Back, Sort of

Losing a mother is hard. It doesn't matter how old she is or what intellectual arguments one can muster about circles of life and all that. The plain, raw truth is that it simply wallops you emotionally.

I've finally started back to work on Where Shadows Dance. I've had to ask for a month's extension, but my editor has been very understanding. This past weekend, Steve and I drove up to the lake. We hadn't been there since before Christmas, and it was heaven.

Those endless hours and weeks of sitting at my mother's bedside gave me much time to think. There's nothing like spending day after day in a hospice watching people die, one after the other, to cause even the most goal-obsessed amongst us to reevaluate their priorities. Last 31 December, I found myself oddly ambivalent about the beginning of this new year. Now, I'm ready to make some changes.

My thanks to Sphinx Ink, Emily and Bruce, Skittles, Steve Malley, Susan, Jan, Kim, Melinda, Lainey, Kierra, Vicki, Orannia, pax deux, Charles, Kalliope, Holly, Natalie, Caluch, Lana, Pam, and everyone else for their kind words of sympathy. You helped more than you'll know.

A New Year

I normally like new years. They’re an annual—if artificial—chance to start over, to reassess and try again and throw ourselves with renewed dedication and hope into the endless quest to make ourselves, our lives, our world a little bit better.

Yet I find myself approaching this new year with a strange sense of detachment somehow lacking the enthusiasm with which I normally embrace this ritual. Perhaps it’s because New Orleans is wrapped in a deep freeze that is killing my garden with an icy wind howling straight from the arctic to whip at my hibiscus and palms and the bare stems of my frangiapanis. Perhaps it’s because I’ve just said a stoic goodbye to my youngest, off for a grand adventure in London. Perhaps it’s because I’m watching my 92-year-old mother fail a little more with each passing day. I could blame the economy, the endless beating of war drums and the greed of politicians, but that will always be with us. Maybe I’m just in a funk. Maybe this year I’ll focus on the Chinese New Year, coming February 14. It’s going be the Year of the Tiger. Time to start practicing my roar.

In the meantime, I’m stealing this New Year’s wish from Steve Malley, because Neil Gaiman has managed to capture the spirit I’m finding illusive at the moment:

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books, and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art. Write, or draw, or build, or sing, or live, as only you can.

“May your coming year be a wonderful thing, in which you dream both dangerously and outrageously. I hope you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it; that you will be loved, and you will be liked; and you will have people to love and to like in return. And most importantly, because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now, I hope that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind. And I hope that somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”



Cheers, everyone.

The Things We Leave Behind

It isn’t often that cookies inspire deep thoughts, but bear with me.



I was wandering through World Market the other day and spotted this package of Arnott’s Mint Slices, which were my all-time-favorite, special-treat biscuits (cookies) during the years I spent in Australia. Since I’m supposed to be on a health kick I didn’t get them at the time. But they haunted me so much that I finally went back and bought them. And the entire experience started me thinking about the things we leave behind in life.

My life is littered with wonderful taste sensations that have entered my orbit and then departed, never to be experienced again. The world’s best chocolate-filled pastries from a hidden lane in Florence. Airy confections from the shop down the street from my apartment in Athens. Devonshire teas everywhere from Winchester to Wellington to Adelaide. Fish strewn with lemon and spices and cooked in foil by a Palestinian refugee with a stall in downtown Amman. (Notice this litany is heavy on deserts; I have a sweet tooth.)

But it isn’t just great foods that I’ve had to leave behind. It’s also pleasures and pastimes and the patterns of my days. Catching snowflakes on my tongue. Casting a lure just so in a clear mountain stream. Waking up in the morning to throw open my bedroom window and gaze out over a Spanish plaza once known by Romans and Moors and medieval knights. Trekking across a sun blasted, stony Arabian desert to come upon the ruins of a city abandoned two thousand years ago. Cutting back a bougainvillea rioting over my garden in the Adelaide hills and pausing to listen to the haunting, ever-exotic cry of a kookaburra.

And then there are the things I’ve lost without even realizing I was leaving them behind. As a teenager I played the guitar and had a horse. In my twenties I was absolutely fluent in French. At one point I went through a ballroom dance phase and swam a mile every day. Then I was seriously working toward a black belt in Tae Kwan Do. But life got in the way, my focus shifted, and before I knew it, those things, too, became a part of my past.

And don’t get me started on the friends and lovers I’ve left behind.

This constant letting go and loss is probably hardest on those who move around a lot. But I suspect everyone’s life is this way to some extent. A few nights ago, I was sitting at the sidewalk table of a local Lebanese restaurant with my husband of (almost) six years and my gorgeous, dark-eyed, twenty-something daughter. The air was heavy with the scent of night blooming jasmine and Mediterranean spices. An Egyptian singer was wailing over the sound system as the St. Charles streetcar went clanging past. It was a magical blending of old and new, lost and recently discovered.

Life, bittersweet, but good.

The Triumph of the Underdog

The triumph of the underdog: it's something we all want to believe can happen. But how often to we get to see an underdog triumph in real life? Not often, which makes those few, rare moments all the more precious.

Picture a frumpy middle-aged woman from a small town in Scotland. She’s never been married; never even been kissed. But she dreams of becoming a singing star. She gets a chance to go on a national talent-scouting program, and she grabs it. When she walks out on stage, everyone laughs at her. They think she’s going to make a fool of herself. Then she starts to sing, and audience and hardened judges alike gasp in wonder at the beauty of her voice. By the end of her performance, they’re on their feet, cheering, with tears running down their faces.

Of course, this song can make me cry under even ordinary circumstances. But this performance—ah, this performance is sublime.

One of Those Weeks

Ever have one of those weeks when it begins to feel as if anything that can go wrong, will? This past week…

My daughter ripped the bottom out of her low-slung sports car on one of New Orleans’s Katrina-ravaged streets. While it’s in the shop being repaired, she’s driving MY car (down those same Katrina-ravaged streets). Then…

The washing machine in my mother’s house broke down. Since it’s old, I decided to go buy a new one--not easy when I don’t have a car. Then,

Our cat Nick, one of the stupidest but also one of the sweetest felines in the world, went into kidney failure. We’re hopeful he’s going to recover, but he’s not out of the woods yet. He’s only eight years old, poor guy. Then…

I broke my toe. Without a car (see above), I’d been walking. No more. Then…

My washing machine broke down. Fifth time in two years. Grrrr.

And then, although it was technically not in the same 7-day streak, Steve and I did a booksigning at a local independent bookstore this past Saturday and sold not a single book. Not one. In all my years as a published author, I’ve never been skunked at a booksigning. I guess there’s always a first. I’m not taking it personally—I’ve talked to huge NYT bestselling authors who fly into a town for a signing and don’t sell, so I know it happens (plus we were able to sign a lot of stock). But still…

The good thing is that with the exception of Nick's health, these are all pesky (although in some cases, expensive) irritants. I know life could be so much worse. Nevertheless, here’s hoping for a better coming week!

Letting Go

I've just spent an exhausting, heart-rending week delivering my youngest to college in Florida. It's an incredible place--a small liberal arts college right on the beach, complete with great vegetarian food and a wonderfully supportive faculty and staff. She's already already signed up for sailing lessons and the search and rescue team. I know she'll have a great experience there and that does help. A little.

Yet this morning I found myself needing to reach for The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, and rereading this passage:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.