Living Above It All

Second Story Woman by Carole Calladine was worthwhile, but wouldn’t have been a commercial success even if published by a national publishing company. I have a great deal of respect for Carole for writing the personal account of having diabetes, sneaking food, not exercising, a body like a melon, and all the other things that happen to people when their weight increases.

Carole takes off for Vegas by herself and learns to look at life differently. She starts writing and taking pictures and gives into it. She starts bicycling and gives into it. She learns about life’s possibilities. She gives up her job that has lots of status for a quieter one. She embraces her life. “A new world opened up. Wings against a blue sky fluttered inside of me singing words of thanksgiving. The freezing robin clinging to the branch had thawed and been freed by the fires lit from within.”

And then she takes care of her weight because she sees life differently. “For my sixtieth birthday, Andy presented me with a new bike with good brakes and two saddlebags. I was excited as any six-year-old with a new set of wheels to ride. The saddlebags have been filled with camera, pens, and paper. The views from my studio, in my journal, from my friends, and from my bike seat would nourish me pulling me out of life’s tight places when I was a cantankerous, old bear. I’d continue to ride, play, and sing my hosannas. The Emerald Necklace beckoned.” Husband Andy wanted to lease part of it but she loved the upstairs’ view of the park. So she lives upstairs and he lives down. She's a second story woman.

No Writer's Block Here--Ask Me for Ideas

Ideas . . . they're too numerous to follow.  I'm working on my memoir, trying to sell my novel and always changing it, and yet, there are ideas--a book on my spirtiual journey, a collection of short stories on working in Cleveland, another wineries book, the stories of my ancestors.  And yet, I had another one at dinner with other writers. My idea is to take a black girl who grew up in the black ghetto in the 1960s and have her have a white boyfriend and somehow she ends up being sterilized because of fear she’d make wrong choices, but she doesn’t find out until it’s 1980 and she’s 25 and married that she was sterilized. She’s struggled to be part of white society and it hasn’t been easy, and now she hates them and can’t believe she ever loved one. Her best friend is white, the boyfriend’s sister, and she remembers her girlfriend’s role in the event that led to her sterilization. The thing is, can I be black? My initial idea had been to take it from a white girl’s perspective and have all the same things happen, but would a white girl be sterilized? Maybe, in the KKK times. I think it would be hard for me to write as the black girl.

If You Want to be a Writer, Write

That column by Plain Dealer's Regina Brett was next to my computer for years, and it appeared in a compilation of Regina Brett's quotes in  God Never Blinks.
Brett has important things to say about real things that happen to people, to everyone, and things that change people’s lives, like getting abused or raped—she says “your sexual identity is stolen. You don’t get to gradually come of age. When someone else’s sexuality is forced on you, it stunts your own growth. I spent my adult life trying to please a man by doing all the things I guessed he wanted, but I didn’t have a clue as to what made me feel good.” I can use that in my book, I think.

At the end of chapter 10, which made me cry because her Uncle Paul had a sad life and raised a child who was disabled and died young, she said “He’d be the first to say God never gives us more than we were designed to carry. Some of us were designed for more, some for less. No matter what, even if we are asked to carry a portion of sky, it is beyond bearable. It is gift.”

In the chapter “Make Peace with Your Past so it Doesn’t Screw up the Present,” Brett talks about how to get unstuck. First you have to know you’re stuck She said for her, if her “emotions don’t match what just happened, it’s about my childhood. I’ve learned to freeze the moment, just like you would pause a movie, and ask: Wait. Is this reaction about the present moment? Or is it about the past? I can’t change the past. But by changing my response to its leftovers, I can change the present.”

Then there are the sage thoughts in Lesson 29, “What Other People Think of You is none of Your Business,” when she wrote about what readers had to say about her, and her boss at the Beacon Journal asked her if she would be upset if someone called her a chair and she said she’s not a chair and he asked her if she knew whether she was a whore (which someone called her). She goes on to say “Perpetual quietness of the heart. That’s what I truly want underneath all those things I think I want. To be at rest when nobody praises me. That is true freedom.”

She says we should have a personal mission statement upon which you would truly base your life. She concludes that “I am simply a child of God, as valuable and treasured as every other child of God. Not the best, not the worst, and it doesn’t matter a whit what anyone thinks of me.”

The Blue Shoe

Anne Lamott’s Blue Shoe was so much fun to listen to on tape because it was clearly written and well read. I’m a huge Anne Lamott fan, and it was really cool that we watched the documentary about her when we were in Lakeside last weekend. Her story of dealing with single motherhood and alcoholism is one of finding strength within and becoming a good and peaceful person. That’s what Mattie Ryder’s story is about too. Mattie is the newly-divorced mother of two living in her mother’s home with lots of unanswered questions about her life—in fact, it’s not too much different than my own Daffodils and Fireflies, there’s so many questions. It’s a “quiet” book, the kind I’m drawn to, like Sarah Willis’ novels. A new guy in her life doesn’t cause her to go crazy with passion—she’s too reluctant to go there.


As in my novel, clues emerge, in the form of a blue shoe and a key from a paint can. Now she knows why her aging mother is so crazy and why her father was so mysterious. What Mattie needs is honesty and intimacy, which she’s always lacked, and she finds that when she falls in love with Daniel. The blue shoe resides with each person in the story at different times. It was like the piece of bread social workers gave to orphans: “piece of bread was just to hold on to, to reassure the children through the night that they were safe now, that there would be bread to eat in the morning."

Mattie’s mother was good to everyone else but her own children, most likely because of her husband’s philandering, which made affection difficult. This was the direct result of knowing her husband loved another woman. Mattie does sort of the same thing, sleeping with her ex-husband Nicky even after he married someone else—this seemed to come from a need for love, not from a desire to get together with him, and her disgust for herself was the first step in the right direction. The reason she and Daniel fall in love is because of her honesty with him, and he falls away from his own wife because of a lack of intimacy. It was surprising to me that Mattie took pride in winning Daniel away from Pauline, sort of like she did better than her mother in winning her man and it somehow vindicated her father’s lying to them. Mattie’s faith is tested, but not so much the “religious” part, but her own God connection. By the end of the book, she’s at peace with who she is and the decisions she’s made, and has made her God connection.

Father Candy Book by Les Roberts

Read my review here: http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/01/book-review-the-strange-death-of-father-candy-by-les-roberts/.

Retreating Again . . . at River's Edge

On the second day of the Skyline Retreat at River's Edge, I woke to think about when to go to breakfast and the heated therapeutic pool and when to do yoga and take pictures. It’s my nature to know there’s not enough time to do all those things and to make that my concern. I know, though, that morning time is writing time, and that’s what I’m here to do; everything else will fall into place. I dressed, then went into the chapel to say my prayers and meditate on carved Christ on the wall, then I made my way slowly down the halls to get a cup of coffee, reading about the programs and looking at the art on the walls. A watercolorists’ framed originals and prints are along the main hallway, and some are good, some not, and I think about how I should get out my paints and about Joan’s upcoming watercolor program at the Idlewyld. There’s a spiritual retreat coming up near my birthday that seems to be right up my alley, and I’m thinking about going to it. All these thoughts flittered in my head as I made my way to the dining room for coffee, which I’m sipping and noticing how different the flavor is, coffee that’s much better than Maxwell House and mellower than Starbucks, with a hint of cinnamon, which doesn’t bother me. Then I noticed a display about human slavery all over the world, which we talked about yesterday because I just finished the book “A Cup of Friendship,” and I thought about how I want to help with that cause, especially when I read that the CIA thinks 50,000 people are either brought to or through the US every year to become prostitutes, domestic slaves, field hands, etc., and they’re kept like prisoners.

Cleveland's East Ohio Gas Blow-Up

Don Robertson’s book The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread was fun to read. He has these terribly long run-on sentences that I love. Those run-on sentences are one of the reasons why I need to get a new writing group. They don’t get that they’re all right.


I have to admit that I skipped around in this book, read the first 30 pages and skipped to the middle of the book, and I read the last half of the book in about two hours or less. I had to have it done for book group, and Ms. Roberta did a wonderful job of showing us where Morris Bird III walked and what the places that were blown up look like today. She even did a trifold board with photos she collected from the internet and took herself. We met at Lynn’s place, her comfy little haven, and had chicken salad with rosemary bread and rosemary butter, chocolate covered strawberries and shortbread cookies, and bread pudding. Very well done.

Don Robertson wrote 18 novels during his lifetime and he was from Cleveland. He took the night shift at his newspapermen’s job (he wrote for both the PD and the Press) so he could write novels. This book was written in 1965 when he would have been around 36 years old, and there are two other books with Morris Bird III in them. The New York Times said, “Delightful . . . universal enough to send a twinge of nostalgia through any ex-boy.”

The best part of the book was the end when Robertson captured what it was like to be in the Hough area when the gas tanks blew—I couldn’t put it down. We like this kid described in third person and always by his full name—Morris Bird III. “He had never seen Suzanne Wysocki cry. Veronica Lake had revealed herself to him. Suzanne Wysocki had never revealed a thing—except, of course, her interest in babies and death and all that sort of beeswax.” He loves a real girl and he loves Veronica Lake and Robertson says things like “beeswax,” which cracks me up. He keeps a picture of Veronica Lake hidden in a copy of a book about baseball, a picture he crooked from Woolworth’s. People tell him he has a good mind, and there are a whole mess of items in his head like “When you pitched baseball gum cards against a walk you got two for leaners” and “Republicans were terrible people. Everyone said o. Or anyway, almost everyone” (this one I particularly loved.) How about the word “tiddlelump”? The time is 1944, and we’re there with Morris and his little sister Sandra and a wagon with the words “NOSMIRC KAERTS” on it “hauling Sandra and the alarmclock (what’s with the combining of words like that?) and the jar of Peter Pan Peanut Butter.”

Characters are well drawn and they all run together in paragraphs, like on page 135 when we get “Mrs. Barbara Sternad sat down and had a cigarette . . . So what if she did sort of baby herself? . . . The Bernstein neighbor again telephoned Casimir Redlich. No, no sign yet of Irving . . . Mrs. Imogene Brookes gently soaped herself in her tub. She always was gentle with her body. Its measurements were 35-22-35, and she didn’t want to disturb anything. She was humming, and her head was full of visions of her passionate optician, her wonderful G. Henderson LeFevre . . . Now she was entrapped in a dreadful situation, and the awful part of it was—she was enjoying it. It was uncomfortable and it was preposterous, but she’d never enjoyed anything more. Never.” Later, on page 138, she reflects “But she wasn’t in her right mind. He was quite tall and think, and his shoulders were rounded, and he wore rimless spectacles that in no way concealed the fact that he blinked too much, but oh dear, appearances were so deceiving. She loved him. Truly she did. She had to. If she didn’t, what did that make her? Oh dear. Such a dreadful thought.”

The descriptions are as horrible as how horrible it must have been. And I didn’t even know this true East Ohio Gas event of blown tanks of natural gas that caused 5000-degree temperatures even happened. The places where the houses were is now owned by East Ohio Gas, Roberta reports.

Why did nine-year-old Morris do all this? Why take his sister in a wagon across town? "Selfrespect." And when he gets home, he’s going to get it.

North East Wine Country

On my last day at Mount St. Benedictine's, I drove east along the lake. Vineyards stretched out to the south of Lake Road as far as I could see, and to the north of me until the Lake stopped their March. It felt bountiful. At Courtyard Winery, owned by 4^th generation growers, I had quite a long talk with the winery owner, who knows the Lake Erie Region in Ohio pretty well and has been all over the country learning about wines. He lived in California for a while and he highly recommends we go to Washington State and drive along the Joaquin River and loop around to the Columbia Valley and into Portland. He says it’s a beautiful drive and we’ll see some 500 wineries. He hoped I’d buy a case, but he understood me when I said my husband wouldn’t be happy if I did that without him—I purchased a Cabernet Sauvignon and a Courette hybrid wine, which were both good, but young, so they'll stay in the rack for a while.

Another Milan Jacovitch Book by Les Roberts

I want a cigarette because Milan smokes then so real in The Cleveland Creep. The book is tight, with no extra words at all. We immediately liked Milan and are drawn into the story from page 1: “A couple came into the bar and sat down next to me. They both had that kind of unremarkable, unmemorable face that you couldn’t identify ten minutes later, and the only reason I noticed them at all was that his head got in the way between me and the TV set at the far end of the bar.” There’s something about the way he talks that is very much Les’s voice, and I love it. I hear Les all the way through the book, and because I love Les, I love reading the story.

We learn about Milan gradually, but at the beginning of chapter two, we get “Maybe it’s the empty-bed syndrome after a lifelong marriage; maybe it’s just that I’m pushing forty and not terribly pleased with where my life has taken me,” which is followed by two paragraphs of his life story, his entire life summed up just like that and very naturally in the conversational tone that this first-person past-tense book does. While this is a book about solving a crime, it’s mostly about Milan, and I suppose that’s why people like it Les’ books so much. He has absurd conversations with people because he doesn’t hold back, doesn’t care much about what people think of him.

I find it interesting that he goes into discourses about art and places and it doesn’t bother me. For example, he gives a description of A Streetcar Named Desire and a critique of the actress’s performance, and it sounds like he’s just telling a story. On Cleveland locations, we recognize them: Sammy’s becomes Danny’s, and the Watermark becomes the Watershed. I’m glad Milan too Mary to the Watermark instead of to Sammy’s, which was always a bit obnoxious.

Descriptions. Get a load of this: “his face got tight like a woman’s leather clutch purse that had been stuffed too full with makeup and cigarettes and tampons and address books.” Since Milan is narrating this, that’s Milan’s description. Milan is smart. Some of the things he says, like “I’ll bet your dictionary of American clichés is falling apart from overuse” are gems.

The plot is easy to follow and intriguing. I want to find out what happened to the guy who was murdered, and I want to find out what is behind it all. What are the reasons human beings do these things to each other? Greed, hate, jealousy, anger, all those negative things that make us human are the things capable of turning us to murder.
At the end of the book we’re in Milan’s personal life, and his relationship with Mary and his thoughts on the whole matter, which is exactly where the book should go to at the end because the book is about Milan and not about the murder he solved. There’s a long sentence there, but I like long sentences. “And afterward, after we had moved into the adjoining room for reasons of comfort and greater maneuverability, and we were each smoking a cigarette and sharing a Stroh’s, I couldn’t help reflecting on the nature of the universe, and how from death comes life, from destruction comes rebirth, and from a particularly messy and brutal case that had pretty much destroyed my faith in human nature came my first moment of real peace and happiness in a long time.”

He struggles with having chosen the private investigator line of work, and he ends the book with “And maybe, just maybe, it might not have happened to a greengrocer or a rack jobber or the guy who sells ads on the phone for the Plain Dealer. And that made it all okay.”

A Pulitzer Achievement

Anna Quindlen is known for her essay columns in The New York Times and Newsweek. Her novel Every Last One is a moving story of the death of a family, the consequences of misjudgment, and the quest for forgiveness. Mary Beth Latham is married to a doctor and has three children, all different, two almost perfect, one not so perfect, but all loved and cared for as well as a mother could care for her family in upper middle-class America. Quindlen is honest about the life they lead and she describes their suburban realties and how the kids and their parents act like she sees it every day: “Her period is late. He got suspended. Like a broadcast in another room, we mothers hear about some of this after the fact—in overhead calls or conversations at the kitchen table. The kids know we will keep quiet, not out of tact but out of shame. We know that our children are having sex, smoking pot, drinking beer, but it is easier to say nothing.” It’s a life I always felt apart from, because I worked hard.


There’s a lot about the family, but like many middle-aged women, Mary Beth has given up part of her dreams even as she found happiness in landscaping other people’s yards. “Ruby knows that I majored in English, and she once asked why I had not decided to be a writer myself. “I just found it way too hard,’ I’d said. She looked away.” She pays her migrant workers less than Americans would be paid, but she rationalizes that she’s helping out families in Mexico who are a lot better off having money flow to them from the US.

The kids expected to be overachievers, and in a way, that was their downfall. A boy who loves the daughter and is jilted by her and feels let down by the family moves into their garage, knows their habits, papers walls with their pictures over which he writes “Perfect Family” in red, and then murders them all, every last one. But he doesn’t fully succeed because Mary Beth and her son Alex survive, she because she’s knocked out and left for dead and him because he’s on a skiing vacation. After the deaths, we witness misery and grief and lives interrupted. Neighbors and family are giving and selfless, but they’re suffering. Mary Beth remembers a neighbor who lost a child and how she and her friends wondered how they survived. Now she muses, “One of the worst aspects of living now on the far shore is that across the chasm I can see my glib unknowing former self. I despise that woman, her foolish worries and her cheap sympathies.” Our suburban housewife is becoming wiser for her loss.

We begin to learn about Mary Beth’s grave mistake and how she somehow feels she failed them by having an affair and failed them by not recognizing the murderous mental state of Kiernen. One of the most painful scenes is her attendance at her daughter’s graduation, but her daughter is dead; the audience applauses loudly, a display of love and sympathy and respect in the wake of feeling like a piranha. She wonders about boxes and mementos and where they lie within her mother’s house in Florida or in the trash or at Goodwill and thinks she could ask her, but what difference would it make? “Whatever she did was fine. That’s what I’ve learned. It’s fine. Whatever you manage to do.” Expectations of life are now gone.

Both mother and son manage to get through the ordeal and create new lives for themselves in the same town in which they have always lived. At the end of the book, outside her new home, because she can and no one else is there to “think it strange, I call their names, one b one, into the silence. The silence is as big as the sky, and as I call to each of them it is as though the name is a bird, flying out over the trees and into the lowering afternoon.” She’s trying. “It’s all I know how to do now. This is my live. I am trying.” As the jacket cover says, “Ultimately, as rendered in Anna Quindlen’s mesmerizing prose, Every Last One is a novel about facing every last one of the things we fear the most, about finding ways to navigate a road we never intended to travel, and about living a life we never dreamed we’d have to live, but find ourselves brave enough to try.” This well-wrought book is Quindlen’s sixth novel, and she also wrote seven non-fiction books. She continues to be careful with her craft, as a Pulitzer Prize writer would.

Eat Pray Love -- It's all we need besides sleep

I admit that I was a bit put off by Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love at first. Her meandering writing style was not well crafted and that irritated me, as it does every time I read a New York Times bestseller and discover a writer can’t write. But she was a National Book Award Finalist for her book The Last American Man and received a New York Times notable book designation for Pilgrims, for her compelling voice, comic touch, and amazing ear fro dialogue. Harper’s Bazaar said “The heroes of Pilgrims . . . are everyday seekers.” Anne Lamott is quoted as saying it’s “A wonderful book, brilliant and personal, rich in spiritual insight.” And I love Anne so I started liking Gilbert. The New York Times said “If a more likable writer than Gilbert is currently in print, I haven’t found him or her . . . Gilbert’s prose is fueled by a mix of intelligence, wit, and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible.” The Los Angeles Times called the book “A mediation on love in its many forms—love of food, language, humanity, God, and most meaningful for Gilbert, love of self . . . Gilbert’s wry, unfettered account of her extraordinary journey lets even the most cynical reader dare to dream of someday finding God deep in a mediation cave in India, or, perhaps, over a transcendent piece of pizza.”

By the time she got to the Ashram in India, the writing was no longer a problem. I was so interested in her journey that I decided to structure a retreat around it, even though I hadn’t finished the book. I’m defending her here because last night I received an e-mail from someone who had a hard time with me using her book for a retreat, especially in the Methodist church, and he wanted me to stop. I wrote back with my honest experience of the book, and I woke this morning confident that what I’m doing is fine because the District Superintendent said it almost doesn’t matter what you offer the church membership if you get them in the door. The decline of Christianity in America is a fact, and churches need to learn how to deal with that.

The book inspired me to do a retreat based on Gilbert’s year of journeying. February 19, 2011, it came to be.

Interesting: People think your soul make is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. You can’t live with a soul mate forever because it’s too painful. One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone else’s body is not a decision you can make It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not.”

Processing the Silence

On my second day at the monastery, I attended morning prayers and listened to the voices of the community of women. Thomas Merton wrote, “Life is not accomplishing some special work but attaining to a degree of consciousness and inner freedom which is beyond all works and attainments. That is my real goal. It implies ‘becoming unknown and as nothing.’” Later he wrote "only save me from myself. Save me from my own, private, poisonous urge to change everything, to act without reason, to move for movement’s sake, to unsettle everything You have ordained. Let me rest in Your will and be silent. Then the light of Your joy will warm my life. Its fire will burn in my heart and shine for Your glory. This is what I live for. Amen, amen.”

I met with one of the sisters for spiritual direction. She talked about how people get to the point at midlife where it’s important to explore their passion, because time’s running out. We talked about praying for guidance and looking for signs from God. She told me a story about her life in which she was waiting after I told her about reading Sue Monk Kidd’s book, and sometimes we just know a change is coming but we don’t know what it is. And then it’s there and we need to know it when we see it. The waiting period can be a time of growth. My takeaways were to remember I’m not alone, to make time to experience the silence and wait, to never give up my passion, to wait patiently for God to give me direction, and to trust that all will turn out well.