AOL Welcome Screen Headline of the Week: Bonus holiday week headlines

Nothing screams WELCOME TO AOL quite like celebrity news, unless it's maybe news of a "shocking" medical condition THAT YOU MIGHT GET ("Why we should be worried").

Combine the two and you have this double whammy Thanksgiving week bonus headline tandem... both of which, incidentally, were alongside each other on the same AOL welcome screen page this morning.

All that's missing is the word "racy."

Worm Discovered In Woman's Brain
Doctors Went In for a Tumor to Find
Quite a Surprise: What It Looked Like

TV Star Contracts Flesh-Eating Bug
Bitten Filming, He's Struggling to Live

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AOL Welcome Screen Headline of the Week

A two-tiered beauty that was too good to pass up:

Woman Has Bizarre Brain Illness
What It Has to Do With Sean Connery

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"The forces that work against you..."

Whenever I crack open a book to a random page and read EXACTLY WHAT I NEED TO READ AT THE VERY MOMENT I'VE FOUND IT, I like to pass it on to my friends... just in case it's what THEY need to read, too.

I was weeding through boxes of books and belongings this morning, trying to pick out what I'm going to take to my next (temporary) stop and what I'm going to leave behind. As I sorted the books into piles of TAKE ALONG and LEAVE BEHIND, I found myself getting more and more frustrated... verklemt, as my ex- used to say... so mentally agitated and confused that I literally had to step away from the task at hand and go lie down.

Why did this upset me so much?

I took a mini-nap, tried to focus myself, then got up, made a cup of coffee (always a great idea for someone who feels mentally agitated and confused, haha, but I digress) and went back to my sorting. Near the top of the LEAVE BEHIND stack was a book by David Viscott called EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE.

"Simple truths for dealing with the unfinished business of your past," the subtitle read.

I opened the book, at random, to page 69; a section entitled "The Forces that Work Against You:"

WARNING SIGNS OF EMOTIONAL DANGER

Inherent in the natural healing process are certain safeguards that alert you to danger. There is a bad feeling that you get when you misstate the truth. It can be a subtle uneasiness, a disquieting sense that something isn't right. It can be a wave of anxiety or sadness. Be still and ask yourself what just disturbed you. Correct what you just said so it is truthful.

Another sign that you maybe in trouble is when you find yourself avoiding situations that are not especially dangerous. Ask yourself what feeling the situation brings to mind.

You may find yourself breaking into a sweat or developing signs of anxiety, shallow breathing, and rapid heart rate when a subject is mentioned or a certain person approaches you. Ask yourself how you have been hurt. You're probably afraid of losing control over your anger. When a sad memory returns, you are being reminded of some loss that is still being mourned.

Don't push it away. Identify and acknowledge the feeling. Put it into words by saying to yourself, "I really miss her, I wish I had tried harder, it was a shame to give up when I was so close," or some other comment that states both your feeling of sadness and accepts some responsibility for the painful memory.

Your discomfort is a message telling you that something is wrong. Assume that you probably know what it is.

Use your feelings of discomfort to guide you to be more honest.

Examine your heart. All your answers lie there.

Hmmmmmmm.... Your discomfort is a message telling you that something is wrong...

Assume that you probably know what it is.

O.K.... well... let's see...

I hate moving. I really haven't had a permanent home since I moved to Vermont, and it's getting a little tiring. However, tomorrow I need to move to temporary housing once again (I've been housesitting for a friend, but I need to move elsewhere for the next two months because my friend will be back home for the holidays). I hate packing up things; I hate sticking things in boxes and leaving them in a storage space (in this case, my friend's basement) until "someday" when I have a home and can bring them all together. I want to take along as many books and belongings as I can to this next temporary stop, but I know I need to travel light... but I also feel guilty about leaving the stuff BEHIND at my friend's. What if she gets pissed off that I've "left too much stuff" in her basement?

Also, the books represent, to me, unfulfilled and unrealized ideals and aspirations. Books I haven't read, things I haven't done. Regrets.

Hmmmmmm.

I shut Viscott's book, moved it to the TAKE ALONG pile, boxed up the LEAVE BEHIND books into four small boxes, took them down to the basement, and started in on the kitchenware.

Like I said: that passage helped me. Maybe it'll help you, too.

AOL Welcome Screen Headline of the Week

Bathroom explosion burns teen

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AOL Welcome Screen Headline of the Week

Just thought that this one had a nice ring to it:

Clooney's New Red Carpet Arm Candy

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Once again, WALDEN

Henry David Thoreau's Walden is one of those books that seems almost magical: every time I pick it up, I find something different in it... and, more than that, whenever I pick it up and open it to what seems like a randomly selected page, I always find exactly what I need at that particular moment.

Right now, I'm working through a string of days without a break: when Labor Day comes, I will have worked 24 straight days without a whole day off at either job. But then from September 2 through 8, I'll be off. Call it "earning my vacation."

I haven't had a great deal of spare time and energy lately, and unfortunately sometimes I don't use the time and energy I have in the best ways I could... which just makes me feel MORE tired and stressed and annoyed with myself.

This, plus an email from a friend in which she vented about her work ("i like to say [the economy] doesn't get to me but i see it has affected sales, my job is harder, more frustrating... on this beautiful day i just need/would love to tidy the house and be mindless but deadlines press in on me") got me running to Walden, so to speak, to find a pithy, appropos Thoreau quote. I was looking for his quote on how to make "making a living poetic," because if it is not poetic, then it is not a LIVING we make. Etc etc.

So I opened up my old Modern Library edition of Walden to the section "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," and this is the passage that jumped out at me:

"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few items beautiful; but it is far more glorious to be able to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour."

Just what I needed to read, when I needed to read it. I also sent it to my friend.

So, from two of us, once again: thanks, Henry!

AOL Welcome Screen Headline of the Week

Starlet Reveals Desire to Be Naked

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Wonderful you

At the beginning of the summer, as I wrote in a previous blog entry, I really identified the song "Workin' On A Groovy Thing" with a woman I had my eye, heart and spirit set on. Now the summer is almost gone; I've gotten to know her better; and while I still sense the possibility of what I wrote about and felt three months ago, more than anything, Van Dyke Parks' lyrics to Brian Wilson's song "Wonderful" sum up the way I feel for Her-With-A-Capital-H.

Lots more I could write, but I'll let Van Dyke and Brian say it for me:

She belongs there left with her liberty
Never known as a non-believer
She laughs and stays in the one-one-one-wonderful

She knew how to gather the forest when
God reached softly and moved her body
One golden locket quite young
And loving her mother and father

Farther down the path was a mystery
Through the recess the chalk and numbers
A boy bumped into her one-one-one-wonderful

All fall down and lost in the mystery
Lost it all to a non-believer
And all that's left is a girl
Who's loved by her mother and father

She'll return in love with her liberty
Just away from the non-believer
She'll sigh and thank God for one-one-one- wonderful

("Wonderful" by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks; copyright 1966)

O.K.... maybe add in two more lyric snippets: the first, a question from another Wilson-Parks SMILE lyric-- "When is the wonderful me? Wonderful you?"-- and the second, an answer from an old Pretenders' song:

"Maybe tomorrow... Maybe someday..."

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Customer of the week

This afternoon at work, a woman with three kids came to the outdoor smoothie bar at the market and asked for two small smoothies, and a small lemonade with extra sugar, "for my youngest, who's visiting her father tonight."

Fixing leaks while still in port

I started writing the book that became YOU DON'T THINK SHE IS (the novel I'm submitting to agents) seven summers ago. It took so long to refine it and revise it because I really didn't know what I was doing as a writer. I learned from writing all of those pages, vignettes, stories, chapters, drafts... learned what worked and what didn't; learned what the story was; learned who the characters were.

Seven years is a long time, so of course, when I finally finished the 370-page NOVEL that I'd distilled from that stack of writing, I was psyched to get it out there. I researched agents, made a list of what looked like Good Matches, and told myself I'd get queries into 15 agents' hands by the end of June.

Then... I found out I had to move. Somehow, the threat of a pending move threw off all my equilibrium, and, in spite of my efforts, I simply couldn't get any of my work out there. The one time I tried submitting the book recently, I couldn't. The online submission wizard at the agent's website came back with a message: FAILURE.

Nice.

Now it's August, and even though I'm a month past my self-imposed deadline, I'm happy, in a way, that I didn't start submitting before the move. Those 5-6 weeks that I was totally preoccupied-schizzed about moving FORCED me to set the book aside and not look at it...

...and, now that I've picked it back up and looked at it, I realize that, before I submit it, there's one last step I need to take. It's the same thing I did before I submitted my final product in the MFA program at Goddard: go through the manuscript with a finetooth comb as a COPY EDITOR and PROOFREADER. Clean up awkward sentences and clunky clanky passages... scan for typos and (unintentional) misspellings... remove repetitive words and phrases... eliminate cliches... fix punctuation.

Clean it up.

As I stated in a previous post on this blog, I'm all for the Jimmy Buffett school of novel writing. But best to fix small leaks while still in port. I feel good about doing this because I'm finally happy with the book as a NOVEL and a STORY. To use a metaphor, the barber's done with the haircut... he's just brushing around and dusting on the talc and splashing on the tonic before he snaps the bib off and lets you out of the chair.

Anyway... yesterday I did the first 19 pages and wrote down 10 pages of changes. Most of them minor; a couple of them sentence or paragraph rewrites. Lots of places where punctuation (or font: italics) could be tweaked to make the meaning more clear... lots of misplaced modifiers (that's the problem with trying to write in a voice that approximates SPOKEN word)... a few places where I used a key word twice within a couple sentences of each other, and thought it best to eliminate the multiples. Lots of changing passive voice to active voice.

It's an arduous, time-consuming task... the writing equivalent of what Julia Child was talking about when she said "Every job has its share of slicing onions." But now that the important stuff is done (story, structure, character, subplot), cleaning up the technical glitches is a piece of cake. Even if it DOES make my eyes water occasionally.

Better watery eyes than a leaky boat.

AOL Welcome Screen Headline Of The Week

Just like the wording of this one:

Ailing Songbird Caught With Liquor



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"When I saw you, I knew that I was gonna love you..."

Can love songs serve as prayers? I've noticed lately that certain songs and their lyrics not only resonate with me, but, in hindsight, seem almost prescient. It's almost as if they were waiting for me to sing them as hymns so that God could answer them for me.

To wit:

A couple winters ago, while I was working on a rough draft of my novel, I found the old Fifth Dimension record "Workin' On A Groovy Thing." The song and the lyrics (written, I later learned, by Neil Sedaka) seemed tailor-made for a section of the book that I was working on, so I incorporated them into a chapter, with the song playing on the radio as kind of a Greek chorus while the action took place. It seemed like that was "the reason" I'd found this song.

But somehow, the song stuck in my mind and resonated in my heart and my spirit... and I didn't really think about why, until recently, when I met up again with a woman I liked. I met her a while ago, and at that time, found out that she was attached... and then she moved away... so I thought "O.K., boyfriend... moved away... well, that's that!"

Still, I felt drawn to her in my spirit, and I not only held out hope that someday I'd see her again, but I prayed to God that our paths would cross and we'd get to know each other better, and if it was right...

And now, amazingly, miraculously, she's back. By all indications, she's no less attached than she was before, but this time, I've gotten to know her better, and I've found that the deep feelings I felt for her weren't misplaced... she's an amazing, one-of-a-kind person, and I feel the same way I did when I first met her. Just a deep, deep connection and, as an article I read about "love at first sight" said, "an awareness surrounding me." But, more than that, an almost inexplicable feeling that she's my heart's and my soul's future. Like we're both where we are right now, but that there's a direction I need to go in my life, and if I follow that path, somehow, she's going to be there.

As I wrote to a friend...

....there's all that deep stuff I feel that I don't understand, which must make you think I walk in awe or hold her on some pedestal or something... but when I'm around her, I don't notice all of that. I kind of feel it in the background, but mainly what I notice is that I just LIKE BEING AROUND HER. She's one of those people who makes you feel better because she's down- to- earth, funny, happy, unflappable. She sees the humor in things without being mean or cynical. She laughs at herself without cutting herself down, and can make you laugh at yourself without feeling like you're being insulted. She's not a doormat, but she doesn't disrespect people... and more than that she doesn't IMPOSE on people around her...

I'm really really really really putting this over to God. I do not want to fuck this up. If it's right, I want it to BE right, and if it's not, I want to find whatever IS.

I get all caught up in that when I'm not around her, but then when I see her, it feels effortless. I feel what I feel in my spirit, which makes me feel like something big is in the air, and yet the biggest thing of all to me is that when I'm around her, I couldn't feel more relaxed. She couldn't be a more laid-back, fun, sweet person. SHe makes me laugh and I make her laugh.

I am in serious like here.

To which my friend responded, and I quote:

You are in sooooo deep. And I wouldn't call it serious like.(!) Save these emails.....if anything happens with her, she'd love to see how beautiful you write about her.

Funny: I got this email just a few minutes after I printed out what I'd written, thinking "Maybe someday I'll give this to her."

I've never really felt like this before, and it's a little scary, especially given current circumstances and all the reasons why not (her having a boyfriend chief among them).

I find myself feeling like that old song from the Cinderella musical, "Ten Minutes Ago" --"I wanted to ring out the bells and fling out my arms and to sing out the news! I have found her! She's an angel!"-- but at the same time, there's a part of me that knows that the best thing to do at the moment is play my cards close to the vest and protect this feeling.

So what does all of this have to do with "Workin' On A Groovy Thing"? Just that now, finally, the words of that old hippie pop song not only seem to make sense, but they resonate like they never did before, because it's exactly what I feel for this person. The words are where my heart and spirit are right now.

I don't even mind the word "groovy."

When I saw you I knew that I was gonna love you
And every day I thought of how much I'd love you
Now you're here next to me
And ecstasy is a reality
I feel good when you are near
I'm alive 'cause you are here
Workin' on a groovy thing, baby
Workin' on a groovy thing
Workin' on a groovy thing, baby
Let's not rush it
We'll take it slow...

At the moment, I don't feel like there's a lot I can do in this situation except be a good friend and keep asking God for the answer. I know what I feel, but I also know that current circumstances are what they are, and, as the I CHING might counsel, "movement in any direction would not be advisable."

Still, like I said, I know what I feel. So we'll see.

In the meantime, I wonder if there are any songs she's heard that, for reasons she can't explain, she keeps coming back to. Maybe, like my friend said, someday we'll find out.

For now, though, I'll keep singing those hippie hymns, and a few others, and see where they take me.

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Dear Writer...

I've started submitting the revised draft of my novel You Don't Think She Is. Last year around this time, when I was still living in suburban Philly, a few months after I graduated from Goddard, I submitted the first draft of the novel. Ten submissions; ten rejections. You'd think that'd be a disheartening and discouraging experience, but really, it wasn't. After carrying the book around, in various stages of completion and then in various incarnations, since 2001, it felt good to finally put the work OUT THERE and get feedback on it, even if the feedback was just ten "Sorry, not for us"s.

That first round of submissions was also a learning experience, in so many ways. It spurred me to really look at the book and see what its strengths and weaknesses were, and to focus myself on further revisions so I could submit a stronger version of the book the second time around. But it also taught me a lot about the submission process itself.

I found that the most discouraging and frustrating rejection letters I received were not those that I had to wait the longest for; they were the ones that came almost immediately. These were responses from agents to whom I'd submitted no sample chapters or excerpt; just the prescribed one-page letter with my curriculum vitae, my publications and prizes, the "elevator pitch" ("Pretendyou'reinanelevator andthedooropens andanagentstepsin andyou'vegot30seconds beforehegets out sopitchyourbook whatdoyousaywhat'stheplot what'sthestory andnowthedoor's opening TOO LATE! BZZZZZZ! HE'S GONE FOREVER!!!"), and the marketing/positioning statement (where I see the book fitting in the racks at the stores. To which the only reasonable answer is, "Right at the front, on the BESTSELLERS table." But I digress).

How, I wondered as I wrote and sent these letters, can someone possibly judge my BOOK on the strength of a letter which contains none of the elements (voice, plot, subplot, story, dialogue, narration) that make the book what it is?

Those few rejections made me realize that, during round two, I wanted to submit only to agents who accepted excerpts or sample chapters. I didn't want my work to be judged or rejected on my strengths or weaknesses as a letter writer; I wanted it to be judged and accepted on its strengths as FICTION.

A few weeks ago, I got the idea to write my query letter in one of my characters' voices. Voice, after all, is such a huge element of this work. The narrative voice of Brian, of course, holds the book together, but woven into the work are the voices of his best friend Margo and his soon-to-be-girlfriend Christy, in both dialogue and in epistolary interludes.

Why not have Margo write the letter for me?

Dear Agent,

Well, it may seem weird, having a character in a book write the query letter for a writer (if he can write a book, why can't he write a letter?) but that's what I'm doing, so weird or not, here goes.

My name is Margo LeDoux, and I'm one of the characters in Max Harrick Shenk's novel You Don't Think She Is...

It felt like it solved the problem. Somehow, first of all, writing the letter in Margo's voice gave me a detachment that I'd lacked when I tried querying the first time. As I wrote in a previous post on this blog, part of my revision process was that I found it difficult to state concisely what the book was about, what the story was, what happened. Strangely enough, though, when I sat down and typed it out in Margo's voice, the single 'graph, 20-second-stuck-in- the-elevator-with- the-agent plot summary came right off my fingertips:

...So what's the book about? It's about me, and about my best friend Brian (he's the narrator) growing up... and this neighborhood girl, Christy Kelly, who has a crush on Brian and who hates me because I like him... but she figures out by eighth grade that if she wants to be with him, she has to get through me... and the rest of the story is what happens when she finally figures that out.

Simple. That's the story. Why didn't it come out in MY voice in those OTHER letters?

More than this, though, I felt like I'd communicated one of the book's biggest strengths: THE VOICES OF THE CHARACTERS (Margo's voice in particular) and their sense of humor.

Finally, remembering all of those boilerplate form rejection letters I'd gotten last spring, I addressed the letter to "Dear Agent," with a P.S. from Margo:

Forgive the impertinence of the salutation, but I've seen some of the rejection letters that Max has gotten. If you agents can send him form rejection letters that start out "Dear Writer," then HE can send YOU form submission letters that read "Dear Agent." Just trying to be fair.

I felt a little hesitant about this approach-- it wasn't "by the book"-- but something about it felt right. It felt like it reflected the spirit and character of the work more truly than the boring step-by-step template queries that WRITER'S MARKET and so many other writer's books and workshops prescribe. It reflected my strengths as a writer, my sense of humor, my story, my characters' voices, all of it.

If an agent didn't like the letter, then that agent probably wasn't a good match for my work... but they would DEFINITELY get a feel for my book from reading the letter.

Still, before I started querying, I sent a rough draft of the letter to a Goddard friend of mine, who responded that it was "brilliant" and that I should use it.

So earlier this week, I started round two of submissions. I went into the online WRITER'S MARKET agent listings and did a focused search (agents who worked with new writers and who represented mainstream novels and YA --young adult-- titles), and, armed with a list of eight agencies, started sending. I sent the letter and a sample chapter (chapter one: thirty pages) to one agency, and (grudgingly) sent a letter only to a second. I did NOT use the "Dear Agent" approach in either letter; I feared that it was somehow too over-the-top. Instead, I addressed the letters personally to the agents in question.

Two days after sending out the first submission email (the one that was a letter only), I received my first reply:

Dear Writer,

Thank you for your query. Unfortunately, your project is not right for this agency at this time.

Best of luck to you as you seek representation.

Warmest regards...

"Warmest regards." Indeed. How warm that form letter was.

If submitting a work, like every other part of writing, is a learning process, then I learned two things from this opening round of two submissions. One, that I need to try to submit only to agents who are going to actually READ MY WORK regardless of the letter... and two, if I am going to send a letter only, use the version where "Margo" addresses the letter "Dear Agent."

Just trying to be fair.

To read chapter one of You Don't Think She Is, click here.

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My God controls the universe...

One of my favorite statements on the power of faith and God is in the documentary When We Were Kings, the movie about Muhammad Ali and George Foreman's 1974 heavyweight title fight in Zaire (the "Rumble In The Jungle"). Ali came into the fight as an underdog: Foreman, the writers said, was too young, too powerful... his right hand too devastating for an older Ali to reckon with, much less defeat.

Ali, though, saw the heavyweight fight as a chance to help his people's cause at home, and in a prefight sequence in his hotel room, he shadowboxes as he talks about his approach to the fight:

"Now when I go in the ring," he says as he dances, punctuating his words as he punches the air with jabs and crosses, "you see what kind of mind I got now? I've just got a POWER now. I mean, I've got a power that I'm not even gonna realize, until after, I might look him in the face and say 'How did I do that?' Allah, God, I'm his tool. God got in me. My purpose is my people. This man looks slow... God has made this man look like a little kid... that so-called right hand ain't NOTHIN' now... I don't even FEEL him... I ain't got no feelings... I walk right in and I take my shots... because I got God on my mind. I'm thinkin' of my people bein' free... and I can help with just one fight. Now he looks little in comparison to what I'm gettin' FROM it. He ain't NOTHIN' now! But..."

And Ali stops punching and his eyes get big and scared, his voice hushed.

"...if I think about ME... just me... and 'George Foreman knocked out Joe Frazier,' like HE was God... 'George Foreman knocked out Ken Norton'... and the white press, the power structure, ranked me to get tired in five, six... then I'll go in like Norton and the rest of them and get scared.

"But I'm not lookin' at the world and what THEY see. MY God controls the universe."

AOL Welcome Screen Headline Of The Week

It'd have to be a pretty good week for any headline to top this one:

New Celeb Mom Can't Stop Talking About Her Chest

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Bee is for baseball

Last week, I was umpiring a minor league little league game in Stowe. The kids in this league are between 7 and 10 years old, and, according to the one coach, "this is the first time some of them have ever faced live pitching." If you can call the pitching "live:" as my friend Shawn, who hooked me up with this gig, said, "Get used to saying BALL FOUR! a lot. Lots of wild pitches and passed balls and bases-loaded walks."

I've been studying the rule book to get nuances of the game down for potentially sticky situations, but sometimes, as anyone who's ever followed baseball will tell you, there are situations that you could never have been prepared for. Like last week's game, at the Moscow VT little league field: the Stowe Mets vs. Hyde Park. With the bases loaded, the Hyde Park kid stepped into the batter's box and took a beautiful pitch right down the heart of the plate. If he'd swung, he would have walloped it a mile. Instead, he barely looked, and in fact was the proverbial Frozen Statue as the pitch ripped by him. I remembered the feeling well: standing up at the plate, facing a live pitcher... sometimes I couldn't even take the bat off my shoulder.

I empathized, but called a STRIKE... as the Stowe catcher lobbed the ball back to his pitcher, though, the Hyde Park batter STILL barely moved. Paralysis... and just as I was anticipating a three-pitch called strikeout, the batter slowwwwwwly turned his head only --no other motion at all; just slowly turned his head-- to face me and call time.

"I can't swing," he said nervously, quietly. "There's a bee on me."

I called time and swatted the bee away... the kid stepped in, took his next pitch... ball low, outside, which bounced a few feet away from the catcher... who reached for the ball and then, like the batter a pitch earlier, froze in place.

"Time," I called, and I swatted the bee off the catcher's arm. "I'm the ump, guys," I added. "If they're going to sting anyone, they'll sting me."

This seemed to make sense to them, and play resumed, bee-free.

No matter how long you study, some situations just aren't covered in the rule book. Nor is the most simple rule of all: with some age groups, and some kids in all age groups, you are more than an arbiter. You are a mentor.

More than that, you are a bee swatter.

Addendum: Yesterday (Sunday, May 18), in the ninth inning of the Phillies' loss against Toronto, Phils' radio play-by-play man Scott Franzke and color man Larry Andersen had the following exchange, one which illustrates perfectly why this duo is one of the sharpest, most fun announcing teams on major league radio:

Franzke: Coste asks for time again to wave at a bee in front of him.
Andersen: Or to swat it away.
LONG PAUSE, then Franzke started laughing.

Took me a second, too.

Favorite cartoon of the week

AOL Welcome Screen Headline Of The Week

No further comment needed on this one, I believe:

Mary-Kate's Thigh-High Slit Is Scary

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Parents: can't live with 'em...

A couple days ago, I had my friends Shawn and Chantal take a picture of me standing in front of my new Kia sportage. Here's the picture . (That's their inn, Auberge de Stowe, in the background.)


Through an amazing sequence of events, I inherited the truck when their niece abandoned it a couple months ago. It needs a new heater core, but other than that, is driveable. Seeing as my last car died on the interstate when I moved up to Vermont (see this post for that story), I've been without a vehicle for the last eight months... so to get a free truck (with awesome snow tires) was, like I said, amazing.

I basically got a great five-speed four-wheel-drive for the cost of tax, title, tags and repairs. About a thousand bucks.

Life is good.

Anyway, since the vehicle is now street legal, I wanted my parents to SEE the truck... also, since I haven't been home to see them since Thanksgiving, let them see ME with the truck... so I emailed the picture of me standing in front of it, all proud. Max and his new used SUFree... the first picture of me, really, that my parents have seen in five months.

So today I got an email back from my dad. He showed the picture to Mom... whose response, relayed via email from my dad, was, and I quote:

"Oh, look at that hair... he'll NEVER get a job looking like that."

AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

I took a breath and typed back "This is Vermont. Expectations are different here. Besides, I'm through with those kinds of jobs."

I felt much the same way that Woody Allen must've felt in that documentary WILD MAN BLUES... it was a film about his jazz band (Woody's a jazz clarinetist and plays a regular gig at some club in NYC; this movie was a documentary about his band playing a festival in France)... anyway there's a scene where they show Woody and his parents (both now in their 90s) in his apartment in Manhattan... now putting aside the whole Soon Yi thing, and the fact that he hasn't done a GREAT movie in a while, still, this is WOODY FREAKIN' ALLEN, one of the best director-screenwriters of the last fifty years... an Oscar winner... by any standard a success. Anyway, they're talking about Woody's filmmaking and music and all, and his mother says...

"We still think you would have been a great doctor, Woody."

He stammers some reply and she continues. "We do, we do. We wanted you to go to medical school like (relative's name)."

So, as Shawn puts it, it never ends.

And as Carolyn Hax put it, when dealing with parents, apply the law of diminished expectations. Expect nothing other than what you've always gotten, and then anything you get on top of that will be a happy bonus. You just have to bless them and let them go on their way, thinking what they think.

I love my parents... they've given me so much, but they will never get used to the idea that I moved up here to break through as a novelist and do so while living minimally in an area I love. And a few years ago, their response --no, never mind their ACTUAL response, but "what I imagined their response might have been"-- would have paralyzed me.

Today, though, I just took a breath and typed back. I am liberated.

Still, a part of me hopes that someday, when I've sold my books and broken through as a writer, they'll make a WILD MAN BLUES about me... and Mom can sit there on camera at the kitchen table, swirling the coffee around in her mug.

"You would have been such a great teacher... and your hair looks so handsome when you keep it trimmed."

The internet way of thinking

On the XM classic soul station ("soul street") recently, I heard a great old David Ruffin solo track from the 70s: "Walk Away From Love." I remember the song from the radio back then: it's one of those classic mid-70s sweet soul records, replete with strings and horns and glockenspiel, courtesy of a beautiful arrangement by Van McCoy. I downloaded the track from iTunes and of course wanted to hear MORE... I told myself that I'd get the download for now, and then just get the track on CD along with "more" Ruffin-by-Van, and I'd be set.

Well, "more" is kind of problematic. The original 1975 LP on which "Walk Away From Love" appeared (Here I Am) is out-of-print on compact disc... "out-of-print" with a caveat. You can get Here I Am if you want to buy a limited edition (5000 numbered copies, on Hip-O Select) boxed set of The Great David Ruffin: The Complete Motown Solo Albums Volume Two. This two-disc set has all four mid-70s solo albums that McCoy arranged and produced for Ruffin... plus outtakes.

Tempting... and I want to hear more...

...but I don't know that I NEED to hear that much more... I don't know that I WANT that much more. I also don't know when I'll have the time to really sit and LISTEN to that much more. Forty more tracks of David Ruffin produced by Van McCoy is about 30 more than I was looking for at the moment, really.

But there's a kind of thinking that the internet seems to encourage (if not spawn)... a thinking that says

YOU WANT
DAVID RUFFIN
ARRANGED AND
PRODUCED BY
VAN MCCOY?
HERE'S THE
COMPLETE
SESSIONS!
EVERY NOTE
THEY EVER
RECORDED!

THIRTY-FIVE BUCKS.

More David Ruffin and Van McCoy than I would listen to for the rest of the year, if I even stayed interested that long. I mean, I love "Walk Away From Love"... it's a gorgeous track. But I'm not writing a master's thesis on David Ruffin and Van McCoy. I just wanted to hear a few more tracks, that's all. I don't want or need all four albums plus outtakes all at once. I just wanted to hear a little bit more, a little bit at a time.

But the internet way of thinking is GET IT ALL. RIGHT NOW.

The thing is: I will probably end up ordering that boxed set eventually. But I know I'd enjoy it more if I could just get the stuff one album at a time, though. It's not the internet way, but it's my way.

AOL Welcome Screen Headline Of The Week

'I Was Tortured.I Was in Tears'

Kate Beckinsale's On-Set Meltdown,
Nude Scene Crisis: What Happened?

I guess there's a few different reasons why this one won. First of all, there's the classic AOL welcome phrase device of using a word ("crisis") to overdescribe a celebrity problem ("Nude scene"). It's a great phrase: "Nude scene crisis."

But also, it's use of the word "torture," especially when seen on the same page as a link to a story about a disabled woman who was literally tortured to death by housemates.

Kinda puts your "torture" in perspective, huh, Kate?

Carolyn Hax-ism of the week

Every one of Carolyn Hax's live Friday chats online at Washington Post.com has at least one sentence or paragraph that hits home. This one, from Carolyn's reply regarding a man's distress at his brother's pending marriage, was the one from the last chat. As with so many of her gems, it almost doesn't matter what the question was:

There's not much you can do to stop someone from making a mistake he's determined to make. You can, though, shift your take on why he's sharing your unhappiness. You see it as a chance to fix things. Maybe he doesn't want it fixed, maybe he just wants to talk. Let him talk (and of course drive you nuts). Ask questions instead of offering ideas--example, "What do you think you should do?"; "What would be your perfect outcome?" or even, "Is there something you want me to do or say?" and "WHAT DO YOU WANT?" Leading questions.

Notes from a week of work at Harvest Market

Following are some things I noticed or heard at my job the last week or so. I am presenting them sans analysis; just putting them out here as is, for you to make of them what you will.

* "Weird and Slightly Scary Product Name" Department
Last week I went down to the kitchen to get something from the walk-in and I noticed a single brown cardboard box (mixed in on a shelf of Honey Graham Cracker crumb boxes) with the following product description printed on the end:
LASER SCANNED RAISINS

* "No, actually, they're the one item on this counter that sucks" department
Exchange with a customer at the pastry counter:
Customer: And what are those?
Me: That's a maple biscuit.
Customer: Oh. Are they good?

* "I don't know... you tell ME, lady" department
"So," a woman asked my co-worker David as he stood at the deli, "what is the difference between the big salami and the small salami?"

* "Nope! Psych! I don't!" department
"So," I said to the customer as I surveyed the scattered items she'd just bought and paid for, "would you like a bag to carry all this stuff?"
"Yeah," she said, "if you have one."

Future updates as events warrant.

AOL Welcome Screen Headline Of The Week

Had to block, copy and paste this one before it vanished from cyberspace forever...

You Can Bust Your Belly Fat
Reach for These Two Nuts First

Random thoughts on a Sunday

Just some random stuff I felt like pulling together, none of which merited its own post, but which together... uh... STILL might not merit its own post. Ah, well...

* * *

I loved Kevin Cowherd's article about Renaissance Faire dinner theater in the Baltimore Sun ("Watching Knights of the Dinner Table"). Even Cowherd's weakest columns inevitably have one line in them that makes me laugh out loud as I read. This one had more than one.

* * *

Advice from my friend Shawn, when I whined to him about a general malaise I'd been feeling lately: "We all suffer bouts of depression, indecision, angst. But don't let it interfere with moving your life forward. Let it go. Shake things up if you're down.... I understand what you're going through, and the best medicine is movement. Give your brain something new to think about so that it doesn't have time to fuck with you."

That last line is what Zen masters have been preaching and trying to practice for years. Easier said than done at times, and, oddly enough, easier done than said at other times.

I'd rather hear it from a friend than from a master. Thanks, Shawn.

* * *

Listening at work to the "Starbuck's XM Cafe" station, featuring "adult singer-songwriter" music (aka bland, midtempo, nondescript, nonmelodic confessional modern folk rock, or, as a Rolling Stone writer once described REM, "moan in search of a melody') and a track from Bob Dylan came on.

The problem with the aforementioned genre of music is that the performers who populate it are trying to do what Dylan did (does) while lacking three essential elements:

* Dylan's sense of himself as not only a performer and a songwriter, but as a stage persona, a character independent of Robert Zimmerman, the man who has placed himself in the title role.

* Dylan's talent as a songwriter: meaning not only his obvious gifts as a wordsmith, but his fearlessness as an artist.

* Dylan's devotion to rock and roll, and to making sure his songs never lull, but drive or pulse.

The inability to capture any of these three elements is what dooms most modern day singer-songwriters to mediocrity, and also explains why 99.99999999% of the time, the moniker THE NEW DYLAN is simply misplaced and never to be trusted.

* * *

I've noticed that whenever I have coffee, whether it's my 16-ounce 50-50 french roast-french roast decaf at home, or a long espresso (a double shot stretched out to coffee-cup size) at work, or a Red Eye or Americano at the cafe, or a cup of Dunkin Donuts brew grabbed on the fly... no matter where or when, I've noticed that somehow I always leave an inch of coffee in the bottom of the cup. I don't know why. For a while, I thought "OK, so maybe I should get the next size down," but when I started doing that, I STILL left an inch of coffee in the bottom of the cup.

What does unfinished coffee represent? Hmmmm...

* * *

Best STATUS UPDATE I've yet read from one of my friends on Facebook was my Goddard pal George's post from last week:

George took the True Age Test and found out he died five years ago.

* * *

Best one-liner I've heard recently: my co-worker Ian's description of "speed dating" at a local pub, where participants rotate in seven-minute shifts between tables of other singles.

"Yep, seven minutes. Five minutes of small talk... then the two most unforgettable minutes of our lives."

* * *

Realization: that I have gotten the good things I have in my life right now by trusting God and following faith... by realizing that my actions and thoughts and words have consequences in my life and in the lives of those around me, and that I am largely responsible for my life, the circumstances in it, and the quality of my relationships with people.

I'm thinking of one friendship in particular that, eight years ago, seemed like it would never happen, that was impossible... that I would suffer forever and never unlock the key to this person. Now, eight years later, I count this person among my closest friends. It all came about for a lot of reasons, but from my perspective, it happened because I knew I wanted this person in my life, knew she was important to me, and so I worked HARD spiritually to build a foundation for a friendship (blessed her and her life and her family in my heart, let go of a lot of baggage on my end) and followed "the silent voice within" in all my contact with her.

But I also just made sure that I respected her, and further, I TOOK THE RISK and expressed what I was really feeling for her. Scary, because I told her some things that, if she'd taken them the wrong way, might have shut the door forever. But instead, with the foundation I'd laid and we built together, she got where I was coming from, told me where SHE was coming from, and so we met in the middle. And we've been there ever since. One of my closest friends, and it's hard to believe I ever wanted it any other way, because now I wouldn't want it any other way.

From her and my friendship with her, I learned to be persistent and understanding, to abandon my expectations and just meet people where they were and give what I had, because who knows, if I needed someone's friendship, maybe THEY in turn needed MINE.

I'm keeping this in mind as I struggle with my feelings for a "distant star." I know what I feel and what I want. And having been there before (having someone I held in esteem at a distance become one of my closest friends over the course of time), I also know that it's possible. Like I said, I've been here before... several times, in fact. And each of those times, what I ended up getting turned out to be something much different from what I thought I wanted... but still, something amazing and beautiful and wonderful in its own way that I wouldn't trade for the world.

So I'm approaching this "distant star" with the same reverence and respect that I have approached others in the past. We'll see what happens.

After all, tomorrow, as the aforementioned Mr. Dylan sang, is a long time.

Garfield Minus Garfield

In describing a somewhat, uh, mentally unbalanced co-worker to me once, my brother said "She sits in her cubicle and talks to herself the way you talk to yourself when you're in your apartment alone."

Whomever it is that got the brilliant idea to do the blog Garfield Minus Garfield has tapped into that same energy. This is the funniest website I have read in years.

What is Garfield Minus Garfield? It's Garfield panels with the cat photoshopped out, so that Jon, Garfield's owner, is left talking to himself. Sounds like it'd be a little pointless, but from the blog's main page...

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

My favorite one is here.

Garfield is a kid-friendly foray into the imagination. Kids (and the kid in adults) love the idea that a man could have such interactions with his pets (and, for adults, Get Fuzzy has taken this concept to the nth degree)... but when you really THINK about it... I mean, imagine for a second that you're a fly on the wall in Jon Arbuckle's apartment, listening to him talk to "his cat"... not just TALK, but CONVERSE. Anyone who's ever had a pet can relate... still, in many ways, Jon might as well be talking to an empty room.

Meds would be indicated.

Not only has Garfield Minus Garfield become one of the first sites I click on whenever I go online every day; it's also gotten me to-- imagine this-- ACTUALLY READ GARFIELD EVERY DAY IN THE PAPER!!! Garfield has always left me a little limp; I just didn't find it particularly funny. I suppose if I was a cat lover, or maybe, more specifically, a 12-year-old cat lover, I might have enjoyed it... but it's always been on my COMICS TO READ LIST somewhere down between Mary Worth and Apartment 3-G. Since I discovered Garfield Minus Garfield, though, I actually read it in the paper, erasing the cat in my mind's eye, catching up on Jon's battles with mental illness.

I even tried creating a few of my own (posted below). My apologies for the quality; they're crude (I'm not anywhere near as smooth with graphics programs as the owner of the GMG blog is) but they made me laugh.

In my apartment. Alone.

Uh-oh.

* * *

Here are my versions, altered from current Garfield offerings on the Universal Press Syndicate website. Apologies to Jim Davis and to the Garfield Minus Garfield webmaster:

Wine

Rather than go into my traditional tirade about how, for years, I was intimidated by WINE because I felt like I didn't really KNOW enough... I just knew what I liked... not realizing, of course, that that was ENOUGH... anyway...

I always want to pass along wine recommendations, so here's my current fave: Banfi Centine 2005. A red wine. Awesome.

For those who need to read about the terroir and flavor tones and the like, here's the blurb from the Banfi website:

The calcareous soil and temperate micro-climate of Tuscany rewards the wine grape with unequaled fruitiness. Among the noble grape varieties that thrive here are Sangiovese, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot.

Centine is a bright ruby-red youthful wine, intensely fruity with a lingering finish - a testament to its overall balance. It is an ideal companion to pasta, grilled or roasted red and white meats.

Grape Varieties: 60% Sangiovese; 20% Cabernet Sauvignon; 20% Merlot.

In the words of Max at the Christmas party, where I had about four glasses of this stuff:

WOOOOO!!! I'M GONNA SKATEBOARD DOWN THIS SLOPING UNDERGROUND TUNNEL BETWEEN MY BOSS'S HOUSE AND BARN!!!!!!! WOOOOOOO!!!!

And no sulfite hangover the day after. Yummy.

We have a couple cases of this stuff at work and I'm planning to bring them home one bottle at a time. (Or is that TAKE them home?)

Then, a skateboard. And kneepads.

Endings and beginnings

Today, I received, in the mail, an envelope from the Prothonotary and Clerk of Courts in Coudersport, PA. My divorce decree. I am officially a single person.

I don't know what to write, don't know quite how I feel.

No one, I am pretty sure, goes into a relationship thinking that someday it's going to end. Certainly no one goes into a marriage thinking it's going to end. Unfortunately, my two (!) have ended the same way: with the equivalents of "common law" divorces: no-fault... papers filed through the mail... one day, a sheaf of papers arrives in the mail, with a cover letter asking for my signature on a couple pages, and then, a few weeks after I send them off, another, slimmer letter in the mail:

CIVIL ACTION - LAW
CASE NO 2008-125
IN DIVORCE

DECREE

AND NOW...

Funny: when my ex- and I were separated but still legally married (pause for a second, as I absorb the new tenses I'm using here), and she was hoping that I might "come to my senses" and we'd get back together (part of me was hoping the same thing for her, too), she said once "It's all just easy come, easy go to you, isn't it?"

No, June. It wasn't.

That's why, even though it seems like there's nothing more "easy come, easy go" than a common law, sign-and-submit divorce, I know that it's anything but for her. It certainly isn't for me.

* * *

When the mail came this afternoon, I was on my way downtown. As soon as I saw the envelope, I knew what it was. There aren't many reasons for any prothonotary in Pennsylvania to be writing me; besides, I'd signed the papers and returned them three weeks ago. I knew it was coming.

I walked into town, barely thinking about the paper in my bookbag... went for lunch, and then to the bookstore to buy a book (Kaleidoscope Sky by Tim Herd) that I'd had my eye on, plus a card for my parents and a couple other cards... then across the street and down the block to the Stowe Coffeehouse, where I sat and had a Red Eye (in my case, a decaf coffee with two shots of espresso in it; call it a Pink Eye) and opened The Envelope. The date was unceremoniously rubberstamped in a space on the form.

DECREE

And now, Feb 11 2008, it is ordered and decreed that Plaintiff and Defendant are divorced from the bonds of matrimony.

February 11...

Last week, I decided that I was going to go out on a limb and, defying all reason, send a SECRET ADMIRER valentine to a woman I had a crush on. Our paths crossed earlier this winter, and since then, I haven't been able to shake her from my spirit.

I mailed the card on Saturday.

On Sunday, I found out that she had a boyfriend.

On Monday, February 11, I found out that she had received the card.

I like to believe in the logic of cycles, of endings and beginnings, and in the power of faith and spirit to move objects and people that may seem, logically and rationally, unmoveable.

Could February 11 have been both a day of ending and beginning for me?

Time will tell.

* * *

I stopped into my workplace, Harvest Market, on my walk home to not only get a cup of coffee and a couple of Jones Green Apple sodas for the evening, but because I knew if I told everyone what had happened, I'd get empathy. Sure enough, when I showed the decree to my co-worker Ben, he patted my back. "Hey, if you wanna hang out or something, let me know."

Just what I needed to hear, when I needed to hear it. Thanks, man.

Lisa, one of the managers, gave me a chocolate covered strawberry ("You need this today") and I sat with another co-worker, Ian, and his roommate (whose name I don't know) and we talked about skiing, snowshoeing, going out on the mountain, and how beautiful it was. I decided that rather than walk home and hole up in my room and feel sorry for myself, I was going to go home, strap on my snowshoes, and go for a walk across the powder.

My apartment is above Gracie's, a restaurant on Mountain Road in Stowe. The Stowe rec path passes right in front of my building and crosses over a small stream about a quarter mile to the south; between the building and the stream, there's a wide open field, on which, a couple weeks ago, a group of snowshoers left their mark in the form of gigantic, crop-circle-like swirls.

As I snowshoed past the open, clean field in the gently falling snow, I looked out across the unspoiled snowscape, and I knew what I had to do.

Thinking of those crop-circle swirls, with my snowshoes, I walked a giant, 100-foot-wide heart into the snowscape. It will be there for all to see tomorrow, Valentine's Day.

I wonder if anyone will guess that the person who made it had just opened up a divorce decree.

Love still works. Life is still good.

* * *

After I took off my snowshoes, I took a shower and went downstairs to Gracie's for dinner. I seldom go out to dinner, but tonight, it seemed important.

Had a steak and two glasses of wine: one for endings, and one for beginnings.

Here's to both, and here's to love.

There's nothing you can do that can't be done
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game
It's easy

Nothing you can make that can't be made
No word you can say that can't be said
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time
It's easy

All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need

There's nothing you can know that isn't known
Nothing you can see that isn't shown
Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be
It's easy

All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need...

(John Lennon and Paul McCartney)


Happy Valentine's Day!

A simple quiz for the insecure

Carolyn Hax, of the WASHINGTON POST, is without question my favorite advice columnist. Not only is her syndicated TELL ME ABOUT IT the most insightful and bullshit-free advice column out there, but her weekly chats are full of gems, made all the more impressive by the fact that the chat is done in real time.

This little exchange is from her chat today at washingtonpost.com:

New York, N.Y.: Hey Carolyn,

Love your chats -- I'm hoping you can help me on this. How do you get over the need to have everyone (or if not everyone, most people) "like" you. I'm usually afraid to make waves or risk alienating people, even for good reason, because I'm always worried that this person will become resentful and besmirch my fair name among my social circle.

I think there's some good in restraint, but I feel like the fear of reprisal is too strong for me to deal with in general and then I end up feeling trod upon.

Advice, please? Thank you in advance!

Carolyn Hax: Pencils out, pop quiz:

Do you like everyone? Yes/No

Does your dislike of someone impinge significantly on his or her ability to lead a fulfilling life? Yes/No

Are there some people you dislike so much that their favorable opinion of you would be an insult? Yes/No

Do you think it's a realistic goal to be universally liked? Yes/No

Do you think it's a desirable one? Yes/No

Can you conjure one person who is universally inoffensive? Yes/No

If yes, has that person ever made you laugh so hard you spit your drink? Yes/No

-----

The point of this quiz being, everything you feel comfortable believing about other people's (dis)likability applies directly to your own. It's okay, certainly survivable, and in many cases desirable, to be distasteful to some people.

Enjoy.

",..when my attention was caught..."

January 6 1858 - ...Very little evidence of God or man did I see just then, and life not as rich and inviting an enterprise as it should be, when my attention was caught by a snowflake on my coat-sleeve. It was one of those perfect, crystalline, star-shaped ones, six-rayed, like a flat wheel with six spokes, only the spokes were perfect little pine trees in shape, arranged around a central spangle. This little object, which, with many of its fellows, rested unmelting on my coat, so perfect and beautiful, reminded me that Nature had not lost her pristine vigor yet, and why should man lose heart? (from Henry David Thoreau's Journal)

Without going into too deep detail, I've been facing a sort of dark night of the soul recently. Vermont winters seem to be good for this kind of psychodrama, at least in my case: the long cold nights encourage holing up, contemplating... and when the internal struggle gets to be too much, there's the beautiful outdoors: cold, snowy, crisp, invigorating, to remind me that there's something more and bigger and better than my problems.

Life, I'm learning, is a series of choices, but the biggest choices are those you make unwittingly or impulsively when it appears on the surface that you don't really have a choice at all. It is learning to take my power of choice, freedom and responsibility back in these "choiceless moments" that has really freed me from so many things that held me down for so long. I've still got a ways to go (who doesn't? That's life) but I'm learning. So, dark night of the soul or not, life is good.

It's funny, though, how a convergence of seemingly disparate events leads you to awakening, beauty, and God's presence.

To wit: yesterday (Wednesday) at the market, one of the guys scheduled for the afternoon shift was sick. True to form, he tried to buck up and come into work anyway, but "I puked in the truck" and they ended up sending him home.

I worked a morning shift yesterday and was looking forward to an afternoon of... ??? The ??? could be any number of things, but lately it's meant, for lack of a better way of putting it, indulging the impulse to stay stuck in the past rather than let go and move forward. Wasting a lot of time "nursing those old hurts," as Louise Hay would put it. I didn't know what I was going to do yesterday afternoon, but I knew that I HAD the afternoon to myself, and I was kind of looking forward to it, since I also had the morning off today. Even if all I was going to do was "nurse old hurts."

But they needed someone to cover the late afternoon for this guy. I didn't want to give up my early evening (4-7:30 pm)... but I knew I could use the money... so I said "Yeah, I'll cover it." I went home at the end of my shift (1 pm), had lunch, read a little bit, wasted some time on the internet, took a mini nap, and at 3:30, got up to go back into the market.

I thought of taking my journal along, but always feel hesitant to take that notebook to work. I knew it wouldn't be particularly busy, though, and I wanted to take SOMETHING along to pass the time. Out of impulse, I grabbed a copy of a book called THE HEART OF THOREAU'S JOURNALS --mainly because it'd fit in my coat pocket, but also, I'm sure, because I suspected that, 150 years ago, in his neck of New England, Henry might have gone through something like I'm going through now.

I didn't get much reading done, but one of the passages I read was the one above, about his seeing the snowflake on his sleeve. Nice. God And Nature Are Always Here For Us. Etc. Etc. Etc. I helped my two co-workers shut down the store and walked home in the cold.

This morning, I'm supposed to ride to Burlington with my friend Shawn. I have a few things I need to get for my apartment; I also cashed in change from my piggybank so I can buy the new Lucinda Williams CD; but also, there was a software program that I was considering buying that would, in AA parlance, enable me to nurse my old hurts further. And lately, as I said above, I feel like I'm seeing that my choice is between staying stuck on old pain, old hurt, old sadness, old longing, old regret... OR... finding a way to get it out and let it go and move forward.

I want to move forward.

So... this morning I woke up around 5:30... got a shower... as I stood in the hot stream, I said a little prayer: I want to let go, understand, and move forward was the feeling, if not the actual words. And when I came back to my room, I could see that, outside, the sky was clear and star spangled. I'm going to go out and stargaze for a few minutes, I decided, and I put some coffee in a travel mug, bundled up, grabbed my Audubon Guide to the Night Sky and my headlamp, and went down the steps and outdoors.

My friend Shawn gave me the headlamp when I was futon-surfing at his inn. It's an LED lamp -- two lamps, actually: blue and red-- mounted on an elastic band that I slip on my head. The light comes right from my forehead, and not only lights up the path before me on dark early morning-evening walks to and from work; it also makes me visible to oncoming vehicles.

Outside the door of my apartment, next to the porch, there are forsythia bushes which, it being stick season, are now tall bare twigs. I seldom if ever notice them as I walk down the steps to leave the building...

...but this frosty, chilly morning, as I passed them, the blue light from my headlamp caught the ice crystals on the twigs, and the tiny rectangular crystals reflected the blue light brilliantly, glimmering and twinkling like tiny blue Christmas lights. As I moved around the bush (great straight line. Don't touch it.) different crystals on the branches caught the light, and would spark briefly as the blue lamp hit them, then, as I moved, crystals next to or behind them would sparkle.

I went outside expecting to see stars, and I did, but the light from that frost-coated forsythia was all the more beautiful because it surprised me. If I hadn't turned my head (with headlamp) at the moment I did, I would have never seen this light show.

At this point, Thoreau would probably have given a grand summary of the experience, putting it (and himself) in perspective. That's what he did when he wrote about the snowflake:

...I may say that the maker of the world exhausts his skill with each snowflake and dewdrop that he sends down. We think that the one mechanically coheres and that the other simply flows together and falls, but in truth they are the product of enthusiasm, the children of an ecstasy, finished with the artist's utmost skill.

As my ex- actually said to me once, though, I'm no Thoreau. So I'm simply glad that on a morning when I went out to see the stars, I saw something nearer, more surprising, just as beautiful.

Mainly it just shows what happens when I'm feeling lost and I pay attention. Reading that short passage of Thoreau's reminded me that sometimes, when you're looking for a sign or an answer, as in A SIGN! AN ANSWER! what happens is that a snowflake falls on your sleeve, or ice crystals glimmering in your peripheral vision catch your attention.

The trick is to pay attention. And, I suppose, to keep paying attention. And to keep asking for the answer.

Just don't expect it to be what you expected.

"...but what's it ABOUT?"

When I started submitting my novel to agents last summer, a friend of mine from the Goddard MFA program told me that I needed to come up with a 10-second plot summary. Ten seconds, as in: "Imagine you've got an agent in the elevator with you, and you have ten seconds to tell them what your book is about. Ready? GO!"

Uhhhh... uhhh...

A couple days ago at work, I met a woman who went to high school in Gettysburg (the setting of my novel) around the time that my novel took place (mid-late 70s). "Oh, my novel is set in Gettysburg," I said. "I actually grew up in Carlisle, but I set the book in Gettysburg because I didn't want to incriminate anyone."

"Oh, you wrote a book?"

"Yeah."

"What's it about?"

Uhhhhh...uhhh...

I stammered out some response that I'm certain sounded like THIS BOOK ACTUALLY HAS CHARACTERS BUT NO PLOT AND IT'S NOT REALLY ABOUT ANYTHING AND I'M CERTAIN YOU PROBABLY WOULDN'T WANT TO READ IT, HERE'S YOUR SINGLE SKIM MOCHA LATTE, HAVE A GOOD LIFE.

Why is it so hard to step outside of a work that you've written yourself and answer the simple question "What is it about?" My smart-assed response has traditionally been "Oh, it's about 280 pages," but even if that gets a laugh, it still doesn't answer the question.

It's not just that part of the process of selling a book (to an agent, to a publisher, to a reader) is communicating concisely what the book is; but as my friend Chris said, understanding what the book is about and having a clear idea of the story and the plot focusses your revisions. "Anything that doesn't serve the story, out it goes."

What happens? What do the characters do? What would a plot summary in a movie listing for my story look like?

Somehow I didn't have any trouble with that last one:

SAD SWEET DREAMER (PG-13) A middle-aged man delves into old letters and diaries to understand the friendship between his high school sweetheart and the best friend who later became his wife.

Not exactly compelling, but it's a start.

"But what's it ABOUT?" my friend Shawn said.

"We're not trying to bust your balls here," Chris added. "But it's a good exercise."

Yeah, right. Exactly what all my gym teachers used to say in high school.

So I answered: It's about love and jealousy and fear, and the veneers that people put over their real feelings in order to preserve friendships and-or avoid heartaches.

"But what happens? What do the characters DO?"

I'm still working on the answer here.

Stay tuned.