The Bones of our Family

For the fifth year in a row, my kids put up a Day of the Dead display in our library.




We've been collecting these skeltons since before Dominic was two. We were living in Arizona, and told him he could pick any book at the bookstore. He chose this $28 photo gallery from Pomegranate Press:which we thought was pretty random. Until we took him to Mexico a couple months later, and our little toddler chose a clay basketballing eskeleto.

This was our 2008 display:You can see that our display began a little skimpy.






Here's 2009:







In the past 11 years, we've added so many pieces from Cabo, Tijuana, San Francisco, San Diego, even Portland. People send them to us, too.

And we've made some--some from felt, some clay ones with Steven.

It's kind of a funny family hobby, I guess. But aren't these skeletons great?

"High?" Concept

If you get what "high concept" is, I'm seriously jealous.

I want to know. I've tried to know.

Last spring, I listened eagerly to a really great workshop that HarperCollins editor Jordan Brown gave on "High Concept." And I still came out with no idea.

I get that there's something about being able to sum up the work in one sentence.

But the "Books" section of the San Francisco Chronicle does this with 40 books every week.

And I went through my bookshelf, and could apply "High Concept" to everything in there.

Magic Treehouse # 36: Blizzard of the Blue Moon: Jack and Annie search New York for a unicorn tapestry that will bring hope to the Great Depression.

Pete Hautman's Godless: Four middle-American teens make up their own religion that becomes exactly what they're trying to avoid.

Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible: A missionary family is more changed by Africa than Africa is changed by it.

It seems to me that anything can be High Concept.

Wikipedia is no help.

Okay, I get the "concept" part. But what the heck is that "high?"

My New Favorite

store is.... HARBOR FREIGHT!

This is a tool place, and I LOVE it! Every Sunday, Daney and I clip their coupons out of the San Francisco Chronicle, and we hit up the wide aisles of wire and screws and containers for both of those.

We buy our battery tester for $2 minus 20% and get a free pair of utility scissors, a free flashlight, and a free electrical meter with it.

Last week we got a six-piece screwdriver set.

Of course we don't just shop.

One big question we ask ourselves every time is why all women work in a store like this, with wire and screws and containers for both, with toothless man-customers, under the blaring flourescent lights.

Of course we feel guilty buying this stuff made in China, wrapped in plastic.

But we get all crazy guessing what we might get next Sunday with our coupons. We're waiting for the something that will make all our boys here green with envy.

Let There Be Light!

There's this lamp on my mind--a little lamp with a little beaded shade you might've found on a cabaret table in Berlin in the '20s--that caught my eye my first year at San Francisco State. I was riding the bus home, and there it was on Mission Street, right in the window: the light of my life.

I must've passed that thing a hundred times before I finally went into the shop one day and asked about it.

"It's a Tiffany Lamp," the woman told me sternly. "It's $300."

I wanted that lamp so badly. But of course I didn't have the three bills to flip for it.

Twenty-one years later, I still remember what that lamp looked like. And even more, I remember how bad I wanted it.

I wanted it more than I had wanted anything so impossible.

Until now.

Now, I'm wanting something terribly badly and terribly impossibly.

And if it happens to happen, the first thing I'll do is order that little red Tiffany Lamp I've already found online.

Ptah

When I was an undergrad at San Francisco State, I took some fabulous art classes. One of them was a sculpture class which was assisted by Ptah*, a tall, wiry Rastafarian with a real smile.

Ptah was a graduate student. He was broke and 40-ish, and any day, any time, you could find him in the studio: helping strugglers like me, or mixing or firing the clay, or smoothing his art with his large, kind hands.

One day in class, Ptah told us to look at our works from a different perspective. From above, perhaps. Or from below. To turn it, and see it from the side.

I was making a big African head--maybe a planter?--that I thought was almost finished.

But when I turned it, I noticed that the chin and cheeks were under-defined and the nose was way too big.

It needed some serious work. Revision.

Twenty-one years later, I've been thinking about how I can apply all this to writing.

Can anyone help me pay homage to Ptah and use his advice?


*The last day of class, we found out that Ptah named himself after the Egyptian God of Creation.

Me(me)

My BCF (Best Cyber Friend) Shannon tagged me with this meme. Shannon is wise and hopeful and I would bet anything, a really good teacher. Like her, I love a HOT cup of good coffee, and hate dirty floors, and that my sisters live so far away.

Do you want to play?

Fill in the blanks after each bold word and tag 3 of your friends with your meme!

Here's Me(me):

I like musicals: live, on disc, or in the stereo
I like mochas
I like my friends--from Mo, who I met in kindergarten, to Anjie, my new writing partner
I like the fall
I like art
I like teaching and practicing critical thinking
I like decaf green tea
I like collecting Los Dias De Los Muertos skeletons with my kids
I like living in Ashland
I like living in America
I like when my kids lay in bed and read together
I like how I feel after I do yoga

I love my incredible husband. And San Francisco

Today is a new opportunity to be a more patient mom, to be a better house cleaner, to be a stronger writer, and to serve my students and community

I hate the word "hate"
I hate doing yoga
I hate ignorance
I hate that I hate ignorance
I hate girl drama

I (secretly) like weekdays when I'm off work and have the whole, quiet house to myself

I love my two families: my little one, where I'm the mom, and my big one, where I'm the sister

Critical Writing

My generous and talented writing partner, Anjie, made me borrow a nice thick textbook the other day. It's called The Fourth Genre, by Robert Root, Jr. and Michael Steinberg, and defines and presents creative nonfiction.

Because the book has a boring cover and 473 pages, it took me a while to crack it.

But when I did, I blew through almost the whole thing in one night.

This new market I've been trying out, adult memoir, is tricky; adult readers seem to demand better construction, unpredictable organization, deeper content.

"The Masked Marvel's Last Toe Hold," by Doctor Richard Selzer, is a stunning example of parallelism, of metaphor, of finding mature meaning from a childhood event. This essay reminds me of "The Wrestler," in which Mickey Rourke plays a veteran athlete who struggles with identity as he ages.

Then there's Pico Iyer's "Where Worlds Collide," an analysis of LAX.

Richard Rodriguez's "Late Victorians" is also about a place: San Francisco, where the social agenda is transformed, but where physicality stays the same.

If you don't have time to read these short short stories, here are the best tips I gleamed from reading the book.

1) Overall, it appears that pure essayists are a dying breed; most essayists now hail from other media (journalism, fiction).

2) Make a list of all the topics you'd never write about. Then write about one of those topics.

3) Time change can be accomplished through changes in landscape, biography, and commentary.

4) A memoir is a quilt of one's favorite memories. It is the writer's perspective on history, and when written, it changes the past and sets it in stone.

5) Writing critically communicates with the reader, challenges her to consider plural perspectives, while being courted.

5) "The true rewards [of writing] are internal--the satisfaction of asking your own questions and finding your own answers" (Root and Steinberg, 1985, p. 357).

Mairy Godmother

My mom knew what she was doing when she picked her younger sister, Mary, to be my godmother. Since the beginning, Mary and I hit it off. She had this chest in her room in San Francisco; it was filled with toys, and every time I visited her, I'd choose one.

Each Christmas Eve, when we were allowed to open one gift, I'd find the present with Mary's round writing. Before I could even read.

When I was seven, Mary and I took Muni to Macy's downtown. We rode the escalator to the second floor, where Mary bought me a brown paisley-printed skirt and a Betsy Clark watch. I wore the skirt and the watch down the escalators and out of the store, feeling excited and happy and special.

I stayed with Mary in her flat on Lawson Street, in her red-carpeted apartment on Dolores, and in her house in the Sunset.

Mary made peppermint cake and black-bottom cupcakes. She worked in a hospital and had a son, Greg, for whom she baked tiny treats to go inside his eight-inch Cookie Monster delivery van.

We would take walks, sometimes at Ocean Beach. We went to doll shows and listened to Neil Diamond's "Coming to America" over and over and over.

Today we sang "Sweet Caroline" together into ceramic salad tongs in my kitchen. Our birthdays are this month: I'll be 39, and she'll be 50-something.

It's been almost two generations of singing and laughing and crying, and an almost impossible amount of talking. We talk books, and men, kids and corn. We talk chocolate and coffee and sex. We try to figure out my mom, who's been gone twelve years now. We miss her.

When Dave and I moved to Oregon sixteen years ago, we thought it was accidental. It wasn't. Mary lived a couple of hours up I-5.

Mary is the grandma my babies don't have: she checks in with their math, sends them books, and reminds me to be patient.

This evening, Mary and I took the kids to Toys R Us.

When Rees strutted out with the Lego Battle of Endor tucked under his arm, I knew exactly what he was feeling.