watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

But now, spring break is over.  I’m back at home.  David has only had the manuscript for a week. It’s ridiculous to expect that he’s read it.  I know he’s at least started because he sent me an e-mail saying it had arrived and he was enjoying the read, but I know he’s busy.  And as much as I’d love to think he’s at his desk reading RIGHT NOW, that he can’t put the book down, I know that’s crazy and unrealistic.  It’s too much to ask. Too much to expect.  I need to relax, be patient. He’ll get to it.  At least these are the things I tell myself every hour when I check my e-mail and feel a little pinch of disappointment he hasn’t sent word.

But here’s my problem:  I’ve spent the last ten-plus years of my life working on this book.  Day in and day out, rain or shine, in sickness and in health, till death do us part. When I say the novel has become a part of me, I’m not kidding.  Just like I don’t remember the days when there wasn’t Harry Potter, I can’t remember a time when I DIDN’T think about Wheatie and Ralph Angel and all the other characters who have become my second family. I feel like I’ve lost an arm . . . No, I feel like I’m LOOSING MY MIND as I wait for David’s response because all of a sudden, I don’t have a story to work on. Well, that’s not true. I actually have three stories I’m thinking about, but I’m back at the beginning. It’s horrible. It’s actually worse than staring at a blank computer screen at the beginning of a chapter because at least then, I could look over my shoulder and mark my progress.  This feels like I’m floating out in space without being tethered to the capsule. It’s all black.  I can’t tell if I’m upside down or right-side up. 

See this picture of my office?  

Okay, I admit, it’s still a bit junky, but this is the cleanest it’s been in MONTHS!  During my full-court press to finish the novel and during the entire time it took to complete the edits, I couldn’t see a single square inch of the floor for all the paper and crusty coffee mugs and Fiber One Bar wrappers and piles of books. Do you know why it looks this neat now?  BECAUSE I’M NOT WRITING!!!!!!!!! For the first time in ten years, I have time to pay bills and do the laundry and answer e-mail and IT’S KILLING ME!!!!!   

Which is all to say, I’d better hear from David soon.  Just kidding.  What I need to do is start the next book. That’s the only thing that’s going to save me. That’s the only endeavor that’s going to make me feel like me again.  I’ve been running a literary marathon for over a decade. Now that it’s over, this phase anyway, I can’t expect to wake up the next day and not run, right??????? I’ve been conditioned to run. That’s what I do. I can’t take this free-floating.  I completely understand why actors desperately swing from one movie to the next.  It’s the primal need to feel productive, to be fully engaged and maybe even a little over-extended, to feel like you’re alive and doing what you’ve been put on this earth to do.  The only feeling that could be worse than what I’m feeling now would be long term writers block, the kind that goes on for years.  I think I’d shoot myself.

So tomorrow, it’s time to get back to work.  I’m packing up my computer and heading to my office.  I’m going to shut the door and only come out for lunch.  I’m not foolish enough to expect that I’ll start writing. I won’t put that kind of pressure on myself.  Besides, I’ve been at this long enough now to know how it goes:  I’ll go easy. Start slow.  I’ll read some poetry and maybe a couple of short stories. That should quiet my mind enough for me to hear the new voice, the first word, maybe even the first sentence. An image will come to me and then one of the characters I’m thinking about will step forward, offer his or her hand, and I’ll be off to the races again. After that, waiting for David’s comments won’t feel like lying on a bed of nails.  I’ll have someone else tugging on my sleeve.

 I can’t wait to see where I go.  I can’t wait to meet my new family.

I took the girls to see my parents last week for Spring Break. When I told my mom I’d started taking piano lessons again, she nearly fell on the floor. All week, she begged me to play something for her. “Just one song. Anything.  Please.”  I suspect she was privately thinking she’d believe I was playing the piano when she heard something with her own ears.  On the last morning, just before we left, I played “Pirate’s Song,” the jaunty little tune fit for a third grader. I may as well have played a Beethoven concerto the way my mom reacted.  But as I write this, it occurs to me her reaction may have been inspired by something else: a sense of relief that as a parent she hadn’t failed, the thought that even though I bombed at that recital thirty years ago, she’d planted the seed.  She’d done her job as a parent.  

I understand the reaction.  I want so much for my girls.  I want them to love music and books the way I love music and books.  I want them to understand why art is important. Not just understand, I want them to BELIEVE it the way I believe it–with my whole self.  And so, just like my mom did thirty years ago, I find myself dragging them to museums and concerts when they’d rather watch Nickelodeon. I hear myself insisting they push to the front of the tour so they can hear everything the docent has to say when they’d rather hang back.  Just last Sunday, I heard myself declaring that I was buying tickets for the Egypt exhibit at the De Young, and “they were going whether they liked it or not!” 

The weekend before spring break, I dragged them to a classical music concert at Berkeley.  The American String Quartet was performing pieces by Hayden and two other composers whose names escape me at the moment.  We were the only African-American family in the concert hall. H and C were the only kids.  No joke–the average age of the audience members was probably sixty-eight.  At the end of the concert, the man seated next to C tapped her arm and said, “come back again, and bring your friends.”

C is still taking piano lessons too, and sometimes it’s a challenge to find a balance between being a hard-ass and being sympathetic to the other demands on her time. I told her when I sighed her up I was going to ride her pretty hard about practicing and quitting wasn’t an option. At first, she was at the keyboard all the time.  But then the novelty wore off as she realized she wouldn’t be a virtuoso overnight. Now, most days, I have to remind her to practice and she usually has a dozen reasons why she can’t get to it.  I didn’t ride her about practicing while we were visiting my parents,  but when we got home from I insisted she put in some time.  She grumbled and sighed and moped and finally dragged herself to the keyboard. But I think my hard-as-nails-approach paid off.  Monday, after her lesson she turned to me and said, “that was fun.  It makes a big difference when I’ve practiced.”

I resisted the urge to launch into one of my parenting speech.  I just squeezed her hand. “Exactly.”

I don’t care if my kids grow up to be concert musicians.  In fact, I seriously doubt that will happen. But if, thirty years from now, they can sit at a piano or pick up a violin or saxaphone and play something that brings them joy, I’ll have done my job.  I won’t even bother denying it–  I’ll breathe a sigh of relief and give then a standing ovation, exactly like my mother.

After a thirty year hiatus, I decided to take up the piano again. My last piano experience ended badly. Beethoven was my undoing. I was thirteen at the time, far too interested in boys and drill team to practice. When it was my turn to play at the recital, I pretty much made up “Moonlight Sonata,” on the spot, rocking and swaying like Liberaci, as my teacher flipped through the score, frantically searching for the notes I played. She finally realized I was “improvising,” and sat through the rest of the piece with a look of horror darkening her face. When I returned to my seat, my mother said, “I give up. No more piano for you.”

But I love music and I’ve always regretted not knowing how to play an instrument and not knowing how to read music. It’s sort of like going to a foreign country and not knowing the language: you know the experience would be twice as rich if you could only communicate with the locals. For years, I envied people who can sit down with a sheet of music and play, or even better, play songs from memory. Actually, I admired them, as I’ve admired all musicians. I decided years ago that I wouldn’t allow my children to make the same mistake I made. They were going to play an instrument whether they liked it or not. Quitting wasn’t an option.

So when C came to me last October saying she wanted to take piano lessons, I signed her up that same afternoon. What I didn’t expect, was that her teacher would change my life.

I took “The New Yorker,” to C’s first lesson, thinking I’d take advantage of the time and catch up on some of the articles I meant to read. But C wasn’t five minutes into her lesson before I’d folded the magazine and jammed it in my purse. Her teacher, a middle-aged Russian woman named Tatiana, started talking to C about feeling the music with her whole body. She talked about music being a conversation, a series of questions and answers. Each measure was a sentence, with color and variation. She offered a short history lesson. The language of music is Italian, as it turns out, and the way people learn to play music in the U.S. is different from the way they learn in Europe. I was hooked.
I went to each of C’s piano lessons from that day until the end of the term, and when it was time to sign up for the winter quarter, I wrote a check for the two of us.

It also helped that last summer at Ragdale I became good friends with a composer who showed me a concerto he was composing. He’d reached a point and couldn’t get any further. He was stuck. There was a place on the score worn thin from all his erasing and crossing out. I recognized it immediately and told him so. It was just like writing a chapter in the novel–all the trials and errors, the struggle to find the next right word, or in his case, the next right note. I realized then how similar our worlds were. Writing a novel and composing a concerto weren’t too different. He also gave me the great gift of leading me through a Chopin concerto score while we listened to it on his iPod. It was the same experience one would have if a writer led you through a chapter, explaining why he or she chose a particular word or phrase. I’ve never experienced anything like it.

My lessons started in January. Talk about starting from scratch. I didn’t know the difference between treble and bass clef. I couldn’t make my fingers move. It was like learning to walk. But each time I went to a lesson, Tatiana told me something that blew my mind. Our lessons are as much about music theory as they are about reading the notes. There’s so much emotion, so much color. Last week we talked about Chopin and Dostoyevsky, how they suffered in life. Did you know Dostoyevsky was set to be executed and was only spared at the very last second? He was literally on the block when the Czar stayed his execution. How’s that for a reason to write great literature? And Frederic Chopin, his relationship with George Sand? His death at 39? My God.

Life is busy. My plate is full. But I find time to practice–not every day, but most days. Funny how much richer the experience is this time around.

My next lesson starts in forty-five minutes.

Recently, I read another Malcom Gladwell article in The New Yorker where he talked about how long it takes a person to master a skill. Most of the examples and anecdotes he cites escape me now, but I do recall him saying that it takes approximately ten thousand hours of practice to master something. Ten thousand hours broken down into something like eight hours of practice, seven days a week is roughly ten years.  If I apply that calculation to my novel, it means that I should be a master by June 15, 2009–which is exactly ten years since I left my job to write more or less, (but mostly more) full time.  I have approximatetely six months before I’m suppose to feel like I have some control over this writing life.  Geez, that’s a scary thought.  Nothing like a bit of Malcom Gladwell to put it all in perspective.

This picture was taken at 8:02–just after the polls closed on the West Coast.  This was how we reacted to the news Obama had been elected. Immediately after I took this picture, I ran out into the middle of our street and screamed.

The next morning, H had an assembly at school where the students were asked where they were when they heard the news and what did they think they’d remember about the event.  H said she’d always remember seeing her mother cry.

Let America be America Again

Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed–Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breath

(There’s never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fools and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek–
And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak

I am the young man, full of strength and hope, Tangled in that ancient endless chair
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of
satisfying need! Of work the men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one’s
own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. I am the worker sold to the machine. I am the
Negro, servant to you all. I am the people, humble, hungry, mean–Hungry yet today
despite the dream. Beaten yet today–O, Pioneers! I am the man who never got
ahead, The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I am the one who dreamt our basic dream In the Old World while still a serf of
kings, Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, That even yet its mighty
daring sings In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned That’s made America
the land it has become. O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas In search of what
I meant to be my home–For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s short, And Poland’s
plain, and England’s grassy lea, And torn from Black Africa’s strand I can To build
a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me? Surely not me? The millions on relief today? The
millions shot down when we strike? The millions who have nothing for our pay? For
all the dreams we’ve dreamed And all the songs we’ve sung And all the hopes we’ve
held And all the flags we’ve hung, The millions who have nothing for our pay–
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again–The land that never has been yet–And yet must
be–the land where every man is free. The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s,
Negro’s, ME–Who made America, Whose sweat and bloor, whose faith and pain.
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose–The steel of freedom does not stain. From
those who live like leeches on the people’s lives, WE must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath–
American will be!

–Langston Hughes

So you can understand why, when I realized earlier today that I’d forgotten to buy the books again, I panicked. I couldn’t show up at Tatiana’s without the goods. I must have called half a dozen music stores only to find that they were all closed on Sundays. Luckily, I found one store, downtown near Union Square, that was open until five. That was at 4:15. I jumped in the car.

But this post isn’t about music books. This post is about what happened to me AFTER I bought the music books and headed back to the parking garage.

The first thing I noticed about Dee Dee was that she looked like a small bird. She was petite, at least compared to me, and looked frail inside the yellow sweatshirt which complimented the yellow undertones in her skin. She couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred and ten pounds. Her wavy hair was going gray hair and she’d pulled it away from her face with a clip of some kind. I had no idea how old she was. She could have been in her early forties or her mid fifties–it was impossible to tell because her tawny brown skin had barely a wrinkle. But it was her eyes that took me by surprise. They were red rimmed and terribly watery, as though they were infected or were result of hours spent crying. She was walking sort of hunched over and appeared to be lost, like she wasn’t exactly sure how she ended up on the corner of Powell and O’Farrell, in the midst of all those bustling tourists on a late Sunday afternoon.

As I crossed the street, she fell in step with me and our eyes met briefly. We nodded in recognition the way black people always nod to each other in public, it’s one of the unspoken rules, and I noticed in a back-of-the-brain sort of way that she was looking me over. But I had a lot on my mind. I’d spent most of the afternoon at another high school open house. My novel was giving me trouble. I had a stack of bills on the desk that were waiting to be paid. So I didn’t give Dee Dee much more thought until we were inside the garage and she approached me.

“Can you give me a ride?” She sort of swerved over to to me and blurted out the question.

“Excuse me?”

“I really need a ride. I tried to catch a cab but he took all my money and all the battered women’s shelters in the city are full. I found one that’ll take me and my daughter, but no cab will take me because I don’t have the twenty-five dollars it’ll cost to get down there.”
At that point, she started to cry, or not really cry, but sort of moan and mumble, like she was struggling to hold herself together.

You see some interesting characters on the streets of San Francisco, and if you stop long enough to listen, you’ll hear some pretty interesting stories. Like the homeless guy who always waved to me as I exited the Sutter Stockton garage. I use to see him every week, then all of a sudden he was gone. When I saw him a couple of months later, I rolled down my window, asked him where he’d been and he explained that he’d had an office job for a while, but preferred selling Street Scene newspapers even though he didn’t make as much money because at least he was outside. Or the couple who advised me not to cross the street in the middle of the block at Harrison and Fifth Street because they’d seen two people get hit in that very same spot. When I thanked them, then mentioned that they were living under the freeway and asked if I could spare a dollar. I gave them five because, after all, they practically saved my life. Or the man who was holding up a funny sign that made me laugh because it was so honest, so I gave him the entire spinach quiche I was planning to take to my writing office.

Maybe it’s the expression on my face that pegs me as someone who’s interested in people’s lives. Or maybe I just look like a sucker. Either way, I suppose Dee Dee figured I’d at least listen to her story.

My first thought when she approached me was, “well, I’ve never heard this one before. She’s pretty good. And who’d ever think to beg for money in a parking garage?” But something about the way she was fretting, the way she really did seem to struggle to hold herself together, to keep herself from crying even though her eyes were brimming with tears, made me think she wasn’t conning me.

I asked her to repeat her story, and that’s when she told me that she was trying to get to a battered women’s shelter. She’d reported her husband on Monday for beating her and the cops had hauled off to jail. But the Sherrif’s deputy (or someone in law enforcement) had just called to say someone was posting her husband’s bail and he’d be home in two hours. They advised her to get to a shelter, but all the shelters in the city were full. She’d found one that had room for her and her three year-old daughter but no taxi would take her because she didn’t have the money. Her husband had taken it out of the bank. She said something about him taking her rings too, but she didn’t care about that. She just wanted to get out before her husband came home. The shelter had a bed for her if she could only get down there.

“Down where?” I asked.

Dee Dee unfolded a piece of notebook paper on which she’d written the shelter’s name and address . . . It was in San Mateo.

This is what goes through your mind when it’s five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and you’re downtown, standing in a parking garage, listening to a battered woman’s story:

1) gee, I don’t think she’s conning me because she’s really about to cry now.
2) it’s five o’clock. I wonder how bad the traffic is on the 101?
3) I wonder where her daughter is.
4) okay, she must be telling the truth because her voice is shaking and now it just cracked and she’s wiping her face.
5) I wonder how badly did this guy beat her.
6) how many battered women’s shelters are there in San Francisco?
7) I don’t know any battered women . . . at least I don’t think I do.
her sweatshirt and jeans are so clean. And wow, her tennis shoes are really white.
9) I know that feeling . . . no, not the battered part, but feeling as though you don’t know where to turn.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll give you a ride. Just let me get my car.”

I didn’t actually learn her name was Dee Dee until we were headed up Geary towards her apartment. She lived in a building at the corner of Geary and Jones, on the fringe of the Tenderloin. We needed to get her daughter who was sleeping at a neighbors.

“I’m Natalie, by the way.”

“I’m Dee Dee.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, because she’d started crying again. “I’ll take you down there. It’s going to be okay. I’m a mom too.”

We’d probably gone two blocks when Dee Dee looked in the backseat and realized I didn’t have a car seat for her daughter. “It’s a three-hundred and eighteen dollar fine,” she said. “The only time a child doesn’t have to be in a car seat is if they’re in a cab.”

I didn’t know that. I immediately regretted throwing out C’s old car seat when we cleaned the garage.
I told Dee Dee I was willing to take the chance. My windows were tinted. We could strap her daughter in the backseat and no one would know. But she was adamant. If I didn’t have a car seat, a cab would be safer. I admit to being a little suspicious. Who was to say she wouldn’t just take the cab money and run? Maybe she didn’t even have a daughter. But she was still so shaken. I mean her whole body was trembling–and not in a drug induced sort of way.

“Okay, I’ll give you money for a cab.”

When we got to the corner of Geary and Jones, Dee Dee ran up to her apartment to check on her daughter while I searched for an ATM machine. By the time she met me back at the car, I’d found one (no easy feat in that part of town) and had taken out sixty dollars. Dee Dee had mentioned that she didn’t have any money and I knew the cab ride would eat up almost thirty bucks. I just couldn’t send this woman and her daughter out into the world with a dollar fifty in her pocket. She was a bit calmer now, and I stood with her on the corner while she called the shelter to tell them she was on her way. And that’s when she did something that convinced me (not that I really needed further convincing) she was telling the truth: She asked me to write down my phone number and promised to call when she got her things together and was in the cab.

I gave her the money, we said goodbye, and I drove away before she went back up into her apartment. Some people would have hung out their in car until they saw Dee Dee come down with her daughter and climb into a cab, and I admit the thought occurred to me. I stayed long enough to take this picture of her building, then I got in my car and drove home, because I figured at that point, what did it matter if she was telling the truth or not? Not to sound sappy of anything, but in the end, we were two women, two mothers, more or less the same age, who were just trying to hold it together and get through the day. I happened to be in a position to help her out, and I hope she’d have done the same for me. Whatever she saw in my face that made her approach me, I’m glad she did.

I was on Geary and Filmore when my phone rang. It was Dee Dee, telling me she and her daughter were getting in the cab.

And just about an hour ago (right now it’s 11:40), my phone rang again. It was Dee Dee, apologizing for the delay. It had taken her all this time to get processed at the shelter, but they’d made it. She thanked me again and I wished her luck. I thought about telling her if she ever needed help again, she should feel free to call, but then something told me she would. She has my number.

But not this year.

For the first time since the girls have been alive, Halloween’s approach finds us almost completely unprepared. No pumkins, no costumes, no strings of orange lights laced in the windows. There’s a part of me that couldn’t be happier, because you know what? Halloween is a pain in the butt. It’s not like Christmas which is supposed to be all about the joy of giving. It isn’t even like Thanksgiving or Easter, when at least you’ve got refrigerator full good leftovers for all the hours you’ve spent slaving away in the kitchen. Halloween is a complete wash for me, a whole lot of work for very little reward. Besides, I don’t like to costume parties and it drives me nuts to spend all that cash on candy only to have them it in the cabinet growing stale until I finally toss it a year later. Okay, every once in a while, I see some dressed in a costume I think is pretty clever, but that’s about it. To my mind, there are only three things that make Halloween worth the effort:

1) I get to watch “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!” which I’ve watched every year since I was a kid

2)  I get to peek in people’s houses when they open the door to hand out candy

3) my girls give me all their mini-Milkyways.

But even those pleasures are fleeting. Last year, the girls asked that I wait out on the sidewalk while they went to people’s doors, which put an end to my peeking, and they both squirrreled their candy away in their rooms  which mean no Milkyways for me.

Until today, I thought I was alone in my secret hatred. Then I heard W admit to another parent that he has to stifle a gag reflex every time he helps the girls carve their pumpkins.

Since school started, we’ve been terribly busy. In addition to the usual fall hustle and bustle–back to school nights, weekend soccer games, homework and after school activities–we’ve added the high school application process. It’s been a little crazy. So I wasn’t broken hearted when, last week, I noticed we hadn’t launched into the regular Halloween prep. I thought maybe we’d entered a new era. H had already informed me that she was going to a friend’s house to make her costume and that she didn’t need me to shadow her Halloween night. She wanted me to drop her off at Robin William’s house and she and her friends would make their way home. They had cell phones if the ran into trouble. C still wanted us to tag along while she trick-or-treated, but since she was going to be a Hippie, she thought she’d use my costume from a couple years ago. One quick trip to Goodwill for go-go boots and she’d be done.

But just as I was starting to feel a little guilty for being so willing to say goodbye to our Halloween traditions, the girls realized they didn’t have any pumpkins. So this morning I took them to the pumpkin patch. It wasn’t so bad. In ten minutes they’d chosen their pumpkins. They didn’t want to go through the haunted house. They wanted to go to the mall.

So it seems that we’re on the brink of a new era . . . sort of. Yes, the girls still want us to help around the edges. They still need us to drive them to Goodwill and light the candles to put in their pumpkins once they’re carved. But a couple of years from now, neither of them will bother to ask for our input. W and I will wait up worrying whether they’re home from a party.

So I suppose I’d better these last years while they’re still around.

As it turns out, planting sugar cane is no joke, it’s back breaking work, made even more strenuous and exhausting because planting season usually begins in the middle of August and stretches through the end of September. Temperatures are generally in the high nineties with seventy percent humidity. The guys I was working with told me that back in August they had to rush a guy to the hospital. They thought he was just suffering from heat exhaustion, but the doctor told them he nearly died. His body temperature was 108 degrees. I was originally supposed to go down to Louisiana to plant cane the first week of September. I’d have been out there toiling away but lucky for me hurricane Gustav forced me to delay my trip. By last week, the temperatures were in the mid eighties, and let me tell you, that was STILL hot. I started planting at seven o’clock and by ten-thirty, I’d sweat through my shirt.

As usual, I was totally unprepared when I showed up for work. First, I forgot my hat. I’d had a few drinks the night before and was operating on four hours sleep, so I wasn’t at my best anyway. I was so focused on remembering how to get out to the fields that the whole hat-sunscreen thing sort of slipped my mind. I stopped off at a Winn-Dixie hoping I’d get lucky, but they didn’t sell hats. The cashier, a young black woman, asked me what I needed a hat for, and when I told her I was planting sugar cane, she sort of scrunched up her face and suggested I go next door to Walmart. I’m sure she was thinking, “Who is this black chick with the funny accent? And why does she want to set our people back seventy-five years?”

I also forgot to bring gloves. What idiot goes to plant sugar cane and forgets about gloves? But the thought didn’t occur to me until I was in the fields. I was too embarrassed to ask Clint Judice, the cane farmer I was working for, for a pair. I did bring him a bag of donut holes and some chocolate dipping sauce as a little thank you gift. At least I thought about that.