The 4th Novel is now happening

After an unfortunate series of disconcerting and time-consuming events, I am writing fiction again. Here is a teaser from my 4th novel (currently in creation). Please ask me how my novel is going, as there is no accountability so motivating as your friends and family kindly nagging you about your progress! 

The Synopsis of A Badge Washed Up:

A grieving middle-aged, African-American cook finds the badge of a forensic scientist, who is presumed dead, washed up on the shore at a beach-side retirement community. No one in authority will take Janey’s clue seriously so she searches for Brooke Stone, the missing scientist, on her own. Janey finds a lot more than she expected.

Chapter 1: The Hook

My son, Saul, didn’t always die in my dreams, but that didn’t make any of the nights after his death less of a nightmare. Even in my sleep, on some level, I suppose I still knew that he was really and truly dead. I found every dream of him so close to real though, because I wanted it to be so badly, that I could smell his hair still. My heart was a wound that never healed. Walking long distances on the beach numbed it some. Plodding fatigue brought me to an edge that hinted at living. Moving proved I was breathing. That I should continue breathing.

I often walked the shores after work, at sunset, until my heels were cracked and bleeding. One day last August, I got more than I bargained for though.

My hands were shaking even though the heat beating down on the sand was so hot that my eyes felt scorched.  I felt sorry for all the little elders of the Shore Acres Seaside Retirement Resort where I worked. Their thin old skin loved the heat, but so much sun was hard on their pale eyes.  In truth, I felt sorry for the entire world. All the time, I just felt sorry.

 I felt sorry for my beautiful dead baby. The injustice of his promising life cut short in his prime burned so rough in my chest that my hands still shook, two years later, whenever I thought about it.

I paused my walk, stuttered stepped into the surf, and let the green Gulf of Mexico wash in and out over my toes. The smell of salt filled my nostrils and pricked at the edges of my eyes reminding me of the taste of the tears I was too dry to cry any more. I kept playing back the last time I saw my son, Saul, alive. 

“Come on, Momma, I'm walking one mile up the road.  Julie's house is right on the edge of Orange Grove.  The first house on the left as you turn into the neighborhood.” He bugged his eyes out at me and shook his head.

“I know you can walk the mile, Saul.”

“Julie is a good kid.  We're really going to work on our project for the science fair.  I promise.” Saul spread his large hands open in front of his body and stuck out his lower lip.

“I know Julie is a good kid. And you know I trust you.”

He rubbed the palm of his hand over his tight brown curly hair. “So, what's the hold up?”

I watched him shift from foot to foot, one ratty Converse over the other, as he waited for me to answer him.  He was sixteen years of earnest adolescent energy.

I wasn't sure what my problem was, but for some reason, I didn't want him to go out that evening.  My stomach grumbled. I should have listened to my mother's intuition that early February night. “It's winter, Saul.”

“It's Gainesville, Florida, Momma.  Low of sixty-two degrees today.”

“It gets dark before six 'o-clock, Saul.”

“There is a sidewalk the whole way.  I have to cross one street and there is a stop light there.”  He gave me a sideways smile and draped his arm around my shoulders.

I said nothing. Why didn’t I hold him tight right then?

“I'll take my hoodie in case it gets cold, and I'll be home by seven for dinner.”

I shook my head and smiled back at him. Why didn’t I tell him I knew the hoodie wasn’t necessary?

“I'll also leave Julie's phone number on fridge for you.”

He was a good kid, an Honors student.  He never sassed me. He never complained that we couldn't buy him a car or a phone, or that his clothes came from the third-hand bargain boxes at second-hand shops.  He smiled every day and he did his best to make others smile too.  He tried to take care of me. 

“Okay,” I consented, trying not to frown. Why didn’t I insist he hug me right then?

He promised to be home by seven for dinner that night because we both knew his dad would probably wander in very late, drunk and smelling like some other woman. 

I don't know when I heard the first siren for sure. It was fifteen minutes after seven, I was sitting at the kitchen table with our food plated, when the bottom just dropped out of my stomach as if I was on a plummeting airplane. I got really worried.  Saul was never more than a few minutes late to anything in his life.  He was two days early for his own birth.  He rolled out of bed every morning before his alarm clock went off.  I stared at our plates. Instant mashed potatoes, canned green beans, and thin fried pork cutlets cooled on the microwave-safe malanite. I listened to the sirens outside. The one siren warbling siren exploded into a symphony of sirens.

I thought I should call Julie to see what time Saul left her house, but when I got up from the table my feet took me past the phone and through the front door. 

I ran accross black-top parking lot in my socks, toward the front gate of our apartment complex, and the sound of sirens.  I remembered tasting my heart in my mouth as I called out for Saul. I remembered seeing one of Saul's Converse on its side on the pavement, covered in so much blood that it looked red rather than washed-out gray all over.

 I remembered many things. All of them hard. I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be whole, to be real, to be happy. I couldn’t remember being innocent enough to believe that justice would eventually prevail. I couldn’t remember what it was like to assume that the world would play fair if I played fair too. My heart ached the most though, because I couldn’t figure out what good love was in a world that killed my kid with impunity.

Eventually the sound of the ocean, tide rolling over shells, brought me back to the hot beach again. I hadn’t realized how far I’d walked out into the Gulf of Mexico. I tottered on the unsteady slope of sand. The hem of my basketball shorts was wet.

Salty waves tugged against the back of my knees and shell grit slapped at my shins.   That’s when it hit me, literally. A sharp wet slap on the side of one knee pulled past me on a wave and then caught between my legs, limp and leathery, as the wave receded. The water was gritty, so I couldn’t see what it was. I reached down and plucked it from the water. Black leather, well-worn before it was worn more well by the ocean. It looked to be a wallet at first. A broken clip on one side. I thought it was odd to have a money clip on the outside of a wallet at first. I flipped it open to find a wad of kelp wrapped around a gold colored shield.

Even through the kelp, I could tell the shape of a badge. The bare edge of metal glinted in the sun. I pulled the kelp away and peered at the badge’s dull enameling proclaiming, “Florida State Department of Public Safety.” I rubbed away more kelp and the engravings became clear, “Forensic Scientist, 424242.” The plastic ID sleeve was empty, gaping like a dead jelly fish. A shiver shot down my spine. The leather, dead skin, was waterlogged and gross. I wanted to drop it, but the enamel of the badge was warm, and I couldn’t let it go for some reason. I traced the “424242” with the tip of my index finger. The grooves were soothing. I folded the wallet up and clutched it, dripping beside me as I walked home. The numbers and the title sang in my head with each foot step. I didn’t know much about law enforcement then, at least not much positive, but I knew a, “Forensic Scientist” probably wasn’t a typical police officer. A Forensic scientist might not even carry a gun. Worry tugged at my gut. A Forensic Scientist sounded like someone who could easily get hooked into troubling things and end up dead. Or mired in a world of hurt. Like me.

†

I put a paper towel down on my dresser and left the leather wallet laying in the sunlight to dry. The badge unclipped with a soft thwap and I rinsed it carefully under the bathroom tap. Multi-colored sand grains trickled down the porcelain and rimmed the rusting metal edges of my sink’s drain. I knew I would leave the sand there to sparkle in the water, a testimony to my new complete-lack-of-housekeeping habit.

An old mock-up of an idea for the cover.

Reality tells taller tales than fiction.

Fans and editors sometimes ask and criticize how authors plot outlandish events and happenings that just really couldn't ever happen. Right?
Well, I'm sorry, Virginia, there might not be a Santa Claus, but there is a bum in a Santa Claus suit who really does roam the beaches of Honolulu gifting cookies in April.  And I have seen dozen of drunk Santa Claus look-alikes on a lawn during the Houston's Lights in Height's Festival.  And there was that Santa stripper with herpes I saw in an ER room once...

Anyway, my point (and I do have one) is that it is very easy to fall into what I will call the "Jarring Too-Reality Trap" when plotting my stories.  

I've seen and discovered some very weird things while  researching things for my novels, A Walk Away and Catch to Release.  Even weirder things than I see in my day job riding along with first-responders and extreme environment teams to do job analysis (and some of those tales are indeed tall--like the time I got to stand under a 20G centrifuge for people in Russia's Star City).
As a writer, I'm incredibly tempted to work in those very real and very weird things into my stories. It's quirky flavoring, something that I love as a reader myself, but that temptation can cause a backlash of disbelief or confusion so strong that it leaves a reader hating my story and it's ridiculously real events.
And that's a problem. Not that I believe I will ever learn enough to know how to write to please everyone (I'm not sure I'd want to either), but I do believe that fiction serves a purpose.  I think fiction is supposed to help us deal with our world more mindfully by entertaining us enough to read through many different mental simulations or rehearsals where we can see how various people handle and process emotions and situations.  Fiction is an engaging way for us to learn interpersonal skills and discover social insights, without any boring lectures or dangerous missions.  So it's a problem if I shock too many readers out of that opportunity with a plot event they can't reconcile with probability, but it is also a thin line--I mean we read fantasy and much of those stories include events that are no where near probable, but we don't mind because in their established universe they sound probable and real.

So what I have learned to help avoid the "Jarring Too-Reality Trap" so far is:

1. Yes, it is cool that a South American radio novella star really did serve as a cartel hit-woman by arranging murderous accidents for her targets in the 1980s and that would make a good twist--but any weird reality-fueled twist probably requires a lot of narrative exposition to establish that as a viable probable reality for my readers.
2. Feedback from editors and betas can really help you see when your true facts are too true and the reader will likely doubt any explanation you might provide in narrative.
3. Society and popular culture decide the final truth you can get away with in your fiction. For example, in reality 95% of those who receive CPR outside a hospital die, and it isn't really helpful for injuries like gunshot wounds.  Also, those 5% who live don't usually live long or ever return to normal. CPR works best on cardiac arrest victims, and then it still only helps around 15% of the time. But thanks to  TV, many readers believe that CPR can save a main character and restore them to 100% functioning within a day or so.  If you don't want to promote that fallacy, then you have to plot carefully enough to avoid any situation where the reader thinks "they should just do CPR to save that character, that is what would have happened in real life."
4. Limit my quirky reality flavoring to two events per novel or less.  A little probably goes a long way? I mean would you believe me if I told you I once used a Rock Flounder to pull myself to shore, without swimming, through a cloud of jelly fish? Or that I saw a man who had died instantly from a 15 mph auto accident even though he was wearing a seat-belt, driving a decent car in the US, and had an airbag that deployed correctly?  It just doesn't matter how true it is if I overwhelm you with too much truth to process in one reading.
5. I have to remember to serve one premise. The purpose of my writing anyway, even if it isn't the purpose of all fiction, is to create a story that engages readers and empowers them to learn something about their own social and interpersonal experiences; so if I want to accomplish that then everything in the story should serve the story's premise first and foremost.  For example, the premise of Catch to Release is that the best way to protect the ones you love is to show them you love them so they don't do stupid things that get them hurt trying to get more love and attention.  Anything that doesn't support that premise, I tried to cut despite it's veracity (or not) otherwise.  The jarring too-reality events I kept where the ones that support that premise--sometimes being a hero means helping your loved one be her own hero, so she can defend herself from our improbable, unbelievable reality at times.

Have you discovered any tips or tricks for avoiding the "Jarring Too-Reality Trap" in your own writings?  Any too-true funny or scary stories of succumbing to the trap that you want to share in the spirit of Halloween impending?

#BeMightyWrite

Holding wild hawks was deemed too real by a beta reader for the scene I wrote about counting them in A Walk Away.

Novel Preview: Catch to Release

Chapter One – Bang, Bang. Got Me Good.

Addison Weller pushed open the underground garage access door beneath the courthouse and glanced over everything before she ushered the Honorable John Errington through the door ahead of her. The fine hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She listened and heard only the hum of the industrial heating system, but a prescient tingle tapped lightly over her spine. Reaching her left hand inside her jacket, she put the tips of her fingers on the butt of her FN 5.7 pistol. She placed her right hand lightly on the back of the Honorable John Errington.

A solitary businessman watched them from over the hood of a black sedan forty feet to their left. Weller noticed he was immaculate in a navy suit, white shirt, and pale blue tie. His face was smooth and regular as milk, until he reached inside his jacket. One of his brown eyes darkened and squinted in an aim as he pulled out a Sig Sauer P299.

Weller drew her heavy FN 5.7 smoothly. Her left forefinger brushed the safety off as she slid her gun over the crisp linen of her suit vest with a soft rasp. She tossed her head to clear away a dark brown wisp of hair in her sight-line. She leveled the gun. Adjusting her own aim to the poor lighting and the lack of breeze underground, she strained to hear over the adrenaline roaring in her ears. With one long, sure step forward, she brought her own body between Errington and the Sig Sauer’s speeding bullet before firing her own weapon.

The two shots fired so quickly that John Errington wondered if he was dreaming them. For a brief second he thought to protest when Weller pushed him to the oily ground in front of a black BMW. Then Weller’s stillness rested heavy on his back, and her weight behind her forearm spread across the back of his shoulders. He listened carefully to hear her breathing. He heard silence.

“Weller?” Errington shifted his face off the floor just enough to talk.

Under the tunnel of parked cars, he saw a man in a navy suit, arm outstretched but still holding a smoking gun, and a pool of velvet blood creeping over the oily floor. The man blinked at Errington as their eyes met, but the man didn’t make any other movements. Errington watched a sigh fall from the man’s lips to the floor. He swallowed, and asked again, “Weller?”

Weller’s weight lifted with such speed that Errington was too stunned to sit up.

He heard the steel door to the garage bang open and lifted his head to watch Weller wheel around to face the door with her FN 5.7 aimed and ready.

Errington let out a long shaky breath. One of Weller’s team members, the exceedingly tall one with short brown hair, filled the doorway.

Errington rose to his knees as Weller lowered her weapon, and he heard her request, “Wimberly, call 911, and then call Jim O’Rourke at the Chicago DSS field office and tell him we’ve eliminated a hitman. He’ll get the investigation rolling.”

Errington stood and watched Wimberly nod before leaving to comply with his boss’s request.

Weller offered a hand up. “Would you like to see if your phone charger is still in the car now?”

Errington tried to swallow the leaden fear bubbling in his stomach, but only managed to throw up on the floor between his wingtip shoes.

Chapter Two – Stage Fright, Stage Right.

Shay Greenaura played the guitar like most people played a piano, with all ten fingers intimately involved. She thought of her guitar as another woman with a driving pulse that she could bend. The cheers of the seven thousand or so souls watching her play rushed over and around her like waves washing against stones at the sound of every clear note she struck. Sweat stung her eyes and she tossed her head to free the tangle of blond curls sticking to her forehead. She sang out the closing note and leaned into the tightening of every muscle in her small body. Her voice broke free and clear beyond the roar of the crowd for a last, lingering second. Wolf whistles and cheering rolled over the stage. She was already drunk with the calm, wonderful weariness of giving all of herself to her passion, her music.

Thirty feet away at the edge of the stage, a solitary man in a horde of exuberant women watched Shay touch the hands of her fans and smile at each one as she walked off the stage. The man eyed the crunchy-granola hippie chick next to him and decided she would do fine. All of these liberated, self-righteous women ultimately just want to go home and be given some order, some direction, to soften the chaos of freedom. He would seduce her first, as he knew she believed she wanted to be seduced. Then when she learned to trust him, he would ram order into her with each hammer of his cock and beat her to the edge of senseless before he silenced her life into eternal order. He smiled to himself and smoothed one hand over the Greenaura logo on his T-shirt. He would use the hippie chick for today. But, one day...one day soon...Shay Greenaura will be my bitch. That thought made him hard in his jeans. He caught the blue eyes of the petite blond hippie chick with a shy nodding smile calculated to earn her interest.

†

Gloved hands pattered on a keyboard in a dim public library just minutes before closing time on a rainy Tuesday. A YouTube video of Shay’s latest concert rolled on in a minimized window, while in a larger desktop window, Shay’s blue eyes crinkled with a grin in a candid still shot. The photo was a nice close-up of Shay in pajamas, at home on a winter night, snuggled up on the sofa with her daughter, Iva. The pleased photographer slashed a warning over the photo in Jack-the-Ripper-horror font, “I WILL KILL IVA. SLOWLY. SO YOU CAN WATCH.” The photographer saved the creation to a jump drive, careful to erase the file properties, pocketed the drive, and erased all history folders before leaving the library.

†

“This is the Chasten Scorn show coming at you live on Talk Time Satellite Radio. We are all ready to ridicule and beguile Robespierre Greenaura, bass-guitarist and pansy brother of the infamous liberal dyke singer, Shay Greenaura. Say hello to the folks, RobO, you know the drill.”

“Hello, world. I’m Rob Greenaura and I can take the Scorn.” RobO flashed Chasten a wide self-deprecating grin and patted the thinning hair down on the top of his head.

Chasten shrugged his hoodie smooth over the back of his neck and smiled broadly. “Then let the games begin. Our first burning question, RobO, is—and we have done our research, so we do have some dirt—why is your sister quickly becoming a rich and famous musician with a cause, when you were the first one with star ambitions?”

“That’s too easy, Chasten. I never had any star ambitions. I just liked crooning cover songs, and I was floored and amazed that my baby-sister wanted to play along.”

“Aw, come on, man. Aren’t you even a little jealous that the scrawny no-name drummer of your Frank Sinatra cover band achieved all of this success as a singer and a songwriter, while you were stuck tagging along?”

“Well the cover band was mostly for fun anyways. I never expected it to feed us long-term. Our dad died when I was ten and Shay was four years old, and our mom wasn’t exactly reliable even before she died, too. So, I’d already been working as a busboy, and then as a bouncer for several clubs in DC, before I started trying to sing for more money. Shay had an after-school job, but she learned to play the drums so we could take home more of the band’s pay.”

“Got tired of ramen noodles?”

RobO chuckled. “Honestly, we got tired of living without power because we couldn’t pay the utility bills. Even when Shay wasn’t at work, she followed me to the gigs so she could have air conditioning and light for free for a while each night.”

“So you took your underage baby sister along to clubs like The Bottom Line bar for her safety?”

“Ha! No, of course not. Have you met my sister? I took her along for my safety.”

Chasten laughed boldly at the punchline in a deep rumble that was obviously playing it up for their listeners. “Point taken, RobO. So you taught your baby sister to play drums so you could keep her out of trouble and use her for slave wages?”

“Sort of. She actually taught herself to play drums by watching every night, I guess. I didn’t have a clue until one night when our regular drummer got too pissing drunk to stand up and we were about to go on without any drums, she slipped in behind his kit and started playing.”

“But how did she get from behind the drums to strumming a guitar and singing then? And how did you end up behind those drums?”

“We were waiting in the alley to go on at some scummy joint above a nice restaurant one night. Shay picked up Glen’s guitar and sat on his amp fiddling around with it—just like she did just about every time we waited somewhere, but that night she started singing along. Some poem she’d been scribbling all over the back of envelopes and receipts. A more upscale club owner, Jane Karsen, walked out of the restaurant after dinner and heard Shay singing. She handed Shay her card and asked us to play an early evening gig at a coffee house she had just opened called the Daily Grind. Since the time slot allowed us to still play our regular gig that Friday, we went to the Daily Grind first. Shay and I played that gig with her singing and me playing the bass guitar. We had to borrow both guitars from Glen the first few weeks, but then found I found a three-piece jazz drum kit and an acoustic guitar on sale in some pawn shop. After that we played any gig we could get anyone to book with either of us singing lead.”

“The masses just liked your sister best.”

RobO rolled his eyes and shrugged. “No accounting for tastes, heh?”

“What about this Greenaura crap? Couldn’t you guys make up a better stage name?”

“It’s our name. Our father gave it to us. All I know is that it means ‘from the village of Greenaun,’ which is in County Mayo, Ireland. Our father was of Irish descent, but his family had been here so long, and suffered so many separations, that I don’t think he knew much more than that. At least, he never told me more than that.”

“What about your mother?”

“She was part Italian and part Polish. She kept a list of family births and deaths in the front of her bible, but I don’t think she ever knew where or how her own parents or brothers ended up. I think they gave up on her before we were even born. I don’t remember any grandparents or uncles or aunts. None of the names on her list have led to anyone alive so far.”

“You heard that, world. If you’re related to these shady Greenaura musicians, please let us know. Maybe RobO will get sentimental and cut you in on the inheritance. Right?”

“Sure thing, Chasten, we’ll split our whole stock of Irish whiskey and all our bail bonds with anyone who can show they’re remotely related.”

“Now don’t be so damned generous, you bastard. Tell us how the hell you got from sleazy clubs in DC to Chicago in the first place.”

“Well, it’s really kind of a long story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

Chasten smirked. “No, but I’ve gotta ask you to tell it anyway. How else am I going to get a balding, middle-aged drummer to fill out an hour long show? I’ll interrupt you when I need to.”

“Okay. You asked for it.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Our mom died just a few months after I turned eighteen, but Shay was still only twelve-years old. Child protective services gave me the choice of assuming guardianship for Shay, but they advised against it since they didn’t feel I could take care of myself well enough yet. I opted to let them place Shay into the foster system for three years until I turned twenty-one and got a little more practice at raising myself.”

“So you left your little sister hanging in the wind?”

“Yeah, but in my defense, I thought I was doing what was best for both of us. It wasn’t until Shay and I were back together that I realized just how wrong I was.”

“So what happened?”

“The foster family Shay was placed with over those three years essentially used her as a drug mule and beat her into secrecy.”

“Whoa! Holy Cow!” Chasten’s eyes grew wider. He leaned in toward RobO to listen.

“Yeah, I know. Unbelievable, right? I had my doubts, too, until Metro PD showed up on our doorstep one morning to question Shay. The foster parents had been busted for dealing at a little league baseball game. Based on their subsequent accusations against Shay, and the evidence they handed over in Shay’s old school back-pack, the DA was pressing charges against Shay for possession with intent to distribute.”

“So then what? As far as I know Shay Greenaura has no criminal record.”

“No, she doesn’t. But it scared the hell out of us since we knew it was her word against the foster parents’ implications—and we didn’t think that stood much of chance in convincing any judge. Lucky for us, the public defender worked out a deal. If Shay agreed to serve as a witness for the DA against the foster parents as needed, do 500 hours of community service, and serve two years of probation with active drug counseling, even though she swore she never used any, then the DA would not press charges.”

“Okay, so how does that get you from Washington, D.C., to Chicago?”

“Well, Shay testified and the foster parents were convicted, but then they appealed and the conviction was overturned on a technicality, not too long after Shay finished her two years of probation with counseling. We were both afraid the foster parents would try to cause her some sort of misery in retribution. During the counseling, Shay saw something about a mission and shelter in Chicago called Second Start. I started poking around their web site and saw that they specialized in helping young adults get another start after drug-related misdemeanors. It seemed like our only real chance out, so we started saving for two one-way bus tickets to leave.”

“And you gave up your cover band and your gigs to go?”

“I did give up the cover band. We couldn’t take the other band members with us, and we didn’t have any connections in Chicago to restart the band, or knowledge of the club scene there to arrange any gigs.”

“But?”

“We kept our pawn-shop instruments. Shay and I played for money every chance we got on the way to Chicago, and all around the Second Start shelter once we got there. Many folks at the shelter helped us get paying gigs and promoted our work. Shay is a natural and it was easy for her star to rise once people could see her perform. She came out of her shell of fear and insecurity, too, and found a sense of belonging in the community.”

“Aww. How rainbow-from-the-ass-ends-of-butterflies lovely is that?”

“Yep. A regular happy ending. For me, too. I met my wife Sylvia there. Syl had been arrested for possession of cocaine as a minor before escaping from her rich bitch parents in the suburbs to the Second Start shelter in downtown Chicago. The three of us just bonded, and when Syl got a job in the city’s permit offices, she started networking with vendors who were willing to mentor us all on promoting our music. Everything worked out for the best.”

“So you’re not miffed about giving up your whole chance at fame and fortune to look after your sister?” Chasten’s voice played the tonal registers of false incredulity.

Shaking his head, RobO gave a sheepish grin. “Nope. I just want to keep my family safe. Shay and Syl experienced so many things because there wasn’t anyone who cared to keep them safe.”

“Safety is more important than fame and fortune, hey?”

“Yes.”

“But you never get bummed out about it? I don’t believe you.”

RobO half nodded and played with the zipper on his green pleather jacket. “Well, sure, sometimes. Sometimes I feel I still can’t really keep them safe. Sometimes I get tired of my brilliant little sister’s talent for change, evolution, learning, personal growth. Whatever you want to call it. Getting caught up in all the hubbub associated with that talent can be overwhelming and tiring at times.”

RobO shrugged out of his jacket and pushed up the shirtsleeve on his left forearm to reveal his tattoo. He held it up to show Chasten. “That’s why I have this tattoo that says ‘it is what it is’ right where I can see it when I drum. I think everything, including change, power, and growth is good in moderation. Some things you still just have to accept and make the best of. I just have to accept that I can do more good behind the drums, supporting my sister and hopefully keeping my family safer, than I can pursuing my own fame and fortune as a singer. Sometimes what it is should be enough.”

“Jeeze. Deep thoughts by RobO, folks.”

“Yep. It is what it is. Don’t you enjoy being a penny-ante shock DJ, Chasten Scorn?”

“Oh no, I’m not going to answer that. This isn’t about me. In fact, it’s time for me to ask you the question that matters most, RobO…what giveaway did you bring to appease our audience members?”

RobO smiled and reached behind him to pick up a hard-shell guitar case. “I’ve brought one of Shay’s custom, green-pearl-sparkle, semi-hollow, body guitars.” He unlatched the case and lifted the guitar out to show Chasten the sparkle beneath the studio lights.

“Well folks, I’m looking at it right now, and it is a thing of beauty even if you don’t write lesbian-folk-pop songs. The first caller who can correctly name RobO’s Frank Sinatra cover band wins.”

†

Shay pushed open the steel exit door a crack and found a score of people crowding the alley behind the Maddux Theater in St. Paul. She quickly pulled the door shut again. The cold air fanned in behind her and washed over the entire sweaty band at her back.

“What’s up?” RobO asked from behind her.

“They alley is lousy with media, fans, and,” she sighed, “protesters.” She looked at the ratty concrete floor and a dewdrop of sweat beaded down the edge of her nose to splash against the top of her boot.

“No other exit gets any better, I’m sure.” RobO’s voice was calm and smooth.

“Let’s just do it.” Fallow, her drummer flexed up and down on the tiptoes of his green Chuck Taylor’s.

“I’ll go in front.” RobO nudged Shay away from the door.

Shay rubbed her palms over her face and pressed herself close to RobO’s broad back.

†

The crowds parted around RobO letting him through. After twenty or so steps, he turned to smile at his sister and found that he could no longer see her. The crowd around him was looking behind him and shouting.

Hoots of “Shay, over here,” and growls of “Jesus can still save you, sister” echoed around him. Smartphone cameras flashed. Bodies pushed past him.

The rest of the band was lost in the sea of people. Everyone and everything sparkled dewy with the night’s humidity.

RobO spotted a small blond head bouncing above the writhing mass of humanity and turned to push his way back to Shay.

This alley, this venue, the security isn’t built for this level of recognition. RobO used his arms in a breaststroke manner to swim through the crowd to rescue his baby sister. I’ll never keep her safe.

An early cover concept draft.

If I wrote it, would anyone read it?

Does the creative non-fiction trend sparked by David Sedaris, etc. include travelogues in the Mark Twain, Will Rogers, and Flannery O'Connor tradition?
Soon I will set off on a hundred mile hike with my septuagenarian parents and esteemed wife along a wall built to keep out the rabble nearly 2,000 years ago. Hadrian's Wall follows the rolling contours of green fields, moors, and marshes from one coast of England to the other.   The walk alone could break us, but add in the weeks away from home in a strangely similar, but still different culture. Sure America owes some cultural heritage to England, and Texans are Americans...
But as the t-shirts put it, "Texans don't keep calm. We carry on."
We are not a couth group. Mom and I learned and tried to speak French in Paris.  Unfortunately, French spoken in Texan drawl was completely incomprehensible to all native French speakers. It did cause one little old man to pat my head though.
I can't help but think wouldn't it be fun to write the modern travelogue, "Lesbian Texans and Septuagenarians on Hadrian's Wall" as a vague parody of Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
I'm sure it would be full of my Scotch tasting notes, landscape photos too expensive to print or format in an eBook, and lots about English summer rain and blisters. I'm also sure it would record the socio-emotional growth of a family soaking in too much time together. Of course, there would be some sarcasm and some self-deprecation, but I'm pretty sure my whole point would be sharing my imperfect perspective in the hopes of helping other imperfect humans grow, love, and pursuit happiness with joie de vivre too.

The real question though is would anyone read it?

Should I risk dropping my armor and even trying to publish it somehow? Or would it just be better to write it for myself to myself so I don't exhibit any symptoms of the Emperor's New Clothes?  What would Mark Twain or Will Rogers do? I think Flannery O'Connor would have said the point is in the living, so write it if it helps you live. And that's probably the answer I need, because I do think that writing it will help me revel more in the moment of living it.

Suit up?

A funny story in honor of my Bubbas on National Siblings Day.

Cracked: A Sibling Conspiracy

In the fall of every year, two things re-percolate to the surface of my stream of childhood memories.  I remember Smurfs and indoor baseball. What child wouldn’t grow up to remember Smurfs?  But indoor baseball is a different story. There were originally only two people on the planet who knew the rules, and even we disagreed on our rule interpretations.

For instance, the “instant homerun” rule stated that any ball hit against the back wall without bouncing first on the playing floor was an automatic homerun. My older brother demanded that only balls that struck above the sliding glass door on the back wall were homeruns, as the rest of was sliding glass door and therefore not technically a wall at all. I contended that a ball that struck any part of the back wall, glass or otherwise, was a homerun – mostly because I had a hard time even hitting the back wall, whereas Brian could smack the wall above the door every fourth at bat.

He was an awkward gangly teenager then, but he managed to mass enough coordinated power to win most Saturday morning games. Not that beating his seven-year-old sister was a big deal. Only losing to his little sister was a big deal, unless, of course, he planned the loss to make me feel better—so I would keep playing. He thought those losses were necessary anyway to keep me from ratting him out to Mom and Dad for inventing the game, but truthfully, I wouldn’t have finked on him. We couldn’t play outside until they got home, and after cartoons were over, it was the best thing we had going in the way of entertainment.

Late one morning in autumn, after our Fruity Pebbles gorge-fest and the Smurfs were over, we decided it was indoor baseball play-off season. As the all-powerful older brother Brian was responsible for moving the minor furniture out of the base paths.  I dug the red plastic bat and slightly oversized lime Nerf baseball from their sacred hiding place in the back corner of my closet.

After a short review of rules and boundaries, Brian flipped a quarter for sides. I was the ‘visitor’ and with a cheery tap of the bat, I bounced over to home plate. Being first to bat meant that I would have at least one at bat where I wasn’t trailing by three or more runs. I could set up some padding on the scoreboard.  

As Brian readied himself to pitch, I cocked my bat ready above my shoulder, tucked in my chin, and nailed my stare to the ball in his hand.  He wound up and delivered a weaving spongy sinker. I swung the bat in a curt slice and missed.

Strike one.

I squeezed the foam ball up from the carpet backstop and tossed it back left-handed, disillusioned.

Brian wound up again. 

I focused my magic mantra on the ball, “BASEHIT. BASEHIT. BASEHIT.”

The throw was fast and straight –only fast throws with a Nerf ball can ever be straight, as the slow ones wobble around like a turkey in hunting season.

My bat swept over the plate in a long calculated arc and I pulled my hips into the swing.  The hit was a head high drive toward the long right corner of the back wall.

I thought to run, but the enormity of the ball’s perfect trajectory towards “automatic homerun” territory kept me planted two steps toward first base (the corner of the TV unit).

As the ball crossed under the air vent just before the right edge of the back wall, it took an inexplicable hard turn for the fireplace mantle along the right field wall. The ball struck Mom’s fine china vase (replica Ming Dynasty) dead center.

The ball dropped like an ancient horse-fly on a hot day and bounced from the vase to the brick below. In the following spot of time and space, the vase tottered. 

The rasping sound of ceramic wobbling over brick caused us to hold our breath, and then there was a suspended second of silence before the vase hit the base of the fireplace with a pistol crack.

We stood looking at the cracked shards of ceramic speckling the parquet floor, mottled rug, and fireplace in an exploded star shape. 

Super nova achieved. 

The big bang, Mom exploding into a super-heated rant about how she couldn’t own anything decent that we didn’t deface, was inevitable.

Brian’s posture from the mound read “game over.”

Humpty Dumpty came to mind. My eyes watered. I tightened my lips, in case that bottom lip decided to start a mutinous tremble.

I went through all seven stages of grief and back again, settling on shock and denial. I didn’t hit a homerun? I broke Mom’s vase? 

Brian jogged toward the laundry room for a broom and dustpan. 

I drug my bat over to the carnage and stared at it thoughtfully, trying to will the pieces together like a parapsychology lab subject mind-bending spoons. 

No luck.

Brian broke the reverie by commanding some mindless action—the best balm we knew for scabs of disappointment. As he swept everything into the dustpan, I nit-picked slivers from the tile. 

 “We could say the cat did it,” he suggested.

I thought about the time Dad whipped Brian, like some mutinous first-mate, for lying about feeding the cat when he didn’t. “No.”

“Yeah. You’re not so good at lying anyway,” he conceded.

“What if we just put it in the neighbor’s trash and act like it never happened? Mom probably won’t notice it’s gone, and if she does, it’s not really much of a lie to act like we don’t know what she is asking about. And even if she suspected, she couldn’t punish us or stay mad without ‘the evidence’, right?”

Brian laughed and shook his head, bangs flying. “Sure, she can. Mom will notice it is missing, and she is smart enough to figure out we are to blame.” 

He said “we” but I knew, as he did, that even if Mom thought it was only my fault she would punish him because he was “responsible” for me on Saturdays. He walked toward the kitchen trash.

“Wait…” I called.

He looked at me wearing his big-brother half-grin of enforced patience, his shoulders still facing the trash.

“Uh. Don’t throw it away. What if we glued it back together as perfectly as possible and stuck it on the mantle again? We could tell Mom we broke it, but show her how hard we worked to get it back together for her and she won’t be so mad. Maybe she’ll forget to ask how we broke it. And . . . even if she asks, she still won’t be so mad.”

Brian raised an eyebrow and coddled the dustpan. He was thinking. We both looked at the clock. Worst-case scenario, we had an hour to work, best case, three hours if they worked overtime closing up. He dumped the dustpan carefully on the kitchen table and bolted up the stairs to hunt out his model glue.

I started stacking big pieces together.

We didn’t say a word after that really. We worked heads down, hands talking for a little over two hours. Big pieces glued together first, then little pieces glued on to fill in the chinks. Brian used a wet paper towel to wipe away the excess glue before it could become hardened. I used my two smallest sharpest fingernails to cut and pick away stray strings of glue. Brian laid a piece of cardboard down to protect the table while we worked. We used the cardboard to pick up the glued vase and transfer it back to the mantle as soon as we deemed it safe to transport the goods from steady tabletop across the uncertain abyss of hall and living room toward the towering mantle.

“Maybe we should rotate it so the biggest pieces face front? The sunlight from the sliding door shows those hairline cracks too well.” He put his hands on his hips and tilted his head to one side.

“Yeah.” I nodded.  

He gave the vase a quarter turn from the bottom rim with surgeon steady hands. “Not bad, huh?” I asked.

“We’ll find out,” he grinned.

We moved the furniture back into “living” positions and I went upstairs to color something.

Mom and Dad pulled into the driveway fifteen minutes later. I applied my innocent face and floated downstairs to stand near the kitchen table toying with a grocery store flyer Dad had just put down.

Mom asked Brian to gather the dirty clothes so she could do laundry.

Brian looked hesitant, and started to say something. 

Mom interrupted, “Now, please? So I can get it started while we take a quick nap.”

Brian nodded and bolted off on assignment.

“What did you two eat for lunch?” Mom demanded.

“Cereal, I think,” I fibbed.

Mom murmured disapproval, “Well, no more junk before dinner, but I’ll make you a sandwich if you want one.” 

Dad said something about taking us to see the latest Star Wars movie after his nap.  I tore out of the kitchen and up the stairs to find the Yoda t-shirt Brian had out-grown into my wardrobe.

͠

I came home from college for Thanksgiving my junior year to find Brian and Mom in the living room tidying things up before assorted relatives amassed at our house for turkey and dressing. Mom had made a new flower arrangement for the occassion, and during extended placement trials, she decided the flowers might look best on the mantle above the fireplace.

I noticed Mom hesitate as she lifted her Ming-imitation vase from its central post on the mantle. She tilted the vase back and forth in the dusty afternoon sunlight looking into its archeological origins.

            “It’s so strange, look at how it’s all cracked up. What caused all the cracks? Why hasn’t it broken?” Mom mused.

Caught completely unaware, Brian and I cracked up, boulder rolling on the floor, in gut-busting peals of laughter.

Mom looked on from all five feet of her height above us.  “What?”

Laughter kept us from responding, but the uncertainty was already starting to spread into recognition on Mom’s face.

“You two did this?” she smiled and raised two eyebrows with as much authority as Queen Victoria.

Brian nodded between laughing convulsions that were more fit for a five-year-old boy than a man with three kids of his own. 

I snorted, held myself still on the floor, and tried to explain, “Of course we did. We broke it about fifteen years ago playing indoor baseball while you and Dad were at work, but we glued it back together to keep from getting into trouble.”

 “You never noticed the cracks before?” Brain inquired.

“No.”  Mom laughed from her belly.

I met my siblings eyes and we smiled at each other with our whole beings.  I remembered that the winter after we cracked the vase, my younger brother was born and we shared our love of indoor baseball with him over the following years.  We never broke another vase, and no squabble ever broke us apart.  I realized that some cracks help keep a family whole.

Brian and I dance at my wedding reception

Kirby and I drink scotch

Why Write?

I've spent three-fourths of my life to date studying human behavior. Psychology is my first intellectual passion, so why do I write fiction? Most especially, why do I write lesbian romance?

Honestly, I've always written stories in my head, mostly to entertain myself on long road-trips, but occasionally to entertain friends and family. Eight years ago, on a long flight out west with some very bored colleagues, I told them a story that I made up on a road-trip through Grand Teton National Park. I thought the story was about what would happen if a National Park Service employee who loved her job and worked hard (for very little pay, for a long time) to get exactly that job in that place met the love of her life and discovered her soul-mate had to work in the city. What happiness would this heroine decide to keep pursuing? If she couldn't have both, what would she sacrifice? Her love of meaningful work and the life purpose she had already chosen, or her chance to grow true love and companionship? What would she do if the deck was further stacked--if a large chunk of society didn't condone the relationship? If her soul-mate turned out to be another woman?

Hooked by the emotional dilemmas (my colleagues were psychology nuts as well), they encouraged me to just write the story--to make it a novel. Thanks to some inspiration from National Write a Novel Month (NANWRIMO.org), I discovered I did want to and could write a novel. That story became the lesbian romance, A Walk Away published by Affinity. But I also discovered I wanted to write lots of novels. And as I scribbled out plot after plot from mystery thriller and absurd horror to traditional contemporary romance I made another discovery. I had an epiphany. All my stories, no matter the genre or setting, were all about love.

More specifically, everything I write is about how letting someone love you (being completely vulnerable) is the scariest, hardest, and most rewarding thing you can do with your life.

Elated and thinking myself rather clever and self-aware, I told my encouraging colleagues about my epiphany. They smiled benignly and said something along the lines of, "Of course. Why do you think we told you to write? It's something the world needs to be reminded of again and again."

So I write, because nothing else sticks in the mind and makes a philosophy tangible and true like a story. I write because reading is one of the first places so many people test and observe behaviors, and I want to inspire people to learn to behave more vulnerably. Behave vulnerably enough to let someone else love you. The greatest gift we can give, the best stories we will ever write, are the ones where we let ourselves be loved.

I think this is especially true when social norms, or our individual perceptions of social norms, tell us that being that vulnerable with someone else isn't appropriate (like when we fall in love with someone of the same gender, or a different race, or a different religion). Letting yourself be vulnerable enough to be loved by someone opens up unknown worlds, unexpected joys, and contributes your single drop of inner peace to the filling of the world peace bucket. At least that is what I believe, based on my study of human behavior, and so I write. Especially lesbian romance.

Like heart rocks, meaning is where you find it and writing helps us do that.

Carnival of Wants

I want to light you up

from soul to sole,

like a Tilt-a-Whirl,

until you know exactly how this love

feels banging around my insides.

I want to free you up

from doubt,

like a Cotton Candy swirl,

until you know exactly how this hope

feels sticky-sweet, complete.

I want to bowl you over

from head to heel,

like a Ferris Wheel,

until you know exactly how this fear

feels a little fun tilting over me.

I want to fill you full

of laughter and cheer

like a silly, slow Teacup ride,

until you know exactly how to slide

our rich lives closer entwined.

I want to read you complete

from cover to cover,

like a carnival adventure novella,

until we can keep the joy written 

twirling in lights

between you and me.

Free Short Story, or is it Creative Nonfiction? You be the judge.

From Wikipedia: Creative nonfiction (also known as literary nonfiction or narrative nonfiction) is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Forms within this genre include biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, travel writing, food writing, literary journalism, chronicle, personal essays and other hybridized essays. According to Vivian Gornick, "A memoir is a tale taken from life—that is, from actual, not imagined, occurrences—related by a first-person narrator who is undeniably the writer. Beyond these bare requirements it has the same responsibility as the novel or the short story: to shape a piece of experience so that it moves from a tale of private interest to one with meaning for the disinterested reader."

A Fear of February (a tale taken from life).

I’m standing in the hall in front of the ICU at a local Catholic hospital waiting to see a friend, whose chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer has put her pancreas in life-threatening mutiny. Only one visitor is allowed in at a time. A crucified Jesus sculpture rests on the wall next to me. His open wounds seem wrong in this place where blood-borne pathogen safety is sacred. I resist the urge to put Band-Aids over the plaster Jesus’ stigmata. February approaches, and I am uneasy standing in the hallway waiting.

†

I am suspicious of February.

All in all, I’d have to say I lead a more charmed life than most, but Saint Valentine’s month has been a long-standing host of tragic misfortunes and hassles for my friends and family. If each calendar year could be thought of as a chance at bat in our lives, then February would be the dreaded change-up or insurmountable knuckle-ball in my pitch count. February shifts the ball deep into its glove, rubs in a little hidden Vaseline curse, and delivers its goods looking like Roger Clemens going for a bean ball.

I know, you’re thinking it can’t be so scary if I know when the pitcher will toss that pitch I’m not going to like. But what if you only knew it was going to be a bad pitch, that you couldn’t hit the ball in play no matter what, and that the umpire was always going to call that pitch a strike? Psychologists say that knowing something bad is going to happen is worse than being oblivious to it when you have no control over the situation – fear paralyzes you when you might otherwise walk on ignorantly unscathed.

I was in a different hospital hallway twenty years ago, when February pitched its first really convincing twister.

†

It really all started with a dog and a cat.

My first dog, a Brittany Spaniel, named Cocoa, was two years old when I came into the family. Her tail had not been docked like most Brittany Spaniels, so it stood up like a big white willowy feather wherever she went and announced where I could find her. Her soft chocolate and bright white fur was like a cup of Swiss mocha with marshmallows to a kid. When I was a toddler, she followed me everywhere, even along the beaches of Galveston. She didn’t like the booming surf and gritty sand much, but she went into the long crashing tide line when I did. She hauled me away from trouble and deep waters by barking and tugging at my socks or diaper until I fell away or gave up on dangerous intentions. As I grew, she was my pillow when we watched Saturday morning cartoons, and she was the weight holding my feet sure to the ground whenever I sat around reading fairy tales. In the February of my twelfth year, Cocoa got old and tired and quietly died. I felt the life go out of her body as I held her, my tear salty face buried in the familiar fur of her shoulders.

The cat belonged to my older brother.  We called the cat Easy, because he could easily fall asleep anywhere instantly. Easy was at a loss in the days after Cocoa died. I think he missed antagonizing Cocoa by kamikaze sleeping in whatever spot she wanted first. He slept on the sidewalk in front of the house the first few days after Cocoa died, as if she was just walking around the block beyond his domain and he had decided to wait. A few mornings later, before school, a neighbor brought Easy’s lifeless body back to our door as I went out to catch the bus. Easy had fallen asleep in the street and had been run over by a car. Dad called my brother at college. I stared blindly at the spot at my feet where my guardian dog should have been and listened in as my brother, my hero, softly cried on the phone over our losses. February was just warming up.

†

The real breaking ball came the next year. I was thirteen, gangly and awkward in the eighth grade, but a seventh grader named Jennifer thought I was heroically cool. She mimicked my volleyball serve, my three-point jump shot, the way I tilted my batting helmet, my affinity for reading books in the bleachers, and my crushes on outsider boys. She found me after basketball practice in early February, when I was feeling as dejected and worthless as my cheap generic tennis shoes, plugging balls at the basket in an empty gym. I was too young and self-centered to know what she wanted and so I didn’t invite her to shoot too. I quit to give her the gym and as I picked up my ball and smiled on my way out, she waved and shouted, “Hey, you know you’re my hero?”

Like anyone without self-confidence, I shrugged off her praise with a self-disparaging retort.

The next day Jennifer and two of my other softball teammates went to a high school basketball game. I’d planned to ride with them, but I was running a fever after school and feeling crummy so I opted out. I spent the evening curled up in a blanket in a lawn chair on the deck, drifting in and out of sleep. The cool humid air felt good on my feverish skin and I felt better outside listening to the rustle of leaves. Eventually Mom came out to force me inside. Clouds had covered the sky and they were lit a strong strange orange. We listened as sirens and a helicopter sounded in the distance, not knowing February was winding up real malice.

The next morning, our coach called to say Saturday practice was canceled. Jennifer, Jill, and Karen’s car had been hit from behind by a drunk driver on the way home from the game. Jennifer was thrown through the car windshield. Every bone in her body had been broken. Mom could only say that Jennifer had held on until about an hour ago, but Jill and Karen were still in critical condition, as if that was at least some consolation. No one prepares parents for telling their children these sorts of things.

I rode along to the hospital with Jill’s older sister. She said that doing nothing would probably feel better as long as we were near enough to do something if needed. We stood in that hospital hallway until Karen’s sister Mary walked out of ICU and saw us. She’d been feeling sick too last night and hadn’t gone to the game either. I stood there as she cried in my arms, our escape guilt an implicit mutual ingredient in our shock. The ocean of hospital sounds moved on around us.

Tuesday was the funeral. I sat between Mary and Alice among a tight school of bodies drifting dumb through the waters of ceremony. I made none of my characteristic side comments, for which Alice had nick-named me after SE Hinton’s Two-bit. So Alice and I placed red carnations on the casket. I remembered how Jennifer had told us about reading somewhere that carnations were considered roses for peasants. Jennifer’s mom wailed and sputtered denials as reality came back to her at random intervals. A vise squeezed my hearts each time, but I choked back my own sobs as somehow too inferior to show next to a mother’s anguish. I felt stunned in the same way a batter looks blustery and bluff the first time an umpire makes a really bad call.

†

By the February of my sophomore year of high school, Dad and I had been driving to Austin every weekend for three months to give my Grandma a break watching my Grandpa. Grandpa had a stroke that paralyzed his whole left side. Many days he cried with embarrassment as Dad helped the nurse shift his lean farmer’s body to change a diaper. Dad said nothing, but held his Dad’s hand, and asked me for small things (a coffee, a napkin) in smooth tones with his other big hand on my shoulder and his eyes on the wall. His stoic manners were familiar and comfortable to me, but then, the last weekend we would see Grandpa alive, Dad lost it. We got in the van to drive four hours’ home from the hospital on Sunday evening. My Gibraltar-rock Daddy, put his face in his hands and wept uncontrollably over losing his Daddy, over having to watch his proud father deteriorate cumbersomely against his own will, and over all the things he’d never said to his Dad. I did all a helpless daughter could do. I sat, waited, listened, and let his tears flow without showing him how much it scared me to know the world was as big and absurd to him as it seemed to me. The following week Grandpa had another stroke and died. Our next trip to Austin was in the stiff somber clothes of a family in mourning. I was starting to see a correlation in the timing, getting to know when my pitcher most liked to throw the nasty stuff, and I was learning to fear.

†

The February of my senior year I had a dream, a nightmare. I was deep in a boreal forest near the kinds of rocks and creeks and twisty trails I love, camping. But hordes of menacing black spiders covered the ground, harbored in the trees, dominated rocks, and swarmed at me. I ran for the tent, aiming for at least a fabric barrier that could shelter me. In the tent, my mother’s father sat on a camp chair in an appealing empty void of spiders and green light. He smiled at my tripped-up harried entrance, the same proud grin I’d seen play over him for as long as I could remember. He handed me his old whittling pocket knife and told me he didn’t need it anymore, but I would.

When my alarm clock went off, I got out of bed, and wandered down the hall to brush my teeth. I heard the phone ring as I rinsed my mouth.  As I washed the sink out, Dad knocked on the bathroom door to give me the news. Mom’s dad had a massive stroke and died earlier that morning. The man who taught me to play checkers so well that I still haven’t lost a match almost forty years later was gone. The man who taught Mom and I both to learn anything and everything by reading was no more with us. Mom is a Daddy’s girl. I slipped into my parents bed room and held Mom has she cried and told me how weird it felt to know your biggest fan, your most unconditional support in the world, was not with you anymore. A few days later, after the funeral, I opened a small box of stuff Grandma had sent home with Mom for me to keep to remember Grandpa. I touched the smooth worn handle of his whittling pocket knife like touching his hand again. I began to think I could plot a way to bat through February, maybe learn to get way ahead in the count and then just take the rotten pitch without striking out or letting my teammates down.

†

Years later I was interning at NASA in a lab. I was impressed by the astronauts who came in to participate in an experiment on a neuro-vestibular platform that was supposed to help them readjust their balance to earth more quickly after flight. KC was a first of her kind astronaut. I accidentally copied her on an email about a brown-bag lunch for our lab while she was buried in training for a mission. She showed up to the lunch anyway and told me how glad she was I’d copied her and how much she liked our lab’s work. The launch of the mission in January was flawless.  Over the course of the mission KC and the rest of the crew got more science objectives accomplished than anyone expected.

When February 1, 2003 rolled out, I was feeling relaxed and hopeful. That Saturday was blue, clear and mild. Morning sun shone through my windows with real warmth as I got dressed to go to a rugby match. The whole day would be spent playing this screwball game with friends and I was savoring the diversion from sitting face first at a PC monitor at school and work. I was desperately trying to remember what a flanker, the position I was to play, was supposed to do when the phone rang. Mom told me I’d better turn on the news because they were saying the shuttle exploded on landing. The radio clarified that the shuttle, with KC, had disintegrated in a fiery streak over Texas during descent.

†

February hasn’t always pitched death. Sometimes it just pitched out screwball punishment. But every February brought an attack of some sort in the place I am most vulnerable: my friends, family and loved ones. There was the February my first serious boyfriend proposed to me, way before I was ready to even consider marriage, and I had to watch my words of refusal cut his world into bite-sized ribbons of uncertainty. There was the February my Aunt was diagnosed with cervical cancer. The February my spunky great grandmother died weeks before her 100th birthday. The February I told my parents I was in love with a woman and watched them cry about the social hazards of lesbianism. The February my first real love, the one I thought I would marry, walked out on me for someone else—who was really bad for her. The February my dissertation chair bailed out on me and prolonged my dissertation by 18 months of crying struggle that exacted a toll on all my friends and family. The February my mentor had a quadruple bypass. The February another girlfriend had an affair with a histrionic psychopath while I paid all the bills and tried to keep step-parenting well.  Sometimes there was something I could do to help clean up the inning, but usually all I could do was watch Valentine’s tawdry month break bats and chew up rally hats.

Usually all I could do was persist.

†

So here I am, in that Catholic hospital hallway, waiting to see what it looks like this year.

Kate exits the ICU doors and it is my turn to go see Darla. Darla is a strong woman with a sharp wit. She is a black woman who grew up in inner-city LA and propelled herself through medical school back when women, let alone, minorities were not so easily admitted. She has sat in my office’s visitor chair and shared coffee and wisdom with me for the last year. We’ve shared reference books and plotted practical jokes on co-workers together. We’ve empathized over the folks we couldn’t help with our different brands of psychological training. Darla has three teenage children and she is her husband’s true partner. I swallow and try to keep my composure as I think all of this and look at Kate.  She gauges the look on my face as just cool concern for Darla alone, squeezes my arm, and smiles at me. I smile back, and then put on my game face, the one I know Darla needs to see.

“You’re so quick to care and slow to panic.” Kate reassures me as I hand her my cell phone and walk in.

Am I? Fear is thick swaddled about me, but maybe Kate is right. I have no panic, just careful fear. What will February bring this year? Who will it take out of my life? How far down in the count am I? On one hand, I want to scream at the stupid mother -fucker to bring it on. Maybe blazing resistance will buy us all some peace by fooling February into throwing one in the actual strike zone. On the other hand, I’d like to reason with February for a minute or two—like Babe Ruth reasoned with Charlie Root after that second strike. I mean I’ve been here year after year, mucking through the tears and clawing my way to a better appreciation of life’s beauty every time. My hands and my heart only open more each year, so why should February keep bothering?

I’m not just going to give up and strike out. I will get on base.

†

I think back and remember the six months following Jennifer’s death. Our softball team was short three of its starting players the whole season. No one expected our team to make playoffs that way, let alone go to Nationals. My older brother stepped in that May, home from college, to help coach for the first time. We scrapped our way through eight games in the losers’ bracket at the state playoffs in July with just one pitcher on our roster. Five of us batted better than a seven hundred average for the tournament. We were one run ahead in the last inning of the championship game with one out and a runner on third when the batter hit a deep fly to right field. Alice made the catch and came up gunning for home plate with all her might as the runner on third tagged up and busted toward home plate. I snagged Alice's throw, gripping it tight in my glove, and tagged the runner mid-slide for the final out.

The whole field went wild. I jumped up and down, and threw off my helmet and mask. Before I could remove any more of my gear, my brother raced across the field, threw me in the air and twirled me around with my leg guards clanking joyfully.

That following August would have been, should have been, and in some way was, Jennifer’s first time to play at Nationals. We stepped on the field for our first game at Nationals, and the unknown crowds cheered our infamous under-dog team. The whole day smelled of clean grass, sweet dirt, salt sweat, and old leather in the sun. Crickets joined the chorus of crowd swells underneath the haloed lights as we played through the night. I could taste hope.

†

When I walk out of the hospital, after seeing Darla, it is raining cold, clean, fat drops of fragrant, life-renewing rain. Somewhere in the darkness a distant radio plays Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Texas Flood.  I walk on, my fear forging my hope new again.