Love's Labor Lost

Blurg.

I have misplaced the journal I keep for my son. I've kept a journal for both him and my daughter since they were born - recording milestones and funny stories and their little quirks. I'm not the best journal-keeper - but I have made an effort to write in these journals on their birthdays and whenever they do something that I don't want to forget.

On New Year's Day, I opened the drawer of my bed stand. There was my journal, and Annie's, but Henry's was absent. I gave my room a cursory rummage to no avail. My husband consoled me, saying it's bound to show up somewhere. Still, days later, I have not found it. It's absence is nagging at me. Multiple times a day I open my bed stand drawers, hopeful that by some miracle the journal will be there, found. I've entertained the idea of searching for it in the strangest places - like the big blue garbage cans in the garage - uncertain if these impressions are the product of inspiration or complete lunacy.

Last night, before going to bed, I opened the drawer to my bed stand again. And then, I started to cry. My husband was more than a little mystified by this behavior. "It will turn up," he said. I cried harder. He made a show of looking for the journal, getting down on his knees and peeking under the bed. "I need to get over this," I said. And I do. It's just that, I've been keeping that journal to remember the things about my son that I'm certain I'll forget. I've been keeping that journal as a kind of portable memory. I've been keeping that journal as a safety-net. I know it's morbid, but I've always thought that if I died young, my son would have a record that I loved him. Proof, in my own hand, that I cared enough to chronicle his life.

I've been thinking about my compulsion to write these past few days. It is an affliction that is not unique to myself. I've been thinking about the way people scrawl their names on bathroom stalls, into tree trunks, on cinder block walls. As if all of humanity is wanting desperately to proclaim "I was here." We feel the need to leave our mark on the world, to leave something that will endure, something that will survive us. Writing is nothing if not an attempt at immortality.

Okay, maybe I'm being too dramatic. But still, I can't help feeling that I've lost more than just a little-lined notebook.

String Theory

My credit card statement for November reflected a charge of $3652. When I called the bank in protest I was informed that the charge was made to Lazear-Smith and Vander Platt Memorial Home in Warwick, New York. So, basically, someone stole my credit card account number to finance a funeral.

If I were an investigatory journalist, this is the kind of story that would have me on a plane to New York, questioning the funeral director, searching the Obituary section of the newspaper, tracking down the family of the deceased. I wouldn't want to confront the guilty party, but I would like to hear their story, to learn what led them to pay for a funeral with a stolen credit card number. I'd like to figure out just how exactly I in Salt Lake City came to be tied to them in Warwick.

Last week I took my children to the Dinosaur Museum at Thanksgiving Point. One of the exhibits featured pictures displaying continental drift. The first displayed Earth as one unified land mass surrounded by sea. The subsequent pictures showed the continents drifting farther and farther from each other through the geological periods - Jurassic, Cretaceous, Present Day. The last picture in the series was labeled "Future," and was simply (and, I thought, rather unadventurously), a large question mark.

We didn't linger too long at this particular exhibit, rushing on to the T-Rex and Allosaurus, exhibits ostensibly more impressive than a two-dimensional depiction of the world slowly falling apart.

Today, my brother is coming home from a two-year LDS mission he served in Ventura, California. We talked to him on the phone on Christmas. He did not sound terribly excited to come home. He loves the people he's meet in California, he said. He loves his life there. Of course, his departure from Salt Lake City was also a painful one. He loved the people he knew in Utah. He loved his life here. When he left, he pierced a small hole in our geography, taking with him a thread of support and connections and love that linked him to his home. And now, today, I imagine him completing the stitch he started, puckering the landscape as he pulls that thread home, a thread now lenthened by the support and connections and love he experienced in California. For my brother, today, Ventura and Salt Lake City will never be closer.

We humans love to play the "who do you know" game. It is among the first things we do when introduced to someone new - attempt to make a connection with them. And, more often then not, we find that we share a mutual friend, attended the same school, visited the same place. We hunger for these connections. They are necessary, as if the ties that bind us are holding the world together, like a massive ball of twine. Luckily, these connections are easy enough to make. It's a small world, after all, despite the shifting, drifting tectonic plates. I wonder with what agony the earth groaned at that initial splintering apart. Perhaps, at our best, we humans are attempting to heal the world, to thrust our needles into the geography and thread it back together,  piecing the lost, aimless fragments back into one glorious, unified whole.

As we approach the New Year, this is my wish for our swiftly tilting planet - not just peace, but wholeness.

Holiday Potpourri

I'm going to go ahead and blame the holidays on the complete brain drain I've been experiencing this month. Since I can't summon the mental energy to compose a whole blog post, I'm going to take Bill Murray's advice and baby step my way through this.

- I gave myself an early Christmas present and registered for the LDStorymakers Writing Conference. I attended last year, and it was really wonderful. If you've never attended (Janel, Brooke, Stacy Heaps), think about coming with me this year.

- The other night, I had a dream that I was driving Mitt Romney to the Iowa Caucus (I know, it doesn't make sense), and giving him advice about how to beat Newt. And I'm not even a Republican.

- I just finished Cutting For Stone. It is among the best books I've ever read. I literally cried through the last 100 pages.

- On Saturday, I found a fortune cookie in my purse and gave it to my son. I literally laughed out loud when I read it to him:

(And just in case my photography skills aren't up to par, my son's fortune is: "An alien of some sort will be appearing to you shortly!")

On The Radio

Monday afternoon I am making Chicken Ala King for dinner, listening to NPR, when Judy Blume just happens to join me in the kitchen. I have tuned into Talk of the Nation in the middle of the segment, but when it dawns on me that the mild-mannered woman Neal Conan is interviewing is in fact Judy Blume, the room kind of spins around for a minute. It is the same kind of response I had when I discovered that Rhoald Dahl's daughter Ophelia runs a charity that aids Haiti, or, more recently, that Stalin had a daughter living in, of all places, Wisconsin. Dumbfounded, I listen as callers dial in and ask Mrs. Blume writing questions, as if she is actually a real person. In my mind, she is a work of fiction - like Sheila the Great or Superfudge. But, obviously, she's not - because she's politely answering questions and relaying the story of how, when she was starting out, she squeezed in a couple of hours of writing when her children were in school. Like me.

I listen as she tells about the time she went to the book section of a department store and was surprised to find that the clerk had shelved Are You There God? It's Me,Margaret next to the bibles. To me, it doesn't seem like such an error in judgment. I grew up reading Blume's books, It's Me, Margaret among them, back when the mysteries of maturation were too taboo and forbidden to actually talk about. At the time, those books served as a bible of sorts - before menstruation became a nuisance and I discovered that the exercise accompanying the chant "I must, I must, I must increase my bust" isn't as effective as I'd hoped.

The funny thing is, Monday in the kitchen, Judy Blume managed to assist me through my post-adolescent phase, too. She gave one of those callers some writing advice, and, for me, it rang true:

"It's all about your determination, I think, as much as anything. There are a lot of people with talent, but it's that determination. I mean, you know, I would cry when the rejections came in — the first couple of times, anyway — and I would go to sleep feeling down, but I would wake up in the morning optimistic and saying, 'Well, maybe they didn't like that one, but wait till they see what I'm going to do next.' And I think you just have to keep going.

"You know what? The thing is that nobody writes unless they have to. So if you have to write because it's inside you, then you will."

Check out the whole interview here.

7 Things You Probably Don't Know About Me

Last week, Stacy Henrie awarded me the Versatile Blogger award. I luckily discovered Stacy's blog a few months ago - and have been a devoted reader ever since. I also took my cue to blog every Wednesday from her - imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right Stacy?

As a recipient of this very prestigious award, I am supposed to share 7 things about myself. Here goes:

1- I have, perhaps, the most awkward high-school dance pictures. Case in point:

                            Note the position of my date's right hand. And if this isn't enough, there's this one:

                                                        Note our, um, height disparity.

2 - I was eighteen years old and a high-school graduate before I received my first kiss. However, after viewing above pictures, this probably is not surprising.

3- I know all of the lyrics to Lisa Loeb's Stay by heart.

4 - When I worked at a family practice in South Bend, Digger Phelps insisted that I be fired after I attempted to collect his co-pay. Oh, you don't know who Digger Phelps is? Neither did I. Apparently, the former basketball coach of Notre Dame, and current ESPN commentator, thinks he's kind of a big deal.

5 - I am a runner. I ran track and cross-country in high-school and college. I still run, although my training now is much less rigorous.

6 - Once, on a date, the waiter brought by the dessert tray and stated that the slice of chocolate cake served 4 people. This was during my track star days, and I had something of an appetite. I asked the waiter if he had ever seen anyone finish the cake alone. He hadn't. I said I thought I could do it. He said, if I could, he wouldn't charge my date for the cake. Then, he plunked down a ginormous slice of chocolate cake in front of me. I, with some effort, polished it off. I don't think my date was as impressed with this accomplishment as I was.

7 - I am a terrible laundress. Washing, folding, and putting clothes away is too much for me. Matching socks is a lost cause. My current strategy is to store the socks in one of those recyclable cloth grocery bags. The low light of my day is watching my husband fish through the bag for two of a kind before he rushes off to work.

Call of the Wild

When I tell my children that the wind can howl, they do not believe me. "Wolves howl," my son all but scoffs. "Wind blows." This is my literally-minded child; the boy who questions everything; the one whose first attempted written sentence was "My vanes are in my bode." His sister, of course, takes his side  - she is his shadow and echo. "Wolves howl," she reiterates, "like this." She then proceeds to treat me to her best wolf imitation, which, I have to concede, isn't bad.

We are in the kitchen, poring over the science kit we purchased at the school book fair. I am in the process of coiling a thin strand of copper wire around a nail, in an attempt to make an electromagnet. To me, howling wind is no less preposterous a concept than electromagnetism, but my son has no problem believing in electrical currents and magnetic poles. The proof of those concepts is before us, literally in the sharp black text of the science booklet, and physically, in hand.

The next day I bundle up my son and send him outside to play with the boy across the street. My daughter and I, sensibly, stay inside, and watch the boys join the whirlwind of swirling autumn leaves. And then, we hear it. The wind howls.

"Did you hear that?" I ask, vindicated. "The wind is howling."

This phenomenon clearly delights my daughter.

"Listen to that," I say, as the wind continues to howl. "The wind is talking to us."

"Mom, I need my coat," she says. "I need to go talk to the wind."

Her face is luminous with wonder. As I armor her with a puffy parka, her slight body nearly doubling in size, it is preposterous to me that, at times, I have considered motherhood a sacrifice. We stand together on the porch, and she hesitates for a moment. Glorious, golden October has given way to harsh November, but, in the end,the cold proves no deterrent for my daughter. She gallops down the porch stairs and the wind howls its welcome to her, but I can't hear her response, because she's already tripping down the sidewalk, crunching leaves under foot, racing toward her brother. Theirs is a world in which I no longer reside - a world where wind is a playmate. They are my own and yet, my children are what I am not - vessels of concentrated, endless energy. I stand on the front porch, hugging my arms around myself to shield off the cold, and wait until my daughter reaches the end of the walk and takes her place as her brother's shadow.

Beg, Borrow, and Steal

There's a line from a movie you may or may not have seen, that goes, "There's something you have to understand about art. It comes from somewhere."

Where does your art come from?

When I was a child, I wanted to be a writer. I wrote poems and Christmas plays and stories for Reflections. However, when I reached college, somehow I became convinced that I couldn't write. Sure, I could turn out a mean essay for my Crit Lit class, but I couldn't write write. I wasn't creative enough. I wasn't blessed with a big enough imagination.

Then, a few years ago, I started a family blog, and I remembered how much I enjoyed writing. Like, writing writing. And so I took the plunge, clinging to the only real creative writing advice I had ever learned, which was "write what you know." I wrote a short story about a woman who's husband was in law school. Nearly everything in that story was from something I had experienced, heard, witnessed, or read. Since then, I've continued to write, but my strategy hasn't really changed. My stories are comprised of things I've begged, borrowed, and stolen. I'm not creative - I just have fast hands.

But it is something of a wonder how, when you decide to write, little bits and pieces you've filed away in your mind start to come together. Start to form something new. The spark for my current story came from a bumper sticker I happened to see one day on the freeway. Ideas had been swirling around in my mind, but that bumper sticker pulled them all together.

There is something dreamlike about the process of writing. In Shadow Catcher, Marianne Wiggins writes, "How the average person dreams is pretty much how the average novelist puts a page together." We writers grasp for those fragmented, grainy thoughts and images, patch them into narrative, and hope it all means what we think it should.