Comments are appreciated and answered.
It was on this date in 1969 that the Beatles performed live together for the last time, on the rooftop of the building that housed their Apple headquarters. There’s a video on youtube of almost 25 minutes with the songs they played. I suspect this video will be pulled, so enjoy it while you can!
On his blog, Jeffrey Ricker asks:
Here’s a question–or actually several: what music inspires you? Have you ever written anything inspired by a particular piece of music? Do you listen to music while you write?
Here’s my answer:
I do make mental and sometimes real soundtracks for the novels I work on. Off the top of my head: Three Fortunes involved a lot of R.E.M. and a bit of U2 (Kieran was Irish, after all). I listened mainly to George Michael while working on I’m Your Man because there’s a lot of yearning in his songs and in the novel. I not only listened to the Pet Shop Boys during the period when we wrote When You Don’t See Me, but their songs became our chapter titles and the band was special to Nick. A Coventry Wedding was all Beatles, all the time, and though a lot of Beatles songs are mentioned in the novel, there are also coded references to their songs or song titles. Here’s one: Jandy meets a crotchety old artist in the book whose name is Wayne Plochman. In reality, Plochman is a brand of mustard: thus, “Mean Mr. Mustard” from the album Abbey Road.
I’d probably need to reread the other books to remember what songs were inspiring me while I wrote.
I write in silence, usually. The exception to this is when Tim and I work in the same dwelling, because he always has music playing. So a lot of times I mentally connect songs to my mood when I was writing something, even though they didn’t necessarily inspire it or have anything to do with it.
Speaking of music… One regret I have is that we took a fragment of a song lyric out of It Had to Be You. Every time I hear the song, it makes me laugh because of the scene it evokes–and not using it cost the readers a laugh in a comic moment in the novel. We were beginners and afraid of being sued.
Just for me.
A little self-indulgence on a day when bleak weather matches a certain hurt that always flickers somewhere inside me.
A song I won’t listen to anymore.
A voice I can’t hear anymore.
Cameras that shot photos more blurry than memories ever will be.
David has hit the road again on his Cross Country Dog in a Box Tour. I was able to get a fairly decent shot of Friday’s goodbye:
It was a great visit that I enjoyed so much. I still wish Debby could have been here, too. Next time, maybe.
Saturday is John Lennon’s birthday, which has me thinking of my late friend Riley. I wish he could see the Google Doodle video.
Rainy days and Mondays don’t always get me down, but I have to admit to feeling a little melancholy yesterday. March 8 is my lifelong friend Riley’s birthday, and no matter how silence sometimes stretched between us over the years of our friendship, we always made every effort to call each other on our birthdays. It’s been two years since he died, not enough time for me to forget my impulse to reach for the phone to say happy birthday and catch up.
When I talk about my friends who’ve died, it’s never a bid for sympathy. Sometimes I don’t talk about people because it makes me squirm that anyone might think I’m exploiting their memories for attention. In actuality, though I think of those lost all the time, it’s rarely with sadness for myself. I have too many joyful, funny, and tender memories. My regrets are that I feel they were cheated of time and the world was cheated of them.
I’ve said it on here before, and I’ve said it in person so many times to other people: It’s important to acknowledge loss. For our own mental health. To recognize and honor their lives and our feelings. I always think of the title of George Whitmore’s book Someone Was Here. We need to say that. We, and those we lose, deserve for us to say, “Someone was here.”
On behalf of two people dear to me, I want to recognize their someones who were here.
Friend and cousin Ron contacted me on Friday to let me know that it was time to say goodbye to Kipper. I never got to meet Kipper. I only knew him through Ron’s stories and photos, and I understood their profound friendship. Ron wrote to me about him:
…he had more personality than any other dog or human I’ve ever known. A definite character, I could always tell how he was feeling.
Forever clicking across the kitchen floor, wiping his cold nose juice on me and stealing kisses at every turn. He was supposed to leave me two years ago when he was diagnosed with bladder cancer…coincidentally at the same time I was dealing with my own cancer. But he stuck around…I truly believe it was because he knew how much I needed him. Toward the end, his bladder cancer had progressed, previous nerve damage had become worse causing him trouble when he walked, his eyesight was awful, he was nearly deaf, he had some arthritis, and was starting to have some anxiety issues. And yet, he was happy. I know he was, I could always tell. Not in serious pain. I don’t think it ever even crossed his mind to give up. He definitely taught me more than I ever taught him. He made it seventeen years…he had a good run. And I never knew I could love anyone as much as I love him.
Thank you for sharing Kipper and his funny ways with me over the years, Ron. You two were so fortunate to have been in each other’s lives.
On Sunday, another dog slipped gently away as he rested next to his best friend. I got to see Bailey many times over the seventeen years he spent with my brother David. David’s an outdoorsman, happiest when he’s somewhere camping and hiking in remote mountains and the high desert. He used to joke that if it weren’t for Bailey, he’d never find his way back to his truck. Bailey was always game to hit the road, and if my brother was visiting and left in the truck without him, Bailey was not the kind of dog who’d curl up and sleep. He waited and kept watch, knowing his place was in the seat next to his fellow traveler. He tolerated the rest of us and even our dogs, but he didn’t play and he didn’t cuddle. He was a one-person dog and he never let you forget it. That’s why it meant all the more to me one Thanksgiving when we all converged at my mother’s in Utah. Bailey actually lay down on the floor nestled against my legs while my mother, sister, and I sewed on the AIDS Quilt panel we made for my friend Tim R. Bailey was there when it counted.
Our family will miss him very much. Thank you, David, for bringing him into our lives.
I was sitting on the front porch Tuesday afternoon after I dropped all the rose petals into the flower bed. I was thinking about John Lennon and Riley and their eternal connection in my heart while I sang to the dogs. The dogs LOVE it when I do this; in their excitement, they run to distant corners of The Compound, probably hoping I’ll sing even more loudly so the world can share in the thrill of it all.
I wasn’t singing a John Lennon or even a Beatles song, but one of my favorite Neil Young songs, “Birds.” I was sad, and it occurred to me how one of Riley’s gifts was that no matter how crazy awful our lives were (and 1980 delivered a ton of crazy awful), he could always make me laugh. As I sang, I remembered Riley telling me a story about a day he was sitting on his front porch, singing and playing his guitar. He was working on a song of his called “I Saw the Light” about the rotten luck of his alter ego, the Mysterious Vagabond Poet. Each time the MVP thought his life was taking a turn for the better, another awful thing would happen. And as Riley sang, he suddenly realized that across the street, his neighbors were sitting on their front porch and laughing their butts off. That’s when he knew he’d accomplished what he wanted to with the lyrics: He’d taken all the crazy awful and made it funny. He came to my house a couple of days later to make sure the song would get the same reaction from me. Remembering how I laughed back then gave me a much welcomed lift.
Image taken from the Internet.
Some years this date passes by without my commenting on it. This is not one of those years. I really miss my friend Riley and think of him on this day as I have every year since 1980.
Though I joked around a little about her in A Coventry Wedding, I’ve never been one to disparage Yoko Ono. In fact, I admire her tremendously. She’s always been forthright and true to herself as an artist. Two things I love about her work are the Yoko Ono Wish Tree and the Imagine Peace Tower, a beacon of light that will shine through midnight tonight in Iceland, as it does each year from John Lennon’s birthday on October 9 until the anniversary of his death–today, December 8.
In memory of Riley and John Lennon, I created my own little wish for peace in rose petals. After I photographed it, I left it, though I was sure the dogs would plow through it before either Tim or Tom could see it. Instead, all four dogs and the puppy have stepped around it, and it’s still there hours later. Never underestimate the wisdom of dogs.
On a less somber note, happy birthday to Famous Author Rob Byrnes and our mutual friend Byrne.
A long time ago, in a small town far, far away…
My first love (his name is Tim, because there are a limited number of men’s names in my personal history of love and friendship) found someone else over the summer, a girl from a nearby military post. This often happened when a new batch of Army families moved in–they brought pretty teenage daughters with them. So my hero, the boy who’d been the center of my life, my beautiful, motorcycle-riding, leather-jacket-with-fringe-wearing, blond-haired, green-eyed Tim, broke up with me just before my sophomore year in high school. The Other Girl (whose real name I’m stealing for a character because I like it), was not in school the first six weeks of that year. She had mono.
For the first time, upperclassmen could choose our English courses in six-week modules from several topics, which meant that sophomores through seniors might end up in the same classes. That’s why Lynne and I shared an English class with Tim and my friend Riley, though they were older than we were. Riley and Lynne would watch with rolling eyes as Tim sat behind me and played with my long hair, braiding and unbraiding it, or rubbed the back of my neck with his thumbs, or leaned forward and whispered nice things to me during class. They rolled their eyes because once we walked out of English, where people who knew The Other Girl might see us, Tim ignored me. And I let him get away with it.
Those were the most miserable six weeks of my young life–not just because of the romantic roller coaster, but because an expiration date loomed. My parents were moving to a community a few miles away, where my father was the assistant principal of the high school. They couldn’t wait to transfer me there, in no small part to get me away from Tim. The big breakup wasn’t enough for them; they also wanted inaccessibility. It was as if they had a camera in my English class.
Looking at photos of myself from those months, I can still feel tears lurking. Even when I’m smiling, my eyes are pools of misery. There’s nothing quite so intense as the loss of a girl’s first love. When she’s also taken from all her friends and put in a new school where she feels different from everybody AND is the assistant principal’s kid–not a good time.
After I was transferred, Tim and The Other Girl broke up and he began calling me. Maybe it was a case of absence making his heart grow fonder. Since I didn’t have a driver’s license, and he wasn’t allowed to come to our new home, we devised a scheme to see each other one weekend. Lynne’s older sister would pick me up and take me to Lynne’s house to spend the night. Lynne and I were supposedly going to their high school football game. Lynne actually had a date, and the two of them were dropping me at the stadium before they went somewhere else. I’d be meeting Tim there, which would give us a chance to talk things out and reconcile before he took me back to Lynne’s that night.
I can still remember how I looked and what I wore that Friday. My hair was shiny and hung board-straight to my waist (it was the style). My makeup was light but applied to set off the big brown eyes Tim always complimented. I had on my favorite jeans and a new shirt that I loved. I took my brown suede jacket with me because of the chilly autumn night. Everything went according to plan…
Except that Tim never showed. I kept thinking maybe I got our meet-up place wrong, so I walked around the stadium during the whole game. Riley, who was a drummer in the band, watched from a distance, occasionally shaking his head but restraining himself from saying anything that might upset me more. When the game was over and the crowd was filing out around me, Riley went with the other drummers to put up their equipment. I didn’t move, sure that Tim would never stand me up. Finally Riley and his girlfriend Carol came back for me and made me leave with them.
I couldn’t go to Lynne’s, since she was supposed to be with me, and I sure wasn’t going home. Whatever their plans had been, Riley and Carol gave up their date that night to drive me around until I could meet Lynne. I was sitting in the back seat when Carol changed the radio station just as Carole King’s “So Far Away” began to play. I finally broke down in sobs, and I can still hear Carol saying, “Awwww. Riley! DO something!”
He couldn’t, of course. Sometimes you just have to let a friend’s heart break. And though it wasn’t the last time I’d have a broken heart, because it was the first time, I had no context for it. I didn’t know that I’d eventually get over it. I didn’t know that Tim and I would reunite and break up several more times before we both moved on. All I knew was that it felt like I was being turned inside out, my world was ending, and life would never be good again.
Though I never had teenage daughters of my own, my memories of being that naive and feeling that fragile–though of course, I actually had the strength and resilience of youth on my side–are sharp and fresh. Along with all the other versions of me I’d grow into over the years, that girl still lives inside me.
Maybe she’s the one who was so bewildered when I read Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. I was genuinely reluctant to buy it. I even told the bookseller as much. Why? Because so many people have written such terrible things about it. Some people would say they liked the story but the writing was awful. Others would say the writing was passable but they still despised it and couldn’t fathom its success. I’m not going to get into more specific criticisms of the books. Anyone can find them on the Internet, and many of them were written by people who also write books, including people I know and whose books I read.
But the books are written for the very audience that Bella is part of: the adolescent girl. Bella is completely believable to me, with her insecurities, her stumbling attempts to do the right thing, her love-at-first-sight for exactly the wrong boy, her sense that the weight of the world rests on her young shoulders. Meyer makes Edward her protector, maddening though he may be. He adores her, he rescues her, he watches over her. Theirs seems a hopeless love, never to follow a normal course, perhaps never to be consummated. It’s safely dangerous love, and to Bella, her first love plays out on a sweeping, sometimes agonizing, sometimes thrilling scale.
So did mine, and Tim wasn’t even a self-sacrificing vampire.
Bella is every teenage girl who ever felt hopeless, passionate yearning for a rock star, or the school’s most popular jock, or a teacher, or a gay best friend. It’s exquisite torment, and again, someone as young as Meyer’s Bella has no context for her feelings other than what she might find culturally, for example, in movies or literature.
And all those young readers and moviegoers who are infatuated with Bella and Edward are doing the same–falling in love with a love story that’s set up to have a certain physical purity while packing lots of emotional drama.
I’m not sure why Meyer has been singled out as a bad writer by writers that other people have also ridiculed and belittled. Maybe Meyer’s novels aren’t to everyone’s taste, but are any of these sharp-tongued critics being forced to buy and read her books?
It delights me when I see young people reading. And if they are led by Bella and Edward to read Romeo and Juliet or Wuthering Heights or any other literary classics, how can this be a bad thing?
Finally, if it’s not Meyer’s writing which people find so objectionable, but the swooning, over-the-top reactions of adolescent girls and ‘tweens, I can’t help but think of girls’ frenzied reactions to Rudolph Valentino, Frank Sinatra, James Dean, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Leonardo DiCaprio, to mention a few teen idols. Furthermore, in my life and certainly online, there are plenty of examples of people who exited their teenage years long, long ago, both male and female, who practically live in a ménage à trois with a couple of lovers named Angst and Drama.
So this is my confession. I read Twilight while I was reading Moby Dick, and I didn’t fall down dead from the literary dissonance. I was waiting to rent the Twilight DVD because a couple of other people said they might read the book, too, before watching the movie with me. But I couldn’t stand the wait. Not only did I buy New Moon and read it, but I dragged The Brides and Tom into my depravity by persuading them to watch Twilight last weekend. Today, I bought the last two books because I want to see how the love story of Edward and Bella plays out.
And I don’t feel one moment’s shame for any of this, because my heart remembers and celebrates that exquisite torment that is falling in love for the first time.