Driving With Sue

Sue pointed to the corner where we used to meet. She wore a pair of navy trousers, a short sleeved, buttoned blouse. I wore my usual cropped trousers with a boxy top, an image of funky irreverence. “The mailbox is gone,” she said. We were cruising in her black Lexus sedan, two women in our early seventies, going back to the New Jersey neighborhood where we’d grown up. I’d known Sue since I was twelve, the new kid in town, taking a seat in Mrs. Murphy’s geography class. Sue collected friends like charms on a bracelet. I was happy she’d scooped me up. We lived in similar houses, small capes with one car garages on postage stamp lots, and on that day in May, the houses looked remarkably the same. No McMansions. Yet, I hardly recognized that corner where we used to meet every morning before walking to junior high school, then to high school. I did recognize town, the corner buildings that housed the drug stores, the banks, now selling clothing or smoothies. Someone had turned my father’s camera store into a boutique wine shop and wine bar. Main Street, USA was long gone.

In many ways, Millburn was an idyllic place to grow up, neighborhood streets I roamed at will, the drug store where after school, Sue and I bought ice cream cones, single or double dip, the record store where Saturday mornings, we listened to 45’s before making our selections. Later, when Sue got her Nash Metropolitan, we cruised the streets we used to walk, looking for friends, then crossed what in that town was a northern Mason-Dixon line, Jews south, WASPS north, looking for my boyfriend’s car. He had friends who lived north. I felt that division, but I didn’t ponder it, not then. I won’t now. What interests me is the way that place held onto my adolescence, giving me back my teenage self, an image of a pony tailed teenager holding her books to her chest, meeting Sue at the mailbox that wasn’t there. This was the place of my deepest yearnings, my unbridled passions. My dreams of escape. After college, I didn’t return, marriage my ticket out.

Sue stayed. I think she knew she would. She married a chemist, a demanding man who died young. But not before Sue nursed him through heart surgery, diabetes, amputation, kidney failure and dialysis. Sue confused love with obedience. I never did.

I may have left New Jersey, but I didn’t leave Sue. That same adolescent connection that brought me back to the old neighborhood tied me to Sue. She was the friend who knew me when I was fifteen, full of myself and bubbling with life. Over the years, Sue has helped me move backwards through my life, unraveling threads and trying to understand how I, a middle class Jewish kid from Millburn, New Jersey, became a writer, a teacher, a mother, a grandmother, a friend and dog lover, living on the rocky coast of Maine instead of on a postage stamp lot in Millburn, New Jersey. Driving with Sue, saw an essence of my younger self, that same essence I see, these days, in my three granddaughters, all visiting and going to summer drama camp, coming home, singing and dancing in my kitchen, in my living room, then later, after dinner, swimming naked in the pool, unencumbered, new, forming and formed. 

Cold Mountain

Here in the Blue Ridge, this Monday morning of Memorial Day, where I’m hiking, I am alone. The trail is mostly dirt, gentle up hills, down hills, switch backs, a few steeper climbs. The perfect hike to warm up my hiking legs. The path cuts through a field where tall grasses grow. Wildflowers. Now an opening After hiking through a large field to an open meadow. Leaving the meadow, I sit on moss, pen in hand when I see a hiker approaching. A young man wearing shorts, a white shirt, cap, a small pack on his back, he hums his way along the trail, sees me, or I see him. I say “Hello.”

Hardly pausing he says, in a voice that sings more than it speaks, “Hello, how are you?”

And he’s on his way, humming, again.

A breeze stirs the air. In the pale blue sky, the rumble of an engine. A plane I can’t see. I love these colors, this particular blue of the sky, these leaves on the mountain laurel, on birch and beech. Conifers.

An artist at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts where I’m in residence loves color. Vibrant color that dances and sings. His colors come to him as he paints, and he describes for me a white rabbit, a golden monkey, a dancer spinning inside her red dress. I see only shape and texture. Color, of course.

On the trail again, I pass the hiker who passed me. He’s sitting on a rock beside a stream, lighting a small burner, eating breakfast or lunch at nine forty in the morning. At a trail junction, I notice that my reading glasses are gone. They slipped through space between the waist band of my trousers and the waistband of my pack. Go back? Continue on? I’ll need to come up with a better system for carrying my glasses. This will be the second lost pair of reading glasses in as many hikes.

Now, on the Appalachian Trail, I’m meeting section hikers, a through hiker, a young woman, heading to Maine. I’m thinking about my glasses again, when I hear a voice. “Ma’am, did you drop some glasses.”

The humming hiker. In his hand, my case with the purple swirls.

He goes on. I don’t see him again. 

Boston, Sunday Morning

Sitting in a Starbucks across from the Parker House, reading a story by Ann Hood, I tried to keep a man’s voice from interrupting fiction’s dream. But his voice was strong. Insistent. I glanced to my right. Two men, street people, poring over a crossword puzzle, the man with the strong voice, leaning into the table, his long stringy unwashed gray hair, streaming. He wore jeans, a thin tee shirt, an undershirt, really. 

“I can’t remember how to spell palest or pale,” the man opposite him says. He’s younger, with reddish hair, glasses, wearing a long sleeved flannel shirt.

            “P-a-l-e-s-t,” the older man says.

            “Palest. Is that what you’re saying?” the younger man says.

             As I listened, I kept my eyes focused on the scene outside the window wall, the garden of the Old City Hall where azalea as white as snow bloomed, profusely. Rising from the garden a statue of one of history’s giants. Later, I learned he was Josiah Quincy who lived from 1772 to 1864, a long life. Josiah Quincy was a member of the Massachusetts Senate, of Congress, a municipal court judge, mayor of Boston, president of Harvard.

            “I can’t continue with the this,” the younger man said. Glancing over, I saw that he had pushed himself back from the table. “Want to take it over to the park?”

            And I wondered on this particular visit to Boson, how many times I'd  walked past these men as I crossed The Common, head high, eyes erasing their humanity? Now, as they walked past my table, the older man, shouldering his dirty back pack, the younger man following, I lowered my gaze, hopefully, a gesture of respect.  

Papa's Yhartzeit

Looking for oncoming traffic before turning on to York Street on my way to a yoga class, I saw the lead hearse in what turned out to be a very long funeral procession. Tears welled, and I cried. I had no idea who had died, no idea where those tears had come from—until at lunch, I told the story to Dick, my husband. “Is it anybody’s yhartzeit, (anniversary of a death)?” he said. “In April?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.” 

Then, memory flooded back. I ran upstairs, opened the drawer of my bedside table, found the small piece of paper where I’d written my grandparents’ birth dates and the dates of their deaths. Abraham Block, April 25, 1958.

I raced downstairs. “Dick, what’s the date?”

 “April 25^th.

“You’re sure?"

He gave me one his looks. 

"It’s my grandfather’s yhartzeit. I can’t believe it. How can that be?”

"I guess you remembered."

Taking a yhartzeit candle from a cabinet, I struck a match. No, not I. I didn't remember. Perhaps, my body did. But I wouldn't have known, really known unless I'd told the story. 

The Agent Search

I’m a writer searching for an outlet for my memoir, querying agents, gathering information on independent presses, thinking of going indie—indie, the cool way to say self-publish. I want an audience for my book, and that’s why I’ve driven nearly seventy miles to hear Jason Allen Ashlock’s talk, Agents For Today’s Author, a talk sponsored by Grub Street of Boston.

Jason stands at a podium inside a YMCA on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s a warm March evening. I shed my sweater, pull my blouse from my skin. Jason is young, probably in his early thirties, looking younger, vibrant and energetic. Intelligence and understanding pool in his deep brown eyes. He greets us, warmly, then asks: “Is the traditional literary agent still viable?” A brief pause before he answers. “No. Or not for very long.”

All of us in this audience know publishing is in crisis, smaller catalogues, fewer bookstores, fewer books sold. The industry is top heavy, investing somewhere in the range of $300,000 to bring a book to market. What if the book doesn’t sell? Returns flow back to the warehouse. No wonder agents tell me they’re only selling celebrity memoir or memoir with a strong enough hook which generally translates to drug addiction, alcohol addiction or dead babies. Why? Because they’re pre-sold.

And that’s where the digital revolution comes in. “Digital,” Jason says, “shifts the value chain to a value web.” The agent used to be the way a writer reached her reader. The chain was linear, writer, agent, publisher, distributor, book store, reader. Now, a writer can reach her reader in multiple ways, and because of this, agents are squeezed. Some have left the business. Some are charging fees. Some are serving as their clients agent and publisher. Others, like Jason, are changing the look of the traditional agency, becoming involved with design and marketing, moving from the background into an open explosive force. Jason says, “An agent’s job is to manage the possible in the digital space.”

And in this shifting digital world, Jason tells this audience of writers that we will need to become our own agents for a while. This is a spin on the advice we’ve been give for a while now with a difference. Jason is suggesting that agents get involved in helping writers launch their books in a new way. Is that way really new? Take my memoir. I’ve published excerpts, one winning a prestigious prize, in my quest for audience and a platform. Jason is suggesting that before an agent takes a book to a publisher, that agent might find digital ways to launch a writer’s work, perhaps by asking that writer for an eBook or perhaps an excerpt on various sites to create a buzz. Not so different from my traditional publishing in the literaries. But—in order for Jason to take on a client who writes a literary memoir, such as mine, he said when we spoke briefly after his talk, he needs to believe there’s a large audience out there for that book. The old catch 22? Not quite. I believe there’s more flexibility in this new model. So, Jason, expect my query. 

Memoir, Straight Up

Last night after watching the film, “The Artist,” the beautiful many layered story of a silent film star tossed aside when talkies come in, I slept badly, dreaming of closed doors, a filthy outhouse. I awoke disgusted, climbed out of bed, walked downstairs in the dark and made myself a cup of coffee.

I’m a writer of a certain age, trying to bring a literary memoir to publication which in today’s publishing climate seems to have as much relevance as a silent film. Five years ago, my credits in literary magazines, Ploughshares, the New England Review, the fact that chapters from this book have been published, one winning a prestigious award, would have made an agent notice. Now, few agents answer my queries, and those few who do, send a polite, but form rejection.

The culture has gone visual, and ironically as movie and television screens have grown larger, the book has grown smaller becoming an image on a laptop, an iPad, an iPod. Is the book dead? I don’t think so, but I do think traditional publishing is not only in transition, but as Steve Almond said in a recent seminar I attended, “crumbling under the weight of its own inefficiency, and what’s suffering is anything literary.”

In my query letter to agents, here's the way I describe my book: Girl Wrapped In A Curtain is a scene driven 78,387 word literary memoir that explores the complexity of love between a father and daughter. That day, sitting at the table with eleven other writers, all of us trying to figure out how to publish our books, traditional, electronic, small press, do it yourself, I nearly laughed out loud. Literary, once a respected word, was now the kiss of death.

I don’t even want a big New York publishing house. I’d like a small press, but I still need an agent and agents keep their eyes on the big houses, going to smaller presses later. Agents and editors say what’s selling are celebrity memoirs and memoirs with a hook, which means sensational, ie abuse, addiction or mental illness. My book is my story of coming to love my difficult, mean, charming, manipulative, narcissistic father. He is my Rochester; I am his Jane, for Dad is ninety-one, half-paralyzed, bedridden, incontinent and demented with startling moments of clarity and dying when, finally, he lets me into his life. Is he conning me? He’s that kind of guy.

So, who’s my audience? All of us out there who will be, who are, who have cared for aging parents.

Back to “The Artist.” Leaving the movie theater with me, my husband said, incredulously, “That was a silent film.”

Yes, it was. A modern silent with the old embedded in the new. My book is memoir, straight up. I’m not claiming the artistry of “The Artist;” yet, like the silent film star in the movie, who needed to find his way back into film, I need to find my way into publishing my literary memoir. 

Sun and Sky

Early morning. Green grass. No snow. Outside, the ocean ripples. No white caps. Where I sit on my chaise in the early morning, I cannot see the sun. Yet, I know it is there, just out of view, because the horizon glows. “Too dark,” a friend had said, when I told her I was taking this northeast facing room for my study. I understood. I’m a person who loves light; yet, one of things I love about this room is anticipating the sun’s return as it travels north, its coming and going an essential rhythm of my life.

Now, the sun’s light illuminates a wooden bench I have placed at the edge of the lawn where ragged stone steps lead to a rocky beach, and although none of them is here, I can see each of my grandchildren, the three girls, the boy,hopping rocks, then stooping down to stare silently into a tide pool. 

This is the ebb and flow I need in my life, this silent coming and going of sun and light, cool and warmth. Upstairs, Dick, my husband, and the dogs sleep. What wonderful dogs, what perfect dogs to give me these moments of solitude to watch my invisible sun spread its light from bench to grass and now to the railing beside steps that lead to the deck outside my study. How quickly day asserts itself, blue sky, a swath of high white cloud.

And suddenly, I am remembering Margin Call, the movie Dick and I saw last evening, and I am struck by the lack of sun and sky. Wall Street exists in a world of machines, tall buildings with elevators, large rooms filled with computer screens, their unnatural light, their graphs and numbers, surreal, unreal. No where in that movie does sun light a bench or a railing. Men climb to a roof top where artificial light becomes their beauty, and the flickering lights are beautiful—but they obscure the sky, moon and stars.