I don’t know.

But as the result of receiving an email with a note asking, IS THIS YOU and a link from someone I trust, I know what it’s like to have my murder covered by TV news.

I got the link this morning from my son, followed a few moments later by a note that said, “Does this scare you, Mom? Who do you think is doing this?”

For a few breathless moments, I didn’t know who was or why.

As a news reporter, I’d made my share of enemies over the years….

But when I hit the button that would have allowed me to comment on this had it really been a You Tube-type video, I found that it led to a promo for the offbeat Showtime hit ‘Dexter,’ the sort of weirdly tender tale of a serial killer – a young man taken in by a hard-bitten cop as a tot who was found in a… well, in a vat of blood that also contained the body of Dexter’s mother. His foster father recognized quickly that Dexter had certain..proclivities. And yet he loved the little boy who couldn’t love, as did Dexter’s foster sister. He raised him to be an ordinary boy with something different. He raised him to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a law man, again with a bit of a twist. When Dexter, a specialist in, of course, hematology for the Miami Police Department, runs across a vicious killer who can’t be stopped by legal means, he has his father’s permission to take matters into his own hands.

Of course, it’s impossible to feel sympathy for a ritualistic serial killer.

Except it isn’t.

Emotionally, despite an aversion to the death penalty, even I feel that there are clearly human beings (often called “animals,” which is an insult to animals) who do things so heinous that – in old West parlance – they “need killing.”

Dexter keeps slides of their blood (of course, it’s his JOB to photograph blood spatter and keep slides of blood for DNA analysis and so forth) which is the part that makes this show a kind of parable of vigilante protest against crime: Stop the insanity through insanity.

I was introduced to ‘Dexter’ by my friend, Bill, a fellow so mild-mannered that other obsessions include buying inexpensive used Volvos off eBay for the use of his college-aged children.

The only other person I know who’s “into” Dexter is my son, Rob.

Which was how I finally guessed who found the site to create the video greeting card of my murder investigation.

And here I thought I was famous!

Yours,

Jackie M.

The Still Summer contest is over; and some lucky winners will have prizes headed their way once they learn who they are.

I intend to quote in full some of the best entries in this space in the next few days -- because a bad vacation can make a great story. It's just too bad we have to live through them. However, I want to share some stories about vacations you'll be glad you never had.

For all of you who wrote, whether or not you read Still Summer or are hoping to see the movie, thanks for sharing your tales of woe, comic or otherwise (I won't be quoting the "otherwise" kind, although some were indeed heartfelt. Enjoy the cologne and wear the earrings on your next vacation... here's hoping it will be a great one.

And look for my Young Adult novel, All We Know of Heaven -- set to appear in February from HarperCollins. It's a story of tragedy and love lost and found, but also a story of the care we need to take when we get behind the wheel of a car. What happens to one person affects a family, a peer group, an extended peer group -- and ultimately, all of us. What happens to Bridget and Maureen in All We Know of Heaven could happen to any of us, or any of our children. It's an absorbing story, but also (I hope) a point for discussion in families in which the parents read the book with their young teens or older teens.

Be safe as this holiday season begins. Remember, we don't live only for ourselves, but for others.

There have been a few people, in a life cram-jammed with the opposite message, who have told my second son that he was smart.
One of them, Donna Mahr, a math tutor in our tiny town, was the first.
She died just a couple of days ago.
How many lives did Donna Mahr change in her not-so-very-long life? (I believe she would have been in her 60s, and lost a stout-hearted fight against breast cancer with grace and quiet calm.)
How many lives did she transform?
How big are the boundaries of the universe? For every child she believed in, she gave comfort to a family whose heart was broken at the core. She gave hope to a family who knew, who KNEW, that their son or daughter had gifts that didn’t fit the traditional mold, who suffered a scalding anger and shame every time they were told that their child just “wasn’t on the ball, just didn’t get it, needed more than special education, was lazy, didn’t care” and later “wasn’t college material, should consider the military if they’d take him, maybe a sheltered environment.”
She taught kids – some small, some tall, some eager, some not so much. But she mended families who didn’t know where to turn.
Despite the best efforts of the rather nice public school system in our town to prevent this, our son graduated with a low B average, in part because of Donna Mahr, who was an angel before she ever got her wings. The low B resulted from failing the final exam in English as a senior, because of an accusation that he had cheated. Teachers said a “kid like that” could not have grasped Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried,’ particularly the parts about Chaucer, which our kid read when he was thirteen. When we objected, the administrators told us that his teachers, whose opinion it was that Dan hadn’t done his own work, were the ones who knew him best.
One said, “We can’t let him get away with this. We’re the ones responsible for the kind of person he will be.”
We, however, thought that we already had that job.
In fact, although certainly he was “a kid like that,” he read all the time, three and four books a week, and it saved him. Donna nurtured this, and helped him fill in the gaps where he will never shine – math and spelling and handwriting, with the assistance of another tutor. Handwriting is impossible for this son. Told over and over that he just had to “try harder,” he instead felt disgust when his writing was more formless and illegible than his eight-year-old sister’s.
Once, an associate of Donna’s passed the special needs room where our son went each day for guided study. He was seated on a high stool, receiving a lecture for losing yet another paper. The sarcasm and cruelty directed at our student, and his shame, literally brought tears to the man’s eyes. He was being told that needing extra time “wasn’t fair to the other students,” a refrain we often heard.
Donna always questioned that. Why was giving a kid who needed extra time to do the right thing somehow doing a disservice to kids who didn’t need extra time? Why did there have to be fault?
Her piercing reasonableness cut through so much denial. But it wasn’t until he left high school behind that we saw her work in action.
Though it has been a challenge, heaven knows, because our son has as many learning disabilities as I have fingers on one of my hands, he now is a college sophomore – a young man with friends and a future.
But this isn’t his story.
It’s the story of one remarkable woman, whose legacy to the young lives she touched was one of gentle civil disobedience: She taught kids whose trajectory for failure had been drummed into their hearts and minds long before she ever met them. She taught them math, but also she taught them that it would be they who defined themselves, not doctors, experts, teachers or even parents.
And she did this with such absolute conviction that the kids could not contradict her. They came away believing in her and thus believing in something they’d been taught to doubt – their own capabilities.
When I last saw Donna Mahr, she was pale but happy, at a table surrounded by great friends who’d been part of her book group for years. She asked after our son, as she never failed to do. At the moment I write this, he doesn’t know that she has died. Studying to be a chef, he had wanted to cook her a special dinner. Now, he won’t have the chance to do that. But already, even with false starts and do-overs, he has done her proud. He has looked inside himself and seen what Donna saw there. Donna Mahr didn’t leave a fortune or a foundation or a building named for her. She left a pyramid of better lives, a monument that will grow and thrive forever.

Here is how he looks, my last baby.

He’s a sprite, truly an angel child, charmingly verbal, from wearing “peekaboo dipes” to insisting that “all dinosaurs are babies.” He’s a kid with a grin for everyone, natural greeter at our front door, a kid who dances through his mornings.

And I’m joining up with him just in time, while he’s still round and soft as a plum, a little bear cub clinging to a tree.

I’ve decided dating these blogs just as my newspaper column ends, after 25 years, 11 in syndication. It was a good run – and almost a diary of my life. But it is this face you see here, this moment with this last-born of my five sons and two daughters,that helped me decide it was time to give up weekly journalism.

For all those years, the columns were a sort of diary of my family growing up – of my own growing up, for I was a grass-green twentysomething when I began. Atticus, however, does make me young.

He reminds me how life can begin again when it seemed to end – more than a dozen years ago when my first husband died young. I wrote a novel, then another, and now I’m putting the finishing touches on novel number nine and moving on to number ten.

As for children, there will never be another after this one. It’s not that I feel too old; but these – each of them – need one-on-one with both of us, me and my husband Chris, who married me and my kids nine years ago.

Long ago, when my son Dan, now 21, was young, I set aside an evening every two weeks for a date with each child. That’s a tradition I intend to take up again with my younger kids, who range in age from nearly 2 to nearly 12. And I’ll do the same with the older ones who let me.

The years since my husband died have been filled with not a little excitement, turmoil, acclaim, surprise, pain, abundant love and fear… but not enough silence, not enough privacy or quiet laughter or simple hours together.

That’s why I’ve decided to put on the brakes, in this one area of my life.

I’m going to lose some money. I’m going to lose some chops. But I’m going to gain just a little more of the one thing we can’t buy: time. I’m ready to pay out little more of the former to have more of the latter, before I turn around to ask myself, where has it gone?

You see, I’ve got a date with Atticus, to play dinosaurs.

I’ve got a date with his brother Will, to make a fort of blankets and chairs, with my husband, to talk politics and prairie flowers in the darkness of our room. I’ve got a date at college in Indiana with my freshman, to spend a few days buying him new tennis shoes and taking his friends out for a big restaurant dinner.

I’m not sliding into the slow lane. In fact, I intend to commit to my writing in a deeper way than I have before.

But some months ago, my first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was named by USA Today the second most influential book of the past 25 years – second, that is, to Harry Potter.

And that’s how important my writing is to me.

It’s the most important thing, second only to one other. But much as I love it, it’s second by far.

Recently, I was part of a Writers Come Home celebration at my alma mater, the University of Illinois, in Champaign-Urbana, in conjunction with the school's Homecoming celebrations.

I was reunited after more than 30 years with the only professor of all my professors whose name and curriculum I recall -- the magnificent Mark Costello, not the writer of The Big If but of the Murphy stories. He remembered things I had not; and one was a deep delight. There was a policy in his seminar classes that no one writer's work might be work-shopped by other students more than once in a given class. But he recalled that my fellows became my fans (painfully shy and secretly only 16 to my peers' 17 or 18 years of age, I wouldn't have dared look up long enough to know) and asked to read my work more than my allotted rota.

During the three semesters of Creative Writing Professor Costello taught me (the only three semesters of Creative Writing I ever took) I received what I think was an outstanding start on a career as a writer of fiction that would not begin for another twenty years.

Because as a high school junior, only 15, I had competed for and won a National Council of Teachers of English award, so I had my choice of good scholarships at eastern universities. I think I'd have thrived at a small private school for girls, like Smith, for example. But my parents discouraged me; and at the end of the day, I would have been too homesick and childlike to be that far from home in a world of sophistication that my children understand but I would not have.

Still, until that day last month, I felt a kind of burr under my saddle when others spoke of illustrious colleges where their "papers" were stored, while I have donated mine to a beautiful little Carnegie library in Wisconsin.

I don’t feel that way anymore. I may not have letters after my name; but I think I learned my craft from a master – even if I don’t practice it like one.

In any case, eyebrows peaked when I began my remarks.

After thanking Mark Costello, for whom I feel a tenderness and admiration I cannot quite articulate, I spoke about my time a few years ago on the fiction jury for the National Book Awards.

Of the five writers on the jury, three had been students of Mark Costello -- Bob Shacochis, David Wong Louie and I. And one of the short-listed nominees that year was indeed Mark Costello who had written 'The Big If;' and it seemed for a good long time that this was the odds-on favorite to win. But I fought for the work of two other writers whose books had plots as well as stunning, supple writing; and the final winner was Three Junes by Julia Glass.

It was a woman, and it was a woman’s first novel. Which brings me to my topic.

Last summer, an author who signed herself only as 'Jen," but who was, it quickly became apparent, Jennifer Weiner -- author of immensely popular and witty romantic comedies including Good in Bed and In Her Shoes debated online with Dwight Garner, a senior editor of the New York Times Book Review. She asked, tongue in cheek but quite seriously, about the secret set of criteria that apparently appertained to the truth that more male than female authors saw their work reviewed in the New York Times.

Back and forth it went (on the website called papercuts.com, where you can find it archived). Why was it obligatory to review the new Don D. but not the new Jodi P.? Was it somehow assumed that works by men would comprise subjects of more scope and depth, while "women's" topics would be daintier, closer to home, of less significance to a world in which (to quote Dr. Johnson) a man must have his sea voyage or his war in order to feel realized? Despite Tolstoy having written about a lovely, foolish woman's adultery and suicide, and Andrea Barrett's having written memorably of a stunning ocean voyage... it is true that it is somehow presupposed that even commonplace things take on greater scope and significance when a man is the one who tells the tale.

It wasn't an unfamiliar debate. Laura Miller and Francine Prose had assayed the same basic questions -- albeit absent the question of reviews -- in essays published by Harper's magazine. While suggesting that the suspicion with which women were still regarded as "serious" writers was part of a larger cultural issue, critics of THOSE essays pointed out that the New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath had suggested that men simply write more books thank women.

Which is simply not the case.

In any case, this was my topic at my alma mater.

When I spoke, I told the room at large that I agreed with the general opinion that to be taken seriously as a writer, a woman must be able to write regularly about more than the things we all experience -- human connection, pity, sacrifice, courage, personal injury.

She must be able to “write like a man,” about subjects that interest men – about cars and horses and crimes and wars and golf and fly fishing and war and exploration of the sky above or the sea floor below.

And yet a man who sets out to write about home and hearth and even the most esoteric lot of a woman – witness Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden – is considered a prophet, possessed of an extra sensory organ of perception.

Here we are, on the brink (perhaps) of electing a KNOWN woman to be the Commander in Chief of the United States and leader of the free world and still somehow, we assume that it will need to be a man -- and not one of us girls -- who writes the Great American Novel.

If I had gone to one of those tonier schools, perhaps I would have learned to think better And I would have been able by now to have figured this out.

yours,

Jackie M.