Thoughts Happen

One fish, two fish ... are we having fun yet?

Somewhere along the line I think I forgot how to have fun. I realized this with chagrin after a recent conversation I had with my husband that went something like this:

[Scene: Husband comes upon me reading on the couch]

 He: Oh, so you’re reading a comic book, huh?

Me: Well, I’m reading this cool book about comics. It’s called Understanding Comics and it’s all about the art and technique of comics and how they work, and it’s written in the form of a comic. Pretty cool, huh?

He: Umm, do you ever actually read comics?

Me: Well, no.

[End]

Okay, okay, it’s true — I am studying comics. I have found a way to turn something fun into work. But hey, I love my work —what can I say? Like when I go to the magazine racks at Barnes and Noble and pick out a handful of titles, mostly I am taking them home for research. I do read them, but I also study the mastheads and bylines, what they use for fillers and how long the feature articles are.

I almost never just plop down on the couch and read for an hour or two straight just for pleasure. Most of the reading I do — almost all of it nonfiction —is stolen in bits and pieces. If I read something just for fun for too long I get antsy and feel like I should be doing something productive.

I also work from home, and when you work from home and you love your work, the line between work and fun can get a bit blurry. I can (and do) spend a lot of time on the computer, and get tremendous satisfaction from tweaking my web site and keeping up with my social networks. I really enjoy it, but I don’t call it fun. Somehow calling it work makes it seem more worthwhile, less of a time-waster.

 I read somewhere recently that there should be no such thing as a “guilty pleasure.” If you enjoy something, just call it a pleasure and be done with it. Guilt should not be involved. Reminds me of that line from Dr. Seuss, “If you never did, you should. These things are fun and fun is good.”

So maybe my problem is not that I forgot how to have fun, but that I forgot that it’s okay. It’s okay to admit that futzing with the settings on my blog or reading a magazine is fun.

Maybe not fly a kite in bed fun, but still —baby steps.

Why I Have a Problem With Elizabeth Gilbert

So—Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book, “Committed” is out. Haven’t heard of it? Perhaps you’re familiar with another little thing she wrote, called “Eat, Pray, Love”?

 By the time I first heard of it several years ago, “Eat, Pray, Love” was already in paperback and an international best seller. The new girlfriend of a friend we were camping with was reading it at Plaster Blaster, and I glanced at the back cover after taking in the subtitle, “One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia,” under the 3-word title ingeniously spelled out in pasta, mala beads and flower petals. From this brief introduction and later snippets I gleaned from media coverage (you’d think this book had singlehandedly saved the publishing industry), I gathered that Gilbert a) had gone through a foundation-shaking life crisis; b) managed to take a year off to travel and deal with said crisis; c) wrote a book about said travel and crisis; and d) was now an overwhelmingly successful writer because of said book.

I was perhaps just a slight bit jealous. In the midst of a crisis of my own at the time, I snarkily thought, “Well, wouldn’t that be just great if we could all run away from our problems by traveling for a year and then make an unholy amount of money writing about it?” I was damned if I was going to read the thing.

Then I heard Gilbert would be speaking in L.A. with my favorite author, Anne Lamott. If Anne deemed her worthy of a co-appearance then her book might, just might, be worthy, but I still wasn’t ready to part with any cold, hard cash for it—I put a hold on the audiobook at the library. I did not, however, end up going to L.A. for the talk, and consequently forgot about the book.

A month later I hurt my neck and spent hours each day flat on my back on the floor with a heating pad or sitting very still on the couch looking straight ahead. My hold on the audiobook percolated to the top, and, since I couldn’t do much else, I spent a lot of time listening to the author reading it aloud.

I’ll admit, the book was good, and as I listened to it I learned that her trip fell together more as an unnatural set of circumstances rather than being planned by a flighty rich girl with commitment issues, as was my first impression. Afterwards, I discovered that while I distanced myself from the book (just another pop book to tick off my "I’ve read that" list) I was at the same time inexplicably drawn to Gilbert’s interviews, from the Borders Book Club to her recent TED talk. Maybe I’m trying to suss out exactly what it is she drew upon to give birth to this megapopular work, or maybe I’m just waiting for her to mess up. Either way, I’ll begrudgingly admit that she seems like a pretty genuine person in the midst of extraordinary circumstances.

 I read the prologue of the new book, a combination of memoir and historical treatise on marriage, at the bookstore the other day. I’ll probably end up reading it, but I’m still not willing to give up my hard-earned cash. Some grudges die hard.

Not Your Mother's Librarian

Librarian is not the occupation you think of first when meeting Laurie Knodle. High-end realtor, event coordinator or aerobics instructor perhaps, but librarian? Her lively personality, stylish outfits and megawatt smile don’t fit the mold of the quiet, dowdy book maven. Yet Laurie has been at the Rancho Santa Fe Library in North County San Diego for the past 12 years. A popular children’s librarian, Laurie has been known to sport a balloon animal hat, wrangle a very frisky visiting sled dog, and probably sneaks turns at Dance Dance Revolution during teen time. “We don’t shush here, we get shushed,” she joked. She is all about fun, but also has a serious passion for turning kids on to books.

 A mother of three children ages 23, 21 and 19, she first volunteered at their school library, starting the Everyone A Reader program at OPE Elementary. Eventually her kids outgrew the school library, “But I didn’t,” she said, which led to volunteering at Rancho Santa Fe. “I started out shelving books, doing crafts, walking the dog—I loved it,” she said. (Many libraries use therapy dogs that children read aloud to.) Six years ago she became a part-time children’s librarian, funded through the Rancho Santa Fe Library Guild.

What impressed me about Laurie when I started taking my daughter to the Rancho Santa Fe Library was that she remembered the books my daughter had read and always made a point to tell us when new horse books came in or American Girl books or whatever her current interest was. And she talks directly to the kids, asking their opinion of the books they read and joking around with them. It’s all part of her secret strategy to get them hooked on books.

“So many kids that are shy, they would never presume to ask you a question. They don’t think they should go over to you, so when I tease or joke with them, it puts them at ease, lets them know that they can ask questions. If you can get kids to love books, especially as kindergardeners or 1st-graders and get them their own library card, that’s wonderful.”

Keeping up with the ever-changing selection is a challenge. “I read a lot of kid's books,” she said, “and I try to read all the award winners. The YA (young adult) books are the hardest to keep up with—I’ll read the first in a series and I also read reviews on Amazon.” While making sure that books are age appropriate, her philosophy is, “Whatever they will pick up and read—let ‘em.” This applies to the current craze of vampire related books and anything else kids request. “We want them to get so they make a point to come here and feel like it is their library.”

Laurie loves being a children’s librarian and couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. “Being around little kids keeps you young mentally. I’m just about their maturity—and they know it!” she laughed.

[When I interviewed Laurie for this post she made me promise to link to the San Diego County Library web site and let you know that you can access all 30 libraries in the system, get homework help, download audiobooks ... this woman is on a mission!]

This is one in an occasional series of posts called Our Neighbors. We interact with so many people in our day-to-day lives; Our Neighbors is for getting to know them a little bit better. If you have a neighbor you would like to write about, email me for information on guest blogging.

Thanks, Frank

Frank McCourt—writer, teacher, racounteur—has died, and the world is a little less, well—Irish for it— the irony being that McCourt was as American as anyone for as Irish as he was. And in the last 13 years of his life, since the publication of his first memoir Angela’s Ashes, McCourt celebrated the “second act” of his American life (which F. Scott Fitzgerald famously denied could exist) with a gusto that made up for its unfortunate brevity.

I discovered Frank McCourt when I picked up Angela’s Ashes shortly before a vacation to Ireland several years ago. I didn’t really know what it was about except it was a famous book by an Irish writer and thought it might be good background material for our trip.

I read its iconic opening line, "Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood," and I was hooked. Memoir is one of my favorite forms and McCourt is, to my mind, one of the best that ever was. His distinctive stream-of-consciousness passages of quoteless dialogue pulled me in to his world at a visceral level, and his uncanny ability to capture the thoughts and feelings of every age of that miserable childhood from four on up walking a razor’s edge of heartbreak and humor opened my eyes to a whole new level of what memoir could be.

McCourt showed me that a life, any life, when explored with achingly funny honesty and a sense of amazement at the absurdity and wonder of it all, transcends experience to become not simply a chronicle of one life, but a chronicle of life, this one-go-round take-it-or-leave-it proposition.

McCourt followed Angela’s Ashes with ‘Tis, the sequel that covers his life as a young to middle-aged man in New York from 1949 into the ‘70s, and Teacher Man, which chronicles his 30-year career as a teacher in New York City schools. Though not as dramatic as the narrative of his childhood in Ireland, I found ’Tis to be perhaps even more poignant, as McCourt perfectly captures the awareness of those moments in adult life when you know you will never again be who you were.

My favorite passage of his is a sentence (and yes it’s all one sentence) from ‘Tis set on the docks with a mid-20s McCourt on lunch break with a fellow dockworker, an older black man who befriended him.

It’s ham and cheese slathered with mustard and we wash it down with a quart of Rheingold passing the bottle back and forth, and I have a sudden thought and a feeling that I’ll never forget this hour on the pier with Horace with seagulls circling for what might come and ships strung along the Hudson waiting for tugboats to dock them or push them out to the Narrows, traffic rushing behind us and over our heads on the West Side Highway, a radio in a pier office with Vaughn Monroe singing “Buttons and Bows,” Horace offering me another chunk of sandwich telling me I could use a few pounds on my bones and his surprised look when I nearly drop the sandwich, nearly drop it because of the weakness in my heart and the way tears are dropping on the sandwich and I don’t know why, can’t explain it to Horace or myself with the power of this sadness that tells me this won’t come again, this sandwich, this beer on the pier with Horace that makes me feel so happy all I can do is weep with the sadness in it and I feel so foolish I’d like to rest my head on his shoulder and he knows that because he moves closer, puts his arm around me as if I were his own son, the two of us black, or white, or nothing, and it doesn’t matter because there’s nothing to do but put down the sandwich where a seagull swoops in and gobbles it and we laugh, Horace and I, and he puts in my hand the whitest handkerchief I’ve ever seen and when I offer it back he shakes his head, keep it, and I tell myself I’ll keep that handkerchief till my last breath.

And I’m sure he did.

Thanks, Frank—for everything. I’ll miss you.

The day I met Anne Lamott

It was February 22nd, 1999. No, I'm not like that woman in National Geographic who can remember every day of her life since age 11 with photographic recall. Nor am I an Anne Lamott stalker, recording every encounter in a secret journal. (Dear Diary: Today I rode in a taxi and I swear the driver was the one Anne described in Grace (Eventually). I felt around in the seat crack to see if I could find any stray dreadlock hair to no avail. Maybe next time.") No, nothing like that. 

It was a pretty benign encounter at a book reading at Warwick's in La Jolla, and I know the date because she inscribed my copy of Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith with the note "2-22-99 for Louise, with best wishes, (heart) Anne Lamott."

It must have been a weeknight, and for some reason I couldn't leave my six-month-old daughter at home with my husband, so I had her with me. Maybe he had a class, or maybe I knew I'd need to nurse during the time I'd be out. Even though I was pumping breast milk, we waited too long before trying her on a bottle, and she would scream and wail if we tried to get her to drink from a plastic nipple as though we were trying to make her drink poison, so often I just took her with.

I don't know if I'd ever gone to a book reading before. It wasn't the kind of thing I did. But I had read Lamott's funny, personal and offbeat book on writing, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, and the unflinching honesty of it was like cayenne pepper on a sweet honeydew slice. You mean even published writers are insecure? And they procrastinate and tell themselves they have no business being a writer but then go ahead and do it anyway? This was back in my I-couldn't-ever-imagine-myself-as-a-writer-but-I-keep-buying-Writer's-Digest-and-going-to-classes-and-reading-writing-books-because-I'm-weirdly-compelled-to-do-so phase, and this was news I needed to hear. I figured if this woman was going to be anywhere I could get within earshot, baby or not I was going.

So I showed up at Warwick's with my baby in a sling like a literary earth mother. The reading was nice, although I had to keep walking around the store to keep my daughter from getting fussy so I was often out of sight of the podium. Lamott read from Traveling Mercies and the only thing I remember was a question from someone in the audience about her use of the phrase "mixed grill" in one of her essays. Lamott said she couldn't ever remember using the words "mixed grill," but later on when I read the book, there they were. Eventually I had to get baby out of the sling and let her flop around on the floor in one of the aisles a bit. Thank goodness she wasn't crawling yet, but I hadn't thought to bring any toys with me.

I bought a copy of Traveling Mercies in hardcover and a paperback of Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, since there I was with a new baby and all myself. It was getting late, and while waiting in line to get them signed my daughter got fussier and fussier. Eventually I crumpled up the paper bag the books were in and gave it to her to play with. All I could think was that I hoped Anne realized that I had indeed bought the books at Warwicks instead of sneaking in an Amazon purchase, which I had heard her say she got really miffed about. 

When we got to the front of the line she smiled at my daughter, who was now of course being an angel, and asked our names. She signed Operating Instructions to her, again "with best wishes," but this time adding "Annie Lamott, Sam's mom."   

While finishing up this post my now ten-year-old came up to me at the computer and read the title out loud. "Yup," I said. "You were there, but you don't remember it. You were a baby." I picked up Operating Instructions and flipped to the page signed to her. "And here's something else you've never seen." "Cool," she replied. Yeah, pretty cool, I'd have to agree. Happy Birthday Anne Lamott, a.k.a Sam's mom.