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Gray Thursday

Just my legs in the mirror’s reflection as I waited for my post-op exam, where all looked good. Did have something put on the wound which is still burning a little three hours later, but that’s all right. I’m very grateful for my entire medical team from my primary care doc to the specialists and nurses, PAs, and NPs who always take good care of me.

I have a long way to go to finish the beginning of the first coloring pages in the “Mountain Jewels” section of The Magical Unicorn Society Official Coloring Book. This group of unicorns is gray (of course!), each with distinct mane, tail, hoof, and horn colors in red, green, blue, and purple.

Tom’s working from home at his desk next to mine in the office. Though I usually don’t sit in the office when he’s working, the range of music his phone is streaming is excellent, so I’m working quietly next to him. I took that photo mainly so I could show that I’m FINALLY having my first coffee in nine days because I finished my antibiotic (doesn’t get along with coffee) yesterday. We still have snow melting outside, but I craved cold coffee.

I’ll add the finished coloring pages to this post later.

We have dogs all around us.

Like the princess and the pea, Anime rests on four layers of blankets/beds.

The smol dog Eva hogs the heater.

Jack and Delta: Uneasy are the heads that claim the daybed against interlopers.

As promised, below are the newly completed pages from this book. Excerpts from the book include this info: Mountain Jewel unicorns are known for their short tempers and gruff personalities… [They are] wary creatures who don’t often trust humans… Found in some of the harshest environments on Earth, [they] can survive high altitudes and cold temperatures…and are fiercely loyal to each other.

Sunday Sundries

Things that are gray. Or grey, as that spelling seems a little more magical than “gray,” and to me, all of these items have magic.

From bottom left, a rat sent by Lisa in Iowa years ago when we had to remove rats from our attic in The Compound amid much drama and mishap. In the end, the rats were gone, the house was secured, and despite it all, there were moments of humor, and Lisa’s rat symbolizes that. It was, in fact, that kind of magic that brought Lisa into our lives when she read the humorous TJB books, wrote us a letter, and a bond was formed. It included a visit to The Compound and meetings at Saints and Sinners, and it endures to this day.

Next up is little Dedo, a gift from me to Tom one year. Dedo is a small gargoyle on the Notre Dame Cathedral who is said to have a protective, caring presence. Dedo is a symbol of kindness and safeguarding. Sounds like Tom. Sometimes when you want to wander across the Internet, look up stories and legends about Dedo and his likenesses.

Then there’s Batman, whose sartorial choice for this look is a gray bodysuit. Through the decades, his bodysuit has had bold colors of several hues, zebra stripes, a mummy bandage look, brown, and black, but most often, he’s in gray. Batman is a symbol of hope and justice. He has no superhuman qualities, but he represents the best of humans in his quest to protect others, disable villains without killing them, and give people a belief in a better future.

An elephant, besides being my college mascot, symbolizes many things in different cultures. A list includes: power, wisdom, loyalty, fertility, strength, high moral character, longevity, stamina, moderation, eternity, memory, vitality, majesty, and intelligence. Speaking of magic, many years ago, over coffee, a professor told me a fact about elephants that made me rethink a certain bias I had, planting a seed that would fully bloom in the 1990s and change my life for good and for better.

Oh, the shark bites…the book. He’s only being playful. I doubt I ever gave any thought to sharks at all until one night when a few of us were hanging out in the lone convenience store in the wee town where I went to high school. (As I recall, the sister of one of my friends worked there, and she didn’t care if we gathered there. There was nothing else to do.) I picked up a book, read the first few pages of Jaws, thought, Eek! Not for me! and put it down. Later, I saw the movie when it came out, loved it (and also ended up loving the novel), and from then on, sharks held a fascination for me. I appreciate seeing them in their natural environment thanks to skilled photographers. I like seeing them in cartoons. They continue to have mystery and, like the elephant, a majesty to me.

Finally, we have what I dub a “melancholy of Eeyores.” In the pantheon of characters who inhabit Hundred Acre Wood, Eeyore seems to have a theme for many people, who think he’s: sad, depressed, pessimistic, downtrodden, negative, gloomy, and hypersensitive. However, he’s also a thinker and a planner. The magic of Eeyore is that he’s greatly loved by his friends. They don’t exclude him, berate him, try to change him, or avoid him. He brings a balance to their group, and they love him without conditions.

Finally, I included the writing prompts book Complete The Story. I feel as if I’ve story-told enough in this post already, so I’ll leave you with the prompt below. Maybe something among the worlds of gargoyles, heroes, and animals pictured will trigger your imagination or a memory that helps you create a story of your own. The story begins…

On the 4th day of the 10-day selfie challenge, I wished I’d never bought a smart phone. The photo of me was innocent enough, but what I accidentally captured in the background opened up a whole world of trouble. I had been walking…

Happy imagining and writing!

A writer’s heart

This resonated with me when I saw it today, and that’s all I’ll say about it.

I hadn’t planned this, but a doctor’s appointment I spontaneously made on Wednesday and was scheduled the same day, led me to a referral to surgery on Thursday, when I had a very minor surgical procedure that went fine, with a follow-up next week to conclude things. Probably the most challenging part to me is the antibiotic I’m on which requires a bland diet and no dairy. I’m already bored with what Debby said is the BRAT diet: bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast (dry). I have no interest in rice by itself. In the mornings, I’m eating oatmeal (I never use milk with it anyway), then for other meals I switch between apple sauce and bananas, and dry toast and saltines. No coffee or tea. Just water and occasionally for a treat, a little cranberry juice. Nurse Debby is handling my four days of dressing changes.

When Tom took his vacation between Christmas and New Year’s, he was finally able to put time into recovering files from the backup drive of a computer that died in early 2020. (We’d misplaced that drive and thought after searching other backup drives that everything was lost.) We weren’t sure that whatever hit the dead computer hadn’t also impacted the contents of the rediscovered drive, but he transferred literally thousands of documents to another external drive. Today, I began accessing some of the contents for the first time.

I feel, like the subject of a previous post, that I’m time traveling, having already sifted through hundreds of personal photos I thought were gone. It’s been surreal, because so many of those photos encompassed our sale of The Compound, our move to Houndstooth Hall, the Harvey flood, the deaths of Margot and Guinness, the new dogs that came into our lives to become Anime’s pack and our little friends–just so many dogs and people and things.

There are photos I don’t remember taking. Places I don’t remember going. For example, I found photos that I think might be from Mark Rothko: A Retrospective in the Beck Building at the Museum of Fine Arts in December 2015. I vaguely remember going to an exhibit in years past, and I have bad photos that inform me this was probably the one. We were in the middle of selling one house, moving into another, it was the holidays, and I was working crazy hours, so I’m not surprised it’s all a blur.

These were a couple of photos I found in my files, probably taken with my phone, that I think were part of that exhibit. I could probably find the first one online if I wanted to do a deep dive in image searching. The second one looks like it’s behind glass, reflecting paintings from another wall, and I’m not sure the colors are true. It could be more of a challenge. Regardless, Rothko’s art always feeds my soul and seems like the perfect way to finish my red-themed week.

Photo Friday, No. 943

Current Photo Friday theme: Collection.

An Accidental Collection

Recently, I was thinking of things I’ve collected. Dolls, of course, particularly Barbies and their accessories, angels, pigs, wee plastic animals and cars, and apparently coloring books; most of these didn’t begin intentionally. I might like an item, buy another occasionally, and then friends and family will add to them with gifts. There are also things that ended up with me after divorces and deaths. I asked Photo Friday if “Collection” had been used as a challenge, and now this week, it has!

I didn’t set out to collect Coca-Cola items, though it’s a product instantly recognizable worldwide, and I’m indifferent to the value (or lack) of anything pictured. These items represent my personal history with four distinct families.

Included in this photo are two tins, one that looks like an old Coke vending machine; the other, a miniature suitcase. I have a lot of tins in general, partly because Lynne collects them and has given me several; because fun is one of the few things I’ll join; and because they can be useful for storing things.

As far as the bottles, the first (starting on the left) is a special issue for a family wedding, printed with the couple’s names and the date. Anyone can order personalized bottles from the company, but in this case, the groom was the son of a Coca-Cola executive. It was a perfect souvenir for wedding guests.

The next two bottles are part of Coke’s 75th anniversary collector edition. I once had six of them, in their little divided cardboard carrier. Though I sometimes tell a funny story about how that went from six to two, these two are a symbol to me of three generations of a fractured family who is a cherished part of my history.

Though the next 10-ounce bottle is a 1994 holiday greetings bottle, I likely saved it because it reminds me of the bottles of my childhood and of family stories. One involves a hospital stay for me when I was 3-4 years old. Per doctor’s orders: I got all the little bottles of Coke I wanted. (It sounds crazy, but there was a medical reason.) This bottle also reminds me of Saturdays with my father at the gas station. He’d buy two small Cokes and a single package of Tom’s or Lance peanuts, then split the peanuts between us by pouring them into our Cokes. I loved that mixture of salty and sweet, but I especially loved hanging out with him.

Next is a 1983 commemorative bottle celebrating Alabama Head Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant’s 315 wins; and a 1992 aluminum can celebrating a century of Crimson Tide football championship titles following the team’s formation in 1892. Alabama is my father’s alma mater, as well as my own, and both my first husband’s and Tom’s. But there are people from my family and Tom’s who attended Auburn, and this tray featuring Bama’s head coach Bear Bryant and Auburn’s head coach Ralph “Shug” Jordan commemorates the last Iron Bowl game Jordan would coach in this fierce rivalry on November 29, 1975, just before he retired.

Next, that’s a 16 oz double-insulated can, spill proof, with a screw-off top for filling with the beverage of your choice–though you’ll still be advertising Coke! Then a couple of red aluminum bottles (emtpy) because I like their classic look.

Finally, the last bottle is the one I’ve had the longest. From our earliest teens, Lynne (who shares her birth city with Coca-Cola’s) and I would carefully check the bottom of each of our Coke bottles to see what city and state it was from. There was a goal: that city of our music idols, that city where we set our first stories, that city we imagined we’d one day live in. She found her bottle first, and eventually, I found mine, too: LOS ANGELES CALIF the bottles are stamped. I don’t know if Lynne still has hers, but mine went with me through high school, college, and every home in Alabama and Texas afterward.

I love that I’ve visited L.A. Love that I’ve known people from there who patiently answered (and still do) my endless questions. Love that it still remains part of the stories I imagine. Love that my restless self eventually settled in a large city which shares a whole lot with Los Angeles: urban sprawl and seemingly endless miles of highways, a diverse population in every way, sports teams, an appreciation for the arts, and a WE WILL PREVAIL attitude.

Have a virtual Coke from me, L.A. I will always celebrate you.

Tiny Tuesday!

Those shoes are mine, betch. Lyric from “Kelly” and the song “Shoes.”

In 2008, when I was in New Orleans with Lynne during a chilly February, I made a visit to Greg’s apartment to see him and his and Paul’s cat Nicky, perhaps better known as Skittle. Greg gave me that parade throw from the Krewe of Muses. It lives with my other Mardi Gras memorabilia in the living room display cabinets. I gave hundreds of Mardi Gras beads and throws to my grand-nieces and -nephews when they were little kids, but some treasures will always remain with me.

Carnival began in New Orleans on January 6 and will end March 4 on Mardi Gras Day. The 2025 Krewe of Muses parade will be on Thursday, February 27.

These CDs will take me days to get through, because I find them so effective that I tend to let them repeat multiple times. They were produced by New World Music, and if you follow that link, you can find the links for getting them in your country. They’re also available for resale on ebay and many other online retail sources, and there are undoubtedly different offerings in this series from the ones I have.

I used these CDs for myself and much of my practice in the late ’90s, early 2000s, and they remain my go-to choices for resting, relaxing, or centering myself. I probably bought the “Reiki” CD first, from Body Mind & Soul in Houston at their previous location (close to The Compound), and I kept going back to get the others. In the store’s current location (closer to Houndstooth Hall!), it remains one of the best places in Houston for gifts and for all your metaphysical needs.

Do intentions matter?

Over the past few days, I’ve seen too many photos and read too many stories from the city of my , Los Angeles. My heart aches for all those homes lost. People lost. Businesses and jobs lost. The daunting prospects of recovery and rebuilding. Not everyone there is wealthy, nor are all those neighborhoods filled with the residences of celebrities.

I’ve seen videos of terrified wildlife fleeing from fires, including a cougar with her two cubs running behind her—so beautiful, so scared. I’ve seen horses being rescued and taken to shelter in safe sites, and offerings from other communities of the number of horses they can take in. Many pets have been placed in shelters until their families can figure out where they’ll be staying or going next.

So many have lost their homes, all their homes’ contents, and sometimes even their vehicles. Meaning to be reassuring, people offer, They’re just things. They can be replaced.

Not all things can be replaced.

I thought of my decades of photos, my own and my mother’s. My father’s art. My lifetime of journals. My father’s military records. My mother’s genealogical records.

I thought of all the mementos and items Tom’s parents have saved his entire life and given to him on special occasions. His rocking horse. His family Christmas ornaments, including some from his grandmother. His parents’ art.

My teddy bear. My dolls, and I don’t mean that massive collection of Barbies so much as my baby dolls and the dolls my father brought back from Korea and Japan. Some of the Barbies do have deep sentimental value, too.

I thought about Tim’s violin, built by his grandfather. The portrait of Rex done by a local artist and gifted to him by Laura. The plant he brought back from his grandmother’s funeral that he’s kept thriving for several years. Lynne, too, has two plants, one that came through various relatives from her grandmother to her; another that was her mother’s, who died in 1978. I thought of the carousel horses that were gifts from her late husband.

Debby lost some very precious keepsakes related to her children during our flood in 2017, and a couple of things I valued from my teenage years went missing, maybe inadvertently thrown out with larger items. We’ve lost a lot over the years, but we’ve never lost everything, as is happening to so many right now because of the L.A. fires.

Some things can never be replaced because most of their value exists only in our hearts and memories. Sometimes, when our hearts are broken, those things give us something tangible to cling to, just as our companion animals give us the will to be strong, to keep going.

Yesterday, I watched a video of a stranger, maybe someone’s neighbor or a passerby, as she realized she saw movement on a property, and used her hands to pull two surviving fish and two turtles, all struggling, but alive, out of someone’s koi pond in their yard next to their burned down house. She put them in a cooler that she filled with their water to transport them. (There were others, fish at least, that hadn’t made it.) Imagine losing everything but what you could take with you, and then being reunited with those four little survivors, and what they might mean to those people. The kindness of that woman is immeasurable, and she’s just one of so many who are trying to do something, anything, for their fellow Angelenos.

There’s so much heartbreak in these losses, but there’s also heartbreak in the vitriol from the usual choir of cruelty. I can’t understand, don’t even want to understand, how people can be so small, so hard, instead of just kind. Even in thoughts. In words. Just kindness. It costs nothing to be kind.

Do intentions matter? Yes. I absolutely believe they do.

Over these days, I’ve turned to music from the CDs that live in the sanctuary closet with a lot of the things I once used in my practice. They’re meant to comfort. To help someone relax. To be a channel to healing. I have more, but these were ones I pulled out so far.

Enya, The Celts, 1987 and re-released in 1992; Watermark, 1988; Shepherd Moons, 1991; The Memory of Trees, 1995; A Day Without Rain, 2000. Loreena McKennitt, The Book of Secrets, 1997.

Loreena McKennitt: Parallel Dreams, 1989; The Mask and Mirror, 1984.

I’m grateful for artists and their music, as I am for all those who provide the movies and television shows we watch, the books we read, the art that intrigues us. So much of the creative output that entertains and enriches us comes from that concentrated part of the west coast.

There are two realities I hold on to. First, our strength and resilience are the reason we persevere and rebuild. It’s how San Francisco has come back from earthquakes. How New Orleans came back from Katrina. How New York came back from terrorist attacks. I’m picking big cities because right now it’s Los Angeles, but across the Midwest, the Northeast, the South, the West and Northwest, this same spirit has driven us, as it will North Carolina and other areas impacted by disasters, whatever their causes.

And second, the abundant kindness we show to those who experience catastrophe reflects the best in us. Whether we give our time or material support or let our thoughts, words, actions, and prayers come from kindness, infused with the energy of good intentions, we get to choose to be a part of one another’s healing instead of their suffering.

Tiny Tuesday!

Tom gave me this candle for Christmas, and it burned next to me sometimes over the multiple days this post has taken me to write.

Now that some of our house and holiday chaos has tapered off, I’ve resumed working on the Neverending Saga. It feels really good. I mentioned that I’d gotten encouraging messages from Lynne when she read the most recent chapters. I’m very fortunate that both Tom and Lynne stay engaged by these novels and offer me not just positive feedback, but also constructive suggestions, and they sometimes ask questions that cause me to look ahead or to better flesh out things already written.

In a few months, it’ll mark six years I’ve been working on this series. It’s been challenging and sometimes discouraging. As I start the new year, I’m doing a kind of inventory of the journey so far.

First: One of the first people, who is not a writer, with whom I discussed my plan for rewriting/developing the novels, told me that I couldn’t write books that include the diverse set of people and some of the social matters I wanted to make part of the stories. Because I’m white (and so is this person), I was warned that any characters of color–whether Latinx/Latine, Black, or indigenous American–would be rejected by the “woke” readers (not my term) I might hope would be among my audience. Within a couple of years of that conversation, expressing my opinions and values, not just in the books, became enough of a problem that this person chose to end the friendship.

I was surprised but have no animosity or resentment about it. I see it happen every day among friends and families, consequences of the time we live in. It does, however, make me uneasy when other people go silent now. Instead of thinking, everyone’s busy, lives are complicated and full of competing demands, I tend to castigate myself for anything I might have said or done that drove them away. This despite the fact that I have friendships stretching back through all the decades since the sixties, and we don’t all think alike or agree on everything. If each of us has a specific fear or anxiety, mine is abandonment, and it’s based on experience. Who knew one day the term for that would be “ghosting.” I’m not a fan. I do appreciate that in the experience described above, at least I wasn’t ghosted.

Second: Getting back to what and how I want to write, I understand the concept of “own voices.” We need more books from diverse writers; people of all cultures, genders, socio-economic groups, minorities, sexual orientations. It’s not my place or right to co-opt the stories of those voices. However, I’ve lived in, and I grew up in, places with a wide variety of people. I’ve worked with, lived with, gone to schools with, attended churches with, been taught by, and been friends with all kinds of people from all kinds of cultures. Even before I ever wrote a word (I started my first novel when I was eleven), I observed everybody. I listened to everybody. I heard people’s stories. I read endlessly in all kinds of genres, set in places all over the world. I’ve taken no one else’s stories, but many of their stories undoubtedly speak to or inspire the stories I write. I’m not writing biographies. I’m writing fiction.

Third: I kicked off the first decade of this century with published novels I wrote with three gay men. Every one of us wrote every character: male, female, straight, gay, transgendered, Black, white, Latinx/Latine, elderly, adolescent, wealthy, struggling. We weren’t writing autobiographies. We were writing fiction. People often assumed I wrote the straight female characters in those novels. I did introduce a new one occasionally, but their stories were filtered just as often through the other writers as through me. Once characters are properly established, they take on their own lives, whether I’m the only writer or a co-writer. That statement right there–I’ll go back and put it in bold–is my joy in writing fiction. Characters will surprise me, defy me, break my heart, and make me love them, even their flaws.

Fourth: One friend offered to read the books as they were being written, as a kind of beta reader. I’ve never had beta readers (other than my writing partners). I gave fair warning that these were works in progress based on old, very old, versions I wrote in the far-away past. They were subject to change during new versions because I’m older now and a more seasoned writer. This person had read and enjoyed my published novels (the TJB novels, the Lambert-Cochrane novels, the Coventry novels). To me, that implied I could be trusted to tell the stories of flawed characters organically. Not only were my narrative choices subject to change, the characters would change. Grow. Make mistakes. Course correct. Learn. I think that’s called being HUMAN. I don’t write androids. Robots. Aliens. (I don’t even write vampires who sparkle, but I sure read them.) I’m not interested in writing perfect or static characters. If you trust me because you’ve read me before, then I deserve the opportunity to develop the story and allow my characters their flawed humanity. This person began to take issue with my characters’ choices. In addition, I’d get comments like, “This character is obviously a serial killer.” I’ve never written, would never write, a serial killer. Anyone who’s read me knows that. The feedback became insulting, annoying, and an impediment to my process. The friendship survived; the beta reading relationship ended.

Fifth: Other people agreed to or offered to read the works in progress. Here have been the results of that. One never started the first book after agreeing to be a reader. One read the early lives of the first three of four characters who have points of view in the first novel, but then got tired of reading anything and wanted to switch to watching television for a while. The manuscript was never picked up again. One read the first novel and asked for the second, where the reading stalled. As far as I know, it remains unfinished. A fourth wanted to read them, has the first two novels, and again, as far as I know, never began.

These things definitely impact my self-esteem as a writer. Now, when someone asks, “May I read them?” The answer is, “Not until they’re all finished.” The beta/early reader concept hasn’t worked for me, and I realized it can even be harmful. I’ll continue writing and hopefully finish these novels because I want to. Because I need to know how it all turns out.

Below, using the week’s theme of black and white, is some motivation. Maybe you need it, too, as encouragement to forge ahead and protect yourself from what inhibits or harms your creativity.

Sunday Sundries

This week’s theme: Things that are black or black and white.

A pyramid with hieroglyphics; a raven on a skull, evoking Poe; a crow and a raven on either side of a cranberry/amaretto candle (gift of Debby–a nice scent to create to), atop two of my favorite books, ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ and ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’; coffee mug with ‘LOVE’ that includes a paw print; quartz crystal ball with black tourmaline inclusions; and the ‘300 MORE Writing Prompts’ book.

Taking a prompt from the book, here’s what I wrote this morning.

Lovely day

Today was a good day. My friend Debbie and I enjoyed a long FaceTime call. Texts from Lynne sharing her thoughts on new chapters she read from the work in progress boosted my spirits. I think I’m finally ready to take on the next chapter.

Tom and I did a bit of housekeeping and later had a nice afternoon and dinner with The Brides. (Debby and Timothy weren’t able to join us, but our four dogs did get to spend a few hours with Aunt Debby, so at least they felt spoiled and happy.) Pepper came with her moms, full of health and vigor, and I felt like it had been forever since we saw her. And once again, I got NO photos of her, especially when she was romping in the back yard. I never take all the pictures I mean to take.

Rhonda and Lindsey wanted to extend Tom’s birthday celebration with a couple of gifts. I’d made a hearty homemade soup and cornbread, and we had lemon poundcake.

To finish off the week’s blue theme, here’s a picture of a mushroom lamp Debby gave me for Christmas that will live in the writing sanctuary giving off its soft light.

Shake it up

My last snow-themed post of the week came from this coloring book and officially brings Christmas week to a close. Christmas itself hasn’t been stressful, which isn’t always the case. I managed to get everything done even though I left most of it until December. NOT Christmas things have been more stressful, but that’s just part of life. All the friends and family we communicated with in one format or another help keep things happy. We have so many and so much to be grateful for.

I hope this guy gives you a smile and serves as a reminder that shaking things up can sometimes be a good thing, and regardless, they settle down in time. I don’t know why his tree looks yellow. It’s green on the page.

ETA: I had a couple of fruit stickers I wanted to add to the page of fruit stickers in Wreck This Journal, and after I did that, I began flipping through the pages until I came to the one for “Rubbings.” It had a single entry on it (“Cowboy”), and I thought of my leather bracelet sitting just across the room on my bookshelf. So I did a rubbing of that, which seems right on this date.