The Places I Can’t Forget

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” -Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier

There is a basic tenet in Buddhism that the only reality is what is happening now. The past exists only in our heads, muddled by our own unavoidable perspectives and biases, and the future may or may not come to pass. If a piano falls on you in three seconds, it’s best not to have spent that time separated from the sights, sounds and emotions of the moment.

I find this a helpful construct for many reasons; I tend to be a ruminator and a worrier, frequently leaving the moist, fragrant air of a summer second to regret the actions of a remote January morning, or to fret over what might happen as the air grows crisp and the leaves turn from green to red. I wonder, though, if it is wrong to remember places I loved, that are forever lost to me, and that live on only in my memory and the collective memories of those who actually experienced them. It’s a moot point, really, because I can’t seem to stop myself, and it doesn’t seem to do me any significant harm to remember. This happens, particularly, when I think about my grandmothers’ houses, places that still exist, but which are empty of the people, the atmosphere and any other context that gave them meaning for me.

I have not seen the ocean in more than a year, and I feel keenly the inability to summon, clearly, the sound of waves on the sand, the salt smell in the air, and the sound of gulls. I know, though, that if I jettisoned my obligations, filled my trusty Hyundai with gas and started driving, I could be on the beach in less than 24 hours. I could feel the sand shift under my weight, search for shells and bits of glass, roll up my pant legs and flirt with the lacy white edge of ocean that rushed up to meet me. It’s all still there.

The house in which my mother grew up in Ohio is still there, too, but not really. 5105 Chestnut Avenue in Ashtabula Ohio, built on a red brick road, near the train tracks and a quick walk from the “downtown” where we shopped at Carlisle’s and went, after a Thanksgiving dinner with our Jewish family, to see the parade that brought Santa in for the season. A house built at the turn of the last century, divided into two parts with a series of mysterious tenants inhabiting the smaller, upstairs apartment that originally housed my great-grandmother. Two stern Mormon gentleman with suits on, a kind old lady who invited me upstairs and gave me candy, and a pair of white china swans made to hold bridge snacks. Inside, a foyer with a massive, embroidered chair that we believed to be a throne of some sort, always the smell of something wonderful cooking, the front bedroom with part of an ancient Cleveland Indians sticker on the mirror from when it was my uncles’ bedroom, the back bedroom filled with books, my grandmother’s bedroom redolent of perfume, her dresser covered with the jewelry, perfume and powder befitting a woman who had once been a model, and always been a beauty.

Outside, in warm weather, the sharp smell of Spirea, and a family with kids across the side street. It never occurred to me, as I played with them, that there was almost no furniture in their house, that the windows were broken, or that they were dirty and wore the same clothes all the time. I didn’t understand why my grandmother, head of the local Red Cross chapter, always insisted that they be fed something from the largesse in her refrigerator and pantry; sandwiches, homemade fudge, packets of leftover leg of lamb, noodle pudding and carrots. I didn’t understand until years after her death that the neighborhood was falling apart around her, that the death of the steel industry had left poverty, the end of Carlisle’s and the whole downtown, the conversion of surrounding houses into rentals, and an increasing threat to her safety. To me, the house lives on with its linoleum kitchen floor, the single bathroom with a claw-foot tub, the bathroom cabinets full of fascinating items like Sardoettes and Vitabath. It still smells of Ma Griffe, roasted meat, and the cool metallic smell of the back hall where can goods filled a series of compartments with individually latched doors. It is still my grandmother’s house, the house in which my mother grew up, and the house in which I felt completely adored, safe and cosseted in the way only a band of Hungarian Jews (or Greeks, or Italians, or Mexicans) can cosset a beloved little girl.

My other grandmother lived in North Providence Rhode Island, in a house that I loved maybe more than anyplace else I have ever been. It was on a corner, with an unused grape arbor in the back, and a stone wall overlooking the street on the side. Across the street lived the Feely family, large, Irish, loud, welcoming and (to me) magical. I played with Sean and Michael Feely every waking minute when I was in Rhode Island, and avoided playing with the drippy girl whose name escapes me, she of the Beautiful Chrissy doll, who used to stand outside my grandmother’s house calling plaintively for “Eee-ann” until my father asked her, gently, to knock it off.

Inside, there was Grammy Graham’s kitchen with the wall clock that played a German song, and a bread box with a box of Cheese Nips in it. I learned to make pie crust in that kitchen, rolling out my own scraps, sprinkling them with cinnamon and sugar, and patting them into my own tiny tins. We ate at a trestle table made by my grandfather (which is now my desk) sitting on long benches. It was very New England, from the row of peter tankards on the shelves of the hutch to the braided rugs on the floors made by Grammy over long winters. The bedspreads were white with little bobbly things on them, the bathroom smelled of a combination of Cashmere Bouquet soap and bandages, and the under part of the hutch had a pewter cream and sugar set in which I knew that there were always sugar cubes which I would remove using the tiny tongs, and dissolve on my tongue as I lay on the cool, hardwood floor. I slept, on summer visits, on a screened-in porch which was heaven to me. I was alone, close enough to hear my family moving about on the other side of the wall, cooled by the evening breezes, calmed by the swoosh of passing cars on the street below, feeling very grown up as I read into the night. Years later, long after my grandmother’s death, I persuaded a friend to drive me from Boston to Providence to see the house again. It had been changed; it was no longer the weathered blue-grey of my recollection, the arbor had been removed, and it was not Grammy’s house. I wept inconsolably, undoubtedly making my unsentimental friend wish he had made other plans.

I still dream about both houses, disoriented until I am sufficiently conscious to understand that I am remembering only phantoms. The smells of roasting turkey and baking pie, the texture of nubby bedspreads, and the glimpse of an upstairs neighbor are lost to me except in my own mind. They spill out, no matter how vigilant my attempts to “be here now.” There is a Spirea bush near my own house, and there is a moment every spring when I catch its strong, sharp scent and I am twelve again, bumping up the red bricks of Chestnut Street, stretching after hours in the car and looking up to see my grandmother in the doorway at the top of the stairs. Mostly I live, in the present, but I am secretly pleased that I am so unenlightened that I can still travel back to the places that I preserve, in some dark and dusty memory book,  like the loveliest of pressed flowers.

Apples and Sheep

The real issue is the phone. I am almost at the end of the contract that binds me to Verizon and to my pink Blackberry Curve. It hasn’t been a bad run; I’ve never had an issue with Verizon aside from their draconian tendency to declare a payment “late” five minutes after it’s due, and I mostly like the Blackberry. It has limits, though, the Blackberry – I would like a bigger screen, faster connections, and the ability to play music from my iTunes library. I have long dreamed of a single device that would replace the Blackberry/iPod Touch combo that I now carry everywhere I go for more than five minutes, and that dream could, of course, be answered by an iPhone. That slender, shiny object has long been the Holy Grail of technology about which I have barely allowed myself to dream; we are a Verizon family, I had A Contract, it was Terribly Expensive. In a world filled with war, poverty and oil spills, it seemed beyond petty to spend time thinking about a phone, even a phone that would play my music, offer me Doodle Jump when my oral surgeon left me in the chair, and allow me to use my index finger to scroll swiftly to the last comment on a post. I do think about it, though, growing faintly fevered as I contemplate the possibilities. No more juggling the Blackberry and the iTouch while driving. No more endless scrolling with the little ball to get to the bottom of a screen. The end of receiving calls asking me if I had intentionally made a phone call when I had, in fact, dialed accidentally through pocket or purse.

The good news is that my husband, himself more interested in the new Droid technology, has figured out that I can leave Verizon, buy an iPhone and start a new relationship with AT & T for a mere $100.00 plus a tiny bump in the monthly bloodletting. The bad news is that the possibility of owning an iPhone has rekindled a deep-seated conflict for which there is no therapeutic treatment. I believe, in my heart of hearts, that I am a Mac person. I am writing this on a Toshiba PC, and I have never actually owned a Mac, but I know in some inexorable way that I should have a sleek, white Apple product on my lap. My husband believes that the whole Apple marketing strategy is aimed at hooking rich, white sheep; he reminds me often of the “Simpson’s” episode in which Lisa gets an iPod and becomes, briefly, a worshiper at the shrine of a thinly veiled Stephen Jobs. Do I want to be one of those sheep, he asks me, using an arguably less good operating system, and one which offers me no real benefits or improvements? I do. I really, really do.

They are beautiful objects, those light, white Macs, and I feel certain that being relieved of my heavy, 17 inch black laptop would be the first step on the path to Technological Enlightenment. I also believe that pulling a Mac out of one’s laptop bag at a coffee shop is like a secret handshake; the other Apple People smile a faint, smug smile and admit you into the inner sanctum. I have bought the “I am a Mac” ads, hook, line and sinker. Macs are for people like me, creative types, liberals, music lovers. They probably come with the home page set to “Salon” or “HuffPo.” Never mind that their allegedly intuitive navigation would actually be more difficult for me after 13 years of using a PC, or that I am unlikely ever to make or edit movies. I am emphatically not the dowdy old guy with glasses; I am the hip, young guy from “Dodgeball” who may be dating Drew Barrymore.

I am a sheep.

My parents, my brother and many of my friends have Macs, and I take every possible opportunity to play with them. I love their lightness, their brightness, the cuteness of the icons. I am dazzled and stricken with envy at the ability to sync everything between Mac and iPhone so that one’s calendar, playlists and documents are available in miniature form. At a local bakery I recently saw a college student studying for finals, her high, round table sporting a MacBook, and iPhone and a pristine cup of coffee. She was maybe 20, lithe and blonde, her hair in one of those casual ponytails that made her look breathlessly sexy but would make me look like Kathy Bates tearing down walls in “Fried Green Tomatoes.” I knew, then, with a pang of desire unseemly in a follower of Buddha, that if I could just get that stuff my life would be different. My fingers would grow longer and attractively manicured on the keyboard, my legs would lengthen, and I would undoubtedly develop a faint odor of fresh laundry and spring flowers. My writing would become magnificent, my grocery lists would be miraculous, and every e-mail would resonate with a unique combination of incisive wit and admirable pragmatism. How could it be otherwise?

A sensible, independent person in my position would understand that Droid is the latest and greatest, and that it would be smarter to stick with Verizon, pick a phone that used Droid, wait for their new music library system, and revel in my PC by installing Microsoft 7.0 in all its considerable glory. The grass is sleeker, whiter and cooler on the other side of the fence, but not really any better for me. The iPhone gets me everything I need in one piece of equipment, but I lose a real keyboard, which I kind of love. A Mac would really have no clear benefits for me beyond the aesthetic, and costs considerably more for the privilege of making me A Mac. For the things I actually do, as opposed to my Walter Mitty dreams, my PC and my Blackberry work petty darned well, miraculously well in the great scheme of things. It’s not like I am writing posts with a quill and parchment, or calling to make dinner reservations on a rotary phone attached to the kitchen wall. It’s only, it’s really only that I long for an iPhone with all my heart, and if I can have one, I’m going to have one. If I win the lottery I will also have a Mac as soon as I get the first check from The State of Michigan.

I am a sheep. A fat, white, woolly sheep with an Apple in its mouth.

Matters Domestic

Leroy got a better job so we moved
Kevin lost a tooth, he’s started school
I’ve got a brand new eight month old baby girl
I sound like a housewife
Hey Chel, I think I’m a housewife

-”Anchorage,” Michelle Shocked

My parents both worked, and they had an enviable and sane balance of household duties. She cooked (well), he made our school lunches, did laundry and took us to the dentist, she gardened, he mowed and weeded, they decorated together, and a gnomelike little woman from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula deep-cleaned once a week. We kept our own rooms clean, walked the dog, emptied the dishwasher, set the table and generally did as we were instructed. Not only was my mother not June Cleaver; I was keenly aware that a mere decade before my birth women had been trapped at home whether they wanted to be there or not. My mother’s best friend Joyce, who I loved and admired, said often that she “nearly went crazy” during the years that she tried to stay home with her children before returning to teaching. I grew up vaguely scornful of women who did not work, squandering their hard-won freedom in exchange for days of “ring around the collar” and recipes involving canned, creamed soups. I did not believe that I would ever be married or have children, and my future seemed necessarily to be all about the well-cut suit, the Lean Cuisine and the pleasing of no one but my dynamic and fully actualized self.

The older I got, however, the more I noticed a virulent strain of domesticity creeping into my daily life. My dorm rooms were always “decorated,” and I loved the time I spent arranging furniture, hanging curtains, and creating appealing landscapes of books, colored pencils and found objects. I entertained, “borrowing” glasses and plates from the dining hall, riding a borrowed bike outside City limits to buy wine, and fashioning ersatz canapes from whatever I could find at the Ben Franklin on Main Street. When I had a law office, I decorated it with white furniture, a cozy floral waiting room couch, walls of (non law) books, hanging plants, and bright oil paintings. Classical music played constantly, I burned scented candles, and I made really good coffee that was served in mugs made by a potter friend.

When I got married, after courting my husband mostly in my bright, warm little office-home, I had already had my son. (Definitely not June Cleaver). My plan was to take the baby to work with me, and continue blazing trails of truth and justice. What actually happened was that I was far more interested in the baby than in anything else I was supposed to be doing; after three months Rob and I decided that we could afford for me to close the practice, parcel out my cases, and work very part-time from home. I was a housewife, and I absolutely loved it. I decorated, I crafted, I cooked, I baked, I was delighted by the baby, I reveled in piled of clean, warm laundry and I made “mommy friends” who were also home all day. There was never a single moment when I resented the arrangement, longed to be working again, or felt even remotely “crazy.” It was the best job in the world for me, and I felt incredibly fortunate that I had the option to stay home. Sam was in day care a few hours a week while I worked, and I saw that as an opportunity for him to love another set of people, and to be open to the world.

I know that most families need two working parents, and that there are legions of women who would love to stay home with their children, at least in the early years, and can’t afford to stop working. I also realize that the whole question of who stays home, if anyone, and whether it benefits children is a huge, touchy sore on the body of domestic policy from the personal to the national. We made a decision, for our family, that it was good for me to be at home and involved in Sam’s school life for as long as we could afford it, and that we were willing to make some trade-offs to make it possible to work only part-time, and from home. We didn’t take vacations, we drove cars until they fell apart, we didn’t eat out much, and we rarely had the most expensive or latest gadgets. We saved money because I had no work-related expenses, we paid for minimal daycare, I cooked creatively on a tight budget, and I really enjoyed garage sale hunting and turning discards into useful, household objects.

As time passed, we decided that it would be good if I earned more money; Sam was getting older and more independent, my stepdaughter was out of the house, and the economy was eroding the salary that had made it possible for Rob to support us all comfortably. I work part-time, but occasionally I have a full-time gig; two years ago I was press staff for a federal Congressional campaign and worked more than eight hours a day for several months. Just last week I completed a writing job that consumed most of my waking hours for two months. I felt good about the financial contributions I was able to make, and I thought it was important for Sam to see the example of a strong, working woman, but I was always aware that things at home were falling apart; the kitchen floor got dustier and dustier, laundry was sometimes scrounged from the “dirty” basket and pressed into service, and more than one takeout meal appeared on the table at 6:00. No one died; it’s how lots of families live all the time, of necessity. That didn’t make me like it any better.

At the moment, I am between jobs. The writing project is over, and I don’t start my next “real” job (as Hospitality Coordinator for a local church) until June 1st. I am engaged in a glorious frenzy of polishing wood floors, re-covering throw pillows, making homemade granola, bread and soup, washing dogs and ironing summer linens. I do not wear heels, pearls or a cinch-waisted dress, I do not fix Rob a cocktail and freshen my lipstick when he comes home, and I do not watch soap operas. My brain is fully intact, but my heart is at ease. The sacrifices made by the feminists before me are always on my psychic radar, but surely they were blazing a trail for me to be allowed, not only to be the president of a corporation, but to be the president of the PTA if that’s what I want. I cherish the choices available to me because of their work, and because I was lucky enough to be born white and upper middle class, to parents willing and able to buy me a fine education. I am beyond blessed to be able to balance meaningful work and periods where I am, happily, “just a housewife.”

I wish we lived in a world in which parents, not just mothers, could choose to stay home with their children, at least during their earliest years if they wanted to. It saddens me tremendously that many of the families in which children would most benefit from the daily presence of a parent are those least likely to be able to afford the loss of an income. I wish that the community I live in saw as much worth in making a home for their children as they see in the amassing of “stuff.” For every woman I know who is working because she is passionate about her career, I know another who is working with a heavy heart, supporting SUV payments and an a show home with cathedral ceilings.   Call me a throwback, but I believe with all my heart that the willing making of a home is a job as valuable as any other, and that it should never be viewed with cynicism or contempt. It is, at it’s best, a labor of  love.

Worse Than Wicked

Of the two very worst things I have ever done, one of them is the way I treated my stepdaughter. I had no excuse; I was well-mothered, as were my parents and my husband. There was a veritable catalogue of loving, generous maternal goodness for me to observe and study. My mother-in-law even gave me a good example of stepmothering; she married a man with four children abandoned by their own mother, and raised them with kindness, fairness and incredible energy. They all view her as their “mother” to this day, because she was.

When I met my husband, I knew that he had a little girl. I met her, and found her to be cute, loving but not “my kind of kid.” She was the child not only of my husband, but of a mother who was unsophisticated, and, as it turned out, seriously mentally ill. I didn’t like the fact that my stepdaughter watched cartoons and movies all the time, that she was uninterested in books, and that she preferred fast and processed food. When I found out that I was pregnant, I began to think about the ways in which our child would be raised differently. There would be little or no television, there would be lots of books, there would be fresh, interesting things to eat, exposure to culture, and high academic expectations. In other words, our child would be raised to be me. I was an elitist, a snob, and the product of a family of academics – a boy broke up with me once, partly because all my family talked about was “the kings and queens of England.” The thing is that I liked growing up in my family, and it had produced two responsible, intelligent, cultured, well-educated children. It was what I knew, it seemed to have worked well, and it was natural (I think) that it was a pattern I sought to follow as a mother.

It was clear within months that we could not have weekend visits from my stepdaughter and live my Utne Reader Dream Life. She liked to watch TV, particularly “Rugrats,” which I found absolutely appalling. She liked McDonald’s, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and Chi Chi’s. She was not a reader, or the kind of kid who is instinctively given to learning new things. Her baby brother adored her, and as he grew, I gave up on the TV moratorium and made blue box macaroni for her when I made my own, homemade version for everyone else. I knew that her mother was not well, that life at her other house was sad and hard, and I kept trying to summon the compassion I would have felt for any other child under the same circumstances. Like a physical blockade, there was something that would not let me open my heart, relax, and accept the fact that no real harm was being done to Sam if he spent a few hours on the weekends watching Nickelodeon. I resented that little girl in a way that made my heart nothing better than a small, black rock.

Shortly after we moved into our house, when Sam was three, it became apparent that my husband’s ex was really, really not okay. There had been signs, but the combination of an oblivious GP and her periods of relative normality slowed the inevitable diagnosis. We knew we  could not leave a child in her care, she agreed, and we petitioned for sole physical and legal custody. It was the right thing to do,  and I talked a good game about helping her, keeping her safe, and providing a stable home, but I was devastated. The weekend suspension of my dreams was about to become our life; how could a decent human being tell a little girl who had watched her mother fall apart before her eyes that she was barred from any of the things that made her feel comfortable? How could I institute a TV ban, change her eating habits, make her stop talking baby talk when she was traumatized?

I say to myself now, as a kinder, better, less desperate woman: how could you even think of anything other than loving her and making her feel at home so that she could heal? How could you have taken such human tragedy and made it all about yourself, a privileged, beloved, not-all-that-young woman who traditionally loved and cared for every stray, human and animal that crossed her path? I can’t answer. I can only say that at the time, I saw nothing but my own loss, my own overwhelming sense of duty, failure, and anxiety. I could “do” for her, and I did braid her hair, feed her soup, be her Easter Bunny, but I never felt maternal.

As the years passed, a funny thing happened. It was no lightening bolt miracle of compassion on my part, but a gradual process of allowing my stepdaughter to become fully real and deserving of my help. She struggled with Mean Girls, and I was surprised to find that my impulse to defend her and set things right was swift, strong and true. She struggled with school and I pushed and nagged until we got the school district to test her and make a plan to help her work around the processing disorder that made it difficult for her to retain what she read. In high school, she was given an elaborate assignment involving the writing of numerous poems based on the works of Monet, an assignment that might have given pause to a Master’s candidate in creative writing. I tried to coach her, I tried to get the teacher to work with her in such a way that she had a chance of success, I watched her cry in frustration, and then I wrote it all myself without a shred of guilt. We got an “A+” and the teacher asked whether she could submit it to a magazine. We savored that triumph, my daughter and I.

It never became a bond like I have with my own mother; my stepdaughter and I shared few interests, and I often felt that we were not necessarily speaking the same language. In spite of the gaps, she became my child, and I became a person in her life who she could trust to give good advice, and practical help. Kind of a mother, although I was  a much better mother to my son. I always had difficulty accepting her without judging her choices, comparing her to others, or feeling guilty about what a bad job I had done. I got her through school, I taught her to write thank-you notes, put her napkin in her lap, and do her laundry, but the real love in her life, the deep, uncritical, ridiculously lenient kind of love came from her father and her (real) mother. I felt it only situationally, like waves that threatened to topple me with their force, but later melted into tame and level waters.

As she grew older I saw that she was naturally a kind person, a hard worker, and something of a pragmatist. She was good with babies, animals, grandparents, and the downtrodden. I admire that in her. She trained in her last two years of high school to be a Nurse’s Aid, and works at a local retirement center. Jjust over a year ago she presented us with a serious boyfriend. Earlier this week, they had their first child, a beautiful, shaggy-haired nugget of babyhood named Chloe with whom I fell instantly and irrevocably in love.

I might wish for different circumstances for her; she is only 20 and unmarried, but I have learned not to judge. Well, honestly, I have learned to correct myself after I judge. She loves her baby, and I see in her a kind of natural, calm maternal spirit that is unusual in the high-strung, internet-obsessed Older Mothers of my acquaintance. She doesn’t over think, she doesn’t ruminate, she just loves her daughter, instinctively and well. She has a chance to make the home she always wanted, now, a home without a divorce, without an unpredictable mother, and without a stepmother who cannot find a way to really, thoroughly love and comfort a frightened and damaged child. I want that home for her, because she is a sweetheart, and she deserves it.

I wish her a happy first Mother’s Day, and I hope that some day she’ll understand that, lacking her naturally accepting and sensible nature, it took me a while to become the mother she needed. Knowing her, I’ll get another chance.

Vocation

I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure. -Eric Liddell, “Chariots of Fire”

I have always wanted to write more than I wanted to do anything else (with the possible exception of reading). For a different kind of person, a saner, more confident kind of person, the happy coincidence of desire and objectively confirmed ability would have been a clear directive: Do This Thing. Being, as luck would have it, my neurotic, insecure self, I heard none of the praise, and all of the dire warnings about how writing was something “everybody thought they could do.” I believed those who cautioned that the chances of making a living as a writer ranked somewhere between those of being an NBA point guard or the victim of two lightening strikes. I wrote joyously from the time I was in elementary school, producing “novels” on my red Olivetti Valentine typewriter, but as I aged it began to seem incredibly presumptuous even to say aloud the words “I am a writer.” “I write.” I would not have had the nerve to say “I am a stunning beauty,” (partly because it isn’t true, but bear with me) and it seemed equally, ridiculously and pathetically arrogant to present myself as an artiste. It could be a hobby, a parlour trick, but a Vocation was a serious matter and involved cubicles and suits rather than garrets and thrift store clothing.

Into this teetering high wire act of self-examination came my first really serious boyfriend, who fancied himself a writer.  He did, in fact, write massive novels that I edited for him as I repressed the knowledge that they were truly terrible. (The guy was really, really hot). They had plots, I’ll give him that, but the dialogue was stilted, cliches grew like mushrooms after a soaking rain…you get the picture. Even my pathological desire to be the girlfriend of this moron didn’t prevent me from arguing over and over with him about whether writers were born writers, or whether, in fact, anyone (him, for example) could just buckle down, apply himself and produce a novel. His key word in those arguments was always “marketable.” He believed (and may still believe) that if you write some formulaic novel that people will read in order to distract themselves from actual thinking, it is “writing” and “marketable” and “good enough.” I believe that there is a place for romance novels, “Sweet Valley High” and certain kinds of mysteries, and that while they are technically “written” they are not “art” of any kind. This was a total cultural and personal impasse; I do believe that “anybody can write a book,” but I also believe that I do not want to read something written for a check and not because of a need to communicate something, and to be heard.

It stuck with me, though, the notion that all that really mattered was the ability to create mindless literary Valium. Taking all of the available data, skewing it in such a way that any little ray of hope was blotted out by the immense elephants of pragmatism, I turned down every opportunity to do what I was born to do. After high school I chose to be a musician, because it was harder for me than writing, and therefore Real Work. After I recovered from that spectacular train wreck and spent happy years as an English Major, I chose not to pursue writing again; I went to law school because it sounded sufficiently rigorous, and, again, like Real Work. My parents, far from being proponents of all things “sensible” and lucrative, always believed I was a writer, and did their best to encourage me to take a shot at a writing life, without appearing actually to be offering advice. I heard and dismissed them in the same way I ignored their insistence that I was pretty.

After riddling my feet with bullets for twenty years, I was unable to write anything other than legal memoranda and the odd preschool newsletter. I had killed and buried whatever that thing was that had made me delight in the words and phrases that tasted like fresh-picked berries and stained my soul with their sweet juice. I was resigned to ill-suited jobs that made other people nod in approval. More accurately, I imagined that they were nodding in approval. For the most part, they were thinking about their own lives, unaware that some odd remark made twenty years earlier about the wisdom of a degree in “something practical, like packaging logistics” had been magnified into The Secret of Life by my misguided mind. I wore suits, I followed precedent, and I turned away from that persistent restlessness that came after reading a really great novel or story. “I could do that,” I would think, and then I would remember that everyone had a novel in her desk drawer, everyone at a cocktail party “had a book in him,” anybody could write, and nobody much was terribly good at it.

Through a series of tiny steps involving great trepidation and shame, I started blogging. I blogged about food, because I was interested in it, and it seemed to be a safe way to write without seeming to present myself as A Writer. I started to write about things other than food, and people liked them. I grew tired of writing about beating air into soufflés, photographing dinner before allowing anyone to take a bite, and competing with the power players in the foodie blogging universe. I was hired to write, first for other lawyers, then by a political campaign, then as a ghostwriter. I was being paid to write. I was, perhaps, a writer.

Forty years have passed since I received the Olivetti Valentine for Christmas, and commenced to write my first epic, “Lacey Comstock, Pioneer Girl.” I still feel that the writing I do in exchange for money is legitimate, and that what I write for pleasure is less so. I have not quit my day job(s), I do not believe that I am the next Donna Tartt, or even that my works will be collected and published, along with a regretful Forward after I die. I still look around in book stores and see that “marketability” rules, and that publishers cannot afford to indulge the writer who spins a beautiful phrase unless the phrases add up to something worthy of critical, if not popular approbation. My eyes are clear, my dreams are in check, and I can honestly say that I have expunged from my mind the image of my name in the New York Times Book Review.

It is, however, my true vocation to write. It takes nerve for me to type those words, to let them stay there, drawing attention to themselves at the beginning of the paragraph, obvious even to the most casual skimmer. I have to let it stay, though, because it really is the Secret of Life for this life, which (barring karmic recycling) is the only one I get. I dishonor my parents, who have believed in me all these years, any sort of Cosmic Organizer, and myself if I hide my desk light under the bushel of stark terror. The next time someone asks me what I “do,” I will look them in the eye and tell them I am a writer. Then I will devalue the proclamation with nervous laughter and seventy two qualifiers, but…it’s a start.