Just us...

So this past Monday, I dragged myself out of bed at o-dark-thirty so I could make it down to the court house by 8:30. I had jury duty, and not a year goes by that I don't. Because any Texan can request a jury-trial for anything, including parking tickets, this creates a ravening system that needs hot, fresh, open-minded jurors every day of every week of every year. And, despite my anti-societal stance on nearly everything, to my astonishment, I'm nearly always empaneled, voir dired, and often selected for the jury itself. I've sat on one criminal trial that lasted three days and, on the tiny side of things, I've been on a jury that decided the fine for a speeding ticket.

Every time I wind up in one of our courthouses here in Dallas, I have the same thoughts about the same things. I suppose this is because the things I brood about are things I don't have any answers for, and are probably unsolvable. Anything tangled up with legalities appears to me as the trickiest of mine fields, best to be avoided. I never get used to how long everything takes. Time in a courthouse appears to move at a maddening sludge-rate, so much court-house activity takes place in hallways, sitting and waiting, sitting and waiting. The cases I've sat on have been pending for several years, so when a judgment is rendered, it always strikes me as too little, too late or, conversely, too much, too late. Also, maybe it's my addiction to crime shows and murder mysteries, but I'm always struck by the artlessness of courtrooms: the bald-faced lies from witnesses, the naked ambition of prosecutors, the seedy avarice of criminal lawyers, and the transparent guilt of the defendants. I want to stage-manage everything and whisper, No, no, no! Don't look so shifty. No! Don't tell that terrible joke to soften us up! No! Stop it!

There are few lunch or potty breaks, and not many places you'd want to eat. Veterans like myself know to come equipped with a chunky paperback, money for the sticky vending machines, and lots of Nicorette gum. In honor of the low-techiness of it all, I brought a Tom Wolfe collection of essays about the 60's, and felt transported back to the day. Other than the occasional and frowned upon buzz of a cell phone, I bet not much has changed since then.

But the plus side of jury duty is us solid citizens. It's fun to be part of a randomly selected group...sort of like being in grade school again, or winding up in a community summer camp. This time, twenty-five of us were chosen and led into courtroom #3. We were, among other occupations there, a cafeteria food worker, a martial artist, an HR director, a corporate lawyer, a truck driver, a high school teacher, a disabled oil field worker, a truck loader, a defense lawyer, a medical researcher, a web designer and of course, me, a writer.

I thought that might be enough to bounce me out. On other voir dires, I've been asked if I write investigative pieces and while I generally and truthfully say no, I'm not a reporter, I can see the lawyers frown and scratch through my name. This time they appeared delighted. "And what do you write?" the defense lawyer asked me brightly. "Um," I said, trying remember some understandable things I've done, "I write screenplays, commercials for broadcast, and I ghost-write books." "Aha," the lawyer chirped, smiled broadly, and didn't take me off her clip-boarded list. And then we were all sent out into the hall, while the lawyers picked over us and puzzled out who they'd select.

I think of us jury-candidates as innocents abroad. We've been snatched from our daily lives, put into an environment none of us much like, and know very little about the processes there. I don't know if it works. There appears to be a frightening number of variables and too many unknowns. But I can testify from my time on various juries that we take our jobs very seriously, argue over minutae, and send our questions out to the judge time and time again. Somehow the right guy gets to be foreman and somehow we can agree on a verdict.

This time I was fairly sure I wouldn't be chosen. We were asked if we had anything against osteopaths or chiropractors, and my hand shot up. "An osteopath is a medical doctor," the judge admonished me. "I don't care," I said boldly, "I think they're quacks and I think chiropractors are quacks." And I do. It's a semi-informed bias, I guess, but a bias nonetheless. I knew I'd have trouble with chiropractic evidence should it be offered.

So, after we were dismissed to sit in the hall, I hunched over my book until an idea for a short story came to me. I pulled out one of my moleskin notebooks and scribbled furiously. The courtroom door opened and someone called, "Where's the writer?" "Over there," someone else said, "she's writing."

What to say...

Like most writers, my preferred condition is solitary. If I owned a cave, I would live in it, lowering a basket now and then for urgent supplies. However, if a reader happened by and clambered up the cliffside to see me, I'd surely build a fire, haul out the graham crackers, Hershey bars, and marshmallows. My reader and I would have a high old time over a sloppy batch of blackened s'mores, chattering about everything under the sun. I will always make time for my readers. Count on it.

There was a time when I was far more outgoing than I am today. I did a fair amount of public speaking then too, and every so often I'd get a phone call. Tell me what to say, the voice on the other end would beg, Just give me something to say. I'm afraid my callers hung up, bitterly disappointed, when I pointed out that day-to-day relationships rarely flourish on snappy come-backs. Besides, I didn't have any. I've never been particularly adept at social encounters, and probably my career choice is connected to that. Writing gives me time to polish my dialog, something life never does.

Yesterday I got a longish email from a woman I've known, in a sense, for quite a while. We have a friend in common, and he's kept us up to date over the years. The times I've bumped into her, she's struck me as open, funny, empathetic, and creative. She wrote to say she was reading through my blog, and mentioned a couple of posts she liked. Next she wrote about a conversation she'd had, one with a sibling. It was a long conversation, with some shared, painful confidences, and later she cried. Then she vacuumed and had some ice cream. She closed her email saying that afterwards she'd thought to herself that she wanted to talk to me. She thought: Ashley would know what to say. But her in-the-moment response was better than anything I could think up.

I've had phone calls like that, the ones that dredge up disconcerting stuff from the briny deep, then leave you surprised and exhausted. And while I've done my share of sobbing, I never had the good sense to vacuum or eat a bowl of ice cream. Both would have done me more good than my usual reaction, which is to walk in circles, smoke a pack of cigarettes, and brood. Besides, after a wrenching conversation, there really isn't anything to say. To the one who has been wrenched, you can say there, there, and make mooing sounds, then throw in a shoulder pat. It's a lot kinder than talking about issues, God knows. Words have their limits is what I'm trying to say, and, in the messiness of life, they're usually completely inadequate.

I loved her email, though. It was a wonderful accounting of how something really happens, and how it leaves us speechless and unsettled. I could picture her throughout all of it: at odds with herself and dissatisfied. Today I thought about her while I grocery shopped. I thought how the warm and human heart will necessarily feel pain. I thought that a willingness to have messy conversations requires its own kind of bravery. It takes courage to wade into murky waters, feeling lost and discombobulated when the popular culture urges us to be cold, complete, and slick. She's admirable for keeping it real, for staying honest when few people are.

Naturally, from my bloggy perch, I'd like to write something stirring. Maybe paste on a moral or something. But that's not needed, and it's certainly not desired.

I'm just glad K. reminded me: life is bigger than words.

A lot bigger.

Going back...

This morning, thoughts of going back have been flickering in my head...and more specifically, I wonder about going back in time. This week's New Yorker brings an article about Charles Van Doren, and his version of The Great Quiz Show Scandal. Stuck in my mind are scraps about the incident: a story in Life magazine, accompanied by black and white photos of variously depressed and disappointed grown-ups; a grade school lecture about cheating; and some TV commentary about our national moral rot. But mostly I remember myself, up in my room, bored with the whole business, and sneakily listening to rock and roll on my plastic clock radio, wondering what any of this had to do with me. I tried asking myself if I would have cheated on a quiz show if offered lots of money. I didn't think I would. On the other hand, I didn't think I'd ever be on a quiz show, so the quandary I posed was half-hearted to begin with. Reading Van Doren's article just now, I have a reflexive temptation to ponder our collective innocence back then, since past decades always seem dominated by naive ideas and populated by laughably stupid people. It's fatally easy to forget that any dusty historical period was actually complex, ambiguous, and in technicolor.

Some years ago, when we vacationed in Louisiana, my husband and I went over to Bayou Teche to visit a plantation called The Shadows. Just as we got there, a tourist bus pulled up and disgorged about twenty chattering elderly ladies from New Jersey. Because they all seemed full of piss and vinegar, my husband and I were disposed to like them, but our disposition almost instantly turned to hatred. As we trooped through the plantation house, the ladies kept up a loud running commentary, one nuttily contrary to historical fact. In the kitchen, as we all stared at a table well scarred by carving knives, one of the women announced, "That's from their swords. Not many people know it, but back then everyone cut up their bread with their swords. That's why they always wore them." "No they didn't!" my husband stage whispered. As we padded on towards the master bedroom, another woman remarked brightly, "You know, George Washington spent a lot of time in Louisiana. He wasn't tall like you read in books. Oh, no. George Washington was a short little fella. Maybe five feet tall, tops." "Make her stop doing that," my husband hissed at me. "I don't think I can," I said. "Then let's get out of here," my husband said, "I hate revisionist history." I edged backwards and tried the door behind us, only to discover it was locked. Seeing me rattle the knob, our guide said, "We have to do that now: lock each room as we go. People were stealing things out of the rooms." The group looked over at us curiously, and I almost emptied my purse right there, just to show I wasn't making off with a candelabra.

Later, my husband asked, "How can people do that? Just make crap up. I don't get it." I figured it was a rhetorical question, so I didn't answer. Anyway, I didn't have an answer. I like history and grew up in the DC-Virginia area, surrounded by lots of it: houses, graveyards, and battlefields. I don't know what it's like to have an empty place in my brain where a real fact should reside. Perhaps if I was seventy-three and from the pineywood flats of New Jersey, I'd announce that back in the day, everyone cut their food with swords. I don't think so, but it's like the quiz shows, you can't know unless you've been there.

On the other hand, I'm with my husband on revisionist history. It's annoying to hear pronouncements about hippies, Vietnam, Nixon, and the greatness of the Reagan years, when you were actually in the pudding. Besides the factual side of history, there's an emotional side too. When I sat up in my hot little room, listening to Bo Diddly on the clock radio, I was engaged in an act of overt middle-class-white-girl rebellion. Listening to race music was chancey stuff. However, I was only conscious of liking rock and roll. I didn't know I was part of something bigger, something that would flare up and catch fire in the sixties.

But that's another story altogether.

The wrong way in...

Today I read an article in The Guardian by a woman who decided to do the High Fidelity thing and contact all her old boyfriends. Did I mention she was a fifth-of-vodka-a-day alcoholic? No? It's a key point since it explains why the men she contacted were creepy guys, and sheds a dim ray of light on why she might write this up for public consumption. Plainly, she is a young lady ruined by the deadly combination of art and booze.

Generally, I navigate the tricky seas of life through a series of truisms I've hammered out for myself. Two of these are: Never look up people from your long-dead past, and Don't do anything advocated by novels, movies, plays, or popular songs. That second rule is my most hard-won. For years, I did only what novels, short stories etc. built their plot-lines around, and discovered this is decidedly a wrong way to go about things. Nearly every action done or suggested in a novel (movie or whatever) is wack, otherwise, it wouldn't be the least bit interesting or engaging. Art is not made from serene, happy lives, but from boredom, misery and fatal decisions. If Emma in Madame Bovary had decided to get a grip, and knuckle down to life in her dead little town, there would have been no novel, but Emma might have lived a long and fairly bearable life. Had Ishmael not gone to sea, there would have been no Moby Dick, but he would have avoided a lot of turmoil and nuttiness. Anyway, who goes whaling as a cure for free-floating anxiety? (Ishmael, that's who.)

My first truism is one I learned very early: Don't look back. As Hericlites knew, even 2200 years ago, you don't dip your toes in the same river twice. A single high school reunion should be enough to realize that your memory is flawed and that people generally lose touch for good reasons. At such events, or during unfortunate meetings on the street, you always come face to face with graying strangers and your own poor taste. The few times I've violated this rule, I've discovered that friends from the dim past have mysteriously turned into my parents. At such meetings, I was relentlessly and cluelessly quizzed. Why did you decide to do that? I never heard of such a thing. Why did you divorce him? He was a good steady guy.

But the real iron-clad rule is: Never look up old loves. The only conversations you will ever have are bad ones. This young lady in The Guardian rushed heedlessly into old boyfriend meetings a la John Cusak in High Fidelity, and came a cropper. Evidently she didn't stop to ask herself: Do I work in a record store? Am I an immature hipster-type guy, afraid of commitment? Does John Cusak look happy? Instead she barreled ahead, phoning up a series of no-hopers who said unkind things as they pawed her legs. Besides believing in a movie plot and its cardboard characters, she also believed a deeply-flawed art-idea: that of redemption. This notion postulates that all suffering is worthwhile if it is transformed into something finer.

Now sober, she wanted to show these past loves/one-night stands that she was all cleaned up, had a job and so, had redeemed herself. But entropy being what it is, she mostly got a realistic eyeful of how bad these guys were and it shattered her tenuous self-esteem. Then, in a last-ditch effort to exchange her wretchedness at the border for a big glob of Art, she wrote about her humiliations in great detail, then published them in a newspaper that enjoys a world-wide circulation. Whereupon her bewildered musings were seized on by snarky bloggers like me. The End.

I'm not sure what the moral is here. Don't believe crap you see in the movies comes to mind. As does, Let sleeping dogs and rotten boyfriends lie. Except that morals-to-the-story don't do much good. Most of us can't take good advice. We have to make good advice, and good advice generally comes from bad living. It's the human condition.

So mind how you go.

Boot scootin' into Dallas...

Larry McMurtry and his writing partner Diana Osama are in Dallas, giving a talk I will not be attending. My absence won't be due to spite or poverty, but because I make a lousy audience. Unless my own writing is going very well, hearing from other authors just gets me pissed off and greenly jealous. If my writing is going gangbusters, then I'm only in the audience to see what I can thieve...a nice turn of phrase, perhaps, or a seductive plot-line. Like a lot of artists, my emotions are mostly low and suspect.

However, I'm in Texas entirely because of Larry McMurtry and I've already told him that, face to face. Right after my father died, unexpectedly and far too young, I found myself sealed up in his house with my step-mother. Gloom, weeping, and suburban boredom steamed up the atmosphere and, with nothing much to do, I tackled the fat paperbook I'd bought in the airport. It was Moving On by Larry McMurtry: a long rambling portrait of Houston and a very young tearful character named Patsy. Maybe it was because I felt so lost and at odds with myself, but I became entirely captivated with the book, with Patsy, and most of all, with Houston. Then and there, on our scratchy couch, in our generic salt box house on Military Road, I promised myself that I would get to Texas. By hook or by crook, by God, I would go there.

As it happened, after graduate school, just before heading off to be a museum director in Fort Dodge Iowa, I was offered a one year grant at North Texas and accepted on the spot. Within six months, I'd met the man I later married and, thirty years later, I'm still here, with no regrets about any of it.

I met Larry McMurtry at a faculty dinner party many years ago. I remember he had the blackest hair I'd ever seen, and the whitest skin. After dinner he talked about his bookstore in Washington DC and managed to be the most boring man I'd ever encountered. All of us were utterly stultified, as he mumbled tonelessly about the business ins and outs of bookstores. As for me, I could barely keep my eyes in focus. But just before he ambled off into the night, I told him my favorite book was Moving On. He brightened up considerably, since the critics had savaged it. "It's my favorite too," he admitted. I told him I'd come to Texas because of it, and he smiled.

Today he and his writing partner were interviewed on a local radio show. McMurtry, who is marvelously proficient, talked about his ease in writing fiction. "I guess I'm in a trance-like state when I do it," he said. I could understand that. I get the same way, but only after about an hour into it. What I'm really doing is transcribing a series of images in my head, that come to me, one after the other. Stephen King calls this, "...looking into the monitor." It's a hypnotic condition, but there's nothing sleepy about hypnosis, although it often looks that way from the outside. Really, it's a state of hyper-alertness. I think it's what hooks me into writing and painting both. It's the way I feel while doing it.

Artists like me, the ones who feel they're a part of the work as-it-occurs, are sometimes classified as haptic. They are not people who stand as observers. Rather they are emotives, while the detached observer types are classified as visuals. Most artists are a mixture of the two, with one aspect predominating. Visual types are the majority in our culture and, for a long time I went around thinking I wasn't a real artist, because I didn't draw horses or people, and I wasn't a real writer, because the sound of words interested me more than snappy plots. And then, time went on, and it didn't matter if I was comfortable as an artist. Just doing it was everything.

So, thanks, Larry. For the book, for Texas. For getting me here.

Move along, nothing to see...

When the web-crawlers pull enough references to death out of your posts that you find your blog advertising tombstones and obituaries, it's time to give it a rest. I'm so sick of everything dying, my husband said angrily, on his way out the door to bury some stiff little varmint. I knew how he felt. Death can saturate your world, so much so that I'd begun to envision mortality, that old hustler, as a huge leaking teabag. And so I'll only note that my little cat died, but only after a ferocious struggle. I'll write her the eulogy she deserves another time. It needs to be a good one, and I'm not sure I'm up to it now.

This weekend I polished off one huge looming job I've been chiseling at, a bit at a time...getting my short stories in order. They cover a span of about ten years, and there are about fifty of them, some published, more of them not. Most of this chore involved weeding out duplicate copies, finding old drafts, then cataloging them neatly, and in the process rereading a lot. Psychologically it's an arduous and finicky task, because it involves the writer I am in my head vs. the writer on the page.

For a very long time I was the most reluctant of writers, only because writing was so painful for me. Every time I sat down to do it, I felt like a barely recovered burn victim, filled with dread and foreboding. When the story was done, I'd want to curl up like a mealie-bug, aching from a weird humiliation. Those emotions were bewildering, and oddly at war with the joy I would feel during the writing itself...this sense that I was square in the middle of a living mystery.

Once, I was on a panel of writers, all of us sitting in a row, stupid as bull's eye targets, taking questions from the audience. We were asked the usual stuff: where did we get our ideas, did our families ever get mad over stuff we wrote about them, how many hours did we write per day, yadda, yadda, until our talk deteriorated into something misty called the process. I said that I felt real writing, authentic, from-the-center, no-fooling writing had to do with spilling secrets. I didn't say much more because the idea had just occurred to me.

I don't know about the poor schmucks who paid money to hear us, but for me it was a very useful idea. I knew that the best of my stories were always accompanied by a puzzling boatload of shame. Then I remembered a truism that time and experience had taught me. The secrets we are likely to take to our graves are not of the fizzy technicolor variety...that something awful happened to us in the toolshed, that we once ran off with the yard guy, that we've embezzled quite a tidy little stash. The secrets that eat our lunch are generally so benign they can live within us for years, coring out our hearts, and darkening our lights.

I remember a man I taught with, getting so drunk at my apartment he felt he could finally unburden himself, and blurrily confessed that he'd flunked first grade. My great uncle nearly broke down when he told me how he'd knocked his brother's ice cream cone into the dirt. Those kinds of secrets are the ones I blurt out in my writing.
But it's a day's work getting to them. Something in me is likely to butt in and hurry me away...not from the lurid car crash, but from the day I broke my thermos walking home from school. Move along, nothing to see here... Except, that's where I need to stop and stare, because there's everything to see.

And so, in all my busy cataloging, I shouldn't have been surprised that I didn't remember writing many of my stories. I'm amazed I wrote them at all. Evidently my habit of writing obsessively pushed me into some half-conscious zone where I could get at this flotsam: the broken thermos, the ice cream melting in the dust, the weeping first-grader.

You know, the good stuff.

Cat shadows...

When my mother was hours from dying, I sat by her bedside. She was unconscious by then, slipping between one world and another, fully consumed by cancer. I remember only one light was on then, so the shadows on the walls loomed huge, and black, in stark knifed out shapes. And I remember that her two cats played on the pillow next to her, and in the next room the hospice nurses laughed softly at something. And I thought, Why not? Meaning why shouldn't her small cats play? Why shouldn't the nurses share a smile? Life goes on heedlessly, despite us.

And now, sitting with my little cat, Rita, I think that death is the same for us all. Like my mother, Rita slides between the two worlds, and stares at something only she can see. It's a hard business, this dying, and there's work to be done...work that only the dying know. There's not much for the living to do, except to be respectful.

Death, as Whitman said, serenely arriving, arriving...delicate death. But for me, death is a clown, gamboling right before our very eyes, performing his ultimate magic trick: Now you see her, now you don't.

At a Zen lecture I attended, a Buddhist abbot asked why no one had questions about death. As soon as he said that, everyone sat up, listening avidly. Why should death be any different from life? asked the abbot.

I'll have to take his word for it. I hope there's humor after death, and triviality, and love. But mostly I hope there's recognition.

I hope.

Death of the semi-colon and one small cat...

My small cat's death will not rank high in earth-shaking importance, if it ranks at all. It will simply carve another memorial in our own hearts, my husband's and mine. Not too long after Cutter Bob died, our cat Rita had a stroke. She lost the use of her back legs and her full sense of reality. Now she stays in my laundry cupboard, where I have rigged up a hospice consisting of clean bath towels, her special kitten milk, and a bowl of water. Mostly she sleeps, but sometimes she is frightened, spaced-out, lonely, or in pain. At such times, I lift her out, massage her muscles, and drip Pedialyte on her tongue. She will be nineteen in August, if she lives that long. If she were a human, she would be 94 years old.

When I realized how desperately sick she was, on top of the other signs of great age, I knew I could not have her put to sleep. She is not often in pain, she still eats with pleasure, and shows signs of enjoying her pats, rubs and attention. The other day she even managed an ill-tempered swipe at me. Even so, those aren't my reasons for rejecting euthanasia.

I've been a Buddhist for many, many years now. And Buddhism, at least the branch I follow, is not big on tidying up life to suit ourselves. So I take nature as I find it, and attempt to follow its lead as best I can. Tending to an old and dying animal is sometimes heart-wrenching, but mostly it's my great joy. I like being around Rita, and her Rita-ness, while flickering, is still apparent.

She is, like all our cats, a moggy...a mixed breed. If she's one thing more than another, she's Japanese bobtail, but with a tail. More specifically she's a Miko. Miko's are white, red, and black, and common in Japan. American Chinese restaurants often display a cat statue with a upraised paw, one with Miko coloration. The upraised paw is a characteristic bobtail expression. It's one Rita employed to great effect, although she didn't just raise her paw, she often waved it to get our attention.

Each morning for the past three weeks, I have peered in at her, fully expecting her to be dead. I'm astonished at her will to live, although I shouldn't be. Her will has always been ferocious, and employed delicately. Each evening, I have whispered to her that her work is done and that it's all right to let go, but Rita, as she always has, will exit on her terms. Oh, my sister, I pray that I will meet you in your next incarnation. How happy I will be to see you again!

And, also a contender in the small announcement category, Slate magazine ran an article titled, Has Modern Life Killed the Semi-colon? I'm generally nonplussed by people who are outraged by published misspellings, who criticize another adult's pronunciation, or who believe text-messaging is a clear sign of the end-times. Who cares? I think. Let others communicate entirely in initials, if they want to. Similarly, I think it's perfectly fine if a punctuation mark vanishes. The history of punctuation is littered with the corpses of peculiar little marks that once meant something, and have now gone.

I just hope the period doesn't give one last gasp and croak. I'd kick up a fuss at that one. The Romans didn't use them, and what a mess it is trying to decipher Roman Latin.

But, from my experience at death-beds of all kinds, I know some things can't be predicted.

The death of the semi-colon, the death of my tiny cat: both will come in due time. It will be a time not of my making, not subject to any hope or influence from me.

Somehow life is sweeter for knowing that.