The View from Room 820

Because objects in motion tend to remain in motion, it should not have surprised me that the gallstones that brought me to the emergency room 10 days ago would continue to wreak havoc. Last week was spent trying to find a balance between extreme discomfort/nausea and a medication level that would let me get my work done, as well as shuttle back and forth to the doctor's for tests and scans. The tests got worse, not better, so when I saw the surgeon at a previously-scheduled appointment yesterday morning, he said, "I think we're going to admit you."

"Look, you're in the penthouse," the hospital auxiliary lady said when she showed me to my room. It's true; I'm on the top floor of the Virginia Hospital Center, with a wall of windows that looks out onto a nice suburban neighborhood. I can see trees and the highrises of Ballston, though it's been pretty gray since yesterday.

The Virginia Hospital Center is rated one of the nation's best hospitals, with good reason. It used to be Arlington Hospital, but was rechristened 10 years ago after a massive renovation/expansion. The buildings are big, clean and shiny, and the staff have been nothing but kind. I'm in a private room, with wi-fi and cable and an IV drip that beeps if I bend my arm wrong.

That said, hospitals are for sick people. I don't think I belong here, or at least I don't want to believe that I do. I spent about an hour (at least, it felt like an hour) in an imaging machine last night, and based on those results I think I'm having some kind of surgical procedure today. I'm really, really hoping to be home tonight, even though my bed at home is not adjustable and the hospital has better cable. I have no big insights from my hospital experience, except the obvious ones: nurses are great. Patient care assistants are great. Twelve hours is probably too long for a shift. Hospitals smell weird.

The one really good thing about all of this is that I have health insurance. God forbid this should have happened last year, when I didn't. 

Thanks to everybody who's called or emailed to express concern. I'm in good hands and should be home soon, tomorrow morning if not tonight.

The Gall of It - and March's Reading List

Let the record show that March 2014 was a crummy month for me and many people close to me, and I am glad to see the end of it. (I did manage to salvage the very end of it with a viewing of Muppets Most Wanted in good company.)

Sometime between now and the end of April I will be bidding farewell to my gallbladder, which has become clogged with stones and is interfering with both my liver and my spleen. The medieval attribution of bad temper to those organs is justified; I am uncomfortable and irritable and generally unpleasant to be around right now. You may think it's funny to remark that you notice no difference in my usual demeanor. You may even be correct about this, but please notice that I'm not laughing.

Anyway, I read quite a lot in March. About half of it was work-related and therefore confidential, but here's the list for public consumption.

What I Read in March

Elmore Leonard, RUM PUNCH. I reread this for a book club discussion on Fairfax Public Access Radio at the beginning of the month. I'd thought I remembered it pretty well, but realized that I was remembering the movie Jackie Brown, not the book it was based on. The book is sharper and more violent than the movie, and the central character is not Jackie but Max Forster, the bail bondsman played by Robert Forster in the movie. I hadn't realized that RUM PUNCH itself was a sequel to THE SWITCH, which I haven't read. Anyway, RUM PUNCH is a great novel about midlife and how we decide where to make our stands, as well as being a highly entertaining caper novel.

Alma Katsu, THE TAKER. Alma was the guest author on the radio show I participated in; I'd met her a few years ago at the Virginia Festival of the Book, but am embarrassed that I didn't get around to reading her first novel until now. It's a great historical fantasy romantic epic, in the tradition of Interview with the Vampire and Outlander. Lanore's passion for the young man she can't have drives her from colonial Maine to Boston, and into the arms of the dangerous Adair, who is not what he seems to be. I'm looking forward to reading the next two books in the series.

Lawrence Block, THE BURGLAR WHO COUNTED THE SPOONS. You cannot go wrong with a book about Bernie Rhodenbarr, bookseller and semi-reformed burglar. The latest in the series works on a couple of levels; as a classic whodunit in the tradition of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe (an influence the book openly acknowledges) and as metafiction about the business of bookselling. The theft of a Colonial American spoon turns out to be related to the death of an elderly socialite, but it's much too complicated to explain here, and I'd be depriving you of the fun of reading the book.

Serena Mackesy, HOLD MY HAND. Bridget Sweeny, fleeing her abusive ex-husband, takes a position as housekeeper for a vacation rental property in a remote part of Cornwall. The townspeople warn her about the house, but no one tells her why. Odd things start happening, and Bridget's daughter Yasmin makes a new invisible friend as the house's history forces itself inexorably into the present. Great reading for a blustery winter's night; I do love a good ghost story.

Donna Johnson, HOLY GHOST GIRL. Superagent and eminence grise Dan Conaway, who represents Donna, thought I'd love this book, and he was right. Donna Johnson's mother ran away to join a tent revival when Donna and her brother were tiny, and the children spent their formative years traveling with Brother David Terrell and his followers. As the years passed, Donna came to understand that Brother Terrell was not only her mother's pastor but her lover — and eventually the father of two of her sisters. He thoroughly enjoyed the material benefits of his ministry, and ultimately served time in federal prison for tax fraud. But — and this is what makes this book so compelling — he was also, as far as Donna could tell, a man of great and genuine faith who appeared, at times, to carry miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit to his followers. Donna bears witness to all of this, with an awe-inspiring compassion.

Jo Wood, IT'S ONLY ROCK AND ROLL. I admit I bought this because it was a Kindle Daily Deal, and I needed something mindless. Jo Karslake was a 22-year-old model when she hooked up with Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones, and the two were all but inseparable for 30 years until he finally left her for a teenager. The book reads like a book-length People magazine feature, which is not a criticism; it was exactly what I wanted, but weeks later I can barely remember anything about it. I did finish it with the conviction that no one in their right mind would want to be a Rolling Stones' wife or girlfriend.

Declan Hughes, ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE. It's been much too long since we had a new novel from Declan Hughes, and this book won't be out in the US until the summer. You should pick it up, once it's out. It's a standalone, a novel of domestic suspense that taps into the deepest fears of midlife: that we're wrong about everything, from the plans we've made to the people we love and even what we thought we knew about ourselves. Claire Taylor comes home after a week away to discover that her husband, children and belongings are gone, and the family dog is dead in the yard. A day later, a man's dead body is found in the yard, and Claire's husband Danny is the prime suspect.

Gavin Edwards, LAST NIGHT AT THE VIPER ROOM. Halloween is central to the plot of ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE, and it's the heart of this book as well, a nonfiction look at the short life and terrible death of River Phoenix. It's strange to think that was already 20 years ago. The Los Angeles Edwards describes had already changed by the time I got there in 1999, and it's obviously changed even more now; some of it lingers, though, and some of it will repeat itself as long the entertainment industry exists. Edwards places no blame, but shows us River Phoenix as a young man in an environment he had no tools to manage. After reading this book, I want to watch the movie Dogfight, which Phoenix made with Lili Taylor in 1991.

Spencer Quinn, THE DOG WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. I recommend the Chet the Dog books for whenever you're alone and doped up in a hospital emergency room; this is the fourth in the series. Chet, the narrator, is so cheerful and pure of heart that even when things go bad, there's always the possibility of a treat, a game of fetch or a good patting. Chet and his human partner, Bernie, take a job as bodyguard for a single mother who's not telling them her whole story, but wind up hunting for her young son when he goes missing. Late in the book we meet (briefly) a young dog who might turn out to be connected to Chet, so now I have to track down books five and six to find out who this puppy is. Until I can get another dog of my own, Chet and his friends are a happy substitute.

Five Things I Had Forgotten About Virginia Beach

I'm back in Arlington today after eight days in Virginia Beach, which was probably the longest stretch of time I've spent there since I left for college in August 1982. We moved to Virginia Beach when I was seven and I left when I was sixteen, but it's still the closest thing I have to a hometown. My two brothers live there, Mom's grave is there, Dad still keeps an apartment at Chicks Beach. Since Mom's death, though, holiday gatherings tend to be at my sister Peggy's, outside Richmond, and it was usually too much for me to drive the extra 90 miles from Richmond to Virginia Beach.

Now, however, it's 200 miles door to door from my house to James and Sara's, so there'll be a lot of the Southside in my future. In fact, I'll be there on April 12 to see Bruce Springsteen, and I expect to be back a lot over the summer. (Summer traffic is a nightmare, but my work is flexible enough to let me travel at off-hours.)

The City of Virginia Beach has transformed itself in the 30+ years since I left. For one thing, its population has nearly doubled. Construction is constant, a little overwhelming. Most of it looks shoddy, houses of siding and polymer shingles next to my childhood neighborhoods of red brick. (Brick is cheap in Tidewater Virginia, or used to be. The land is clay, and ships from all over the world carried bricks as ballast, and left them behind when they sailed away with tobacco, whiskey and hams.) The whole south half of the city used to be farmland, and some farms remain, but most of the farmers sold out; the money was too good, and everything was cheaper in North Carolina anyway.

Not everything has changed, though. The Virginia Beach SPCA is exactly where it was when my Girl Scout troop visited it, out on Holland Road; back then it felt like a trip to the country, and now it's right off a major intersection. The Willis Furniture sign is still a landmark on Virginia Beach Boulevard, welcoming visitors to the gracious neighborhood of Thalia. The planes over Dam Neck are still deafening, and I still wonder how anyone lives in that flight path. (Lots of people do.)

And a few things I had forgotten, and was glad to remember.

1. Virginia Beach is huge. It used to be Princess Anne County; they turned the whole thing into a city. It's 497 square miles, of which about half is land and about half is water. By comparison, the entire state of Rhode Island is just over 1,200 square miles. "Around the corner" in Virginia Beach means about five miles away.

2. The Virginian-Pilot is a damn fine paper, especially its military coverage. My brother and sister-in-law still get home newspaper delivery, and I had forgotten what a luxury that feels like.

3. It's not all Navy. The Navy is the single largest employer in Virginia Beach and its sister communities of Norfolk, Chesapeake and Portsmouth (Hampton and Newport News too, but they're on the other side of the bridge). If you don't work for the Navy, chances are good that you work for a Navy contractor (as my brother and father do), or for an organization that serves Navy personnel and their families. But the serious money in Hampton Roads isn't Navy, or Navy-related. It's real estate, and some of it goes all the way back to the bad old days. The powers that be in Virginia Beach were there before the Navy and will be there after the Navy is gone. I can't say whether that's good or bad, but I went to school with some of them. It was a good school, with an honor system and a weighty sense of history.

4. Virginia Beach has a lot of churches. A lot. My brothers and sisters and I fought a lot as kids, and my mother would quote her own mother: "See, how these Christians love each other." Well, the sheer number of independent churches in Virginia Beach is pretty good evidence that no matter how much humans might love the Lord, the first thing they're going to do is fight about it. It's kind of impressive that so many individual communities can support so many places of worship, but it's hard not to remember the Tower of Babel when you drive past a whole row of them.

5. Pollard's chicken is still the best. No contest. When I was engaged, we were going to have Pollard's cater the wedding reception. I may never get married, but maybe they can cater my funeral.

When Kindness Becomes a Commodity

Greetings from Virginia Beach. I've spent the last week down here with family — cancelling my trip to Left Coast Crime, which I'm sorry about, but this was more important — because we're all dealing with the usual life-cycle issues that any big family goes through from time to time. (And while I mention that, fierce congratulations to my cousin Christine and her husband Patrick, who welcomed their third son into the family earlier this week. At last count, I had 21 first cousins; I have lost count of how many first cousins-once-removed I have, but it's somewhere in the dozens.)

My brother James and his wife, Sara, are mourning the death of her mother, Linda, after a long illness. Linda lived with James and Sara in the last years of her life, and we took her into our family as she took us into hers. She was kind and funny and optimistic almost to the very end, and her faith was awe-inspiring.

The last couple of months of her life were terrible and terrifying, as so many cancer deaths are. Sara and James, their daughters Gina and Kristan, our brother Ed, our sister Susan and others saw to her needs, drove her to and from doctors' appointments, and in the end sat by and watched, pushing the pain pump so that she could die in peace, surrounded by people she loved.

Last night James and Sara got a condolence visit from Angela, one of the hospice nurses who had tended to Linda in the last months. This lovely woman came on her own time, after a full day's work, partly to mourn but partly to celebrate Linda's struggle, which Linda believed (and I believe) would end in a homecoming. Sara and Angela talked about one of Angela's colleagues, who had also been a great help, but has quit the hospice service because she just couldn't do it anymore.

"I don't know how you do it," said James. Angela (I swear I'm not making that name up) must hear that all the time, but it's true, because the hospice service here is nearly overwhelmed, and will be increasingly so as the baby boomers age. The nursing shortage is more than a decade old, and although the situation had improved a bit over the last decade, it's about to get a lot worse — a lot worse.

Because let's get serious: could you do that work? I could not. It's hard to imagine who in my circle could, although I know a lot of wonderful people. It's hard enough when it's someone you love; if you've been through it, you know how courage and compassion can fail, how helpless you feel, how exhausting it is, how frankly scary all of this can be. Life is the biological imperative; most of us don't go easily.

It's none of my business how much Angela earns, but apparently the median income for hospice nurses is about $60,000. That's not poverty level, but that shames me. It should shame all of us. No, you can't buy compassion — but God, shouldn't we be rewarding the people who do the hardest work of all, the work that makes us (well, me) shudder and pretend that reading books for a living is work, too?

I have no answers, but this is a conversation we need to be having. Forget missing aircraft, misguided foreign military operations, the latest celebrity divorce, or your outrage about whatever kind of sex people you don't know might be having or not having. We all die. We don't get a choice about that. Who is going to help us on that final journey, and how are we going to pay them?

Many years ago, in a conversation with a friend about my grasshopperish attitude toward money and financial planning, he said, "I'll tell you this: Stephen Spielberg is not going to die in a public hospital ward."

We cannot outsource compassion and care, but we can do a better job of rewarding the people who do it for a living.

Thank you, Angela and all your colleagues. And Linda, safe journey home.

Clean and Clear

This is me.

I don't allow my picture to be taken unless I absolutely cannot avoid it, and this has been true for many years. I feel — yes — shame about what I look like, about the weight I've put on and about the reality of time passing.

I had a short window of about four years, maybe five, in which I was aware that I might be somewhere on the spectrum of what other people considered "pretty." It was intoxicating, though I knew better than to trust it. People who knew me back then will remember my disgusting habit (which embarrasses me to think about, even now) of watching myself in a mirror. Was that me? Was that person me? I didn't know, and I still don't.

Nor have I ever trusted in Cinderella-type transformations: in fancy clothes and/or makeup, I am still my schlumpy self, and always was. I never really had a waist, even when my rib bones showed through my skin. I have Irish legs that drop piano-style right to the ground, without ankles. My feet are absurd, Lego-style rectangles, and the best manicure in the world cannot make my hands look like anything but an aging child's. My hair — well, we've discussed my hair.

For many years, the easiest thing to do about all of this has been to ignore it. It's especially easy in Maine, where common sense calls for as many layers of clothing as you can pile on, and nobody pays attention to what anybody wears, in any case. And I lived — for nine years — in an apartment that did not have a full-length mirror. (No, of course I didn't buy one. Why would I buy one?)

I knew I'd need new clothes when I moved back to D.C., but one of the more painful surprises of moving back to the city has been the omnipresence of mirrors and other reflective surfaces in public places. Conveniently, the loss of peripheral vision means I'm not catching my image out of the corners of my eyes, but sometimes it's just inescapable, and head-on is even more disconcerting. Who is that woman? Do I know her?

Lent started this week, and I began it with something else I haven't done in at least 10 years: I went to Confession. And yes, it was terrifying, but only before I stepped into the stall. Once I sat down with the priest, it was easy, because he was glad to see me and I was glad to be there. The pastor of my church is an older man, a funny man, a man who has seen and forgiven much worse sins than mine — and a man who understands that his job, on behalf of the God we both believe in, is to say, "Welcome home."

So it felt like a strange coincidence — and yes, I'm getting to the point of all of this now — that on Wednesday, the incomparable Laura Lippman posted a photo of herself without makeup to Facebook and Twitter, in order to tell Kim Novak that it was okay to look the way you're supposed to look. She challenged everyone to do the same, and the response has been and continues to be overwhelming.

Erin Mitchell has assembled many of the photos into a video here. Take a few minutes to watch it, and realize what I did: we look like ourselves. It didn't even occur to me to judge how my friends in this video looked, I was just so happy to see them all. I've bookmarked that video and I'm going to watch it whenever I need a little help. Thank you, Laura, and thank you, Erin.

Posting my own photo (above) felt like going to Confession. It cleared me and freed me. No, I don't look the way I wished I did, but it's nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, I can change it if I want to, and maybe I do; I've just finished a three-day whole-foods cleanse that I'll probably adapt for the rest of Lent.

I might even buy a full-length mirror this weekend. (And as I type that I think, but that's just crazy talk.)

February's Reading and a New Word

Lent started this morning, and I learned a new word: metanoia, which in a religious context means "repenting," but in the original Greek means "a transformation of mind."

Despite some recent evidence I've seen to the contrary, I don't believe that human beings are naturally lazy or incurious. Look at any group of kindergarteners; they are busy and they want to know why. Where and how do people lose that? What beats it out of them?

I am busy and I want to know why, although I admit to laziness when I think I can get away with it (seldom, when one bills by the hour). This year I want my reading list to reflect that; last year's reading was too closely tied to my work and my personal preferences. But books, if we let them be, are the most powerful tool of mental transformation available.

I still have to read a lot for work, and thus February's list doesn't include a few things I read for clients. But it's more eclectic than usual, and I'm happy about that. Here's to metanoia, not just for Lent.

What I Read in February

Greg Herren, FASHION VICTIM. Although I prefer paper books (hardcover or paperback), I'm not above the temptations of cheap or free downloads. I'm mildly embarrassed that it took a free download for me to read one of Greg's books, because he is a hilarious and thoughtful person and rather intimidatingly prolific. FASHION VICTIM is a romp, a light-hearted mystery that introduces magazine writer Paige Tourneur, who has secrets of her own. The next best thing to a weekend in New Orleans.

Chuck Wendig, BLACKBIRDS. Chuck Wendig is another prolific author whose books I hadn't read yet; I meant to read this last year, but finally got to it because it too was a cheap download. (Yes, I bought from independent booksellers this month, too.) It's the first in a trilogy about Miriam, who can see how people die. Most people have it coming, as Clint Eastwood says in Unforgiven, but when Miriam meets a rare good guy and realizes that his imminent death may be her own fault, everything changes. I am impatient to read the second and third books in this trilogy.

John Straley, COLD STORAGE, ALASKA. The advance readers' copy of this book traveled in the front seat of my car for most of November and December because it was always the book I was going to read next. When the hardcover arrived, I could not put it off any longer, and I was glad I didn't. Cold Storage, Alaska is a tiny fishing/canning town on the Alaskan coast, hundreds of miles from anywhere. Miles McCahon, the town's physician assistant, has mixed feelings about his brother Clive coming home after a prison term. Clive's showing up with a strange dog and a lot of unexplained cash doesn't make Miles feel any better. People might compare this book to Carl Hiaasen, but Straley's voice is his own, and his view of human nature is far more loving and generous. COLD STORAGE, ALASKA made me homesick for Maine.

Dorothea Benton Frank, THE LAST ORIGINAL WIFE. I wanted to like this book. I really did. I loved the first chapter, in which we meet Leslie Carter, who is contemplating ending her marriage of 30 years, and has no compunctions about asking a well-preserved stranger for a referral to her plastic surgeon. Leslie's husband Wesley deserves to be left, no doubt, but Leslie herself is so one-dimensional and self-absorbed that I didn't care whether she'd find true love with her high-school sweetheart. And a howling timeline error — ten missing years — told me nobody read this book very closely before it was tossed to the public. Books like these give fuel to every jerk who looks down on "women's fiction."

Clive Cussler with Grant Blackwood, SPARTAN GOLD. Since I don't take vacations, this book was a great substitute. Professional adventurers Sam and Remi Fargo stumble upon a German mini-submarine in a Maryland swamp, which turns out to be linked to a relic of a broken wine bottle that may have been part of Napoleon's lost cellar. Of course an international supervillain has been searching for this lost cellar, and will do anything to track it down — so Sam and Remi start a chase of their own, from the Caribbean to the Riviera, with Ukrainian strongman Hadeon Bondaruk and his henchman on their heels. I learned a lot from this book, and it was perfect airplane reading, as it let me imagine I was flying to Monaco instead of to JFK.

Dyan Cannon, DEAR CARY: My Life with Cary Grant. I love celebrity memoirs, and I refuse to call them a guilty pleasure. I just want the celebrities to remember something interesting. This charming memoir is fascinating and not a little sad, and would be even if the two people involved hadn't been movie stars. Dyan Cannon was 23 and, by her own account, oddly innocent when she met Cary Grant, who was 58 and had already been divorced three times. Their age difference was so extreme that it took her a while to realize he was courting her, and then even longer to realize he had no intention of marrying her. When she made it clear that she wanted to be married, he agreed, but they might have been better off going their separate ways. Cannon is direct and honest about almost everything, including Grant's LSD use and her own drug abuse, but her casual references to "purging" made me wish she'd been more open about her eating disorder, if that's what it was.

Frank Langella, DROPPED NAMES. Yes, I read two of these in one weekend, immobile on the couch with a sinus infection. It was all I could handle. This book is a feast of anecdotes about Langella's encounters with some of the most famous people of the last century. He met everybody, and slept with a lot of them: Noel Coward, Rita Hayworth, John F. Kennedy, Yvonne DeCarlo, and on and on. With one exception, everyone he talks about in this book has died; even the last survivor, Bunny Mellon, is no longer able to contradict him. But Langella is insightful, even as he's being brutally honest. His portrait of Anthony Perkins is loving (though coy; he hints at experimentation with men, but confesses nothing), and his description of his flirtation with Elizabeth Taylor is wistful and compassionate. He also makes no bones about being a complete monster in his own right — but what a life, what a book.

Saira Shah, THE MOUSE-PROOF KITCHEN. I read this book in one long insomniac night, and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. Anna, an ambitious London chef, is married to Tobias, a scattered but talented composer. Their first child is born with birth defects so severe that both Anna and Tobias consider leaving the baby at the hospital, and never bringing her home at all. Instead, they buy a ramshackle farmhouse in rural France, and try to make something out of their shattered dreams. Saira Shah herself has a child with profound disabilities, which makes any criticism I have of this novel feel like criticism of the author's own parenting, although Shah has emphasized in every interview that she and her partner are not Anna and Tobias. The book sometimes feels almost too honest, but Anna and her family are saved by the intervention of characters who feel a little too much like "magical natives," and I'm not sure I bought the ending. Like all good books, it told me things about myself I might not have wanted to know.

Laura Lippman, AFTER I'M GONE. I was a fan of Laura Lippman's books before I met her, and am grateful to call her a friend. Even so, this is quite possibly her best book, which is saying something. Small-time gangster Felix Brewer disappears on July 4, 1976, but this book isn't about that. It's about what happens after he's gone — to his wife, Bambi; to their three daughters; but most of all to his girlfriend Julie, who disappears herself ten years later, only to be found in an advanced state of decomposition in 2001. Sandy Sanchez, a retired Baltimore detective who works cold cases for extra money, decides to look into what happened to Julie, and Lippman takes us through the 30+ years of the Brewer women's lives without Felix. Every character here is starring in her own life story, and the truth turns out to be something that happened while they were doing that — in fiction, as in film, as in life, so much is about whatever you happen to be looking at, at any given moment. No, I'm not going to explain that any further. Just read this book.

It's Only a Car

I need to get rid of my car.

This is not a surprise. By the time I left Maine I had already stopped driving at night if I could help it, and the availability of public transportation was a major reason for moving back to the big city. I love public transportation. Last Friday I took the Metro, cabs, and a shuttle bus to get all over the city, as my car sat unused on the lowest floor of an underground garage. I go days without even thinking about my car, though I'm still paying to insure it and it costs me $100/month to park it. Giving up the car should be a no-brainer.

So why isn't it? Why can't I even talk about getting rid of my car without starting to cry?

Foolishly, I thought I'd skipped my midlife crisis, or had it early by running off to Los Angeles in 1999, and then to Maine in 2004. I was always precocious that way, and congratulated myself that I did not need to have a midlife crisis, as I had never envisioned my life in terms of the goals that other people work toward (spouse, children, career, home-ownership, etc.), and therefore felt no corresponding anticlimax. I had gone from one career to another without any plans at all, I told myself. As long as I stay healthy I'll never have to retire, and I've never kept score the way most people do anyway. Yay me!

But here it is, and here I am, and here is this car, the last car I'll ever own, my own personal memento mori.

It's kind of stupid that the car is what's brought me here, because I never even wanted to drive. My Grandmother McLaughlin never learned how, which has become something of a family legend. I mean, she was a 20th-century woman; she died (much too young) in 1971.  I never got the chance to ask my mother, but would like to ask my aunt and uncles exactly how that worked. Even with deliveries, wouldn't she have been trapped at home? Or was she agoraphobic (one of several tendencies that run down multiple branches of my family)?

I wasn't agoraphobic, nor am I. I just didn't want to drive, and when I was 15, it seemed absurd that anyone would expect me to. It still seems absurd that we ask 15-year-olds to manage control of a multi-ton moving object. Sixteen is a ridiculously young age for a driver's license, and most American drivers (including me) get their licenses with the bare minimum of physical and mental skills required to operate an extremely dangerous piece of machinery. I was not, am not, a skillful driver. I have managed not to cause anyone personal injury. That's not a high standard.

My first car was an impulse buy, in my mid-20s. I was living in the outer suburbs, and needed a car. A friend in the Foreign Service had a colleague who was leaving the country and needed to sell her car cheap. I got what I paid for: a 10-year-old brown Mercury Lynx that had never been maintained and died on the street about three weeks after I acquired it.

My next car was a new car, and heavy with symbolism. It was a Saturn, the union-built model from Tennessee that was supposed to save the American car industry. I bought a four-door sedan, because I was dating someone I thought I might marry, and it seemed practical to buy a car that would eventually accommodate a car seat. The relationship ended within weeks of my buying the car; although breaking up wasn't my idea, in retrospect I think the car showed me that I didn't need him. That car lasted seven years — longer, or at least more stable, than any romantic relationship I've had — and took me across the country to Los Angeles, where I sold it to a friend because everyone knows you can't drive a stick shift in L.A.

The current car, the Blueberrymobile, was purchased new in Santa Monica after a legitimate, well-reasoned search (assisted by my cousins Sheila and Moira). The travails and triumphs of that car are well-known to longtime readers of this blog. Suffice to say that although I have not always been the most responsible owner, the car has gotten me from West to East, from North to South, and has earned a good long rest.

The car is just a car. But it's also my personal history, my independence, and my optimism. Giving it up means acknowledging that I will, in the foreseeable future, become less mobile, less independent, less free and eventually dead. This is not a tragedy; this is life. I've been extraordinarily lucky to have everything I've had for as long as I've had it — and most of all I want the dignity of not being the last to know I need to get off the road.

So: For Sale. 2000 VW Beetle, approximately 156,000 miles, one owner. Any reasonable offer considered.

My Month of Women's Fiction

Somewhere in the third week of January I became aware that except for my clients' work, everything I'd read since the beginning of the year was a novel written by a woman. Nothing about this was deliberate; these just happened to be the books I wanted to read, and they all just happened to be written by women.

Reasons for reading are as numerous and varied as humans themselves. Whatever other motives I might have, entertainment always comes first. I no longer finish books I don't enjoy — that's a privilege I claim in middle age — so although I enjoyed some of these books more than others, you can take this as a set of recommendations.

What I Read in January

Rebecca Chance, BAD ANGELS. "Rebecca Chance" is the glamorous alter ego of novelist Lauren Milne Henderson. Lauren writes crime, while Rebecca writes what she calls "bonk-busters," epic novels of love and money in the tradition of Judith Krantz and Jacqueline Susann. It had been way too long since I'd read a book like this, and it was perfect for New Year's Day: a Christmas-themed romantic thriller set in a Canary Wharf apartment that houses people recovering from plastic surgery. Fabulous, darling.

Louise Penny, A TRICK OF THE LIGHT. I'd stopped reading Penny's Inspector Gamache series after a book I felt did not play fair with its characters or the reader. I returned to this book because the story revolves around my favorite character in the series, the middle-aged artist Clara Morrow, whose professional triumph is obscured by the murder of a woman who turns out to be a long-estranged friend. Penny settles for no easy answers here, and the murder mystery is secondary to the more complex mysteries of envy, love, professional jealousy, addiction, forgiveness and redemption. It was good to be back in Three Pines.

Joanna Trollope, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. This book almost got a blog post all by itself, and I may yet come back to it. This is the first book in The Austen Project, a contemporary reworking of Jane Austen's novels by some of today's best writers. Trollope's always an entertaining read, but even her skills can't disguise the failure of The Austen Project's premise. The financial and social pressures that drove Austen's characters were entirely different from those today's women face. In simply importing Austen's story to the present day, Trollope makes her characters (with the exception of Elinor) behave in ways that challenged belief and tried my patience. That said, I'm very curious about what Val McDermid does with the second book in the project, NORTHANGER ABBEY.

P. L. Travers, MARY POPPINS. "Saving Mr. Banks" sent me back to this book, which I'd loved as a child. It's as good as I remembered it, especially the sequence in which the infant twins lose their ability to talk to the birds. That made me cry when I first read it, and I still grieve over my own lost ability to converse with birds.

Joelle Charbonneau, THE TESTING. The first book in Charbonneau's trilogy for young adults introduces Cia Vale, who desperately wants to be one of the handful of students chosen for higher education in a future society devastated by war. Only the strongest and most intelligent can pass The Testing, which involves more than Cia can imagine. Yes, it has a lot in common with THE HUNGER GAMES, but Charbonneau's dystopia is interesting, and the story speeds like a rocket.

Joyce Carol Oates, THE ACCURSED. Another book that could have a blog post to itself, the story of one doomed year in the life of a prominent Princeton, New Jersey family during the time of Woodrow Wilson's presidency of Princeton. I started this last summer, but could not give it the attention it deserved, and had to return it to the library before I could finish it. After I downloaded a copy when it went on sale for Kindle, I spent every free moment for a week finishing it. Stephen King called it "E. L. Doctorow’s ‘Ragtime’ set in Dracula’s castle," and I can't describe it better than that. It is an epic, sprawling historical novel about class distinctions and suppressed desires and Jungian monsters, and I'd take a class on it if anyone wanted to teach one.

Alison Gaylin, REALITY ENDS HERE. Gaylin's first novel for young adults is the story of Estella Blanchard, half-sister of the famous Blanchard sextuplets and co-star of one of TV's most popular reality shows. When Estella gets a Christmas present that seems to be from her father, who died ten years earlier, she is overwhelmed by the thought that he might still be alive. Her quest for the truth shakes everything she thinks she knows about her family, even behind the scenes. Estella is a terrific character, and the descriptions of the mechanics of the TV show are fascinating.

Charlotte Jay, BEAT NOT THE BONES. The very first winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel was this second novel by an Australian writer whose real name was Geraldine Halls. BEAT NOT THE BONES is a deceptively simple book about a young widow's trip to New Guinea in an effort to prove that her husband, New Guinea's Chief Anthropologist, did not commit suicide. Her quest for the truth takes her deep into the jungle, to discover truths as horrifying as anything Joseph Conrad ever wrote.

Susan Wittig Albert, THE DARLING DAHLIAS AND THE TEXAS STAR. A charming cozy mystery set in Darling, Alabama in the 1930s, just as the effects of the Depression settle in. The Dahlias are the town's gardening club, and the Texas Star is a daredevil female pilot whose arrival in town wreaks havoc in more ways than one.

Joshilyn Jackson, SOMEONE ELSE'S LOVE STORY.  Single mother Shandi Pierce falls in love with William Ashe after they are held up at gunpoint in a gas station outside Atlanta. William's mourning the loss of his wife and daughter, and Shandi thinks he holds the answers to all her questions. As it turns out, she may not be asking the right questions, and the answers she gets will be not the ones she wants but the ones she needs. A lovely, lovely book about people stumbling toward redemption. I can't explain how or why this felt like exactly the right book at the right time, but it did.

Sue Monk Kidd, THE INVENTION OF WINGS. I didn't read this because Oprah's chosen it for her Book Club 2.0, but I understand why she did. It's a gorgeous historical saga about the lifelong bond between Sarah Grimke and Hetty, the slave girl given to her as a personal maid on Sarah's 11th birthday. Sarah Grimke and her sister, Angelina, were real-life pioneers of the abolition movement. THE INVENTION OF WINGS imagines the journey that took them there, while also telling the story from Hetty's point of view. Brilliantly constructed, beautifully written, inspiring.

Saying Yes, Saying No and the Tragedy of Humanity

I say yes a lot. It's overcompensation for a temperament that is pathologically change-averse, and would gladly go nowhere and do nothing and stay in my bedroom reading the books people sent me until I ran out of food. (I do run out of food on a regular basis, so at least I'd go out sometimes. Although now I live in Peapod country, so maybe not.)

Saying yes has been a mostly winning strategy. It's gotten me into a certain amount of trouble, but it's also let me have a pretty fabulous life. I know a lot of interesting people and I've watched, if not actually done, a lot of interesting things. I told my boss 25 years ago that I wanted to learn as much as I could about as many different things as I could, and I've been able to pursue that goal pretty well.

Over the past week, however, I've had a few too many reminders that you can't say yes to everything, and it's not a good idea to try. Adulthood is all about knowing when and how to say no, and what to say no to — because if you can't do it for yourself, the universe will damn well do it for you.

I didn't know Philip Seymour Hoffman, except in the way that we all knew Philip Seymour Hoffman. Because didn't you feel like you knew Philip Seymour Hoffman? I did. He was close to my own age, and he looked like someone I might be related to. He talked like someone I might be related to, about things I cared about and was interested in. He felt like a member of my tribe, the group of people trying to figure out how and who to be in this world.

Yesterday afternoon, like everyone else, I wanted to believe that the news of his death was a hoax. A cruel, horrifying hoax would be better than what the truth turned out to be. A 46-year-old man died, leaving three small children and a partner and a world of people who loved him but could not give him whatever it was he needed.

Humans are small, and the universe is vast beyond our imagination. We have such a narrow window on things, and such a short time to be here. The Internet Movie Database says that Philip Seymour Hoffman played 63 different screen roles in less than 25 years, and that doesn't count his iconic stage performances or the plays and movies he produced and directed. He said yes to everything. In doing so he got to live so many lives that were far, far from the reality of his daily life — but he lost his footing in the life that mattered most, the daily struggle to connect with the live human beings who had the right to expect his presence and his engagement.

It's hard to know whether addiction was the cause or the effect of that, and it doesn't really matter. Addiction might start as a yes to a new and interesting experience, but continue as an easy way to say no when you don't know how to do it otherwise — to step out, to turn off, to shut down, to absent oneself from care a while. The drug says no, so you don't have to.

I turned down a project last week for the first time in a few years. I wasn't right for it, and it wasn't right for me. I might say no to a few other things this week. Saying no terrifies me because it feels like holding myself separate from something (or someone) that might need me, and if no one needs me, why am I here? But this is the constant battle, this is the fight of humans on this planet — the quest for that point of equilibrium at which we can say yes to enough to connect, while saying no to enough to stay whole.

Philip Seymour Hoffman couldn't find that point. Maybe none of us can. But today, while I travel up to New York City, I might watch Magnolia again.

The State of the Union

My first January in Los Angeles, I asked one of my cousins where people were getting together to watch the State of the Union address. She said something like, "People watch the State of the Union address?"

Last night, for my first State of the Union in the DC area in 14 years, I went to pub trivia with Claire and Zach and their friend Tristan, and I read the speech online this morning.

The problem is, we agreed over bacon cheese fries and Irish beer, that the President is never honest about the true State of the Union. If he were honest, the speech would have gone something like this:

My fellow Americans,

The state of our union is baffled, angry and sad. We don't understand why we can't have everything we want even though most of us spend at least four hours a day watching TV, and another two playing Candy Crush. We look around and see obnoxious young bro-types earning six figures while our friends who are teachers haven't gotten a raise in five years, and we live in fear of our own job skills becoming obsolete and unnecessary.

You elected me because you hoped the country could be different and better, but you forgot the part where that meant its citizens could be different and better, too. It's just easier to blame everybody else, and the government is being torn apart between people who think it shouldn't exist at all and people who think it's capable of doing far more than it can. And nobody wants to pay for it.

It's easier to be outraged than to be empathetic. It's easier to point to other people's shortcomings than it is to look at what each of us could be doing differently as individuals. The ugly truth of life in a human community is that stuff tends to go to the people who want it most and are willing to fight dirtiest for it. We know that's true about ourselves; our founders knew it, too. That was why they set up a government that was supposed to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

Well, we're doing pretty well at providing for the common defense. I guess. Nobody can agree on what "promoting the general welfare" means, and as for the blessings of liberty — well, explain to me the logic of a political party that wants government out of people's business, on the one hand, but insists on setting rules about who individuals can marry and what women do with their bodies, on the other. Explain to me the rhetoric of "saving" children yet unborn while cutting off support for their food, shelter and education once they're here. I don't get it. I really don't. Everybody counts, or no one does.

Our Constitution guarantees all citizens the right to worship, but some people seem to think that only applies to one religion. I'm here to tell you that the Constitution protects your right to worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster, if you believe in that, and it is not the business of any government organization to make anyone uncomfortable about what they do or don't believe.

Government of the people, by the people, for the people is what our country is supposed to be about. Government is not supposed to be something separate from us. It's a citizen's republic that requires everyone who cares about it to participate. It's not a perfect system, but our government is not the enemy, and we have the power to change it if we want to.

Some people are never going to like me. They might have good reasons, they might have bad reasons, but that's just the way it is. It's probably true that I wasn't ready to be President, but let's be honest: who is ready to be President? Can you name one single person who's really equipped to handle this job — with the possible exception of Bill Clinton, who's only equipped because he spent eight years learning how? It doesn't matter whether I was ready five years ago. The country was ready for me and what I represented, and that's a hopeful thing. It's still a hopeful thing. And here I am, and I'm what you've got, so deal with it. Let me do the job I was elected to do.

Democracy is messy — or, to be more precise, participatory government in a federal constitutional republic is messy. Change takes time. It's actually for the best that change takes time, because change is always traumatic, and meaningful change always means that somebody has to lose something. It's going to hurt, but isn't it better to take the pain now than leave it to our children to suffer even more? 

So my fellow Americans, what I ask of you today is to stop yelling. Stop assuming that everyone who disagrees with you is stupid or greedy or unpatriotic. Our neighbors are not our enemies. We're all Americans. Let's remember what that's supposed to mean.

God bless us all, and God bless the United States of America.

Of course, since I myself spent last night drinking beer and arguing about the correct spelling of "Mohandas," I recognize that I have become part of the problem.

As it was, we came in second, and got $20 off our bar tab.

Secrets, Lies and Things That Just Aren't Anyone Else's Business

I'm good at secrets. I kept a lot of secrets for a lot of years, not only my own but other people's as
well. I still keep a lot of other people's secrets. I am trying, within the context of not boring people into paralysis, to keep a few less of my own.

In this new world of 24-hour social media, not everybody needs to know everything about everyone else, and we're certainly under no obligation to share the intimate details of our lives. But deciding not to share something is not the same thing as keeping a secret. I've been thinking a lot lately about where the line between privacy and secrecy falls.

As best I can tell, the line is a lie.

Let us say, for example, that you are having dinner with an ex, and would prefer not to tell your best friend about it, because your best friend will tell you (kindly and truthfully) that this is a bad idea. So your best friend calls, and you have a long conversation, and you just don't mention that you're going to be seeing That Person, because why would you even get into it?

The way I figure it, this is secret-adjacent. It didn't come up, you didn't mention it, and if the dinner really is innocent, there won't be anything to tell except that you saw That Person and it was fine.

It becomes a secret when your best friend says, "What are you doing tonight?" and you tell a lie. Because lies are like potato chips: no one can ever stop at one. The first lie creates the need for a second, and a third, and a whole fabric of conceit that winds up changing your friendship, if only in the subtlest of ways. A lie is the compounding of a secret, because lies have to be secret, too. Do it long enough, and eventually you don't remember what the truth was in the first place.

The easy reaction, then, is to say, "No secrets, no lies." But the mechanics of human relationships don't allow that. Sometimes, to avoid hurting someone you love, or to save something important, you really do have to keep a secret. Sometimes you really do have to lie — as long as you don't allow yourself to forget the truth. (For further discussion, I refer everyone to Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh.)

As I navigate my new less-secret life, though, I reserve the right to say, "I'd rather not talk about that," and I will do my best to take it as a complete answer from the people around me.

Heroes and Martyrs

he·ro

noun \ˈhir-(ˌ)ō\

: a person who is admired for great or brave acts or fine qualities
: a person who is greatly admired

: the chief male character in a story, play, movie, etc.

mar·tyr

noun \ˈmär-tər\

: a person who is killed or who suffers greatly for a religion, cause, etc.

I saw The Hunger Games: Catching Fire over the weekend. Great movie, in some ways even better than the book, and the popularity of both the books and the movies has fueled an entire mini-industry of dystopian fiction in which teenaged heroes and heroines fight for survival.

That's not a new thing, though. The heroes of ancient mythology were almost all teenagers (and mostly male, but not always). Teenagers want the opportunity to dare greatly and achieve great things, and all of us who used to be teenagers remember that longing, if we haven't beaten it out of ourselves. 

We all want the opportunity to be great, to do something massively meaningful – don't we? We all want to find some version of the hero's journey, to be the central characters in our own monomyth. 

It's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which is a good day to think about the realities of the hero's journey. The danger of turning Dr. King into a historical icon is that it lets us forget what everyday heroism looks like. We focus on the great events — the Montgomery bus boycott, the March on Washington, that last rally at Mason Temple in Memphis. Those were extraordinary and spectacular events that allowed an extraordinary man to rise to the occasion, but if we take our impression of King's heroism from those public events alone, we are missing the point in a major way.

The real heroism happens offstage. Dr. King married Coretta Scott in 1953, and they had their first child in 1955, only weeks before the bus boycott began. Three more children followed, in 1957, 1961, and 1963, a stretch of time in which Dr. King was arrested, harassed, subjected to government surveillance, openly jeered and constantly under threat of physical attack. He didn't go from rally to rally or speech to speech. He was working every day on the process of change, which terrified and infuriated so many people, and in the midst of all that he was also trying to have something that resembled a normal family life.

And that's where the heroism is, that's what separates someone like Martin Luther King, Jr. — or indeed, like Coretta Scott King — from me. I hope and believe that given the opportunity to make a one-time sacrifice for something or someone I cared about, I'd do that. (I actually hope and believe that I already have.) But living with that kind of persecution and fear on a daily basis is a sacrifice I doubt I could make. Frankly, I hope I'm never asked for it — but as I type that I suspect that I am, that we all are, and we choose to ignore those demands every day.

Good people live among us. Heroes live among us. It's good to have this day to remind us of what that means, and of what we might yet aspire to. 

 

All Time and No Time

We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.

— The Stage Manager, Our Town by Thorton Wilder

I have a lot to do today. A lot to do in a confined stretch of time: people are waiting for things, I have deadlines, both real and inferred. Other people's impatience makes me anxious to the point of paralysis, which is obviously counterproductive. Time is the currency of my life: I measure it out not in coffee spoons but in billable hours.

We don't get a lot of time, here on earth. Eighty years, maybe — more if we're lucky, less if we're not. We hoard it and we count it down and we obsess over it by marking anniversaries of one kind or another. Do we mark anniversaries because we are afraid that we might otherwise forget?

Mom died eight years ago today. I went to Mass this morning and lit a candle, even though it's not as if I don't think of her every single day. She's gone, but she's not gone. She remains a constant presence in my life, and I still talk to her all the time, even if I never hear anything back. I am not sure what marking the anniversary does for me or for her. I just knew that I needed to do it.

Because my time continues, even if her time does not — and as I thought about that this morning, I finally understood that eternity is not a stretch of time longer than we can imagine. It is no time at all. No beginning, no end, therefore no need to count down or keep track the way humans do. It is whole and all-encompassing. And we, with our endless scorekeeping and time sheets, pay hardly any attention to that at all.

Maybe we can't. It's too distracting. What would happen to the earth if we were all Zen monks, renouncing physical needs and focused on eternity? Food would not be grown, houses would not get built, books would not get written or edited. We do those things because we need to and we like to. I like scrambled eggs and hand-tied rugs and novels. I am not ready for eternity, not yet. None of my clients are, either.

But I suspect (and hope) that Mom really loves it.

Change your life, change your hairstyle. Or is it the other way around?

Mr. H has horrible hair. Mr. H was one of the Letter People, an alphabet-teaching tool my younger sisters and brothers brought home from kindergarten. All the letters had people attached to them, but Mr. H is the only one I remember. (Click that link to see the rest of them. Mr M and his munching mouth ring a bell, but I feel certain I never knew about Miss I and her itch. In fact, I'm sorry I know about Miss I and her itch now.)

Anyway, Mr. H stayed with me because we have similar hair issues. It is not an exaggeration to say that I have spent 48 years in search of a low-maintenance hairstyle that gives people the possibly incorrect impression that I am a congenial, responsible, attractive member of the society I have chosen.

I could embarrass myself by posting photographs of various hairstyles I have experimented with over the years, but I will not. In early childhood, my hair was so dark it was almost black, and absolutely straight. Over the years it lightened up naturally, and started to wave, which I proceeded to help with various over-the-counter chemicals. The Bernice-style bob in 10th grade was a bad mistake; the curly perm in the mid-'80s was another. The Los Angeles-era highlights were great, but I couldn't afford them. The long, back-to-the-woods hair of Maine made a DC-area friend say, when I took her to breakfast at The Porthole, "Well, at least now I know why you look the way you do."

My sister Peggy took me to her hairdresser in September, during a weekend in which I made several life-changing decisions. Having most of my hair cut off felt like part of that process. It was liberating. It made me want to have even more cut off, so I'm doing that this afternoon. In all seriousness, I'm bringing the hairdresser a photo of Emma Thompson at the Golden Globes, and saying, "Make my hair look like that."

I can tell you right now how this conversation is going to go.

Hairdresser: Uh — I don't think your hair will do that.
Me: Maybe not, but can you try?
Hairdresser: I'll see what I can do. It's going to take a lot of product.

About an hour later, I will emerge from the salon with a bag full of hairstyling products I'll have no idea how to use, and a haircut that will look great until my next shower. But I will feel good about having made the effort, and I might even take some pictures so people can see what it was supposed to look like.

Because it's not about the result, it's about the journey. As Mr. H and I both know:

Mr. H has horrible hair.
Haircuts are too much
for him to bear.
His hair is horrid
and always a mess;
But he is quite happy
that way, I guess.

Five Good Things about Tuesdays

Now that the blog is up and running again, I feel obligated to post daily even if I have nothing particularly insightful to say. But it's much like nightly news broadcasts: there's always something to say, even if it's just a human interest story.

Tuesday is, according to the people who study these things, the busiest day of the week. In fact, they've sliced it even finer: apparently 11:45 on a Tuesday morning is the most stressful time of the week. But Tuesday is also my favorite day of the week, and this is why:

1. Tuesday is trivia night. At least it is at The Liberal Cup, central Maine's finest brewpub, and at Nanny O'Brien's in Cleveland Park, and at Samuel Beckett's in Shirlington, and probably someplace close to you as well. Why is that? Because otherwise it would be a slow night for your neighborhood watering hole. (And actually, The Liberal Cup's trivia night is on winter break until next month. But if you're in the area, you should go there anyway.)

2. Airfares are cheaper on Tuesday mornings. I got that tip from my friend Karen E. Olson, who used to be a travel editor, and I have found it to be true. Last Tuesday morning I booked a round-trip flight to New York for $146.

3. Tuesday has good theme songs for both the morning AND the afternoon.

First, "Tuesday Morning" by The Pogues:


And then, "Tuesday Afternoon" by The Moody Blues:



The field's still open if you want to write a song about Tuesday night.

4. New books AND new records come out on Tuesday. Today, Rosanne Cash and Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings have new albums out, both of which I covet. If the weather holds, I will drive over to One More Page Bookstore tonight for the launch of THE DESCENT by Alma Katsu, even though Martha Grimes is at Politics & Prose tonight, and if I could be in both places, I would. Chances are good that someplace near you has a book event tonight, and/or a record launch. Artists survive by people buying their work, so do your part.

5. Tuesday is ABC to XTC night on RTE 2XM. My friend and client John Connolly, author, raconteur and man-about-town, hosts a weekly Internet radio show that celebrates the punk, post-punk and New Wave music of his (and my) youth. It airs for an hour on Tuesday nights (and again on Saturdays) at 10:00 p.m. Dublin time, which is 5:00 p.m. Eastern time. Through the magic of the Internet you can listen to it anywhere, and pretend that you are 18 again. At least, you can pretend that I am 18 again. I don't know how old you were in 1984.

Five Things I Did Not Know at Saturday Night's Trivia Contest

I took Saturday off. I rarely take a day off, and even this past Saturday I had a few routine tasks for clients, but I realized last week that I'd been here for a month, more or less, and had yet to take advantage of being back in a major metropolitan area.

So I did stuff. Big-city stuff. I got on the Metro and ran some errands. I went up to the Bethesda Library to see Joelle Charbonneau talk about her new YA novel, INDEPENDENT STUDY, and I was impressed by the turnout, which seemed tied to Bethesda's extremely cool Teen Reads program.

From there I went to Mazza Gallerie, where I saw Saving Mr. Banks, a terrific movie that bothered me for reasons I'll probably discuss in a future blog post. (Separately, this week I plan to visit a hairdresser and ask for the same haircut Emma Thompson wore to last night's Golden Globes.)

But after that, I went to Politics & Prose, one of the world's most wonderful bookstores, for its monthly trivia event. The friend I was hoping to meet there didn't show, but some friendly strangers let me join their team.

We did not win, partly because I did not know these five things:

1. The Dickin Medal has been awarded since 1943 to an animal that displays conspicuous gallantry and devotion of duty while serving a branch of the British armed forces. (It was last awarded in 2012 to Theo, a springer spaniel who held the record for most operational finds of explosive devices in Afghanistan. Theo died of a seizure after a firefight that killed his handler, Lance Corporal Liam Tasker.)
2. The world's strongest beer is called Sink the Bismarck, a name it shares with the 1960 film starring Kenneth More.
3. The next year to begin on a Wednesday will be 2025. (To my shame, someone on my team knew this, but I thought I knew better. This is my single biggest failing as both a trivia team member and a human being. I'm working on it.) 
4. The country between Honduras and Costa Rica is Nicaragua. (I really, really need to take a geography class.) 
5. The constellation that used to house the sun during the winter solstice is Capricorn, which was also the symbol of the Babylonian god Ea. (I'll do astronomy after I finish with geography. One planet at a time.)

I like to know things. I like the feeling that I know things. These are very different aspirations, and the challenge is not to let the second get in the way of the first.

Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Access, and MEIN KAMPF

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment I, United States Constitution

Surprise, surprise: Mein Kampf was one of the best-selling political e-books of 2013. It is not protected by copyright, even in translation, and it's widely available for free, though you can also pay a lot of different publishers 99 cents for it. (I wish that everyone would agree that Yad Vashem is the only organization with the right to take any money for it, though they probably wouldn't want to sell it.)

If you were looking to ban some books, Mein Kampf would be a logical place to start. Instead, Mein Kampf is Exhibit A for the value of the First Amendment, and why it's never a good idea to ban any book, no matter how offensive its content.

I have not read Mein Kampf, but had I continued to study German history, I definitely would have read at least parts of it. I probably would have read parts of it if I'd stayed in political communications, and I might eventually take a look at it just on general principles. Like The Quotations of Chairman Mao (which I have read big excerpts from, in translation), it's a document that made a disproportionate impact on a vast number of people. It's important to know what's in it, and understand how the rantings of a racist megalomaniac could have captured the imaginations of entire nations. The Nazi propaganda machine was one of the most effective in history. Anyone who wants to block similar movements in the future needs to understand how the first one worked.

It's also important to keep hateful literature available because of the confirmation bias phenomenon I wrote about earlier this week. If hate speech is suppressed, the rational non-haters cannot speak against it in public forums. Suppressed speech doesn't go away; instead, it oozes into corners, it collects underground, it seeps to the edges of society and is cherished by people who love secrets and conspiracies and already believe they are persecuted. It builds up under pressure and explodes when good people least expect it, because it was all happening somewhere we couldn't see it.

Did the "Duck Dynasty" guy have a right to say hateful, stupid things about African-Americans and gay people? Yes, he did. Did A&E have a right to fire him for being an embarrassing ignoramus? Yes, they did. That was never a First Amendment issue. But is our society damaged by giving him back his television show? No, I don't think so, because it's no bad thing to remember that he speaks for a lot of other ignorant, delusional people. His continued presence in the public eye keeps the conversation going. Since he's on the wrong side of history, that conversation can't do anything but embarrass him and A&E more. I wasn't watching "Duck Dynasty" anyway.

How Do You Know When You're Being a Bully?

"It's not my fault being the biggest and the strongest. I don't even exercise." 

— Fezzik the Giant

I grew up with four younger brothers and sisters. I was a bully. I know that I was, despite my mother's best efforts. I felt angry and powerless in a house where everyone competed for time and attention, and my younger siblings were easy targets for all my rage. I was not powerless over them. I'm sorry about that; I think I've apologized over the years, and the dynamics between us have changed. But the memory of punching my two-year-old brother in the stomach (I was six) still haunts my early-morning hours.

Watching Governor Chris Christie on TV this morning reminded me that this power imbalance is the key to bullying. Not every act of meanness is bullying. To be a bully is to threaten someone who lacks the ability to defend himself or herself, for whatever reason. They might be smaller, older, younger, physically frailer, less wealthy, less knowledgeable, less influential — or, in a group situation, outnumbered.

A lifetime of policing my own tendencies (not always successfully) and watching other bullies in action has taught me that many, if not most, bullies have no idea that they're bullies. They don't realize how scary they are. They don't see how people react to them, because they have no idea how much more powerful they are than the people they're bullying. Under stress, Chris Christie probably doesn't remember that he is 5'11" and however many pounds and governor of the 11th largest state in the country. He probably doesn't remember that he's got a pretty wife and four kids and two honorary doctorates, or that Bruce Springsteen hugged him. I don't know anything about Chris Christie's childhood, but I'm willing to guess it didn't feel very powerful.

A woman I used to work with terrified our junior colleagues. She had no idea she did this; in her mind, she was still the sweet young thing no one took seriously. Her aggressiveness was merely pushing back against the forces that had conspired to keep her down 20 years earlier, even though those forces had long since been vanquished.

I have caught myself doing the same thing. I am a freelancer who provides a service, and a single woman of a certain age (we don't say "spinster" anymore). My assumption is that in any group dynamic, I'm the beta animal or even the omega. But that's not always true. That ignores the bone-deep privilege I carry as a European-American, as an officer's daughter, as the product of private education and as someone with an IQ that tests above average. Not to mention being taller and larger than most of my peers (though I'm working on the "larger" part). In certain situations, I am intimidating. I can't help it. I can't let myself forget it, either.

Five Steps Toward Joining a Community

Christopher Bea is on his way to a new home in Colorado, and it occurred to me that one thing I know a lot about is how to make a new place home. A few months ago I tallied up all the moves I've made in my life, including summer-housing moves in college, and the total upset me too much to log it here.

It takes a while for any new city to feel like home, but these five steps speed the process. They apply not just to geographic places, but to professional and virtual communities as well. All the usual caveats apply: don't put yourself in danger, and don't put anyone else in danger either. But see if these work for you.

1. Subscribe to and read the local paper. "Local" is the key word. The New York Times doesn't count, although you should read the Times if you live in New York, with particular attention to your own Metro section. Subscribing to the paper gets you on a lot of other mailing lists, which may or may not be useful, and the physical copy of the paper often includes shopping and coupon sections that will help you stock your new home. But most important is that your new local paper is the best way to find out what your neighbors care about and what they do in their spare time. Pay special attention to the letters to the editor, the police blotter and the Calendar features.

2. Get a library card. First, it's free entertainment. Second, it's a hub for civic and community activities of all kinds. Third, it's a crossroads where all demographic groups meet: young, old, rich, poor. At the library, nobody looks out of place. If you're looking for a job, the library's often the best place to start; if nothing else, they have free internet.

3. Find a place to hang out. Everybody needs a safe "third place" that isn't home and isn't work. Find yours. It might be a bar, or a coffee shop, or a diner, or a gym. Sit at the bar or the lunch counter or the communal table. Don't be a creep, but be open to conversations with strangers and go often enough that people get used to seeing you there, and you get used to seeing the other regulars. If it's a bar, coffee shop or other place with service, tip well enough that the servers remember you by name and are glad to see you.

4. Greet your neighbors when you see them, and introduce yourself. Say "Hi, I've just moved in." Don't push; they don't need to hear your whole life story, and they're probably on their way somewhere. But you never know. Once they know you're not an axe murderer (unless you are an axe murderer), you can ask them things — where people go for brunch, maybe, or the best place for a haircut, or how early in the day the mail comes. People like to be recognized as authorities on things they know about.

5. Do something completely new, and possibly out-of-character (within reason). In your new town, nobody knows that you're someone who doesn't eat seafood or never dances in public. So do something you'd never do in the place you came from. Sign up for a yoga class, or ballroom dancing. Go to karaoke night and actually sing. Run a 5K. You can't embarrass yourself, because nobody knows who you are or who you're supposed to be. It's extraordinarily liberating. Take advantage of that, and find out who you are in this new place you're calling home.

And Then What Happened?

Years ago when I was a baby lobbyist (for a nonprofit regulatory association, not the kind that had money to spend), my boss and mentor gave me what might be the most valuable advice I've ever gotten.

"Before you say something," he said, "Think about the response you want."

It's not possible to have both sides of a conversation, and for the most part we shouldn't try. In fact, presuming you know the outcome before you begin is a recipe for disaster. But in anything that resembles a sales pitch — and quite a lot of our daily interactions come down to sales pitches — you have to start by imagining the response you want.

Over the weekend I got a couple of emails from complete strangers who asked me to nominate their books (which I had not heard of, much less read) for prizes at upcoming conventions. I replied politely to the first message, but discarded the other as spam.

What I would like to ask those authors, however, is, "What response did you hope for? What response did you expect? What response would you make to a similar request?" My guess is that the authors in question didn't think this through at all. Which tells me that whatever their other attributes might be, they're probably not great plotters.

Because "And then what happened?" is the question that should carry anyone, writer or reader or watcher, through any kind of story. The hero — the person who wants something, the person on the quest — wants something, and does something to get it or make it happen. And then what happens? Well, someone else wants something different, or does something to block the hero's journey. And then what happens? The hero has to regroup and try something different. And then what happens? Keep asking the question, and eventually you've got a novel (or a screenplay, or a law; choose your own adventure).

It's useful in almost every situation, although if you're not careful, all the different possibilities can paralyze you. As long as you're asking "And then what happened?" you keep moving, until with luck you get to the end: "And they all lived happily ever after."

(But even as a child, I wanted to know: And then what happened?)