Here it is, summer ended and everyone back in school – the nights no longer “good for sleeping” but edging toward cold. The old timers (and the young timers) say that this summer rushed past. I know that it did for me. It took me a full six weeks to recover from the emotional toll of two daughters graduating eighth grade.

It was joyous. It was lovely. It was, more than either of these, harrowing. Read on.

By my count, including kindergarten, I’ve graduated five times. Of course, that was what my children call “back in the day,” before iPhones, $200 ballet flats, and instant status updates – which is to say, pre-culture.

Still, I know about commencement. Three of my nine children have actual college diplomas, and they received them only yesterday, it seems. There were rituals, observances, fountain pens given and then re-gifted.

Despite this, nothing could have prepared me for the onslaught associated with the graduation of my two eighth grade daughters.

Said Thoreau, beware occasions requiring new clothes. Beware especially five of them in six weeks.

OMG, as my daughters would say.

At first, my shy girls, Mia and Merit, weren’t sure about the “semi.” (Merit, born in Ethiopia, thought this dance might be held in an eighteen-wheeler.) We urged them to reconsider and go.

After all, we’d had an eighth grade dance. It was in the gym – in a gym similar to the place where, four years later, we would go to the prom.  We bought dresses. We bought them at Sears.

How could we know that, once unleashed, our girls’ desires would make  Anna Wintour look like the poster girl for voluntary simplicity?

They thought we might have to go to New York for a weekend to shop.

They discussed how to measure up to Simone, Stephanotis, and especially Serena, whose dress was created for this purpose when she was eight or something by a designer in Istanbul using age progressions.

Then came the class trip. Not a day trip to the amusement park. A week trip to D.C. No more than $150 each in spending money!

Next, an LBD.

For the dinner dance.

What’s up with dinner dance? A dinner dance is what your parents went to in 1969 at the Moose Lodge.

The EIGHTH GRADE dinner dance is being held at a place called the Jailhouse Tavern. I’m not making that up.

This leaves only the yacht cruise.

Now, our family is so large that when we moved to this small town, it basically changed the census data. We have a certain need. So the school was gallant in helping make sure that our daughters were included in all these adventures.

We also did our part.

Each event required multiple corollary events.

Christmas tree sales, wrapping paper sales, bumper sticker sales, fudge sales, bake sales, yard sales, plant sales, car washes, cat grooming, piñata demos, spaghetti dinners, pancake breakfasts, pizza lunches.

Of course, as with all school fundraisers, no one except the parents buys anything. Co-workers now avert their eyes when they see us coming, even if we pretend the sign-up sheet is just a petition to ban books or something.

Now, there are the tributes. Serena’s parents are buying ads in the local papers and hiring a videographer. Stephanotis has an uncle who designed fireworks for their family celebration. There’s a question of dresses for the private parties? Is re-wear okay?

I put my foot down. It’s okay for Katherine, Duchess of Cambridge. It’s okay for you, too.

We bought dresses. We bought those dresses at Sears.

And yet, since January it’s been a check check here and a check check there. Here a check, there a check, everywhere a check check.

What am I going to do for high school graduation? Sell my plasma starting in tenth grade? Will Serena’s parents host a destination party in Tuscany?

Does anyone else think this is a little excessive for the culmination of only the first eight years of school?

Isn’t this consumer culture pushed to its extreme, ordinary life as an MTV reality show, the unsurprising adultification of adolescents, the trickle down of red carpet desires into a blue-collar world, the crass reification of life altogether?

And isn’t it nuts that I have to do this three more times?

 

 

 

 

WEATHER PORN

I’ve only lived three places in my life.
One was Chicago where, although there was some of the most barbarous weather south of the south pole, people tended to kind of shrug it off — as they did almost everything else. Baby born at home? Take it to the hospital when the game’s over. Head wound? Looks worse than it is most times … he awake? Business failed? You always wanted to travel …          And so, when I moved to Wisconsin, at the tender age of 21, I was unprepared for the nearly salacious atmosphere of amazement, jubilation, and downright tongue-lolling arousal that greeted every cumulonimbus. People didn’t actually want tornadoes to touch down and blow up their houses, but they kind of wanted tornadoes to touch down and blow up their unattached garages. People didn’t actually want school to be closed by the blizzard of the century … but they actually did want school to be closed, and, in anticipation, bought seven gallons of milk and queued up eleven back-to-back episodes of Special Victims Unit. After a long time (34 years), I moved away from Wisconsin, to, as it turns out, the other place on earth where weather is porn.
Now I live in Massachusetts, on Cape Cod.
As I sit here (in Wisconsin, at a relative’s house), the sun shines brightly after a wimpy little blizzard scarcely deserving of the name “dumped” (they always “dump”) six new inches of snow on an already frosted landscape. I was to have been in Boston, but I missed the narrow window of opportunity, and now can’t go back until at least after the weekend, until End-of-the-World-Storm-Nemo has done its worst. I should be glad. But I’ve changed. I’m jealous of my family, about to participate in a branch-popping, road-clogging, light-quenching, hem-drenching big fist of a blizzard. I want all that drama. I want to see that mean North Atlantic face. I want to huddle with my nearest and say, it’s really coming down now, as if it would do anything else.
On Cape Cod, people still often fish for a living, or do other things that put them at the indifferent mercy of the elements. They speak of the weather the way they speak of boats and tides, with a rueful, respectful, and undeniably lustful approbation.
This is the day for meteorologists. The other reporters stand when they walk through the newsroom.
White collar crime?
It’s for sissies.
No-collar crime?
Another day.
Give us weather, that’s what we want — the bigger and meaner the better. We want to be controlled.

On my grave, I don’t want it to say, ‘SHE NEVER MISSED A DEADLINE.’ I do want it to say BELOVED MOTHER. But also, I want it to say, SHE HAD EXCELLENT MANNERS.
Now, I’m … polite.
I’m … personable.
I’m .. not nice.
I’m … gallant.
But I want to have manners of the kind demonstrated by my friend Whitney, who is practically British.
She would never bring up a problem of her own, even if her arm were detached and gouting arterial blood, before asking after yours. She would never put a morsel of food in her mouth before seeing that you had your lunch (brunch, dinner) with a cloth napkin. Upon me, she did inflict her cat — even though I have allergies to cats that border on rabies. I did not say she’s perfect. But she has excellent, excellent manners.
She also responds to a gift with a handwritten note MENTIONING WHAT THE GIFT IS and how she intends to use it. When you sleep over, she provides cocoa before bed EVEN IF YOU DON”T ASK FOR IT, which why would you, but you want it desperately?
She does no icky things, like look at her Kleenex after she blows her nose. She dresses up for everything.
I think that excellent manners involve restraint.
I think that is what excellent manners really are: they are the practice of civility in the want of the actual good cheer. Good manners mean that you are really listening, instead of just waiting.
What do they mean to you?

Today I told a therapist who’s an acquaintance that I’d be happy to go to rehab if I had a vice.
I don’t drink or smoke or chew, or go with boys who do. (Actually, I suspect one …)
The idea of daily therapy and a cell with clean sheets, just for a break, would be pretty fabulous.
I wouldn’t want to bring anything except my computer and my single page of research.
If all people who went to prison were smart, more great books and novels would come from prison (some have, despite the fact that the lights are on all the time). With 60 days to write, group therapy, and huge amounts of free time, I could get the biceps of Jillian Michaels and write Warren Peace (it’s a retelling). I could write five articles, a novella, and a screenplay. And a chapbook. I don’t even know how to write poetry. I could learn.
Why do only people who are addicted to things get to go to rehab?
Why do only nuns get to go to convents?
Why isn’t having nine children with complex lives a pre-existing condition requiring sequestration?
Don’t write to me and say that I shouldn’t make sport of this because your brother or sister, or god forbid, your beloved child, really did have to go to rehab. It goes without SAYING — yet I will say it — that this is a sendup …. except not really. I really would feel far less guilt, and far more pleasure, if someone FORCED me into seclusion … and I’m not taking it back.

My son Marty and I spent the day in the hospital.
It wasn’t unfamiliar.
You know how people say of some folk, why, he was never sick a day in his life? Well, of my 23-year-old son, Martin, you might say, “Kid was never well a day in his life.”
The surgery he has Thursday on his broken hand will be the third in a short life — all of them harrowing. He was on his way to rehearsal, for his first Equity show, ‘Oliver!’ in Boston, when he was T-boned by a guy trying to make a left turn from the center lane on a one-way street, the presence of Marty’s car in the left land notwithstanding.
In most of the rest of the country, excluding perhaps southern Florida, this is known as “mayhem.” In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, it is known as “driving.” You start your engine and you take your chances.
For Marty, this is, sadly, business as usual. Nothing is simple for him. Because his brothers had flu, when he was twelve, I told him to drink 7-Up and lie down. When he collapsed onstage, we found out he had a ruptured appendix. There was a slight chance an abscess would form, requiring future surgery.
Three of those.
Because he had sleep apnea, he had his tonsils removed and uvula clipped when he was sixteen. There was a slight chance he would have hemorrhage.
Marty woke me up at 3 a.m., carrying a mixing bowl of blood.
He said the most painful part was cauterizing his throat.
I find all this so gross and sickening. But, Marty didn’t lick it off the ground. When I recently got a new physician, she looked at my recent medical history (which included breaking one of my teeth off below the gum, with catlike grace) and a little surgical test last spring that ended up with pulling out some of my parts and my spending a month with my little sister and her husband and their boys in their thousand-square-foot farm house. The doctor said, “Are you, trying to kill yourself or something? Slowly?”
Marty … will heal.
I am still sort of healing (differential of just over 30 years in immuno-joy).
Still, by his age, I’d only broken one hand and had a concussion as well as a welter of bee stings.
What lies ahead for this hapless kid?
And he’s an actor.
While his face is his fortune, so is the rest of him. And they’re chipping away at him … while I could be a brain in an aquarium and still do my job.

I’ve been asking my readers and friends: share your favorite silly (or not so silly) phobia.

Mine — when people fold paper and then run their fingers along it? It gives me chills of horror just to think about it.

Syrup. When I was about four, I chased my mom into the corner grocery store, and ran smack into this  pyramid display of about 40 glass bottles of maple syrup. (Who makes a PYRAMID of maple syrup bottles?) There was a storm of glass and a spreading lake of syrup and blood … never ate maple syrup again.
REALLY big birds. They’re just too prehistoric.

Malls. This is self-explanatory.

But the big one, the only one that is real is … being lost, on foot or in the car. Being lost, rural or urban, night or day, makes me feel as though I’m at the edge of the apocalypse.

Now for others …

Paper cuts

Eating meat that’s identifiable as the animal it was when it was alive

Cotton, the kind in aspiring bottles

Dark water

Cats

Felt (not as in “a deeply felt narrative,” but the cloth)

The sound of a sewing machine

Dogs barking

Train whistles at night

Candlelight

And the biggest number of votes … of course, clowns.

Back in 1990, when I was a young mother and got a perm (a great, fat, pyramidical perm), I knew even then that this would be an occasion for photo-album shame. Little did I know that, during my perm period, things would happen, such as the whoopsie doodle publication of my first novel, THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN, that meant I would be recorded with that fuzzy pyramid on my head. Right now, I know that little tattoos, in celebration of turning 30 or 40 or 50, are not going to last — while the kind of tattoos that are a lifelong symbol of a raw and unexpected dawn after a twenty-hour night in some castaway place, will last forever. Vertical platform heels, that make even the agile walk like a wooden toy soldier, will not last, but ballet flats will. Tans won’t be back. Bubble mini skirts are headed down the wind tunnel of memory. And Axe for men will be replaced by something that doesn’t make clean smell like dirty papered over, the sooner the better. Do you know which current style is headed out forever?

Speaking of thinking person’s thriller, I can’t think of a better way to describe Jacquelyn Mitchard’s groundbreaking, pitch-perfect What We Saw at Night (Soho Press, $17.99, 243 pages).  Best known for penning the first ever book selected by Oprah (The Deep End of the Ocean) Mitchard this time out serves up teenage protagonists who all suffer from a rare illness that makes them deathly allergic to sunlight and thus confined to a vampire-like existence roaming the streets at night.  Daredevils occupying their own private dystopian world in stark contrast to the hours ruled by the “Daytimers.”  This is a rare tale that’s as riveting as it is heart wrenching penned by a true master of the written word.

Best friends for life, Allie, Juliet, and Rob rule the night country — liberating boats for midnight swims, dipping in the hot tubs of fancy ski chalets, looking for any risk or thrill or secret the night can offer. They’re out there because they can never see the sun. A genetic defect, XP, means that life is the toaster, and they are the bread. Their lives may be short. They don’t want to die without ever having really lived. When they take up the fierce, demanding urban sport of Parkour, leaping from buildings, vaulting over walls, they are, for the first time, more powerful and free than “the daytimers.”  But one night, the night of their greatest feat, bouldering up a five-story cliffside building, they glimpse, through a glass door, the unspeakable: a man with what appears the dead body of a young woman. In their terror, they don’t realize … he sees them too. That night breaks open a world of old secrets and new lies, and terror even greater than the fear of death.

Of WHAT WE SAW AT NIGHT, Lauren Myracle, author of ‘Shine,’ says, “Dangerously addictive, breathtakingly beautiful, terminally awesome.”

Whoo hoo! Pub DAY!

I respect her.

And I like her.

She’s articulate, bright, creative, and thoughtful.

As a narrative genius, she’s a really great math professor.

Her love is the legal thriller: she’s so crazy about Scott Turow’s work that she thought she could be the next Scott Turow (Hey, sorry Scott, if you get good enough, there’s always going to be a next you, even if there’s a current you).  She knew all the right elements – the good guy with a shadow past, the sympathetic but somehow sinister victim. When she put them all together, they should have worked like a fine watch to create a readable narrative, but they didn’t because it takes more than all the elements to make a story, just as it takes more than all the ingredients to make a cake. What she wrote wasn’t even really a novel: it was an organized notebook.

A handful of publishers, big and small, weren’t really interested, although several letters praised her voice.

So she published it herself, through one of the crop of straight-to-digital publishers, among them Amazon’s Kindle Direct, and others that offer the services of an editor and package, as well as marketing advice and direction. Amazon has an obvious edge, but of the sixteen self-published direct-to-e authors I know, ten swear by other favorites.

Several other friends have self-published in “trade” (large form) paperback, some accepted by publishers with no up-front tariff who do the design, some editing, and lend a hand with a marketing plan. The author can earn up to 70% profit on every book sold by POD, or “print on demand.”

“I’d much rather do this than get an advance I might not be able to earn. There’s so much less pressure,” says the next Scott Turow.

Because she is a beloved, charming, credible person (and because those suspenseful elements promised so much) five thousand people bought her first book. Her second followed quickly. “It works!” she said. “I have total editorial control. I know what I’m doing. No one is changing one word that I write.”

That’s the sad fact. No one is changing one word that she writes.

Authors say traditionally that when you want to administer self-abuse, you read your reviews on Amazon. Sometimes, the reader reviews will say that your latest book is a masterwork (this is usually your best friend). Some will say that your work compares favorably to (insert most dreaded author name here). One of the ways that readers show that they are forces to be reckoned with is to say that this book could have “used a good edit.”

What those readers mean is that the book should have been shorter.

Often that book has had a good edit, or three or five.

Sometimes the edit adds pages. Most people don’t know that. Sometimes, the edit forces the author to explain the obvious in more ways than anyone could believe.

Most often though, the editor has saved the author from wearing a great suit with a big blot of mustard on the lapel. A great editor has a price beyond rubies. That editor may not know what it’s like to write, but sure knows how to read, and has extraordinary taste. Editors’ futures and reputations ride on the success of
their authors.

Would I have a book published over which I had complete editorial control? The very thought is like two hands grabbing my stomach and twisting. It’s that horrifying.

A friend of mine at a university in the Midwest has accepted two students into the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program she directs. Both had enormous potential and that indefinable something – talent? Ease within language? One young woman had seven self- published books to her credit; the other had five. Those books
had cool titles and clever conceits and their covers showed a savvy sense of branding, in that they were different from each other, but colors, titles, designs and type-faces all worked to identify them as a certain kind of confection, from a certain company. They were smart books but they were not good books.

My friend has written two books and is finishing a third.

Her books were published in the traditional way. If your student has written seven, there’s a certain skewed presumption – even if your books were critically acclaimed or
made “the list.”

The presumption is that the student knows best.

The presumption is scary.

There are more books than ever out there, most published the usual way. Even some that get extraordinary attention are dumb. I would venture to guess that even more
self-published books are dumb because I think second eyes are essential.

What kind of gatekeeper can let this new enterprise flourish without making the bar so low you don’t even notice it?

What difference does it make? I’m afraid that there’s a drawn big boomerang: After buying a few, or even a slew, of self-indulgent, self-published books, readers are going
to get fed up.  But they’re going to get fed up with everyone who writes books, except Scott Turow and Jodi Picoult