the hotel Harry gave us his card: Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo, it said.

And I found myself calming down, murmuring the rest of Dotty Parker's New York rosary, also my own: "Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live."

Oh, No, Not New York

So I'm sitting with Ted over late breakfast at Tom's Coney Cafe on Dort Highway, dreading New York. I'm eating a turkey and swiss croissant and drinking a decent cup of coffee and reading, ironically, the New York Times -- one of our daily treats from (she lowers voice to a whisper) the corner Starbucks. There's an article about how Lou Dobbs doesn't tell the truth -- particularly when it comes to leprosy in the U.S. Apparently he said there were 7,000 cases in the last three years -- mostly perpetrated by those pesky immigrants -- when really, it was 7,000 cases over the last THIRTY years. Confronted with his statistical creativity by David Leonhardt of the Times, along with suggestions Dobbs has been offering broadcast exposure to white supremacists, Dobbs replied, "You've raised this to a level that frankly I find offensive." Funny how raising the level of something can be offensive.

A big glamorous black woman comes in and Ted says, "Is that LaKisha?" We're on the lookout since she rolled into Bishop Airport Sunday night. Don't know if she favors these Dort Highway dives, but we're at home here. A roly-poly guy in the booth next to us orders a "Jy-Roe" and the waitress impatiently corrects, "HEE-Row." I can almost hear her say, "HEE-row, dumbell." "Okay, HEE-row," he tolerantly repeats, "Whatever, gimme one." I like a place like that. Two guys in Harley teeshirts amble in and order platters of two coneys each, even though it's barely past breakfast. I think the slim young woman in a nearby booth, chain smoking and rather wearily done up in a wide metal belt, short skirt and tight top, might have come off the circuit further down the road. We're all in this together.

So anyway, even though I'm enjoying my New York Times amid the comforting dishevelment of my Flint brothers and sisters, I'm dreading the actual city of New York. Friday morning Ted and I are jumping a jet to Newark airport, plopping down in our overpriced room at the Roosevelt Hotel, and enduring three days at Book Expo America.

I'll be one of 30,000 authors, publishers, agents, booksellers, scam artists and hangers-on competing for space in the aisles of the Jacob Javits Convention Center. The number of booths are in the thousands. Among other rules, they say bookbags on wheels are forbidden, for some reason.

It's a trade show, the business end of the deal -- and I've decided it is time I abandon my fantasy life of grassy, nurturing artist colonies and rambling ruminations on line breaks and symbolic intent for the bottom line.

My book will be displayed a couple of places, a single dandelion in an overpopulation of weeds (weeds are wildflowers by another name, right?) and I'm supposed to find out if I win, show or place in the ForeWord Magazine Literary Novel of the Year Award (for the record, there are something like 40 rubrics and 650 finalists...only ten, however, in my category). I don't think I'll win: a fancy-schmancy Solzhinetsyn collected and a reissue of a novel with a new foreward by Wole Soyinka are the front-runners, I predict. ForeWord has found a brilliant way to cater to all us independently published authors desperate for exposure; yes, I bought the gold-embossed "Finalist" sticker for my book. Fifty-five dollars, if you must know.

Then I'm recording a podcast at the iUniverse booth: five minutes, five questions. Then Ted and I are going to try to snag autographs from the likes of Wilbur Smith and Alan Alda. I'm going to fight for a front-row seat at an interview with Christopher Hitchens and have breakfast on Sunday with Ian McEwen and a couple of hundred of his other best friends.

It's just that I'll feel so...small.

Just one little Flintoid with half a foot in LA, treading into Gotham City with all the rest of those rabid writer/aspirants. Oh, the horror.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Oh, No, Not the Tufted Titmouse

One of my students said she was walking around the UMF campus recently when suddenly an adult bird dropped out of a tree and landed on the sidewalk in front of her, dead. She's not particularly a birder or environmentalist, but it freaked her out and she didn't stick around to try to figure out what might have happened. She said she thought it was a crow. She rushed away and left it there.

I thought of that incident last night when I opened my Flint Journal. I swear, in the melancholy department it's not safe to open the newspaper anymore. The first page headline cried out "Dying Birds" and said the West Nile Virus is decimating bird populations in the U.S. -- particularly American crows, but also robins, chickadees, bluebirds, blue jays, house wrens, and tufted titmice.

Damn it, the tufted titmouse? I love that bird -- not just its hilarious name, but its perky little topknot and the way the cheery birds sweep onto the back yard feeder in small bouncy cadres, dropping down from the neighbor's cherry tree one by one to grab a seed.

Should we be getting ready to lose everything we love? I'm thinking of Elizabeth Bishop's gut-wrenching villanelle, "One Art": "The art of losing isn't hard to master," and wondering if I have the intestinal fortitude for what sometimes feels like a looming environmental collapse. I remember that no matter what people say about the underlying acceptance in Bishop's poem, written after the suicide of her longtime lover Lota, the last word, undeniably, irrevocably, is "disaster":

"...the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster."

I don't want to lose the tufted titmouse. Is it too late?

Early Morning at Flint Northern

I know what I was thinking: nobody'd show up at a high school in the north end of Flint to hear a talk by two college English teachers. Especially, I thought, not at 7:22 a.m., when the first class was supposed to start. My colleague Janelle Wiess and I were there because of Jeanette Rousseau, a UMF alum who's been teaching English at Northern High School for about six years. After agreeing to the visit, I spent a week dreading it. I've heard repeatedly that the Flint schools are disastrous, chaotic, peopled by unruly kids -- the Flint Journal recently ran a story saying some schools don't even have enough money for toilet paper, and teachers and parents were bringing it in.

I set my alarm for 5:30 a.m. and on a rainy morning, drove down bumpy Mackin Road and into Flint Northern's long driveway. There I was startled to encounter a virtual traffic jam of buses, cars and kids pouring into the beige Seventies facility. As Jeanette directed, I went around to the "flag pole" side, the student entrance, where a crowd of dozens of kids, regular kids in jeans and backpacks, moved patiently through the metal detectors. It was 7:05 a.m. when I made my own way in and found the office. I had a few minutes to relax before reporting for the first class. The place hummed with secretaries getting organized, phones ringing, students dropping in, teachers checking in -- obviously at full tilt. The classes went great -- the students respectful, alert and asking sharp, cogent questions. At least half said they want to go to college. Attendance policies, plagiarism, how to get help from professors, all relevant concerns, emerged, in a room festooned with assignment directions for "oxymoron" and cinquain poems, tips for MLA Style, and bumper stickers like "Hate is not a family value" and "If you stop to think, don't forget to start up again."

What struck me most, simply, was the obvious energy for school. Despite all the recent district-wide brouhahas and brutal funding cuts, somehow, the community is still getting schools to happen. Maybe my expectations were low, but it amazed me that the students were there -- somebody got them there -- at 7:22 in the morning, in big numbers, at an hour when I'm usually just rolling over in my brass bed and clicking on Morning Edition. It touched me. And then that they have to go through metal detectors, one by one, examined by security guards. And that they might not have toilet paper (they later assured me they did, at least at their school). I wish school was unambiguously safe -- I wish they didn't have to have metal detectors, but they didn't seem to object, waiting their turn. It seems sad -- students could be forgiven for beginning to believe that we don't care about them, that education, based on our fiscal betrayal and their crowded and crumbling schools, doesn't really matter all that much. But this morning I felt a glimmer of hope. I hope against hope they can't wait to get to school -- I hope once they get through all the obstacles, what happens in those wide institutional hallways and bustling classrooms makes them believe their minds are the best thing they've got, on a rainy morning in the middle of May.

A Brief Report

Lilac week. Breathing deeply on a walk like drinking sangria. My brain is lavender.

The sweet and promising smell of fresh paint on Calumet. Hopeful, even as I fight off melancholy: my man gone for now.

This morning, boisterous spring lightning and thunder, drenching rain. Grateful for all that energy. Lonely.

Bob Woodward, Will Ferrell, Lakisha Jones and Burning Snow

What a week in Flint, Michigan. In San Pedro, my second home, we're never surprised by movie-makers putting up detour signs, taking over Pt. Fermin Park -- sometimes for weeks at a time -- or setting off explosions at midnight at the harbor. In Flint, though, it's something exceptionally rare.

So the town was feverish and hysterical this week when Will Ferrell and Woody Harrelson, along with trucks, vintage cars, light set ups and dozens of crew rolled in to film scenes for "Semi-Pro" featuring the 70s fictional basketball team, the Flint Tropics. The scenes they filmed in Flint involved transforming streets into winter, so crews from a company named "Snow Business" piled supposedly biodegradable fluff on several city blocks. And they stripped the leaves and buds off trees along First Street, trees which didn't seem to know that Hollywood trumps Mother Nature, especially in a cash-strapped town. They claim they'll replace those trees, but it's galling.

And the other day some of the leftover "snow" caught fire. Ironic twist on the Hollywood week. Snow smoking around the stripped locust branches. Ah, yes, things are going great in Vehicle City.

In the midst of the "Semi-Pro" hoopla, Bob Woodward showed up, part of UM - Flint's Spotlight series, to sell books, talk to high school students, and deliver a noon talk to a couple of hundred grown ups. I bought a copy of State of Denial and got it signed by the man himself -- who despite his recent wiliness and self-promoting actions confusing truth with fortune, remains a journalistic hero of mine. I was a young reporter at the Orange Coast Daily Pilot during Watergate, and every day in '73 and '74 was more exciting than the last. We idolized those boys -- and believed in the power of the word, of relentless research and fearlessness, to bring down evil. What's happened since? Even Woodward sits a bit too comfortably in corporate laps and the Washington press corps have the spine of eels. Still, it was stimulating to see Woodward in person and hear him talk about how he interviewed Bush for three and a half hours over two days. Stunningly, he claimed to have asked him 500 questions. It seems our president isn't a guy to go beyond the one-word response. Truth, ah, elusive truth slinks off, neglected, into the darkness.

Finally, Lakisha. She got her "American Idol" mojo back last week and squeaked through to the final four. Flint celebrates her with so much obsession it's...dare I say it?... embarrassing. Better, though, to rest in the talents of a powerful gospel shouter than corrupt politicians and industrial decay.

Mesmerized by Trees

Here's a the first half of my May column for Flint's East Village Magazine. The town is almost exclusively notorious, but the trees in my neighborhood are lovely. For the rest of it, check out eastvillagemagazine.org.

One of my first great losses was not a person, but a tree. It was a maple in the front yard of a parsonage in Ohio. The tree was about 25 years old, with a series of satisfying saddles, and I climbed it with increasing strength and skill for about five years. I vividly remember getting as high as I could on summer days and hugging the trunk, riding a breeze or simply blissfully hanging on, smitten by green. Much later, when I encountered Federico Garcia Lorca’s luscious poem ‘’Green,” I thought of my hours in that tree — “Green, I love you, green.”



Unfortunately for my spiritual development, I blamed the church for the tree’s demise. Denominational bureaucrats in the optimistic boom of the 1950s decided to add on an educational wing. They actually moved the parsonage up the street a block, and my beloved tree was uprooted and chopped up to make way. Seeing the huge hole where the tree had been was my first experience of grief, and I’ve never quite trusted organized religion since.

So I learned a dual lesson quite early — not only that one can have a specific and individual relationship with a particular tree, but that trees can’t be taken for granted. There are always people around who’ve got a better idea than a tree. And they are usually wrong — obscenely wrong.

And here we are 45 years later, experiencing not just global warming but global melancholy, the zone for maples, for example, seemingly moving northward, and the trees that we’ve come to love in peril from all manner of blights, wasps and compromised habitats.

This is all to get to an ode of praise — a tribute (I desperately hope not a eulogy) to the trees of our neighborhood. In my frequent walks from Woodlawn and Burroughs Park east across Sunnyside or Calumet to Pierce Park and back, I’ve fallen in love with a dozen trees.

Some were planted by design, part of a “tree plan” of a city once more gracious in its priorities. Some are there by “accident,” volunteers from seeds dropped by birds or carried by wind. Like the houses and residents on our leafy blocks, the trees have character and individual histories to be known and cherished.

Take for instance the immense silver maples providing the beautiful arbors over Beard, Maxine, Blanchard, Kensington and Linwood. According to Mike Keeler and Sherry Hayden, longtime environmentalists and neighborhood activists who took me on a fabulous “tree walk” recently, these trees are at least 60 years old. They were planted in what former Parks Director George Liljeblad calls the “tree lawns” between the sidewalks and the curb about the time the houses were built, mostly in the mid-1930s.

(Sherry notes that cicadas love the old maples. If you walk along Maxine on July or August nights you can hear them chirping out what, as a poet, I’d say are long summer spondees, aural neon advertising “SEX-SEX-SEX” or iambs like “Love ME. Love ME. Love ME.").....

A Sensualist Moment on Earth Day

Eighty degrees on the back porch, I'm sitting in the shade reading rough drafts of student short stories (kids getting lost in fields, car wrecks with no seat belts, creepy neighbors, insane miming clowns, threatened virginity, a lottery winner losing it all -- the usual panoply of the Flint imagination) and the sun moves gradually onto the slate porch floor. I feel its radiance before it gets all the way to my toes, still in their thick winter socks. I'm drinking strong black tea -- nothing fancy this time, just the real goods, pekoe with the bag left in a half hour. Two yellow tulips blooming along the fence; two dozen more buds about to pop. A mourning dove chases his girlfriend around the yard. She stays just a few inches ahead, making quick swerves to the right and left. Eventually he'll catch her: she'll let him. A bee zips by my ear. A bee! Could it be a honeybee? Is it possible they're not all dead?

Since it's the end of April, I allow myself not to be anxious about the heat. It can be 80 degrees on April 22. That's not so unheard of.

When exactly did the sun become the enemy? In my lifetime -- after centuries of reliance and celebration, after centuries of art and poetry and worship. Today, I'm willing to take it the old way, so beckoning, so beneficent. Today it feels like a gift. I watch the oblivious doves -- adorable, panicky bobbers almost put on the "can shoot" list but saved in a Michigan vote. I'm trying not to think about Blacksburg, those unrelenting images of guns and blood and grief. I'm trying not to think about the worst week in months in Iraq -- hundreds die in markets -- in markets! -- those gathering places where there's food -- the one thing we must have to survive, and hope, and communion. I'm trying not to think about Gonzales, and how he can't recall, and can't recall and can't recall and can't recall. But one needs to acknowledge all this: this, too, is the world.

So I get up from the chair, drop my pen on the last draft, and submit. I stretch out on my back on the slate floor, in the sun. For a quarter hour those beams shine on my winter skin. I turn my face to it, my eyes closed, and the bright gold penetrates my eyelids, so that all I see is bursts of yellow coronas. The heat penetrates my black jogging pants. I stretch out my arms and let the rays warm even the pale white undersides. It's audacious, this unmitigated, healing warmth and light. Perhaps I'm old enough now that the warnings don't matter. For a quarter hour the sun feels perfect, my body soaking it in the way we used to. So this is what it comes down to for an old sensualist: indulging in unambiguous sun, an ancient pleasure, while a wisp of nostalgia lurks, just a few inches away, just a few inches, in the shade.

Remembering Kurt Vonnegut

The inimitable Kurt Vonnegut died while I was wrestling with my spring sickness, and, a bit belatedly, I wanted to offer my own small tribute to this American literary genius.

I love his eight premises of Creative Writing 101, in the Intro to Bagombo Snuff Box (he called those early stories
"a bunch of Buddhist catnaps.") Here they are:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will
not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass
of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or
advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading
characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the
reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make
love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as
possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete
understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could
finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few
pages.

I love the earthy concision of these bits of advice. He then says
that Flannery O'Connor was the greatest short story writer of his
generation, and she broke practically every one of his rules but the
first. "Great writers tend to do that," he wrote. RIP, Vonnegut.

Feelin bettah, ain't dead yet

Coming out of a tunnel of spring sickness and grateful to feel human again. It hit both of us at our beautiful bed and breakfast in Bellaire three weeks ago: last good night was that luxurious soak in the jacuzzi and the eucalyptus massage that followed. Oh, sweet Jeezus.

But we paid a price: our smiling pores opened up so big they apparently took in the worst infection of the season, and we were laid up for days (and not in a fun way). The day after the jacuzzi, before we realized how bad off we were going to be, I made my husband drive me up to the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula: I was bound and determined to see the Grand Traverse Lighthouse and have lunch at Boone's in Sutton's Bay. When we got to the lighthouse we both had serious chills and sniffling, and the low point was my poor patient man had to pee in a frigid outhouse.

Things to note: 1. WHY does the gift shop at the lighthouse use plastic bags? Don't they know it takes a thousand years for these suckers to biodegrade -- if ever?

2. WHY does the B&B (otherwise fabulous in all respects) offer Ice Mountain bottled water? Haven't they heard about the water table deterioration, attributed to this company, in their very own neighborhood?

More later. This is just to say I'm back and okay.

The Palmer Method at the Bellaire B&B

OK, so yeah, maybe it was the relaxation of the deep jacuzzi and eucalpytus massages; maybe it was the plush bed and marble fireplace; or maybe the combination of great taste and kindness of our hosts, Jim and Dave. But when the sickness hit, we were so feverish, about the only thing we could manage to do was lie side by side and snuggle.

Then the most marvelous thing: my husband started writing on my back with the eucalpytus oil. Murmuring that he'd studied the Palmer Method of cursive writing from the nuns way back in Brunswick, Maine, he gently sent me missive after missive. Ah, this sweet man knows I love my language.

It's great being old coots in bed. We get to do anything we want, including the Palmer Method. There's one reason to keep cursive alive.

Green Tea with Peace

I meant to write "Green Tea with Peach" but the typo suits the morning. Leaving for a weekend with Ted at a B&B at Bellaire, MI. I've decided, as I wrote in an email to my colleagues/fellow alums of the wonderful Warren Wilson MFA program, that having had my say about Starbucks, it is better to argue over ideas, even truncated ones, even truculently, than to dogpaddle around in banality.

Outrage at Starbucks

I should have known better. I rushed through the Starbucks drive-through (or drive-thru, as they call it) this morning and didn't pay attention to my vente mocha until I got in to school. As I was turning on my computer and going through my mail, I took my first sip. Then I happened to notice the word "Darwinism" on my cup.

I looked more closely. In a quote filling up the side of the cup from "Dr. Jonathan Wells, biologist and author of 'The Politically Correct Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design,' are these words: "Darwinism's impact on traditional social values has not been as benign as its advocates would like us to believe. Despite the efforts of its modern defenders to distance themselves from its baleful social consequences, Darwinism's connection with eugenics, abortion and racism is a matter of historical records. And the record is not pretty."

Bear in mind I was on my way to work at THE UNIVERSITY, where we face ignorance and assaults on the whole notion of science and the validity of evidence, every day of our working lives.

I'm outraged and disheartened that this quote appeared, unwanted, on my Starbucks cup. I immediately called the local Starbucks to complain, and, taking the measure of my heated attitude, she gave me the customer service number (1-800-STARBUCKS). There, I vociferously explained to the young man that I do NOT want to read a quote like this on my coffee cup, and that, more to the point, the use of an excerpt like this, without context, without opportunity for real debate on a very complex issue, is offensive.

He said the quote is part of a plan from Marketing (whom he said would not talk to me) to "stimulate debate." I said this method trivializes the way meaningful discourse occurs. I said that's just what's wrong with the way my students think: they get their supposed "truths" in disembodied bits and pieces: they don't know how to judge. Deprived of context, of background, of actual research and discussion, they remain clueless. I said if Starbucks is really interested in meaningful discourse, they should endow a University chair, or fund a nationwide series of debates.

I didn't want this debate to begin (and end) with my coffee cup. I just wanted a cup of coffee. I should have known. Now back to trying to teach my students how to think, in a world where irresponsible corporate "coffee cup" fallacies are what pass for "stimulating debate." Starbucks should let its stimulation begin and end with coffee.

Mary Helen Blew Me Kisses

Sunday report: At 9 a.m., I rolled out of bed. I pulled on my "Minot Beavers" sweatshirt and old black pants, carefully backed the Honda down the driveway (always an accomplishment when I've just waked up), and cruised down Court. I timed myself just right: there was a train drumming along the tracks between Dort and Averill, but the last car slid by when I was a half block away. (I wish I could say it was a caboose because I love that word, but...it was an ordinary greasy black oilcan. Well, there, I've said caboose anyway) The arms went up just as I got there, so I actually didn't have to brake. And then I got cafes mocha and NYTimes for my next door neighbor Mary Helen and me, enjoying the old Neil Young tunes they were playing. When I got home, I went through Mary Helen's back gate as I always do and I could see her up, padding around the kitchen in her PJs.

I love Mary Helen. Soon after I moved in and my first New Yorker arrived in the mailbox, my mail carrier casually said one day, "Did you know both you and your next door neighbor get the New Yorker?" I don't know if that's legal to say, but I appreciated it. We started comparing notes over the back fence. One glorious Sunday morning that first summer, we caught each other goofing off in our respective backyards. She called over,

Some keep Sunday going to church
I keep it staying at home,
With a bobolink for a chorister,
And an orchard for a throne.

Any lapsed preacher's daughter worth her salt knows that Emily Dickinson poem well, and I couldn't believe I had the great luck to have a neighbor who would quote ED over the back fence. I'm terrible at memorizing poems, but I ran inside and pulled the rest of it up on Google and gave it to her on a notecard:

Some keep Sabbath in surplice,
I just wear my wings
And instead of tolling the bell for church,
Our little sexton sings.

God preaches, a noted clergyman,
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of going to heaven at last
I'm going all along.

Anyway, usually, especially in winter, I never go in when I drop off her paper -- just leave the decaf mocha and paper on the table in her sunroom, her two little doggies Nannie and Zooey barking exuberantly. They know me, which is nice. From the kitchen window, Mary Helen blew me kisses. It was raining, and I like that, too. The air smelled great. It was a heavenly Sunday.

Voyeur at the Round House

Every day when I'm in Flint I walk by the round house. It's on a corner lot down by Gilkey Creek, and it looks very odd in this neighborhood of colonials and small Tudors. Its single story is contructed of dark gray brick and has a flat black roof with two cylindrical brick chimneys, each with a conical tophat, poking up from the roof. There's a tall white fence around the back third. Unshapely, monstrous evergreens obscure all its windows, except for the front, next to an attached garage. Whose idea, probably back in the Sixties, was this architectural anomaly? For months it's been obviously uninhabited and overgrown, a hopeless "For Sale" sign up in front. Lately, somebody's at least trying to do something with it: it's been a big mess, trucks coming and going, a huge dumpster in the driveway. I always crane my neck when I stride by, having a big appetite to see inside other people's houses, but it has always been obscured by the dumpster or vehicles, or the curtains were securely pulled shut.

But yesterday, whoa, the round house sat completely open to view. The curtains were gone and the curved driveway was clear, with nobody in sight. So, after looking furtively over my shoulder, I walked right up to the round house and took a good long look.

What a weird place! Totally empty, inside it looks like a set from the Dick Van Dyke show. The one of the brick chimneys visible from the street is connected to a circular fireplace in the center of the living room, which has a carpeted, semicircular "conversation pit" and a step up to a circular carpeted area around and behind the fireplace. The whole thing is strangely set off by white cast iron railings separating the conversation pit from the rest of the room -- as if the residents or guests couldn't be trusted not to fall off the step down. Off to the left is a dark kitchen that looks more like a bar, and on the far side of the circular living room are big glass doors to -- a small, triangular swimming pool! I'd never have guessed it was there from the street.

What's so cool about peering into other people's houses is the way you can start to imagine a whole new life. What if I lived here? What would I be like?

I tried to picture the sensibility behind the round house -- not the hippie part of the Sixties, but rather something related to Hugh Hefner and martinis at 5 p.m. and men in black suits and skinny ties and glamorous women in tight dresses, high heels and beehives. At one point in my young life, that was how I thought sophisticated adults lived: not like my parents, who didn't drink, didn't care about clothes, kept the same couch for 50 years and favored digging homegrown potatoes over anything having to do with, say, New York.

This is a house from StarTrek, a house from the Space Age. Sixties architecture was fun -- so unlike our parents' predictable block structures, buildings like comfort food. It would be hard to get comfortable in the living room of the round house -- and you'd be quite exposed -- like those damn "open plan" schools that never worked.

Now, though, it looks, well, kookie. Some of it even was called, wasn't it, "Googie architecture" ? The round house doesn't quite ascend to that moniker, but getting a chance to peek inside made me smile. I know nothing about the people who lived inside -- whether they smoked Parliaments and had sophisticated cocktail parties or whether the woman of the house made rumaki and donned a skinny black dress. It does seem, in retrospect, as if the Sixties weren't about being comfortable, but about being...daring. It was fun back then. It was fun being young in the Sixties.

But I don't particularly miss the Sixties, except that I sometimes miss having a young body. And while I enjoyed picturing myself skinny dipping in the very private swimming pool at the round house on a hot Flint Sunday, I don't want to live in the round house. I don't particularly want to push the envelope or wear high heels or grip the cast iron railing to keep from falling into the conversation pit. But it's a deliciously taboo pleasure to walk up to somebody else's house, stare right in the windows, and imagine another life.

Meanwhile, A Peaceful Sunday Night

Trying not to stay in the dark place too long. That "a human neckbone at his feet" phrase, those four horrific iambs, became an obsessive mantra yesterday when I was pounding around the neighborhood, trying to walk off the effects of grading 40 freshman papers, and struck by a commentary from Iraq I'd heard earlier on NPR. And I'm so worried about the bees. What are we doing to this beautiful world?

Iraq: The Big Story of the new generation. My husband's two sons, probably immune; my stepson from my first marriage, probably old enough at 37 to escape. My nephew, an electrician, robust and smart -- probably immune. But these young kids whose names and pictures show up every night on the Lehrer News Hour and every Sunday on This Week with Stephanopoulos, damn, my friends, they are children, and most of them are from the small towns of America, as others have aptly noted. Children. And those who don't die -- come home carrying the memory of horror in their hearts. We will have something immense and dark and troubling with us for decades to come. I hope we have enough love to take them in and give them what they need to heal.

But I'd promised myself not to stay in the dark place. Listening to Dylan, "Love and Theft," my favorite cuts "Mississippi" and the sweet "Moonlight." Earlier, I let myself be awash in a gorgeous CD of Tongan music my San Bruno friend Emile Hons passed along a couple of weeks ago -- the soothing harmonies of Kuila -- with dogs barking in the background. Oh, that takes me back to those languid kava parties in 'Osamu's little oval hut of long ago. It makes me feel better to hear these peaceable songs and sip a little wine and relax. Here's to finding pleasure after a dip into the dark places. Here's to music that soothes the savage breast.

Villanelle For An Anniversary of the War

A human neck bone at his feet,
A soldier shudders in the sun.
The bees are dying in the heat.

The country chills in sickly sleet.
In Uruguay Bush rattles guns
A human neckbone at his feet.

A dying woman can't use weed,
the tulips sprouted far too soon.
The bees are dying in the heat.

The northern ice caps melt in sheets.
The oil man digs another hole,
A human neckbone at his feet.

A dying woman can't use weed,
The white bears starve and drift alone.
The bees are dying in the heat.

Can sense survive in these defeats,
when soldiers shudder in the sun
a human neck bone at their feet,
and bees are dying in the heat?

When It Began, A Foreboding Day in New York

Four years of madness. I was at 4Cs in New York City in 2003 when it was all beginning. What have we done?

VERNAL EQUINOX, 2003, New York City

Light and dark are supposed to be equal
but today in the caverns of New York
darkness seems to have the edge.

Across from my thirteenth floor room
CNNS's unlucky strobe flickers in every
office cube. I pull the red drapes shut.

I'm here to give a paper on failure, bad
joke. For airport safety, no laptop: revising
words come hard to the yellow pad. My pen

leaks blue splotches on my hand, blots
the insufficient page. My head's congested
from the half-empty flight, the ride through

Lincoln Tunnel, where guardsmen stood with guns.
In every elevator, tiny TVs report first casualties
while we stand, hypnotized and horrified, waiting

for doors to open. Tanks like buffalo graze
haunted sand, the only green the spooky network
night lights. We get on, we get off, brass doors closing

at our backs. I drink green tea and try to concentrate,
turn to books I brought for comfort: Rilke and
Marquez: "It was inevitable" -- again and again --

"the scent of bitter almonds." Then, a loud crash,
right here in New York. I run to the window, push
open the drapes, my heart a panicky fist. But

below, people walk unfazed, the busy night trade
seemingly unchanged. And then another boom,
and I understand it's thunder -- simply thunder

and a stun of lightning, and then
a deluge of rain, tarnished silver,
heavy and streaking the high windows.


(Thanks to Dunes Review, where this first appeared)

A Winter Gig in Sutton's Bay

In line with my "Pentimento" entry below, here's an old poem of mine, from a time I went up north in winter to do a (rare) Creative Writing in the Schools gig for Duncan Spratt-Moran. The snow was so deep that I had to park on the road, and Duncan and his two daughters met me there with a sled to take my suitcase in, through a snowy path in the woods, to their beautiful house. It was dark and I remember starlight. One of Duncan's daughters, about six or seven at the time, endearingly took my hand to guide me. When we got to the house Duncan served broccoli, tofu and peanut stir fry in front of a big wood stove and the next morning made fresh ground coffee before I went off to meet the kids. It was a wonderful experience and I still remember it fondly. But I was a little homesick, too.


POSTCARD FROM SUTTON'S BAY

Up here it would break your heart to see how
the little cherry trees bend against snow.
My mother said purple is the color of grief.
These white hills cry out longing, longing
and the jagged row trees click and bow.

I miss you and your city eyes, our love
faulty neon where nature's on the lam.
I think these fields love their loneliness,
these chaste hills love themselves, wrapped
in Amish dresses of gray and brown and black.

The snow here is a missionary, too blessed
for my rough boots. At home with you again
I'll love my emptiness. This prim frost bites.

Pentimento on M-10

I don't often go north from Flint in winter. Thursday I did, traveling alone to Ferris State for a conference. Driving those roads gets me melancholy, thinking about my first husband. He spent blue collar summers up there and the scrubby lots and pines in rows and brown rivers all touched his heart and filled his poetry. Used to be the only time I'd go up there was with him, waiting watchfully for the sweet sadness to descend on him around Evart. I loved that part of him. Remembering his love for white birches doesn't go away with the end of marriage, now six years past.

But one lays down new memories, even in old territories, a pentimento. Is that the word? I look it up. Oh, man, yes, that's what I mean. Rooted in the Italian for "repent, " the artist changing his mind, painting over that hand that didn't look right, making the eyes turn another way, reangling the troublesome feet, paint over paint. Regret and trying again.

So, my trip a pentimento. MapQuest took me up 75 to M-10, as usual -- 85 miles an hour easy all the way to that cool rest stop at Clare with the cast iron sculptures and the good bathrooms. But after that, M-10 narrows down to a two-lane and if you've got any sense you take a deep breath, not try to pass every pickup or old Dodge, and just pay attention.

Going west in the late afternoon, I hit ochre sunset slanting off wide fields of snow. The brown this time of year is beautiful, every twig limned and distinct, every hawk feather, it seemed to me, sharply visible in the clear late winter air, shadows of the stone houses and outbuildings extending halfway back to the fenceposts, the stiff remains of cutdown cornstalks elegant contrast to sensuous curves of snow.

Last week when I flew back to Michigan from California, gloomy and resistent to my all-too-familiar Midwest, the view from the air after the Mississippi River was like a reverse Wizard of Oz, stunning change from technicolor to black and white -- or brown and white, really -- a shock of subtraction. But driving into the sunset the other day on the old roads, thinking about a lost marriage and heading toward something new and good, the land seemed rich and textured and full of lovely subtlety again.

Memories of Wendy's Manicure and Al Murray Shoes Make Me Happier in Cold Flint

Cantankerous this Wednesday back in Flint, 14 degrees with two inches of fresh snow on the ground, and I don't find it amusant. The second day of jet lag almost always the worst. So I draw a big deep bubble bath and sink in decadently. Remembering Jim Harrison's recent eminently sensible prescription for what ails ya: a huge porterhouse, a quart of the best bourbon you can afford and a long hot bath, then sleep for a day. But I gotta be at work in an hour. So, wrapped in Ted's big heavy white robe, the most I can get of Ted who's still back in San Pedro, I crank up Sam Cooke belting Change is Gonna Come, and after that, the Overture from the Marriage of Figaro, and after that, Harry Nillson wailing "Down." Aggressive and loud. I'm feeling slightly better, but don't catch me admitting it. Anyway, it's not even 9 a.m. yet.

By the way, Harrison's Returning to Earth is my favorite recent novel. I dig the way his main character dies midway, walking into his own freshly dug grave in Canada, dreaming of ravens and bears. And when I tried to post the cover for a little variety in the paragraph, Safari crashed and I had to start this all over. Must be crow magic in the air.

Anyway, two memories of Pedro warm me this day. There's a Vietnamese manicure place in a little mall off 25th where I always go when I'm there -- they're fast and friendly. I love the sound of the Vietnamese language bubbling around me in that room; to my ear, it's like frogs on a summer night, or water tumbling over rocks, or hens murmuring -- whatever, it's a lovely cacaphony. Wendy, a delicate woman with delicate hands, took on my Ohio paws, which looked huge resting on her table. I asked for the oil manicure and added the paraffin wax, and then she wondered if I'd like a flower on one of the nails. It's not my usual, but I said yes only so that I could watch her create the tiny white flower with four petals and a perfect stem on my left ring finger. Then she glued a tiny jewel in the center, and then she created a corresponding one on the other hand. This doesn't "look like me," but I loved them, and I loved watching her ply her remarkable craft, and they lasted for a week.

The second warming memory had to do with buying shoes. Ted wanted to buy a new pair of New Balance sneakers, and we went to Al Murray Shoes off Western Ave. in Pedro. The service was so great I decided to buy a pair myself. We spent 45 minutes there, the clerk lovingly measuring our feet, leisurely talking to us about our feet (I'm serious -- I've never had any shoe clerk do this) and making suggestions for the best shoes for us. He said my poor aging arches are falling and that can lead to back aches and headaches and all kinds of other malaise -- "The feet," he said passionately, "the feet affect everything." When we put on the shoes he selected, complete with arch-supporting inserts, we walked around the place feeling 20 years younger, floating like angels, while he beamed at us. Then he gave us a good talking to: "you must walk," he said. "Forty-five minutes a day. You must sweat." We nodded compliantly. "You'll feel so much better, and now you have the right shoes for it." I felt so...loved. What a pleasure!

So I'll put on my blissfully good fitting sneakers and stride out into this frigid day.

Pellucid Days in the City of Angels

1. Rains and sea winds last week made the San Gabriel Mountains from our apartment in San Pedro stand out as I'd never seen them. Here's how they looked when Ted caught them Friday. So this is how those mountains might have looked to a tall ship pulling into the harbor 150 years ago.

2. Tuesday: Dinner at Taix and Brahms chamber music at "The" Disney downtown. Ted used his new Onstar for the first time to get us to the restaurant; the voice of a nice young man and his helpful computer helped us make all the right turns. And yes, regardless of politics lurking behind the bar or in the kitchen, Taix DID deliver that anise-flavored Basque drink amer picon for my friend Teddy, who likes it as much as did my stepson Eliot who got me to try it at his wedding in Reno last year. I opted however for a sour gin gimlet. Later, we froze our asses off in the 50-ish LA night, but couldn't turn down a chance to sit on stools at the Pinot Grill outside the Mark Taper Forum for shots of Bushmills before sprinting across the street to The Disney. Fabulous acoustics for a round of Brahms songs, a clarinet quintet, and a piano quintet. But why, for the millions of dollars overbudget that place cost, are the seats so uncomfortable? Might as well be imprisoned in a Northwest Airlines middle seat. REALLY!

More to come.

Celebrate the Sentence Day

Happy March Fourth! Don’t forget to observe my self-declared holiday: National Celebrate the Sentence Day. March Fourth is a sentence, and if you think about its homonym, March forth, it is the only date of the year which works as a sentence outside the numeral structure. Okay, just go with me on this and stop your quibbling.

In Los Angeles, thousands of runners literally are marching forth for the LA Marathon, THE most appropriate day of the year for such valiance. All the rest of us, all around the world, from dawn to dark, are crafting sentences for every conceivable reason: to declare love or war, to buy pomegranates, to negotiate a lease, to call a loved one out to see the hawks in the palm tree, to complain that our feet hurt, to comfort a baby, to support our candidates, to ask for a kiss, to give thanks for a kiss, to mourn the dead.

I celebrate the powerful reassurance of one complete thought put into words. I celebrate the miraculous structure of human language: the stolid march of subject-verb, subject-verb; the riffs and infinite improvisations of sensual adjectives, sonatas of adverbs, the bringing-together of conjunctions, and the spritely prepositions, pointing every which way. I am grateful for how the sentence orders my life experience – a structure that makes it possible for you to read this, wherever you are, and understand a little of what I have to say. I’m grateful for the architecture, varied and elaborate, that helps me capture my experience and visit the life houses of other writers.

I’m thankful for the workhorse sentence; I’m awed by how my human language has given me more joy and gotten me into more mischief than anything else about me. It’s good to be alive on this March Fourth, the day which is a sentence, and to have the words at hand to reflect on being human. I celebrate the boundless majesty and possibility of the sentence. Here’s hoping we use our words, our sentences, to protect the earth and find a route to peace.

Bonding to My Town's Bad Luck

I've just agreed to write a monthly column for the intrepid and durable East Village Magazine in Flint. I've known its editor, Gary Custer, since living across from him at Avon Street, where I moved into the apartment described in the column sampled below in 1981. Here's the opening of my inaugural piece. For the rest, check out the EVM website, www.eastvillagemagazine.org.

I was sitting in a booth at Redwood Lodge last fall with a famous poet. Brent Nickola and I had just picked him up from Bishop and we were settling down over lunch, delighted he was here and very pleased with ourselves.

The poet, Bob Hass, a gracious man, quickly turned the conversation to Brent and me and to Flint, where he was going to spend the next three days.

“There are only two reasons to end up in Flint,” I heard myself say, “birth and work.”

Brent and I grinned at each other and watched Hass’s face soften — not quite with pity, he’s too elegant for that. Let’s say it was a look of … empathetic curiosity.

“It’s true,” I said, knowing I could turn the moment into a joke. “Brent was born here and I came for a job. What other reasons would there be — fine dining?”

I got through my first quarter of a century in Flint without giving this much thought. But now, in my 26th year, beginning a second quarter century, a pestering question keeps popping up.

What does it mean to live in a place for a very long time? What does it mean, particularly, to live in a place for a very long time that is, say, bleak, unglamorous, and at its best, notorious? What does it mean, in other words, to live for a very long time in Flint?

It’s perilous to think too much about the past … one can begin to seem like a tiresome old fart.

But today is a frigid, overcast Saturday, paltry snow flaking down. It’s monochrome and melancholy, just right for this confession — like most other transplants, I never thought I’d stay this long....

Reader, I Married Him

Five years ago this week, on a frigid night in Flint, I got take out shrimp from a Chinese place, ate it alone in my high-ceilinged lonely apartment, and went to bed feeling isolated and depressed. At 4 a.m. I jolted awake in a panic, my heart wildly racing, my neck burning, my arms tingling, my legs cramping, and my stomach nauseous. Desperate and afraid, I got up, walked around and around the wooden floors in my stocking feet. I was convinced I was having a heart attack. I didn't want to die alone. I forced myself to get dressed and drove myself on a snowy, icy freeway to Genesys Hospital, where I stayed for two days for tests and more tests, until they finally assured me that it was not a heart attack and sent me home, shaken but relieved.

I remembered this anniversary of sorts Sunday night when I watched the last half of the new Masterpiece Theater version of Jane Eyre. I remembered that Jane Eyre, my 2002 panic attack and my own Rochester, the man I married in 2005, are all tied together. On the way home from work tonight, a full moon glowed overhead and I could swear there was a full moon that week, too, one I could see from my hospital bed in the cardiac unit. I remembered I'd been reading Jane Eyre that winter, and I thought I remembered that I had written notes in it as I'd waited anxiously for one test after another in the hospital. At home, I rummaged from room to room. I really wanted to find the book. I wanted to reflect on that terrifying moment of my body's fragility, and what I might have noted about it. And I finally did-- find Jane Eyre, that is, pushed behind some old CDs in a downstairs shelf.

The semester had just begun and I was teaching Women's Lit for the first time, replacing a professor who was on sabbatical. I had left my husband of 15 years the previous spring, and that first long winter was rough. We were all still reeling from 9/11, of course, and on top of everything I was in the throes of a turbulent, mercurial menopause. Everything was hitting me hard. I was 52 years old and it seemed hopelessly improbable that I could begin again. There was too much history. Who did I think I was, starting over? Yet there I was, having wrenched myself from one life and thrown myself into another.

I adopted Professor Zeff's syllabus as she had always taught it, without changing a thing, and there at the top of the reading list was Jane Eyre. I'd read it in college 30 years before, but never since. So I was madly reading it again, trying to keep ahead of my students, the 50 or so women and three men staring back at me as I reported in each day from what felt like a fabulously irrational new life. I had reconnected with an old friend from Peace Corps, a man I hadn't seen for 25 years, and he'd been flying in to Flint from LA to see me about once a month. I loved him, but it seemed impossible to plunge into a new life with him so hard on the demise of my old. I was still in deep mourning for the death of the dream of my marriage. I could only think of what was lost. But when Ted came to visit, sometimes I began to forget the grief and let in a little pleasure. We connected physically, and I was startled and amazed.

When I set off for the hospital that night, gripping the wheel and expecting to be attacked by pain all the way, part of me was still planning to show up for class the next day, and so I had tucked my copy of Jane Eyre into my purse. Inside it now, there is still a folded menu from one of my hospital meals -- it says "fruit cocktail/jello/dry creamer/decaf coffee/whipped potatoes/hot beef sandwich/carrots/no salt." On it I wrote, "Hospital food really is nasty, still we eat it because we're hungry." By we, apparently I meant me and Rita, in the next bed over, whom I wrote was "impossibly frail with a mastectomy on the left side from the same year her husband died." I cried when she told me. She, too, thought that she was having a heart attack, and in her case, she was right.

I kept going back to Jane Eyre. "What good it would have done me at that time," Jane writes, returning to Thornfield after her first dramatic encounter with Mr. Rochester in the moors, "to have been tossed in the storms of an uncertain struggling life, and to have been taught by rough and bitter experience to long for the calm amidst which I now repined." I wrote on the menu, "smiley faces everywhere. Darling, honey, kiddo." There was a National Geographic with an article about the aurora borealis. I found it comforting. And a ten-year-old issue of Prevention Magazine on the windowsill.

Eventually, of course, Jane falls in love and after she first touches Rochester and he clings to her hand, she goes back to her room "tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea," intensely sensing a "freshening gale, wakened by hope." I'm not sure how far I read in the novel those two nights at Genesys, but I know that the book gave me hope. I began to believe that whatever time was left in my life, it was good -- this passion I had, to begin again in love.

From California, crazy with worry, Ted finally found out where I was and called my hospital room. "Why didn't you tell me what was going on?" he demanded, crazily angry that I had left him out. "I want to come out there. Do you want me to come?" I wasn't sure I could ask anything of him, nor sure if I wanted to. Or dared to. But I knew I'd just terrified myself and I was afraid of being alone. "I want you to come," I finally said, and the next day, there he was, hugging me back to life in my apartment, the old radiators chugging out noisy heat. That weekend I let him take care of me. That first night when we snuggled into bed, he put his arms around me and whispered, "Were you afraid?" And when I said yes and finally gave in to tears, thoroughly and unapologetically in the moment, with its terror and joy, I knew something big was happening -- to me, and to us. Things were different between us from that moment on.

And my beloved copy of Jane Eyre, with the page predominantly earmarked where she announces, "Reader, I married him," is here in front of me now, a cherished artifact of starting over, of a sea change, of a molting that has been the biggest and most wonderful surprise of my life. Early Happy Valentine's Day to you all.

"Rogues, Desperados and Cutthroats"

Participating for three hours in a mass group booksigning at Barnes and Noble Saturday somehow reminded me of the weddings arranged by Sun Myung Moon: everybody hoping for the perfect match, but knowing it would be provided by somebody else, a god figure who meant us well. (I'm an agnostic who thinks there's nothing wrong with magical thinking -- go figure.) There were 12 of us lined up at tables at the front of the store, each supplied with a Sharpie, a pile of our "product," a glass of ice water from the cafe, and, of course, our respective hungry looks and desperate hopes. I was dreading it; I'd had lunch at the mall's Ruby Tuesday with my dear friend Professor Teddy beforehand, loading up on appropriately healthy food (grilled chicken salad) and yielding at the last minute to a limey Kamikaze from the bar.

I knew a couple of the other authors -- for one, the gregariously satirical Andy Heller ("Come Heller High Water") and Tom Powers, the retired Flint Public Library research librarian who'd been the demented brain behind the rowdy Julia A. Moore Bad Poetry Contest for which my former husband and I served as judges for years. Also in the lineup was a romance novelist (selling her 11th book -- impressive -- I bought the big type edition for a mere $4.95) a vampire novelist (sexy and predictably ebony-haired), a historian, a self-help writing neurologist, two children's authors, and a manly adventure novelist whose fans lined up the whole time.

My friends materialized and I sold 10 books -- apparently not a bad result, three per hour. If I did that well on Amazon I'd be doing a hell of a lot better than this morning's depressing sales rank of 641,000 -- but then, we're not supposed to obsess about such things, are we? I was the only author there visited by TWO sets of twins, and adorable ones at that, the boys of Jake and Helen Blumner and the girls of Dave and Jen Larsen.

This is my first novel, and I'm trying to learn post-publishing etiquette. Being a poet most of my writing life, I conscientiously walked the gauntlet buying the other authors' books and requesting their autographs. I'd brought extra money just for that. It's the way I've been "brought up," so to speak -- poets are supposed to support each other. We're always talking about "the writing community" and how we have to stick together. We know nobody reads us; we're lucky if other poets read our slim volumes. Nonetheless, we make our friendly gestures; we do what we can. In poetry, of course, there isn't enough influence, power or money to go around, and there'd NEVER be a 12-poet lineup at any Barnes and Noble. Here's the thing, though: not one of those authors on Saturday bought mine. What's wrong with these people? Who's their mother? I went home feeling peevish and wounded.

That night I was depressed and keyed up, and, the temperature outside plunging to a life-threatening 9 degrees, I snuggled into bed early. But I but couldn't sleep. So I reached for Tom Powers' exuberantly colorful 2002 book "Michigan Rogues, Desperadoes, Cuthroats." I immediately felt better. He says P.K. Small, "the Ogre of Seney," became a "gastronomic adventurer" who, for the promise of a drink, would 'gulp down horse manure, either fresh and still steaming, or as a tooth-busting, dried up horse apple." And here's my favorite -- Powers describes T.C. Cunyan, "the Man Eater of Peterborough" like this: "short, squat and tough, he looked like a 170-pound piece of gristle." I still laugh every time I read this amazing sentence.
So I'm grateful to Tom Powers for saving me from middle-of-the-night novelist angst. At least I didn't have to eat horseshit, and even though I heard a major brawl broke out somewhere in the mall just an hour after all of us literati had packed up our Sharpies and left, I understand that the world I'm in is basically benign.

Sado-Masochism and the Screaming Child

I spent two hours of MLK Day sitting in the dentist's chair. Well, wait, it's not really the dentist's chair because HE'S never in the chair and, for that matter, neither is my dominatrix hygienist of the day, Rose. It was sort of an accident -- my appointment wasn't until weeks later and when I called to change an 8 a.m. appointment to a more civilized hour, they tricked me into accepting a cancellation for that very afternoon -- a rare day off.

No matter what I do they always yell at me. Except for Kathy, that is, my favorite hygienist, who had bought my novel and leaned around the corner into Rose's cubicle to dish about the book. "I wish I'd had a life like that," Kathy said, while I drooled from the godawful banana-flavored numbing cream Rose had just q-tipped onto my gums. Damn that stuff is bitter. "I wish I'd had that much fun."

"Issha novel," I garbled, "made moshtovitup."

"Yeah, I'm not buying that," Kathy said. Maybe she needs to believe it really is possible to have a life like that. Maybe that's why nobody wants fiction anymore. Everybody wants to believe everything can happen. That's okay, most of my novel actually is true anyway -- or some timeworn version of "true" -- and I did have a hell of a lot of interesting adventures when I was in my twenties.

Anyway, apparently I have a small mouth, my teeth all crowded together in there, and that's why I'm always on the precipice of periodontal disease. When I get Kathy, she's kind to me, and that's why I always try to get her, but the last time, after she finished, the mean dentist came in and said I needed to come back three days later because Kathy hadn't gotten all the plaque off. I accepted the appointment but when I got home I called right away and cancelled it. They get me two hours every four or six months, and that's it. I like Kathy.

So I swear they gave me Rose on MLK Day to get even. She's funny and wry and I secretly like her -- I've been hearing about her kids and stuff for about 15 years -- but she's relentless. This time she insisted on sticking cardboard hell into my mouth for xrays, the heavy vest pushing against my heart and my throat gagging while she dashed away for each print. And then she started the cleaning with that sonic thingie that makes me feel like I'm being waterboarded.

Well, even with that I was holding my own reasonably well, concentrating on the oldies songs on CARS 108 and trying to get a peek at paltry snowflakes drizzling onto a little pine I always watch outside Rose's window. Then this kid arrived in the next cubicle over, and as soon as he got into the chair, he started shrieking. It went on through the eight needle pricks Rose administered to numb my wussy upper gums, it went on through all four of my quadrants, and it went on even through the cherry-flavored polishing.

"Wha ish it? Gwatanamo ovrthere?" I sputtered. "Hey, kid, don't give up the sheecrets!" Rose giggled and told me to suction. She said my gums were bleeding even though I floss every night and I've even switched to a buzzing electric toothbrush.

The kid shrieked some more.

"Theyshoogashim," I said.

"They're trying," Rose said. "He won't breathe in." He was eight, she said, and he does that every time.

Eventually the kid got done and I got done. The mean dentist, who's really not mean, came in and felt up my neck for tumors and shit and checked my gums, declaring me cavity and plaque-free. I asked him why he was running Abu Ghraib in Flushing, Michigan and he didn't laugh. I thought I was quite hilarious. Neil Diamond was warbling "Sweet Caroline" when I finally clambered out of the chair and got my free toothbrush and dental floss. When I went out to pay my bill the kid was playing with Legos in the waiting room, his hair askew but his face almost disturbingly calm. He wasn't making a sound. His brother was next in the chair, and Rose told me he never fights in the slightest.

Poetry Church

Spent a Friday night at a little bookstore in Flint listening to and watching Traci Currie, a UM - Flint instructor and poet, deliver her goods. It was sweet. Such soothing pleasure. Just a circle of about 15 people in comfortable chairs, and the bumpy, polished wooden floors, and the Art Deco arched windows, and dark falling out on Second Street, and a little table with snacks and wine waiting for us, and a few people walking by outside, and Traci passionately speaking. After a frenetic first week of the semester, Traci's human voice was brave and refreshing.

Part of the comfort for me was the purity and simplicity of the situation: no cell phones, no TV, no email, no pixels. Just a circle of people listening, and Traci there giving us her all. The power of a single human voice, singing out.

I spent a lot of my childhood in circles like that: in Bible studies and prayer meetings in places like Calvary EUB church on Gibbs Avenue in Canton, Ohio, and later, memorably, in Blissfield and Nellie, Ohio, plucky, struggling little churches in Coshocton County. My mind and heart learned to receive and respond in those evenings of scripture and talk. Even when I was a child, the people in those gatherings welcomed me in and let me speak if I wanted to. I remember those people as kind and gentle. I loved their stories. It was never only about the words, but about the meanings of the words, and what we all thought about them. I have the poetry and rhythms of the flawed but addictively lovely King James Bible in my bones, and a fondness for the dear folk who sat around those circles. after hard days in not always happy lives, struggling to find grace and insight in The Word. That hope, centered in language, is still deeply embedded in who I am. The hope that language might be able to save us. Or at least, profoundly please us.

Now, I usually eschew traditional church. But I find the same comfort in Poetry Church, in rooms where remarkable regular people offer up their words, and where language still sometimes delivers startling grandeur and grace.

Writing into an Unknown Silence

This is a peculiar feeling: writing into a large electronic balloon, where my words are like molecules circulating and bumping up against billions of other molecules. Since I'm not getting any comments, I wonder if I could write virtually anything and virtually no one would notice. An interesting take on audience: there could be somebody out there, or maybe no one. Sort of like God.

I'm thinking about how I used to write. I have the gift of one specific moment when something became clear to me. I was about 14 and we were living in a rickety parsonage in Blissfield, Ohio. I was often alone in that time of my life, and it was a condition which did not upset me -- I liked the possibilities within my solitude. Anyway, I was sitting at a little desk on the second floor of the house, and I remember a milky daylight filtering in a window to my left. I was writing in a notebook. I never called it a diary -- diaries were for more trivial pursuits, I suppose I thought. Anyway, a moment surged up in which I said to myself, "I want to write. I want to be a writer." I was so sure that was what I wanted to do that a brief, euphoric ecstasy washed over me.

I've never made it "big" and my life has taken many twists and turns: I have not had the intense focus required, probably, to make this my only life's work. I'm not the best there is and even now, as I feel my age nick away at my energies, I feel unrealized and in need of more practice. But by far it is the clearest and most consistent professional moment of my life, and it was exhilarating.

RIP James Brown

Woke up to the news on Christmas morning and couldn't stop crying for about an hour.
My first husband and I, still young and full of hope, used to rate our dinner parties by whether we ended up rolling up the living room carpet and dancing to the Godfather of Soul.
If I was still in Tonga I'd put on my biggest, messiest mourning mats and wear black for a month. I don't feel good. I'm woebegone. dejected, doleful. I'm down.
And it's sadly, irrevocably official now: my youth is over.

Happy Holiday Doubt in the Pedro Sun

Christmas Eve in San Pedro -- the day awash with that energizing California sun streaming in through the bedroom drapes, getting in my husband's eyes as we roll over and click on the morning talk shows. Out here, Stephanopoulos and Russert start at 8 a.m. and I love lolling on the bed, what's left of the beleaguered LA Times splayed around me on the comforter. I can alternately watch Meet the Press, read the paper, stare out at the harbor and sip coffee reheated from last night's dinner party in big red Christmas mugs. What languid and lovely multitasking!

In the "Current" section, my husband finds something he wants to read out loud, an article about the myths of atheism, while that bountiful Christian communitarian, Rev. Rick Warren, robust and at ease in his tie-less pinstriped shirt allows as how he can be pro-life evangelical and an AIDs activist; "being sick is not a sin," an inserted box quoting his wife Kay reassuringly reminds us.

"I'm starting to like this guy," I say. He's easier to watch than Joel Osteen, that glazed-looking evangelical cyborg whose Christian smile looks botoxed and demented. We debate whether Rick Warren or Mitch Albom is richer, and I figure it'd be a close call, what with Albom's adorably heaven-heavy oeuvre. We reflect on Barbara Walters's special on heaven and how it seems to us people believe in heaven because they hope they'll get to see a lost loved one again. We both find that poignant, if delusional.

So my husband picks up the LA Times again and reads, "Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse," Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason contends. Under Myth #2 -- "Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history" -- he argues, "There is no society in history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable."

Oh, music to my Christmas Eve ears. I come from Quaker forebears, folks who got run out of England and then Nantucket and then South Carolina because of their religion, and I grew up in a passionately fervant Christian home, so appreciation of freedom of religion is deep in my bones. This history is also part of my own passionate suspicion of the mischief religion propagates on nonbelievers; I'm one of them. As an adult I am much more comfortable with reverent doubt and not-knowing. I agree with Harris's view, under "Atheists are arrogant," "When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn't arrogance, it is intellectual honesty."

Well, I'm happy in my nonbelief. This time of year I like to play one of my personal Christmas carols, Randy Newman's "God's Song." I can't resist quoting it here:

"Lord, if you won't take care of us
Won't you please please let us be?"

to which God replies:

"You must all be crazy to put your faith in me
That's why i love mankind
You really need me
That's why i love mankind."

Anyway, eventually my husband and I clambered out of bed and clicked off the tube and went out for a walk in Pt. Fermin Park and breakfast overlooking the marina at 22nd Street Landing, The sheer beauty of our surroundings seemed to still our impulse to cogitate. As Harris asserts, "from the atheist point of view, the world's religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn't have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation." Indeed. Evidence of this still gorgeous, if troubled, earth is all around me this day before Christmas, and it is sufficient.

A Kamikaze at Tiny's

Jimmy is back from Texas: I ran into him today at that famous newstand at the corner of Las Palmas and Hollywood Boulevard.

I made him buy a copy of my novel from the trunk of my husband's car. It's $17.95 and I didn't have change for Jimmy's twenty, so I took it and told him I'd buy him a drink at Musso and Frank's. It was a perfect day in Hollywood -- low sixties, that bright California sun. It was only a block or two to Musso and Frank's and, freshly arrived from other places, we were both squinting in the sunlight. Then Jimmy decided he wanted to move his rental car so we climbed in and drove two blocks to some parking garage where he could leave the thing for two bucks. Jimmy knows the meter maids of Hollywood well and he knows when they want to be bitchy there's no compromise.

Jimmy used to run a barbershop on Las Palmas right next to my husband's awards and trophy store. I used to bring in a bottle of decent champagne every time I'd come into town and sit over in the barbershop because they had air conditioning and drink champagne with Jimmy until my husband got a break to take me to lunch. When Jimmy'd see me coming he'd holler out, "How's your pussy??" and I'd yell back "Satisfied." Mostly queens or lonely has beens came to get their hair done, including one guy who looked exactly like Humphrey Bogart and actually made his living doing standins. I always tried to get him to have some champagne but he would never take any. Once I brought in my CD of Elvis Costello and the Fairfield Four, a beautiful collection; Jimmy loves get down gospel sounds.

Jimmy's partner was Bobby, a tough little Latino who always wore black and had a black pompadour and lots of bling and who shot himself in the head out in his house in the Valley, hooked on too much Vicodin and despairing, we all thought, of his double life. Out there he had a wife and kids; in Hollywood it was a little different. After Bobby died Jimmy held on for about three years but finally decided to go to Texas to start a new life near his aged mother and her retired oil-business boyfriend. Jimmy thought the landscape, the fresh air of Texas might do him good. But after a year he was homesick and without work; he needed a license he didn't have and he didn't want to stick around and sit in class all day. His mom bought him a George Strait double album, thinking it might help, but while Jimmy says he liked a cut or two he really couldn't get into it. So he came back. He's always been a Hollywood queen, he'd tell you -- his father worked for Warner Brothers and he's got the place in his blood. And so here we were, coming at Musso and Frank's from the parking structure thirsty for something strong.

But we forgot Musso and Frank's is closed on Mondays: their ornate iron grate was solidly pulled closed and locked for the day. Jimmy thought he knew of another place, but when we got there, it wasn't open either; a black-clad waitress smoking on the sidewalk said we'd have to wait till 4, but we wanted our cocktails now. "Try Tiny's," she said, pointing back to the Boulevard. Motivated by thirst, we trekked past Cahuenga and found the little storefront with white marquis lights circling a square sign: Tiny's.

After our eyes adjusted to the dark interior, somebody yelled, "How can I help you" but there was nobody but us and a couple of deep red booths, an enormous wooden bar with a classic "bar nude" over the mirror; finally the bartender stood up from putting bottles in the frig so we could see where the voice was coming from.

We clambered onto the barstools and ordered: a double-olive martini for Jimmy and a kamikaze for me. Jimmy's favorite words are fucking and pussy and you know if you're sitting down for drinks with him you'll get an earful. He's about the happiest guy I know, though, especially his third day back in Hollywood, and when he slings the blue it's out of exuberance. The bartender was unfazed; eventually he told us every item in the place got bought off EBay, including the massive bar from some old drinkery in South Chicago. The drinks were excellent and we toasted to Jimmy's mother and Hollywood, and threw in another one for Bobby, may he rest in peace. Jimmy likes to talk about beauty -- and how it seems to be rapidly fleeing. I said Jimmy, what are you about 37? and he said, yeah, on one side! He said he used to spend hundreds on Lancome and the like, but they never worked. Now, he said, he uses Jergens, the one with the pink top, $3.99 from Walmart -- the same stuff his mother's been using for 50 years -- and he says it's just as good. I pledged to try it, but quoted WCWilliams, "Ach, we were all beautiful once" and told Jimmy in my view we'd just have to get used to getting old.

Anyway, I spent most of the money Jimmy gave me for the book on the drinks and left the rest for the bartender. It was bright outside, even brighter than when we went in, and even with those delicious drinks coursing through our bloodstream, nothing looked all that much better on the Boulevard. But it's fun to have Jimmy back, and fun to be back myself, finding a bar named "Tiny's" on a sunny December day just before the solstice.

Back to the Coast

I live a double life. In one life, I get up into a gray dawn in a gray post-industrial city and this time of year, facing east, stare out at bare branches and the slim chance of a streak of sun before lake effect overcast takes over. I plod in to teach at my university and hope there's still a cup of coffee left in the office carafe so I don't have to make it. I methodically turn on my computer in my windowless office, consult the syllabus I optimistically crafted in balmier times and get ready for class...I am structured and orchestrated and choreographed and responsible and, and, and...

In my other life, I wake up facing southeast over the LA Harbor and make green tea and get the LA Times off the street that slants sharply down toward Fort MacArthur with its big green commons and red roofs and beyond that, marinas full of little yachts and massive concrete slips for container ships from China and Japan. In this life, the colors are emerald and azure and white and red. From our bedroom, my husband and I see two graceful palms and sometimes parrots perch and squawk there. At night we sometimes hear seals bark down in the rocks. I dawdle and write and look out to sea and sometimes I do nothing.

So tomorrow I fly out of the gray and into the blue to sweet California, where my husband waits and my body stretches out in the tangy sea air. Even thinking about it now, my bag packed, the violets watered and the bills paid, I feel myself slow down. I'm grateful for the unbending, the opening up, the way I feel renewed in my coastal life. I'm grateful for the world that lets this be: the privilege of this fertility, this gentle turning, this balance.

The Dagger of Plagiarism

It's an unglamorous, gray day in Flint, the atmosphere made all the more oppressive by mountains of grading. This is when being a writing teacher is hardest: I miss the daily sparkle of the students in person now that classes are over, and what I'm left with are their complicated, convoluted struggles to communicate with me on the page. I'm doing a lot of my grading online now: at least, I can settle down with a cup of green tea, in my sweats, and click and comment on my amiable MAC while looking out the window at the leafless black trees -- this time of year, they look arthritic and when a wind comes up from the west, you can almost hear them creak.

So, I swear, the FIRST paper I open doesn't feel right. Doesn't read right. A few clicks on Google later and I realize, yes, it's happened again: A student who would have gotten a B otherwise gave me a paper cut-and-pasted from sources easily accessible on Google. So he flunks the paper and flunks the class.

When I told my colleague about it later, at school, she says, "It feels like a dagger." We both use knife-wound images as we vent. Like my neighbors parking their white van in front of the house, this is an odd crime -- is anyone really hurt? In a world so full of actual bloodshed, how dare we two teachers, leaning against our doorposts on a gloomy Wednesday afternoon, claim injury from a student's awkwardly stolen words? Let's take a moment to breathe: let's acknowledge, with all due respect, a sense of proportion. If my life was at stake, or the student's, probably I wouldn't give a damn.

But why, when my colleague and I are talking about it, do we simultaneously, instinctively, bring our hands to our chests as if to protect our hearts?

It is because we love words and believe in their power beyond all reason. Words are my Word, my lifeblood and my pride.

My colleague tells me she is training herself not to take it personally. I've been teaching far longer than her but I still struggle every time. It feels like a dagger: a dagger of betrayal and disrespect. In my response to my student, after he'd at first denied it, then admitted it and asked for mercy, I wrote in a flood of emotion: " I feel personally offended. I do not see this as a negotiable item, and I am very angry about it at the moment. I'm not in a good place for any sort of compromise, and because this is something I take VERY seriously, I don't think you'll get anywhere with me." I was sorry afterwards that I'd let myself be so raw. The next, and final, message was crisp and cold and governed entirely by the language of rules.

My colleague says it's really NOT personal. I know that. The student's just trying to get by: plagiarism happens out of laziness and the press of deadlines, and, I suspect, our students' understanding that we really, truly love the shining paragraphs, not the bland and mediocre and confusing ones that are the students' messy results much of the time. I think our students want us to love them, and if we haven't taught them enough to pave the way for those golden sentences that will make us love them, maybe they just want to find the ones that will. Maybe I'm crazy because I just got home from the office Christmas party and had a little bit of the de rigueur holiday egg nog -- the heavily frothed brew redolent with secret dollops of whiskey that everyone denies are there. I must have had too much, yes, that's it. Because if there's any truth to my half-baked theory, then plagiarism is about the failure of love. And that's a damned depressing thought on this dark, unredeemable midweek night.

Out of the Cold

I'm attempting to rediscover this little blog. My new novel, not coincidentally, is called Night Blind. To find out more, go to my website, www.janworth.com. Yep, that's me.
I've been thinking I had a few things to say about publishing a novel. So I'll see if I can get this going again.
And it's not just that, but the opportunity to try to move beyond the book, to write something new.
So here goes nothing!