Last Bus to Crazytown

My husband and I are empty nesters. Our youngest child went off to college in the fall and last winter, anticipating this event, I did what any hormonally imbalanced woman would do.

I went down to the local animal shelter and adopted a rescue puppy.

And this is not just any rescue puppy, mind you. This is a rescue puppy with plenty of emotional baggage. (Think Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.) It seems our shy puppy, only three weeks old, had been found huddling with his three siblings under a bush on Christmas Eve after witnessing their stray mother get hit by a car. One of the puppies had already died of exposure. The others were taken in by a loving foster mother who rose every few hours for three weeks to hand-feed these poor orphans.

We named him Yoshi, which means “good” in Japanese.

We were as anxious as any new parents might be to raise this one right. We bought every dog-rearing book we could find. We’d had dogs before when the children were small, Jack Russell “Terrorists”, my husband called them, but we’d been too harried and over-burdened as parents to pay much attention to the dogs.

Yoshi has a group of plush animals, his “babies”, that he sucks every night as he’s falling asleep, as diligently as my children used to suck their thumbs. He rides with us in the car, goes for long walks in the park, sits between us on the sofa at night watching television.

Worrying about his socialization skills, we took him to the dog park. He didn’t do well. He seemed horrified by these strange four-legged creatures that bounded over, intent on ramming their noses up his ass. He sat down abruptly and leaned against my leg, humiliated and confused.

Thinking he might find a better class of playmate, we took him to a local doggy daycare. The woman in charge, who my husband fondly calls “The Commandant,” stuck him alone in a room with a large, overly friendly Doberman. (She raises Dobermans, of course). When Yoshi squealed in fright at the slobbery advances of the Doberman, the Commandant claimed that he was a “fearful dog” totally unsuitable for daycare. “You have no way of telling with these mixed breeds,” she told me. “Why he’s the way he is.”

Did I detect a bias against mixed-breeds? Oh no she did – ant.

I insisted Yoshi be given a week’s trial. As far as I was concerned, he showed more intelligence than any of these over bred, muscle-bound, pedigreed dogs she seemed so proud of. Every morning Yoshi rose and when told he was “going to school”, pranced, tail-wagging with excitement, toward the door. Every day at naptime I picked him up from daycare, hopeful that he’d managed to make a few friends. On Friday, the Commandant crooked her finger and indicated I should follow her into the office. Yoshi was being expelled. He had only made two friends but they were in the little dog class and he was too big to play with them. The big dogs didn’t like him. He wasn’t a team player.

I came home with a lump in my throat, imagining Yoshi friendless on the playground. Sitting by himself at the lunchroom table. Not being invited for slumber parties at the more popular dogs’ houses.

“Never mind,” my husband sniffed. “We both know Yoshi is gifted. He’s too intelligent and sensitive for those other dogs.”

I blew my nose, pouring us both a stiff drink. “Do you think we should adopt again?” I asked . “So he won’t have to be an only dog?”

Helicopter Parents

I’ll admit it. I am one. I raised three children and I tried to make their lives as happy and trouble-free as I could. Because I’m a good mother and I only wanted the best for them. I didn’t want them to suffer from bullies, mean authority figures, social events they weren't invited to, bad grades they occasionally made, sporting teams they didn’t make, all those traumatic events that characterized so much of my trouble-laden early life.

I just wanted my children to be happy.

And guess what? They’re not. As young adults, they worry about everything. They fret over every little bump in the road of life they encounter. A boss who treats one of them unfairly is a “psychopath.” A boyfriend or girlfriend who doesn’t return their affection can cause a month-long depression. A job that one performs diligently is suddenly eliminated in a down economy – how fair is that?

The answer, of course, is it’s not fair. Because life isn’t fair. My generation knew that. So why did we raise our children to believe that it is?

My husband recently read an article about administrators who are seeing waves of ill-prepared children entering college, children who’ve never made a bad grade in school, or been cut from a sports team, or had to arrange their own social calendar, much less done their own laundry or kept a check book. Children who’ve been protected from failure all their lives and so have come to expect that life is fair.

When I was a girl, I didn’t get a new bicycle just because everyone else on the street got one. If I made a bad grade in school, my parents didn’t call the teacher and request I be allowed to retake the test because I might not get into the right college. On the few occasions when they attended one of my basketball games, they didn’t call the coach afterwards to see what I could do to get more court time.

I learned that sometimes things work out and sometimes life sucks. I learned that failure means picking yourself up, trying a little harder next time, and going on.

And, hopefully, my children will learn that, too. Eventually. Once I stop hovering.

The Literary Life

As a teenager, I used to imagine my future life as a writer. I imagined myself twenty years into the future living in a cottage overlooking the Irish Sea, dressed in a pair of silk pajamas, a cigarette in one hand and a martini in the other, churning out novels that brought me international acclaim. I imagined a life of quiet seclusion, my only interruptions the daily mail drop, bags and bags of letters from adoring fans who would be content to worship my literary genius from afar.

Fast-forward thirty years to the hard, cold reality of my life as a writer. (a) I’ve never been to Ireland, (b) my fan mail arrives in the form of occasional emails that I’m always thrilled to get, (c) I spend most days dressed in a pair of baggy sweatpants and a stained t-shirt, and (d) I never write clutching a cigarette and a martini (well, not a cigarette anyway).

Writing is no longer about living a life of quiet seclusion. With the advent of podcasts, web sales rankings, and televised book reviews, it’s all about marketing, baby. Image has become just as important as substance. The cult of Youth and Beauty has finally infiltrated the publishing world.

Take a look at the cover photos of some of the writers on the best-selling lists and you’d swear they just walked off the pages of Vogue. Even the literary writers (although done up in tasteful black and white, of course), manage to look youthfully arrogant and, well, fabulous. My son, a Photoshop Wizard, assures me that, with a little work, he can make me look fabulous too.

And I thought all you had to do to be a best-selling writer was write a good book. Silly me.

Byron had a club foot. I’m pretty sure if he wanted to make it in today’s media-saturated publishing market he’d have to do something about that. My new novel, Beach Trip, is set to launch in May and I’m already feeling the pressure for a makeover. I’m thinking fifty pounds, a jowl lift, and a professional teeth-bleaching at the very least.

Forget ghost-writing; the trend of the future will be for ghost-doppelgangers, younger, more attractive actors to fill in on the media circuit for aging, fabulous-challenged writers.

One of my daughters, who looks exactly like I did twenty (okay, thirty) years ago, would be the perfect fill-in for me. I told her with my talent and her looks we’d hit the best-seller lists in no time, we’d be a shoe-in for Oprah and Good Morning America. She thought the idea demeaning to women (she’s currently taking a feminist literature class and has lost her sense of humor.)

Besides, she’s twenty-one. She looks like a goddess. What does she know?

Yes, We Can

I’m watching the news this morning about all the hoop-la over Obama’s upcoming inauguration. Should he tone it down, given the economy, or should he throw down in a big way, given the historical significance of his election? Should Michelle wear designer duds or shop at Target? As if the guy doesn’t have bigger things to worry about!

I have to say, though, despite all the bad news coming from the television anchors (have you ever noticed how these people seem almost gleeful as they deliver their forecasts of doom and destruction?), I have this inner feeling of optimism. I have this gut feeling that everything is going to be all right.

Call me crazy, but I miss the days of Bill. Bill Clinton could sell a double bed to the Pope. He could sell you chicken shit and make you believe it was chicken salad (to paraphrase another of our fine Southern presidents, LBJ). And maybe that’s what this country has been missing for the past eight years. A president who could make us believe, really believe, in chicken shit.

Not that I’m lumping Barack Obama in with Bill Clinton. He has something of Bill’s calm, unflappable demeanor but in Obama it’s more an air of studied resolve, of steady determination to see a job through.

I was never quite sure if Bill, despite his obvious intelligence, was seeing the big picture. Obama’s grave countenance the evening he celebrated his historic win in Grant Park, tells me he does see the big picture, and is approaching what history may call some of our country’s darkest days, with the requisite combination of courage, boldness, and tenacity. And somehow, despite all the bad news, this comforts me.

Maybe it’s because I read history. Maybe it’s because I know that, during those moments of extreme crisis in our nation’s history, we’ve always managed to produce a leader who helps us rise above failure, division, and despair. George Washington. Abraham Lincoln. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Barack Obama?

Miracles happen every day. If we believe.

Damn, That Girl Can Write

Anyone who reads my novels knows I love dark humor. The darker, the better. And no one does dark humor better than the British. I discovered Hilary Mantel years ago while browsing through an out-of-the way bookstore. I read Everyday is Mothers Day, followed by the sequel, Vacant Possession. The novels revolve around Muriel Axom, the hulking, psychopathic, idiot savant daughter of a medium trying to eke out a living in a crumbling English middle-class suburb. Muriel is a truly evil character and yet also strangely compelling and childlike. It’s a testament to Mantel’s ability as a writer that she can create a character who evokes such strong conflicting emotions. Slowly, patiently, and diabolically Muriel plots her revenge on people who have been cruel to her, including her own mother. Her transformation in Vacant Possession, set against the staid, bourgeoisie background of the Sidney family, is by turns grotesque, horrific and comic.

Mantel is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including The Orange Prize for Fiction (Beyond Black). She is a fine writer but she’s not for the squeamish. Her novel, The Giant, O’Brien is the story of an Irish giant who exhibits himself on the London curiosity circuit in the 1780’s. Charlie O’Brien is also an Irish storyteller who entertains the human oddities he travels with, the dwarfs, bearded ladies, prostitutes, and pinheads. At eight feet tall, he’s a celebrity of the circuit, but he’s also begun to grow again, which means he’s dying. It’s at this time that he comes to the attention of John Hunter, the brilliant Scottish anatomist who determines that he must have the Giant O’Brien’s skeleton for his collection. The novel is slim, but Mantel manages to capture in her spare language the essence of the eighteenth century, with its cruelty, hypocrisy, and dawning preoccupation with scientific research. It’s the story of two remarkable men, set against the dying of the old world, and the birth of the modern age.

My favorite book of Mantel’s, however, is her autobiography Giving Up the Ghost, which can be enjoyed by everyone. It’s one of those books that, as a writer, I can so clearly relate to, pages where she describes what it’s like to be an imaginative child, a storyteller, an introvert in an extroverted world. She also describes what it’s like to be an intelligent woman, an academic, in a man’s world of the nineteen sixties and seventies. Her lifelong struggle with endometriosis, her misdiagnosis and subsequent battle with the medical establishment over her own body, are conflicts women everywhere can relate to.

Kudos, Hilary. You go girl.