Thieves

When I got to the yoga studio yesterday, I was surprised to see that iron security "fences" had been installed on the windows and door of the nearby quilt shop.

There had been four burglaries since the first of the year, ten quilts stolen in all.

Quilts?

Okay. Apparently, one was worthy $2,500. But, still.

Here is the moral dilemma of the writer: Instead of being appalled that anybody would steal...anything, the writer becomes obsessed wondering who in the world would break into a quilt store four times and steal ten quilts--and why?

We considered this before class. Nobody came up with anything that made much sense. One person did suggest that they might put those little chips in them so they could be traced.

"What if they traced it to a nursing home and some old person was all wrapped up in it," someone observed. "What would you do then?"

And therein lies one of probably a gazillion stories you might write, starting with this weird little incident. What if...

Years ago, in the eighties, when Laura Ashley dresses were all the rage, I happened to be in London during the store's big July sale. Prices were astonishingly low, and I got into major frenzy--grabbing dresses, trying them on, keeping some, abandoning others, getting more to try. When, finally, I had decided which ones I wanted and went to the check-out to pay for them, I went to take the smaller purse (with money, credit cards, and passport in it) out of my big shoulder bag, but it wasn't there.

All I could figure was that someone had reached under the dressing room partition and taken it from my (stupidly) open bag, which I had set on the floor while I tried on the dresses.

Which meant the thief had to be a woman. Plus, it was an upscale store in an upscale neighborhood, there was a security cop keeping an eye on things. Which meant she had to look enough like the other women in the store to escape notice.

It got weirder.

It was too late to go to the embassy to see about replacing the passport, but when I called the next morning, prepared for a major ordeal, I was informed that the purse, with passport, had been turned in at the Victoria Station Lost & Found. I could pick it up any time.

Predictably, the cash (about $300 in sterling, francs and guilders) and travelers' checks were gone. But the passport was there, so was my credit card. When I travel, I always make a little index card with money conversions on it for handy reference. The index card was still in the purse, torn in half by the thief and put back in its place--as if to say, Ha! You won't be needing this anymore.

This detail thrilled me. It seemed worth the lost cash and the hassle. I knew I would get a story out of it--and, in time, I did.

I wonder where people who aren't writers put the things in their lives that make them angry or dispirited or sad. Or happy, for that matter? All that build-up of emotion. Where can it go? How do they make sense of it?

Those quilts. Was the thief a kind of Robin Hood, stealing the beautiful quilts to keep frail elderly people warm? A pissed-off kid, maybe belonging to the middle-aged lady who own the store? The lady herself, collecting insurance to pay bills for a sinking business? A jealous customer who botched the quilts she tried to make herself? A quilt dealer who...

Like I said, there are a gazillion possibilities.

Pick one. Begin.

House Angst

I’m not sure exactly when I first noticed “The Mansion,” but I remember walking or driving past it countless times during my childhood and adolescence, on the way to my Aunt Ruth's house. It was (I realize now) a moderate-sized Tudor house, which I regarded with deep longing every time I saw it. It was as if it was my house, but some awful trick of fate had kept my family from living in it. If we lived in that house, we would be happy. Not to be happy in a house like that simply wasn’t possible.

The house we actually lived in was in one of those subdivisions that sprang up after World War II, a little crackerbox of house on a row of other little crackerbox houses that looked more or less the same. We moved in at the height of the Baby Boom, the mid-fifties. At one point, there were 55 children on our block alone!

It was a long walk to…anywhere. The park, the library, school. Sometimes I would pretend I was walking home to The Mansion. The living room, with its brick fireplace; the dining room, with its big bay window; the cozy kitchen; the rec room. My own bedroom, of course, with a canopy bed, a window-seat. Books, a radio, and a huge bulletin board covered souvenirs and snapshots of myself having a fabulous time with all of my fabulous friends—who would magically appear when my life in this house, my real life commenced.

I was absolutely convinced that I would own this house someday. Weirdly, though, dream was so attached to the idea that living there would automatically right all the sad, unspoken problems of our family that I couldn’t imagine past living there with them, in some teen-magazine version of the perfect life.

Thursday evening, I visited my friend Connie Mitchell’s young adult literature class for librarians at IUPUI. It was fun because most the students had read several of my YA books and had great questions. One observed that both Wish You Were Here and Everything You Want had “dream houses” in them. But in WYWH, the mom got the house she dreamed of and seemed genuinely happy in it, while in EYW, the mom refused the house she used to long for, even though, having won millions of dollars in the lottery, the family could easily have afforded it.

(A connection I’d never noticed before, myself.)

“Why is that?” she asked.

Starting with The Mansion, I described my lifelong dream of the perfect house, which began with the belief that life lived in my mansion guaranteed a happy family and morphed, over the years, to what I think of as “house angst.” The closest I can come to defining it is, “What I know now about what real happiness is, coming up against that old longing.”

Even after I understood that the house I imagined wouldn’t really make me happy, even after I chose teaching part-time so that I could write seriously and chose traveling, which I’d also always longed to do, instead of staying put in the perfect house I still can't help wanting the house.

Sometimes not having it, knowing I’ll never, ever have it feels like grief.

Which is crazy because the truth is I don’t want it anymore. I really don’t.

One thing that interested me about writing about a family (very much like my own) winning the fifty million dollar lottery, as I did in Everything You Want, was the idea that having all that money would bring you smack up against your dreams. Suddenly, you could have…everything you want.

Actually, everything you thought you wanted. Which is a whole other ball of wax.

Abby, the mom in the book, who gets totally whacked out about the money, explains why she doesn’t want to buy the big, beautiful house she’d dreamed of for years—which I realized, writing it, was exactly the way I’d come to feel about my own dream house.

“[The house is] what I used to want, she says. "I wanted it so bad I could taste it. I’d drive by it sometimes at night, when the lamps were on, and I could see inside to the living room and I’d imagine us all there. It scared me, it seemed so real. Like it was a life I’d lost. Or the life I should have had…It’s too late…The last thing I want to do is buy a big house and have to decorate it, buy stuff to fill it up, get used to living in it.”

Honestly, I think one of the major reasons I write novels is because it’s like getting to live more than one life. The houses in WYWH and EYW are real houses I’ve driven past countless times over the years and fantasized about—and I got to own one of them by way of a story.

How cool is that?

I see now that I gave Jackson’s mom her dream house because the time in her life was right for it—and it actually did make her happy. But that happiness played off of Jax’s sadness at leaving the house where his divorced parents had last been happy together. So there was a cost.

There always is.

Abby might decide to buy that fabulous house in her post-book life, she might not. I don’t know. What mattered was at that juncture in the story of her life she understood herself well enough to know that she needed to figure out what she really wanted before making any huge decisions.

As for me, in my real life, now--I’ve lived in our little brick bungalow since 1969!

I have a sort of love/hate relationship with it. I love how cozy it is and how our whole history is in it. I hate that it doesn’t have a window seat or a breakfast nook. Or a screened-in porch, where I could sit and read and listen to the rain.

But if I didn’t live here, who would I be?

Summer Break

A former student of mine once sent me an essay she’d written in a college class that began, “I asked God to give me a break.” She was a lovely girl, a straight-A student. Sweet, earnest, with a flinty streak of determination that I loved to watch in action. She had been raised as a conservative Christian and was active in her church.

She was a good, solid writer in high school, but she had trouble engaging fully in the mess of creative process, especially when a piece took a turn and she found herself making an observation or asking a question that made her strong faith waver.

I remember writing in the margin of her journal, “God gave you a questioning mind. Why would He have done that if He didn’t want you to use it?”

College cracked her mind open in that wonderful way it does, when it works—and made her the writer I always knew she had it in her to be. The essay she sent me was about the evolution of her conservative childhood faith into one that embraced the questions and contradictions of a person fully awake in the universe.

I loved that she asked God to give her a break so that she could do whatever she needed to do to make that happen. If I believed in the kind of God that grants requests, I would ask him to give me a break, too. But from myself.

Seriously. I would like to take a break from feeling so driven about—everything. At least for a while, I would like to write without ambition, for the joy of it—just to see where writing would take me—instead of constantly wrestling with the puzzle pieces of a novel, obsessed with trying to put them together when I know that crucial ones are missing, not to mention the fact that the shapes of the ones I do have keep shifting. Plus there’s no box with a picture on it that shows what the completed puzzle is supposed to look like.

I love writing novels. I really, truly do. But right now, I feel weary of the long process, the constant clutter of people and places in my head.

Lately, I've been thinking about a summer day a few years ago. Steve was gone, fishing, and I’d just returned from a trip and hadn’t gotten back into my routine yet. For a whole Sunday I just did whatever I felt like doing.

Mainly, I remember being on my bike on the Monon Trail and being so happy. It seemed like the world was offering up all sorts of things as I rode along to make me see this was how life is supposed to be. There was a man with a parrot on his shoulder! There were babies and dogs. The trail felt like a big parade and I was in it.

I remember thinking, is this the way some people live their lives? You feel like riding your bike, so you just…do? Or watch a movie, go to a museum, dig in the garden for a while? What would it be like not to be thinking constantly that you should be should be attending to some made-up world in your head, trying to wrestle it into words?

I’d like more days like that in my life.

So, it’s official. I’m taking a (summer) break.

From myself.

(If I can.)

Conversation in the Target Parking Lot

So I get to my car with my purchases and come face-to-face with a very cute little boy, about four, sitting in his car seat in the van next to it. The door's open, his mom's loading what they've bought into the back.

Me: Well, hello there!

Boy: What's your name?

Me: Barb. What's your name?

Boy: Oscar.

Me: That is a fabulous name. You are going to grow up and do amazing things with a name like that.

Boy's Mom: What do you say?

Boy: Do you know everyone dies?

Me: I do. It's sad, isn't it? But usually it doesn't happen for a long, long time.

Boy: (Nods, contemplative.) Everyone dies.

Boy's Mom (mortified and somewhat alarmed): I'm so sorry. He's just obsessed with this. I don't know what to do.

Me: What can you do, really? He's right.

Boy's Mom: (Sighs.) What do you say, Oscar?

Boy: Nice to meet you.

Me: It was really nice to meet you, too, Oscar.

And I load the stuff I bought in Target into the car and drive away.

The Jim Morrison Phenomenon

When I went to Paris in 1981, I got it into my head that I wanted to see Jim Morrison’s grave. I’m not sure why. It’s true that I loved the Doors’ music in the Sixties. “Light My Fire,” “Riders in the Storm,” “Break on through to the Other Side.”


Who didn’t love a band that got kicked off the radio for inciting kids to riot then? Jim, though—he always seemed to go one step too far. Did he really have to expose himself on stage, drink himself into oblivion, do every drug invented by mankind?

Not to mention write all those dreadful poems.

Anyway, my traveling companions, Pat and Joan, and I set out for Pere LaChaise Cemetery on the Metro. Looking for Jim, we passed but were not sidetracked by the graves most people came to see—Proust, Chopin, Balzac, Collette and Moliere, to name a few. It was a weird place, graves as far as you could see and family tombs that looked like tiny houses set in rows on winding paths so that it seemed like a neighborhood of the dead. We followed signs that said things like, “This Way to the Soul Kitchen,” “This Way to the Morrison Hotel,” or simply, “Jim”—with an arrow. More than one skeletal black cat crept across our path.

The grave—and everything around it—was a mess. Dead and dying flowers strewn on the ground. A smashed cross. Graffiti everywhere, including on adjoining graves. “Sex, drugs & love forever!” “Morta la Bourgeoisie.” “Bientot Jim.” “My only friend.” The usual names and initials people feel compelled to leave wherever they go.

Two women stood, heads bowed—one maybe twenty, the other fortyish. The younger carried a single red gladiola, which she propped against the monument. The older woman took her photo. Then I took their photo together.

“You know,” the younger woman said. “He’s not really dead.”

Just then a cemetery guard came into view, quite official in his uniform and cap, and walked toward us—we thought to chase us away. But, no. He wanted to chat.

“Bonjour,” he said, tamping his pipe. “You are American?”

Pat, Joan and I said, yes, we were.

He leaned toward us, his eyes bright. “Do you know the brand Zenith?” he asked.

Turned out he’d just bought a new Zenith radio and wanted reassurance that he’d made a good choice. The conversation went from there to the Germans in WWII to the relative merits of New York versus Paris (thoug it wasn’t clear whether he’d ever been to New York), to a Roman bath somewhere behind the Pantheon. When we left, he walked with us a ways, smoking and talking until disappeared, mid-sentence, down a wooded path.

That was weird.

But the weirdest thing of all was how, when I got home, it seemed Jim Morrison was everywhere. I’d turn on the radio, and a Doors song was playing. Walking through a tunnel under Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, I saw Doors graffiti. I walked into a bar cluttered with pictures of Jim, picked up Newsweek and saw his name mentioned, passed a guy on the street who was wearing a Doors tee-shirt. I stepped on an elevator and heard “Riders on the Storm”—in muzak, for Christ’s sake!

Seriously. Jim was everywhere—and, in time, this birthed a fabulous epiphany, which I dubbed “The Jim Morrison Phenomenon.” Jim was always there. I just hadn’t noticed until the surreal experience at Pere LaChaise put him on my radar.

Over the years, this has happened with all sorts of things.

Which brings me to…Silly Bands.

Early last week I was somewhere, can’t remember where, and saw these flimsy little bight-colored rubber bracelets shaped like animals set on the counter with a sign that said, “$1.99.”

Each, I thought? Then promptly forgot about them.

Until I went to Heidi’s “Personal Best” program at school on Thursday morning, where her dad had a couple of bags of said bracelets to give her as a reward for being so smart. At which point, I noticed that most of the kids were wearing them. In fact, some had so many bracelets on that their arms were half-covered with them.


“Silly bands,” Heidi told me when I asked what they were. (In that duh-implied tone of voice reserved for completely clueless people.)

Suddenly, Silly Bands were everywhere. Just like Jim had been!

I swear, every kid at the Art Fair on Saturday and Sunday was wearing at least one. So when we realized that it was the kids who most wanted to play our groovy Writers’ Roulette game, we went out and supplemented the prizes with….Silly Bands.

We raked in the dough after that. No matter what they actually won—tee-shirts, notebooks, pens, buttons—most of them wanted a Silly Band. Fine with us. They stood, agonizing over which one to take. A red star, a purple dinosaur, a neon yellow duck, a blue boat, an orange car.




“What are those?” a lady asked.

“Oh, Silly Bands,” I said. “They’re all the rage.”

And felt like breaking into a wild rendition of “Hello, I Love You,” just to confuse her further.

Writers Roulette & Other Literary Pursuits

I spent Saturday and Sunday manning (womaning?) the Writers’ Center of Indiana’s booth at the Broad Ripple Art Fair, along with a group of fabulous volunteers. Betsy Lewis, volunteer extraordinaire in all manner of Writers’ Center needs, had the genius idea of having a prize wheel, which turned out to be the absolute best part of the weekend—both for raising money and for sheer entertainment.

I mean, who (in their deepest heart of hearts) doesn’t want to gamble?

Who can’t afford a dollar—for a good cause? (Well, at an art fair, anyway.)

Plus, there was the unexpected benefit of parents feeling guilty for dragging their kids around looking at art who were willing to throw in a dollar to let them spin the wheel.

Betsy also made very cool story-starters, which also drew kids to our booth (and the wheel) and it was lovely to watch them bent over, writing earnestly. My grandkids, Heidi and Jake, volunteered, too. Their job was to write sample stories to post on the tent. Needless to say, the stories were…brilliant.

For adults and teens, there was an ongoing story to add too—also lots of fun.

Tony Brewer and Jason Ammerman, of the Reservoir Dogwoods, as well as Sarah Skwire and Joyce Brinkman were on hand to write poems on demand for $5. Sarah wrote one for a brand new baby, also one for a couple’s sixth wedding anniversary, which made the bride cry (in a good way:-).

Best, we talked to so many people who were interested in writing and glad to know we existed. We collected well over a hundred names to add to our e-mail newsletter list and there was an unusually large number of online memberships and class registrations waiting to be processed on Monday morning.

Beach Reading

What could be better than spending virtually all day reading on Hilton Head Island, looking up occasionally to see dune grasses, ocean, and sky spread out before you? It is my favorite thing in the world to do, my favorite birthday present (yesterday was my birthday), and one of the things that makes me feel lucky to be alive.

Better yet, the first book I read on said beach this week was the new Elizabeth George, This Body of Death. A deliciously fat, complicated, can't-put-it-down mystery with an ensemble of recurring characters even more compelling than the plot--the kind only she can write.

I say characters, but George's people are absolutely dead-on real to me. Handsome, brilliant Inspector Lynley getting over a tragic loss (which freaked me out so much when it happened a few books ago that I actually had to stop reading for a while); his partner,the disheveled, determined, Barbara Haver; the ultra-cool, former gang chief turned cop, Winston Nkata.

How. Does. She. Do. This?

I would truly love to know. I would love to interview her sometime. What about her unfolding plots surprise her in process, I wonder? Lynley's tragic loss, for example. Did she set out, knowing? I'd bet she was as shocked as I was when it happened.

In any case, I highly recommend this new installment.

And if you've never read Elizabeth George, I recommend starting with the first book and reading up to This Body of Death.

Lucky you, with her whole world yet to be discovered.